Jonathan Sacks on the effects of the global market in terms of relationships

I'm reading this book for Sin and Salvation in the OT: Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations by Jonathan Sacks.

I've really appreciated much of what Sacks brings to the conversation concerning our current times. In light of some of the recent conversations I'm having with friends concerning relationships--their formation, their maintenance, and depth--I found the 8th Chapter of this book very intriquing. It speaks on the global market and its affects on society. Among the many different points in this Chapter, I will share those dealing with relationships.


A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprize that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded. It would, in short, be one in which marriage made little sense--and that, by and large, is what has happened. (155)


Quoting Jeremy Rifkin:

'[W]hen most relationships become commercial relationships and every individual's life is commodified twenty-four hours a day, what is left for relationships of a non-commercial nature--relationships based on kinship, neighborliness, shared cultural interests, religious affliation, ethnic indentification, and fraternal civic involvement? When time itself it bought and sold and one's life becomes little more than an ongoing series of commercial transactions held together by contracts and financial instruments, what happens to the kind of traditional reciprocal relationships that are born of affection, love, and devotion?' (155-156)


For life to have personal meaning, there must be people who matter to us, and for whom we matter, unconditionally and nonsubstitutably...we are not made to serve economic systems. They are made to serve us. (157)


The market is a means, not an end. (159)



Any comments?

Adam posted some quotes from this book as well.