The Collapse of Intelligence

The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges In an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very cause of its expansive success… 

If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated,  the inevitable result is nothing less than the collapse of intelligence.

E.F. Schumacher

Matt Fox offers us some background and some commentary on his ideas:

E.F. Schumacher ,well known for his book, Small Is Beautiful, was a British economist… He also studied Gandhi, nonviolence, ecology, and Buddhism also with Christianity. He is speaking ancient wisdom when he points out that the capital sins of greed and envy are simply unsustainable.

When he talks about being cultivated, he is referring to the mass media and our advertising-saturated age…. Similarly, Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said that if we “forfeit our sense of awe, the universe becomes a marketplace.”

It’s not hard to agree with these sentiments… as awful and as disturbing as they are, it takes very little effort to be on the internet or to watch television for very long and not find ample evidence of this overwhelming emphasis and this materialistic tendency all around us.

As a society, and maybe as a larger Western culture, it is imperative that we rediscover a sense of awe and wonder that will counteract the commercial reductionism and the soul- empting tendencies so prevalent in our world today. Without recapturing a sense of “reverence for life”

And a sense of living in a gracious universe that would care for us all, we have allowed a corporate and soulless consciousness to dominate and in so doing create an elite class of  crass consumers who threaten the existence of the planet!

Gandhi observed, even before the accelerated consumption and exploitation of the environment that there is “”[enough to meet everyone’s need, but not enough to meet our greed.]”

I can recall my attempts art arguing this destructive tendency through the lens of mythology;

 The great Bultmann vs. Multmann debate about scripture has many parallels here… If we strip away any sense of the sacred and make life mechanical, it will only serve materialistic ends… only if we are willing to infuse our world with a reverent sense of magic, wonder, and awe, we will save the planet from ourselves!