Economic Crisis: Waiting for the messiah

The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of our civilisation. The values that we hold dear are the very same that got us to this point. The meltdown in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value systems. A house is on fire; we see flames coming through the windows on the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact it is raging elsewhere. For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But apparent economic triumph has deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture. Individualism has been raised almost to a religion, appearance made more important than substance.
Success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to fellow human beings. We thought that our actions affected only our own sphere but the way that appalling decisions made in America have set off a domino effect makes it necessary to bring new ideas to the forefront of our civilisation. The most important is that we are more connected than we suspected...
The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years. It wouldn’t do just to improve the banking system — we need to redesign the whole edifice. There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there is a strange silence. Why? Because we are all implicated. [We] took the success of our economy as proof of the rightness of its underlying philosophy... Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes. I strayed into the oldest church in Cheltenham not long ago and, with no intention in mind, opened the Bible. The passage that met my eyes was from Genesis, about Joseph and the seven lean years of famine. Something struck me in that passage. It was the tranquillity of its writing, the absence of hysteria. They got through because someone had a vision before the event. What we need now more than ever is a vision beyond the event, a vision of renewal.