Humanity is responsible for its own culture, its history, its triumphs and its cock-ups. If we made the faith traditions that were perverted to tribal causes, we can remake them to salve the situation: working out our own salvation. Now there’s a role for religious faith as a human creation! 3 SOF 42 / july 2600 Former Bishop of Durham David Jenkins and author Monica Furlong have both produced important new books, one about the state we are in economically, the other about the state of the Church of England. We invited each to write about the other’s book. First MONICA FURLONG reviews ss Pe | ier ¥ i les ' | i z 1 $ A a fe ™ us guide to the market Market Whys and Human Wherefores, by David Jenkins, Cassell, £16.99 As I began to turn the pages of David Jenkins’ new book I felt I could not possibly be the right person to review it (and, of course, I may not be). It is about economics, the Market, capitalism, politics - subjects on which I have the rather simplistic working knowledge of those who are neither academically nor professionally involved. But then, early on in the book, the bishop places himself in the role of the novice, the non-expert, the “anxious idiot” as he puts it. The word idiot, he says, comes from the Greek idiotes - a private person or individual - a word that declined in use until it came to mean a layman or an ignoramus.
Reviewing free market theory, Jenkins finds himself “not only a frustrated and often angry citizen...(but) an increasingly troubled human being”. He writes: “I cannot but question the present emphasis on growth in productivity, profit and consumption. I suspect not only a false promise but also a threatening prospect.
How realistic is it to believe that we can go on developing our present patterns of production...and then multiply it by the ten-fold increase...which current projections suggest would be required if there were to be enough ‘trickle down’ to spread market prosperity effectively around the majority of the population of this globe? I fear for my grandchildren and IJ fear for our still lovely and lively world.” Jenkins has read widely and deeply to find compelling evidence about the depredations of the market, about its tendency to make a small number of people wealthy while many more are worked to exhaustion or forced into unemployment and poverty, and about the indifference of the whole system to the needs of a vibrant society, or of the earth itself. In Market-think, profit, like some unforgiving juggernaut of a dogma, rides down all that stands in its way.
Bringing a great deal of reading and thought to bear on economic and political history, Jenkins supplies wonderfully accessible summaries of classical economic theories, of current ideas, of the ideas bandied about by } SOF 42 / July 2000 the media and by politicians on both sides of the political fence, between whom, on these issues, there is little or nothing to choose.
Like the child who commented on the emperor’s new clothes, or lack of them, Jenkins takes on the Great Panjandrums of our time and makes a powerful case against them, though without the naivete of the child. He suggests that the blind faith in the market, the handing over of power to it as if it were fate itself, something beyond human power, is a kind of mad religion, or idolatry, that thinks in a circular way with no reference outside its own hall of mirrors. One of its sources of power is what he calls TINA - the believe that “there is no alternative”- a false belief put about by politicians and others that makes the rest of us too dispirited to question We cannot trust the lords and gurus of the Free Market further. His contention is that not only must we question further, but we must collectively find a new approach.
Treating the market as a faith troubles Jenkins profoundly, though not for the reasons one might superficially suppose. “I am not investigating the sources of market optimism in order to make a case for God.
What I am doing is pursuing a secular case against investing optimism in the current operations of the Market on the basis that these operations are inevitable as well as beneficial. My concern is to establish the possibility of changing things. I am not an economic determinist and I do not believe that ‘there is no alternative’. I believe the possibilities of human freedom are rooted in something deeper and more realistic than the trading activities of human beings. It is my conviction that to put one’s faith in the operation of the Free Market is a potentially disastrous inversion of causality, determination and responsibility. We cannot rely on the Market as if it were Providence... We have to rely on ourselves with whatever resources - practical, moral, inspirational and spiritual - we are able to discover in and between ourselves.” He senses that we have turned our backs on better and finer visions of what human society might be and reduced everything, Gradgrind like, to a dreary and mechanical system that brings little joy.
He questions the theory that competitiveness between human beings is the key to economic success, and notes the damage to the sense of community when everyone is seen as a rival, not to mention the hopelessness of those innumerable people who, for a variety of reasons, are always going to be non-starters in that sort of race.
In contrast to the resolute upbeatness of the market enthusiasts he quotes a 1996 publication by Earthscan entitled The Politics of the Real World. The book was a major statement of public concern from over thirty of the UK’s leading voluntary and campaigning organisations including Christian Aid, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Save the Children Fund and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
In authentic and well-documented detail the statement summarized a mass of evidence about the increasingly destructive impact of the operations of the market system.
There has not been much sign of our own, or other governments, taking its wisdom on board.
Jenkins’ arguments are many and fascinating, and lucid enough for other anxious idiots to digest. In a final chapter he looks at what he calls a series of “risks” that he thinks are more promising ways forward than the risks associated with “interest” and “the Market”. They include a Great dot comma David Taylor writes about THE GREAT DISRUPTION: Human Nature and The Reconstitution Of Social Order, by Francis Fukuyama, Profile Books, £20.00: “Fukuyama explores the change from industrial to information society, and compares the accompanying decline in moral and social values with that which occurred during the industrial revolution. He argues, though, that human beings are biologically driven to establish moral values, and have unique capabilities for reasoning their way over the long run to spontaneous order. After the Great Disruption of recent decades, society appears to be re- a consensus that “increased taxation is necessary to fund establishing what we now say we cannot afford but know we should principles of afford”. (He is not talking only of conscience here but of social order - sheer common sense, if we do not want to end up living in principles ghettos in fear of our neighbours, as some rich people appropriate to already do in the United States, or in a totally polluted HUMAN NATURE AND THE the age of environment). RECONSTITUTION OF Other “risks” involve more sensitive applications of information in SOCIAL ORDER which we now democracy, new forms of “money creation and credit availability which would finance enterprises at low-levels of return on capital to enable the development of small local enterprises and co-operatives in heavily populated areas in undeveloped countries, or in run-down areas in developed countries”, and schemes for a “basic income” with drastic simplifications of taxation and welfare payment systems. He advocates more local participation, particularly in local government, with renewal and responsibility used as a counterbalance to “globalization”.