Green Action March Comment
So let’s face it. We are in a huge mess, despite the rose-tinted spectacles used by some of our political leaders who are clearly not well in touch with the realities that most of us face. The neo-liberal economics of recent decades combined with the assault on the ecology of the planet may be reaping dividends for the rich few, but for the majority of us the immediate outlook is bleak.
Our society is fracturing and breaking up, and, in my view, this is being encouraged by a government which seems intent on systematically dismantling the structures which have held us together since industrialisation. Over the centuries our cultural norms and institutions have evolved and gradually been democratised (though far from being finished). In the home, the workplace, the wider community, even the Church, we have experienced the universalisation of voting, education, health, welfare, housing and trade.
But what we are now seeing is a de-regulated economy with an excessive emphasis on individual freedom and liberalisation, with a loss of many of the checks and balances a healthy society requires.
Employment, which once spread at least some security and equality, is becoming a lottery for millions on uncertain short term and low paid contracts. Health care and learning are rapidly being commercialised, whilst the leisure industry reduces entertainment to superficial games and distractions with little fulfilment or social interaction. Whatever happened to creativity?!
Our schools have become so obsessed with targets that we forget why they are there – to instil children with confidence and skills to grow into relational people. Yet increasing numbers of young people leave school apparently without the self-assurance to hold a meaningful conversation.
So much for the grumpy old man rant!
What many so-called solutions to these really complex issues, all of which have an indirect effect on our environmental impact, fail to note is that we are in danger of losing the human scale in our civic society. The organisations which control our world are large and out-of-touch: huge transnational corporations, large instruments of government, distant international bodies, giant food producers, massive financial institutions and remote technological industries.
Even the phrase ‘Big Society’ (a term once labelled by Rowan Williams as “painfully stale”) misses the point that what makes us disconnected is the lack of sustainable personal relationships - powerlessness affected by a lack of community.
We need to be connected – to our politicians, to our economic systems, to our neighbourhood, to the earth. That is what brings about human fulfilment. Loving relations and trust with those around us.
Roman Catholics use the phrase ‘subsidiarity’ to describe this: no bigger or more distant than necessary. The Christian Gospels use the term ‘koinonia’ – a common unity or community. St Paul talks of ‘the Body’, different parts connected to a functioning whole. They all point to a world in which people have a profound sense of belonging and inter-connection to one another and to the Earth.
If we are experiencing a social wilderness at this time, let’s remember that it is in re-connecting that we can once again grow in hope in possibility…
Martyn Goss
This article first appeared in
Devon Churches Green Action News, March 2013
