Vinoth Ramachandra

One week before the Great Crash of October 1929- which precipitated the Great Depression- Irving Fisher of Yale University, perhaps the most distinguished US economist of his time, claimed that the American economy had attained a “permanently high plateau”. Three years later the national income had fallen by more than 50 per cent. No one, not a single economist, had seen it coming.

The usefulness of economics, observed that wittiest of economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, is that it provides employment for economists.

I thought of Galbraith when I read that the new Italian cabinet comprises economists, industrialists and masters of finance- the very people responsible for the debt crisis in the first place! And I do not understand why the European Central Bank, which lends any amount of money to every debt-ridden bank in the Eurozone,  does not lend to countries, thus forcing the Italian government to borrow at much higher rates of interest on the open market. And how is it that the United States, whose public debt is more than five times that of Italy, continues to borrow at the low rate of 2 per cent while Italy’s has reached a supposedly “unsustainable” level of 7 per cent? And why do the media go into a frenzy whenever a credit rating agency downgrades the credit rating of a country when all those rating agencies were caught with their pants down during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis?

Can any economist out there help me understand these mysteries?

My puzzlement seems to be shared by the Queen of England.  When attending a presentation in November 2008 at the London School of Economics, the Queen asked all the distinguished economists assembled there (and I paraphrase her words): “How come none of you nerds could tell us beforehand that this would happen?”

The economists went away and puzzled over the Queen’s question. The British Academy convened a meeting of the country’s top economists, and the results of that meeting were conveyed to Her Majesty in a letter, dated 22 July 2009, written by Professor Tim Besley, of the LSE and Professor Peter Hennessy, an eminent historian of British government from Queen Mary College (also of the University of London).

In that letter, the professors stated that individual economists were competent but that “they had lost sight of the wood for the trees”. There was, according to them, “a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.”

I take this story from Ha-Joon Chang’s recent book 23 Things they Don’t tell You About Capitalism. Chang is a well-known economic historian at Cambridge University, and here he continues the valuable work of myth-busting that he began with his more academic books Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans (where he showed, for instance, that the Western nations became rich by pursuing the very policies that, through the IMF and World Bank, they dissuade poorer countries from following).

Chang calls our attention to the phrase collective imagination in the professors’ letter. Hadn’t most economists (though not all) assured us, and still assure us, that markets are free and work well because we are rational, self-seeking individuals and so know what we want for ourselves and how to get it most efficiently? Where is there any discussion of the imagination, let alone of the collective kind, in economics textbooks or economic conferences? Conventional, neoclassical economics works with a reductionist understanding of human nature (selfish, rational). The complexity of human motivations and the socially embedded character of rationality are ignored in the pursuit of an abstract, ahistorical “economic science”. There is no room for notions of moral imagination, social solidarity, or the common good.

The failure of the economists, Chang points out, was understated in the letter to the Queen. It wasn’t simply that economists were wrong-footed in a once-in-a-century disaster that could not have been predicted. They played a crucial role in creating the conditions that paved the way for the 2008 crisis (and dozens of smaller ones that came before it in the 1980s and 1990s). They advanced theories that justified unregulated financial flows, high income inequalities, job insecurity, and the neglect of manufacturing in favour of financial “services”. The brightest and best of them told the rest of us that all was well with the global economy, and that the US had found the magic formula that combined high growth with low inflation.

The architects of the so-called East Asian “miracle economies” were not slaves to economic ideologies of the right or the left. They too were very clever people, but most came from backgrounds in engineering or law, not economics. Chang’s target is clearly not all economists (he is an admirer of Pigou, Minsky, Keynes, Sen, et al.) but the free-market economists whom the Anglo-American world (and some in South Asia and Latin America) has followed for the past three decades. This kind of economics, he says, has been worse than irrelevant; it has “been positively harmful for most people”.

More on Chang’s economic myth-busting in later posts.

I was visiting Portugal earlier this month, and my visit coincided with that of Marina Silva, the Brazilian environmental campaigner who served as Minister of the Environment in President Lula de Silva’s government.  This remarkable woman has been justly honoured all over the world for her tireless and courageous work. She is far more than an environmental activist on behalf of the world’s forests. She is a promoter of a different style of politics, one that puts the long-term future of the planet and its inhabitants before short-term financial gain. This is a politics of sustainability. It is the translation into all our political and economic activities of the Biblical mandate to “cultivate the earth and to serve/care for it” (Gen.2:15).

Marina Silva is a committed Christian. Her Assemblies of God church has commissioned her as “a missionary for the care of creation.” (Just imagine the transformation in the global Church if politicians, economists, business leaders, environmental activists, artists and others were also likewise commissioned and prayed for!). When she was Minister of the Environment, she brought together heads of fifteen other ministries, including transport, agriculture, education and energy, to formulate policies that would bring the notion of sustainability into the heart of government. This led her into collision, as it has done all her life, with powerful corporate interests and criminal networks that seek to control the Amazon the way that drug cartels in other Latin American countries control the narcotics trade.

