Viva Contentment, Gratitude and Moderation!

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.