‘If we are to serve the truth, I think we have to name capitalism as the problem, not the solution.’ Photo: by fikry anshor on Unsplash
Economy drive: Paul Hodgkin asks if it’s time for a Quaker testimony against capitalism
‘How do we create meaning in a world that seems headed for the medieval or the neolithic?’
Today, a new epochal truth confronts us: our way of life is destroying the Earth. What testimony flows from this truth?
Testimony, according to Rachel Muers in Quakerism and Theological Ethics, always arises out of our refusal to live a lie. Today, climate breakdown and the destruction of the biosphere point directly to the two lies that our culture is built on: the lie that the Earth and its resources can be exploited at will; and the lie that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet.
As the crises unfold, it is becoming ever clearer that these two lies are at the heart of our culture. If economic growth and the need for endless resources are not just design faults in capitalism but its beating heart, then should our contemporary testimony to truth include a witness against capitalism? This feels as big a step as the Peace Testimony must have felt to Margaret Fell and George Fox in 1660. Surely, we think, a green economy must be possible? Surely we can make the things we need without endlessly destroying the Earth’s peoples and ecosystems? Surely, we can somehow have our cake and eat it? Well perhaps, but it won’t be capitalism, it will be something yet to be invented. Meanwhile it is capitalism that squats on the Earth turning sunlight, past and present, into CO2 and landfill. No, if we are to serve the truth, I think we have to name capitalism as the problem, not the solution.
For British Quakers, such a testimony poses a particular reckoning, for it was Quakers – the Derbys, Wedgwoods, Frys, Allens, Barclays, and Gurneys – who nurtured ironmaking, pottery, banking, and pharmaceuticals, into existence. By the 1820s Quakers controlled a significant portion of the GDP of Britain. We were the Googles, Amazons and Apples of the early industrial revolution, and it is this, perhaps even more than our involvement with slavery, with which we need to come to terms.
At a personal level, a testimony against capitalism might mean a commitment to consuming less – fewer flights, less meat, less stuff. But a witness against capitalism and economic growth involves far more than this. Capitalism is our secular ground of being, and it is no accident that the language of the market echoes religion: We are held by the hidden hand of the market, which is in turn omniscient (‘you liked this so you’ll like that’), omnipresent (there is no region of the Earth or our hearts which the market does not seek to commodify) and omnipotent (you can’t buck the market). To bear witness against the central lies of capitalism means living in completely new ways that are hard to imagine.
It is not just that the end of capitalism would deprive us of many good things like medicine, education, or food. It is that capitalism offers – or appears to offer – us the freedom to be ourselves. Giving up capitalism would seem to imply that we have to give up the freedom to travel, to learn, to be free of disease, the freedom to be one’s ‘real self’. If refusing capitalism means refusing ‘self-realisation’ this rocks us to our foundations and begins to explain why ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. The journey of our autonomous self to find itself is the secular equivalent of a pilgrimage to God. Our right to be ourselves seems to speak to the very essence of our lives. Does confronting the truth of our times, and bearing witness to the end of capitalism, mean that we have to say goodbye to freedom and to a sense of our autonomous selves?
Well, I think we are about to find out. If the Earth’s limits really do herald the end of capitalism, then getting the harvest in will become more important than doing Pilates, making a lot of money or even writing that novel before we die. Sharing the food, and being part of a community, is going to be more important than the particular freedoms of being a consumer.
In one sense this is just the pragmatics of getting by in a climactically chaotic world: of course we must act collectively to get the harvest in, or make shoes, or deliver babies safely. The deeper question asks how we do these things, while also enabling each of us to be ourselves. How do we create meaning in a world that seems headed for the medieval or the neolithic? As the balance shifts away from individualism and towards mutuality, we need to allow kindness, and difference to flourish. Capitalism cajoled us with gold and guns to leave our villages. Now, we must take the best of what we have learned by escaping from the village, back into the new villages in which we may soon live. Quaker methods may serve us well here: tolerance, time, stillness. Beyond this, we need to be exploring, before things get worse, how we live together in these newly truthful ways.
Our whole concept of truth and of witness has been developed in the context of a world rich in energy and steeped in ‘progress’. Living the truth in a world of declining energy consumption is likely to be radically different. The forces driving this are primarily physical and ecological, not political, so we will need to live new words: sufficiency, solidarity, radical hospitality. All these celebrate the collective not the individual. They speak to limits, not freedom, to acceptance, not autonomy. The times that will bring us to this are still arising, but I think now is the time to start living these truths.
We know, intellectually, that we depend on all other things. But living under climate change means moving beyond this to actually not getting in the way of these things, not massacring them, not turning them into holidays or Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is the Earth, and its great implacable cycles of water, carbon and sunlight, that decides our future. It is not we who are in charge – we are not even stewards – rather it is the incessant, uncontrollable ‘becoming together’ that is life. Prometheus is dead. Long live Gaia.
The epochal Earth crises call forth words from the depth of awe: revelation (a laying bare), apocalypse (an unveiling), repentance (a turning away and seeing the world anew), and sacrifice (making holy). With these words our souls begin to speak: ‘Ah! Now we see. Now we understand what we have done. Now we grieve. Now we change. Now we may be renewed.’ The Earth crises call us to name the juggernaut that we have created.
