There was a time when these three qualities
were extolled as virtues. Today other
forces are displacing them – like entitlement, consumerism and
over-exuberance. So we hear of
“lifestyle audits” and even spending ceilings to keep leaders from setting a
bad example. In Canada, when
Tommy Douglas was premier, he drove a Dodge – not a Cadillac. In Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara made
the Renault 5 the official car of cabinet ministers, to reduce expenditure on
Mercedes limos. In the past year, Pope
Francis has stated that leaders should drive “humble cars”. He has declined to move into the Vatican Palace and is leading by example. Actions speak louder than words.
On my recent trip to Canada, the
Premier of Alberta had to resign for making extravagant plans for a penthouse
suite at the top of a government building.
The planning did not follow normal channels. In South Africa, this is exactly what
happened at Nkandla. Yet here the
President’s party did not ditch him, as hers did in Alberta, in spite of very clear outcomes of
an investigation done by the ombudsman known as the Public Protector.
Contentment
Consumerism is the more modern, North
American version of Capitalism. It is
quite different from the older European version, in which wealth accumulated
tended to be re-invested rather than spent.
In fact, Consumerism was resisted in Europe
at first, in the post-war years. It was
regarded as gauche. But it
prevailed. In this version, people are
encouraged to be spenders not savers.
The medium for this is called Marketing.
How can Marketing work where there is contentment, gratitude and
moderation?
The chickens have come home to roost. According to Sampie Terreblanche, it was high
levels of consumer debt and government deficits led to the global economic
slow-down that he calls the Great Recession (from 2008). He links this to both bail-outs of companies
that were “too large to fail” and to an increase in corruption and corporate
criminality. Again on my recent trip to Canada,
I found that scandals in politics are not just a South African phenomenon!
Terreblanche writes: “The ideologies of
neoliberal globalism and market fundamentalism that were sold so triumphantly –
and arrogantly – to South
Africa by the Americans in the early 1990s
now stand thoroughly discredited.” (p 35, Lost in Transformation).
I am a missionary not an economist. But on both sides of the Atlantic,
I would like to see more redistribution of wealth – poor people living with more
and rich people living with less. In South Africa,
the legacy of neoliberalism is inequality.
Some people have become fabulously wealthy, while most people have not
felt an improvement in their lifestyle.
This imbalance needs to be corrected… there is just no question about
it.
Gratitude
The gospel of neoliberalism, brought to you
by Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, said that lowering taxes would stimulate
economic growth. Business would
experience that “my cup runneth over” – and that would cause plenty of
“trickle-down”. This is where the nonprofit
sector comes into Democracy. It is there
to carry social benefits on through what in South Africa is called CSI (Corporate
Social Investment). In this way companies
express their gratitude to society by having a double bottom line – financial
and social. They fund registered NGOs to
provide care to the marginalized – those who fall through the cracks of the
economy - like the unemployed and the destitute.
Pope Francis pointed out that the problem
with this approach is that they keep
making the cup bigger! His metaphor
is instructive. Neither do I see it as
only governments that do this, slowing the trickle-down effect. Certainly governments in the North rarely meet
their pledges for development assistance, and public servants live on a gravy
train where ever you go.
Sharing wealth with others is but a way of
expressing thanks for what you have received.
A good example is the Giving Pledge, but it is for millionaires, not for
ordinary people. Do we give enough, as
families and individuals? Or is our generosity diminished by the environment of
Marketing, that drives people away from the values of contentment, gratitude
and moderation? I have a sense that in
the context of Consumerism, there has been a lot of drift from those virtues,
and that each of us has a role in making the cup bigger, and thus reducing the
trickle-down. This applies to prosperous
South Africans living in a country where disparity is phenomenal – and to those
overseas in “the West” whose lifestyles may become an issue to the Great
Shepherd when he returns to separate the sheep from the goats.
Moderation
The ancient Stoics espoused this
virtue. It was not Pope Francis who
thought it up. The Lausanne covenant promotes the slogan: Live simply so that others can simply live.
C4L has scaled down for its own reasons –
not so much there is less trickle-down, but because it recognized that it was
living beyond its means. This caused it
to go chasing after funding not so much to carry out its mission as to keep the
wheels turning.
Some people may see this as slowdown or
even failure. We don’t. We see it as a sign of the times. How can we point the finger at government
“fat cats” in our Advocacy programming when we ourselves are not ready to
redistribute our wealth, especially for the cause that we champion – youth
unemployment?
There is a difference between your income
and your wealth. One is your personal
Profit and Loss Statement for a month or a year. The other is your personal Balance
Sheet. Most people gauge their giving by
their income - for example, by tithing ten percent of it. But if you earn 100 000 per year, live on 50
000 and tithe 10 000, then you “store” 40 000 away in investments. You accumulate wealth by doing this year
after year. What about deploying ten
percent of your wealth for development, as well as ten percent of your
income? That would make the cup smaller,
and increase the trickle-down. We all
need to do more, because the gap is getting wider as the trickle-down dries up.
