the idolatry of unlimited growth

I've never read this newsletter before, and I have a feeling I would disagree with a lot of it. But I really liked this article on "Hybrids, Biofuels, and Other False Idols." I find it fascinating that the editor for a Green Party magazine takes such a spiritual approach to his criticism of the car culture.

Perhaps most interesting to me in this article is the contrast that Fritz draws between "deep greens," who want to reform the social and ideological factors that have brought our culture to the place where we are, and "shallow greens," who just want to keep reforming the system. I am definitely a deep green, and I have often felt frustrated with the perspective of shallow greens who can't seem to see where the problems really lie. It seems so wasteful to me to just improve the system--use hybrids, eat industrial organic food--without exploring the underlying mindset that has brought us to a place where such things can even exist.

Fritz mentions, for example, the "moral and political dilemmas of a growth economy." Just hinting at this idea in most circles has freqently gotten me called an anti-American communist--a label to which I particularly object, since I lived in Eastern Europe for a year and have seen the effects of communism firsthand. The ideology--or perhaps I should say the idolotry--of growth has roots deep in American practice, but it has only recently become an explicitly defended American ideal. Early America grew because she could; early colonists were eager to take over the space that was, in their minds, mostly empty and free for the taking. But they did so in a way that was, as far as they were able, careful, thrifty, and economical. Frontier America was notoriously frugal; even today, traditional American communities--farm communities and small towns--are still known for the value of "waste not, want not."

It was only in my generation, the "me" generation of the eighties, that unlimited spending and wasteful extravagance became the ideal of a new culture. It was Generation X that invented the saying that has come to summarize all of American culture: "He who dies with the most toys wins." And this is a good summary of what an unlimited growth economy really is: the insistence that there must always be more inputs coming into the system. Our economy today is founded on that principle; there must always be more spending, more products, more growth. Staying the same is not an option; to stop expanding is to fall into a recession. And that is why the American people have been transformed into consumers rather than citizens. Once we had bought everything we needed, the producers and sellers had to invent more needs for us so that we would continue to buy, continuing to invest into the system so the economy could continue to grow. It's an endless cycle of spending and waste.

An economy of unlimited growth is not an American ideal; it is a recent phenomonon, and it is impossible, in practical terms, that it will last. But never mind that. I am much less concerned with whether it's an American ideal than with whether it's a Christian ideal. And the answer to that, I think, is so obvious as to hardly merit discussion. Placing our worth in the things we own and collect is not at all a Christian attitude; there could hardly be a less Christian way of living. Always thinking we need more--the next best technology, the next best entertainment--drives our attention to the physical world and captures our hearts with earthly things. It is hard, very hard, to pay attention to the spiritual when your mind is so focused on the physical. We have become a caricature of the parable of the man who kept building more and bigger barns, blithely unaware that it was not more money, but his very soul, that he would soon have to pay.