Hope in Troubled Times

A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises

Goudzwaard, Bob, Vander Vennen, Mark, Van Heemst, David

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441201683
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religion, Politics & State

Word Guild 2008 Writing Award (Culture) We want to have it all: financial strength, secure homes, clean air and water for our children. With the latest technological advances available, we deserve to have every dilemma resolved. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? Hope in Troubled Times dares to say "no." Poverty, terrorism, and overtaxed land are planetary problems that make even believers despair. But the authors point to Christ as the source of hope. Our choice is obvious. We work together, learning to live unselfishly, or we watch civilization sink further into the abyss. With a foreword by renowned human rights activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Hope in Troubled Times provides real-world solutions to life-threatening problems. The authors show that with God's guidance we can knock down the idols that stunt clear thinking.

PART 1

// SETTING THE STAGE //

/ 1 /
IN THE SHADOWS OF PROGRESS

A Parable

Our world seems to live under the curse of scrambling for solutions but not finding them.

The disturbing upshot is that most in-depth international reports now express the resounding conviction that today’s most pressing, implacable problems—dilemmas like global poverty, environmental devastation, and global violence—really can deteriorate no further without catastrophic consequences.

A story from an unlikely time and place may shed some light on our own situation. In the eighteenth century, a European explorer happened upon an island in the South Pacific almost completely denuded of vegetation, trees, fresh water, and animal life. The island, named Rapa Nui by its inhabitants and Easter Island by the explorer, was populated by only a few unwell people and by hundreds of gigantic, spectacular stone-sculpture idols. Even now the best engineering minds have scarcely grasped how the islanders could have sculpted and positioned the colossal statues. According to the few survivors, though the island had been fertile and had supported thousands of inhabitants, the chiefs and priests had promised that stone gods would deliver prosperity the likes of which had not been seen before. “The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ‘ideological pathology,’ as some anthropologists call it.”1 Caught up in that mania, the islanders gradually off-loaded their practice of caring for each other and the island to their stunning stone creations, the perceived source of their prosperity. But the stone idols, spectacular marvels of human engineering, exacted a punishing revenge instead. Chillingly, their insatiable demands for resources consumed their makers and the island’s once abundant life.

This book argues that, in a vastly different environment, contemporary “ideological pathologies” not unlike the one that ravaged Easter Island lie at the foundation of some of today’s seemingly most irresolvable global problems. We suggest that many of the spectacular forces of Western progress today—unprecedented marvels of human achievement such as contemporary market forces, technological development, scientific progress, the state, and power unleashed—have become elevated to a status not unlike the position of privilege occupied by the stunning stone idols on Easter Island. Most basically, against this backdrop we seek to help build the capacity of all of us, from all walks of life, to participate in implementing actual solutions. But we do so inspired by a deep hope, for it is our unwavering, enduring conviction that there is real hope for our troubled, mired world—genuine, concrete hope that deeply engages global poverty, environmental destruction, and widespread violence.

This chapter introduces the approach that then serves as the foundation for the remainder of the book.

Missing Solutions

The opening statement, “Our world seems to live under the curse of scrambling for solutions but not finding them,” would sound overly dramatic, not to mention tinged with fatalism, if it were not for the fact that over the last three years a number of researchers have sounded new alarm bells. Strikingly, however, the solutions proposed in almost all their reports do not sound convincing. The medicines prescribed do not correspond with the depth of the ailments. Consider three examples.

The Environment

In 2005 the United Nations published a compelling report entitled “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.”2 More than 1,300 scientists from 95 countries collaborated over a period of four years to produce this study. Its primary conclusion, supported by numerous investigations in various disciplines and by reams of empirical data, is that the collapse of a number of natural systems is imminent. The belching of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is accelerating climate change, while the overuse of natural resources is causing irreversible damage to the environment. Never before, argues the report, has the destruction wreaked by people on the environment been as pronounced as it is today.

