Douglas Knight

You know your problem? You live in a culture which does not take ideas seriously. It does not believe that anyone lives or dies or kills themselves for an idea. But people do. A vision inspires them. Their imagination drives them. Whether the revolution they are looking for is going to bring about the Post-Carbon future or a universal Caliphate, it is this vision and their imagination that moves them. They hold out against the dominant but dismal idea that what we want is determined by what our bodies need, or by what our gender or class or ethnicity demands. Islamicists and all other Utopians are driven by their imagination. They assume that ideas and freedom are more important than our stomachs. You Westerners believe that we are propelled only by our material interests, and that every idea is cloak for the truth of the base appetites beneath. We live in a very pessimistic society, a lot of Gnostic and Manichean stuff undiagnosed out there. We live in a culture that does not believe in culture. Which is why it despises Christians. A notice on the door of St Mary Aldermanbury advertises a talk entitled ‘Why are Christians Strange?’ How deeply we Christians have internalised other people’s perplexities and resentments. But is it really good for them that we should do so? ‘Why don’t Christians fall into line?’, ‘Why don’t they think like the rest of us, ‘Why don’t we make them behave like the rest of us.’ Put that monastic home-spun on again, you Christians, and practise your hymns, for your time will soon be here.
Niall Ferguson talked to audience of merchant bankers in St Paul’s Cathedral last night, one of the many launches of his biog of Siegmund Warburg. The title he gave himself was ‘Men, Morality and Money.’ Ferguson’s line was that when a boy, Warburg’s Mama made him pray every night, and before doing so, examine himself to find the errors and omissions of the day. Warburg thus remained a very moral man, the very model of ‘relationships banking’ rather than ‘transactions banking’. Go and do likewise, was Ferguson’s understated message to the assembled bankers. One reason that we have a financial crisis he said is that financiers don’t read history, even financial history, so never imagine (again, imagination) that their actions have consequences which may rebound on them, and that from time to time in human affairs things get rough. Warburg was a responsible banker because he, almost alone, escaped the political consequences of the economic collapse of Weimar to epitomise the old-fashioned banking of the City of London pre-the big bang. Today’s bankers are too young to remember even the 27% inflation and power-cuts of the Nineteen-Seventies. Something to look forward to.
Though Ferguson is a performer, the echo created by the architecture of that vast building meant that his voice cancelled itself out, making him scarcely audible. That building does not allow you to understate and remain subtle. You cannot offer morality ironically there. You have to give judgment, intoning slowly. Ferguson and the bankers and I were all under the judgment seat of Christ, sitting in the great cross which is the transept. Ferguson, or any one of us, can simply ask ‘Have we all done something very foolish? Have we done something that endangers our economy and our society? Have we made it more likely that the next generation will have less opportunity to live in an open economy and society than we have had? What resources does the Gospel give us to weigh these questions?’
You make no cultural contribution by talking about culture or history or morality. You have to begin with judgment. You can talk about the judgment of our successors on us, and indeed our own likely judgment when in twenty years’ time we look back on our present selves. And you can talk about the judgment of God. If you want to make a contribution, begin with the Christian faith and stay with it. Only by saying what the gospel is are we able to secure our hold on any of the cultural by-products – the political liberty that enables the free market – enjoyed by the majority who wish to remain Christianity’s cultural free-riders. You like freedom, freedom to trade? Be a Christian. Be a Jew. Someone asked Ferguson about Islamic finance, and after saying something affirming, he said that Islam was the greatest single threat to freedom and civilisation. If the assembled financiers were tired of freedom and civilisation they should simply carry on as they are and events will do the rest…

Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim.
Daniel Greenfield Sultan Knish

Suicide, or as the participants doubtless dubbed it, a “martyrdom operation,” was the evident goal of the Hamas supporters on the Mavi Marmara… the incident was an exercise in the theater of horror, one suicide attack in long and sickening series of suicide attacks.
It is hard to see what sequence of events might prevent a horror beyond the worst imagings of the Western public. That is the Islamist trump card. Even if the West wins, the Islamists believe, it loses, as America did in Vietnam and France did in Algeria. The cost of victory will be a wave of horror and revulsion that destroys Western morale. And they well may have judged us aright. If we are incapable of distinguishing our culture from the failing culture of death that has empowered itself in so much of the Muslim world, we will not survive.

