Rethinking The World - Gotta Serve Somebody

This article appeared as an editorial in the January 30, 2009 editions of The Parkville (Missouri) Luminary and The Kansas City (Kansas) Luminary, and the March 2009 edition of The Mension (the newsletter of Mid-America Mensa).

The other day I was in my house, adding an extra layer of clothing and another stack of mutual fund certificates to the fire to fight the chill. It was about 19 degrees outdoors. I looked out the front window, and saw a young fellow walking along, wearing shorts, a hooded sweatshirt, and a stocking cap. In spite of myself, I thought "well, there's one less competitor for scarce resources".

At times these days, that kind of thinking comes more easily than it used to. Not that I welcome it. I don't believe in the utility of a worldview in which everyone is a rival for dwindling supplies of life's necessities. In fact, I think we're all better off if we work to develop ways to cooperate with one another, and to nurture networks of local sufficiency.

That attitude seems even more important now, what with the economic situation the way it is. There's little need to elaborate here on the myriad examples of evidence supporting a storyline of an economy in trouble.

And yet... it begs a question. What is the economy? We mostly accept it as an entity the existence of which is in and of itself. But is that right?

Writer David Korten (www.davidkorten.org) puts it this way: "The only legitimate function of an economic system is to serve life." That doesn't seem so strange. At least not until we examine generally-accepted attitudes toward "the economy". Our culture, it seems, holds that "the economy" is the primary meter by which the success of a society is measured.

That economy, Korten points out, "is wildly out of balance with human needs and the natural environment." As a consequence, we're faced with the disaster before us. And a culture dedicated to serving an abstraction, an economic system.

Perhaps we should begin assessing economic function against indicators of what we really want - flourishing children, families, communities, and natural systems.

It seems self-evident to me that, if our worldview doesn't fit strategically with what author Derrick Jensen (www.derrickjensen.org) calls "a sane and sustainable way of living", we're kind of like that guy wearing shorts when it's 19 degrees out - foolish and ill-prepared for conditions which don't mesh with our abilities to cope. We'd better find that sane and sustainable way of living, and, it seems to me, we should work to define an economic system the function of which is to serve life, not vice-versa.

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