Marina herself was born in poverty and grew up in the Amazon rainforest. She spent her childhood tapping latex from rubber trees and hunting with her father to support their large family. She was 16 years old when she finally learned how to read and write. That happened after she moved to the nearest city to work as a house servant. Until then, she had learned from the forest and her own people who inhabited the forest  – these stimulated in her the love for creation, as well as the senses to interpret it. Ten years later she earned a university degree in history and went on to found an independent trade union movement with rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes in the state of Acre. (Just imagine how many children there must be like Marina around the world, their human potential undeveloped simply because of the misfortune to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time).

In the early 1980s Marina and Mendes organized peaceful demonstrations by forest-dwelling rubber tappers against wanton deforestation and the expulsion of forest communities from their traditional holdings. Acre became famous as an example of grassroots resistance to wholesale environmental destruction by logging companies hand-in-glove with local politicians. When Mendes was assassinated, their work became known on a global level. It catapulted Marina into federal politics and, in 1994, she became the first rubber-tapper to be elected to the Brazilian federal senate.

As a senator, and later as environmental Minister, she fought to reduce deforestation by a combination of actions: increasing forest patrols by making the official environmental agency Ibama work alongside the Federal Police and the Defence Ministry; breaking up over 1,500 illegal businesses in the Amazon region;  re-ordering land use by creating 24 million hectares of protected areas and introducing the Public Forest Management Law which provided for the sustainable production of timber, and financially enabling the local forest-dwellers to have a greater role in the management of the forests.

Marina is back in the Brazilian senate, and she embodies a politics that puts people and the planet before profits and power. But this is a lonely position to occupy anywhere in the world.

The rich elites of Brazil, India and China who are the focus of the global media (as in the recently held Indian Grand Prix) are the ones who define “development” for the rest of us. Their moral imaginations are, tragically, severely crippled. They can only imitate the wasteful, unsustainable  lifestyles of Western elites, and although we now know more of what those lifestyles cost the planet and the majority of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, there seems to be little creative thinking in these “newly emerging powers” as to what an alternative model of “development” would look like.

Finally, compare Marina Silva with some of the current presidential candidates in the USA who claim to be “Bible-believing” Christians. Michele Bachmann, for instance, has only one recipe for the present economic woes of her country: scrap the Environmental Protection Agency and all environmental restraints on Big Business! Such stupidity gets a bigger voice in the secular media than Marina’s evangelical economics. (One wonders which Bible Bachmann and others are reading). Can the Church worldwide look to women like Marina as role-models, instead of vociferous North American mega-church pastors and politicians, when it comes to Christian leadership in the public sphere?

Some readers have written to say that Camila Vallejo is a member of the Communist Party of Chile, as if this should make my admiration for her evaporate.

If we are to shun any involvement with communists, then we should also be boycotting all goods made in China and Vietnam, and persuading our governments and business leaders to stop all trade with these countries, let alone investing heavily in them. Joining communists to make money is okay. Joining them to protest against injustice is not. What hypocrisy! And how paradoxical that the United States, which projects itself as the defender of liberty and human rights around the world, is so dependent economically on the communists that the relationship can even be described as one of ownership.

It can, of course, be argued –as the Slovenian communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek does- that today’s China is the ideal capitalist country in which the main task of the ruling Communist Party is to control the workers and prevent their self-organization and mobilization. The Party’s power is legitimized by its undercover deal with the new capitalists, which takes the form: “You stay out of politics, and we will keep the workers under control.” Zizek claims that the ruling regime is so sensitive to any notion of workers’ self-organization that “even the official books dealing with the history of the Chinese Communist Party and workers’ movement in China silently pass over the subject of trade unions and other forms of workers’ resistance, even if they were supported or directly organized by the Communists, lest the evocation of this past give rise to dangerous association with the present” (Living in the End Times, 2011).

One of the myths about capitalism that was popular during the Cold War was that it was the handmaid of democracy. Economic freedom would usher in political freedom. But, even in the history of Western nations, the truth was the very opposite. It was the spread of adult suffrage and the maturing of democracy that curbed the excesses of capitalism and protected men, women, and children from the worst forms of exploitation.

God’s “upside-down kingdom”, which has dawned in Jesus Christ, will one day spell the “scattering of the proud…the bringing down of rulers from their thrones…the lifting up of the humble, the filling of the hungry with good things and the sending away of the rich empty-handed” (Lk.1:51-2).  The day of final transformation is when God’s redemptive presence will fill the earth (Is 11:1-9; 65:17-25; Rev.21:1-5). The victory that Christ secures through his death and resurrection is given to those who are willing to become like little children (Matt.18:2), that is, nobodies; these are also the “poor in spirit” (Matt.5:3), those who have relinquished the obsession with control and competitiveness.

