Traits of modern beliefs that are at the core of today’s crisis.
from Richard Norgaard
Changes in European perceptions of themselves, both with respect to nature and social organization, also coevolved around very important new ideas about individualism that coevolved with the rise in atomism in natural philosophy. Martin Luther’s call for reform of the Catholic Church stressed that individuals were responsible for their own salvation through their own reading of the Bible, the only true source for coming to know Christ and God. Luther’s call awakened individualism, expanded education to the masses so people could read, unintentionally further separated church and state, and ignited multiple intellectual Enlightenments: English, Scottish, French and eventually in the Catholic Church and feeding back on Protestantism too (Ryrie, 2017). The natural theology that evolved into natural history and then into natural science was increasingly built on atomism and the assumption that the parts of nature could be understood apart from each other. As a result, modern science split into disciplines with each discipline learning about particular parts of nature. No one needed to understand the whole because it was thought that the parts would naturally unify into the whole. Millgram (2015) characterizes the coevolution of knowledge with technology and social organization since the Enlightenment as the Great Endarkenment. People today, scientists included, are far less conscious of the environmental system in which they live than were hunter-gatherers. The Enlightenments’ strong move toward individualism in social thinking and atomism in natural thinking became traits of modern beliefs that are at the core of today’s crisis. Economism and the Econocene
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Very well said…. unusually clear. Today, it seems heresy to say we sink or swim together; we including all life. It’s not our basic commonalities that count, but celebration of our differences… leading to social fragmentation, as we see right now. And who benefits from promoting this?
anxiety and stress make us individually and socially dumber and dumber.
“Rich people, when elected, are more concerned with their historical evaluation of their work, and are less likely to be corrupted.” (An Economist Who Drinks the Kool-Aid)
This was told to me by a long-time friend who is a Doctor in economics. I was stunned how tone deaf it was, how wrong it is in reality, and how someone so educated can be so deaf, dumb, and blind. Given what is happening in my world I am beginning to question who one’s real friends are.
Folks are getting smart to the political manipulation of religion, but they are not godless.
Universal Audience of Ultimate Truth for Salvation
Ultimately all ethics depends on individual consideration, mandated in Leviticus 19:18 “Love your neighbor as yourself,” also found in Confucius Analects 12:2, Buddhist Udana Vagna 5:1 and Matthew 7:1. Consistency is the hobgoblin of limited minds as God and Truth are incomprehensible (Isaiah 40:25) and dogma and ideology are idolatry which detracts from evidence based realism. This is why the only answer can be a question. All creativity and science is divine (1 Cor 3:5-9). Jesus opposed traditionalist Sadducees and fundamentalist Pharisees but embraced syncretic Samaritans. Jesus was nothing if not anticlerical “Do as they say, not as they do” (Mt 23:1). Isn’t it odd the fundamentalists quote scripture by number as if lawyers? Meek means tranquil, not humble. Meekness is devoid of the passion of just war which divides and obfuscates. (Jer 17:9, Eph 2:3)
Hades (Sheol) was a holding place from which Jesus freed us, not a banishment. “gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn”. (Matthew 3:12 ) There is no purgatory, burning is into oblivion. “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43 ) Today! Saints intecede! If Jesus told us to be like the children (Matt 18:3) how could he believe them to have Original Sin? Mary CHOSE, by Free Will, to be sinless and surrendered herself to the service of God, as God long awaited (Luke 1:30). Luther said “Mary is rightly called not only the mother of the man, but also the Mother of God” (24:107) and “There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.” (10:268). God lived in the Temple (Exodus 36:8) so as Mary bore God she replaced the Temple which was destroyed when she rose exactly on Tisha B’Av, the original lent of eating only fish because fish survived Noah’s flood.
