It seems not a day goes by without a news report about environmental pollution in one form or another. Beijing is well-known for its shockingly poor air quality. As a result, last year saw highways closed and flights canceled due to diminished visibility. Other cities try to cope with trash mountains — Mexico City recently shut down its Bordo Poniente landfill, the largest in the world, due to its encroaching on human habitation and seepage into the local aquifer. But authorities failed to make adequate alternative arrangements, compounding the disposal problem.
Pollution of the entire earth’s water supply is evident in the fact that there is not a clean river anywhere on the planet and in the fact of frequent catastrophic oil well and oil tanker spills, not to mention huge oceanic garbage patches of floating plastic microfibers. The problem of seaborne plastic pollution is growing alarmingly each year.
Plastic is not readily biodegradable and is swallowed by marine life, thus entering the food chain. The concern is that the chemical composition of acrylic, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyamide and polyester may be harmful to marine life and human life once ingested.
If that were not enough, now we’re told that Americans, who spend 90 percent of their time indoors, are subject to sufficient air pollution from carpets, paint, wood products, cleaning products, computers, etc., to pose a serious health threat.
And there are more pollution issues to concern us:
There’s surely no question that life has speeded up of late. In the minds of many, it seems to be linked with the technology of delivering more and more easily accessible information. We have long been told that we are in the Information Age.
About 20 years ago I interviewed the late Neil Postman, who had written Amusing Ourselves to Death and later Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. He warned back then that so much information was raining down on us from so many sources that we were becoming overwhelmed. He said that without context, it is impossible to make sense of it all. Today we have e-mail, smartphones, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to add to the mix. Many of us are connected all the time, constantly attentive, always replying, never quiet.
But is this always helpful or valuable? Usually, there is a price to pay. As the editors of the Hedgehog Review write in their Summer 2011 issue, “We spend more and more time in front of screens and less and less time in face-to-face communication, as well as less and less time by ourselves without some means of electronic communication to distract us from any possibility of solitude.”
Postman also made the comment that all scientific or technological progress is not necessarily human progress. Just because technology is available does not mean that it is of benefit to the human being. In any case, we should not allow machines to dictate our pace of life. We should not become tools of our tools. God made us to function within limits. His created world operates within certain time frames. Trees grow at a regulated rate. There is nothing to be gained from hurrying. Human beings take about nine months to develop in the womb. It is not helpful to rush the process to completion. Our minds and bodies operate within limits. Most people need seven to eight hours of sleep each night. We need to dream. We cannot operate for long without rest. And we are not made to be perpetually connected.
When Postman spoke of the need for context, he meant the way in which we frame life. How is information and its flow governed by the frame within which we live? For those who want to live according to biblical principles, the frame is exactly that: the Bible. What does God’s Word tell us about time to fulfill our responsibilities and time to think?
One scripture that comes to mind is Ephesians 5:15–16: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (English Standard Version). The sense is redeeming, buying back or buying up time so that it can be effectively used, because we are living in a difficult world that does not reflect God’s values. So in respect of how we use time, we should be getting our priorities right, not wasting time that could be more beneficially used.
And there is more to consider when we talk about having the time to think. The Bible is filled with exhortations to meditate on God’s way so that we can live wisely. But meditation takes time—time that has been set aside for this specific purpose. It cannot be done when our days are filled to the maximum with distractions.
Perhaps we all need to take time to consider whether communication technologies and pace of life have been taking us away from the source of our life.
David Hulme
New documentary evidence revises what was known about Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-62). His drive to surpass Britain in industrial and agricultural output within 15 years meant mobilizing millions of peasants and housing them in communes. They moved billions of cubic meters of earth by hand in ill-advised water conservation schemes that ultimately failed. They melted down metal of all kinds in backyard furnaces in an effort to boost steel output, but produced mostly useless pig iron. Ever-higher grain quotas were demanded for export. All of this was done at great individual cost, only to bring on the ravages of possibly the worst famine in human history.
Mao’s Great Famine (2010) by historian Frank Dikötter, chronicles the ghastly four-year period that resulted in the peacetime death of millions. The word “famine” disguises the brutality of the catastrophe, for many were deliberately deprived of food and rest. The revised estimate of those lost is more than 45 million -- a number based solidly on Chinese sources.
Mao was not able to bring about the progress he proposed. Nor did he care about the human suffering he was engendering. According to Dikötter, “At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated March 25, 1959, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case. At the meeting he announced that ‘When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’”
Like so many other false messiahs throughout history, Mao did not deliver on his version of Utopia and destroyed untold lives in the process.