The redemption that the Gospel announces is thus contradicted by a global economy that persuades persons and nations to live beyond their means. Responsible lending can help people escape from poverty, as in foreign direct investment and micro-credit schemes, provided the terms of the loan are fair and the interests of both debtor and creditor are safeguarded legally. But in a debt-based global economy, lending by rich nations and financial institutions is often irresponsible. Poor nations are pressurized by the rich into selling their rights to their “commons” as partial repayment of national debts. (Would this be a contemporary equivalent of the taking of a poor man’s millstone as security for a debt-cf. Deut. 24:6?). Moreover, many Two-Third World governments are run by incompetent and corrupt politicians who are willing to sell off their nation’s natural inheritance in exchange for massive armies and wasteful, grandiose “development projects”. Thereby whole generations live under the shadow of crippling debts which require extraordinary and sustained levels of economic growth to offset.

The IMF and the World Bank are the favourite targets of left-wing critics of globalization. But dependence on such institutions is more often the result of poor strategic planning and fiscal management, rather than a global conspiracy by the latter. States that run up large foreign debts lose control over their macro-economic policy. We are now so accustomed to governments running up billions of dollars in deficits every year that we take it as normal that governments owe hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to people outside the country. But if you put yourself in massive debt to other people, you lose some control over your life

On a personal level, we can stop using credit cards to buy things we cannot afford. Living beyond our means leads to enslavement and ecological disaster. In this regard, the “99%” whom the “Occupying” movements claim to represent are not blameless- they have encouraged a system whose short-term benefits they have reaped, while ignoring the real victims of globalization. But, on a political level, church leaders, economists, businessmen, journalists, artists, lawyers and social activists need to come together with the poor to claim the rights of the marginalized and the vulnerable.

The recovery of democratic politics is central to any Christian attempt to “redeem” the global economy and the processes of globalization. The lack of political will on the part of wealthy nations to reform global financial institutions and to reshape the global economy so that the benefits of globalization are more equitably distributed can only be countered by a transnational mobilisation of grassroots movements from below.

Let Christians in rich nations learn from Occupying Wall Street and other social movements what following Christ entails…

Until two weeks ago, I had never heard of Camila Vallejo. Now I am fascinated by this charismatic student leader in Chile who has been shaking the political establishment in her country. She is spearheading a populist movement that has the right to “quality education” at its core. Boldly outspoken, Vallejo is only the second female leader in the 105- year old history of the student union in the University of Chile. Hundreds of thousands of university and high school students have been boycotting classes since early June, clamouring for better and more affordable education and an end to the two-tier system that creates a few affluent, elite institutions amid many underfunded public ones.

Last month, transport workers and other public sector employees joined the student movement in public strikes that led to a two-day nationwide shutdown. The government has promised to spend a further US $4 billion on education and to cut the interest rates on student loans by more than half. Chile’s Supreme Court has ordered police protection for Vallejo as she has been receiving death threats. A government official lost his job after suggesting that the protests would end if she were assassinated. Chile’s President is the billionaire business tycoon, Sebastian Pińera, whom opinion polls reveal only enjoys 26% of electoral support. Meanwhile, Vallejo has become a cult figure with songs about her appearing all over Youtube. She is tipped to be a future President.

She tells reporters: “Why do we need education? To make profits? To run a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development? Those are the issues in dispute.”

Here is a 23 year-old woman taking on the whole educational and political system!

The typical response of Christian students, especially in the privileged universities of the world, whenever I talk to them about engaging in acts of social transformation is either “That sounds idealistic…” or “But, we are only students…” And in the case of many graduates (even those in the mass media and politics), they shrug their shoulders and say, “We are so powerless…”

What needs to change in Christian university groups and churches for them to be attracting students like Camila Vallejo, let alone producing people like her?

At the same time as these momentous events are unfolding in Chile, students in New York and other cities in the USA have also been out on the streets every day since 17 September in peaceful protests against the takeover of American politics by corporate power. They call themselves “Occupying Wall Street” and describe themselves as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colours, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.”

Last Saturday, more than 80 of them were arrested by police in NYC.  But this has not deterred them. They write on their website: “As members of the 99 percent, we occupy Wall Street as a symbolic gesture of our discontent with the current economic and political climate and as an example of a better world to come.”

All these are signs of hope. It is poles apart from the irrational violence that gripped parts of London in August. It expresses the “Direct Democracy” I called for in my Blog post of 2 July. To Christian students and churches, all I can say is, “Get involved!” (You can listen, too, to my plenary Bible exposition on Loving God & Neighbour at the IFES World Assembly in Krakow, 31 July, available at  http://www.ifesworld.org/media/audio/wa2011-aen-mark-vinoth).

