The Reporter (Addis Ababa)
Dr. Kassa Bekere
22 December 2007
opinion
Addis Ababa — One thousand years from know, it was said, the men who will inhabit part of the world that we do now, will recognize this period as the inception of Ethiopian renaissance; or putting it another way as the mark of Ethiopia's return to its greatness of the first millennium; or still, putting it differently, this is the period when our country started the journey 'back to the future'. Back to the greatness of the first millennium: the future to be regained in the coming years.
I share this rather modest idea without a grain of reservation. Some dismiss the idea because they take it to be too much infused with optimism. The easiest way I employ to talk to this 'nay-sayers' is to wish them a reincarnation right after a thousand years. And this article? No, it is not about a thousand years; it is about what is going on under our own very nose. Just allow me to take you only ten years back and forth. This article is what the 'nay-sayers' would call another one too much infused with optimism.
Wishful thinking never appealed to my mode of thinking; neither does cynicism. This article intends neither to support any man's wishful thinking nor to defend mine. If one opens an unprejudiced eye to what is going on around us and to project the implications to the nearest future, 10 years, not a thousand, what lies ahead is startling. Positively, of course.
A few decades ago whoever thought of China to become such a prosperous and great nation? Few did. It exploded under everybody's nose. However, analysts who wrote and are writing now about China are taking the pain to tell us that it started a few decades back. Only, 'we failed to see it coming'.
This writer, modesty aside, claims to witness that the grain to a great future is being sown everywhere; it is only that we failed to see it. Although it took many varieties of a grain to make a promising future habitat, I reasonably took business to be the most important of all. Throughout history business activities determined the rise and fall of nations. Nearly in all great civilizations trade and/or business played a major role, though an underestimated one. Napoleon dismissed his advisors' concern about Britain's fast rise in business when he made a joke about Britain as 'a nation of shopkeepers.' It was no later than soon that his ridiculed Britain emerged as the legendary great power of the world and routed Napoleon's invading army. What made into this great nation was but, to Napoleon's dismay, what it had done with its money-mongers-the businessmen.
An internationally renowned business newspaper once wrote, "Once upon a time there was a poor continent. Its name was Europe. It discovered three things: The rule of law, technology based science, and free enterprise. Now it is rich."
Does it sound like a tale? And a simpler one at that? (Remember many great ideas are simple.) But it is working everywhere? What else had gone to the making of the US, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and China? 'China is not known for upholding the rule of law,' one may say. But is it not a wealthy one or one in the making on an unprecedented scale? That is why I singled out business (free enterprise) as the most important factor that greatly contributes to a great future. Business has the power to guide the course of the other two factors (rule of law and technology based science) to the right direction. Long before Europe had come to be an exemplar democracy, it was a commercial continent. So was America.
Why business? After all it is just a mechanistic, low order, anti-spiritual human phenomenon vested with greediness and a necessary evil. Haven't we heard it all the time? Sorry, but you know what the business of the American people is: it's business. If human history has got its minorities, not the usual way of seeing it, businessmen have been the most condemned minorities, though undeservedly. When people think of the source of the wealth of nations, it is common to suffix it either to a purely physical phenomenon (because a nation has huge natural resource) or rarely a purely spiritual phenomenon (like a nation's wealth is fetched from its ingenuity -mostly given to a given race or nation genetically.) Yes, natural resource, and ingenuity may get to play to a nation's development. But only if they are put into synergy. That is what businessmen do to the universe. It is unduly unfair to say God blessed one barren land with ample natural resources, and now that is America. Neither Japan, nor Germany, nor England, nor North Korea-no one of them-is the consequence of the foolish mind vs. matter: Dichotomy. Their opulence is a manifesto of the marriage between the mind (creative thinking) and body (bringing it to reality production). And businessmen are the perfect representation of that unity. They toil in their labor and mind to bless their soul with the riches nature has endowed us with. In doing so they made life easy and happiness normal for all of us. If that unison and harmony between the mind and the body is fostered with free enterprise, it is not wishful thinking to envision a great, wealthy Ethiopia sooner or later.
Despite many factors our society is embracing the idea of business as never before.
The factors contributing to it: here you go.
Religion and Business
Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldreich Zwingli are giants of history in their own right. They were the three most influential reformers of Christianity. They initiated and led the Protestant Reformation. That is what they are remembered and considered great for. I consider that a complimentary remark at best and an understatement at worst.
James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, in their international best-selling book, The Great Reckoning, put it this way:
"The Protestant Reformation, which began early in the sixteenth century, can be crudely and simply understood as a theological justification of savings. In fact, the Protestant denominations become among the more effective vehicles for the promotion of savings ever devised. They contributed to this end through a variety of means. In the first place, they provided an immediate theological justification for saving and lending money at interest.... protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli defended the payment of interest on money lent, and thus significantly increased the return on money.
They also greatly discounted the costs of operating and supporting churches. One of the chief charges of Luther and other reformers against the Catholic Church was that it had grown too opulent. Protestant denominations...built simple, even austere, churches. And they garbed their ministers in the same spirit. Plain black frocks replaced the often-opulent robes of the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church.
This spirit of pruning costs was carried over to the religious calendar in ways that altered the relationship between rich and poor. Protestant denominations reflected this change by scraping forty feast days of saints and other holidays. Rogation Day (sic), Shrove Tuesday, and many others were no longer celebrated. These holy days or "holidays" had provided for almost weekly revels in medieval Europe.
Reform of the religious calendar was an integral part of the theological revolution that reduced the costs of living a pious life. The shift in emphasis from good deeds to faith as the key to salvation helped lift the burden of redistribution that had made it all but impossible for the more industrious peasants and burghers to accumulate capital. It was normally they who had to outfit the table at the incessant village feasts that dotted the old calendar. So much is consumed in these frequent revels that in and of themselves they almost provided a minimum for survival by the poor or the un-industrious. The Puritan rejection of both the feasts and the doctrine that provision of alms and good deeds were keys to salvation effectively cut the tax rate for industrious Protestants. It helped launch a new middle class of prosperous farmers, tradesmen, and freeholders. It also obliged those among the population who consumed more than they produced to work harder. The poor could no longer depend as before upon alms and feasts at the expense of their neighbors.
Puritanism lent still another hand to savings by discouraging consumption. From the earliest Protestant sect, the Moravians, private as well as public opulence was generally frowned upon as sinful. Protestant sects barred the faithful from holding private parties, even on such traditional occasions as baptisms, weddings and wakes. The throwing of grain at weeding was banned, along with dancing, dressing in fine clothes, and over-indulgence in drink. Frequently, alcoholic beverages were banned altogether and other dietary austerities were encouraged. The attempt to discourage alcohol marked a crucial distinction between the emerging middle-class culture, which emphasized self-control and discipline, and that of the lower classes, who consumed prodigious quantities of beer. Per capita consumption figures for seventeenth-century England were "higher than anything known in modern times."
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