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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Bringing Morals Back to the Table
  • Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:13:37 -0700


Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 4:23 PM
Subject: Bringing Morals Back to the Table


Dear Friend

Many of us are eating locally and organically produced food. From a modern
economic perspective, where price is often the paramount consideration,
these choices seem illogical.

What accounts for this shift, and does it have the possibility of expanding
to all of our economic decisions?

At the end of his 1966 essay "Buddhist Economics," economist E.F.
Schumacher
asks, "whether modernization as currently practiced, without regard to
religious and spiritual values is actually producing agreeable results?"

Economics, practiced as a science, an objective discipline, seeks to reduce
relationships to only those that maximize utility. The worker's creativity
and spirituality are discouraged, and consumers are asked to put aside
their
moral considerations in economic decisions.

Buddhist economics is the description of another path in economic
reasoning,
one that involves people "imbued with a fully developed sense of the
sacredness of all existence." Schumacher looked to all faiths to inform his
thought about creating a more sustainable economy. He recognized the human
as an individual but also as a creative element within a larger system.

The Buddhist economist asserts that a person's work should have a threefold
result: develop and use his faculties; join with others in a common task;
and create the goods necessary for comfortable existence. Work becomes an
act of bringing needed goods into the world with respect for the
environment
that led to their creation.

For the Buddhist economist this is the process of finding the middle way,
with both material comfort and spiritual reverence.

Altering the economic perspective requires replacing an outward reflection
of materialism with an inward reflection of morality. In other words,
breaking away from a system that asks us to separate ourselves into "the
economical man," who cares only about compensation and price, and "the
moral
man" of compassion and good will. Working in the tradition of the ideas
taught by Schumacher, the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington,
Mass., has launched a local currency, BerkShares, for the southern
Berkshire
region as a means of reconnecting these two sides and implementing our
values in economic decisions. We use the local currency because it
represents a support of the local economy that includes our friends and
family. BerkShares defines the physical boundaries of our purchases so that
we may see their full impact.

As we learn to reinitiate our morality into economic decisions with the
help
of tools like BerkShares, we will realize the role that locally scaled
production can play. Our morals will demand that our purchases be
accompanied by a more complete picture of the processes that led to their
creation. Therefore, a movement toward relocalizing production must
accompany the incorporation of morality into economics.

The American economic system assumes a consumer chooses goods with the
lowest price. The decision that many of us are now making to forgo price in
favor of local food is based on our values. We believe that food should not
travel over vast distances and that a farmer has a right to a living wage.
When our purchasing decisions take these value judgments into
consideration,
we are willing to pay more for local and organic products. This is the
beginning of a new economy that embraces the moral and sacred values in all
our purchasing decisions.

No endeavor that involves the interaction of conscious beings with an
inherent ethical sensibility can be treated as an absolute science. Working
conditions, environmental health and community support can be included in
our economic decisions. The E.F. Schumacher Society and many other
organizations are working to build the models that can bring together our
economic system and our morals. These models will provide the meaningful
work and the awareness of production necessary for a more complete and fair
economic system.

Sincerely,

Michael Gordon for the
E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-1737
efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Board of Directors: Jessica Brackman, Starling Childs, Merrian Fuller,
Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Constance Packard, Joseph Stanislaw,
Nancy Jack Todd, and Charles Turner.
Board of Founders: Ian Baldwin, David Ehrenfeld, Satish Kumar,
John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale.
Advisory Board: Tanya Berry, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Lisa Byers,
Olivia
Dreier, Hazel Henderson, Wes Jackson, Amory Lovins, John McKnight, David
Orr, Michael Shuman, Cathrine Sneed, Lewis Solomon, John Todd, Greg Watson,
Barbara Wood, and Arthur Zajonc.

This article first appeared in the January 19, 2008 edition of Albany, New
York's "Times Union" newspaper
(http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=656640&category=VOICES&B

CCode=&newsdate=2/6/2008.)






  • [Livingontheland] Bringing Morals Back to the Table, Tradingpost, 02/07/2008

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