John Milbank on the economic crisis

In December, Luke Bretherton organised a conference on the church's response to the economic recession. This is part of a wider – and much needed – initiative, to mobilise the churches in an anti-usury campaign. (Incidentally, since entire Christian denominations are driven by a commitment to usury, we can hardly become a credible witness until we get our own house in order. Whether the churches worship God or Mammon is still very much an open question.)

At the conference, John Milbank's address was entitled "The Moral Market is a Freer Market". It's a very lucid analysis of the economic crisis – especially the "crisis of abstraction" – and of the way Christian theology can shape economic thinking. Here's an excerpt:

"The point about talking about a culture of trust is not some kind of moralistic wishful thinking; the point about a culture of trust is actually that an entrepreneurial culture needs trust. Even if you believe in the free market, it turns out that the model of individualist utilitarianism that goes all the way back to Adam Smith is actually the wrong model. Itʼs the wrong model for the free market itself because if you have endless checking up on people, if you donʼt have trust, that actually inhibits initiative, risk and creativity. This is why the Italian economist Stefanos Zamagni is saying we need to return to the principles of Italian political economy, not Scottish political economy, because the Italian political economists from the 18th century onwards saw sympathy as part of contract itself, not as standing outside contract.

"In the end Adam Smith subordinates sympathy to self-interest and he says that if your butcherʼs selling you meat heʼs not doing it out of the goodness of his heart. But this is untrue. In fact people do enter into economic relationships at the local level for social reasons, for personal reasons, and Zamagni argues in a really powerful way that the more we have relatively informal contracts between people, the more itʼs based on trust, the less you need the intervention of state law on the one hand, or of inner control by firms on the other hand. So this is a different way of thinking about the free market. The market would actually be freer if it was a moral market....

One of our legacies in the West is the division between self-interest on the one hand and altruism on the other. But altruism is not a Christian term. It was invented by the atheist Auguste Comte. Charity is always reciprocal, charity is never a one-way gift, itʼs always a matter of give and take. If it has sometimes to be a one-way gift thatʼs in exceptional circumstance, because the point of charity is mutual bonding."

You can download the full transcript of Milbank's address from the Faith and Public Policy Forum.

Theology of money

The AUFS crew have commenced their next book event, this time focusing on Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money. Here are the posts so far:

1. Power
2. The end of modernity
3. Ecology of money
4. Politics of money
5. Theology of money

Political theology on the radio

ABC Radio National has a terrific new programme on political theology, featuring William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Gopal Balakrishnan, and our own Scott Stephens.

The programme focuses especially on the legacy of Carl Schmitt. It’s a very wide-ranging discussion that moves through Thomas Hobbes, liberal democracy, capitalism, multiculturalism, secularisation, and the modern university. It’s great stuff – on the Radio National website, the programme is available both in audio and as a transcript. Here are a couple of highlights:

William Cavanaugh: “All politics are theological I think in the sense that they marshal large transcendent visions of human origins and human destiny.”

Scott Stephens: “One of the effects of our current celebration of tolerance, of the value of multiculturalism, … is the image of all of these different cultures, all of these different religions … living side by side in a benign inclination towards one another…. But what we don’t recognise is that the only way for all of these cultures to exist side by side, the only way for people to be able to opt in and opt out, … is for all of these cultures to be completely flattened out, to be hollowed out of any zestiness, of any distinctive or specific qualities…. These cultures can only exist side by side when they have already been hollowed out and co-opted by liberal capitalism. In other words, these cultures can only exists side by side once they have been transformed into relatively meaningless commodities. So I think what we need to recover today – and what I think political theology gives us – is the opportunity to recover something like authentic, profound, meaningful disagreement.”

The trouble with kids today: a baptismal sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Text: Luke 18:15-30

“The trouble with kids today…” “When I was their age…” “Remember the days when…”

Get the picture? Old people talking about young people. And ever has it been so between one generation and the next. Old folk look back and see the time of their own youth if not as a golden age, then certainly as a better age than the world of today’s little creeps. We tend to view time from the then to the now as one of decline and fall. And young people, in turn, look at grown-ups and see people out of touch, who don’t understand them, who don’t understand anything. One word sums it up: we’re “boring”, and, if you’re parents, you’re “embarrassing” too. “The young think the old are fools, and the old know the young are fools” – that’s one George Chapman, writing four hundred years ago! Plus ça change, plus la même chose. “Whatever,” teenagers would add!

Me, I think this is a healthy state of affairs – at least for the young. Kids who don’t go through a period of viewing their elders with – well, the range is from condescending hilarity to lofty contempt – kids who don’t go through a stage of alienation and – yes, rebellion – they’re missing out on an essential part of the human experience. Indeed a younger generation that doesn’t set itself against their elders bodes ill for the time when they will become the older generation. For does not every generation of young people have something to be angry about and rebellious against? Has not every generation of parents left their children a world in a worse state than the one that was bequeathed to them by their parents? Do we not therefore warrant the accusation that we have screwed things up, and today, given the ominous state of the ecology, screwed things up big-time? The rebellion of the young, I’m suggesting, is, at heart, of moral significance, with its idealism, energy, and can-do optimism, in contrast to the quite immoral cynicism and complacency that, alas, inevitably seems to set in with thinning hair and sagging bottoms.