Ten years on, media commentary on 9/11 is legion, while other events, equally horrific, are quickly forgotten. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Howard Zinn, the distinguished American historian and author of A People’s History of the United States, wrote: “The images on television horrified and sickened me. Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of punishment. I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing,  from the history of the twentieth century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.”

Zinn continued: “We need new ways of thinking. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, a ‘missile defence shield’, will not give us security… We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting ‘retaliate’ and ‘war’ but from the doctors and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.”

Since Zinn penned those words, the U.S military budget tripled to nearly a trillion dollars, and American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which have claimed far more lives than were lost on 9/11) have squandered the deep sympathy for Americans that was widespread immediately after the attacks on American soil. Despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, the US and Western Europe are no less vulnerable to terror attacks than they were ten years ago.

The New York Times of 31 December 2007 carried an editorial insisting that the United States could no longer be called a “democratic” society. The editorial listed a succession of state-sanctioned abuses of American citizens, including eavesdropping, illicit body searches, arbitrary arrests, torture by the CIA and repeated violations of the Geneva Conventions, all done by government officials without apology and under the aegis of waging a “war on terror”. Other governments took a leaf out of the Bush administration’s book and re-described all their civil conflicts as “wars on terror” which justified introducing or extending draconian “emergency laws” and brutal policies of repression against any dissidents.

It is incumbent on governments to provide security for their citizens. But when “national security” overrides all moral considerations, one is forced to ask whether such a society is actually worth defending. If my “security” is obtained at the cost of harming, degrading or endangering the lives of innocent others, then I should be willing to forego that security. Security obsessions are inexhaustible and insatiable; and once we go down that path, whether as individuals wanting to live in “secure environments” (e.g. gated condominiums) or governments pursing every potential “security threat’, it is difficult to change direction. Groups and persons targeted as “threats” are turned into objects and excluded from the moral universe. They can be the targets of “pre-emptive” eliminations, unilaterally undertaken.

The only people who are ever arraigned before war crimes tribunals are those on the defeated side. Victors have never had to answer for war crimes and other abuses of human rights. (If the Sri Lankan regime is ever arraigned by the UN for war crimes, as is currently being threatened, it will be a historical “first”!). The inquiry into the Abu Ghraib outrage never reached the top echelons of the American military command; let alone the top men in the political administration who sanctioned the use of torture.

In an interview with an online American journal in late 2008, I was asked what difference Obama’s election as the new American President would make worldwide. I said that, while Obama’s election was a good thing for US domestic politics, it would not make an iota of difference to foreign policy. Look back over the past sixty years and you will not observe much difference between Republicans and Democrats where U.S military and corporate interests are concerned.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who were responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to torture. Obama has claimed the right to assassinate anybody, including American citizens, suspected of belonging to terrorist networks, merely on grounds given by the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly. Also, the US has greatly expanded the use of unmanned drone attacks in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan, violating humanitarian rules of engagement by shifting the risks to non-combatants away from American military personnel.

US “exceptionalism” is deeply paradoxical. On the one hand, you have a nation, the first liberal democracy in the world, with a great Constitutional tradition recognizing natural human rights.  On the other hand, however, it is the single biggest cause of cynicism about human rights and the single biggest obstacle to the implementation of those rights by governments around the world. The cynicism is prompted not only by the vast gulf between rhetoric and reality within the US; but also by the way the US, while denouncing other governments’ human rights records (excepting, of course, Israel), refuses to abide by key international human rights conventions, shields its own officials from prosecution, and consistently invokes national sovereignty and American “national interest” over the global common good.

Both the British and German treasuries have struck deals this month with the Swiss government to tax their citizens’ hidden accounts in Switzerland’s globally harmful banking system. However, the identities of these account holders will not be disclosed, allowing Swiss bankers to maintain their bizarre boasts of “privacy” and “confidentiality”. The agreement with Germany sees the latter accepting a paltry $2.8 billion from the Swiss banks said to be holding an estimated $276 billion of Germans’ undeclared wealth. The Swiss authorities will in future tax Germans at the rate of 26 per cent on their interest from their accounts and hand that money over to the German government. Similarly with UK citizens.

The vast majority of nations whose public wealth is siphoned off to tax havens by their political masters, drug barons and business elites have no such bargaining powers. The Tax Justice Network and Christian Aid have been advocating for years an end to banking secrecy in offshore tax havens such as Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and Bahamas. The unilateral German and British actions have undermined that painstaking work. The Tax Justice Network estimates assets held offshore total $11.5 trillion- which if taxed could yield revenues in excess of $225 billion. But leave aside taxation; these havens are vast pools of illicit funds and make the fight against corruption, money-laundering and international crime so much harder.

