A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack

Seven. The Religion of the Market

197 Seven The Religion of the Market Religion is notoriously difficult to define. If, however, we adopt a functionalist view and understand religion as what grounds us by teaching us what this world is, and what our role in the world is, then it becomes evident that traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and less, because that function is being supplanted by other belief systems and value systems. Today the most powerful alternative explanation of the world is science, and the most attractive value system has become consumerism.Their academic offspring is economics, probably the most influential of the “social sciences.” In response, this concluding chapter will argue that our present economic system should also be understood as our religion, because it has come to fulfill a religious function for us. The discipline of economics is less a science than the theology of this new religion, and its god, the Market, has become a vicious circle of ever-increasing production and consumption by pretending to offer a secular salvation. The eclipse of Communism makes it more apparent that the market is the first truly world religion,binding all corners of the globe into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular. So it is no coincidence that our time of economic globalization and ecological catastrophe also happens to be a time of extraordinary challenge to more traditional religions. Unfortunately, it is somewhat 198 A Buddhist History of the West ludicrous to think of conventional religious institutions as we know them today serving a significant role in resolving either crisis. Their more immediate problem is whether they, like the rainforests we anxiously monitor, will survive in any recognizable form the onslaught of this new religion.The major religions are not yet moribund but, on those few occasions when they are not in bed with the economic and political powers that be, they tend to be so preoccupied with past problems and outmoded perspectives (e.g., pronatalism) that they are irrelevant to what is really happening (e.g., fundamentalism ) or trivialized (e.g., television evangelism). The result is that they have been unable to offer what is most needed, a meaningful challenge to the aggressive proselytizing of market capitalism, which has already become the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief system or value system in human history. This situation is becoming so critical that the environmental crisis may actually turn out to be a positive thing for religion, for ecological catastrophe is awakening us not only to our need for a deeper source of values and meaning than market capitalism can provide, but also to the realization that contemporary religious institutions are not meeting this need either. ECONOMICS AS THEOLOGY It is intolerable that the most important issues about human livelihood will be decided solely on the basis of profit for transnational corporations. (Daly and Cobb 178)1 According to the United Nations Development Report for 1999, threefifths of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries lack basic sanitation , a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing, while a fifth do not have enough food or access to modern health services. Today the richest 20 percent of the world’s population now accounts for 86 percent of private consumption, the poorest 20 percent only 1.3 percent—a gap that continues to grow. As a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in a limbo of hunger and deteriorating health. . . . Why do we acquiesce in this social injustice? What rationalization allows us to sleep peacefully at night? The Religion of the Market 199 [T]he explanation lies largely in our embrace of a peculiarly European or Western [but now global] religion, an individualistic religion of economics and markets, which explains all of these outcomes as the inevitable results of an objective system in which . . . intervention is counterproductive. Employment is simply a cost of doing business, and Nature is merely a pool of resources for use in production. In this calculus, the world of business is so fundamental and so separate from the environment . . . that intervention in the ongoing economic system is a threat to the natural order of things, and hence to future human welfare. In this way of...