Page 25 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

4 CHAPTER 1

the competition to get into good secondary schools and even good pre-schools. We
read stories about the increasing tendency among younger and younger persons to
undergo plastic surgery and the surge in obesity. On and on it goes.
At work, during casual conversation over a meal, piped into our headphones as we
listen to the news during a morning or evening workout, in the general atmosphere in
the city or town where we live and play, most of us—consciously or unconsciously—
are trying to make personal sense of all this information: What does this stuff mean to
me? How am I doing physically, financially, emotionally? Where do I fit in this soci-
ety I see and feel around me? Are things getting better or worse? Am I better off this
year as opposed to last year? What will happen next year? What will life be like for
my kids or grandkids, and how does that compare with how I grew up?
The challenge is organizing all of this data into a meaningful and coherent personal
story, selecting and ordering the plethora of information we receive so that it makes
sense. This challenge is aided particularly by an overarching sense of our political,
economic, and social order. Is that order fair? Just? Secure? Does it provide happiness,
hope, fulfillment? Does it offer opportunity? What should our culture look like to pro-
vide these things? We all, I think, have different responses to these questions.
There are, however, two current narratives about our culture that inform the ways
we answer these questions. Both narratives focus on the role of business in the shap-
ing of our lives as citizens today. We can characterize these two narratives, perhaps a
bit fancifully, as a narrative of indifferent capitalism and a narrative of capitalism with
a difference. The narrative of indifferent capitalism is a narrative of danger. The nar-
rative of capitalism with a difference is a narrative of opportunity.

THE NARRATIVE OF INDIFFERENT CAPITALISM
4
The narrative of indifferent capitalism goes something like this. In less than fifteen
generations, we have seen a profound shift from medieval sensibilities to a modern
ethos in which theology, faith, and salvation gave way to reason and a belief in
progress. Cyclical time, marked by the change of seasons, was supplanted by linear
time focused on the clock and efficient productivity. Personal, covenantal relation-
ships, bound by fealty, became redefined by contracts, and individual rights emanated
from notions of property and ownership. Emphasis on good works came to be sup-
planted by a work ethic, particularly a Protestant work ethic that linked material
rewards in this life with spiritual redemption in the world to come. Belief in a free
market economy, with free circulation of money, goods, and labor, served as the basis
for this nascent capitalism, with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) its seminal
text. The Industrial Revolution, often thought to begin with the invention of the first
practical steam engine by Thomas Newcomen around 1710, set the stage not only for
a new way of conducting business, but for a new world order.
America, the inheritor of the European enlightenment, served as the fullest realiza-
tion of such changes, with its seemingly endless supply of abundant land offering the
potential to make good on John Locke’s linkage between private property and the nat-
ural right of individuals. A capitalist economy based on small yeoman farmers and a