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The Anglican Church in Tasmania Search |
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a healthy church...transformingLIFE |
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December 2005 |
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Good or bad?Bruce Felmingham writes about the two sides of consumerism. Consumerism is a word carrying pejorative undertones and in this context is akin to that most abused of biblical quotes: 'the love of money is the root of all evil'. (1 Timothy 6:10). Those protesting about the tenets of high altar capitalism usually leave out the first three words and blame money for most of the world's evils. And so it is with the phrase 'consumerism' whose effect on the way we live is also determined by the motives of consumers. Consumption looked at in a positive light has certain positive characteristics. First, basic consumer goods such as breads, milk, reasonable portions of meat and vegetables and calorific commodities in general are provided by God's grace to sustain and support life. In Asian nations, the staples are rice, meat and vegetables and nobody in their right mind would deny the importance of the basic food items in a world where two-thirds of its inhabitants simply do not have enough caloric intake to sustain their health over three score years and ten. Consumption is also the lifeblood of an economy because goods must be produced and nurtured before they can be exchanged. It is in this production process that many jobs are created and incomes earned. This supports families by giving children educational opportunities; clothes the family and provides the financial support needed to take the family on a brief holiday. The growth of demand for consumer goods also encourages investors to put their money into expanded production so consumption growth also stimulates economic growth and this, it is argued, is a positive for the commonweal. You could infer from these arguments that consumption is invariably positive, but we have come to know that it is not. Consumption is excessive when it involves over-exploitation; then we argue that such consumption is not sustainable. But who is to decide the meaning of sustainable consumption? This question has never been satisfactorily resolved because it involves a missing generation, those who will inherit the environment this generation bequeaths to them. Consumption is also excessive when it is driven by motives which are definitely not in the Christian's lexicon, in particular: greed and selfishness. Why should a nation (the USA) containing 3 percent of the world's population consume 30 percent of all the world resources consumed annually? This constitutes a moral dilemma for western nations and raises a most awkward question: what is wrong with a developed economic system which does not sustain adequately two thirds of the world's population, when we have for example, developed agricultural technologies capable of sustaining the needs of the entire world? It seems as if the wrong kind of consumerism is promoted by the media, in particular by false and misleading advertising, so effectively that mindsets are inevitably altered and individual consumers become hostage to relative thinking known as 'keeping up with the Jones'. Anything you have I can have too, and more. So it is not so much consumerism that is at fault, it is the entirely unacceptable distribution of goods which is the root cause to blame. Generally, that happens to people of Islamic faiths who live in poorer countries and are subject to horrendously unfair consumption patterns. Go no further than this when searching for reasons for the current level of agitation in the Islamic world. The probability of terrorist attacks would be less if the world were a fairer place.
Dr Bruce Felmingham is Reader in Economics at the University of Tasmania |
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