What Would You Be Willing To Sacrifice?

Ed Finn has a blog entry at rabble.ca that I highly recommend. His thesis can roughly be summarized in this excerpt:

The glue that holds any society together is faith in its governments, courts, churches, unions and non-profits -- faith that these organizations, no matter how flawed, will always be committed to serving their basic needs, to protecting them from the worst effects of poverty, unemployment, and sickness.

That glue comes unstuck when governments put private interests ahead of the public interest; when corporations put the uncontrolled pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being of workers and their communities; when unions are stripped of much of their capacity to help their members.

No wonder, then, that so many people have concluded that they can no longer depend collectively on these institutions -- that they are now on their own as individuals, each locked in a struggle for survival, with little or no help from any quarter.

The disastrous result, Finn suggests, is that we increasingly adopt a very selfish outlook on life, moving, if you will forgive a bit of hyperbole, into a stark survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle, a reversion to an almost Hobbesian state of nature.

There can really be no doubt that Western governments, including our 'new' one under Justin Trudeau, are neoliberal in nature. And the kinds of selfishness those governments foster are, without any hyperbole, facilitating the destruction of our world. The notion of sacrificing anything in service of the collective good is being steadily eroded, replaced by a widespread self-indulgence that has been transformed into a virtue.

My immediate concern here is the ever-accelerating rate of climate change, the greatest peril our planet has ever faced. While acknowledging that there are still some very good people today, I cannot escape the notion that the majority would obdurately refuse to make even the smallest sacrifice or lifestyle change that could, if done in sufficient numbers, slow down that rate. And quite significantly, our governments, beyond some paltry carbon taxes, are requiring nothing from us. That vacuum in leadership, in turn, gives licence to the very self-indulgent lifestyles that neoliberalism demands.

The kinds of sacrifices I am talking about are small ones we all could take: not idling our car while waiting for our spouse in the grocery store; combining errands to reduce GHG emissions; walking to the store instead of driving; eating one less meal of beef or pork per week; turning the air-conditioning temperature up one degree and heating temperature down one degree; buying energy-efficient products upon replacement; buying energy-efficient cars; air-drying clothes instead of using the dryer, etc.

All of the above require conscious choices, but none of them is onerous. I shall leave you with some video that highlights the peril we face, as well as this question: What small sacrifices are you willing to make or have made to reduce your carbon footprint?





If you go to approximately the five-minute mark on the following Global National newscast, you will see the impact climate change is having on Vancouver:

Concern For The Collective

For whatever reason, I am one of those people with a deeply ingrained sense of fair play that recognizes we are more than simply individuals 'doing our own thing' in isolation and with no regard to others; I happily acknowledge that we are part of a larger agglomeration that we name 'society.'

So yes, I readily admit to being one of those who counts the number of groceries in the basket of the person ahead of me in the express checkout at the grocery store; I am also someone who uses highway passing lanes for their intended purpose and not as my personal conduit or as a semi-permanent solution to avoiding merging traffic while driving at a speed that shows no regard for cars behind me. I also get outraged if a page is defaced or torn out of a library book.

In my mind, all of the above are serious crimes against the collective, selfish refusals to consider others as worthy of our respect and co-operation as we live out our lives.

And yet it is an attitude that seems all too common today, as governments and cultural imperatives urge us to be self-absorbed consumers whose highest values spring from the dictates of the marketplace, not our consciences, values, spiritual beliefs or regard for the common good.

It was therefore refreshing to read in today's Star an article entitled Harvard professor Michael Sandel examines ‘moral limits of markets’ in new book. In it, Sandel, a highly regarded Harvard professor of political philosophy, asks questions that we seem to have become reluctant to ask today:

Sandel says that we are increasingly reluctant to talk about what kind of society we want. We are reluctant to allow moral and spiritual concerns into public debate. Instead, we’ve come to rely on the market to assign value.

“Part of the appeal of markets,” he writes in the book, “is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher or worthier than others.”

The market is only interested in efficiently matching buyers and sellers. It is not interested in what is being distributed, or whether it is fair — let alone whether some things should be distributed at all.

Sandel talks as well about the growing inequality gap that essentially has us living on different worlds, something that seems so very evident when we look at the direction the Harper regime is taking us in Canada:

By putting a price on just about everything, by having things of great value up for sale, we end up widening the gap between those with money and those without. “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives,” Sandel writes. “We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. . . It’s not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.”

He does not oppose inequality everywhere, but believes that too much of it is dangerous. “Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he writes, “but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”

In a world that encourages lazy thinking, reactionary rather than thoughtful responses, and the embrace of absolutisms, Sandel is a refreshing and much-needed voice of reason and reflection. For those who are especially interested, he also has a 12-part television series available on the Internet that explores many of these questions.