God is beyond time and reason, not being limited by the dimensions that govern our world (Isaiah 57:15). God’s perspective on time is far different from man (Psalm 102:12, 24-27). God sees all of eternity’s past and eternity’s future, hence free will and predestination do not contradict. Since He is the Alpha AND the Omega, there can be no historical progression which is satanic anthropolatry. Parable of Talents (Matt 25:14-30) confirms the glory of capitalism over slothful envy of socialism. Parable of Warehouse is about being obsessed with what we have so we stop living. Superachievers aren’t concerned with accumulation but with constant achievement, seeking to ever use their gifts to the fullest (Calvin Institutes 3.7.5). James 2:14-18,26 shows that while faith is the essential prerequisite, you cannot escape the need for works as well. Half the planet worships to the Psalms of David so stop renaming them as your own hymnals. A Republic of Judges was preferred by God over the Reign of Kings. (1 Sam 8:6-18) The clothing and responsibilities of the Cohens (chief priests) resembles the early bishops (overseers) and of rabbis with the pastors (presbyters, elders). Paul’s word for fornication meant prostitution instead. Paul’s word for masturbation meant malady. Paul’s word for sycophant meant slander. Magog meant Mongol. Jesus came to fulfill not repeal the Law (Matt 5:17) as Pharisees were condemned because they syncretized vindictive Roman natural law over Jubilee redemptory Deuteronomy law. Moneychangers were racist about Roman coins. Redemptory confession is from 2 Chron 7:14 and Resurrection from Dan 12:2, Ezek 37:12-17, and Isaiah 26:19. Forgiveness is found in Isaiah 33:24, Isaiah 55:7, Jeremiah 3:22, Numbers 14,15, Leviticus 6,19,2 Samuel 14:14. Jesus used the lunar calendar, so why do you use the calendar of those that slew him and stole his religion.
That’s an excellent litany contrasting wisdom and its truths with the stultifying dogmas that unfortunately generally end real thought and self actualization of the experiences behind those dogmas. And here is another one: Grace is nothing more and certainly nothing less than love in individual action and systemic policy.
Why would anyone want to have monetary, financial and economic systems based on mere and paltry ethics like profit and power when they could have those systems based on the imminently applicable pinnacle concept and unimpeachable ethic of wisdom AKA grace…and with it still have more profit, and power that wasn’t allowed to be used for obviously corrupt and/or unbalanced purposes.
It’s a no brainer unless one has bought into the fiction that science generally gives more than lip service to ethics, or that natural philosophy/spirituality must necessarily cloud one’s perspective…instead of clarifying and edifying it.
I agree in general with the five ending paragraphs starting with the one titled:
“From material progress to holistic survival and morality.”
However, I argue that classical economics was and remains an outgrowth of the Christian-Cartesian world view. The dualistic split, or more precisely, the trialistic split into the physical, the mental and the spiritual encouraged a mode of thinking which envisioned humankind as separate from nature, having lordship over nature and being a favored and chosen being; the latter apotheosis was seen as even taking form in this world as prosperity.
Classical economics embodies this Christian-Cartesian world view and develops from it the blind faith assumption that the social and economic realm is entirely man-determined and free-standing from nature, especially in that it is regarded as not fully dependent on real biosphere systems. The apotheosis in this world is economic wealth, gained without concern for others or nature. The need for primary resources (raw materials and free gifts from nature) is recognized formally but it is assumed essentially to be an unending cornucopia or bounty maintainable, if need be, by limitless substitution. At its base, classical economics has not escaped its birth from a Christian-Cartesian world view. This view itself is part of the problem. Modern humans tend to think they are above nature and not a part of it.
A figure like Figure 2 is still in error in the sense that it does not show all human systems inside the encompassing system of the biosphere. I wonder if this too is a remnant of Christian-Cartesian framing or merely inadvertent.
Of course, it should be admitted that the hubristic application of production science and technology without concern for the complexity of the biosphere and ecosystems, and the extensive possibilities for unforeseen consequences, is also to be deplored. Scientism is as dangerous as Christian-Cartesian Economism.
All interesting ideas. A while back I did some research on the idea of the ‘self-made man’ within the history of capitalism. Some rather counterintuitive insights emerged, but I digress. Kate Raworth, an economist speaking to the core issue you raise above envisions an economic model where we must learn to stay within the doughnut, hence the name of her book, Doughnut Economics. I have given both my daughters copies to read as I think there is something very important therein.