David Hulme
Despite the early 21st century’s worldwide economic disruption, the 2010 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) puts annual worldwide military expenditure at $1.63 trillion—up more than 50 percent since 2000.
In a world that yearns for disarmament and peace, warfare has become a globalized problem. The defense industry is a key element in the equation, answering the demands of military establishments and various governments that need jobs creation and the growth of defense-related exports to further domestic prosperity.
This raises fundamental moral questions, though not for the first time. Following World War II, American general Omar Bradley summarized the moral deficit that had emerged after that conflict. In 1948 he said, “The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
Despite Bradley’s perceptive analysis, a wartime colleague, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61), oversaw the phenomenal postwar growth and development of the American military-industrial complex. Yet when it came time to step down from office, he made a speech in which he warned about the dangers inherent in the relentless pursuit of supremacy by military-industrial means. He said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Today the military-industrial complex is far more powerful and influential than Eisenhower could have imagined. SIPRI calculates the U.S. share of 2010 armaments purchases at 43 percent of the world’s total. China comes a distant second at an estimated 7.3 percent! The reason usually given is that the United States has obligations worldwide, whereas other nations do not. And while there have been ups and downs in spending and development over the past several decades, the future of the industry now seems to depend on five factors. According to military and defense analyst Richard Bitzinger, they are the hierarchical nature of the global arms industry, defense spending, the global arms market, the globalization of armaments production, and the emerging information technologies–based revolution in military affairs.
Read more in the series Global Problems, Global Solutions.
David Hulme
It’s an undeniable fact that that this world is filled with injustices of every conceivable kind. From ethnic cleansing to wrongful conviction and imprisonment; from theft of retirement funds to the disadvantaging of the poor; from corruption and failing government to female genital mutilation and child soldiers; the list is long and injustice touches everyone at some point in life. Who has not known of or experienced unfair treatment?
Take the seventeen people having served time on death row in the U.S. who are now free due to the advent of DNA testing. According to the New York based Innocence Project, more than 270 people have been liberated in this way in 34 U.S. states after years of wrongful imprisonment.
Then there is the injustice of the death of other innocents. The Nazi bombing of Britain killed an estimated 40,000 civilians between September 1940 and May 1941 – about half of them in London. The well-known 1945 Allied firebombing of the German city of Dresden killed more than 22,000 civilians -- men, women and children. Later that year the pleas of scientists, including Albert Einstein, to spare innocent Japanese civilians went unheeded and the U.S. unleashed two atomic weapons immediately killing 80,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more dying from injuries and radiation related illnesses. Of course, these numbers are but a small fragment of all the innocent deaths of the past century.
Jonathan Glover’s Humanity, A Moral History of the 20th Century is a chronicle of some of the worst injustices. It deals with “the psychology that made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other atrocities.” The psychology is of course what we cannot easily escape, because it is fundamental to human beings. But Glover is not pessimistic or despairing. He believes that “we need to look hard and clearly at some of the monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.” This is certainly the beginning of a way ahead, but can we really do it alone?
Do we have the resources within us?
Justice is about fairness, equitable treatment, impartiality, objectivity, rights –the English term is rooted in Latin “justitia” from “jus,” law or right. Underlying fairness and equity is the moral obligation to do what is right. Judicial systems have tried to develop means of ensuring fair treatment and imposing appropriate penalties on those proven to have abused others and done wrong. What such systems have never been able to eradicate is human error, corruption or the downward pull of human nature. Despite best intentions, injustice remains potential in all our attempts at fairness.
According to the 2011 annual report of the International Commission of Jurists, “Despite the fact that 160 States are parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and should therefore have incorporated its provisions into domestic law and provide judicial remedies to individuals alleging a violation of their rights, victims continue to face tremendous difficulties in accessing justice.”
The reason that societies have such problems is that justice and righteousness (right thinking and living) are not natural to the human sphere. These godly characteristics may be practiced individually now and will ultimately become the basis of all society. Injustice will give way to justice when righteousness becomes the standard for all behavior. The prophet Isaiah knew this well. Speaking of a future godly global ruler, he said, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this” (Isaiah 9:7; see also 16:5)
This is understood to be a reference to the coming of the Messiah. Yet Christ did not fulfill these aspects of his prophesied role when he came in the first century. This is for a future time when universal justice will become reality. As Matthew wrote about Jesus in his gospel, “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles (the nations)” (Matthew 12:18). This is also a quote from Isaiah, where he shows that the Messiah will be persistent in his pursuit of fairness and equity for all -- “He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law” (Isaiah 42:4).
David Hulme
How we come to know what we know is at the center of an often fierce battle being waged against religious belief. Several leading writers have recently authored books with the intent of showing that belief in God is irrational, one even describing anyone so disposed as “stupid.”
