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Ever get tired of trite phrases? There are few that get me going. “Cutting edge” is one, “movement” another. In churchland we’ve lots of (in the spirit of Foucault) power words signaling who’s in and who’s out; who’s de guerre (or flavor of the month) and who isn’t.
I think the “cutting edge” is shifting around. I think it’s part of God’s humor — that irritating way the Spirit messes with all the people, systems and ideas we’ve declared no longer ‘in’ and breathes fresh life into old bones so they become the new ‘cutting edge’.
Take the old Anglicans for example. I can claim identity here. As a baby I was carried up the short street we lived on (Burleigh Road South — named after Lord Burleigh, aka, William Cecil, who served kings and queen in the 16th century — a definite misnomer for a non-cutting edge neighborhood like Anfield in Liverpool) to St. Cutherbert’s church (long torn down and replaced by the dull flats of urban, post war renewal) where I was baptized and given a God-parent. Cutherbert was of Lindisfarne fame so, perhaps, that is why the Cutherbert thing stuck.
[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.
