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Gandhi once said that the Earth has enough resources to satisfy all man's needs but not to satisfy his greed. Recently I attended a church service where the sermon centred on a 1987 United Nations report on the concept of 'sustainable development'. The preacher asserted that it was imperative for any Christian to seek to live in such a way as not to make life miserable or, indeed, impossible for future generations. Present day capitalism rapes and pillages the natural world and her resources without regard for long term consequences and does this almost automatically. Such behaviour, it seems, is intrinsic to our present day system. Of course modern capitalist governments do alter the free market for reasons of social benefit. However trans-national companies are notoriously impervious to the power of national governments and will routinely furnish propaganda and use political muscle to safeguard their profit interests. It is often said in 'green' circles that the mainstream Western mind-set continually seeks to solve problems by magnifying their causes. If we were to define 'poverty' as the state of not having enough money then poverty in Ireland, and in the First World in general, is very often an affliction of the rich. While Western working class life in 1850 may well have involved extreme deprivation this is certainly not so now. Those on the lowest rung of society, the so called social welfare trap, in Ireland would be very wealthy by Indian standards. Their poverty is of a relative nature. Of course such a way of life is not to be envied. Mainstream working and lower middle classes tend to live in a state of relative prosperity. On the other hand the bourgeoisie often fall prey to illusions of money being 'no object', perhaps by virtue of their 'status'. The concept of money being 'no object' is not and cannot be true for anyone, at least in any absolute sense. Bill Gates may well be able to dine in absolutely any restaurant in Paris but infinite gluttony, gastronomic or other, is not in anyone's grasp no matter how close some might appear to this state. This assertion may seem strange to some but Charles Haughey was constantly short of money. His gargantuan consumption of exotic and expensive commodities masked an underlying character flaw that created a craving that no amount of material wealth would extinguish. And he continually sought more wealth. And then still more. Is this not true poverty? Wretchedness! Does one buy things as one lives ones life or live simply to consume products? Whether at the level of the biosphere or the individual, the dis-eased mentality of the Westerner has the same or analogous ill effects. A great deal of the present ecological crisis can be traced to a desire for profits that is devoid of any moral dimension. It is anti-moral rather than simply amoral. And much 'success' at the level of the individual involves the delusion that one is a hair's breadth, always a hair's breath, from achieving infinite gluttony. The ecology movement has its roots in 1960's radicalism that in Europe was more neo-communist than the 'drug' based mysticism of the Americas. These days these movements are ridiculed and, more often, trivialised. The 1970's, the 'me decade', advocated a personal development that was devoid of social content or context: revolution at the level of the purely personal. That the extinction of the human race, and possibly all life on Earth, is a possible, medium term, consequence of the present economic world order is hardly in question. Now, the relationship between 'society' and the 'individual' is much more complex, I believe, than the reductionist model of modern liberal political theory. However the adoption of a desire for 'voluntary simplicity' modes of life style will have a knock-on effect at the macro-economic level. To live well and to desire wealth are close to being mutually exclusive, at least in essence. The rich often, in the real sense, have nothing but their cravings and their grandiosity to show for their efforts. The real point is not to curb one’s cravings and one’s defective perspectives but to lose them. The revolution, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is within us but once thus established it will flow beyond us.
Brendan Burke MA(Phil) 4th August 2008. |