Which is why I am a worried man. No, not because my hair is thinning and my bottom has long since sagged and dropped – though that is true! No, I am worried by what I take to be a distinct lack of rebelliousness in today’s young people. Instead of repudiating and bucking the system, the system has sucked them in. They’ve become its biggest fans. The in-your-face self-expressiveness of young people, always an essential element of their identity – it strikes me as so conventional, conformist even, it smacks of the manufactured and manipulated. By whom? By us older people, of course! By the marketers, advertisers, and commercial providers. Young people have become, fundamentally, economic units, consumers, defined, indeed defining themselves, by their spending power.

(Are you aware, by the way, just how recent a phenomenon youth culture is? It only started after the Second World War, and only began really to kick in during the late-fifties and sixties. Pocket money and ever-increasing amounts of it – that is, available capital, purchasing power – and the rise of a distinct youth culture: they go hand in hand.)

Does the irony escape you? We lament that children today grow up too fast when in fact the whole project is being funded by adults! Check out the magazines kids read: they’re adolescent versions of the glossy world of fame, fashion, and ersatz beauty that obsesses and drives the twenty-to-fifty-somethings. And so the advertising industry quite rightly treats the purchasing public as such as children. For the flipside of children growing up too quickly is adults not growing up at all – we have become infantilised. That’s what money and ennui will do to you. But savvy kids should know better.

Which leads me to point out the interesting juxtaposition of passages in today’s New Testament reading. On the one hand, there is the story of Jesus blessing the children who come to him; on the other hand, there is the story of the rich man who walks away from Jesus. The juxtaposition is hardly arbitrary, and it’s one of contrast and critique.

Jesus is talking about how a person enters the kingdom, or reign, of God. Not how to get to “heaven”, but how to become part of the world God wants it to be, a world of peace, justice, and love, the world Jesus came to announce and inaugurate. How? Answer: by receiving it like a child. But what particular childlike quality does Jesus have in mind? Not, I can tell you, innocence or humility. We’re talking real kids here, not Teletubbies! There was nothing sentimental about Jesus’ view of children; Jesus was no Victorian romanticist. Indeed if the text suggests anything about children it is their weakness and helplessness – they have to be brought to Jesus. No money, no possessions, no position, no power – these are the things that make them role models for the kingdom. Interesting that. We’re always banging on about children needing adult role models, whereas our Lord thinks just the reverse: it’s adults who need children as role models.

And this interpretation – that it’s children’s pennilessness and powerlessness that make them role models for the kingdom – this interpretation is confirmed by the following story of the rich man. For here is the proverbial man who has everything – and observe that he is a good man too, he keeps the commandments, he is a pillar of the community, a member of the Rotary Club or the Round Table – yet so possessed is he by his possessions that he is quite unable to enter the kingdom of God, which demands dis-possession – demands weakness, not strength, demands helplessness, not control.

But as I have suggested, today’s kids would seem to have more in common with the rich man than the child. Just look at the possessions – from designer clothes, to mobile phones, to personal computers. And odd though it may at first sound, they’ve got the power to go with them – and it comes by via the tacit permission of their parents. Just think of the manifesto of the famous Spice Girls – Girl Power – and think of their target audience, the target audience, for that matter, of all girl and boy bands: ten-to-twelve-year-olds. And think of how parents, in oblivious obeisance to the market economy, and to keep the domestic peace, collude in turning their children into shoppers.

I know, I’m beginning to sound like the old man I began with: “The trouble with kids today …” I don’t mean to. Rather I’m simply trying to sketch out the reality of youth culture today, which strikes me as virtually the same as the virtual reality of adult culture today. Consumerism is the common theme: the commodification of everything that moves, the itching and scratching of restless, insatiable desire, the celebration of ever-expanding choice, choice, and more choice. Isn’t this our common reality? It is little Matthew’s reality too.

HOWEVER: whenever we baptise a child in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, baptise him/her into Christ, we initiate him/her into a different reality, an alternative reality, a counter-cultural reality we call the church. At least that’s the theory. Because you and I both know that, in practice, on the whole, Christians are as mesmerised as non-Christians by the idol of consumerism.

NEVERTHELESS: here you are, and here a few of us come, week by week, to see and hear the church “fess up”: to laugh at the pretensions of consumer capitalism’s ridiculous little gods, to expose the lies the world lives by, to tell it like it is to each other in love, even when it hurts, and to practice the quaint and lost arts of forgiveness and peacemaking when violence and vengeance make all the running with the good guys and bad guys alike. And there is no bouncer at the door. All are welcome here without distinction – saints and sinners, losers and winners, the poor and the wealthy, the ugly and the beautiful, the queer and the supposedly normal. Because here the good news of God’s foolish, prodigal, disarming love is proclaimed, as we try to keep alive the rumour of an altogether different God from the one you will find anywhere else, the God who passes judgement on wealth and power, valorises the vulnerable, and calls us into a community of belonging, need, and care.

And so today we not only baptise little Matthew, we also hold him up as the very embodiment of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we want to enter the kingdom of God, we will get in line behind him.

Church and business: retail therapy

Here’s a letter that Kim Fabricius recently published in the British church magazine Reform:

I have no problem with the church in the retail park (“Retail Therapy”, Reform March); what I do have a problem with is the retail park in the church in the retail park.

Mega-malls are the cathedrals of consumerism in which bending the knee to global capitalism takes the form of conspicuous and relentless shopping. What concerns me is that the ecumenical chaplaincy at Middlebrook Retail Park, Bolton might simply be the court prophet that blesses such pagan subjection to distorted desire and spiritual restlessness.

