This is a transcript of my
keynote address presented at the ‘Local Lives, Global Matters’ conference in
Castlemaine, Victoria, 16-18 October 2015.Other keynote speakers included Rob
Hopkins, David Holmgren, and Helena Norberg-Hodge: Samuel Alexander.
hank you for that
introduction, Jacinta, good morning everyone. I would like to begin by
acknowledging the traditional owners of this land and to recognise that these
have always been spaces of teaching, learning, sharing, and conversation. It is
a real honour to be part of this conversation today.
When I was a boy, if ever I were amongst a group of people
congregating at 9am on a Sunday morning it was because I was at Church. For
better or for worse, I am now a lapsed, or rather, I should say, a collapsed
Catholic, although I remain a seeker. But as I look around the world today,
especially from my Western perspective, it seems clear enough that God, if he
is not yet dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche declared, is, at least, increasingly
absent. There seems to be a tension between our spiritual sensibilities and the
cultures and systems within which we live. As the poet-musician, Tom Waits,
would shout in the voice of a husky wolf: ‘God’s away on business.’
But the absence of God should not imply an absence of
religious thinking in our culture or cultures. In fact, I would argue quite the
opposite; that our Western religiosity has become ever more intense in recent
decades, and what has happened is that we simply switched idols, no longer
worshipping the God of Christianity, and instead worshipping at the alter of
growth, singing praises to the God of GDP, our saviour, for only in growth will
we find redemption. Our high priests now take the peculiar form of neoclassical
economists, bankers, and national treasurers. Daniel Bell once wrote in his
landmark text, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: ‘Economic growth is
the secular religion of advancing industrial nations.’
