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A down to earth liturgical battering awaits us after Christmas. No more “Away in the Manger”. Nor sweet, and posh, little voices from King's College Chapel. The wrapping paper in the bin, we hear about a stoning (St. Stephen on 26th December) and more killings, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents ( 28th December). Both have resonances today.
In the Acts of the Apostles St. Luke describes how Stephen, a Greek-speaking deacon, is stoned to death for delivering a long and highly critical sermon attacking his “stiff-necked” fellow Jews for rejecting Christ. Today it might be censured as antisemitism. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the only Gospel to tell this story, Herod is portrayed as wanting to kill the Christ child. But all Herod has to go on is location, Bethlehem, a small village, not far from Jerusalem. So the order goes out to kill all boys in Bethlehem under two years old. Perhaps 20 would have been killed. Collateral damage in today’s terms. These days the ‘acceptable’ number can be calculated by algorithm. The scale of the Bethlehem atrocity is, of course, not the main point for Matthew who is placing Jesus within the scriptural theme of Moses’ escape as a baby from the Egyptian Pharaoh. Like today’s authoritarian rulers Herod did in fact murder potential rivals. The Gospel tells a plausible story even if scripture scholars doubt its historical accuracy. Well, you might say, such biblical stories are nothing compared with our own pre-Christmas diet of mass killings in Syria, the individual torture of Sarah Sharif, the rape, sexual abuse, and all manner of perversity offered up on Radio 4 News breakfast, lunch, tea and supper. In short, Radio 4, our premier news service, seems determined to convince us its audience of what the Catholic Catechism calls Original Sin. And how strange that the BBC campaign to protect children from harmful content on social media doesn’t appear to recognise the prevalence of harmful content on its own radio and TV channels. Should we be wondering whether round the world both individuals and groups of people are very little safer from murderous brutality today than they were two thousand years ago? Has humanity at heart not changed? Even asking the question draws a secular society close to some theological insights. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), described evil as “the loss” or “absence of good” following St. Augustine nearly eight centuries earlier who wrote that evil is the “privation of good” (the loss of something normally present). Evil has no positive existence and is the product of the “will deficient” of human beings. So far clear enough. Though this takes some absorbing. But Aquinas in Part One of his Summa Theologiae, his training manual for peripatetic Dominican preachers, lands us amongst some tricky syllogisms and the issue gets a lot more complicated. But then the idea of evil itself is complex. In a general sense, Aquinas says, goodness is God’s gift to creation, and so to us, integral to our humanity; we are each endowed with the goodness proper to our nature. Animals, each with their specific disposition, are also endowed with their particular goodness. But ours is conditioned by the additional gift of reason and the ability to act purposefully for what we understand to be our good. In other words, there is a moral law written into human nature. Evil in human beings is the absence of that goodness, an absence that causes us to be drawn away from our proper disposition and into inhumanity. It is difficult to find the right words to describe why and how we are drawn away from the good. The word traditionally used was Concupiscence. Thanks to some degree to St. Augustine’s pre-occupations, concupiscence unfortunately has tended to become a synonym of lust. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) description is the “privation of the righteousness that any man (person) ought to possess”. It suggests more widely the all-important social dimension to human goodness and evil. And for Anselm the privation is mitigated by Grace which, Catholics would say, is seen working in exemplary fashion in the lives of the saints. Hannah Arendt captures another characteristic of evil in her controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics 2006. She portrayed Eichmann as a man whose horrendous crimes sprang from his not thinking. “It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity” that drew him into the Nazi project of the Holocaust. Eichmann had no special personal traits except “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement”. For Arendt, it was his apparent ordinariness, his banality, the absence of anything that would separate him from the Nazi herd, that led him into crimes against humanity and into a Jerusalem court room in 1962. In her second Reith lecture this year, Dr Gwen Adshead, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist who at Broadmoor treats perpetrators of extreme violence, addresses the common question “Aren’t They All Evil?”. That word ‘Evil’, she argued, should only be used as an adjective, never a noun. In some ways similar to Arendt, she spoke about how ‘cognitive distortions’ and ‘dysregulated emotions’ can create an ‘evil state of mind’ in otherwise ordinary people. In a profoundly Christian analysis she identifies the seven deadly sins as conditions conducive to an evil mind, placing her analysis within Aquinas’ conceptual framework, the absence or loss of the good. The perpetrators of monstrously evil deeds may be otherwise quite ordinary people. We should not be sheltered from that reality by easy accusations and easy answers. Once we blamed Adam and Eve now it is dodgy DNA. It’s hard for secular-minded people to discuss the issue because so much of the available vocabulary is religious: temptation, sin, weakness, guilt, wrong, Grace. The tabloids feel free to use evil as a headline noun. The Today programme has to make do with ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unacceptable’. Christmas inevitably reminds us of the plight of children and refugees in conflict zones and in our own society, the sixth richest country in the world, but with 4.2 million children living below the poverty line and 117,000 homeless households in temporary accommodation. Not asleep on the hay but no way for children to be living. War does not simply kill and maim children but damages psychologically those who survive. I encounter this damage working in a charity trying to help children in Maronite schools in a poor neighbourhood of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city. We see the consequences of poverty and trauma, from speech defects to severe behaviour problems. Some of the Syrians in Lebanon are taking their children back to an uncertain future in Syria. What must Christmas be like in the uncertainties of Ukraine? I remember a mural in an old Serbian Orthodox church showing two women sitting around a large cooking pot preparing a meal for the family in the manger. It had survived fire-damage from the 1990s Balkans war. My own carved wooden Malawian nativity set is as down to earth as that Serbian mural though short on sheep now. The Christmas octave reminds us that Jesus’s parents had to flee Herod’s violence with their refugee child, the child who came home to reveal the meaning of holiness.