David Goldman ‘The Horror, the Horror’ on the High Seas

Introduction to ‘Gospel and Economy’

Unregulated finance, the ideology of unfettered free markets, and state capture by corporate interests are what ended up undermining democracy both in North America and in Europe. All industrialized countries are at risk, but it’s the eurozone – with its vulnerable structures – that points most clearly to our potentially unpleasant collective futures.
As a result of the continuing euro crisis, European Central Bank (ECB) now finds itself buying up the debt of all the weaker eurozone governments, making it the – perhaps unwittingly – feudal boss of Europe. In the coming years, it will be the ECB and the European Union who dictate policy. The policy elite who run these structures – along with their allies in the private sector – are the new overlords.
We can argue about who exactly are the peasants, the vassals, and the lords under this model – and what services exactly will end up being exchanged. But there is no question we are seeing a sea change in the post-war system of property, power, and prosperity across Western Europe, just as Hayek feared. An overwhelming debt burden will bring down even the proudest people.
Simon Johnson The European Road to Economic Serfdom
Our own red-tory Philip Blond’s Respublica publishes The Venture Society – A small state, big (civil) society, please. It’s a mess of pottage but you have got to wish them luck. Curious how the Front Porch Republicans, of whom the excellent Patrick Deneen is the latest, have taken him to heart. Meanwhile my own account of these matters is nearly presentable enough to be shown to good friends.

States are not founded on social contracts, protection of the individual, or any such idiocy handed down from Hobbes; they are founded upon congregations, as Augustine explained in the City of God. It is not common interest but common love that defines states. We do not have a “self” interest as such; our “self” belongs to our ancestors and our children, unless, of course, we are contemporary Europeans, who despise our ancestors and have no children, and hope to pass into extinction with the minimum of bother.
From Jerusalem came the most persuasive promise humankind had ever heard, namely the promise of eternal life–not the fragile immortality of the pagan gods, whose doom already was sealed by fate in the myths of all the peoples, but life with God past the dissolution of the physical world. The world will wear out and God will discard it like a cloak, Psalm 102 sings, but the Lord will establish his servants forever.
The history of Israel is the history of the world, said Franz Rosenzweig, for as soon as the peoples learned that the God of the Jews had promised them eternal life, they considered how they, too, might become part of this covenant. The Christians emulate us and the Muslims parody us. I use the word “emulation” with respect: as Jacob Neusner observes (and Benedict XVI quotes him), when Jesus declares himself to be Lord of the Sabbath in Matthew, he in effect proposes to make Temple and Sabbath accessible to non-Jews. The truth of this proposition or its ultimate efficacy is another matter, but there is no doubt in my mind that orthodox Christians seek the loving Creator God of the Jews. Islam is a different issue: it maintains outward forms similar to Judaism which enclose an inner pagan content.
The passions that rage over Jerusalem reveal the desire for immortality that underlies all of politics. Humankind does not want safety, security, sustenance as much as it wants to cheat death. Islam’s claim to credibility is that it represents the final prophecy, which has corrected falsified and distorted Scriptures prepared by those sneaky Jews and Christians. It does not want to appropriate the Bible, but rather loot it and leave the discredited shell behind.
David Goldman Eternal Jerusalem