We are treated to the spectacle of European and American governments thrown into a panic over their budget deficits and taking out their fears on their citizens who are least responsible for the problem: the urban poor and the lower middle-classes who are being subjected to crippling cuts in health care,  education and the provision of public services. The super-rich are allowed to get away with tax evasion on a gigantic scale; and immediately cry “foul” if the rulers whose palms they grease even suggest a rise in taxes. (Warren Buffet is a rare exception to this rule!).

I am often reminded of the late John Kenneth Galbraith’s memorable words, written back in 1977: “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich. So it was in the Ancien Regime when reform from the top became impossible, revolution from the bottom became inevitable.”

How refreshing to turn to Professor Zgymunt Bauman’s recent book, suggestively titled Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age.  Bauman is one of the most original and insightful social thinkers of our time. Even at the age of eighty five his output is prolific and his prose still clear, trenchant and thought-provoking. He lives in his retirement near Bradford, a city in the north of England that has repeatedly witnessed bouts of rioting and inter-ethnic violence. Writing well before the most recent spate of riots in London and other English cities, Bauman notes that in Bradford 40 per cent of youngsters live in families without a single person who has a regular job, and one in ten young people already have police records. Such a statistical correlation, he points out, “does not in itself justify the reclassification of poverty as a criminal problem; if anything, it underlines the need to treat juvenile delinquency as a social problem.” (NB: David Cameron and others of the ruling class in Britain were quick to label the recent acts of arson and looting as a “law and order problem”, as if this settled the matter). For Bauman, there are social roots which lie “in a combination of the consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled under the pressure of a consumer-oriented economy and politics, the fast shrinking of life-chances available to the poor, and the absence for a steadily widening segment of the population of realistic prospects of escaping poverty in a way that is socially approved and assured.”

The term “collateral damage” has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unplanned, unintended (but not necessarily, unanticipated) effects of armed interventions, effects that are damaging, harmful, and costly in human terms. Many military commanders retrospectively exonerate themselves by saying that while such risks were noted they were worth taking, because one “cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”. What is glossed over in such accounts is someone’s usurped power to decide which are the eggs to be broken and who gets to savour the omelette (certainly not the broken eggs). Thinking in terms of collateral damage tacitly assumes an already existing inequality in people’s rights and life chances. The situation of youth in Bradford, Bauman suggests, “is a collateral casualty of profit-driven, uncoordinated and uncontrolled globalization.”

The richest 10 per cent of adults worldwide own 85 per cent of global household wealth, with the richest 2 per cent among them capturing more than half that wealth. London is the most unequal city in the world. The financial brokers, hedge fund managers and corporate Fat Cats routinely pilfer and pillage on a scale that dwarfs whatever happened recently in English cities. But they are never hauled before magistrates’ courts for summary sentencing. Nor are they even publicly rebuked. Until, of course, like a certain media tycoon, they fall out of favour with their political cronies.

Karin and I are in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, on our way home to Colombo.  We have spent the past fortnight in London and Poland, at the Jagiellonian university of Krakow, one of the oldest universities in the world, where the quadrennial IFES World Assembly was held. The latter brought together around 600 student leaders, staff and Board members of about 120 national movements affiliated to IFES (sadly, many of the Francophone African delegates were refused visas to Europe).

We also had the privilege of attending John Stott’s funeral in London today. News of his death, at the ripe old age of 90, was announced at the beginning of the Assembly; which was wonderfully  appropriate, given that IFES enjoyed a very close relationship with him ever since its formation in 1946 and he was one of our greatest advocates. It enabled us to celebrate his memory collectively.

Much was said of Stott’s humility and integrity, both at the World Assembly and at his funeral. He was one of those rare Christian leaders who was willing to change his mind and admit that he had done so. Much of this thinking about the Gospel and Christian mission was challenged by his visits to the Two-Third world and his exposure to Two-Third World Christian leaders and their theologies. He actually listened to us, unlike so many others who only came to propagate their views. Commitment to the poor, and a growing engagement with social and political ethics,  came to the fore in his later writings, much to the consternation of his conservative friends.

In a plenary Bible reflection that I gave at the IFES assembly, I mentioned how, when Stott invited me to give the London Lectures of 1998 (lectures which eventually became my book Faiths in Conflict?), he urged me to “Please say something that will disturb and challenge us evangelical Christians. We need to see our blind-spots.” Here was a 77-year old man wanting to be taught by a non-Westerner roughly half his age. How different from other British church leaders I knew!

