The Crisis of Civilization: Economic Globalization and the Shredding of the World

Abstract

The dominant religion in the developed world today is Economicism. Economicism, like religions it has superceded, such as Christianity, has a tripartite organizational structure—a Holy Trinity if you like. For Economicism, the science of economics corresponds to the Father; high technology and the faith that scientific (primarily physical scientific) investigation will solve humanity’s major environmental and social problems (a doctrine known as scientism) corresponds to the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the process of economic globalization, the increasingly free and liberal movement of physical and financial capital, information, labor and migrants around the globe. The claim that economics is a religion of materialism and consumerism, that economic progress will bring about a golden age, “the route of salvation to a new heaven on earth, the means of banishing evil from the affairs of mankind” (Nelson, 1991b, xxii), has been argued for in some detail by Robert H. Nelson in his brilliant book Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (Nelson, 1991b). In this book we shall show that the religion of economics, materialism and consumerism—Economicism—is a bankrupt world view, that is not only rationally and scientifically untenable, but is also leading humanity towards inevitable destruction.

There should be a special word for the feeling of dread caused by reading the works of macroeconomists. As the pages turn, you gradually realise that you are merely the tiniest of tiny cogs in a global machine with no one at its helm, and that your culture, your life and even your own private beliefs are products of economic forces that you cannot comprehend…. Perhaps it’s time for deep ecology and the rejection of materialism. (Editorial (New Scientist), 1996, 3)

The achievements of economic theory in the last two decades are both impressive and in many ways beautiful. But it cannot be denied that there is something scandalous in the spectacle of so many people refining the analyses of economic states which they give no reason to suppose will ever, or have ever, come about. It probably is also dangerous. Equilibrium economics, because of its well known welfare economics implication, is easily convertible into an apologia for existing economic arrangements and it is frequently so converted. On the other end of the scale, the recent, fairly elaborate analysis of the optimum plans for an economy which is always in equilibrium has, one suspects, misled people to believe that we actually know how an economy is to be controlled. (Hahn, 1970, 1–2)

It is economic policies which have made life insecure for the majority of young people in advanced Western nations that has resulted in negative population growth. The supporters of the New Right are practicing genocide on their own populations. (Gare, 1993, 25)