For many people, economic recovery means getting back to where we
were a few months or years ago. That means recovering our consumptive,
greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically
and socially unsustainable way of life. I’d like to suggest another
kind of recovery, drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict
gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high”
he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began
using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way
of life—a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of
addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of
other deeper issues and diseases in his life—unresolved pain or anger,
the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding
ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual
deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.
Similarly, I’d like to suggest whenever we hear the word “recovery,”
we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high,
but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions,
including the following:
1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance.
They give us speed, quick energy, serving as a kind of cultural
amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the
ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.
2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons give us a feeling of well-being
and security, removing our feelings of fear and anxiety, much like a
barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow in the much
more important work of relationship-building, justice, and
peace-making—lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into
an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more
and more weapons, we aren’t safer … especially when increasing numbers
of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.
3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and
political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes,
dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By
making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives,
Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants,
and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high—”crack”
for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your
system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being
stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and missing
things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to
paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.
4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person’s life doesn’t
consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures
growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the
environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used,
and then thrown away into a landfill … that economy “succeeds” by
turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That’s not success.
We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to
a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a
regenerative economy. I believe that in God’s world, if billions can be
made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions
can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.
5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the president’s
town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a
solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship
manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his
neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his
pocket … but wouldn’t you agree that being a good neighbor has a value
that can’t be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial
profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and
communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line—financial
sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So
we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of
community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.
6. Our addiction to easy answers. “Government is the problem.” “Just
throw money at the problem.” We can’t afford our addiction to these
kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a
complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes
the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring
wisdom.
So … maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the
word “recovery” have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us
into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for
too long. That’s my hope and prayer.
Brian McLaren is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. This piece is taken from the God’s Politics blog at Sojourners.
HT: Catalyst
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