Religion
The New Economy must be built on the foundation of a moral and spiritual awakening. Faith institutions have an essential role to play in advancing this awakening, as well as in bridging the class, race, and religious divides easily exploited by political powers that want to keep us dependent on the centralized power of the Wall Street–Washington axis.
Sermons and adult education programs can raise the moral issues relating to human responsibility for one another and the living Earth. They might begin by examining Wall Street culture and institutions from the perspective of the table in chapter 9 contrasting the seven deadly sins with the seven life-serving virtues. They might encourage people to share and examine their personal beliefs regarding the potential and limitations of our human nature and the implications for our prospect of achieving each of the seven interventions of the New Economy policy agenda outlined in chapter 13.
They can form partnerships with faith institutions that follow different traditions and minister to people from other races, ethnicities, and classes to share perspective on the profound moral choices at hand.
I am privileged to count among my friends and colleagues the three Seattle-based “interfaith amigos” — Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Sheikh Jamal Rahman — who are modeling interfaith inquiry and inviting fellow searchers from the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to join in their dialogue.1
As with educational transformation, the transformation of our faith institutions begins one church, synagogue, temple, and mosque at a time, with the potential to build quickly toward critical mass as more faith institutions come to understand what is at stake and what transformational possibilities are at hand.
The Arts
Among the four groups of professionals named, artists are the most likely to self-identify as cultural workers. The best among them are truth tellers who have the ability to awaken our minds from the cultural trance that leads us to consume harmful products, play the mark in Wall Street con games, and support public policies contrary to our interests.
Talented artists can help us see beauty, meaning, and possibility in what we may otherwise experience only as mundane and fragmented. They can take us on a journey to a future no one has yet visited to experience possibilities we may not have imagined.
I came to a deep appreciation of the profound potential of this aspect of the artist’s craft through my friendship with Raffi Cavoukian. I met Raffi only as an adult but have been captivated by the magical quality of his music and its ability to awaken within both children and adults a profound yet playful appreciation of the beauty and possibilities of life. I see the evidence of his influence in the life of each of the many young people I meet from among the millions who grew up on his music.
In the middle of many of my public presentations on the New Economy, I play his “No Wall Too Tall,”2 which he originally recorded for the launch of Agenda for a New Economy.It gets the whole auditorium dancing and unleashes an amazingly inspiring energy.3
Artists can use their craft to befuddle our minds, justify evil, and entice us into self-destructive behavior, as demonstrated by the many talented artists in the employ of Wall Street institutions. These corporate artists use their talents to cloud our ability to see the harmful side of Wall Street products, the deceits of its financial scams, and the real interests served by its favored public policies and political candidates. They earn high salaries, work with clear goals, and have impressive financial resources at their command.
Independent artists, by contrast, are commonly unorganized and simply trying to make a modest living producing works of grace and beauty.
Our movement needs the contribution of millions of artists who use their powers of perception and representation to liberate our consciousness, as articulated by Milenko Matanovic in the YES! Magazineissue on Art and Community:
The artist endeavors to perceive directly, without filters or notions.…In the process the artist becomes more aware of the assumptions and myths that govern the world and so gains the ability to discard the obsolete, empower the appropriate, and create the new.…Images of the future generated through the power of imagination are essential to the health of all cultures, for a society’s vitality is lost once its capacity to imagine is gone.…Artists can be a culture’s scouts, forging paths into the future.4
My Bainbridge Island friend and colleague Bill Cleveland is collecting and sharing stories of a growing group of independent artists who are engaging whole communities to discover their inner beauty and creative potential through artistic experience. These artists work with children and adults involved in programs of community beautification and cultural enrichment to stage public productions. People who never thought of themselves as actors express and explore stories of themselves and their community in ways that heal and inspire. This strengthens the community’s sense of itself and its readiness to engage together in community building and the creation of vibrant local living economies.5
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
For the many millions of us working to create a better world, it is easy to feel discouraged by the seeming insignificance of even major successes relative to the scale of the problems we face as a nation and a species. Consumed by the details and challenges of our daily engagements, we may easily lose sight of the big picture of the powerful social dynamic to which our work is contributing.
Step back from time to time; take a breath, look out beyond the immediate horizon to bring that big picture back into perspective.6 Reflect in awe and wonder at the power of the larger social dynamic to which your work contributes.
So how do you know whether your work is contributing to a big-picture outcome? If you can answer yes to any one of the following five questions, then be assured that it is.
• Does it help discredit a false cultural story fabricated to legitimize relationships of domination and exploitation and to replace it with a true story describing unrealized possibilities for growing the real wealth of healthy communities?