In this battle the lines are drawn between knowledge that is based on scientific method and that which is not. The atheist says that the rational process of identifying a problem, collecting data through observation and experimentation, and developing and testing hypotheses yields humanity’s base of useful knowledge. And, they claim, it is our only way of acquiring such knowledge. We are, after all, physical beings who rely on five senses, and what we receive this way is knowledge of the world and the universe we inhabit.
It is a process that in many respects serves us well. We have made, for example, enormous medical and technological advances by following the scientific method. Human knowledge of the universe has expanded. But is it the case that all knowledge comes only through the physical senses?
Consider for a moment that the attack on religious belief is not new. God’s supposed death is not a recent occurrence. About three thousand years ago, the psalmist David wrote, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalms 14 and 53, English Standard Version throughout). There were deniers of God back then and no doubt well before. But David and other ancient wisdom writers knew that not all knowledge is derived from physical sources, through the five senses. Do they have something to offer us today? What if some knowledge is only available from a nonphysical source, and that is where the sages direct us?
Biblical figures such as the Apostle Paul were well aware of the philosophical issues of their time and had some interesting things to say about sources of knowledge.
David Hulme
Wendell Berry is first and foremost by his own description a Kentucky farmer, though he is also a renowned author of essays, poems and novels. The global cult of bigness and the dis-ease that it causes is one of his passions. This is, of course, related to the development of technology for its own sake. While much of his writing addresses ecological concerns, he also discusses the broader human condition and the restoration of health and peace. In The Unsettling of America, Berry shows that the demise of small-scale agri-culture is indicative of the crumbling of culture itself. The machine has taken over from man, industrialized agriculture has won the day, and humans have been dislocated. Moreover, it is the future forms of our technology that enslave us. And it is not just on the farm that the pressure is felt: “All our implements—automobiles, tractors, kitchen utensils, etc.—have always been conceived by the modern mind as in a kind of progress or pilgrimage toward their future forms. The automobile-of-the-future, the kitchen-of-the-future, the classroom-of-the-future have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans, and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date. But to be up-to-date is an ambition with built-in panic: our possessions cannot be up-to-date more than momentarily unless we can stop time—or somehow get ahead of it. The only possibility of satisfaction is to be driving now in one’s future automobile.”
Of course, the relentless economy powering such “achievements” pays little or no attention to resource depletion, pollution, or the dislocated human being. It depends on the illusion of limitless quantities. To make this reality, Berry writes, “we would have to debase both the finite and the infinite; we would have to sacrifice both flesh and spirit. It is an old story. Evil is offering us the world: ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ And we have only the old paradox for an answer: If we accept all on that condition, we lose all.”
Like E.F. Schumacher, Berry links the problem in its essence to the tempter of Christ, the archenemy of humanity.
In a 1981 work, The Gift of Good Land, Berry explores the tragedy of “progress” via dislocation by reflecting on a visit to Peru. There peasants from the uplands who grew a huge variety of potatoes, using small-scale techniques and organic methods, gave up their ancestral lands and became dislocated by voluntarily moving to the slums of Lima, where they could watch American entertainment on television.
Decades after these works, Berry is still vexed by many of the same concerns and the issues arising from the global “order.” The difference is that the natural world is now in far worse condition. What has not changed are the spiritual precepts that undergird his prescription for healing. He writes, “Most of the important laws for the conduct of human life probably are religious in origin—laws such as these: Be merciful, be forgiving, love your neighbors, be hospitable to strangers, be kind to other creatures, take care of the helpless, love your enemies. We must, in short, love and care for one another and the other creatures. We are allowed to make no exceptions. Every person’s obligation toward the Creation is summed up in two words from Genesis 2:15: ‘Keep it.’”
It is intriguing that he understands spiritual law to be the basis of right use. Another of Berry’s related concerns is that American Christianity has not lived up to its founding documents. Because it has focused on saving souls in the land to the exclusion of practicing religion on the land, it has failed to recognize the sanctity of creation and the laws that support it. In this context Berry quotes Professor Ellen Davis, who writes: “Sound agricultural practice depends upon knowledge that is at one and the same time chemical and biological, economic, cultural, philosophical, and (following the understanding of most farmers in most places and times) religious. Agriculture involves questions of value and therefore of moral choice, whether or not we care to admit it.”
David Hulme
Taken from a chapter I wrote for Access, Not Excess: The Search for Better Nutrition by Charles Pasternak (ed) (Smith-Gordon February 2011)
E.F. Schumacher did not begin his career as an alternative thinker. He was the son of a German political economics professor and in 1930 was a Rhodes scholar at New College, Oxford. He remained in the United Kingdom during the Nazi era, and for 20 years in the postwar period was Chief Economic Advisor to the National Coal Board.