Succinctly, individualism is a cultural artifact. Individualism is one form of life humans can live, created and enforced, tightly or loosely by an “individualistic” culture. Sapiens 30,000 years-ago invented what I’ll call sociality – the notion that humans must live and work together to protect the species and do the work necessary for their survival. It was one of the earliest aspects of Sapiens’ culture, perhaps even the very first culture. The result is not a nirvana in which each human shares equally and happily in the work of the society and will do anything to protect fellow humans. It is rather a predisposition of humans to live in groups (e.g., villages, towns, cities) built around cultural norms and societal rules. Even the earliest humans experienced deviance from this way of life. Some humans preferred competition to cooperation, conflict to peaceful coexistence. Also, since cultures and societies sprang from human imagination, as human populations grew, and humans spread to all parts of the globe conflicting cultures were created and societies became too large for each member to know and appreciate the other members of a society. This article in part deals with those cultures that emphasize the “stand-alone” human as an ideal way-of-life. Norgaard lists several such societies or sub-cultures within a society. But he does not explain these well and neglects several other cultures whose primary focus was individualist ways of life. Most importantly Norgaard fails to consider cultures combining individualism within a community orientation. For example, Norgaard considers the Reformation’s notion that “…individuals were responsible for their own salvation through their own reading of the Bible, the only true source for coming to know Christ and God.” This is correct, as far as it goes. But commerce, farming, the crafts guilds, marriage, sex, and even religious ceremonies were all communal during the Reformation and after the creation of Protestantism. Communal that provides a central place for individuals. Similarly, the notion that “natural science was increasingly built on atomism and the assumption that the parts of nature could be understood apart from each other” is correct, as far as it goes. The name given to the process of understanding through breaking objects of study apart is analysis. But the analysis itself was performed by groups of scientists even in the early days of western science. Otherwise scientists would have no way of checking or receiving feedback on their work. Science is a communal activity, using analysis which rests on the study of each individual part of an object. But even in the early days western science analysis was not the only approach. Much science was based on observation, direct and indirect. While other science was based on theoretical constructs from multiple sources, such as historical studies of Islamic science.
In the construction of Sapiens cultures those who speak for individualism do not speak with one voice. Some say that in all situations it is the individual that is supremely important — an end in him or herself, never to be used by collectivist leaders for the sake of “common” goals. Belonging to the family, the community, the church, the race, the ethnic group, etc. are all secondary to the individual. The only acceptable moral act is one that protects and defends the individual. It is never moral for the individual to be sacrificed for the group. This is a worthless position, since it ignores the individual’s decision to sacrifice for the group, even up to death. Certainly Calvin, for example sacrificed his freedom and his future well-being for his fellow would-be protestants. Voluntarily, at least in part, it seems.
The USA is one of the better examples of culture that varied over time between extreme forms of individualism, extreme forms of collectivism, democratic and non-democratic socialism, fascism, and populism. During its early history extreme individualism was common among Americans, primarily because America was a new country with many new citizens. Every person had to secure her/his own welfare. But during the period from 1930 to 1955 individualism was not high on the list for most Americans. Life was frightening enough without many unpredictable individualists marching around. As peace and settled life returned to the USA in the 1950s, less and certainly less extreme individualism was tolerated. Then came multiple bursts of individualism during the 1960s all over the USA, the UK, and Europe. So, you see individualism, like all parts of human culture is situational. Varying by time and place.
Before finishing I should note that just a belief in individualism, for yourself or your society can have direct results on humans’ actions and inactions. Such a belief can also be used as a tool to manipulate others. For example, the current Republican members of the US Congress constantly justify their actions by referring to American individualism and self-sufficiency. Each person, they say is responsible for choosing and bankrolling the life course each chooses. The government cannot be and should not be a backup. It’s interesting to note, however that few of these members of Congress apply such individualism to themselves. They depend on money and support from others who believe in individualism like themselves, while they publicly maintain their status as “self-made” individuals, depending on no one else.
Finally, there’s this to consider. Every thing and every person have a history. No person knows all their own history, let alone the history of the place and society where they grow up and learn to become a person who acts. In this light it’s impossible for any person to be aware explicitly of all the history of each act, thought, or decision. In other words, each of us is embedded in the culture of our birth in ways that are tacit and opaque. So, like it or not we are all in many ways the individual of our history rather than of our unconstrained choice. Humans have lived communally for 30,000 years. Changing that would literally destroy Sapiens. But it is possible for some communities to create individual oriented ways of life. But always within the community.