Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Sometimes when probing the newspapers, I run into something that jumps off the page at me, that reveals something about what is wrong with us, how we have gotten ourselves into multiple crises, both ecological and economic, until now we don’t have a clue how to get ourselves out of the mess.  This is from a long, exceedingly interesting article in the NY Times by Peter Goodman about the role that the former fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, played in setting the conditions for the collapse of Wall Street:

“As the long-serving chairman of the Fed, the nation’s most powerful economic policy maker, Mr. Greenspan preached the transcendent, wealth-creating powers of the market.

“A professed libertarian, he counted among his formative influences the novelist Ayn Rand, who portrayed collective power as an evil force set against the enlightened self-interest of individuals. In turn, he showed a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly.

“An examination of more than two decades of Mr. Greenspan’s record on financial regulation and derivatives in particular reveals the degree to which he tethered the health of the nation’s economy to that faith.”

And we, my friends, are the victims of his faith, all of us.  This society has been the unwitting dupe of this philosophy, of those who used the Greenspan era to create the greatest concentration of wealth and the greatest gaps between rich and poor, worker and CEO, in modern history, until the bottom dropped out from under the weight of this deception.

A crisis of confidence, indeed.

You know by now that it was another devastating day in the markets.  We are in pretty deep doo-doo, as they say.  The feds keep taking more desperate measures, inserting the government deeper and deeper into the financial underpinnings of the economy.  Nothing is working to stanch the bleeding in the short term.  What is clear now is that we are headed for a very painful period — years, not weeks or months.

What is also coming clear is that we are entering a new era.  There is no putting this Humpty-Dumpty together again.  The attempt would probably finish us off.

The excerpt above reveals a philosophy of libertarian selfishness, an economics of self-interest and laissez faire financial markets, that has now collapsed, as was inevitable.  These true-believers, or snake oil salesmen, convinced us that markets would magically make it all work out somehow, would somehow balance things among our individual “self-interests” so that precisely these sorts of things would never happen; we would all benefit and live happily ever after.  As Greenspan has said, somehow, those that have their hands on the levers of power in the financial world will magically act only with integrity and keep everything working properly.

Right.  In what world does he live?  In what alternative reality has free, unregulated and rampant wealth generation resulted in such a mysteriously wonderful world?

The truth coming home to roost now is how they convinced our people and our supposed political representatives, those charged with looking out for our interests, to invest more and more of our future in the stock market — pensions replaced with 401(k)s, for example.  If they had not been stopped, they would have done this with your Social Security benefits as well.  There is not a pot of public money they did not have designs on to get those funds into the markets for even more wealth generation.  In doing this, millions more U.S. Americans found their fate tied to the self-interests of large financial institutions, their CEOs and stockholders.

They took your mortgages and your car loans and your credit card debts and bundled them into securities and divided them up and sold them and made bets on them, and then backed those bets with credit default swaps, until the whole house of cards collapsed — along with your homes, cars, retirement savings, and more.

Unfettered capitalism is an ugly thing.  It hurts, really hurts, untold numbers of human beings while laying waste to the planet.

We need, oh we so desperately need, a new ethic if we are going to save ourselves, if our children and young people are to have a viable future.

Keep in mind that an ethic based on the self-interested pursuits of isolated individuals is ecologically false.  It is not how nature works, and we, like it or not, are part of nature.  Everything is interrelated; everything affects everything else.  In the same way that our economic way of life impacts our lives, so does it impact living systems in which we are embedded.  What we take in greed we take not only from our financial means but also from the Earth.  And just as in this financial and economic crisis, the result of taking way too much, when we try to act in isolation from the systems in which we exist, those sytems begin to collapse.

We need an ethic that mimics the actual workings of nature.  We need to turn our value system on its head.  Ayn Rand may have ranted against “collective power” as some evil force, but nature is a collective act, and we will not survive unless we begin to act like the organic beings that we, in truth, are.