David Loy: Don’t Waste the Crisis!
Once more, congratulations on your impressive victory, the best news in many years. The only other event that comes close is that our financial and economic systems have begun to collapse. Coincidence or not (God’s way to make sure you won?), the election would have been a lot closer without this different type of “October surprise.” Have we been reminded, again, that “it’s the economy, stupid”? If so, that slogan can be understood in different ways.
No one should make light of the economic pain that will deepen over the next few years. Nevertheless, this crisis is a terrible thing to waste (as Paul Romer once put it) because such an opportunity does not happen very often. The timing means that you are given a golden opportunity to address the fundamental challenge of our times: the relationship between our out-of-control, self-destructive economic system and the ecological crisis. Unless we find a way to face this squarely, and very soon, it’s not over-dramatic to evoke that old metaphor about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
To put it bluntly, our present economic system has become disastrous to our physical, mental, and ecological health. It institutionalizes an insatiable greed: consumers never consume enough, corporations are never profitable enough, GNP is never big enough. Even when incomes are rising, it is not providing what we really need and want, and it is destroying the earth, our home and mother. The rapid warming of the globe—more quickly than anyone anticipated—is giving the whole biosphere a dangerous fever. Civilization as we know it is threatened. And if we cannot find the will and the ways to respond to this challenge, perhaps it does not deserve to survive.
Other developed nations are more aware of the seriousness of our predicament, but thanks to the well-funded obfuscations of some fossil-fuel corporations, many Americans are not. (Jim Hansen, head of NASA and the world’s most respected climatologist, has called their misinformation campaigns “crimes against humanity.”) Most of us still see the issue as merely a technological problem to be solved by lowering carbon emissions. But atmospheric carbon is only the visible tip of the iceberg. The larger issue is an unsustainable global economic system, and the deluded worldview that supports it.
There’s a simple way to point out the basic problem. As you know, capitalism is about using capital (money for investment) to create more capital. This is true whether you produce something for sale or put your money in the stock market, bonds, etc. Since the goal is to end up with more money, everything else becomes a means to that end. “Everything else” in this case includes the biosphere (resources), human life (labor), and society itself, which must continually adapt to the changing requirements of the economy.
The irony is that money in itself is literally nothing: whether pieces of paper or numbers in bank accounts, money has value only because it is our socially agreed-upon medium of exchange. We can’t eat or drink dollar bills. This means that what motivates our economic system (and its preoccupation with incessant growth) is the drive to use anything and everything (now “resources”) to create something that is really nothing. We don’t notice the absurdity of this because we are usually preoccupied with the more and more that the system produces. The fact that many of us Americans already have more than we need is addressed by manipulating our awareness, so that we always want something else that we don’t yet have. It’s always the next _______ (fill in the blank) that will satisfy us.
No other nation is in a position to begin reforming that system, which is why your leadership will be so important to the whole world. Admittedly, this is an extraordinary challenge. In fact, I can conceive of none greater. Frankly, your appointments so far are not encouraging. Nevertheless, you have given us many reasons to hope that you will rise to the occasion and grow to meet the challenge. If you don’t do it, who can? If not now, when?
David R. Loy is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of A Buddhist History of the West and The Great Awakening: a Buddhist social theory.
