Alan Roxburgh: Response to Colin Greene on the Economic Crisis
The Blind Leading the Blind
[Karl] Polanyi’s thesis is that there can be no self-regulating market. The functional ideology behind the last quarter century of economic life in the West has been, of course, the orthodox conviction that the self-regulating market is the form of economic life whose laws, if left to themselves, will cause all human life to thrive.
Who can forget the image of Alan Greenspan, this past October, sitting before the US Congress to answer questions about the economic meltdown? It took shape during his long tenure at the head of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan had been before this very same Congress many times over the past decades. Congress had attended to him with the reverence and silence one would greet a Bishop or Pope. Greenspan is the quintessential ideologue of the self-regulating, ‘free market’ shaping the economic policies of the West for some two decades. There he sat as Congress wanted answers to why this crisis had happened on his watch. All Greenspan could offer was the reflection that we’re all shaped by ideologies - he prevaricated, choosing to confuse frameworks with ideologies – and the penultimate confession: ‘I never saw it coming.’ Why? Because of this ideology, this belief that would and could not be swayed by any counter argument, that markets regulate themselves.
The concept is simple; to employ art to tell the Christmas story. Seek tactile interaction – make a star out of wire, mark your home town on a world map, record the one thing you would take with you on a refugee journey – as a way of inviting people into the Christmas story.
