Jerry Mander on What Happens When We Live in the Absence of the Sacred

Another important voice, one that I encountered earlier than any I have mentioned so far, spoke to me through a book that my son, Lane, wisely passed along to me. He sensed that I’d find it helpful. Interestingly, he was ahead of me in knowing how much I’d like it. His gift was another example of how a book or article came to my attention during this process of remixing economics and religion. The frequency of such occurrences punctures any delusion that might creep into me suggesting that I alone am writing this. Instead, these repeated occurrences have increased in me the feeling of solidarity with the growing crowd who want to live One Earth ways as much as I do.

It was the title of the book Lane gave me that especially grabbed me — In the Absence of the Sacred. It spoke to what I’d been wondering about: “How does having a sense of the sacred make a difference?” I’d long sensed that it did. I even suspected that the essence is lost when we live in the absence of “the sacred.” But I had little ability to put my intuition into words. 

Eagerly I read what the author, Jerry Mander, said. His subtitle, The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, telegraphs how he contrasts the worldview of what he calls the technological peoples with the worldview of Indigenous peoples. Essentially these two contrasting paradigms parallel the Multi Earth and One Earth worldviews.

Mander spells out the role of the sacred in the Indigenous peoples’ worldview (One Earthers) and then shows how much technological peoples (Multi Earthers) lost as we increasingly pruned the sacred out of our worldview. Though economics among Indigenous peoples is infused with the sacred, among technological peoples, economics lost religion. The resulting irony is how within the technological worldview, economics has become its religious cornerstone — an irony I am eager to talk about next in this blog.