Inside Yoga 57 (23/7/12)
A couple of weeks ago I was interested to see a news report about comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his new book Faith in the Public Square, to be published in September. After 10 years in his current post he has built up a reputation for making waves with his views and comments, but it appears that his new book, which coincides with his retirement, is his final parting shot.
It was one of his comments which caught my eye, reported in the Sunday Observer on June 24, “Archbishop’s farewell blast takes aim at Cameron, ageism and cult of greed”, and this was his view on greed.
The paper quoted him: “At the individual and the national level, we have to question what we mean by growth. The ability to produce more and more consumer goods (not to mention financial products) is in itself an entirely mechanical measure of wealth. It sets up a vicious cycle in which it is necessary all the time to create new demand for goods and thus new demands on a limited material environment for energy and resources.
“By the hectic inflation of demand it creates personal anxiety and rivalry. By systematically depleting the resources of the planet, it systematically destroys the basis of long-term wellbeing. In a nutshell, it is investing in the wrong things.”
Well said!!! I am not someone who has ever thought he would agree with an Archbishop, but this is a view close to my heart. Whenever growth figures have been quoted in the news, I have always found myself thinking: “Why are they not happy with 0 per cent growth?” As this means to me stability and is that not enough? Before the economist shouts back that I don’t understand, I do realise that they will say that this means the economy is contracting and all the misfortune that will follow, but I do question like Williams does, the whole premise of that argument.
And Williams has put it so well – and in a nutshell as he says. We have forgotten as a society – and this is now a global society – what is important for not only human wellbeing but the world’s wellbeing, from flora to fauna.
Williams’ point about greed is linked to something I wrote about some time ago: the premise that we, as humans, still act as we did back in the primitive times of Stone Age era, when scarcity was the norm. Back then we ate as much as we could when food was there (as it would be hard to find), and we worked (ie: hunted and foraged) when we could as blizzards and drought would prevent this being done all year. Back then the population was smaller and it was not a 24/7 society: resources survived and people were not obese (as far as I know!) or over-worked. But we are still driven by the same instincts, even though we might think we have developed as a species, we have not evolved.
Therefore, we don’t know when to say to ourselves we have enough. We don’t know how to stop. Our greed is driving the way we are destroying ourselves and the planet we live on – and killing off the other animals and plants that have shared the world with us.
It is a madness that makes the archbishop look like the little boy who saw through the madness of the people and declared that the emperor is really naked!!! The problem is that some of us agree with him, but those who hold the keys to power in our world will dismiss his views as the thoughts of delusional and eccentric priest. And they will carry on with destroying the planet and ourselves: unless…. yes, unless, there is a shift in the way the global population thinks and acts. Is this possible? I would like to be optimistic, but the realist in me does worry that things, like human greed, will not change.
see the Guardian report:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/23/archbishop-canterbury-rowan-williams-book
