Corruption and Environmental Costs of Wreckless Consumerism
When did we lose the enchantment of the world? When did we decide to sacrifice the future of our children and have them pay our debts? When did we decide to pollute to our hearts content with no thought for the flourishing of future generations? Who sold us this mythology of consumerism and growth without end, a carbon future with our end? How did we become so deluded, so corrupt? G. K. Chesterton, British social critic, was not far from the mark when he wrote: “A person who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt person, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. Christ said that to be rich is to be in a peculiar danger of moral wreck.” This should give us pause in our fast world. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) is asking us to slow down and think more deeply, more circumspectly, where we see things more clearly and make our best judgments. Al Gore and his research team have articlated six areas of vital concern for the future of human civilization in his important book The Future: six drivers of global change. Now we have the communal vision of a ‘new human narrative’ by Jeremy Rifkin in Zero Margin Cost Society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism in 2014. Watch his lecture to get the summary theme: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-iDUcETjvo
It should be clear through this five part discussion that the possessive, consumptive attitude is corrosive of individual values of service and compassion toward humanity and the planet. There is no question that the utilitarian ethic of comfort and survival has destroyed our ability to love and respect our neighbour (both local and global). Love and a quest for the good (Charles Taylor, Iris Murdoch) is the foundation of any substantive ethic. Greed and acquisitiveness, on the other hand, are highly toxic forces in public ethics and relationships, promoting a radical breakdown in trust, and nasty politics. Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell strikes the jugular vein when he says that we are presently in a spiritual crisis, a crisis of belief, a crisis of perspective. Steven Bouma-Prediger calls it a lack of discernment about our home. We are alienated and at war with our own home–our fragile blue-green planet, earth.
Corruption: Wealth is a dangerous, heady wine if not handled with accountability. We have seen this in the lifestyle decisions of bankers, traders and Wall Street executives during the high rolling days before the 2008 economic crash that almost entirely crippled the whole global financial system. The power that goes with great wealth can be tremendously life-giving or incredibly death-dealing. The documentaries “Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Inside Job” reveal some shocking, narcissistic behaviours in the leadership of this and other corporations and government. Highly trained, otherwise intelligent people seemed to lose touch with reality; they bought into an operative cultural pathology, fuelled by greed and the ruthless vices of conquest. This has exposed a values vacuum in the governance of corporate society. Also see the movie The Corporation for some eye-opening insights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc Read More…
are poorly formulated and outright inadequate. In particular, Craig deals with what Dawkins calls the main argument of his book – the “who designed the designer” objection. Among other things, Craig points out that: “In order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to be able to explain the explanation. In fact, such a requirement would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed.”1In chapter two, J.P. Moreland deals with The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism. He explains that atheism and/or naturalism cannot give an account for five particular (and crucially important) features of human persons, what Moreland calls the “five recalcitrant features of the image of God.” These five are consciousness and the mental, free will, rationality, unified selves, and intrinsic, equal value and rights. He concludes that “given the epistemological and Grand Story constraints placed on the scientific naturalist ontology, not a single one of these five fits naturally in a non-ad-hoc way.”2 Like much of Moreland’s work, it is profound and fascinating; a mere listing of his five points does no justice to the depth of content he provides for each. 
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