Financial Times – Martin Wolf

Themes: Society

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis – Asia’s revenge

If what they say is true, that ‘journalists write the first draft of history’, then Martin Wolf (one of the world’s top financial journalists) has begun to sketch.

“So among the most important tasks ahead is to create a system of global finance that allows a more balanced world economy, with excess savings being turned into either high-return investment or consumption by the world’s poor, including in capital- exporting countries such as China. A part of the answer will be the development of local-currency finance in emerging economies, which would make it easier for them to run current account deficits than proved to be the case in the past three decades.”

Wolf is arguing that a large part of the credit boom in the West has been driven by large surpluses in emerging economies. Essentially, poorer nations have been unwilling to invest into their own economies, fearing insecurity and lack of return, and have been moving their money into rich economies in the form of cheap credit. The collapse of this system should lead to a better distribution of wealth and investment across world economies.
A good thing, I should think.

Comment and Share

Porous, Buffered, Ecological, ?

Themes: Society

One of our lecturers earlier in the week alluded to the shift in an individual’s concept of Self that can be detected between medieval and modern Western societies. In fact, even the way I’ve framed that sentence would be a pretty good indicator of where I belong in that development.
The work of Descartes is often picked out as a herald of this revolution.
The pre-Cartesian self has been characterised as ‘porous’ as opposed to the modern ‘buffered self’ (the terms come from Charles Taylor).

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed. (Read More)

And maybe we are changing again. The growing awareness of our environmental impact may be contributing to a concept of the ‘ecological self’. Have a read of Tim Flannery’s words in an interview with Andrew Denton:

TIM FLANNERY: Well Gaia is our earth, this extraordinary living organism of ours that we’re all part of and just breathing now, talking we are plugged into Gaia aren’t we? We are, we taking the atmosphere into our bodies, we’re changing its chemical composition and we’re exhaling it. And it’s life that makes the atmosphere what it is, that’s a very important aspect of Gaia you know. Gaia is life working as a whole to maintain the atmosphere as it is, so that life can go on. So Gaia I think is is saying to us it’s time you took control. (Read More)

How does a Christian understanding of subjectivity interact with, and critique, the ecological self?
No answers, just a question.

Comment and Share

The New 14 Day Rail Pass.

Themes: Society

The winner of the ‘Captain Obvious Award that Rewards People for Stating Things that are Clearly Obvious to Everyone with Half a Brain‘ goes to:

Is it any wonder people don’t use public transport?
I don’t know whether to be offended or very, very afraid.
The wondrous irony is that, as you can only buy the 14 Day Rail Pass from a Ticket Window (not a machine), in an important respect it is Not Like a 7 Day Rail Pass.

Which raises the interesting philosophical question: How is this sign being both obviously true, and false at the same time?

words, words.

Comment and Share

Immanentism

Themes: Apologetics, Critique, Philosophy, Society

“If there is an intellectual direction in the culture that has developed over the last few centuries it is that which
is rather barbarously labelled ‘immanentism’. That is to say, the phenomenon which at once characterises a culture and sets for Christian theology its central problem is the widely accepted belief that the world can be understood from within itself, and not from any being or principle supposed to operate from without. Examples are to be found everywhere, from the characteristic modern ‘experience’ of being alone in the universe to the brash technocratic optimism that sees in modern knowledge the key to the solution of all problems.” (Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 2-3)

I generally hate generalisations about anything, especially about cultures. But I also (evidently) don’t have a problem with being slightly contrary, so I’ll come out with it and say, I think Our Colin has nailed the cockroach to the wall with this one.
I just wish ‘immanentism’ was slightly easier to pronounce, then I could start accusing all sorts of people of being it.
It certainly seems influential in many Christian attempts to rethink the presentation of the Gospel to our culture (think emergent church), and in the prevalence and brand of eschatology fashionable in theology (think ‘new creation’ rather than ‘heaven’).
You might have to think a while to join the dotted lines, but they are there, and they aren’t that dotty.

Comment and Share

Dear Baby Jesus

Themes: Society

We watched Talladega Nights last week.
It’s not exactly high-brow comedy, but at the end of a long day… you know.

This clip where Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) is saying grace for his family is hilarious and yet deeply disturbing.

It’s a great illustration of something John Calvin wrote,

For as rashness and superficiality are joined to ignorance and darkness, scarcely a single person has ever been found who did not fashion for himself an idol or specter in place of God. Surely, just as waters boil up from a vast, full spring, so does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human-mind, while each one, in wandering about with too much license, wrongly invents this or that about God himself.
(Calvin, Institutes, I.V.12)

(don’t necessarily take this as a recommendation of the movie, make your own judgement)

Comment and Share

Necessity and Friendship

Themes: Friends, Society

It is an anxious and brutal experience, moving from a small country community to a city. Spare a thought for students from the country who are starting University this week. I well remember the total of 42 hours that I spent on trains, moving from Townsville to Canberra for University.
The constellation of relationships that has helped to locate you within the world, and really gave you your sense of yourself, is suddenly gone.

I’ve been slowly rambling along behind the thought that it seems that the loss of the ‘neighbourhood’ raises the stakes for our other relationships. More of the particularising force that makes me conscious of being uniquely me, must be carried along fewer lines of communication.

Importantly, it can affect our conception of friendship. In some ways I’m tempted to say that we are lead to make our friendships too important. However, while you raise that questioning eyebrow, let me continue by saying that, of course, friendship can never be too important.

No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

That sounds pretty important.
Maybe the problem is more that we are tempted to see friendship as necessary. It feels so necessary when everything else conspires to make you doubt your own reality. It seems necessary because there doesn’t appear to be anything else that holds us together, and if there is nothing left that holds us together, there is nothing to hold me together.
And probably friendship wants to be necessary because it is good, and wouldn’t it be good for goodness to be necessary?

But friendship can’t be necessary without ceasing to be friendship. Friendship is essentially free.

Let me swallow-dive off a cliff and claim that on this site, the philosophical dualism between freedom and determinism is thrashing about. If you can’t see it, it’s probably not really late at night where you are.
But there’s more! Maybe through exploring friendship, we might develop the conceptual tools for a robust account of the nature of freedom. There might be a sense, not only in which Friendship is free, but also in which, Freedom is friendship.

I keep thinking of new questions, please don’t take that as any kind of warrant that I will think of answers.

Comment and Share