By the time he wrote Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher’s spiritual journey had taken him through Buddhism to Catholicism. Along the way he wrote “Buddhist Economics.” In part, this paper addressed the access question at the local level and concluded, “Production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life.” Schumacher also came to value the spiritual truths embodied in the New Testament’s Gospels. He said, “There could not be a more concise statement of . . . our situation, than the parable of the prodigal son. Strange to say, the Sermon on the Mount gives pretty precise instructions on how to construct an outlook that could lead to an Economics of Survival.” The story of the prodigal son is, of course, a salutary tale of waste (prodigality) and repentance/redemption, of physical excess and spiritual access. The wastrel son comes home to forgiveness and new life. And Jesus’ great moral discourse on the mountain is about discovering the spiritual qualities essential to living this life in balance and measure, with respect for God and His creation, including fellowman.
David Hulme
Read more on this topic
This entry is excerpted from a chapter in the 2011 book, Access Not Excess, by Charles Pasternak (ed), dealing with the twin scourges, over and under nutrition. My chapter focuses on the environmental degradation humans have caused and the biblical and alternative resolutions to the problem.
In his seminal work Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher wrote, “If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence.” Greed undergirds the pursuit of excess and denies access to the many. Schumacher made his remarks in response to comments made in 1930 by his mentor, John Maynard Keynes, as the world struggled under the Great Depression. Surprisingly, Keynes had indicated that he thought the day of universal prosperity was getting close. Schumacher quoted him as saying that nevertheless “for at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” By the 1970s Schumacher had come to see that excess, or the relentless pursuit of materialism, destroys both men and women and their environment. The carrying capacity of the world cannot sustain limitless growth, and the related need for moral development cannot be ignored. Thus Schumacher continued with a reference to Jesus’ words in response to temptation by humanity’s great adversary: “There is a revolutionary saying that ‘Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God.’” Spiritual problems cannot be solved by physical means. As Einstein is believed to have said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
From "Radical Restoration" by David Hulme
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“The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY (SPEECH, NOVEMBER 1948)
UP IN ARMS
Outside the UN building in New York is a famous statue on whose base is inscribed, “We shall beat our swords into plowshares.” Ironically, it was a 1959 gift from the Soviet Union. The world was 14 years into the Cold War and the associated nuclear arms race. Sixty years later, we have not yet beaten swords into plowshares. Though the East-West standoff ended in 1991, the peace dividend soon gave way to massive increases in military spending.
It’s not that human beings do not know the problem of war. In 1795, James Madison, a key architect of the U.S. constitution and the nation’s fourth president, wrote: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes . . . the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Yet today the United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world’s military spending. Next and very distant comes China (6.6 percent), then France, the United Kingdom and Russia. These shocking disparities are recorded in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) Yearbook 2010.
The widespread financial crisis and economic downturn has caused no noticeable impact on arms sales. SIPRI puts global military expenditure in 2009 at $1.531 trillion—2.7 percent of the world’s gross domestic product or approximately $225 for each person in the world. You might say that these numbers are surprisingly low, but that ignores the 49 percent increase since 2000. Nor does it take into account the increasing concentration of military expenditure: 15 countries make up 82 percent of the total. It’s also important to note the difficulty of separating the arms industry from national prosperity and employment. According to SIPRI, “the consequent strong relationship between arms producers and governments and the industry’s perceived importance to national security . . . shield it from the immediate impact of severe economic downturns. This status is reflected in the continued high levels of arms sales, high profits, large backlogs and strong cash flows generated by arms production.”
While U.S. armaments manufacturing companies dominate the SIPRI Top 100, Britain’s BAE Systems claimed the highest level of arms sales in 2008. Consistently among the leading arms-exporting countries are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China. Among the greatest importers are China, India, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. But it’s not just the major nations that are involved: companies in 98 countries manufacture small arms.
The quote on the UN statue is no doubt taken from the prophetic scripture in Micah 4:3—“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” This is what is going to happen in the restored kingdom of God on earth. Note that it is not just about cessation of the armaments industry but also the teaching and encouragement of a state of mind opposed to war and conflict. The universal knowledge of God’s way and principles is going to change how people think. Aggression is not going to be viewed as the way ahead. The way of God will be centrally sought and taught, and the human tendency for war will be prevented.
With the end of weaponry and a changed mind, peace will finally be possible.
DAVID HULME
From Vision, Editorial, Fall 2010