Imagine the Quaker
an erstwhile mirror site for weblog on newquaker.com
archives | newquaker.comTuesday, July 08, 2003
There are reports now that the plan by the National Do Not Call Registry to limit telemarketing contacts is about to backfire—with a fresh wave of sales tactics that will focus on the use of direct mail, as email or as the postal kind. Neither of these is a desirable. Traditional direct mail, i.e. the postal kind, is undesirable because it wastes natural resources in its creation, crowds the postal system, creates clutter for the recipient, and in the end makes more trash (since that is where most of it ends up). The telemarketer’s use of email—infamous spam—is equally undesirable because it crowds the Internet pipeline, bogs down ISPs, and creates clutter for recipients. Equally they belie a stultifying obsession for commodities and contempt for the people who would buy them.
Direct mail (whether postal or email) is a necessity for large businesses, especially publicly-traded corporations, as the need for profit out sizes the need for honesty of purpose. Small businesses use direct mail to increase market share whenever they buy into the self-pollinating myth that bigger is better and biggest is best. When a Fortune 500 company complains that registering limits on telemarketing strategies will cripple its sales, our tears should be shed not in commiserating sadness, but in shame.
The late economist E.F. Schumacher's professional goals included teaching business that it functions best in smaller working units, through cooperative ownership and regional workplaces using local labor and resources. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered expressed for him, at least in part, the Buddhist ideal of economic systems, although it more closely matches the Christian model for an economic system.
Businesses adopting a Christian model of labor activity function within people-centered work units, with cooperative ownership, and in regional workplaces using local labor and resources. That sure sounds like E.F. Schumacher, but the fact is that he knew this: the best economic system is the one which edifies work, respects the worker, and supports a labor system in which people could engage in personally enriching activities, not as drones in meaningless, mindless, alienating work. If a man engages in the Christian ideal of work, then his labor honors God; if instead he labors for a humanistic goal, then, like Schumacher's rendition, he veers into the path of Buddhism, or some other -ism, and ends up in a masquerade of a well-founded system.
Schumacher argued persuasively that our modern industrial system, a system built entirely out of materialistic ideals, actually consumes its own foundation: "To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income." This irreplaceable capital includes fossil fuels, ecological systems, and humans—all of which our industrial systems devour with alacrity, as if these resources were without end.
The telemarketer is merely a symptom of this consuming specter. Until the entrepreneur stops flying toward the flame of big business, we will not see an end to this perversion of the lifestyle God planned for us.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:03 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