I am concerned, for example, that the “calm space where worries can be talked through” sounds suspiciously like what Philip Rieff calls reducing the gospel to “rubber nipple” therapy in the burgeoning “anxiety market”.

I am concerned that so-called audacious conversations with the punter, the staff and the boss may not include the pathologies of shopping and debt, the sin of corporate avariciousness, the smoke and mirrors of marketing and branding, the ethics of fishing-the-bottom (the north shops, the south drops), the economic suicide of protectionism, and so on. Now that would be audacious.

And I am concerned, at source, about the agreement between church and management that presumably sets parameters for the project: is the chaplain free to evangelise, spearhead fair trade campaigns, fight for workers’ rights, etc – or is the gospel in chains?

I hope I’ve got it wrong, and that “retail chaplaincy” has nothing to do with greasing the squeaking wheel of the market economy by suppressing hard theological questions and colluding in the privatisation of faith. (As a university chaplain I myself have, of course, exercised a pastoral/counselling ministry; but I have also felt compelled openly to criticise university management for its obsession with a business model of learning, as well as for its contemptible investments in the arms trade.)

It is suggestive, I think, that when Paul ventured into the market place in Ephesus (Acts 19:21ff.), he caused such a “serious disturbance” (v. 23) over the trade in silver that the crowd rioted and tried to lynch two of the apostle’s companions.

Dishonest money: what the financial crisis tells us about ourselves

A guest-post by Scott Stephens (originally written for an Australian church newspaper)

Credit is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It saturates our lives – from the personal credit we each use to purchase household items or to buy our homes, to the shadier, more mysterious world of credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives that commercial banks now trade like a currency.

But it’s the very ubiquity of credit that prevents us from seeing its true nature, like being unable to see the wood for the trees. Credit is, in essence, the promise of limitless, indefinite, unfathomable wealth. And we need credit is because of the kind of lives that we have become accustomed to living, or the size of the profit margins your investors demand. Credit is, like most facets of our economy, an invention, a form of technology for generating more money. But the real innovation of the last two decades has been the willingness of banks to trade debt and risk itself, and thereby to make the economy both more profitable and more volatile.

Likewise, on the personal front, it has been the availability of “cheap money” in the form of low interest mortgages, the subsequent housing bubble, and the conversion of home equity into another line of credit that has pumped billions of dollars into national economies. What we have witnessed, in other words, is a natural extension of the very logic of money, which has aimed from its very beginning at generating more and more of itself, seemingly out of nothing.

This surprisingly modern idea – money generating more money – was actually first put forward by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. He observed the introduction of markets into the first great metropolises of Asia Minor, and even described trade as “the salvation of the states.” But Aristotle was then shocked to observe that the efficiency and simplicity of the market seemed to unleash something monstrous in the human heart. As people saw how much money there was to be made, they began lusting after “profit without limit.” They traded “the good life” (namely, a life organized around virtue and the common good) for lives of excess. Aristotle concluded that, whereas trade had the potential to be “the salvation of the states,” the seemingly limitless flow of money trade introduced into the life of the city brought along with it vices or moral impairments that would be the destruction of the city.

The vices he named were: greed, an inability to be satisfied, a lack of sobriety or self-control, and the willingness to profit through usury. The great tragedy, of course, is that the very vices that Aristotle identified as most corrosive to the common good have become the celebrated virtues upon which the modern economy is built. Capitalism thrives only through these vices.

While we hope and pray that those in positions of influence will find a just and effective response to the current credit contraction, should we not also reflect on our own indulgence in the greed and uncontrolled lifestyles that have brought us to this point? Shouldn’t we hope that out of this comes a rediscovery of a keen sense of the common good, and of new forms of community that nurture the virtues that have long since seemed to disappear from our society?

The onus, then, is on the church – not merely to pray in some benign way that God would mollify the effects of this financial crisis, but really to constitute that alternate form of community. To give the formation of Christian virtue and Christlike generosity priority over misguided “stewardship” (which so often is ecclesiastical code for white-knuckled miserliness). To have the courage to tell our congregations that participation in the Body of Christ means wanting less, using less, wasting less, so that we can distribute more. To embrace those sacramental resources that have been entrusted to us to keep us faithful to our calling, and which themselves enact a radically different kind of economics to that of corpulent capitalism.

The market and the eucharist

“We live our lives at the intersection of two stories about the world: the Eucharist and the market. Both tell stories of hunger and consumption, of exchanges and gifts; the stories overlap and compete…. The call to Christians is not so much either to embrace or try to replace abstractions such as ‘capitalism’ with other abstractions. It is rather to sustain forms of economy, community, and culture that recognize the universality of the individual person…. The Christian is called not to replace one universal system with another, but to attempt to ‘realize’ the universal body of Christ in every particular exchange.”

—William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 89, 86, 88.

Daniel Radosh: Rapture Ready! Adventures in the parallel universe of Christian pop culture

Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture (New York: Scribner, 2008), 310 pp. (review copy courtesy of Scribner)

Now here’s a fun bit of weekend reading. Daniel Radosh, a liberal New York Jew (who blogs here), sets out to discover what Christian pop culture is all about. Americans spent more than $7 billion on Christian products in 2006. This is big business, and, as Radosh soon learns, there’s an entire parallel world out there, a vast alternative to mainstream pop culture, “like a mirror universe from a science fiction tale” (p. 2).