At the end of his life George Fox wrote a beautiful and compelling distillation of his teaching: ‘And from truth flows justice, equity, rightness, devotion, mercy and tenderness. It brings the human heart, mind, soul and spirit to the infinite and incomprehensible God. And from it flows a love to the whole of creation.’ We have to trust that in facing the truths which the Earth is showing us, we will indeed find justice, equity, rightness, devotion, mercy and tenderness. We have to find, and be found by, a love that flows through the whole of creation. Even to us, despite what we have done. In this epic moment, perhaps our testimony to the deep truths of climate breakdown will help our old souls, nurtured through 50,000 years of solidarity and community, to be remembered back into being from beneath today’s idolatry of the individual.
Comments
The problem hinges on the way the making of money has been turned to be the purpose of management. Many other sentient creatures practice management - think of a Meerkat Alpha Female or a Gorilla Alpha Male to name but two. There are species of ant that practice agriculture and, after all, a termite mound is in fact a rather sophisticated air conditioning unit.
All species change the environment around them to create a place to sleep, all create paths to get them from where they sleep to where they eat. However, they tend to practice management for sufficiency, not excess. A lioness doesn’t go and kill prey to see how many she can kill. The difference is that our species of Great Ape has invented an entirely artificial commodity - money.
This was intended to make living easier, by being a sort of central exchange mechanism to make bartering more reliable by giving things we needed a readily convertible value. We didn’t need to figure out whether two sheaves of wheat were worth one loaf of bread etc. However, money became a commodity of its own. We turned the sole purpose of that entirely natural phenomenon, management, into the making of money. The purpose of building places to sleep is to make money, of building roads is to make money, of eating is to make money, even of having sex can be to make money!
Money disconnected us from nature.
All you need do is actively and intentionally turn the purpose of management to be the conservation and enhancement of the environment - place the making of money as secondary rather than primary - and it is amazing what can be done! As I know from personal experience in my own little bit of Stewardship volunteering. See for example: https://www.vscc.co.uk/page/carbon-offsetting and https://vintagebentley.com/sustainability
Both are small businesses in a very niche sector of the British economy, I admit, but both are absolutely determined to make a difference doing what they love. If they can do it, any business can do it!
By markrdibben@gmail.com on 4th April 2024 - 9:43
Hi Mark, Thanks for your thoughts on this. I agree with you that managing every aspect of consumption better so that we use less energy and resources is important because it buys us a bit more time before our capitalist model (in my view) runs up against immovable limits imposed by the Earth and its great cycles of water, carbon, energy, and resources. This makes it more likely that we manage the essential jump to a non-growth, non-resource consuming new kind of economy (if such exists).
But to the very extent that we are successful in using less, we weaken the growth which is at the heart of capitalism and this immediately highlights the paradox: consuming less is inimicable to capitalism which is why the car industry spends billions each year persuading us to buy new cars, rather than billions persuading us to not buy them and to drive lovely old vintage cars instead.
So for me our core task is not managing things better (important as this is), rather it is recognising that our economic system of capitalism has always been built on two central lies: that resources are limitless and that economic growth can continue for ever on a single planet. Running up against the Earth’s limits highlights these falsehoods and this is what is triggering the collapse of late stage capitalism. IF. Paul
By Paul H on 9th April 2024 - 2:13
Hello Paul,
You might enjoy Helena Norberg Hodge’s ‘Local Futures / Economics of Happiness’ work. The problem with the argument that capitalism has to be abandoned is that governmental resources are incapable of funding major climate impactful initiatives. Only the private sector has the resources to do this. All governments can do is ‘pump prime’ and ‘kick-start’.
There is another problem: People. Not the question of population so much, as that is forecast to drop anyway relatively soon. No, the problem is what people want to do. Which is, they want to travel. People love traveling. They love flying. Last year saw the largest number of passenger movements, so the term is called, ever. And this year is forecast to be even more. The largest growth in passengers is in the Far East and another growth market is the Indian subcontinent, despite the fact that this is where much climate impact is beginning to be felt.
The majority of people don’t care about the climate really. They say they do, and they do when they are sat at home in front of the television or their iPad. But they are not prepared to change what they want to do. What they want to do is fly…
So the water rises a bit. Build a wall. A fabulous wall. The best wall. Walls - ahem - ‘Trump’ everything!! As we shall probably see in November.
Until more can be convinced to look inwards, to be guided by the Light rather than by secularism’s external wants, people are even more of a problem than is economics.
In Christ’s Light,
Mark
By markrdibben@gmail.com on 9th April 2024 - 14:05
Firstly I would like to recommend ‘The Great Transformation’ by Karl Polanyi, which refers to that period of change driven by Quakers two hundred years ago.
But we are so embedded in the capitalist system that we cannot even see it - it is like water to fish or air to us. Here is the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray in a radio broadcast in January 1932, at the very depths of the great depression, shortly after the formation of the national government here in the UK to deal with the crisis, and just before Roosevelt became president and initiated the New Deal in the US, but also just before Hitler seized power in Germany and as Japan was invading China:
“Then, must we just give up hope and relapse into despair? I do not think so. Indeed, our despair would itself be false. What we have to do is to wait and be quiet; to stop our feverish efforts to do something; to cease our fruitless attempt to save ourselves. Salvation, if it comes to us, must come from outside. We must wait for the new thing to be born in us; for the new light to be manifested to us. Even to look is useless, for our eyes are blinded. We can only be quiet and wait, expectant but unworried, for the creative word that will say, ‘Let there be light.’ There is nothing else to be done. The next word is not with us, but with reality.”
By GordonF on 12th April 2024 - 9:50
Please login to add a comment