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Nobody knows what awaits us as we brace for another Trump Presidency. Probably not even Trump. His “drill, baby, drill”, if heeded, threatens the future of the planet. Imposition of damaging tariffs is probable. Against China in 2018, he imposed $200 billion’s worth of tariffs creating a full-blooded trade-war. Such a trade war bodes ill for the UK, Canada and Mexico.
Both the immediate and more distant future are deeply worrying. One possible palliative for jangling nerves is People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism For An Age of Discontents, Penguin, 2019, by Joseph Stiglitz. Why bother to review a five-year old book by an American economist? Stiglitz is much published, renowned and reviewed. The clue is in the publication date. He was writing in reaction to the first Trump Presidency when policies were emerging from the chaos. He has a lot to say of relevance to Britain’s future. John Maynard Keynes, 1886-1946, believed investment, government spending and consumption raised output of goods and services, demand-side economics for short. A ‘New Keynesian’, Stiglitz diagnoses imperfect competition and a variety of market failures that require stabilisation by government’s deployment of fiscal policy, as well as nuts-and-bolts interventions, to increase growth. Think of Rachel Reeves’ budget which raised government spending by increasing borrowing and new taxes. Stiglitz served as Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1995-1997 and, for the following three years, as Chief Economist of the World Bank where he became senior Vice-President. Awarded the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2001, he became an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences from 2003-2023. He is obviously comfortable in the world of Laudato Si, 2015, and Fratelli Tutti, 2020, embodying Pope Francis’ thinking on the environmental crisis and society. As the title hints, he would be no less comfortable in a European social democrat government though MAGA-minded Americans would consider him a rampant leftist socialist. There is nothing narrowly economistic in Stiglitz’s thinking. He writes about Trump’s contemporary attacks on the US economy and political system but also links them to wider themes of society and science. “There are two pillars to the increases in our standards of living over the past 250 years: better understanding of how to organize society (checks and balances, rule of law), and better understanding of nature – the advances in science and technology. We’ve seen how Trump and his team have tried to undermine both”. Trump today is now more aware of the constraints on him restructuring society and economy to serve the wealthy 1% of the US population, which has more than 40% of the US’ wealth, and to which he belongs. Stiglitz repeatedly underlines the importance of research and innovation as the wells-springs of economic success; “That is why it is essential for there to be large public investments in research, especially basic research, and in the kind of education system that can support the advance of knowledge”. But is there enough weight and funding given to this by Starmer in his quest for growth long-term? Much of what Stiglitz writes about trade, globalisation, inequality and social justice today’s Labour Party would sign up to, even if initially facing tight, inherited financial constraints. These limitations show up most acutely in the difference between Jo Biden’s massive financial commitment demonstrated in the August 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to counter climate change, some hundreds of billions of dollars on clean energy, electric vehicles and carbon capture. During his first term, President Trump was working to sideline scientific and environmental experts while promoting industry executives and lobbyists, who were eroding the capacity of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Interior and other government agencies intended to serve the common good. He was unpicking some 125 environmental rules as Stiglitz went to press. National debt and global warming are rightly considered as matters of intergenerational justice. Stiglitz served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in a 2021 Supreme Court case on the admissibility of a lawsuit, Juliana versus the United States of America, first filed in Oregon in 2015 seeking an injunction to phase out fossil fuels. It involved 21 children aged between 8-18 and a non-profit (NGO) Our Children’s Trust specialising in what is known as Atmospheric Trust Litigation, based on the idea of the atmosphere being held in trust for future generations. Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, who gave her surname to the case, was 15 at the time. Litigation on it is still in play and such cases have been brought to court, or attempts made to get cases heard, for a quarter of a century. Here, Friends of the Earth in UK have spearheaded climate change related lawsuits with varied success. Where Stiglitz is vehement and Starmer subdued is on the significance of the global 2008 banking crisis and the failures of the financial services sector which Stiglitz sees as serving mainly themselves. The reckless greed of the bankers went unpunished in the UK and money that might have gone to public services went to bail-out those with the incredible gall of very rich who continued to award themselves with bumper bonuses. Part of the investment crisis faced by the UK government clearly comes from the perverse asocial, amoral, modus operandi of the banking sector. The problem is the market power of the bankers and the information technology giants. We need both, but regulated, as both, in practice are indifferent to our spectacular levels of inequality. The USA has the advantage of a written constitution which embodies a set of values. People, Power and Profits holds together with this scaffolding of values, the social and moral norms sustaining the human need for social cohesion and approval of The Theory of Moral Sentiments which Adam Smith published in 1759. We too need to hear and understand how core values inform our economy and democracy, social and intergenerational justice, equality of opportunity. We too need more reason, less emotion, and tolerance for those who have suffered persecution, in determining the path to a fair society. And the Labour government needs to present its policies more coherently as the outcome of its values. Yes, it’s still ‘the vision thing’. Stiglitz decries the way the American dream is more myth than reality. Labour Party dreaming seems to stop short at growth and grim pragmatism. We are lucky that our mistakes, cutting ourselves off from the European Customs Union and Common Market, isolating ourselves as a pretentious offshore island at a time of global perils, Prime Ministers who made us the laughingstock of the world, cannot compare with those of America. Despite our reduced means we do have a vision of what needs to be done about climate change. If Trump indeed dismantles all of Biden’s good work on green energy, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to describe it as a crime against humanity. When considering the forthcoming Trump Presidency we may come to hear Karl Marx’s adage “first time as tragedy, second time as farce” as words of hope. Meanwhile it’s good to know there are people like Stiglitz still around, smart, secular, surviving and offering a way forward. See TheArticle 11/12/2024 |
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