The Gospel tells us about the unity and integrity of the human being. It reminds us that each of us is a unique being, yet we are not ourselves apart from other people. Each of us exists within a series of dualities. Each of us is either a woman or a man; none is a neuter. Each is either married or single, either a parent or not a parent. Each of us is ourselves, but also someone’s sister, brother, child, parent, friend. We are not mere units, persons without relation but we exist through these many relationships.
What is more, each of us is twofold because we are who we are today, and who we will be in ten year’s time. Each of us is not only this present but that future person. The unity of this person is not the present possession of any human being, not even of that human being himself or herself. Persons are not simply individual units, for whom it would be normal to be on our own. We are related to people other than ourselves. We do not simply create our relationships by our own say-so. Some relationships we inherit, and some we hope to pass on to those who come after us. We hope to create or pass on relationships that they will be born into, and if they are willing to recognise these relationships as good, we will have done something for them. But all that depends on thinking of ourselves as persons. Christians do so, but they may be in the minority.
Christians offer their complex account of the human being. On other accounts, persons are insidiously simplified. When we do not think of ourselves as persons, but merely as individual adults, independent units who make their own decisions from their own wills without reference to anyone else, we get a simplistic account of man and a much reduced version of our vocation as economic agents. The Christian view is that we may gain freedom by undergoing our own discipleship, that is, by subjecting ourselves to voluntary restraint of freedom.
The social sciences assume that each of us is an individual on their own, a unit without relation. The more we insist on individual freedom without such self-elected restraint the more we turn the human being into a unit who exists in on-off relationships with other units. These relationships exist only as long as both units want and no moment longer. This makes us one person against the world, for whom there turns out fortuitously, just one friend.
If we turn the person into a unit, who exists in relationship with other units who have no binding and long-term relationship with him, he is effectively in long-term relationship with just one other unit – the state. The corporations serve us as long as we have got money, or can borrow it, to buy their services. But this individual freedom of choice exists only as long as we are independent adults, who pay for ourselves, which we can do as long as we are in the job market. Of course our existence as independent agents begins to wane again as soon as we leave employment again when we retire and make our descent back down into dependency. In the middle of life, we may have many relationships, mediated by the market. By our attempts to grow in freedom without taking on any discipleship and self-restraint we surrender our powers to corporations and the market. But at the beginning of life and again at the end of life we have no money, cannot pay for ourselves, so the state has to supply these service for us.
Every attempt to increase people’s personal freedom that does not start with some form of self-imposed discipleship and self-restraint, tends to shifts responsibilities from that person to the state, and so from this person to all other persons. Every attempt to increase anyone’s freedom increase the power of the state and so increases anyone else’s unfreedom. The state is our parent, partner and sole true ally. Our life would consist is attempting to squeeze more resources out of it. Paradoxically, the more demands we make of it, the more the state is paralysed by special interest lobbies and unable to make good, sparing decisions on anyone’s behalf. On this basis, the individual and the state are mirror images. Each person is a little state and the state is a big person. The two of them are locked in this claustrophobic relationship. On this basis, the state is the true person, whereas we units are persons to the degree that we are dependents of the state.
So the Christian insistence that we are complex beings, who can enforce restraint on our present selves for the sake of our future selves, and for those who come after us, is vital to the concept of freedom. And freedom we agreed is vital to those unforced transacting that characterise economic exchange. You can’t have an economy without freedom. This is why the Christian view of man, as person, the complex being who is encountered only through dualities, is essential to the existence of an open economy. The Christian input, with the complex account of man who as image of God participates in love and freedom, is not only the origin of the open economy, but is essential to its continuing flourishing.

Spread out before the early settlers of this continent was incredible untapped wealth in the form of vast unsettled lands filled with natural resources—all for the taking. Now that the Frontier is mostly tapped out, we are seeing the long, slow, decline from prosperity to scarcity…and with it the loss of individual freedom. How long will it be before we see masses of government-dependent Americans protesting in the streets of our urban centers because the messiah state can no longer provide them with the handouts they have grown to depend on; that they feel they have earned and have a right to? The taking and the giving and the borrowing by government is unsustainable. We all know this. And we know the day of reckoning is coming. The best that messiah government can do is obscure the reality and delay the inevitable.

