C4CC(22): Therefore the land mourns (2)
Sometimes I think I really must have moved politically, because I admire someone like Attlee - and then I re-read this and realise, no, I’ve always had a streak of hairy lefty!
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Consider the reaction of the British and French governments to the decline of the coal industry in both countries during the 1980s. The British government had said “Let market forces decide”, and there was the subsequent spectacle of entire communities being destroyed across the North of England, where the main source of income, the pit, suddenly closed overnight and the majority of the working people were laid off. The damage done to those communities at that time has still not been overcome. In France, however, which also recognised that subsidising coal mining had no future, they adopted the strategy of taking these coal mines out of commission over a period of 20 years so that the communities had time to adjust. There was a concern on the part of the French government about the human impact of allowing market forces to lead the decisions. We can still see the differences 30 years on. Scripture is very clear about one of those sets of priorities being holier than the other. There were all sorts of ways in which this situation in Britain could have been addressed without top down government intervention. The issue was that there was no concern. According to biographies of Margaret Thatcher, who was admirable and courageous in many ways, there was a moment when she said, “These are not our people”. That is an understanding which runs entirely against the grain of Scriptural Christianity. Remember: the rich man does not do anything active against Lazarus, he just ignores him, and it is that process of ignoring and not caring which leads to individual and social hell.
When we discuss the problems of poverty in our world from a Christian point of view then we need to look for where the idols are, and fortunately the dominant idols of our age are not hidden. The idol which we need to be concerned about here is that of “economic growth”. There are clear historical reasons why growth is such a dominant political concern flowing from the experience of the 1930s. At that time economic growth was reversed, there was very large scale widespread unemployment and huge social misery which was only really alleviated by the shift into the war economies through the 1940s. The political classes are very committed to ensuring that it does not happen again. The truth is, however, that we are astonishingly wealthy as a community. As a world society, we have more wealth than we know what to do with, but the systemic problems mean that it is accumulated by fewer and fewer people.
Jesus has a very explicit teaching for us: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Mammon is the god of wealth. If you are concerned to worship the god of wealth or economic growth, then you cannot also serve God. Beyond a certain point of having enough food to eat, clothing on your back, shelter from the wind and the rain, what does growth mean? For the vast majority of our society, we left behind that level of need quite a long time ago. After the war we had rationing, when we were much better fed than we are now. Being afraid of famine in the West is not what is driving our desire for economic growth; rather it is our desire to acquire more and more stuff. We have to buy stuff in order that people can be employed making stuff, and they need to be employed making stuff so that they can buy stuff, and so we get more and more stuff and we end up getting stuffed. We are suffering from an economic cancer, for what is cancer but growth in a part of an organism which takes no regard of the health of the whole? When you hear politicians say, “we must have more growth, we must ensure that the growth of our economy continues to give jobs”, try and add in each time you hear politicians say “growth”, the phrase “of our cancer”. As the economy is becoming more and more separate from the human concerns which are its base, the economy is becoming more and more distorted and damaging. What needs to happen is that the economy, the monetary flows, the industrial development, needs to be reintegrated with our human context.
The trouble is that Mammon also has his soldiers. Think of a listed company which has a certain legal personality and certain legal duties in terms of maximising the value for its shareholders, an institution which is geared up in pursuit of clear and defined aims, and those who work within that company, if they do not pursue those aims, can be liable to prosecution or sacked. What this means is that a situation can develop where an entire company is oriented to an end which is destructive of our wider humanity. The people involved will work for what the whole company is designed to do, to pursue economic growth for itself, and that is reinforced and strengthened by everything surrounding it in terms of its legal structure and its corporate ethos. A non-controversial example is the response by the tobacco companies to evidence linking smoking with lung cancer. Companies pursued their own narrow economic interests at the expense of the wider community. Within the terms of what a tobacco company was set up to do, it was entirely rational, and it meant that they provided a better return on their investment for their shareholders. Being a soldier of Mammon is not unreasonable – but it is most certainly un-Christian.
The health or morality of a company, however, is not detachable from the health or morality of its wider society. The point is that business logic is different from Christian logic and the church and Christian community should feel bold enough to say that this is not acceptable. Just because something makes money and preserves jobs does not make it immune to criticism. There are higher and more human values which govern our behaviour, and it is only because our culture has become institutionally asophic that this is not blindingly obvious to everyone.
Remember that one of the 'rules' about idolatry is that when we worship an idol the idol gives us what it promises, but takes life in return. The idol of economic growth, then, gives economic growth but takes away our humanity. Although most surveys of economic growth concentrate on what is called Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and those show an increase over the last few decades, there are lots of ways in which the assessment of our economies has been done more wisely. Looking at the human quality of life, giving a value or assessment to things like clean air or literacy rates, we can see that although there has been a monetary increase (there has been economic growth) there has been quite a significant decrease in the average quality of life for at least 20 years. Mammon is giving economic growth, but it is taking life in exchange.