Imagine! D.C. and New York City Destroyed, Their Leaders Forced to Live in Bejing

Wes Howard-Brook explains how Genesis, as we read it today, came together in Babylon among Jews whom the Babylonian military had removed from Jerusalem, marched forcibly to Babylon, and put into settlements there designed for captives taken in war. The Jews were hurting badly and needed stories that gave meaning to their ugly situation.

Living as Jewish refugees in the capitol city of the empire that had conquered them and their beloved Jerusalem, Genesis was their answer to what is otherwise the oldest written book of origins that we know, Enuma Elish, the Babylonian book of origins. Enuma Elish told how Babylon had been established by the gods. With that kind of lofty sacred heritage and divine authority, Babylonian Multi Earthers justified their right to bring their “superior ways” to the world around them, using force as necessary.Their expansionist plans included the land to their west which was controlled by the monarchy of Judah, a weak monarchy that was in considerable disarray. By 587 B.C.E., the Babylonians completed the leveling of Jerusalem. Included in the destruction was Solomon’s great Temple.

This double destruction of the two anchors of their culture had been inconceivable to the Jews. They were in as great a disbelief at what had happened as we would be if Washington, D.C., and New York City were demolished along with all of their economic centers, national shrines, and houses of religious worship. Furthermore, imagine all of the ruling elite of these cities being taken captive to live in Beijing, China, or any other foreign city of power. 

The same Jews who had that unimaginably devastating trauma brought together the story of Eden and its immediate sequel Cain and Abel. More about how these stories vigorously protest empire will follow in subsequent blog posts.

What stories would we tell if two of our city-centers of power and wealth were destroyed and military reprisal was NOT an option?

A Money Autobiography — Have You Written Yours?

If you’ve never written a money autobiography, you’re missing a strong experience of better self-understanding. I’ve written several over the years. Each helped me look at my relationship with money and its deity powers over our world. Me included. Reading aloud my autobiography to a small group and inviting conversation (not critique) adds even more value. It’s part of getting freer from the economic clutches of More.

Our exodus from empire and civilization’s Multi Earths economy cannot be accomplished if we do no more than stop using empire’s socio-economic structures, big as that is. To truly leave empire ways behind and change out of the civilization story to another requires a more holistic exodus.  That exodus must also happen within us, in our relationships, and in all organizations where we have influence.

—From my upcoming book, The Eden We Can Choose, to be released in 2012

Writing a money autobiography will help get empire-think out of you. So how does one start? There’s an excellent guide in Faith and Money Study Guide, an eight session manual for groups put out by Faith and Money Network, Washington, D.C. Getting people to write a money autobiography is just one of the really important contributions F&MN has made to many lives.

Austerity?! Let's Talk about Abundance for All

By now we see that all the talk about austerity in these economic hard times does not apply to the wealthiest whose wealth has increased as their taxes remain low  It does not apply to military spending or the budgets of the intelligence community.  It does not apply to the bankers in the too-big-to-fail banks. It does apply to those with no jobs, low-paying jobs, and insecure jobs. It does apply to students in state universities, to people without health insurance, and to many who can no longer self-identify as middle class.

If truth were the reigning norm instead of ideology, the word “austerity” could come from the lips of our president, Congress, financial and corporate leaders only with embarrassment. More significantly, the word is an insult to Creation who continues to offer abundance intended for all. If the ones talking about austerity would use an economic model of sustainability instead of unlimited growth, Creation’s abundance would be finding its way to the tables of families. Energy would be low-carbon or no-carbon, decentralized in its distribution, and increasing quality of life in countless places.

Consider the following paragraphs on abundance from my upcoming book on “The Eden We Can Choose: Moving to a One-Earth Economy and the Stories That Get Us There” —at least that’s the working title.

Abundance

In a culture where more is better, where more means progress, where more grows the  economy, “Enough!” is heard by many as quitting or as agreeing to be marginalized.  The business and organization proverb, “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying,” goes even further by regarding “Enough!” as economic suicide.  But in a one-Earth economy, “Enough!” is the strong word that reveals the very order of Creation.  It defines the limits in which all of life can thrive, or, if ignored, decline and die.  Creation’s order includes limits such as gravity, distance, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and high-velocity wind storms.  These are unforgiving and yet vitally beneficial to Earth’s gifts of rich, livable habitat.  

In a multi-Earth economy, “More!” is the goal to which imaginations and most daily efforts bend.  Limits?  Regulations?  These are to be circumvented or undone.  “Enough” cannot be defined in a model of economics that serves empires. But in an economic model that serves all Earth’s life, “Enough!” stirs our generative and creative powers in a model of abundance that has the astonishing capacity to cooperatively distribute the resources of the planet for all her life forms.