The difference emerged even during the World Assembly (which was one of the best I have experienced- though I confess that being on the program planning team may have biased my judgment!). My Bible reflections and talks are routinely criticised by some people, usually from older Western student movements, but this time the response was almost unanimously appreciative. But some did express their concern that, in preaching from Mark 12:28-34 and stressing Jesus’ summary of God’s requirements (loving God and loving one’s neighbour as oneself) I neglected to emphasise justification by grace. I was preaching “law and not Gospel” as one person from a Lutheran background put it.

I find it difficult to keep cool in the presence of such people who seem to read every passage of scripture through a lens comprising a doctrinal system, thereby deflecting the stark moral challenge of the text. Perhaps that is my own “blind spot”, and why it is so important to read scripture with people of different persuasions and backgrounds. But the emphasis on faith in the Western evangelical traditions, as opposed to obedience to Jesus’ actual teachings, has led to terrible acts (from Luther’s rants against the Jews to twentieth-century defences of apartheid and discrimination against blacks and women) which have prevented many thoughtful, morally sensitive men and women from turning to Christ.

Stanley Jones was an American Methodist missionary-scholar who spent most of his life in India and was a personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi. After his death in 1948, Jones wrote an “interpretation” of Gandhi for Christians. I quote from that book: “Mahatma Gandhi did not see in the Cross what the convinced Christian sees, namely, God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself and that He was bearing our sins in His body on the Tree. Gandhi did not see that. But what he did see, namely, that you can take on yourself suffering, and not give it, and thus conquer the heart of another – that he did see in the Cross and that he put into practice and put into practice on a national scale. The difference, then, is this: we as Christians saw more in the Cross than Gandhi and put it into operation less; Gandhi saw less in the Cross than we and put it into practice more. We left the Cross a doctrine, Gandhi left it a deed.”

We should neither pay lip-service to John Stott nor idolize him. Perhaps the best way to honour him would be to imitate his integrity and teachability.

The popular philosopher Alain de Botton gave a lecture at a recent TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Edinburgh on what atheists need to learn from religion.  In the Blog of the science journal Nature, Philip Campbell reports on what was said. “Of course there is no God!”, announced de Botton, “But let’s move on – that’s only the beginning. We need atheism 2.0, and for that we need to draw from religion.”

Campbell summarizes de Botton’s talk thus:

“Universities turf you out into the world, as if you need no help. In contrast, all major religions see us humans as only just holding it together. The greatest preacher of all was John Wesley, who emphasised above all, in that spirit, the duty of parenthood. And we need those sermons too – not just lectures full of information, but talks that aim to change our lives. What is more, religions say you need to hear a lesson not once but ten times a day – theirs is a culture of repetition. All religions have calendars in which, for example on a Saints Day, you encounter a particular Good Life or Worthy Thought on an annual basis… And in the modern secular world, people interested in the spirit tend to be isolated, whereas religions provide institutions of spiritual togetherness.

Somehow, said de Botton, those who don’t believe in a deity nevertheless need to find ways of incorporating activities that promote spiritual well-being – however we may choose to define ‘spiritual’ – into the structures of our professional or social lives. The religions, he argued, are the foremost example of institutions fighting for our minds. You may not believe in religions, he said, but they’re so subtle and clever that they’re not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone. They’re for all of us.”

De Botton is an engaging writer, whose several books bringing philosophy to bear on topics of everyday life (love, anxiety, travel, happiness) serve as a challenge to those Christian theologians whose work is nothing more than commentary on other theologians. But the latter could well pose a counter-challenge to de Botton. How does a philosopher (of all people) simply assert, without argument, that atheism is true; and then  assert, without evidence, that all religions are essentially the same and, further, that it is religious rituals rather than beliefs that matter to peoples’ well-being?

What is equally puzzling is that de Botton must surely be aware of his own nation’s history.  Immediately after the French Revolution, the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) inaugurated what he termed “A Religion of Mankind.” This was a secularized religion dedicated to the glory of the new French Republic with the full panoply of neo-pagan shrines, temples, feast days, new calendars, wedding ceremonies, the veneration of saints (such as Voltaire, Rousseau and other heroes of the revolution) and their relics, and propaganda techniques learned from their religious foes.

David’s Religion of Mankind was short-lived. However, it was taken up by another Frenchman, August Comte, the founder of positivist sociology, and later by the circle of naturalists who gathered around T.H. Huxley. Comte sought to establish a “scientific-humanist” Church and, ironically, it was not in Paris but in Calcutta that he found his most ardent followers, among the Bengali intelligentsia. Calcutta witnessed the first community of Comte’s Religion of Humanity with its paraphernalia of rituals oriented around humans rather than gods. The group around Huxley in Britain, which included Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, organized themselves into a Church Scientific, with the avowed intent of attacking and undermining the credibility of the Church of England.

