Wednesday August 26, 2009
Enough already!
By Jim Taylor
I haven’t heard much about electricity brownouts in California recently. A few years ago, every newscast seemed to have some kind of report about industries having to shut down, towns suffering power shortages, homeowners ordered to turn off their air conditioners…
B.C. sold billions of kilowatts to California, for which it will probably never get repaid.
John Burton says it’s because Enron folded.
Burton teaches business ethics at the University of B.C.’s Okanagan campus. It’s now well documented, he claims, that Enron created the rolling brownouts to increase demand, raise electricity rates, and thus inflate share values.
When Enron died in disgrace, so did the energy shortages.
Burton was speaking at a presentation sponsored by the Okanagan Institute, every Thursday afternoon at the Bohemian Cafe – a kind of coffee house for sophisticated discussion that used to flourish in London and New York a century or so ago.
On this occasion, the topic was greed.
Greed is bad
Everyone seemed to agree that greed was bad. Especially if it harmed others. Even if it didn’t harm others, the participants thought, greed might still be bad, because it became an addiction, an insatiable lust for more.
And more.
Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s magazine, once described a survey that asked people how much more they would need to be happy. Uniformly, the respondents indicated that an additional 20 per cent income – if I recall the figure correctly – would grant them lasting happiness.
Which sounds realistic. Until you realize that they felt they needed that much more, regardless of their current income. Both the night shift worker at Burger King and the millionaire CEO thought they could be content with another 20 per cent, or whatever the figure was.
In other words, enough is never enough.
Unexamined dichotomy
As I sat and listened, it seemed to me that the assembled group took for granted that material things were intrinsically evil. That’s certainly a recurring thread in Puritan theology. Indeed, it goes back before Puritanism to the “desert fathers” who renounced all material possessions, to free themselves to live lives of greater spiritual purity.
So the question kept coming up: “How much is enough?” How big a house? How many clothes? How many cars? How big a bank account?
As if being satisfied with less would make us better people.
But we would rarely apply such questions to non-material things.
No one ever thinks they have enough friends already. No one wants less health. No one objects to more cooperation, more respect, more sharing, more love…
Obviously, a shortage of these intangible qualities can be just as damaging as material poverty. But is it equally obvious that an excess is damaging?
I’m not suggesting that everyone should aspire to Michael Jackson’s mansion or Jay Leno’s collection of exotic cars. Nor am I arguing that the Puritans were wrong – my inbred suspicion of ill-gotten gains runs too deep to set aside easily.
But I do wonder why we don’t apply to our social assets the questions we direct at people’s physical assets. Or vice versa…
How do we know when enough is enough?
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
I had to send last week’s column out twice – because the first time I sent it, I pasted in an html version (if you don’t know what html is, ask a kid down your block) instead of the text version.
Suzanne Edgar in Saskatoon commented, “It’s refreshing to see someone who is so computer literate struggle; it helps the rest of us who struggle most of the time! Good courageous comments. The story of Noah’s Ark is like the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring around the Rosie.’ The children’s rhyme probably came about as a survival mechanism for children who were living with death from the Pox all around them in the Dark Ages. It was the same with Noah. I firmly believe it’s not a story about how God punishes bad people; its a story of God weeping from the heavens over tragedy, and bursting forth in rainbow colours over some who survived!”
Cheryl Black is a new subscriber, who commented on my exploration of the importance of rain in desert culture, “You have a great way of making the ordinary sacred and the sacred story ordinary.”
Sometimes your letters spark more response than my columns do. Last week, several people criticized Steve Roney’s suggestion that Canada should show its artists on its currency, rather than politicians. Steve responded to their responses: “Nothing could so demonstrate my point, that a large segment of Canadians are actively hostile to admitting Canada has…its own distinct national culture… To think that, of all the things I have written in response to your columns over the years — all the controversial things, I might say — _this_ suggestion, to put artists on our currency, was the one to spark a firestorm.”
End of discussion on this subject.
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
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For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to [email protected].
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
- Jim Henderschedt’s occasional e-zine, Fresh Water, subscribe by writing him, [email protected]
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