The book does not attempt a systematic analysis of evangelical pop culture. Instead, it unfolds as a series of quirky “adventures.” Radosh wanders across the landscape of American Christianity, describing numerous colourful characters and events along the way. Although he begins his journey with considerable cynicism, he remains an open and inquisitive adventurer.

Indeed, the book’s real charm lies in Radosh’s capacity for surprise – he frequently revises his view of Christian pop culture; he is easily impressed by the good in people (even when they’re a little crazy); and he’s quick to offer a generous interpretation wherever possible. The result, then, is a good-humoured and surprisingly sympathetic sketch of this strange parallel universe.

Of course, Radosh has no sympathy for some aspects of Christian pop culture. He has nothing good to say about the absurdly sincere born-again actor, Stephen Baldwin (he satirises Baldwin in a hilarious staged interview, one of the cruellest and funniest parts of the book). And when he visits a Christian wrestling match, he can finally only shake his head: “I decided that maybe some forms of pop culture really can’t be made authentically Christian” (p. 248). Let’s hope he’s right.

Similarly, Radosh has nothing but contempt for the phenomenally popular Left Behind series – a series of books whose theological inanity and ethical debasement are matched only by their abysmal literary quality. Commenting on the rampant religious violence of the novels (he quotes the final novel, where Jesus returns in glory: “Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor…”), Radosh offers the wry conclusion: “Gloria in excelsis Deo, motherfucker” (p. 78).

Radosh is also rightly critical of the dehumanising effects of the evangelical abstinence movement, with its gender essentialism (men are aggressive by nature, women submissive), its “virginity fetish,” and its depiction of women’s bodies “as objects to be managed by men: first by fathers then by husbands” (p. 253). Following in the wake of the abstinence movement comes the Christian sex advice movement, with its belated attempt to help evangelicals overcome their deeply ingrained sexual inhibitions. Although Radosh is sympathetic with the aims of this movement, he is discomfited by its simplistic biblicism. It might be amusing to hear a sex manual using the Song of Songs to provide a clinical explanation of the mysteries of oral sex and genital fondling. But Radosh wonders whether the Bible is really “a universal instruction manual” of this kind; whether something important is lost when the Bible is turned into a mere self-help manual for married couples. “Paradoxically, by trying to read the Bible as all-encompassing, pop Christianity actually diminishes it” (p. 275).

There is, then, a close relationship between the various Christian chastity/sex movements and the otherwise very different phenomenon of evangelical creationism. In one of his most unsettling adventures, Radosh encounters Ken Ham (who frightens him, and strikes him as a “borderline sociopathic” character), together with other leading creationists. In a visit to the Creation Museum, Radosh is confronted by the chilling portrayal of an entire alternative universe in which the history of the cosmos is constructed through a quasi-scientific reading of Genesis. Again, the Bible is diminished – and, frankly, rendered incoherent and ridiculous – through such an all-encompassing application to contemporary questions.

Although Radosh rightly critiques (and occasionally ridicules) these diverse aspects of Christian pop culture, his overall impressions remain hopeful and positive. In most of his adventures he is surprised by what he encounters. For instance, he is expecting the worst when he meets spiritual warfare novelist Frank Peretti, since Peretti’s novels rail venomously against liberals and leftists. But Peretti offers a surprising and touching confession. Discussing his novels from the 90s, he grows suddenly sad, and then admits: “I was very angry when I wrote that…. I lashed out a lot at people” (p. 116).

Again, Radosh is charmed by a prominent Christian supplier who talks with candid regret about the poor quality of much Christian merchandise – referring to some Christian paintings, for instance, the supplier remarks: “You had to love Jesus in order to hang this on your wall, because it was almost a sacrifice” (p. 102). And when Radosh explores the strange world of Christian comedy, he is led to wonder whether “our culture war could be eased just a bit if the public face of evangelicalism was a good-natured, tolerant, funny ordinary guy instead of James Dobson” (p. 233).

Above all, Radosh’s adventures are marked by a glowing portrait of Jay Bakker – a progressive New York pastor, and son of disgraced fundamentalist preacher Jimmy Bakker – who emerges as the book’s real hero. In Radosh’s eyes, Jay Bakker represents the future of American evangelicalism, and his growing friendship with Bakker seems largely responsible for his hopeful evaluation of the future of Christian culture.

Most of all, however, Radosh’s hopeful outlook arises from his confidence in consumerism itself. Concluding the book, he suggests that the problems in evangelical pop culture – its tendency towards intolerance, for example – will be resolved as Christian pop culture is more fully assimilated into the mainstream market. The weirdness and bigotry that characterises some aspects of evangelical culture will thus eventually be smoothed out – not so much through dialogue, discussion and reflection, but merely through the levelling operation of market forces. The result will be a more liberal and more tolerant Christian culture – in short, a more precise mirror of the values of mainstream culture.

By and large, this analysis is probably correct: in the setting of late capitalism, the creation of a vibrant and distinctive niche market goes hand in hand with the emergence of mass homogeneity. But I’m not so sure this is a comforting prospect. Instead, it ought to raise some disturbing questions about the nature of evangelical culture. It seems to me that the only flaw in Radosh’s analysis is his assumption that evangelical consumerism can be neatly distinguished from evangelical identity – as though the modification of evangelicalism’s consumer culture would not also be a modification of its religious identity.