The Church Scientific organized lay “sermons” on scientific subjects, dressed in gowns imitative of the clergy, set up Sunday Lecture Societies to compete with the Church of England Sunday schools, sang hymns to Nature at mass meetings, and distributed pamphlets and tracts which proclaimed scientific naturalism and denounced Christianity as the chief obstacle to scientific progress. Even buildings set up as monuments to science, such as the Natural History Museum in London, were designed as secular cathedrals. A whole new “history” of science was written, regarded today as utterly worthless, to show that science and religion had always been bitter enemies, with Mother Nature replacing God, and Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin assuming a heroic status as the knight-saints of the modern world. Thus a new mythology was created.

Furthermore, religious atheism was vigorously promoted in all the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. It is still the state religion of China and North Korea. The repetitious propaganda/sermonizing and “spiritual togetherness” that de Botton encourages British atheists to cultivate flourished in the Nuremberg rallies of the Hitler Youth, the incessant revolutionary parades of East Germany and Soviet Russia, and Chairman Mao’s cultural revolutionaries who fervently memorized and disseminated his Little Red Book.

We have been there, Alain, done that- and the results have been disastrous. A “spirituality” without truth can be as oppressive as unity without justice. When religions are emptied of gods, other gods take over. And the god of the state is prominent among them.

It is difficult to decide which was the most depressing piece of news last week: the huge trade deals signed by Britain and Germany with  the Chinese government, the grand reception accorded Omar al- Bashir in Beijing, or the helpless rage of the Greek populace before a corrupt global financial order.

Of course, no decision is necessary; and, in any case, they are all inter-related. Truth and justice have been banished from the global public square. The gods of “ limitless growth” and “consumption” brook no rivals. For all the posturing of Western governments on human rights and human dignity, we know how deeply they have become indebted to repressive political regimes such as the Chinese and how deeply enmeshed they are in exploitative financial systems from which they cannot extricate themselves, even if they wished to. Like the client-kings of Rome, depicted in the Book of Revelation, Western governments have capitulated to the Beast and do his bidding (while pretending to be politically sovereign).

Still, I had hoped that significant numbers of the British and German population, especially Christians who care about freedom of thought and religious worship, would have protested outside their parliaments. For those of us who live under dictatorships and military states, the visible support of the so-called international community is vital. The British government promotes the interests of its business corporations, even its arms industry, over the lives of human beings. India is one of the biggest purchaser of British weapons, which the Indian government uses against its own citizens. And until the recent NATO strikes and the condemnation of Gaddafi as a tyrant and war-criminal, British firms were doing business in Libya with the tyrant’s blessing.

As for the latest Greek tragedy, it simply illustrates what I have been writing about on my Blog ever since the so-called “financial crisis” of 2008. If Greek coffers are empty, it is not because of social benefits given to the sick and the poor; but, rather, the irresponsibility of Greek business corporations who hid their profits in off-shore tax havens. Rich Greeks, with the blessing of their politicians, enjoyed public services while not paying for them. (And the Greek Orthodox Church, owner of vast assets, has also been exempt from taxation). But it is the middle-and working classes who are now being forced to practice “austerity” to rescue Greece from bankruptcy. Moreover,  Greece is being charged interest  higher than the eurozone rate. Like global warming and subprime mortgages, it is the poor who forced to pay for the sins of the rich.

Reforms in the financial sector, whether in the US or Europe, are purely cosmetic. None of the institutions and individuals who were responsible for the foreclosures of peoples’ homes have been brought before courts of law. Banks seem to be exempt from the bankruptcy procedures that apply to ordinary people and small businesses.

All this speaks of political failure. The racists, the corrupt, and the mediocre have taken over parliamentary assemblies. Even highly intelligent and moral leaders like Barack Obama have their wings clipped by financial elites. Politics in Canada and Italy is no different from India or Thailand. Given these failures of governments all over the world, isn’t it time for more of us to be get out on the streets like the courageous  men and women in Athens, Damascus and Bahrain? Direct democracy is when the people themselves directly claim the right to decide the laws and policies that will shape their collective life. Their chosen representatives have betrayed them in favour of unelected business and banking tycoons.

Oh for a summer of public discontent all over the Western world! And for more Church leaders like the Hindu guru who fasted publicly in protest against political corruption in India.  Civil society needs to be renewed and activated all over the world.

I recently came across an account by Richard Hughes, an American college professor, which many of those educated in conservative Christian circles will identify with.  Hughes was an undergraduate student at a church-related institution in the American South between 1961 and 1965. During those years he was living and studying no more than 250 miles from most of the great events of the Freedom Movement/ Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, midway through his undergraduate experience, Martin Luther King led hundreds of children through the streets of Birmingham, protesting racial segregation. The city responded with fire hoses and police dogs.  In 1965, the year Hughes graduated from college, blacks sought to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, but Alabama storm troopers stopped them in their tracks with shockingly brutal force.

