Archbishop highlights a shared cultural crisis

Creating a more responsible finance sector requires rebuilding its connection to the wider world and rediscovering a sense of both responsibility for the future of the natural world and joy in making a positive contribution. Or at least that was my conclusion after reading a powerful speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury on climate change delivered last week.

The Archbishop talks about a shared cultural crisis that “could be summed up rather dramatically by saying that it’s a loss of a sense of what life is … a web of interactions, mutual givings and receivings”. He talks about “our calling to nourish” life and secure “a future for all living things”.

He says “a good deal of the talk and activity around the financial collapse has the marks of .. ‘displacement activity’ – precisely because it fails to see where the roots of the problem lie; in our amnesia about the human calling” and “whatever we do to combat the nightmare possibilities of wholesale environmental catastrophe has to be grounded not primarily in the scramble for survival but in the hope of human happiness”.

Even if – like me - you don’t share his religious lens, the speech contains valuable and inspiring insights. Many thanks to UKSIF Vice Chair Helen Wildsmith for pointing me to it.

Would dethroning GDP help build public support for the changes ahead?

As the Financial Times reported recently the Kingdom of Bhutan focuses on Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of GDP: "the theory behind GNH is simple – economic growth is not the end in itself but a means to achieve other aims, such as peace, security, greater well-being and happiness". The article goes on to describe similar initiatives that are underway across the world, from France to the USA to within the OECD.

In fact research shows that although GDP has grown in the developed world over the last few decades, well-being has stagnated. In "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science" Richard Layard (the UK government’s happiness tsar) argues that money is only one driver of well-being, the others being work, private life, community, health, freedom, and a philosophy of life. I’ve found that this list rings true for most people: there seems to be a growing recognition that "earn more, consume more" is a false god. Even climate and resource crunch sceptics are often interested in finding more effective ways to increase their families’ well-being than consuming to keep up with the Joneses.

There is growing cross party support for well-being to replace wealth as the aim of policy making in the UK, and bottom-up initiatives like Transition Towns that resonate with both the well-being and sustainability agendas are spreading rapidly. Perhaps these are the first signs that shifts in public opinion will support the action governments will need to take to simultaneously improve quality of life and maintain a viable environment for human existence.