Some notes in the margin of Philip Goodchild’s impressive book Religion and Capitalism:
The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value. Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates already set in motion.
What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.
One may object that we live in the most humane of human societies; that we enjoy prosperity as never before. But we are blinded by the self-evidence of economics as it serves to uphold the apparently benevolent despotism of liberal humanism. Economics cannot take account of the suffering which results when the social and material condition of the present is wagered on the basis of an ideal future. Abstractions like Gross Domestic Product, which purport to provide us with the value of an economy, cannot calculate the repercussions to the environment; a cost-benefit analysis does not permit sufficient attention to be paid to the threat of financial catastrophe.
For a happy minority, credit is plentiful and goods are cheap. But for the majority, the future – the immediate future – is grim; the main question is one of survival. All of us stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not. Why don’t the terrifying claims of the report on the results of climate change commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, grip us before any other problem? Our attention is misdirected. Is this the effect of our governments, which no longer answer to international law or to the wishes of their people?
Politics is possible only for as long as our attention is uncoupled from the magic of image, spectacle and glamour as they circulate in the mass media. It is possible only when we extend the scope of that which lays claim to our attention. Vaster than the number of countable voters is the polity of those who will have to live in a world which becomes progressively less inhabitable as well as those outside our country with whom we are bound in networks of interdependency.
Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable. But the catastrophe may still be preventable which means nothing is more pressing that developing this awareness.
Our attention has been captured. How to bind apathy in the face of politics into a universal politics which works on a local and a worldwide level that can struggle for the world? But there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared. There is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being.
The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe.
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