ORGANIC FINANCE BOOK REVIEW

BY MARTIN PALMER, AUTHOR AND BROADCASTER

I really don’t even know how to begin this because, well frankly, Professor
Shah has produced a once in a lifetime book. He takes us on one of the most
extraordinary explorations of the intellectual, cultural and significant insights to
be found throughout the cultures of the world which fundamentally challenge
just about everything conventional economics teaches. Here you will find a
range of reading, knowledge and reflection which is truly universal in its scale,
depth and intensity. He takes wisdom, insights and inspiration from around the
intellectual world, ranging from profound philosophers to home-spun wisdom
and weaves for us all a journey of discovery.
Professor Shah comes at the problems of a monolithic world view called
economics which has destroyed civilisations; wreaked the natural world; distorted
relationships between peoples and cultures and which is so arrogant it
hasn’t even seemed to notice this was happening. Drawing upon his own
heritage of Jainism and therefore not just Indian culture but that extraordinary
pool of wisdom and insight known as Vedic – covering Hinduism,
Buddhism, Jainism and influencing other cultures such as Sikhism and Zoroastrianism,
he can summon up both history and culture to form the advance
guard of his thorough critique of western materialist culture – if that word is
applicable here.
As someone coming from what has been described as the grandmother faiths
of western capitalism, Marxism and modernity, bastard grandchildren in
almost all cases – I find myself as a critical Christian from a socialist family,
welcomed into the fold. Shah is not proposing that western cultures and eastern
cultures are irreconcilable. Far from it. In many cases it has needed eastern
cultures and beliefs to reawaken a sense of the sacred in nature; reawaken a
sense that values are not add-ons to the advertising market but arise from core
beliefs. It has also taken Christianity and the best of western culture to challenge
ancient views on women, power and faith that had encrusted other
faiths – and had also done so to Christianity. And it is the beliefs of modern
shareholder capitalism that he helps us uncover with their implicit imperialism,
colonialism, sexism and cultural indifference which lies at the overriding
assumption that materialist culture is reality while everything else is so relative
as to be insignificant.

I have known Professor Shah for over 30 years. We first met when I was
working as HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh’s religious advisor on
the environment. Prince Philip and I had launched an engagement between the
major conservation and environmental organisations of the world – he was
President of WWF International and I had run the world’s first multi-faith
education centre, focusing on how different faiths understood our place in both
nature and in the built environment. Together Prince Philip and I challenged the
secular world to stop ignoring the faiths. When we started in 1986 there was no
major environmental or UN programme that worked with the faiths. Yet the
faiths are the largest sector of civil society and run over 50% of schools, a third
of all universities and almost half of all medical facilities worldwide. They are
also trusted in ways that no government, no NGO, no UN programme is trusted.
And perhaps it was because of this that the materialist secular world
simply ignored the faiths or attacked them as being out-dated and irrelevant at
best, evil and malignant at worst. The faiths are a threat to those who would
place humanity at the centre of all meaning; financial success as the crowning
glory of human endeavour and selfishness – with a little philanthropy when
possible – as the height of human nature. Yet this secular arrogance persists to
this day and warps most of what “world leaders’ think is reality.
In this frankly brilliant book, Shah demolishes all these assumptions.
But what he also does – which so many critics of the current economic cultural
scene fail to do – is offer alternatives. Alternatives that for centuries –
even millennia – have worked, faults and all, but have managed to help communities
thrive. He draws upon ancient writers and beliefs – from Buddha
through Greek thought to the mystics of the great faiths – in order to challenge
us to be better and to think bigger. He also asks us to question such fundamental
building blocks as the very way we educate. Like me, he is inspired by
great educational thinkers such as Paulo Freire and his seminal book Pedagogy
of the Oppressed. For Shah, the very values and assumptions of the western
educational model harbour within them the seeds of destruction, of cultural
arrogance and ignorance and the failure to help children discover for themselves
their own inner light and wonder.
This book doesn’t just demolish. It offers both the old, and the contemporary,
roots for new life to flourish on this dangerously exploited planet.
He asks us to pull down the idols we have created which venerate greed as
good; personal triumph as more important than community success; which
reveres those who stop at nothing for personal gain. In their places he offers us
wisdom from political thinkers; poets; religious teachers; village life and the
arts with which to reconstruct a better more wonderful world. It has often been
noted that, in western culture, two of the most powerful images of human life
both died at the age of 33: Alexander the Great and Jesus. For those of us from
a western culture with wonderful spiritual insights, wisdom and practices, he
asks us to choose. Do we go with the World Conqueror, who destroyed ancient
cultures and imposed his own – or with the gentle teacher of a small occupied
country?

I am sure that this book will offer encouragement to many from the marginal
cultures and belief systems of the world whose scholars always find themselves
on the defensive, forced to adopt a western model to get published or promoted.
Many of these cultures have long histories and traditions of experience
in finance but lack the framework and language to express these positively,
authoritatively and constructively. I am confident that it will help to shape a
radical shift in finance teaching and training by making culture and ethics central
and making the equations build and value trust and social cohesion, rather
than destroy them. Finance scholars can now take responsibility for their science
and help build a truly sustainable future. After all, what other realistic
option do we have?
Thank you as always, my dear friend Atul, for helping me see my culture as
one with riches as well as with scars and curses. Thank you for offering to help
us all do the same with our own cultures. And thank you for not letting us rest
on our laurels but through your encyclopaedic reading and experiences, offer us
the delight of diversity as the antidote to crushing uniformity.
Martin Palmer, Founder of Faith Invest, BBC broadcaster and author of
over 20 books