The issues involved here are, to my mind, far more urgent than Radosh’s concerns about helping evangelicals to become nicer and more tolerant. We should perhaps ask what it means for religious believers to identify themselves by the merchandise they consume; what it means when we allow ourselves to become not a community, but a sub-culture, and thus one more market niche alongside others.

As Slavoj Žižek has observed, the logic of late capitalism presses towards the commodification of a niche identity for its own sake; the Christian merchandise I buy is not itself the desired commodity, but it is merely an ephemeral signifier of the real commodity, which is my identity as a particular sort of Christian. In this case, the product I am really purchasing is radically non-material, wholly spiritual; I am purchasing religious meaning and belonging, religious “community” (since the merchandise allows me to participate in a specific market niche). Here, any neat separation between my “faith” and my “consumer culture” is simply fictitious. To change the latter simply is to change the former.

So what we need today, I believe, is a sustained theological critique of this commodification of Christian identity, and a recognition that the spiritual identity provided by a consumer sub-culture is a seductive simulacrum, an obstacle to the risky venture of Christian faith. If we are to find authentic Christian identity, it will arise not from the benevolent operations of the market, but in a community which creates a new economic space within the world, with its own practices and its own ways of belonging. (More on this to follow soon in my review of William Cavanaugh’s excellent new book, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire.)

In conclusion, I think Daniel Radosh provides valuable insight into the workings of American evangelical pop culture. The book is a real page-turner, littered with surprising discoveries, zany characters, humorous observations and wise insights (it also has an excellent companion website). In the end, though, I just can’t share Radosh’s optimism about the future of Christian pop culture. Instead, my hope would be for the demise of this pop culture, and for the appearance instead of a church that knows its own identity – not an identity that can be bought and secured, but one that comes freely and without guarantees, only because it is sheer gift.

Carl Schmitt on politics, capitalism, and the Catholic Church

“The Catholic Church is a complex of opposites, a complexio oppositorum. There appears to be no antithesis it does not embrace…. Ultimately, most important is that this limitless ambiguity combines with the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision as it culminates in the doctrine of papal infallibility.

“From the standpoint of the political idea of Catholicism, the essence of the Roman-Catholic complexio oppositorum lies in a specific, formal superiority over the matter of human life such as no other imperium has ever known…. This formal character of Roman Catholicism is based on a strict realization of the principle of representation, the particularity of which is most evident in its antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today….

“The Church requires a political form. Without it there is nothing to correspond to its intrinsically representative conduct. The domination of ‘capital’ behind the scenes [of modern politics] is still no form, though it can undermine an existing political form and make it an empty façade. Should it succeed, it will have ‘depoliticized’ the state completely. Should economic thinking succeed in realizing its utopian goal and in bringing about an absolutely unpolitical condition of human society, the Church would remain the only agency of political thinking and political form. Then the Church would have a stupendous monopoly: its hierarchy would be nearer the political domination of the world than in the Middle Ages.”

—Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Umen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 7-8, 25.

On the realness of money

“For me, money has displaced the pivotal concepts of twentieth-century European philosophy, such as being, time, difference, repetition, subjectivity, signifier, lack, void and universality, as that which most demands thinking.”
—Philip Goodchild, The Theology of Money (Canterbury Press, 2007), p. 26.

“There is but a single ontological problem: ‘What is money?’”
—Philip Goodchild, “Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Davies, Milbank and Žižek (Duke UP, 2005), p. 130.

Climate change and the new global morality

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

In early 2004, Tony Abbott delivered a couple of remarkable papers – “The Moral Case for the Howard Government” and “The Ethical Responsibilities of a Christian Politician” – in an attempt to regain the moral ground seemingly lost by the Australian Government.

As he saw it, two potentially devastating trends were at work within the electorate. The first was the fickle but inevitable sense that the time had come for a change of Government. But it was the second trend that Abbott regarded as even more foreboding. There was a strong popular perception that the Government had lost its moral credibility due to the controversial “Work for the Dole” program, its intractably hard-line against asylum-seekers and, of course, the calamitous decision to join the American-led invasion of Iraq. Despite the fact that each of the Government’s positions palpably demonstrated a moral courage of its own, Abbott recognized that the “resentment of the moral guardians whose orthodoxies have been debunked and whose values have been usurped poses as big a threat to its re-election as the ‘it’s time’ factor.”

Time has vindicated Abbott’s analysis. For although the Howard Government won comfortably in 2004 – due more to a visceral suspicion of Mark Latham than any bump in Howard’s moral stocks – the 2007 election saw it caught in a perfect electoral storm. Boredom disconnected the Coalition from the electorate, effectively muting any further policy initiatives or repackaging of their message, while WorkChoices and the refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol left the Government stranded in a kind of moral no man’s land without any recourse to some higher agenda or greater moral cause. (In the final days of the campaign, Howard was left with the pathetically empty assertion: “Like me or loathe me, people know what I stand for.”)

But what we have witnessed over this election year is not simply the predicable demise of an increasingly sclerotic Government which had fallen out of step with the modern sensibilities and values of the electorate. Instead, the Howard Government was a casualty of one of the more pronounced trends in global politics today: the simultaneous banalization of domestic politics and globalization of public morality. To put it simply, as the role of national governments is dwarfed by the enormity of trans-national economic flows and the unfolding environmental crisis, and as people’s habits are more and more enmeshed in the libidinal matrix of consumerism, any immediate sense of morality or common purpose becomes de-localised and cast onto the global stage.

