Some thoughts from Archbishop Rowan Williams for your sunday morning:
“This crisis exposes the element of basic unreality in the situation — the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders.”
“The biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality — the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.”
“We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. ”
“Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.”
I’ve probably done Williams a disservice by cutting up his carefully reasoned logic, but you can read the full article here. It’s an interesting idea – when you think about how we talk about the markets, we use terms that would have been used of the Gods, or the sun, in previous cultures. We talk about the ‘mood’ of the market, how it is worried or confident, how it needs to be placated. Thinking about it that way, the much vaunted $700 billion bail-out begins to look like a big human sacrifice to an angry God who has threatened to destroy us.
The Earthbound Report 