have this built-in power to grow and grow just to make zero return on invested capital.
Now that we have shown that growth is endemic to the system, the question that immediately suggests itself is why does this growth pose a problem to the global environment? Bob Sutcliffe and Elmar Altvater among others have identified four areas of concern or tension in economic growth and environment nexus.26 They argue that universal (global) development at the current levels in USA/Europe/Japan is not materially possible because of the limits of the physical environment. Development as it is currently pursued is unsustainable because of the exhaustion of material resources and the harm done to the earth. Second, economic growth produces pollution and other effects (such as climatic changes and overproduction of waste) that negatively affect human welfare. Third, the use of Gross National Product (GNP) as a measure of development is deeply and methodologically flawed. Negative externalities of pollution are not reckoned in national accounts—thus overestimating national income. Another source of overestimation has to do with the measurement of GNP, which ignores depreciation and amortization of natural capital while incorporating into its calculations depreciation and amortization of “factory” capital stock (capital created by human investment). The final area of concern is distribution and equity between present and future generations and between the rich and poor. This tension is relevant not because of the usual politico-economic issue of fairness but because of the connection between equity and environmental sustainability. With the wanton destruction of the environment and the earth’s patrimony the unborn are subsidizing the present generation. The other issue is between the rich and the poor. It appears that to cater to the poor, to raise the human development level of the poor, more economic growth is needed. The economic growth and development needed to do this appear unsustainable owing to negative environmental impacts inherent in such a move. So it is argued that in order to raise the human development level of the poor, the rich nations and classes (within nations) have to reduce their resource use and waste production.
Is there a way to think about money, monetary thought, and financing schemes that would curb the unavoidable tendency to grow and pollute the environment just to be in one spot of profitability? In order to situate this question in proper discursive framework, one has to examine the fixed idée of economics and the logic of market economy. In their separate works, both Bob Sutcliffe and Elmar Altvater have argued that an examination of obstacles to sustainable development must be properly situated within the grand thought pattern of the West.27 The internal logic of capitalism, Western thought patterns, and the philosophical orientation of economics as a discipline (both neoclassical and Marxian) are a formidable set of obstacles. The whole edifice of economic thought has not seriously considered nature in its model and has discounted the real importance of natural capital. In the dynamics of accumulation, nature has to be transformed in accordance with principles required by capital, “invested with value,” and its intrinsic value is often, implicitly or explicitly, denied. This economistic thinking, which is undergirded by methodological individualism and the “quantitative aggrandizement of value (profit and accumulation),” are veritable obstacles to the kind of thinking and reorientation of societal attitude germane to environmentally sustainable development.
It is at this point of the intersection between the idea of sustainable development and the sociology and production of knowledge that I want us to take a different but complementary approach to the connection between monetary policy and ecology. Perhaps, we all agree that modern economic thought has not been friends with the idea of sustainable development, but we need to go further and recognize that modern Western thought system, in its root and branch, appears antithetical to sustainable development. I will now raise some issues to stimulate our thinking and provoke debate about the laudable quest for sustainable economic development amidst the current thinking and practice of monetary policy.
Western thought, whether neoclassical economics or Marxian, has failed to grasp the ontologically proper relation of human beings to nature. The relation has been conceived largely in terms of technical control of nature (the manipulative-pragmatic orientation to nature). In this regard, the evolutionary metaphysics of history of the Marxists, who see history as human productive forces acting on nature in the successive ladders of development, is as guilty as the dominant Western philosophical thought in which we find the pervasive and oppressive differentiation of subject (humanity) and object (nature), whereby humans violently act on their exterior world with precision instruments.28
Second, let us also not forget that Western thought right from Thomas Hobbes’s conception of order and stability in the Leviathan, Hegel’s dialectic of “lordship and bondage,” Marx’s class conflicts, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and to Heidegger’s primordial Polemos has been variously concerned with how to avert violence or use it for the benefit of society.29
From the peculiar bent of Western Christian thought to Descartes’s Meditations, the material reality is seen as a wholly determinate, objective, mechanical realm to be dominated and discerned by mathematical analysis. In this mindset other modes of intelligence or awareness and associative “empathy” in other cultures that have come to positively mediate human interaction with the landscape are neglected or severely downplayed.30 The resources to use in reorienting mindsets and behavior patterns are, indeed, limited in the West.
There needs to be a rethinking of the idea of human perception to promote a more sensitive and nuanced approach to the earth and for the recognition of the interconnectedness of sensory modalities.31 In general, Western thinking presents the human body as a closed mechanical entity, not an open and active form that is continuously adjusting and improvising to its environment and things in its world. The perceptual boundaries between the body as a subject and the world (nature in its fullness) as its object are not recognized as very thin and unfixed. “The body’s action and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting.”32 The Western cultural orientation that largely denies this receptivity and creativity, inter-subjectivity and reciprocity, is not easily amenable to the mental attitude required for environmental sustainability or deep appreciation of the relevance of the environment to human welfare.
The dominant method of valuation in both the exquisite halls of multilateral development institutions and in the plebian main street appears to be utilitarian. As per this method, everything including interpersonal relationships, fauna and flora, as Altvater argues, “are castrated and reduced to calculations of their utility.”33 In this way, intrinsic worth of human and nature is often denied and does not serve as a limitation on the commoditization of nature and human.
The overarching conclusion is that the struggle for protecting nature goes beyond the nexus of monetary policy, economic development, and environment. One must deploy strategies that address apparent antithetical relationships between nature and the Western thought system, which unfortunately has come to dominate other thought patterns. And to the extent of this domination, many parts of the South are as guilty as the North in subjugating nature to human’s untrammeled domination. Indeed in order to save the environment and embark upon sustainable development we must all wage a multi-front struggle.
Part of this struggle will involve rethinking the concept of money and accounting. In this book we formulate an alternative concept of money as a social relation and specifically in chapter 9 we will offer a constructive proposal to foster a theological understanding and critique of accounting, the language of business.
Exercises
1. The net asset of Andover-Newton Church (ANC) as
