This'll melt your heart

A lovely advert from Humble Oil in 1962. 'Each day Humble supplies enough Energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier'!

from an article by Al Gore. We should all be very proud. 

Did you know that American capitalism is particularly anti-environmentalism because Puritanism was at the core of its foundation? 

Unlike Catholicism, which encouraged Good Works of charity as well as torturing thousands of heretics to death, 17th-century Protestantism believed that worldly success indicated that God approved of you (poor people = unGodly). One of their core texts was the Bible verse about being given the stewardship of earth, to make productive. So good Protestants were encouraged to work hard, look after themselves (don't help the poor: God's decided they deserve to be poor) and don't worry about environmentalism because God's got a plan you shouldn't interfere with. Profit is a sign of efficient exploitation, therefore high profits = God's smiling on you. 

From this stems America's reluctance to act collectively (e.g. decent welfare, a national health service, trade unions), to trust each other (buy guns, only care about your family) and to reduce breakneck consumption. 

You can see it in the spiritual diaries devout worshippers were encouraged to keep. In fiction, Robinson Crusoe is a prime example: it's a journal in which he obsessively details what he's given and what he does with it. Waste and unproductiveness is wrong, efficiency i Godly - which means exploiting the Island (= earth) to the utmost, from the soil to poor Man Friday). 'Counting your Blessings' is part of this tradition too.

It's not just the US, of course - sanctimonious rapacious scum can be found anywhere, but because the Founding Fathers were all Puritans, the ethos of individualism was rooted from the start.

And so we get to Mr. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, famously described as, who recently described the bankers' self-enrichment which has bankrupted most countries as 'Doing God's Work'.* He's not wrong. He's theologically within a proud tradition. Of mean-minded fundamentalist selfishness. 

God, eh?

*Oddly enough, he said it in a fawning profile in The Times which has cravenly removed the article without explanation. Lucky everybody spotted it first!