No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.Stanley Hauerwas
The Global Financial Crisis: Greed Ain’t so Good?
Cont.
Page 2 of 2
| But another debate will be about the extent to which
people will stop worshipping what the prime minister called the ‘false
god’ of ‘unfettered free markets’. As society moves into a debate with
religious overtones, it might be helpful to briefly lay out a religious
perspective, which will at the very least have the benefit of making
sense of terms such as ‘worship’, and ‘false god’. In Christian thought, humans inevitably worship—that is, they ascribe supreme value to something or someone. The proper target of worship, according to this thinking, is God; all other targets are called ‘false gods’ even if they have intrinsically good features. This includes the worship of self, sex, beauty, knowledge, one’s nation or even humanitarian causes. So what does it mean to say unfettered free markets have become ‘false gods’? |
|
Let me begin with a comment from a student in my International Economics class, whom I have no reason to think is religious. When asked to nominate the key values of Western Society, two were offered:
| 1. Individualism – in the form of chasing one’s goals, living life the way one wants; being who you want to be. 2. Consumption – experiencing life through goods and services, eg. nice houses, holidays, cars, clothing and bought experiences. |
I take this student to be saying that ‘the unfettered free market’ is not, in itself, the ‘false god’ that is worshipped. Rather freedom—to make choices and to pursue ‘bought experiences’—is the culprit. The prime minister implied a similar thing about the freedom in his speech when he sought to balance his comments about markets by acknowledging their ability to promote ‘empowerment’.
| It is important to note again that ‘false gods’ in
Christian thought do not have to be intrinsically bad. Freedom is
undoubtedly a great gift of God that we rightly value highly. But it is
easily misused—turned away from a focus on God and others, worshipped
in its own right, it gravitates inexorably toward the self. The
‘freedom’ of one person can trample another’s hopes of security, safety
and well-being. Perhaps the most damning thing that could be said about our economic system is that it can encourage this gravitation-towards-self process. |
|
Adam Smith’s invisible hand is, I believe, a helpful way of limiting unnecessary and unhelpful government regulation—we don’t really need a Dept. of Bananas. But it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that the invisible hand also provides a rationalization for the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, for greed, and for self-worship. As the despair deepens, we are all beginning to recognize the consequences of that.
Dr Gordon Menzies is a Senior Lecturer in Economics and the Deputy Director of the Paul Woolley Centre for Capital Market Dysfunctionality at UTS. He worked at the Reserve Bank 1986 to 2002 inclusive, and his doctoral work in Oxford was on the Asian Financial Crisis.
P 1I 2
| 26-Apr-2009 02:55 PM Anon. |  |
| Hi Gordon, thanks for your article. I agree that “unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, greed, and self-worship” has contributed significantly to the current financial crisis. But your solution seems to commits the fallacy of the excluded middle. It assumes that the only options available to humanity are (a) to worship God or (b) to worship these ‘false gods’. But what if the problem is worship itself? It is just false that “humans inevitably worship”. There are many, many people who do not throw themselves into the kind of myopic, all-consuming devotion and unquestioning submission that, as you say, can so easily trample on the “security, safety and well-being” of others. It’s called ‘the ethical life’, and is available to anyone who is capable of rational reflection and empathetic understanding - in other words, the vast majority of human beings, regardless of (and often in spite of) their religious commitments. The last thing the world needs at this point is yet MORE worship, of anything or anyone, religious or otherwise. Cheers, Anon. | |
| 26-Apr-2009 05:48 PM stephen | |
| I would suggest there are two issues which could be construed differently in Dr Menzies'article. 1. The idea that the unrestrained invisible hand of the free market leads to unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, greed and self-worship. The basic idea of capitalism which the Reformers taught as Biblical thinking was that all people are to serve God and serve others in their secular work. This went against the Catholic idea of seeing only priests and nuns as serving God. Martin Luther understood a person's work as being Jesus hands and feet acting in service to fellow men and women. Capitalism was a way of harnessing this so that you did love your neighbour as yourself. If you did not produce reliable goods people would not buy your wares. This is the restraint in the free market system. As long as monopolies and government rules and taxes do not distort the market then even corrupt people are forced to do a reasonable job in the service of others if their businesses are to be viable. 2. There has been a lot of comments among the more conservative media that this finacial crisis was actually triggered by Government (US senate) interference in the insurance companies which forced them to lend to people who did not have the means to repay their debts. They were threatened with court actions if they did not. It is true this then escalated through greed and was amplified. But the initial problem was not with the free market but with government interfering in a free market process. Its job should really be to keep the operating laws of the market fair. Beyond that it will distort the market as we see happening now and as can be seen in any socialist state. | |
| 28-Apr-2009 04:38 PM Gordon | |
