by Mark Tully
However, the prevalent modern economics teaches us that it is attachment to things, the desire to possess and consumerism that power the engine of growth. We are told that the economy is in good shape when consumerism is rampant, when the tills in the High Street are ringing merrily and banks are pouring money into the housing market. But, as I have suggested, it would seem that the main beneficiaries of high house prices are the speculators and estate agents. The most vulnerable people in the housing market, such as young couples trying to buy their first home, don’t regard the prices they are asked to pay and the mortgage they are burdened with as a good idea at all. The jingling tills in the High Street only reveal that people have been persuaded to waste their time and money buying things they don’t need unless they really do find retail therapy effective. In his book The Hungry Spirit, the British management guru Charles Handy says, ‘If we go on growing at our present rate we will be buying sixteen times as much of everything in one hundred years’ time. Even if the world’s environment can tolerate the burden, what are we going to do with all that stuff?’
In early 2004, Britain witnessed consumerism on the rampage in what the Independent newspaper called ‘The Battle of Edmonton’. Consumerism ran riot and retail rage erupted when the furniture chain store Ikea opened the doors of its new shop in Edmonton, north London, for the first time. Some 6,000 people crowded into the store, lured by incredibly cheap offers on sofas, beds and other furniture. Tempers flared, fights broke out and people lost all sense of self-respect. Competing customers pulled at both ends of sofas, shouting, ‘It’s mine, it’s mine!’ They sat on chairs others were trying to take away, and lay on beds to claim them. About six customers were injured and twenty suffered heat exhaustion even though the Battle of Edmonton was waged on an English winter’s night. Interviewed about the overwhelming response the next day, a senior executive of Ikea confessed, ‘We’re in total shock …’
The Battle of Edmonton is an embodiment of greed on the rampage, but without greed there can be no consumerism. And greed is a particularly corrosive vice because it is never satisfied. In the Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna says to Arjuna, ‘… enveloped is wisdom by this insatiable fire of desire, which is the constant foe of the wise’. In his commentary on the Gita, the Hindu philosopher Radhakrishnan uses two quotations to illustrate the meaning of Krishna’s remarks. The first is from the Hindu Laws of Manu: ‘Desire is never satisfied by the enjoyment of the objects of desire; it grows more and more as does the fire to which fuel is added.’ The second quotation is from the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza: ‘The things which men, to judge by their action, deem the highest good are Riches, Fame or Sensual pleasure. Of these the last is followed by satiety and repentance, the other two are never satiated.’
In theory, Christianity has always rejected the desire for possessions. When Jesus sent the apostles out, he told them to ‘provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses. Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.’ Yet – perhaps not surprisingly – the medieval Church had great difficulty in coping with the followers of St Francis when they took these words literally.
In his book The Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that Judaism has traditionally had a more balanced attitude towards property. Wealth is seen as God’s blessing, and to be enjoyed as such. As for the opposite extreme of asceticism and self-denial, these qualities have little place in Jewish spirituality according to Chief Rabbi Sacks. However, Judaism does not encourage greed, because it balances an individual’s right to property with the concept that we all hold our possessions in trust from God. Wealth and possessions held in trust have to be used or spent as God would like them to be, which is why charity is obligatory and can be enforced by law in Judaism. So too can zakat, or charity, in Islamic law. But consumerism has no such obligations.
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Consumerism can lead to imbalances with nature too, because we humans give priority to our need for economic growth over everything else, including nature’s own need to grow. The world’s worst industrial disaster was the result of a poison gas leak in Bhopal on 3 December 1984, caused by the manufacture of a highly toxic pesticide. The pesticide was supposed to provide a short-cut to agricultural growth, but in the event it damaged far more than pests. The manufacturers, Union Carbide India, appear to have been oblivious to the dangers the manufacturing process posed both to nature and to human life.
One of the most sickening sights I saw in my career with the BBC in India was in the Bhopal slum known as ‘Jayaprakash Nagar’ after the poisonous gas had leaked from the pesticide plant. The slum was just across the road from the plant. Bodies of humans, cattle, goats and dogs littered the narrow lanes. Inside the shacks, sitting on their mud floors, men women and children coughed, choked and gasped for breath, making their sore eyes sorer by rubbing them. Some moaned with pain, others moaned with grief. All were stunned by the disaster that had overtaken them, and terrified of its potential consequences. There was no room at the city’s main hospital for those who managed to get there, and so they were laid out on the hospital’s lawns. The doctors were desperate because Union Carbide could not or would not tell them the composition of the poisonous gas, nor advise them correctly on how the patients’ symptoms should be treated. Dead bodies were piled on carts to be taken to burial grounds and crematoria.
Reviewing the disaster and its consequences ten years later, Paul Srivastava, an American academic born in Bhopal, called on all of us to ‘re-envision the relationship between humans and nature in ways that can prevent more Bhopals on our only too fragile planet’. Organic farming, including organic pesticides, is a re-envisioning of that relationship. The opponents of organic farming argue that chemical fertilisers and pesticides give a higher yield, but yield is, like GDP growth, a very narrow measure which takes no account of broader benefits such as long-term health of the soil and indeed the health of those who eat the food.
