Deepest Energies, Not Abstract Reasoning, Will Change Our Economy

One of my economic “textbooks” for a One Earth economy is, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Written over twenty years ago (1989) its authors, Herman Daly, an economist formerly with the World Bank, and John Cobb, a theologian who taught many years at Claremont School of Theology, were early voices urging deep, systemic economic changes. But, they said, such structural redirection of the economy requires the inherent interplay between economics and spirituality. One of their statements in particular has stayed with me: 

The changes that are now needed in society are at a level that stirs religious passions. The debate will be a religious one whether that is made explicitly of not. The whole understanding of reality and the orientation to it are at stake. We think that, to treat the issues as if they could be settled by abstract reason, is misleading. The victory will go to those who can draw forth these deepest energies of the centered self and give them shape and direction. Getting there, if it happens at all, will be a religious event, just as getting to where we are now was a religious event. Idolatry in the guise of misplaced concreteness and disciplinolatry have brought us to the present crisis. Overcoming these is a religious task (p. 381).

Their word “disciplinolatry” refers to the effort among many economists to turn economics into a hard science in order to elevate its authority. Daly and Cobb see that as idolatry.