Where do we go from here?

The failure of a dominant narrative & the need for a new social imaginary

I was recently introduced to a magazine called Prospect by an Anglo-Irish friend, Colin Greene. It offers a regular series of cultural and political essays that cover current affairs, the arts, economics and culture. The lead article in the latest edition is by Robert Skidelsky. Entitled “Where do we go from here?“, it addresses some key issues in the current global crisis. (You can also connect with several short pieces Colin Greene and I have written.) Skidelsky argues that the current financial crisis is a failure of the market system: it is a crisis generated by the system itself, not some outside agent or actor. He then outlines three levels of failure.

1. First, institutional: banks, regulators etc., succumbed to the ‘efficient market left to itself’ hypothesis.
2. Secondly, the crisis was intellectual. Alan Greenspan’s confession to the US Congress earlier this year epitomizes this failure: ‘I never saw it coming!’ Why? Because he wore a set of intellectual lenses that blinded him to alternative explanations.

Anne Rice and the Catholic Church in an Age of Discontinuity

I was listening the other day to Canadian national radio (CBC). Its Tapestry program interviewed Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles (Interview with a Vampire was turned into a movie). After many years as an atheist, she recently returned to her Catholic faith. (The Tapestry podcast is of the interview is available for download in .mp3 format.)

I was held by the beauty of her language, the journey that took her so far into darkness searching for bearings after the death of a daughter and the end of all possibility of believing in God. I was struck by the deeply literate ways she described the journey into atheism and its long returning. You can read it in Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Anne Rice is no naive fool filled with romantic illusions about the church. She’s indwelt church history, so knows its glory and broken humanity. She also knows the philosophies of our time better than most.

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.