The core imperatives of this global morality are obvious, having been championed in the popular media and taken root in the zeitgeist through such slogans as “Fair trade not free trade” and “Green is the new Black,” and through the “Make Poverty History” campaign. These imperatives are: to mitigate the ravages of free market capitalism on the disadvantaged by means of domestic (grouped under the umbrella term, “welfare-state”) and international (fair trade, debt relief and foreign aid) measures, and to arrest the devastating effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases on our lived environment through the restriction of carbon and methane emissions, sustainable growth and clean energy alternatives.

Needless to say, the Howard Government’s WorkChoices legislation and failure to repent of its “sins of emission” by signing up to the Kyoto Protocol were unforgivable in view of these imperatives. By contrast, Kevin Rudd shrewdly aligned himself with the prevailing moral sentiment by revamping his social democratic façade, all the while pledging his allegiance to strong economic growth:

“Neo-liberals speak of the self-regarding values of security, liberty and prosperity. To these, social democrats would add other-regarding values of equity, solidarity and sustainability. For social democrats, these additional values are seen as mutually reinforcing, because the allocation of resources in pursuit of equity …, solidarity and sustainability assist in creating the human, social and environmental capital necessary to make a market economy function effectively.”

But this statement also points to the substance of our moral crisis today. The supplementary social democratic values that Rudd here espouses merely grease the skids of the capitalist machine, as it were, “creating the human, social and environmental capital necessary to make a market economy function effectively.” Similarly, for Rudd, Al Gore and most other climate change centrists, the solution to our current environmental woes lies not in any radical curtailing of our industrial or consumerist habits, but rather in some supplemental technology that will neutralize the global economy’s addiction to high emissions – such as carbon geo-sequestration, limited use of renewable energy, or perhaps a gigantic solar disc that will block a portion of the sun’s heat.

The problematic core belief in both instances is that the answer to our global environmental/economic problems lies further down the road on which we are already travelling. In other words, capitalism is the cure for the disease that it itself unleashed on the world – to use a line from Wagner’s Parsifal: “The wound is healed only by the spear that smote you.” (A nod toward Slavoj Žižek on this point.)

I would insist, however, that this moral zeitgeist, fuelled by an inherent faith in capitalism’s capacity to get us out of this mess, is not just impotent. It is positively harmful because it gives off the appearance of genuine activity and conveys a false sense of morality, even while we neglect our most fundamental moral obligations. I think of the way, for instance, that James Lovelock has ruthlessly condemned the half-measures self-righteously paraded by Kyoto signatories as little more than “each nation [trying] to gain brownie points for its diligence in meeting the Kyoto limits”; whereas in fact they are just “playing for time.” The reality of our situation demands more serious measures for, as Lovelock maintained in his recent response to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contiguous yet sustainable development is no longer an option:

“I see our predicament as like that faced by any nation that is about to be invaded by a powerful enemy; now we are at war with the Earth and as in a blitzkrieg events proceed faster than we can respond. We are in the strange position of living on a planet where climate and compositional change is now so rapid that it happens too fast for us to react to it. For this reason alone, it is probably too late for sustainable development. Enlightened living of this kind might have worked 200 years ago in Malthus’s time but not now.”

While Lovelock’s “Earth-at-war” stands for the absolute limit of global capitalism, pressing on capitalism’s certainties from the outside, as it were, it is imperative that we also recognize the internal or local limitations of capitalism. Noel Pearson has been rightly critical of Rudd’s reduction of the plight of Indigenous Australians to the disparity between the “privileged” and the “disadvantaged”, insisting that both terms already presume some degree of integration in the economic-cultural dynamic of capitalism. But Indigenous Australians are systemically excluded from the benefits of the free market economy, a state which no mere application of social democratic values can rectify.

“Aboriginal disadvantage,” Pearson says, “has become entrenched during the decades when social democrats, small-l liberals and conservatives influenced policy; many policies for Indigenous Australians have been liberal and progressive.” Here too, we are forced to recognize capitalism’s structural incapacity to embrace everyone within its sphere of beneficence, its inherent moral deficiency.

It is as if this vacuous brand of global morality that I’ve been describing has been spontaneously generated by capitalism itself as a kind of palliative, a way of softening the harshness of its insatiable growth and assuaging our own guilt. If so, then the almost evangelical fervour with which people confess themselves to be climate change “true-believers” might function rather like Marx’s “opiate of the masses” – a way of numbing our economic culpability, and of divesting us of our domestic responsibilities. Against this temptation to “globalize” our sense of morality, it has never been more important to insist on the concreteness of local ethical commitments. I would even go so far as to say that Australia has but one moral crisis on its hands – and that is the ongoing tragedy of Indigenous Australia.

The irony, of course, is that for all of Kevin Rudd’s self-righteous posturing on Australia’s Kyoto obligations, it was John Howard that proved his moral worth by committing his next term in Government to a constitutional referendum on reconciliation.

Nothing much

I’ve been laid up all day with a fever, so I took the opportunity to read Iain Pears’ novel, The Dream of Scipio (which is delightful), and to watch the remarkable film about the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls. The film includes Arenas’ famous observation about capitalism and communism: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream.”

Reading a bit of Agamben yesterday, I also came across a delightfully enigmatic quotation from Kafka’s notebooks: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.”

On Capitalism, God and Mammon

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

In his review of Don DeLillo’s highly acclaimed Underworld – whose sheer size and overall chutzpah established it as the last great novel of the 20th century – James Wood observed that “the book is so large, so ambitious, that it produces its own antibodies and makes criticism a small germ”.

