How much does a sunset cost?

Leonardo Boff

06/04/2008

Opinión

^-A ⁺A

A great American businessman, while in Rome, wanted to show his son the beauty of a sunset over the hills of Castel Gandolfo. Before placing himself at a good angle, the boy asked the father: "Daddy, where do we pay?" This question reveals the structure of the dominant society, based on economics and the market. Everything has a price, even a sunset. Everything is bought and sold. As the American economist Polanyi already observed in 1944, a great transformation has taken place in that dominant society by assigning a monetary value to everything. Human relationships were transformed into commercial transactions and everything — absolutely everything, from sex to the Holy Trinity — has become commercialized and an opportunity to make a profit.

If we wanted to describe it, we would say that this is a productivist, consumeristic and materialistic society. It is productivist because it exploits all natural resources and services in search of profit and not natural conservation. It is consumeristic because without ever-expanding consumption there is neither production nor profit. It is materialistic because its focus is the production and consumption of material things, not spiritual things like cooperation and caring. It is more interested in quantitative growth — how to earn more — than qualitative development — how to live better with less, in harmony with nature, with social equality and socio-ecological sustainability.

It is enough to stress the obvious: a sunset cannot be bought with money. The full moon "that knows my long journey"* cannot be bought on the stock market. Joy, friendship, loyalty and love are not for sale in the shopping malls. Who can live without these intangible goods? The logic of interest does no apply here, but that of gratuity, not utilitarian worth but the intrinsic value of nature, of the warm landscape, the affection between two lovers. Human happiness abides in this.

Someone as above suspicion as George Soros, the great speculator in the world market, confesses in his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998) that "[a] transactional society undermines social values... Social values express a concern for others. They imply that the individual belongs to a community, be it a family, a tribe, a nation, or humankind, whose interests must take precedence over the individual’s self-interests. But a transactional market economy is anything but a community. Everybody must look out for his or her own interests… maximizing profits to the exclusion of all other considerations."

A society that decides to organize itself without a basic ethos of altruism and respect for nature is tracing the path to its own self-destruction.

Therefore it is not surprising that we have reached this point of global warming and the terrifying devastation of nature, with the threat of extinction of vast portions of the biosphere and even of the human species, in the end.

I suspect that unless we break from the productivist/consumeristic/materialistic paradigm and turn towards cultivating spiritual capital and the sustenance of all life with a sense of mutual belonging between earth and humankind, we may find ourselves in darkness.

We should try to be at least a little like the rose the mystical poet Angelus Silesius (d. 1677) sang about: "The rose has no "why"/It blooms because it blooms./It doesn't watch itself/Or wonder if anyone sees it." (Aphorism 289). This gratuity is one of the pillars of the new salvific paradigm.

* Translator's Note: Reference to lyrics ("ella sabe de mi largo caminar") from the song "Luna Tucumana" by folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui.

(Free translation from the Spanish provided by Anne Fullerton. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas).

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