Much as we humans can rebel against imposed limits, real limits give us precisely the structures in which we can live freely, justly, and interdependently.  It is the real limits inherent in nature that give us the structures within which to work.  They are not government regulations, state control, or institutional policies.  Nor are they corporation contracts for resources and labor that give greater priority to wealth accumulation than to a better life for all.  They are the order of Creation, what makes Creation work.  They are evolutionarily exciting, and gift us with the stability that sustains life.  Creation’s order is revelatory, informing us of limits that are recognized by commonsense.

The after-Egypt manna gatherers in the wilderness learned to imitate nature’s life-giving limits.  They learned to use self-restraint by gathering only enough for each day, literally, daily bread.  Any more would rot.  And if they practiced greed instead of repeated actions of self-restraint, they would rot the entire sharing economy. That’s what the multi-Earths global economy has done.  Instead, the daily achievement of the manna-gatherers was not only sufficiency for their household, but to assure the common good—two high ideals in their post-imperial consciousness.

All of the learnings involved in the manna story, all of its power to help us go feral, nonetheless, do not, guarantee that we will not again be attracted to the civilization story requiring multi-Earths.  Our choice to live a one-Earth story is made again and again, each day.  Each choice deepens our conversion from the scarcity worldview of empire to an abundance-with-limits worldview.

Only in a one-Earth economy where abundance is real and has limits—both!—can we experience the feeling of an abundance that is sufficient, sharing, and loving.  Multi-Earths economies have created a legacy of capturing a lot of Creation’s generosity, but with limited consciousness or structures for sharing.  One-Earth economies, by learning from nature how she does it, have created a legacy of claiming as much of Creation’s generosity as is needed, and also growing the consciousness and structures for sharing.  It is the recognition by one-Earth, jubilee economies that nature is a wise teacher, a revealer of how to live, that makes one-Earth living so well-adapted for Earth’s style of abundance.

The Earth Story and the Civilization Story

Here is excerpt #3 from the forthcoming book and media project on one-Earth living, i.e., what is the economic model that fits within the resources of our one-planet home and how we can practice that now. Please offer your critiques to these excerpts.

There are two large stories, not one, underway in our lives. The one we hear most about is the story of human civilization; the unfolding story of world events, life in our community, and how we and our immediate circle of relationships participate in this story. This story so occupies what we call “news” that the second large story seems only for specialists who study it. It is the story of the Earth, our planetary home. This story, studied and told by life scientists, geologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists, is really the much larger, older, and dynamic of the two stories. It is, in fact, the larger context in which the human story happens. But for the majority of us, it is a secondary story—like a specialty shop for the few rather than a supermarket for the many.

Or so it was!  But no longer.

Today the Earth story is getting in our faces. It’s not just the meteorologists telling us about extreme weather. Nor the scientists telling us about new stars or new surprise discoveries of fossils or buried artifacts that fill gaps in the story. It is also insurance companies defining limits on which natural disasters they will cover as changes in climate are greatly increasing the number of disasters. It is the U.S. military planning for how to respond to conflicts arising from migrations caused by the exhaustion of mineral and oil resources, or by land that has been farmed for centuries turning to desert, or by low lands and shorelines becoming submerged by rising waters. It is people needing to change careers because their fishing business that has extended over several generations is no longer providing a living due to the collapse of marine species.

The Earth is speaking with increasing volume and frequency. Many of us are hearing her now; many are not. Still deaf. Or hearing, they rush to secure their privileges, power, and assets, not yet believing that Earth’s story holds the remaining trump cards. Or in a different metaphor some use, Earth bats last.

After reading this Section, look anew at the “news.” Which story is being talked about? We humans have been shaped to think that the story of human history is the only one, or at least the only one that really matters. The ego-centrism of that way of thinking contains within it the seed of its own destruction. That seed sprouted some time ago and is now bearing fruit. This Section says plainly why that way of thinking has been wrong all along. The two-story way of thinking is not only rooted in the truth of the Cosmos, it also gives us the story that we can live by if we can bring ourselves to choose it. Many already have. But as of this moment, the human civilization story continues its irrational pursuit of endless “progress” and unlimited growth. In this it behaves like cancer cells which grow and grow, outflanking the immune system, until they kill their host.  Is there still time to intervene? Is there still time, if we choose the Earth story to live by, for Earth’s immune system to gobble up the cancer cells and still offer humans and all species inhabitable Earth space? These are the questions we are living. The answers are not now known.