Sometime in the Summer of maybe 2019, in what was a different era in my professional life and for all of us, I started on a project to look into ideas of de-growth and low growth economics. Among the books I assigned myself was Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth. Jackson is a British economist working on sustainable economics. I gather he's got a pretty high profile--Prince Charles wrote the foreword to the book. I started the book, it didn't catch me up too much, started a Ph.D. program, etc. But I finally went back and finished it this week.
The main reason to go back to this was because we're doing a study in church on co-op economics with our pastor's husband who is working on the idea through the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Their basic hypothesis is that there is a deep connection between Christianity and cooperative economics.
After going through quite a bit of analysis about the grip a growth imperative has on society and economics, and its detrimental effects, Jackson arrives at a vision of an economic focused on service to others--really care for other--rather than on throughput of materials. Then we talks about where we can see this sort of economy:
Perhaps surprisingly, the seeds for such a transformation already exist, often in local, community-based initiatives or in social enterprise: community energy projects, local farmers' markets, slow food cooperatives, sports clubs, libraries, community health and fitness centres, local repair and maintenance services, craft workshops, writings centres, outdoor pursuits, music and drama, yoga, martial arts, mediation, gardening, the restoration of parks and open spaces. (p 143)
The list is probably peculiar in several ways--it includes forms of organization and general activities for one thing--but for now note that it does not include churches. Which exist in create number, involve great numbers of people, and should be about service to others.
Then to explain what it would take to move from a society of growth and affluence to one that defines prosperity as "the ability to flourish as human beings" (p 212) he talks about the need for a framework that gives meaning and identity, and "relates our temporal existence to some higher 'sacred' order" (p 214). Money and goods have become that in a consumer society, and do a very poor job of providing that spiritual and psychological support and ground. You would expect religion to come in here, but not for Jackson:
Religion may offer some defence against his threat [of a meaningless void that threatened to overturn our hopes and derail our best intentions]. But what should a society do, when religious belief is harder to come by? Or when its intellectual foundations have been shaken? Or when its manifestation entails increasingly fundamentalist (and inhuman) ideals? Is it so unlikely to suppose that some of these vital social functions are taken on by consumerism itself? (p 214)
So for Jackson, religion doesn't have credibility. It's not really worth considering. Contrary to the argument in our Sunday program, churches aren't prime examples of a service and care economy, I do in fact disagree with that, and for me churches leap out as organizations Jackson should look at. It could be that he's in England, and maybe he just thinks of the Church of England and its large bureaucracy--but then again, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, blurbed Jackson's book.
While I see the promise in making this connection, I do wonder if the church has damaged itself so much that it cannot play this role outside of a small band of devotees, and that it cannot form the basis for large numbers of people to change their relationship to growth and consumption. The church broadly defined does shoot itself in the foot regularly, and has significant branches that stake out position that aggressively feed the fires of dead-end consumption. There's some groups out there trying to make different connections, but at this point I don't know if we're talking about a handful of people with Twitter accounts, or something with more and growing tendrils. Can they build enough muscle to take religion out of bankruptcy?
Tim Jackson (2017). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow (2nd ed).
No comments:
Post a Comment