Just how narrow a measure GDP growth can be was brought home to me when I met economists from the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious of Ireland, or CORI. The Justice Commission has been set up because the religious, that is the priests, nuns, and brothers who belong to religious orders in Ireland, do not accept the divisions between the prosperous and the poor they see in their country. The religious are particularly concerned about the divisions created by Ireland’s rapid economic growth. One of the economists, Father Sean Healy, ridiculed the way we measure growth. ‘Would you believe it?’ he said. ‘The key measure is GDP. Well, if you increase the number of children in care you increase GDP. And if you have an oil spill you increase it too.’
‘Why should that be so?’ I asked, somewhat bewildered,
‘The expense of bringing up a child in a family doesn’t register as part of GDP, because it can’t be costed. So it can’t be added to the total value of goods and services produced by Ireland. The cost of a child in care is €2,000 a year, and so that sum is added to the total GDP value. As is the cost of clearing up an oil spill.’ Father Sean went on to explain that a mother who went out to work increased the GDP two-fold; firstly by her earnings and secondly by the money she paid to a child-minder.
Father Sean Healy is not alone in criticising the way that the various contributions to GDP are added up and then conclusions based on this sum total. Clive Hamilton has noted that John Maynard Keynes, John Hicks and Simon Kuznets, who first developed the system of national accounting, repeatedly warned against using measures such as GDP as indicators of prosperity. In 1934, Kuznets cautioned Congress against inferring the welfare of the United States from the measurement of national income. Neither Congress nor any other part of the government in the United States paid any attention to his warnings, and by 1962 Kuznets was calling for the system of national accounting to be rethought. He wrote, ‘Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and returns, and
between the short and the long run … Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.’ Kuznet’s advice was still not taken.
I have already observed that it would be doing the poor of India a great disservice to suggest that their country’s economy did not need to grow. But, as the economist Rajiv Kumar said to me, ‘Whilst growth is necessary it is not sufficient.’ If we question the very nature of growth, we may be drawn to question the underlying myth that distorts our thinking: the myth of progress. We might ask whether we really can go on growing forever, as so many politicians suggest we must.
Our modern-day belief in progress is not dissimilar to the Christian belief in providence, according to which God guides history and human affairs towards the achievement of His purpose. As the hymn says, ‘God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year’. But of course there is an essential difference between the Christian doctrine and this modern belief. The evangelists of progress and economic growth would have us believe that we human beings can work out our purpose as year succeeds year. They lack the humility to question human ability to direct the world aright and they assume that the universe is constructed for our purposes. In contrast to this, many Christians have the humility to accept that humankind’s dominion over the Earth has been given by God, that it is not ours by virtue of our own superiority and that we on our own cannot achieve its purpose – which anyhow is God’s, not ours. Personally, I prefer a theology in which God does not give us dominion over the world but instead makes us partners with nature.
There is another problem with the concept of growth and progress that underpins much of our thinking: it is taken as given, as though it could be justified rationally or, in other words, taken as a certainty. But in his book Heresies, John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has suggested that our current faith in progress is in fact a substitute for the religious impulse, which he believes is ‘hard-wired in the human animal’. According to him, the repression of the religious impulse is responsible for the mistaken view of progress.
Screened off from conscious awareness, the religious impulse has mutated, returning as the fantasy of salvation through politics, or – now that faith in politics is decidedly shaky – through a cult of science and technology. The grandiose political projects of the twentieth century may have ended in tragedy or farce, but most cling to the hope that science can succeed where politics has failed: humanity can build a better world than any that has existed in the past. They believe this not from real conviction but from fear of the void that looms if the hope of a better future is given up. Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes.
It is the effectiveness of that Prozac, the certainty of our belief that science and technology ensure progress, that has led us to accept technology so blindly, to forget that almost every advance in technology has a down- as well as an up-side. Advances in nuclear science are an obvious example. These advances have given us nuclear energy, medicine and power, but they have also given us nuclear waste and nuclear weapons capable of creating disasters worse than any of the natural ones that God gets blamed for. Because the original nuclear powers have been unwilling to abandon their nuclear capability, they now face the terrifying prospect that these weapons themselves might fall into the hands of rogue nations or terrorists.
We invent a technology but then fail to use it in a balanced manner, and so it takes us over. The motor car, for instance, has taken us over. We didn’t realise its failings until it was too late. We have been given such freedom to use cars that we have become addicted to them and now seem incapable of limiting their use. Today, motorists regard the freedom to drive as a fundamental right that supersedes all other considerations, including the damage they are doing to the environment and to society; and politicians in democracies are terrified to take on the motorist.
Similarly, communications technologies are advancing so quickly these days that no one has time to consider the harm as well as the good that they might be doing. Certainly, our newfound technologies are generating an enormous amount of superfluous communication. We probably all have our own favourite story of futile mobile phone conversations. Mine concerns the young lady I sat next to on a one-hour train journey, during which she spoke to her boyfriend four times. The last time she called him, we were just outside the final station. Her only purpose in calling him appeared to be to inform him, mile by mile, about the progress of her journey.
