Accounting and Money for Ministerial Leadership. Nimi Wariboko
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development.
It is at this point of the intersection between the idea of sustainable development and the sociology and production of knowledge that I want us to take a different but complementary approach to the connection between monetary policy and ecology. Perhaps, we all agree that modern economic thought has not been friends with the idea of sustainable development, but we need to go further and recognize that modern Western thought system, in its root and branch, appears antithetical to sustainable development. I will now raise some issues to stimulate our thinking and provoke debate about the laudable quest for sustainable economic development amidst the current thinking and practice of monetary policy.
Western thought, whether neoclassical economics or Marxian, has failed to grasp the ontologically proper relation of human beings to nature. The relation has been conceived largely in terms of technical control of nature (the manipulative-pragmatic orientation to nature). In this regard, the evolutionary metaphysics of history of the Marxists, who see history as human productive forces acting on nature in the successive ladders of development, is as guilty as the dominant Western philosophical thought in which we find the pervasive and oppressive differentiation of subject (humanity) and object (nature), whereby humans violently act on their exterior world with precision instruments.28
Second, let us also not forget that Western thought right from Thomas Hobbes’s conception of order and stability in the Leviathan, Hegel’s dialectic of “lordship and bondage,” Marx’s class conflicts, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and to Heidegger’s primordial Polemos has been variously concerned with how to avert violence or use it for the benefit of society.29
From the peculiar bent of Western Christian thought to Descartes’s Meditations, the material reality is seen as a wholly determinate, objective, mechanical realm to be dominated and discerned by mathematical analysis. In this mindset other modes of intelligence or awareness and associative “empathy” in other cultures that have come to positively mediate human interaction with the landscape are neglected or severely downplayed.30 The resources to use in reorienting mindsets and behavior patterns are, indeed, limited in the West.
There needs to be a rethinking of the idea of human perception to promote a more sensitive and nuanced approach to the earth and for the recognition of the interconnectedness of sensory modalities.31 In general, Western thinking presents the human body as a closed mechanical entity, not an open and active form that is continuously adjusting and improvising to its environment and things in its world. The perceptual boundaries between the body as a subject and the world (nature in its fullness) as its object are not recognized as very thin and unfixed. “The body’s action and engagements are never wholly determinate, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself continually shifting.”32 The Western cultural orientation that largely denies this receptivity and creativity, inter-subjectivity and reciprocity, is not easily amenable to the mental attitude required for environmental sustainability or deep appreciation of the relevance of the environment to human welfare.
The dominant method of valuation in both the exquisite halls of multilateral development institutions and in the plebian main street appears to be utilitarian. As per this method, everything including interpersonal relationships, fauna and flora, as Altvater argues, “are castrated and reduced to calculations of their utility.”33 In this way, intrinsic worth of human and nature is often denied and does not serve as a limitation on the commoditization of nature and human.
The overarching conclusion is that the struggle for protecting nature goes beyond the nexus of monetary policy, economic development, and environment. One must deploy strategies that address apparent antithetical relationships between nature and the Western thought system, which unfortunately has come to dominate other thought patterns. And to the extent of this domination, many parts of the South are as guilty as the North in subjugating nature to human’s untrammeled domination. Indeed in order to save the environment and embark upon sustainable development we must all wage a multi-front struggle.
Part of this struggle will involve rethinking the concept of money and accounting. In this book we formulate an alternative concept of money as a social relation and specifically in chapter 9 we will offer a constructive proposal to foster a theological understanding and critique of accounting, the language of business.
Exercises
1. The net asset of Andover-Newton Church (ANC) as of May 31, 2013 is $538,629. Assuming that the net income of ANC on May 31, 2014 is $100,000 and every other number in the balance sheet remains the same, what will be the net assets (equity number) on May 31, 2014?
2. Perform the same exercise as above, but this time assume that instead of net gain there is a loss of $38,000.
3. Why is the balance sheet always balanced?
4. Define double entry bookkeeping.
5. Brain Teaser: What is liquidity ratio?
15. Hauerwas, Community of Character, 9–10.
16. See Diulio, Theory and Problems, 241. See also Cowen and Kroszner, New Monetary Economics, 9; Mishkin, Economics of Money, 22–26.
17. Samuelson, Economics, 55.
18. Weber, Economy and Society, 167–93; Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 323–59; Marx, “Power of Money”; Marx, Grundrisse; Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 279.
19. Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money, 18.
20. See Marx, “Power of Money”; Marx, Grundrisse.
21. Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money, 18.
22. In the hostile world view, economic transactions must be insulated from social ties so that economic inefficiency does not arise or social ties are not polluted by commercial considerations. Nothing-reductionism fails to recognize how intimate and impersonal social relations transform the character and consequences of monetary transactions.
23. See Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy; Zelizer, “Circuits within Capitalism,” 289–322; Zelizer, “Sociology of Money,” 1991–94; Zelizer, “Payments and Social Ties,” 481–95; Zelizer, Social Meaning of Money.
24. Zelizer, “Sociology of Money,” 1991–94.
25. Wariboko, God and Money, 97–122.
26. Sutcliffe, “Development After Ecology,” 328–39; Altvater, “Foundations of Life,” 10–34.
27. See Sutcliffe, “Development After Ecology,” 328–39; Altvater, “Foundations of Life,” 10–34.