Posted by Rachel on: 07.23.2007 /
“As part of this insane and suicidal economy, we act as though the resources we consume are infinite and the wastes we deposit are invisible. Just as our bodies consume food and produce excrement, in this economy we consume trees and produce smoke, consume clean air and produce smog, consume clean water and produce sewage and toxic waste, consume rock and produce radiation, consume oil and coal and produce gases that turn our planet into an overheating oven in which storms boil and oceans rise and deserts spread and forests wither. Our prosperity system thus becomes an excrement factory.”– Brian McLaren, from a preview of Everything Must Change
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Comment by: joe
1 07/23/07 5:29 AM | Comment Link |Well, first it is fairly extreme. Not everything we do produces ‘excrement’, although a fair amount of it does it is true to say.
I’d say this is an oversimplification which isn’t really helping very much - we are as tied into a ‘cycle of wealth’ as my friends are tied into a disgusting ‘cycle of poverty’, and just pointing out that our whole existance is built on sand isn’t helping any.
I’d suggest this is a suicidal mentality - where the only logical outcome is to kill oneself.
In truth, I cannot justify my own existance and lifestyle I am accustomed to living. Nothing I can do is really going to make much of a difference to that on a macroscale, and if the bible is to be believed, it is us who are heading for a fall rather than the 90% of the world who have a crappy life we are used to thinking of as the world’s ‘problems’.
On the other hand, there are many who are dependant upon us in many ways. It is a big and thorny issue with no obvious simple solution.
Comment by: Rachel
2 07/23/07 8:25 AM | Comment Link |To be fair to McLaren, this is just a very brief excerpt of the book, which will be out in October. The full title is Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.
Actually, in the early stages of this book the working title was Jesus and the Suicide Machine. (Personally, I’m glad he changed it.)
Comment by: David H
3 07/23/07 10:11 AM | Comment Link |Excrement factory seems a pretty fair assessment. Even crap has some benefits; it may be even more beneficial as a by-product than much of the secondary affects from world economics.
I’m not sure what other labels might apply, but the rush to wealth seems inevitable to the world and somewhat inexplicable to me as a Christian. The pursuit of economic imbalance seems as old as civilization. That is not nearly as difficult to explain as how it has become so tightly wrapped with the Christian faith in the US. We are not the first society to list wealth among the blessings from God, but we seem to have taken its status of proof of God’s special love to a pathological level. It has become a sort of prejudice of the faithful — pity and help the (probably foreign) downtrodden, but also look down on them because it is their own fault.
The response to the realities of the world don’t need to be suicidal. Guilt that does not lead to action does much more damage than good. Action that leads to self-demise (physical or economic) may not yield a lot of long-term value (so you give all that you have to the poor, then what?). Maybe all that God wants from us fat, rich Americans is to keep in mind that what we have isn’t because he has made us better than the rest of the world and that our job is to help others when we have the opportunity in whatever ways we can. Like evangelism, the result may not be based on “numbers we have saved” or how many we brought to the altar; the job may be to keep planting seeds and tending the garden that comes our way.
American Christianity seems to believe that salvation, like so much else, can be industrialized. Bring souls to the assembly line, shove them into the system, and out pops a convert at the other end (neatly wrapped in a fire retardant suit and ready for heaven). So call Christians leaders seem to push the concept that we should all be a Henry Ford in the work of the Lord. And the profit (for the person running the mill) is worldly riches, mansions in heaven, and crowns of righteousness. Lost is the sense that seems to come from Jesus that the outcome may be of little or no value (to me or my product) if I lose touch. If I care for one person who is sick, if I feed one person who is hungry, if I visit one person in prison, if I touch one life in the name of Jesus might it matter more than billions given to charity or a million bodies dumped into the hopper of some salvation machine?
But on a simply secular note, in terms of issues like carbon emissions the US has long been the only country in the world that could affect a real change. Had we sunk a small percentage of what was spent on the Cold War into alternative energy research and put in place real policies to force change, then we would be largely free of reliance on oil at this point (then we might have been able to use the Iraq war money as well). However, that didn’t happen until people began to figure out how to capitalize economically on such a change. It is understandable that the world’s view of all transactions should be what is in it for me. But it makes Christianity a hard sell to the rest of the world when we market it on the same terms.