Maybe I am just prejudiced because I dislike so much about the consumerist society. Maybe I am unrealistic. Perhaps the British businessman working in India was right who, after listening to me speak, said, ‘You are an old-fashioned socialist and a romantic about India.’ Maybe there really is no alternative to economic growth driven by consumerism if we are to overcome the problem of poverty? The economist Rajiv Kumar ventures that there is an alternative:
Don’t let consumerism create demand; rationalise it so that it creates the sort of wealth a society needs, like education and health services. In the case of America this means you don’t expand and expand in the hope of trickle-down solving problems of deprival, but you recognise your priorities. Trickle-down never works. The problem is that in economics you never teach welfare; you only teach GDP and per capita income.
The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, who heads a Congress Party-led coalition, also believes there is an alternative. In an interview he gave to India’s Economic Times at Gandhi’s ashram at Wardha, he described the Mahatma as, in many ways, ‘the most modern Indian we have had’. He noted that Gandhi told Indians: ‘We are not only Indian but we belong to the whole world. It is one family.’ The Prime Minister went on to say, ‘We must have the resilience and strength to stand up and uphold our beliefs and not be swept off our feet in the wake of integrating with the rest of the world at a time when the process of globalisation is sweeping all over.’ The Prime Minister went on to urge Indians to ‘copy the West in production and raising productivity, and not in consumption’.
According to Dr Manmohan Singh, India does not need consumerism; it needs the opposite – a dose of Gandhi’s austerity: ‘We cannot afford to have a situation of excessive and wasteful consumption … we must adopt Gandhiji’s principles of simple living and high thinking.’ Another distinguished economist, I.G. Patel, who was once Director of the London School of Economics, warned his fellow Indians: ‘We ignore his [Gandhi’s] vision only at our peril.’
So there is an alternative. It’s the man Indians often ignore when they turn their back on their own tradition and imitate the West. Now more than ever, Gandhi’s basic principles need to be brought back into the dialogue on India’s future. Gandhi told those who did have wealth to hold it in trusteeship for others and not to spend it on themselves. That’s not unlike the Jewish belief described by Rabbi Sacks that we all hold our possessions in trust from God. Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values.’ One of his moral principles was ‘non-possession’. For him this had been ‘a positive gain’. ‘Though I preach poverty,’ he said, ‘I am a rich man.’ This, of course, is the opposite of modern economic growth based on consumerism. Gandhi also said that wealth should be created at the bottom level, the village, not trickle down from the top.
Unfortunately, Gandhi – like almost all prophets – is without honour in his own country, or perhaps I should say he is a prophet honoured in theory as the ‘Father of the Nation’ but ignored in practice. The historian and biographer of Gandhi, B.R. Nanda, said he felt embarrassed whenever foreign visitors asked him, ‘What is Gandhi’s legacy for present-day India? Why do we hardly hear him mentioned?’ I believe that Gandhi is not mentioned because he has been taken too literally. I am sure, for instance, that neither Manmohan Singh nor I.G. Patel would suggest that India should follow Gandhi’s economic advice to the letter. Instead of encouraging a nuanced understanding of the Mahatma, his disciples have canonised him, turned him into a saint. Gan
dhi always insisted that he wasn’t a saint, and even said, ‘Nobody in this world possesses absolute truth. This is God’s attribute alone. Relative truth is all we know.’ But his followers have put him on such a high pedestal that they have given the impression his words and his example enshrine absolute truths and that we should take them as gospel truth. I am reminded of Kipling’s poem, ‘The Disciple’:
He that hath a gospel
whereby heaven is won
(Carpenter or cameleer,
Or Maya’s dreaming son)
Many swords shall pierce Him
Mingling blood with gall;
But his own disciple
Shall wound him worst of all!
If Gandhi is taken too literally, it’s all too easy to debunk him. How could independent India take seriously a man who said he didn’t believe in industrialisation ‘in any case for any country’, and who regarded cities as ‘evil things’? It may be a pity that middle-class India is shedding the sari for jeans, and dhoti kurta for shirt and trousers, but surely Gandhi’s intention can’t have been that Indian men should take renunciation so far that, like him, they shed all their clothes to wear only a loin cloth?
I remember Malcolm Muggeridge, the irreverent writer and television presenter, debunking Gandhi’s celibacy. At one point, Gandhi had taken his pursuit of brahmacharya, or celibacy, to such an extreme that he took girls to bed with him in order to test his control over his sexual urges. Muggeridge recalled that, when speaking to an audience of Gandhians in Delhi, the Mahatma defended this behaviour by saying, ‘My meaning of brahmacharya is this. One who, by constant attendance upon God, has become capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited.’ Muggeridge said the practice reminded him of the story of an old man in bed with a young woman who said, ‘Pass me my false teeth. I want to bite you!’
