As I near the end of my series of columns on values fit for the 21st century, I return to my May 26 column, in which I took our government and corporate leaders to task for reflecting and embracing a set of neoliberal values that are incompatible with planetary health and societal wellbeing in the 21st century.
Their self-interested blind adherence to “business as usual,” I wrote, to an economic system and underlying core values that plainly work against our long-term interests, is because they get so much benefit — wealth, power, status — from the way things are.
But while I think they need to change their values, I do not believe that this can happen if society itself does not change its values.
After all, while we may call them “leaders,” in many ways they are simply followers. An old adage in politics, after all, is not to get too far out ahead of the parade, and to always look back and make sure it is still following you.
At the same time, though, while keen to go along with what the society itself values, they are trying to shape societal values to match their own and their party’s ideologies, trying to persuade people it is in their best interest.
Meanwhile, corporate leaders are interested in promoting their products and selling more of everything so they can grow their profits and their power. So they, too, are trying to shape societal values to match their own and their corporation’s ideologies, trying to persuade people it is in their best interest.
As a result, the whole society — aided and abetted by those “leaders” — goes along with the mis-aligned set of values that are at the root of our ecological, social and economic crises: A lack of connection to and reverence for the Earth, the valuing of individualism at the expense of society, the derogation of government and of regulation and taxation, the valuing of a narrow concept of wealth and the continual growth of an economic system that harms the Earth and many humans.
So the fourth set of values that have to be transformed relates to an explicit set of priorities embodied in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s piece of “scripture”that was the basis of my April homily at the First Unitarian Church: “Ecosystems sustain societies that create economies. It does not work the other way around.”
The sad truth is, however, that we try to make it work the other way around. By prioritizing the economy, we allow it to distort society and harm the Earth’s natural systems that are the ultimate determinant of our health. In the set of dominant values today, it is clear that the economy usually comes first.
We see the finance minister and the budget dominating much of government and the news. We hear economics correspondents talking a lot about the GDP and whether it is growing or shrinking. We are fed business and economic data on a daily, even an hourly basis.
It is only recently — thanks to the initiative of Prof. Rick Kool at Royal Roads University, and only on CBC Radio’s On the Island show, as far as I know — that the daily CO2 levels are also reported.
But nobody is giving us indicators of the state of our local and global ecosystems, which are largely excluded from the reckoning of our economic systems.
And we certainly are not given the happiness or quality of life index or the wellbeing numbers on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis.
So what is it we actually value? Should money really take precedence over wellbeing for all and planetary health?
Is that the sort of society we want for our children and grandchildren, and for future generations all over the world? I hope not, for their sake.
We need a conversation, in this region, across Canada and indeed around the world, about the World Wide Fund for Nature’s seemingly simple but profound statement, about the values that are incompatible with this simple worldview, and an exploration of the values that are compatible with “a planetary civilization rooted in solidarity, sustainability, and human well-being,” as the Global Scenario Group put it.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
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