Hughes writes:

“Unbelievably, in spite of the fact that one of the greatest moral dramas in the history of the United States was unfolding under my nose, I missed it. I missed it almost entirely. I didn’t fully discover what I had missed until I enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Iowa in 1967. I blame myself, but I also blame that church-related college and its professors, for not one of my teachers said to me, ‘What is going on today is important. Take note.’ Or, better still, ‘Get involved.’”  [Richard T. Hughes, The Vocation of a Christian Scholar: How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind, 2005]

The IMF is once again in the news, with its dire warnings about Greece’s debt and the US deficit slowing down global economic growth. This tedious obsession with “growth” and fiscal management, while all other considerations- such as the nature of that growth, who bears the cost of that growth (e.g. deaths by pollution, climate change or rising food prices), and how the benefits of that growth are distributed- recede from public view, only confirms Joseph Stiglitz’s quip that the IMF is staffed by third-rate economists from first-rate universities.

If, say, Germany’s growth rate drops from 4 per cent to 2 per cent, or China’s from 9 to 5 per cent how does that portend global economic disaster? And why is the fate of banks and creditors of greater concern than the fate of the majority poor of the world?

It is refreshing to turn from these insanities to Susan George’s latest book Whose Crisis, Whose Future? Towards a Greener, Fairer, Richer World (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). George has been a tireless campaigner on behalf of the world’s poor, and she puts many of us to shame by her life-long perseverance.  In her latest book she repeats something she said in her first book, How the Other Half Dies, way back in 1976, in a chapter called “What Can I Do?”. Let me quote from that:

“Study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless… Any good work done on peasants’ organizations, small farmer resistance to oppression or workers in agribusiness can invariably be used against them. One of France’s best anthropologists found his work on Indochina being avidly read by the Green Berets… Meanwhile, not nearly enough work is being done on those who hold the power and pull the strings.  As their tactics become more subtle and their public pronouncements more guarded, the need for better spade-work becomes crucial… Let the poor study themselves. They already know what is wrong with their lives and if you truly want to help them, the best you can do is to give them a clearer idea of how their oppressors are working now and can be expected to work in the future.”

She continues: “We still lack sufficient knowledge of those who make the decisions that affect countless lives and are in a position to manipulate the rules to suit themselves- that is, transnational corporations and banks, international financial institutions, global and regional trade bodies, right-wing think tanks and cultural institutions, major state bureaucracies, the media, and so on.”

For instance, over the decade 1998-2008, the financial services industry in the USA, which includes banking, securities, insurance and accounting firms, spent $5,000 million- yes, 5 billion- on lobbying politicians to do away with inconvenient bits of legislation (such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which Franklin Roosevelt instigated to separate commercial banks from investment houses like Merrill Lynch).  By 2007 the financial industry employed 2,996 people to do nothing but lobby politicians. A report entitled Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America describes in detail twelve deregulatory measures that financial industry lobbyists were able to push through Congress with the enthusiastic cooperation of the legislators. And the regulating agencies were being paid handsomely by the banks whose products they were asked to assess. It’s hard not to call this corruption. In any other country, it would. But in the US, since it’s all legal, we don’t equate the US with, say, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

What did the financial services wrecking crew get in exchange for their $5 billion in lobbying and political contributions? They were allowed to create and trade financial derivative products, subject to no regulation whatsoever. Trillions of dollars were subsequently bet on these exotic products. The commodities markets were also stripped of regulation through the Commodities Markets Modernization Act, allowing unbridled speculation and contributing heavily to food riots in more than thirty countries. Whenever the lobbyists or legislators set out to eliminate an useful law, they called it “modernization” or “reform”.

We have been intimidated for far too long by the pseudo-scientific pronouncements of economists and the lies of politicians. Banking is not so complex that we cannot understand how we are being conned.  Where are the Christians in economics and finance who dare to think “outside the box” and write the kind of books that Susan George writes, explaining to “ordinary” folk how not to be hood-winked by the games the rich play?

Here is George’s apt summing up of the reigning economic orthodoxy that is playing havoc with God’s earth and human lives:

“Every cultivated field must produce a maximum without fallow or rest; every worker must be infinitely flexible; every factory must produce at lowest cost or perish; every bank must out-risk its rivals. Hundreds of millions are excluded because they are ‘not productive enough’ or ‘cost too much’. Hundreds of millions more produce and consume so little that they serve little or no purpose in a capitalist marketplace. They are dispensable or worse; their perceived uselessness is nothing but another drag on the system. As far as the rich are concerned, so long as they accept to do so quietly, they can rot. If they protest, they will be dealt with. The rich can do without them. Our societies are stretched financially, economically, socially, ecologically to the breaking point and we have no shock absorbers.”