How then shall people who are cognizant of this eventuality live? Disengage as much as possible from these dependencies. Simplify your wants and needs. Steer clear of the bondage of debt. Provide for your needs of food, heat, and shelter as much as you can with your own hands and backbone. And, most fundamentally, turn your eyes from the false messiah state to the true Messiah. This response is as much spiritual as it is physical. What I am talking about is a return to the American pioneer spirit, characterized by a firm reliance on the God of the Bible, hard physical work, thrift, self-reliance, subsistence, and the family economy. While it is true that the Great Frontier, with all its uninhabited land and untapped natural resources is now, for all practical purposes, gone, the land remains. And if properly husbanded, the land can still sustain pioneer families in this new century, fraught as it is with impending shortages and instabilities.

Living on a section of land and working to make it productive will not bring wealth sufficient to satisfy the average modern American who is conditioned by our culture to spend, borrow, consume, and spend, borrow, waste. But in the days ahead, those people who have returned to the land, have equipped themselves with the tools and knowledge to make the land productive, and who are secure and content with little, these people will provide a valuable example for the helpless, discontent, and confused all around them. Pioneering is totally contrarian to the spirit of this age, but it is a positive, refreshing, satisfying course of action. It is the only appropriate personal response in the midst of the crisis we find ourselves in.
Herrick Kimball The Deliberate Agrarian

The Lord Jesus is God and man in one figure. When we worship him, we are standing before the open door of the throne room of the Lord. He waits for us through there, or since we are the ones who are constrained by our limits, it would be better to say that he waits for us out there. He calls us out of this stiflingly small place and into the vaster place of his immediate presence. And so we marvel at the Lord and so we worship him. That is what the angels are showing us, and why the disciples stand here open-mouthed, moving from bafflement to amazement, singing Holy, holy, holy… This tomb turns out to be the throne of God, where all his company stands around the Lord, for where the Lord is, there his people are gathered around him. It the gateway which opens for us so that we can go in to that company and his presence. Our future is through there, with them and him, for we were made for undying communion with God, and with one another, in God’s glorious company.
Easter morning 2010 He must rise from the dead

Here is a draft of the first chapter of the Economics book for your inspection.

1 Man and Economy

1. There are two economies, of the Church and the world. This distinction and duality is the basis of all others. Consequently, there are two contemporary economies, that of the economy of God, announced by the Christian gospel, and the modern economy, for which we have to identify a corresponding ideology of ‘Modernity’.

2. Christianity insists a person is a covenantal concept. Man is not by himself and then later with God and with his fellow-man. A person is never single before he is one-half of a couple and a member of a family. He is not alone before he is a member of society. In acting well towards his fellow man, he acts properly and for himself.

3. A person may exclusively love and unite themselves to one other person. The exclusivity and uniqueness of the two persons who irrevocably give themselves to one another is the basis of all other covenants, relationships, and so the basis of society.

4. The marriage covenant is an exclusive relationship, and the household it creates is private. Marriages may not be dissolved by the will of one partner, nor may households be dissolved or absorbed by the public square, the market or the state.

5. There are therefore two other economies, the public economy of the market, and the private economy of the household.

6. In the Church people from all stations of society stand shoulder to shoulder. The Church is the embodiment of the reconciliation of all social and ethnic opposites and so the authentic voice of society.

7. The Church is the present anticipation of the future reconciliation of all mankind. It is the voice of the future society pining and mourning for the present society that is separated and lost.

8. The Church is the community in which all are bound to each, and so it is the community in which trust is generated. The Church is the place of self-giving without calculation of return, and so of risk-taking. The two fundamental economic principles of trust and risk-taking originate in the Church.

9. In the Church persons can confess their sins, receive forgiveness and the possibility of a new start. When we take the judgment of others as an anticipation of the judgment of God, and repent, that judgment is good.

