Solidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World

Conclusion: Hope for Tomorrow

6 Conclusion: Hope for Tomorrow When I teach environmental ethics, I often have my students do an exercise in which I tell them to imagine that it is the year 2075 and the environmental crisis has been resolved. I then tell them that they are a group of distinguished historians who have been brought together to outline a new textbook that will document the history of how our world got from its state of environmental crisis in the early decades of the twenty-first century to a healed and sustainable world in two generations.1 Nine times out of ten, the groups start with a cataclysmic event—a nuclear war, an environmental event that destroys large segments of the population, or an infectious disease pandemic that likewise decimates the population. They then write a history in which sustainable agriculture and energy use are adopted universally and population rates are greatly reduced (often because so many people are killed). This exercise offers some insight into the cultural barriers that must be overcome in order to redirect the attitudes and behaviors of people living in the first world. Most of these students consider themselves to be environmentalists; they readily accept that people in the first world are not living in a sustainable way, and yet the only hope they see for turning the situation around lies in catastrophe! The task of challenging first-world Christians to think about issues of overconsumption, greed, and injustice is reminiscent of the words of Jeremiah. Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, “We will not walk in it.” Therefore hear, O nations, and know, O congregation, 111 what will happen to them. Hear, O earth; I am going to bring disaster on this people, the fruit of their schemes, because they have not given heed to my words; and as for my teaching, they have rejected it. (Jeremiah 6:16, 18-19) Recognizing the hermeneutical shift that is necessary to change the direction in which we are headed as a global community can bring despair. The assumptions of capitalism (growth, profit, and trade are a priori goods) and the lure of consumerism appear to have colonized the lifeworlds of the average American in ways that make it impossible to imagine or desire alternative ways of being.2 This colonization functions like a drug, dulling the senses and keeping people floating just below consciousness. People are easier to manipulate that way. An obsessive preoccupation with shopping as entertainment fills closets and homes with useless gadgets, toys, and clothing that often goes unused. For too many people, consumption has become an addiction. Like my students, most US Americans are unable to see our way past the present into a different future. Our addiction to “stuff” means that many people fear a loss of purchasing power will mean a corresponding loss of personal power or personal satisfaction or even self-worth. A new and different future in which people of means live in more sustainable ways is not yet seen as a social good, as a faithful and fulfilling experience of human life lived in covenant relationship with all God’s creation. With Jeremiah (and my students), I sometimes fear that disaster is imminent. In fact, it is already present for many millions of our brothers and sisters around the world. Yet as a Christian ethicist, I find hope in my tradition. In buying the field at Anathoth from his cousin during the middle of the siege, Jeremiah demonstrates that he is also an optimist. I take hope from the people in the first world who are choosing to live their lives in countercultural ways: from people in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement who offer an alternative vision of how to live simply in a consumer culture, from farmers who are committed to the sustainable practices of biodynamic farming in the face of the corporate machine that drives agriculture, from communities of citizens like the Zapatistas in Mexico who are standing up for their rights to self-determination, and from countless communities of faith across this country and around the world who are engaged in the work of social transformation and justice. It is a challenge to preach a gospel of solidarity to a public that might prefer a gospel of prosperity. It is much easier to interpret our economic and material accomplishments...