The report makes an invaluable contribution by thoroughly documenting these realities. However, if its readers are looking in it for concrete ways of slackening the pressure on the environment, they leave disappointed. The report merely comes to the “overriding conclusion that it lies within the power of human society to ease the strains we are putting on the natural resources of the planet.”3 Beyond that it makes only the all-too general observations that “acquiring this will require radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making” and that nature’s value “[should] be taken into account for all economic decisions.”4

Terror and Technology

Our second witness is the internationally esteemed astronomer Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge, England. In 2004 Rees published a fascinating book entitled Our Final Century: Will Civilization Survive the Twenty-first Century?5 In Rees’s estimation, the odds of humanity surviving this century are not high. The nature of technological development causes him grave concern:

Science is advancing faster than ever, and on a broader front: bio-, cyber-, and nanotechnology all offer exhilarating prospects; so does the exploration of space. But there is a dark side: new science can have unintended consequences; it empowers individuals to perpetuate acts of megaterror; even innocent errors could be catastrophic. The “downside” of twenty-first century technology could be graver and more intractable than the threat of a nuclear devastation that we have faced for decades. . . . The theme of this book is that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in history.6

Rees raises alarm, for example, about the prospect that some of the remaining stockpiles of Russian long-range nuclear missiles, still capable of destroying the world many times over, could fall into the hands of criminal states. Yet he does not go beyond issuing incisive warnings. In his view we cannot stop technological development as such; only here and there, at the most, have people successfully been able to alter its course or slow it down.

Global Poverty

A third example is The End of Poverty, an outstanding study done by Jeffrey Sachs, the tireless director of the United Nations’ well-known Millennium Project.7 The Millennium Project originated in official agreements made in 2000 by government leaders from 189 countries. By 2015, among other commitments, leaders agreed to provide at least basic education for all children, reduce the number of people who live in extreme poverty by at least half, substantially cut child and maternal mortality rates, and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Achieving these objectives is desperately needed, particularly in Africa. However, meeting them is not going well.8 By 2005, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) had already expressed doubts that the goals would be met. The concern explains the passionate appeal issued by Sachs and by “One: The Campaign to Make Poverty History”: the project can work and must work, but it will not work without large sums of money. “The big money is what the year 2005 is about,” Sachs declared in the March 14, 2005, issue of Time. In as short a period as possible, the wealthy countries need to increase their development assistance to 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product.

Sachs’s impassioned appeal is well-intentioned and essential, and it represents only one of numerous recommendations. But consider two observations. First, this is not the first time that experts have proposed to combat world poverty by dramatically increasing development assistance. That very proposal launched the United Nations’ so-called Development Decade in 1970. The initiative failed (partly because of the oil crisis of 1973).9 Moreover, at that time the approach included an appeal to renew the distribution of labor around the world, an issue we hear nothing about today; now money alone will do the job. The second observation involves the length of the time frames adopted. The deadline for achieving many current environmental objectives (the Kyoto Protocol) is 2012; the date for the Millennium Goals is 2015. Why do decision-makers not adopt at least a few more limited objectives in the short term? It is difficult to suppress the suspicion that government leaders have wanted to make a good impression; perhaps in the background lurks the thought that by 2012 or 2015 they personally will not have to bear responsibility for meeting the objectives. Making promises is easier than keeping them.

Political Will

These examples illustrate that the concern is genuine. Further, never have experts voiced the concern more articulately and forcefully than today. But the solutions are either stereotypical or even simply missing.

Critics often claim that today’s impasses do not become resolved because of a lack of political will. They argue that politicians in the wealthy countries have their hands tied because the majority of their constituents now belong to the content majority, voters who do not want anything to interfere with their economic interests. No doubt this plays a role. But in our view lack of political will does not sufficiently explain why we do not put real solutions into practice, especially now, when so much is at stake not only for the world’s poor but also for the inhabitants of the wealthy countries—even their very survival. Is the answer then that most politicians today simply give in, capitulate to the current problems? That seems hard to believe. On the contrary, today’s world seems more and more gripped by the urgency of finding new ways out, because the existing remedies hardly work. But we have not yet found new ways.

Why then has the ability to find new solutions, and to build the capacity to implement them, proved to be so elusive?

Endings

Perhaps a first clue to an answer lies in a striking new development, one that may discourage people from becoming engaged in redirecting the current crises. More and more commentators use the word “end’’ to describe our time. Book titles such as The End of History, The End of Ideology, The End of Faith, The End of Nature, and The End of Science point to a gathering awareness that the world is deeply changing.10 So profound are the changes that people can make out something like a fissure or a break in time. Taken together, titles like these seem to suggest that as a society we do not know what lies ahead, but we do know that the future will not unfold according to the patterns and certainties of the past. Though the predictions of experts have reached new levels of sophistication, what the future holds may be less clear than ever because the future lies on the other side of the divide. It is therefore not surprising that the standard approaches have begun to fail and that, as a result, the public at large is now grappling with heightening anxiety about the future.