10. The Church has to name the powers. The Church has to diagnose our crises by relating them to our concept of man and its various reductions. It has to identify them as both the judgment of society on itself, and of the judgment of God.

11. The Church that is confident in the covenant of God and the promise of redemption can identify crises without fear, and give warning of disaster to whichever society it is sent.

12. The state is the result of all our individual inclinations to refer our own responsibility away. The excessive extent to which we do this accumulates this power in the centre without control.

13. The Church will survive a collapse of any state. The British people, and the virtues they have received via the Church, will survive it, and may only survive if they go through crises and collapse. Any crisis is a correction. The more we attempt to postpone our rendezvous with reality, the more traumatic that eventual correction will be.

14. Western, modern economics insists that payment by money fulfils and terminates a contract and releases its parties from all obligation and that money establishes full payment and remittal. Non-modern economics insists that there is no form of accounting or payment by which the relationship of any two agents can be finally closed. No debt can be entirely paid off; every relationship remains open; nothing begun can easily be ended. Payment of money does not spare us future requests or release us from the obligation of meeting them.

15. Our debt to past generations may motivates us to reproduce, to bring about the continuation of society and so give a future to our past. The faith that holds together ‘was’ and ‘is’, may understand that ‘is’ as ‘ought’, and so turn that ‘is’ into ‘will be’. Non-societies understand that each generation is in debt to all previous ones, and consequently to future generations.

16. Christians witness to those fundamental sources of economic subsistence, which promote the household and the dignity of labour and service, and in which, through informal accounting and an economy of favours, social capital remains developed and the human economy remains resilient.

17. The gospel has enabled the economic development of the West. Though the contemporary economy has arisen from a culture shaped by Christianity, the modern economy takes its definition from an antipathy to that culture. But Christianity is not identical with that culture or that economic path. The Church has resources that describe other forms of economics, and Christians model alternative economies. Though the Christian faith points us towards principles, it does not commit us to any model.

18. In faith, hope and love, Christian life models the form of life that points towards flourishing that is lasting, and so is both future and properly present.

19. Christian theological economics is a series of questions that may be put to pagan economics by which it can be kept within approximate restraint.

20. No nation lasts forever. Only the Church itself has the promise of eternal life.

I have been both a central banker and a market regulator. I now find myself questioning whether my early career, largely devoted to liberalising and deregulating banking and financial markets, was misguided. In short, I wonder whether I contributed – along with a countless others in regulation, banking, academia and politics – to a great misallocation of capital, distortion of markets and the impairment of the real economy. We permitted the banks to betray capital into “hopelessly unproductive works”, promoting their efforts with monetary laxity, regulatory forbearance and government tax incentives that marginalised investment in “productive works”. We permitted markets to become so fragmented by off-exchange trading and derivatives that they no longer perform the economically critical functions of capital/resource allocation and price discovery efficiently or transparently. The results have been serial bubbles – debt-financed speculative frenzy in real estate, investments and commodities…. While the problem is usually expressed as one of confidence, a more honest conclusion is that credit extended in the past has been employed unproductively and so will not be repaid according to the original terms. In other words, capital has been betrayed into unproductive works. The credit crunch today is not destroying capital but recognising that capital was destroyed by misallocation in the years of irrational exuberance. If that is so, then we are entering a spiral of debt deflation that will play out slowly for years to come.
London Banker

A coherent idea of discrimination requires a substantive account of justice, and that includes defining what legitimate rights individuals and organisations actually possess. All British citizens properly possess the prima facie individual right not to be discriminated against – in matters like employment, housing and social services – on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation. This is because these involuntary markers of identity are completely irrelevant to such matters. I said “prima facie” because even here there exist widely recognised and uncontroversial exceptions, often arising from the rights of organisations. A rape crisis centre surely has the right to discriminate against men when hiring its counselling staff (perhaps any staff). An African-Caribbean community centre obviously can’t be compelled by law to hire a white guy like me as its director. The Labour party is evidently entitled to discriminate on ideological grounds in hiring its research staff. These are all examples of what the law calls a “genuine occupational requirement” (GOR). The idea is simple and compelling: every independent civil society organisation has a prima facie right to maintain its identity and mission by hiring staff who will support the distinctive purposes of the organisation and uphold its raison d’être. This isn’t a “privilege”, as is often tendentiously suggested, but merely a condition of meaningful self-government. Why then cry foul when religious organisations exercise their right to invoke the GOR provision? Why single them out and deny them the same rights enjoyed by others?