| Dear Anon, Thanks for taking the time to read my article. When I first read your response, I wondered if the problem was including a word with religious connotations (worship) into the discourse about the Global Financial Crisis but on a careful reading I see that this is not so, for you conclude with the dangers of worship 'of anything or anyone.. religious or otherwise'. So, I am left wondering if your complaint is against causes (religious or otherwise) which people pursue with passion – perhaps even degenerating into ‘fundamentalism’? If you have a few moments I’d love to hear what your idea of an ‘ethical life’ is, and whether you think avoiding passion is good (for example, is anger at injustice bad?). By the way, Christian worship doesn’t have to be ‘myopic, all-consuming devotion and unquestioning submission’. Worship is really about affirming what is valuable in life. For the Christian, who is commanded to love God with all her heart soul mind and strength, worship engages emotion, intellect and action. Good worship takes a real look at the world (it’s not myopic), and it wrestles with intellectual challenge (though it is true that it does involve some intellectual submission). I look forward to hearing what thing or things an ‘ethical life’ values highly. Best Wishes, Gordon |
|
| 28-Apr-2009 05:07 PM Gordon | |
| Dear Stephen, the interpretation of the market system, as a means of serving others, is certainly a healthy one, and you are possibly aware of the theological undertones of the notion of the 'invisible hand' (some think of it as an example of providence - though it has morphed from that meaning now). To the basic advantage of the market that you list 'If you did not produce reliable goods people would not buy your wares.' I would add (and did in the article) that relatively uncontrolled prices can coordinate production and consumption decisions to overcome, say, a banana shortage without much requirement for information or altruism. But as I also noted, transactions do not always work out as well as they could. People know different things in exchanges or have different abilities to negotiate complexity. The current crisis has some of these features - while it is true that directed lending had a role to play,it is also true that some of the recipients (and originators!) of subprime loans were not in a good position to understand the risks. By the way, I'd love to know what you mean by 'fair' market laws - would that include guarantees that all people the right to work or a reasonable standard of living? Or would you limit it to a small set of legal obligations (such as truthful disclosure in transactions, and following through on contracts). Best Wishes, Gordon |
|
| 29-Apr-2009 04:03 PM Anon. | |
| Dear Gordon, thanks for your response. I’m afraid you seem now to be equivocating between two senses of worship, which would render your original argument fallacious. Your article defines worship as ‘ascribing supreme value to something or someone’; it involves pursuing or devoting oneself to something/one ‘in its own right’, to the exclusion of all else. This concept of worship was applied, univocally, to both the worship of God and of ‘false gods’. As such, you made a strong case for why worship of the latter has contributed the financial crisis. But now you seem to be watering down the concept of worship, presumably to avoid my objection that worship is itself the culprit. So, in your response, you claim that (a) worship is (or can be) a way of “affirming” (not devoting oneself to) what is “valuable” in life (not what is of “supreme value”); (b) it involves “some” intellectual submission (not unquestioning total submission); and (c) it merely “engages” (not consumes) one’s emotions, intellect and will. But under this revised definition, the worship of ‘false gods’ - like freedom - would be perfectly respectable and reasonable. There is nothing untoward about “affirming” one’s right to freedom. It is certainly possible to do so without violating the rights of others. Indeed, I would argue that the “affirmation of what is valuable in life” is a good part of what it means to lead an 'ethical life'. We may be on the same page after all. Except for one thing. I think we can ‘worship’ (in the revised sense) all that is of value in this life (love, friendship, education, the arts, sports, science, health, justice, nature, the virtues, etc.), without believing in a God; and that doing so can lead to an incredibly happy and fulfilling life. Cheers, Anon. | |
| 12-May-2009 09:30 AM Gordon | |
| Dear Anon, I think the notion of worship does have in it an idea of 'supreme' value, so I should have said 'Worship is about affirming what is of supreme value in life'. Thanks for asking me to clarify that. But I wonder if it is really correct to say I was “watering down” my own concept of worship, when a careful reading of our exchange indicates that I was qualifying your concept of worship – not mine. Your definition of worship "myopic, all-consuming devotion and unquestioning submission" does appear to be framed to tap into stereotypes of religious believers, whilst leaving unscathed the decent folk who pursue the ‘ethical life’. In my experience of dialoguing with friends who do not accept a theistic worldview, they will sometimes admit that their own views involve certain core values that are unassailable (not dissimilar to ‘fundamentals’) and trust in certain highly revered thinkers (not dissimilar to ‘faith’). Of course, I cannot say this about you without any clear notion of what an ‘ethical life’ means in terms of philosophical propositions. If I may say so, my philosophical cards are on the table, whilst yours remain close to your chest. I am grateful for your thoughtful reflections. From what I have gleaned, the best summary of our positions might be that you think the opportunistic greed in the buildup to the crisis was a problem because it was ‘myopic’, ‘unbalanced’ and ‘consuming’. I cannot disagree with that, but I would add that the root problem was that it was ‘ungodly’. Regards, Gordon. |
|
Comment