• Is it connecting others of the movement’s millions of leaders who didn’t previously know one another, helping them find common cause and build relationships of mutual trust that allow them to speak honestly from their hearts and to know that they can call on one another for support when needed?
• Is it creating and expanding liberated social spaces in which people experience the freedom and support to experiment with living the creative, cooperative, self-organizing relationships of the new story they seek to bring into the larger culture?
• Is it providing a public demonstration of the possibilities of a real-wealth economy?
• Is it mobilizing support for a rule change that will shift the balance of power from the people and institutions of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy to the people and institutions of living-wealth Main Street economies?
* * *
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
The first step in making a personal contribution to creating the New Economy is to take control of your life and declare your independence from Wall Street by joining the voluntary simplicity movement and cutting back on unnecessary consumption. Beyond that, shop at local independent stores where possible and purchase locally made goods when available. Make the same choices as to where you work and invest to the extent feasible.
Pay with cash at local merchants to save them the credit card fee. Pay your credit card balance when due and avoid using your credit card as an open line of credit. Do your banking with an independent local community bank or credit union that will invest your money back in your community. Green America provides an excellent free guide called Investing in Communities(greenamericatoday.org/PDF/GuideInvestCommunities.pdf).
The second step is to join with others in initiatives that contribute to any one or all of the five activities mentioned under “Making a Difference” on pages 269–272. Engage in conversations about our cultural stories. Facilitate new connections. Create liberated public spaces.
Demonstrate new possibilities. Many specific possibilities are mentioned in chapter 16 under the heading “Two Epic Moments in the Great Democratic Experiment.” Link your local initiatives into national networks through groups like the American Independent Business Alliance (amiba.net), the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (livingeconomies. org), and Transition Towns (transitiontowns.org).
Above all, engage in conversations about the realities of Wall Street, the difference between phantom wealth and real wealth, and the nature and possibilities of the New Economy. Be aware that economic reporting and commentary in the corporate media usually reflect a Wall Street phantom-wealth perspective. Listen with a skeptical ear and practice identifying the under lying fallacies. Invite your friends and colleagues to do the same.
Join or form a Common Security Club for mutual education and support in dealing with the economic crisis (extremeinequality.org/?p=92). Consider inviting a group of friends or neighbors to discuss Agenda for a New Economy.You can find a group discussion guide at greatturning.org, along with links to other New Economy discussion resources.
For all of the above, plus a wealth of stories and resources helpful in tracking the larger movement to which your work contributes, subscribe to YES! Magazine and draw on the wealth of resources on its Web site, yesmagazine.org.
You can find other links to resources on the New Economy Working Group site, neweconomyworkinggroup.org.
These are useful guidelines for setting both individual and group priorities. Bear in mind that in a systems-change undertaking of this magnitude, there is no magic bullet and no one is going to make it happen on their own, so don’t be discouraged if the world looks much the same today despite your special and heroic effort yesterday. It took five thousand years to create the mess we are in today. It will take more than a few days to set it right.
We humans have made enormous progress in our technological mastery, but we fall far short in our mastery of ourselves and the potential of our human consciousness. Failing to identify the true sources of our happiness and well-being, we worship at the altar of money to the neglect of the altar of life. Failing to distinguish between money and real wealth, we embrace illusion as reality, and enslavement to the institutions of Wall Street as liberty.
The implosion of the Wall Street phantom-wealth economy exposes how effective we can be in creating cultures and institutions that cultivate and celebrate the most pathological possibilities of our human nature. Let the ugliness that the implosion has revealed serve as an inspiration to finally get it right.
Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life. Using that gift to best effect requires constant learning. Life is is our curriculum, and our assignment of the moment is to learn to live by the rules of the biosphere — which itself continues to learn and evolve. Learning is so embedded in the fabric of life that I’ve come to believe that it is integral to life’s purpose.
We can, if we choose, replace cultures and institutions that celebrate and reward the pathologies of our lower human nature with cultures and institutions that celebrate and reward the capacities of our higher nature. We can turn as a species from perfecting our capacity for exclusionary competition to perfecting our capacity for inclusionary cooperation. We can share the good news that the healthy potential of our human nature yearns for liberation from cultural stories and institutional reward systems that have long suppressed it.
The liberation of this potential is the larger vision and goal of the New Economy agenda. It begins with clarifying our values and investing in growing the relationships of the caring communities that are the essential foundation of real wealth and security. As individuals and as a species, we can find our place of service to the larger community of life from which we separated during our species’ adolescence and to which we must now return as responsible adults.