The advent of globalization and the rising complexity of our postmodern society do not adequately explain that anxiety. Mingled with it are elements of loss of perspective, helplessness, and even despair. Indeed, many people in today’s society feel they no longer have a significant impact on the events that most influence their lives. Sometimes people even admit to a baffling sense that the future does not belong to them as much as it once did, as if the future itself decided to embark upon its own self-determined course. But that is a most disquieting, even paralyzing feeling, one that could cause people to enter zones of distraction (such as with iPods and other amenities of modern technology) and dissociate themselves from the grave crises of our time. If the future to a certain extent seems to be setting off on its own, dislodging itself from our influence, then where will it bring us? And what might it do to us?

The Solution Paradox

Add to this a second, possibly related clue. Remarkably, not only have terrorism, global poverty, and environmental destruction become unresponsive to current approaches, but also the solutions themselves often either intensify the problems they were intended to solve or create new and even more serious problems. Too often the cure is worse than the disease. Four examples serve to illustrate this “solution paradox.”

The Distribution of Global Wealth and Poverty

In today’s world, deepening impoverishment and increasing enrichment appear to go hand in hand. In 1969 the incomes of the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population were 30 times higher than those of the poorest 20 percent of the earth’s people. By 1990 that gap had doubled: the incomes of the wealthiest 20 percent were 60 times higher than those of the poorest 20 percent. The difference factor is now 83.11 Jeffrey Sachs reports that not only does half of Africa’s population live in extreme poverty, but also “this proportion has actually grown worse over the past two decades as the rest of the world has grown more prosperous.”12 How could this grim reality have come about precisely on the heels of the 1970s, the decade designated by world leaders to “end world poverty”?

The solutions implemented during the “Development Decade” centered on transferring more money and technology to the South. Strikingly, however, that solution triggered a powerful boomerang effect, one that has operated since the beginning of the 1980s. Capital still flows from the North to the South in the form of development aid and so-called direct foreign investments. But each year since 1982, the total combined amount of official capital flows to the South, both multilateral and bilateral, has been substantially lower than the amount of capital the South has had to send back to the North in the form of interest payments and amortization on debts.13 In 2000, debt payments made by the so-called developing countries to the rich nations and their banks equaled 6.3 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP); in that same year direct foreign investments totaled 2.5 percent of their GDP, while official development assistance (ODA) accounted for no more than 0.6 percent.14 Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, once accurately described this “negative net transfer”—the net outflow of capital from the poor countries of the South to the rich countries of the North—as the exact opposite of development aid.15 And it is partly this reality—the fact that the reverse net transfer of capital carries on unimpeded—that causes a number of experts to voice skepticism that the Millennium Goals will be achieved. Regrettably, the hard-won debt cancellation agreement arrived at in June 2005 by the G8 finance ministers does not alter the boomerang effect: the debt canceled represents only 2 percent of the total external debt owed by the developing countries, and the initiative leaves altogether untouched the conditions that create indebtedness among the poor countries.16

Security

Global poverty is not the only area plagued by the solution paradox. Tragically, mounting evidence—including the violent deterioration of civil society in Iraq and the terrorist bombings in Bali, Madrid, and London—shows that terror and homeland security have also worsened in the face of the current remedies. Clearly, preemptive war, curtailing civil liberties for the purpose of preventing further attacks, increasing armament levels through the application of more advanced technology and increased expenditures, and enhancing the destructive capacity of the military for strategic purposes—these have not solved terrorism. Even as world government military expenditures exceeded US$1 trillion in 2004, the number of serious international terrorist attacks, according to official US government figures, more than tripled (from 175 to 655) from 2003 to 2004.17 The wealthy countries try to guarantee their security by vigorously expanding their arsenals of destruction, yet it is largely this escalation that threatens peace. Even a child understands that if countries all around the world, particularly neighboring ones, adopt arms escalation as the primary prescription for security, then global insecurity increases rather than decreases. Moreover, the alarming pressure that arms escalation is now putting on the world’s increasingly scarce resources, especially oil, causes further destabilization. The winning of wars now occupies such prominence that the winning of peace seems less and less conceivable.

An almost unlimited faith in the power of increasingly advanced arms technology is thriving today. That faith ani...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Part 1: Setting the Stage
• Part 2: Contemporary Ideologies in Action
• Part 3: Ominous Spirals
• Part 4: Hope Awakens Life
• Notes
• Acknowledgments