Right Relationship

Most citizens have been conditioned to accept the operation of the current economic system as an article of faith. Unlimited growth and wealth accumulation are seen as the “natural law” of the economy and nothing can be done to alter this fact even if it means the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems are weakened and severely damaged in the process. This “inconvenient truth” is now a moral challenge. We are faced with a choice: bring the economy into right relationship with the planet and its inhabitants, or suffer the consequences—the increasing destruction of the Earth’s life support systems and social structures.

Peter Brown, Geoffrey Carver and their colleagues at the Quaker Institute for the Future have accepted this challenge. Drawing on the core Quaker principle of “right relationship,” they have launched a campaign to bring our economy, our ethics, and our environment into alignment. A handbook for this movement, Right Relationship proposes an alternative economic model that fuses science and ethics with the earth care teachings of the world’s great religions. “Wrong relationships” close down trust and cooperative reciprocity at the social, ecological and biotic levels, and they degrade moral integrity and adaptive coherence. “Right relationships,” by contrast,” are characterized by interactions that satisfy mutually beneficial goals and advance the common good.

Economics and finance have become, in effect, the modern world’s established religion, with constant growth and wealth accumulation the religion’s unquestioned dogma. This system is obviously unsustainable our resources are not infinite. In contract, Right Relationship not only offers the promise of an equitable, sustainable future but also an opportunity to touch the fullness of human meaning, and, some would say, the presence of the Divine. We now need, for the sake of the human future and the future of the whole community of life, the same wind of moral change that Quakers brought to the economy of slavery. Inspired by this heritage, this guide links minds, hearts, and hands with all those who are rising up in search of ecological integrity, ethical development, and governance for the common good.