OK, this is a ‘thinking out loud’ post.
Tesco – the retail leviathan now claiming an astonishing percentage of British trade – has apparently purchased the coffee shop site on Barfield Road in Mersea, in order to build a new supermarket there. Is this a good thing? I cannot make up my mind.
Certainly, it will mean that those without access to cars are likely to get access to cheaper food. Chances are it will stock more organic veg than the co-op, which will make our home happier (although we’ve discovered the farm shop in Abberton which we like – great pistachio ice cream :o). It is also likely to drive some of the local shops to the wall, which, wearing my ‘community’ hat I worry about. But does that matter? Perhaps the local shops will just compete back on customer service. And what about the question of fair trade products? I preached a sermon a little while back advocating boycotting Tesco products, because they weren’t as pro-fair trade as the co-op, and then my wife took me shopping at the main Tesco’s, and I saw that I had been quite misled. There are lots of fair trade products at Tesco. And I’m comfortable with the idea of ‘trade not aid’ (which is why Live 8 is about justice not charity). So…. a good thing? A bad thing? I haven’t got a clue.
Fortunately, as one of my favourite theologians (Hauerwas) puts it, the church isn’t here to run the country, and make all the decisions. The church is here to help shape people with good characters, who then go and make the decisions themselves.
So I’ll stick to the question of character. Probably of more use in the long run anyway.
I’d say: everyone her/his own responsibility, depending on capacity. If I don’t have the insight and oversight to decide whether some development in my world is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it is not my responsibility to decide and act upon it.
I think I can oversee that buying eco- and fair-trade food, not driving a car, limiting air travel is ‘good’. So that is for me to decide. I preferably buy eco-food at a large supermarket, which I hope to stimulate to enlarge the number of eco-products it sells. The rest I buy in a specialized eco-food shop.
The government (local, national, global) should be able to decide whether such consumer choices have to be supported with different tax regimes for eco/non-eco-products, with introducing tax (!) on kerosine (air-travel fuel) etc. I can make into a main criterium of my political choices consistency of my eco ideas, fair trade ideas etc. with plans of political parties (in NL we don’t have district voting, in the UK: individual candidates). But I’ll have to leave to the government to weigh all the interests of their constituencies against broader general interests as well as insights about justice, peace and integrity of creation.
One of the good uses of the ‘personalized God’ metaphor, is that we can leave the rest, which even our policians can’t oversee, to ‘Him’.