Jonathan Chaplin The Equality Bill must not be used to undermine the right of religious organisations to govern themselves

Jonathan Chaplin is director of the Kirby Laing Institute of Christian Ethics, which is related to Tyndale House, in Cambridge. We need an Institute of Christian Ethics, or even of Christian Theology and Ethics, in London. I think it should look something like this and hold conferences like this one.

1. The Church is gathered
Every Sunday morning Christians gather together in worship. What are they doing in Church? What is happening in these worship services? Why do they meet and pray and sing? We are going to look at what is going on in Church.
We go to Church. We are called together and we come together. We leave our homes and offices to join this gathering. We are roused out of our everyday existence, drawn away from our computer, car and sofa to join these people. On Sunday morning we leave home and journey through these streets in order to come together with all the other members of our Church. We get up the steps and into the church, go down the aisle and take our places next to each other.

As we arrive we start singing. Our service begins with a hymn or a song. We are a pilgrim people who sing on their way, and the first hymn is our song for the journey. We sing because we celebrate as we make our way to the house of God. The Lord has called us together and gathered us here. He has invited us so he is our host and we are his guests. As we journey out of our homes, down the pavement to church, we are drawn into this gathering and we are glad and so we sing songs of praise that anticipate our worship together. Anyone can come in listen and join in. The invitation is general, so every church service is public. The whole community around the Church knows that it can go. Imagine that the Church stands in the middle on marketplace, and that it has no walls, but takes place in the open air so everyone can watch and can hear what is going on, or they can keep their distance, as they wish.
There’s more here…

The unfolding debt drama in Russia, Ukraine, and the EU states of Eastern Europe has reached acute danger point. If mishandled by the world policy establishment, this debacle is big enough to shatter the fragile banking systems of Western Europe and set off round two of our financial Götterdämmerung. Austria’s finance minister Josef Pröll made frantic efforts last week to put together a €150bn rescue for the ex-Soviet bloc. Well he might. His banks have lent €230bn to the region, equal to 70pc of Austria’s GDP.”A failure rate of 10pc would lead to the collapse of the Austrian financial sector,” reported Der Standard in Vienna. Unfortunately, that is about to happen.The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) says bad debts will top 10pc and may reach 20pc. The Vienna press said Bank Austria and its Italian owner Unicredit face a “monetary Stalingrad” in the East. Mr Pröll tried to drum up support for his rescue package from EU finance ministers in Brussels last week. The idea was scotched by Germany’s Peer Steinbrück. Not our problem, he said. We’ll see about that. Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, said Eastern Europe has borrowed $1.7 trillion abroad, much on short-term maturities. It must repay – or roll over – $400bn this year, equal to a third of the region’s GDP. Good luck. The credit window has slammed shut. Not even Russia can easily cover the $500bn dollar debts of its oligarchs while oil remains near $33 a barrel. The budget is based on Urals crude at $95. Russia has bled 36pc of its foreign reserves since August defending the rouble.”This is the largest run on a currency in history,” said Mr Jen.
Whether it takes months, or just weeks, the world is going to discover that Europe’s financial system is sunk, and that there is no EU Federal Reserve yet ready to act as a lender of last resort or to flood the markets with emergency stimulus.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown

Industrial economies are still at the mercy of peak oil. This basic fact of life means that we can’t expect the regular cyclical growth in productive activity that formed the baseline parameters for modern capital finance – meaning that we can’t run on revolving credit anymore because growth simply isn’t there to create real surplus wealth to pay down debt. The past 20 years we’ve seen the institutions of capital finance pretend to create growth where there is no growth by expanding financial casino games of chance and extracting profits, commissions, and bonuses from the management of these games – mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and all the rest of the tricks dreamed up as America’s industrial economy was shipped off to the Third World. But that set of rackets had a limited life span and they ran into a wall in October 2008. Since then it’s all come down to a shell game: hide the giant pea of defaulted debt under a giant walnut shell.
The sad truth of the matter is that we face the need to fundamentally restructure the way we live and what we do in North America, and probably along the lines of much more modest expectations, and with very different practical arrangements in everything from the very nature of work to household configurations, transportation, farming, capital formation, and the shape-and-scale of our settlements. This is not just a matter of re-tuning what we have now. It means letting go of much of it, especially our investments in suburbia and motoring – something that the American public still isn’t ready to face. They may never be ready to face this and that is why we may never make a successful transition to whatever the next economy is. Rather, we will undertake a campaign to sustain the unsustainable and sink into poverty and disorder as we fight over the table scraps of the old economy… and when the smoke clears nothing new will have been built.
James Howard Kunstler Forecast 2010

Jesus Christ is our king. That means that we have a good king, one who can do the job, actually the only one who can do the job. This king is there to protect us from the incursions and demands of those who want to exercise power without authority and who may be able to start doing us good but cannot keep it up. A king is simply a political leader. All leaders get their political authority from God, and God is the control and limit on them all. The world is full of undeclared chiefs, who want to make themselves our kings, without admitting as much, without allowing their power to become explicit or becoming accountable to us through the normal political channels. We Christians are here to remind all leaders that God commands them to act well for the people they have authority for, and that they will have to give an account of themselves, and will stand before that judge. All our political representatives are ‘kings’, ‘chiefs’: we don’t call them that, but that is how the bible regards them. Part of our job is to tell people and institutions who have effective power that with it they have authority to use it well, for the nation as a whole.
So now what about our own political classes? How are they doing? They exercise a form of kingly authority for us. Our government, from the smallest council employee to the prime minster, is the hand of God for us. We have to encourage them to govern, and tell them that they have a good and honourable task. We have to invite them to judge for themselves whether they are doing a good job. Each of them may and must carry out their office. They may do their job, at whatever point, high or low, in their particular institutional hierarchy, in the knowledge that they do it for us, for our good. This is their share in the kingly office of representative rule. They govern for the common good and so we encourage them to do this well, and we give them our thanks. We can remind them that we are here, and are watching, and that they will present their work to God, the only fair judge and true king.
Christ the King St George the Martyr 22 November 2009

Thus the social market, as practiced in Europe, requires the state to step in and provide for those without work and to provide for the mothers of children who have no resident father. These are inevitable results of transferring the responsibility for charity from the community to the state, which is itself an inevitable result of the attempt to make a humane economy, rather than a humane society… The facts have been effectively documented by Charles Murray and others. And the result is clear: that Charles Murray and those like him could never hope to be employed in the state educational system in Europe and would be subject to official condemnation by any politician called upon to consider the matter. The state has externalized the costs of its “social market” policies onto society, and the greater the costs, the more the state expands with fictitious plans to reduce them. Never has a better machine for expanding the rentier class of bureaucrats been devised than this one, which constantly amplifies the problem that it is established to solve. Hence, as educational achievement declines in Europe, state expenditure on education increases—to the point where, in Britain, there are nearly two bureaucrats for every teacher, appointed to deal with the social problems that they themselves make a living by producing.
Roger Scruton The Journey Home Intercollegiate Review Spring 2009