I’ve often thought that the same description could apply just as easily to capitalism. Every attempt to curb its voracious appetite, to “humanise” its world-wide dominion, to place the economy back in the service of the greater good and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not simply failed, but has been assimilated, folded back into the existing economic order and turned into yet another expression of capitalism itself.

Take, for example, the wide-spread use of “anti-globalisation” rhetoric by designer labels and marketing firms, or even the current wave of chic enviro-fundamentalism. In both cases, there is a kind of coming together of opposites, where two trends which are logically opposed (like popular consumerism and radical conservationism) come to occupy the same space, and seemingly without contradiction. So, the exemplary product of global capitalism are T-shirts made in Chinese sweatshops bearing the “World Without Strangers” motto.

But my favourite instance of this absorption of a potential criticism of capitalism into the inert safety of pop culture can be found in the book version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Its back cover features an endorsement, not from Sir Nicholas Stern, nor even from Tim Flannery, but from none other than Leonardo DiCaprio! (I suppose there is a connection between Leo and big chunks of floating ice – but wasn’t his problem that the ice hadn’t melted?)

Yes – capitalism, too, produces its own antibodies. And it seems that nothing is outside of its grasp.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of global capitalism is to have made choice one of those inalienable human rights, to have ensnared the very notion of democracy within an indiscriminate right-to-excess, to have transposed freedom into economic or consumptive terms. This is an achievement that DeLillo grasped in a remarkable way. As he put it in Underworld:

“Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, the convergence of consumer desire – not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.”

Choice itself has thus become the true object of human longing, a longing that has parasitised or colonised human nature itself. And so it seems that Karl Marx was right: the vision of capitalism that I’ve just described – which embraces the entire globe, which can generate more money ex nihilo through the mysteries of financial derivatives and futures speculation, which can bring together polar opposites in apparent economic harmony – is, in the end, theological. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is Mammon.

So, here’s my question: how can we take Jesus’ statement, “You cannot serve God and Mammon,” seriously when God and Mammon are now in cahoots?

Let me explain. While everyone loves to poke fun at the ridiculous platitudes of “prosperity theology”, the conspiring of God with Mammon is much, much older. Max Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously proposed that the capitalist disposition to earn and accumulate arose directly from the Puritan sense of calling which embraces all of life.

But now that the capitalist drive has shifted from thrift to choice, from prudence to indulgence, from accumulation to experience, the way religion operates within capitalism has also changed. Instead of a secularised motivation for work, the function of religion today more closely resembles those medieval rituals that provided sinners with the means whereby to atone for their sins.

We have our own thinly veiled forms of penance – like tithing, charitable donations, watching PBS – each of which makes us feel better about participating in decadent consumerism. And not only that, these forms of penance allow us to participate by relieving any sense of guilt.

And so it is that capitalism and charity can cohabitate. The one lets you indulge, and the other lets you get away with it. The problem at the heart of the matter is that Christianity traditionally has geared itself to dealing with the guilty conscience of the West, how to escape from the consequences of our wrongdoing. No wonder it has so readily been accommodated by capitalism as its ideal religious accessory. It was, of course, Marx that first recognised the inherent connection, the deep symbiosis between actually existing capitalism and various forms of religious belief and practice:

“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification. It is the imaginary realization of the human essence, because the human essence possesses no true reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.… The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion.”

When Marx goes on to insist that a critique of capitalism must begin with a critique of religion (“the criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth”), wasn’t he simply repeating Jesus’ warning, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them”? Such expressions of disingenuous charity – performed for one’s own peace of mind and in the service of Mammon – are the oil in the capitalist machine.

Perhaps the best way of breaking today’s alliance between God and Mammon, then, is to refuse ourselves the false comfort of token acts of charity and fashionable faith, so that we can see our behaviour for what it really is and dare really to live differently.

Now just to be clear, so that no one can come back later and accuse me of coming dangerously close to Marcionite language, let me just confirm that I am absolutely a Marcionite! Radical Paulinism – as Barth recognised in the preface to the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans – represents one of the crucial resources for opposing capitalism, liberal democracy, and the inherent idolatry that sustains them both.

Karl Barth: the word in this world

Karl Barth, The Word in This World: Two Sermons by Karl Barth, ed. Kurt I. Johanson, trans. Christopher Asprey (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2007), 66 pp. With an introduction by William H. Willimon.

In this splendid little booklet, two remarkable sermons by Karl Barth appear in English for the first time. The juxtaposition of these two sermons provides a striking picture of some of the ways in which Barth’s preaching changed over the years.

On the one hand, both of these sermons were preached amidst situations of global catastrophe and crisis. The first was preached in April 1912, just days after the sinking of the Titanic; and the second was preached in November 1934, two days after the Confessing Church had taken a public stand against Hitler (and two days later, Barth would be dismissed from his university post). Both sermons thus take the form of emergency proclamation, of urgent announcement amidst crisis.

On the other hand, the two sermons are remarkably different. In the first, Barth takes the sinking of the Titanic itself as his text – he insists that this event is the organ of divine revelation through which “God addresses us with … power and urgency” (p. 32). The sermon is thus entirely immersed within its specific situation; there is (in good liberal fashion) a presumed identity between divine revelation and the movement of history. This was precisely the position that Barth would later denounce and repudiate so fiercely in his commentary on Romans.