Comment by: Is globalization self-destructive? Is it suicide pact? « Compassion in Politics
4 07/23/07 10:30 AM | Comment Link |[...] The folks over at Justice and Compassion made a great post about “Our Excrement Economy” [...]
Comment by: Is globalization self-destructive? Is it suicide pact? « Compassion in Politics
5 07/23/07 10:35 AM | Comment Link |[...] The folks over at Justice and Compassion made a great post about “Our Excrement Economy.” [...]
Comment by: joe
6 07/23/07 12:42 PM | Comment Link |I agree with David H - we need to feel guilty about our role in the world but we need to find a way not to be paralysed by that guilt.
One of the scariest books of my adult life was/is Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider - and given that he was talking about this stuff in the 1970s, we haven’t really progressed very far.
That book haunts me. I really don’t need any more guilt to go with it.
Comment by: Nathan Ketsdever
7 07/23/07 1:22 PM | Comment Link |I think you’re both right (You and Joe). When we talk about globalization we tend to talk in universal goods vs. bad. Unfortunately, this ignores the vast complexity and truth of issue. For, instance Tom Friedman pronounced the World Is Flat because globalization was leveling the playing field on a global scale. But that as Richard Florida has pointed out in Flight of the Creative Class is not true because of the concentration of talent (and wealth).
So what do you think??? What is your perspective???
So, is globalization a mixed bag? For us? For developing economies? How can we move to a more productive way of talking and thinking about globalization? How can we move to a more productive way of curbing the excesses of globalization? We’re so wedded to globalization and its benefits, how can we reverse our perilous course? Do we live in an “excrement economy”?
I encourage folks to check out the historic YouTube/CNN debates this evening.
Comment by: joe
8 07/23/07 2:45 PM | Comment Link |Hi Nathan, welcome :)
There are various intertwined problems. For example, a couple from what you say above:
1. Whilst it is true that the world is theoretically flatter - ie access to global markets is greater - that really doesn’t help those who have no way to access those markets. There must be millions who have a skill or a product which significant numbers of people would want but are just unaware how to reach them.
2. This all assumes that the prevailing model of global trade as development is a valid one. I’m not convinced it is. A global economy only succeeds if you have economic inequalities - so forces all those poor people to fight over my dollar/pound rather than doing the things that are more sustainable and would enable them to eat. That just aint the way it is supposed to work. I am faced with the horrific idea that all those hardy and imaginative people who have the skills to survive against the odds would do a lot better if I - and all of us reading this on their computers at home - didn’t exist. We’re the problem, not the solution.
Comment by: Rachel
9 07/23/07 8:02 PM | Comment Link |Welcome to Justice and Compassion, Nathan!
In God’s Politics, Jim Wallis points out that in a recent meeting of the WTO, the European Union had 500 negotiators and Haiti had none. As long as we have this kind of extreme power inequity, it seems that two-thirds world producers will be exploited and ignored. I want to see the powerful, (over)developed nations deal more fairly and respectfully with their developing partners. The question is can we actually create the political and moral will to do this? I’ve been pretty involved in the ONE Campaign, and of their agenda of fair trade, debt relief and development aid, I think that fair trade is probably the hardest sell. At least here in the US, people simply don’t question the belief that economic self interest is an acceptable moral bottom line.
Joe, could you elaborate more on this topic? I tend to feel pretty good about purchasing fair trade coffee and chocolate, fair trade clothing and handicrafts and so on. But your comment makes me wonder if my thinking on this issue is rather simplistic or naive.
Comment by: joe
10 07/24/07 12:24 AM | Comment Link |Well - I really believe in fairtrade let me say that. I’d much rather buy a product which I know gives a good price than one that doesn’t.
However, the fact remains that even fairtrade relies on having people to produce something at a much lower price than we could produce it ourselves.
Unfortunately, in a western economy that produces almost nothing, our economy is based on being able to buy things at a low price and sell them at a high one to make a profit. Our pensions, tax system and jobs are dependent on this, and by extension on the backs of millions who we need to do things cheaply.
Comment by: Hear Listen Connect - Off The Map Live
11 07/30/07 5:37 PM | Comment Link |[...] us on the Off the Map blog Justice and Compassion for discussion of an excerpt from the upcoming book Everything Must Change by conference presenter [...]
Comment by: Martin Gugino
12 09/11/07 10:28 AM | Comment Link |But we do need to at least stop.