Craig Uffman on Rowan Williams

by Craig Uffman

Ruth Gledhill of the London Times quotes an article by Rowan Williams in which the Archbishop of Canterbury reflects theologically on the current credit crisis. Williams’ reflections are well worth pondering.

Unfortunately, Gledhill can’t resist a provocative blog headline about Karl Marx that distorts the Archbishop’s thinking: her article is entitled: “Karl Marx ‘right’ to condemn capitalism, says Rowan.” Williams’ essential point is in fact one that many Jewish and Christians prophets have made, and one that Marx, as a student of Hegel, speaking as a Jew in the radicalized voice of a secular prophet, happened to make during the time when the classical synthesis between Reason and Mystery finally broke down. It is no less true simply because Marx recognized its truth, too. Williams comment is actually quite astute theologically: “unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; [Marx] was right about that, if about little else.”

Rowan’s remarks are below:

‘Like [19th century English novelist Anthony] Trollope’s hapless young clerics and feckless young landowners, individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else¹s wholly disposable asset,’ he writes.

‘It is a sort of one-syllable nursery parable of what the last couple of weeks have illustrated in the world of global finance and, of course, a reminder that what we have been witnessing is not just the product of a couple of irresponsible decades.’

He in particular criticises the trading of debts of others without accountability.

‘This crisis exposes the element of basic unreality in the situation - the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders,’ he says.

‘To grant that without a basis of some common prosperity and stability, no speculative market can long survive is not to argue for rigid Soviet-style centralised direction. Insecure or failed states may provide a brief and golden opportunity for profiteering, but cannot sustain reliable institutions.

‘Without a background of social stability everyone will eventually suffer, including even the most resourceful, bold and ingenious of speculators. The question is not how to choose between total control and total deregulation, but how to identify the points and practices where social risk becomes unacceptably high. The banning of short-selling is an example of just such a judgment. Governments should not lose their nerve as they look to identify a few more targets.’

He questions whether we can recover a sense of the connection between money and material reality and warned of a kind of fundamentalism operating in the markets.

‘Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.

‘What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to keep ourselves from idols, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose - which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.’