In closing, I want to take you on a brief visit to the future to see how our children may be living in 2084 if we succeed in navigating the turning from a phantom-wealth to a real-wealth economy.
EPILOGUE
THE VIEW FROM 2084
Simplification is not a commitment to abject poverty but a choice to live more fully.
JIM WALLIS
The idea of deep and potentially wrenching change can be frightening. I have written the following fictional account of life in the real-wealth New Economy in the hope it may make such a life easier to visualize. I trust you will recognize the application of the principles outlined in previous chapters.
Some may be inclined to dismiss this hopeful vision as nothing more than a naive flight of fancy far beyond any possibility of becoming a reality. Anyone who has followed my writing knows I understand the seriousness of our situation and the immensity of the barriers against change.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether there is any reason not to give up, turn off the news, and wallow in self-indulgent pleasures until the inevitable system collapse. I suspect anyone who doesn’t experience similar feelings from time to time is seriously out of touch with reality.
I am also aware, however, that to give in to cynicism and despair is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, I know of no more fun and satisfying way to use the remainder of my days than engaging the creative challenge of helping to liberate the human spirit from cultural and institutional chains of our own making. The best part is that this work brings me into relationship with the world’s most wonderfully thoughtful, creative, and inspiring people.
So join me now in a brief journey. A time machine has projected us into a future in which a real-wealth New Economy prevails. We find ourselves in a world of culturally vital, high-density communities with little evidence of either extreme poverty or extreme wealth, nestled in the midst of lush farmlands and natural habitats. These are clustered around urban centers featuring well-defined neighborhoods, efficient mass transit, walkable streets, rooftop gardens, and inviting parks. Here is my version of our report to the folks back home.
Dear friends and fellow bloggers back in 2010:
My trip to the future has been an experience far beyond my expectations. I landed in 2084 in the United States in a place very near where I grew up. I had been rather nervous about the whole thing, given the financial, social, and environmental disasters I left behind. It is pretty amazing to see how it worked out.
The history books tell of difficult times as the disasters you are experiencing played out, but people in communities all over the world rallied to the cause and created a new economy from the bottom up. The politicians eventually realized what was happening and jumped on the bandwagon just as it was about to pass them by. I love the result and would be tempted to stay and settle here permanently if that were an option, but the terms of my travel don’t permit it — and I do miss you all.
Let me share a bit of what I’m seeing and experiencing. I think it will give you a sense of hope and strengthen your commitment to the New Economy agenda we were discussing before I left. Much of what I’m seeing validates the ideas we talked about. Feel free to share this report with others in the hope it may inspire them as well. So here goes:
This seems to be a truly middle-class society. I’ve found little evidence of more than modest distinctions between the richest and the poorest in terms of income, asset ownership, size of residence, and consumption. Most families own their own home and have an ownership stake in one or more businesses in their local economy. Paid employment seems to be organized to allow everyone ample time for family, friends, participation in community and political life, healthful physical activity, learning, and spiritual growth. People seem to be using that time fully.
Economists in this time measure wealth and well-being by indicators of the health and sustainable productivity of human, social, and living natural capital. Businesses are human-scale
, locally owned, and dedicated to serving the people of the community. They take great pride in their contribution to securing the well-being of their community’s children for generations to come.
I’ve seen no evidence of the grotesque, monotonous suburban sprawl so familiar to our own time. An old-timer told me that in the old days, as the price of oil became prohibitive, people began to abandon the suburbs. Rising energy costs and climate chaos disrupted long-distance food supply chains, and building materials became scarce. Governments responded by spending billions to deconstruct abandoned suburban buildings, salvage the materials for reuse in constructing new dwellings in compact communities, and then removed the asphalt and rebuilt the soil to support organic farming, grazing, and timber production.
Agrochemicals were banned. People seem to compost or recycle almost everything. I asked about waste dumps, but no one seemed to understand what I meant. They just don’t throw things away.
I’ve learned that publicly traded for-profit global corporations went the way of the suburbs. Those that produced useful products were broken up into their component businesses and sold to their employees or to the communities in which they were located. Others eventually went bankrupt. Their intellectual assets were released to the public domain, and useful physical assets were sold at public auction.
The overall quantity of consumption appears modest by our standards, but the health and vitality of the children and of family and community life seem far richer. In my travels around the region, I’m impressed by the diversity of wildlife, the healthy appearance of forests and waterways, and the evident fertility of the soil.
Living off the returns from passive investments, financial speculation, collecting rents, gambling, and other unproductive activities is so unfamiliar that people are incredulous when I try to explain it to them. Their question is always the same: “Why would a civilized society tolerate anything like that?”
Agenda for a New Economy Page 25