"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."
-Alanis Obomsawin, Abenaki Canadian filmmaker (b. 1932)
You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.
-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 6:24 The Message
No doubt many of you recognize the above two quotes. I can remember seeing the above one on posters decorating elementary classroom walls when I was a kid. It wasn't until tonight that I did a bit of digging and discovered it originated with a First Nations filmmaker named Alanis Obomsawin. She is well known for producing Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, about the 1990 siege at Oka, Quebec. While that is true, I bet her above quote has reached thousands of more people than her films. What I currently find most interesting about the quote you find in classrooms is not what's in it, but what it leaves out—you know, the part about Canada being so rich in resources, yet so eager to consume itself.
Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency.
I wonder if this quote alone would describe the current economic lust which front running federal election candidates are now stirring up in voters. I say candidates because I don't think that pandering to our current obsession with the economy belongs to only one party. As evidenced in The Globe and Mail debate this evening, the economy is the NUMBER ONE political issue for Canadians. Call me crazy, call me late for lunch, but in-between the "He's not perfect, but he'll take care of the economy" TV ads I've been asking some dreadful questions: what the hell is the economy? and why is it so important?
At its most basic level the word economy comes from the Greek for household management, or as my old football coach would say, "taking care of your area." This is a cute definition if you're talking about a family taking care of its household affairs in ancient Greece, but, as with most loaded terms, the word has taken on a much different meaning today. One of the founders of market capitalism, John Maynard Keynes admitted that capitalist theory is based upon avarice (extreme greed) and usury (charging interest on loans), both vices that are condemned in all human wisdom traditions. His hope is that we could use human greed to kickstart our economies and then hopefully restrain ourselves so that we would not "sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance."
If this is confusing to you, think about how it would apply in our happy little household in ancient Greece. Everyone would be happy as long as they all were extremely greedy and took whatever they wanted without a care for other family members. Still not make sense? Good. Because it doesn't. And neither does the economic system that we are living under today. Within such a system, there is always winners and losers. The biggest winners in our current capitalist system? Western, White, straight, educated, middle to upper-class men (yes, I know I am guilty). Losers include any opposites to the above list AND, because this is an eco-blog, the bio-sphere with inhabitants of all life forms.
Not a very good system by which to manage our common household, is it? But the problem is, we are immersed in it. This economic system is like a religion to us. Like religious fundamentalists, many of us our very uncomfortable with any criticism of our current economic system. Jesus warned us: Money has indeed, become our God.
In Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, a book that is even more relevant today than it was in 1975, E.F. Schumacher writes
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
And what is our current definition of "uneconomic?" Schumacher continues:
something is uneconomic when it fails to earn an adequate profit in terms of money... This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic.
Similarly,
It would be "uneconomic" for a wealthy seller to reduce his prices to poor customers merely because they are in need, or for a wealthy buyer to pay an extra price merely because the supplier is poor. Equally, it would be "uneconomic" for a buyer to give preference to home-produced goods if imported goods are cheaper.
Again, who are the losers in these exchanges: poor people—both producers and consumers; local and small businesses (farms, trades, etc.) that can't compete with the lower prices of corporations that outsource labour and purchase cheaper raw materials; and finally, a planet which absorb copious amounts of CO2 because of all the global transportation of goods.
If I've lost you at this point, I don't blame you. This blog has kind of turned into a rant. That's okay. For the past week I've had this angst building up within me as I've heard more and more jargon about "the economy." I guess I knew I had to write it out after the debate this evening.
Some of you may be fairly criticizing me for my lack of solutions. I agree. I am hoping in a future blog to write about an economic/political theory that I have been learning about recently. It is called distributionism and, from what I've learned at this point, it provides kind of an economic "third-way" somewhere between global capitalism and stuffy socialism that seems to be much more democratic.
Cheers...
