The reading for class today by David Loy discussed Weber\u2019s arguments about religion and capitalism. Weber claims that economic success became a \u201cdemonstration of God\u2019s favor\u201d making god\u2019s blessing and salvation the motivation for surplus and economic success. But as god has become more distant, the original motivation for economic success has fallen away while the universal striving for success has remained. Meaning that we are all striving for economic success with no clear motive. He states \u201cWe no longer give our surplus to God; the process of producing an ever- expanding surplus is in itself our God\u201d(261). This is a really important point to raise, because it forces us to truly assess our motives. If not for salvation, why are we still striving for success?<\/p>\n
Loy poked at this question when he says that we have fallen into a need for growth to achieve a \u201cnever- satisfied desire for an ever- higher \u201cstandard of living\u201d\u201d(281). This makes sense to me, we were aspiring for success with hopes of salvation, now we are not so sure about God and salvation, but we have this habit of chasing success so we continue to engage in the practice. But what caught my eye was Loy\u2019s use of quotations around the term \u201cstandard of living\u201d. That threw me for a second.<\/p>\n
After some thought I came to the conclusion that Loy added that punctuation to highlight that the idea of \u201ca high standard of living\u201d is totally subjective concept. And I internalized those quotation marks as a stab at the capitalist based perception of a \u201chigh standard of living\u201d which is based in chasing after material goods that deplete the earth\u2019s resources, further the dichotomy of global wealth distribution, and among other faults, fail to bring happiness to the consumer.<\/p>\n
Our current practices are based in a never-ending chase for surplus that if left unchanged will lead to the complete depletion of the earth\u2019s resources. I think editing our definition of \u201chigh standard of living\u201d would be a good place to start in creating a more sustainable lifestyle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The reading for class today by David Loy discussed Weber\u2019s arguments about religion and capitalism. Weber claims that economic success became a \u201cdemonstration of God\u2019s favor\u201d making god\u2019s blessing and salvation the motivation for surplus and economic success. But as god has become more distant, the original motivation for economic success has fallen away while the universal striving for success… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,12,14,18,19,16,1],"tags":[55,54,53,52],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-citizenship","category-climate-change","category-econ-dev","category-freedom","category-power","category-tech-innovation","category-uncategorized","tag-change","tag-consumption","tag-standard-of-living","tag-weber"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}