Needless to say, by the time of the 1934 sermon Barth’s mode of preaching is very different. Here the contemporary situation is even more urgent and more dangerous than in April 1912 – here, the German nation as a whole is steaming towards hidden disaster. But Barth only alludes to these specificities in passing – his entire sermon, from the first word to the last, is absorbed by the world of the Bible and by the sovereign command of God. Hitler, for example, is never named, but only alluded to as a mere “nothing.”

The two sermons thus offer a striking contrast. Indeed, the later Barth looked back on his Titanic sermon with considerable horror – in his Homiletics (WJKP, 1991), he called it “the monster of a full-scale Titanic sermon”! Following Barth’s lead, William Willimon also suggests in his introduction that this is a very “bad” sermon (p. 18), since its text is the newspaper rather than the Bible.

Nevertheless, I myself would like to say something in defence of this early (liberal) Barth – for all its theological failings, I think his Titanic sermon is an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of preaching. Even if the whole sermon is structured by the sinking of the ship itself (rather than by any specific biblical text), Barth’s perception of this event has already been filtered through a biblical imagination – so that the true starting point of this sermon is not merely a historical event, but a biblical “reading” of this event.

Barth’s main argument is that the sinking of the Titanic is the judgment of God: it is God’s judgment on the “crime of capitalism,” in which “a few individuals compet[e] with each other at the expense of everyone else in a mad and foolish race for profits” (p. 40). Barth thus sees the sinking of the Titanic not merely as an isolated occurrence, but as an event wholly conditioned by a larger web of social and economic relations – the same web of relations which also structures the lives of the working-class parishioners here in the little village of Safenwil. For that reason, the judgment of God on the Titanic is connected – urgently and immediately – to the lives of these parishioners. The theological horizon which shapes Barth’s interpretation of the Titanic, in other words, is the same horizon against which his parishioners must understand their own material struggles.

So while I’ll admit that this very socialist and very “liberal” sermon on the Titanic is a far cry from Barth’s later preaching, I think this sermon also expresses something important about authentic Christian proclamation. In the sermon, God is addressing these particular people. And so the preacher must interpret not only the biblical text but also the world itself through the lens of the gospel.

On one occasion, the Word of God might be proclaimed by making Hitler disappear anonymously into the world of the Bible as a powerless “nothing”; on another occasion, the Word of God might be proclaimed by speaking directly against the “crime of capitalism,” and by summoning the people of God to re-imagine their own material world as the place of God’s reign. Two very different sermons, but – if we listen carefully – are we not hearing the same Word?

Slavoj Žižek as theologian

In my struggle to make sense of the entertaining but baffling thinker, Slavoj Žižek, I’ve been reading several articles in the new International Journal of Žižek Studies.

One of the essays by my friend Scott Stephens offers a helpful account of the central theme of Žižek’s work. In this essay, “Žižek, My Neighbour: Regarding Jodi Dean’s Žižek's Politics,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 1:1 (2007), Scott characterises Žižek as the quintessential theologian of global capitalism.

“[T]he theological dimension of Capital is the fundamental determinant of Žižek’s work, the inert mass around which his entire conceptual apparatus orbits. The planetary metaphor here is not, in fact, entirely inappropriate. For as Jacques Lacan put it, the Real – the immutable is-ness of reality as such – is, like the stars, always-in-the-same-position (toujours à la même place). When Žižek states unequivocally that Capital is Real, he is making a serious claim about the ontology of our global situation: the specific nature of Capital demands an appropriate form of philosophico-political activity. Direct intervention inevitably gets folded back into the existing economic order, such that even the harbinger of the demise of global Capital – the threat of ecological cataclysm – can be transubstantiated into an expression of Capital itself. The only proper activity now is to think Capital, not as it actually exists, but theologically, at the level of its substance” (p. 3).

Scott thus insists that Žižek is not at all concerned with proposing an alternative political system to global capitalism. Rather, “the one question that matters” for Žižek is: “What do thinking and writing, as opposed to prescription and action, mean…?” The endless act of writing is thus itself Žižek’s politics, i.e., his theology. “If Marx was the one to analyze (indeed, to theologize) industrial capitalism, then Žižek is the theologian of late- or virtual-capitalism” (p. 4).

And speaking of Žižek and theology, you might like to check out this excellent online lecture by Žižek: “Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics on the Edge of Fear and Trembling.”

Christianity and capitalism

Over at Journeying with Those in Exile, Dan has been posting a long and challenging series on Christianity and capitalism. He advocates radically “nonsensical” forms of sharing, and in the latest post he highlights the economic significance of the eucharist: “We will have sufficient for all, even the least, as long as we break bread together. What we need to remember is that every time we partake of the Eucharist, we are breaking bread with the global body of Christ, with Christians in the two-thirds world. Thus, after such bread breaking, how can we not also share all things with them?”

Karl Barth on capitalism

“Fundamentally, the command of God … is self-evidently and in all circumstances a call for counter-movements on behalf of humanity and against its denial in any form – and therefore a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. The Christian community has undoubtedly been too late in seeing this in face of the modern capitalistic development of the labour process, and it cannot escape some measure of responsibility for the injustice characteristic of this development…. The main task of Christianity in the West is … to assert the command of God in face of [capitalism], and to keep to the ‘left’ in opposition to its champions, i.e., to confess that it is fundamentally on the side of the victims of this disorder and to espouse their cause.”

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, p. 544 (KD III/4, pp. 624-25).