« Our New Story Has the Sacred in It »

Some ecological economists have quit trying to justify their ecological perspective to other economists and turned to telling a new story instead. That story is a OneEarth story and has interactive components of ecology, economics, science, and spirituality. David Korten is one of these, as shown in his excellent essay, A New Story for a New Economy: To Find Our Human Place in a Living Universe, which he delivered to a group of ecological economists.

In the new story we no longer see ourselves outside of nature, ordering and ruling it as if we are half-human, half-godlike creatures—a highly unnatural being that we’re not nearly as good at as we pretend. In deep moments of wondering what life’s all about, we know we’re faking it. And the story we’re living isn’t working at all well when we look at the world. There is a better story in which we see ourselves within nature. There we are caught up in the work of being fully human and fulfilling our purpose in the mystifying creational, evolutionary unfolding.

In the outside-of-nature story, economists have focused us on money as the ultimate measure of our value. Markets are our moral compass. But, of course, The Market can’t really tell us when our money choices are good and when they are bad—not in a truly moral sense; only according to economic calculation and social status. Pope Francis recently called this kind of money-market worship idolatry.

Even though most of us know that our worth cannot really be measured by money, nor can markets reliably guide us morally, yet we make many decisions in our work based on this pretense. We may also defer to upper class values rather than underclass ones without considering carefully what their respective impacts truly are on all of Earth’s community. (I have elaborated on this view in “Giving Primary Religious Devotion to Economics,” a 25 page chapter in my book, Blinded by Progress, 2013.)

Though the new story rejects the idolatrous religion of money and market worship, it does not simply turn to religions of the world and embrace any one of them. Though doing so is possible, such an embrace may be neither wise nor possible in that most religious traditions have differing expressions, ranging along a spectrum from fundamentalist literal thinking to mystical poetic thinking. 

Rather than any carte blanche return to the past, the new story springs from an evolving consciousness, a consciousness striving for a holistic embrace of spirit and science. It holds science and religion together in their ambivalent oppositions and convergences. This spiritual consciousness pursues the science that looks at the quantum universe with its parallel realities and mysteries, the science that goes beyond any Newtonian or rational explanations alone. Just as enthusiastically, spiritual consciousness pursues religious thinking in which the universe unfolds in self-discovery, a kind of process which is energized from within and reflected upon from beyond.

This immanent and transcendent activity is aptly named “spirit.” It is an activity of wholeness or holiness, giving equal regard to the parts of the physical world and the energies infusing that world. Energies and matter are, as Einstein’s equation noted, on either side of one “equals” sign. The new story recognizes these unifying energies with reverence for the way they give life. The sense of sacred presence they evoke while operating within nature’s processes and beyond them increase our understanding of the universe, rather than detracting form it. Such divine presence is not that of supernatural deities intervening in human affairs. Rather, it is working through ongoing processes whose outcomes are not certain. But they are headed in the direction of greater awareness and complexities. These processes move along in a mystifying creational story.

For us to be inside this kind of living, sacred story has the feel of bigness and wholeness. It is the OneEarth story that helps us move into our fuller capacities. Compared to it, the story of money and markets shrivels us. And, of course, the money-market story also destroys Creation’s life processes.

It helps me to remember the original meaning of the word “religion.” “Religion,” coming from “religio,” means “to bind.” The new story, instead of separating us from Creation binds us into it, the precise place for which we are evolved and where we can live our fullest capacities. Without question, money and markets sometimes lift our sense of self for a bit; they are powerful, for sure. But they also drain the spirit out of millions of people and other species. The impotence of the money-market, outside-of-nature story may be best exposed by telling the new story in which we experience the juiciness of our evolving humannes in Earth’s incredible natural community.