What Political Economist, Barry Shelley, Says about “Blinded by Progress”

For the past decade Barry Shelley and I have shared treasured experiences. My only complaint is that they’ve been too few. As I go into detail about in my book, Blinded by Progress, Barry helped me see that the current economy functions as one of the world’s leading religions. More precisely, the leading religion.

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Commodify What's Sacred; Sacralize the Profane

When the time came for Barry Shelley and me to lead our session at the Solidarity Economy Network Forum (2009), I told how I was coming to see that Spirit was inherent in economics. I elaborated by pointing out how economies continually propose to satisfy not only our material needs, but the yearnings of our souls. Economic activity brings meaning to much of what we do. Advertisements often speak to our anxieties and feelings of inadequacy, and then proclaim the good news that their commercial product will satisfy our needs and longings.

I also pointed out how economies can take what is ordinary and promote it into a cultural icon, elevating a widget no one needs to sacred status beyond its real value. This sacralizing of the ordinary gives economics a sacramental power exercised by religions. Such sacralizing adds a numinous quality to other material things, making them also more attractive to us.

Conversely, economies also have the power to de-sacralize. For example, an economy can take an ecosystem we appreciate for its beauty, inspiration, and soul-nourishing wonders, but then turn it into a landscape whose only meaning is the economic value of what can be extracted from it or built on it. Multi Earth economics prefers the sign “For Sale” to a sign reading “Mystic River Park.” To be able to commodify the sacred is an inverse and perverse form of religious power.