A five step neo-Darwinian refutation of neo-Darwinism:
1. A person is, in Richard Dawkins’ beautiful phrase, “a gene’s way of making another gene”. So forget religion, forget values, forget ideals, its all about reproduction; handing on our genes to the next generation.
2. Europe today is the most secular region in the world.
3. Europe today is the only region in the world which is experiencing population decline. As you know, zero population growth – a stable population – requires an average of 2.1 children for every woman of child-bearing age in the population. Not one European country has anything like that rate today. Here are the 2004 figures: In the United Kingdom: 1.74, in the Netherlands: 1.73, Germany: 1.37, Italy: 1.33, Spain: 1.32 and Greece: 1.29.
4. Wherever you turn today anywhere in the world, and whether you look at the Jewish or Christian or Muslim communities, you will find the more religious the community, the larger, on average, are its families.
5. The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.
From which it follows, as night doth follow day, that if you are a true neo-Darwinian believer you want there to be as few neo-Darwinians as possible. QED.
Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: of money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification ‘because you’re worth it’, in that culture, where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born? Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century. The century that is intellectually the closest to our own – the century of the sceptics and the epicureans and the cynics. Polybius wrote this:

The fact is, that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness, and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry, or if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two.

That is why Greece died. That is where Europe is today. Now, that is one of the un-sayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it. The only serious philosophical question is “Why should I have a child?”
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs

James Featherby is calling for Christian responses to the Credit Crunch
The structure of the banking and financial markets are complex, and the transactions within it equally so. This often calls for nuanced judgement calls to be made between a variety of issues and the balancing of one set of competing duties against another. It is difficult to discern the moral issues involved. It can be even more difficult to weigh the competing issues once they have been identified.
The whole gamut of human weakness has contributed to the credit crunch. This includes much that is morally culpable, but also much that is not. Simple lack of knowledge and foresight has been a major factor.
Filling the values gap is not the only answer on offer, and many will not see it as the solution. We will need to compete with the other remedies on offer. I would suggest that we need to do three things:
• First, rediscover God’s values in the areas of economics, business, personal finance and consumption.
• Second, rediscover our confidence in these values as being best for us, our neighbours and our children.
• Third, find the right ‘voice’ to communicate these values – a voice that offers life and not condemnation.
The credit crunch has delivered a profound shock to the foundations upon which the Western economic model was built. But will our financial institutions and governments simply weather the storm, make few minor regulatory adjustments and carry on as before? Can we take this perhaps once in a generation opportunity to consider the values that drive the system and reflect on what values should be driving the system?
James Featherby has produced the pithy twenty-page The White Swan Formula (PDF 2.9 MB)

Fırst, let us not rush past the moment in which we now stand. We will not learn lessons unless we engage fully with the consequences of our mistakes. A key part of that is a proper engagement with the pain caused by our shortcomings.
For too long, for example, the fınancial community has denied responsibility for the effects of the capital that it raises and allocates. So let us pause and recognise the personal and fınancial pain, close at hand and further afıeld, caused by this crisis.
Second, we must determine to understand and apply these values ourselves.
Unless we personally seek to serve, rather than be served, we will simply be hypocrites, and our arguments will remain hollow. Each of us needs to believe that these values work in practice for us individually, as well as for others, and then act accordingly. We need, quite literally, to put our money where our mouth is.
Third, we can join the debate and make our contribution. Everywhere the question is being asked ‘What sort of economy do we want?’ Let us engage in the discussion. We must not be satisfıed with conventional wisdom that says change cannot happen. It is better to blow the trumpet beforehand than reach for the whistle afterwards. Let us be for something, not just against something. One can never tell when the tipping point of opinion will be reached, and without the last straw the camel’s back remains intact.
The discussion is needed on multiple levels… Let us also look long and hard at solutions to the current crisis that simply try to return things to how they were, at least for those of us in the West, by borrowing more and saddling the next generation with the burden of paying the price that we decided not to bear ourselves.

Yup, but will talk about values do it? Or will it require processes of public judgment and public repentance which is, I think, what is meant by ‘engage fully with the consequences of our mistakes’ and ‘proper engagement with the pain caused by our shortcomings’?