Ar a time of such uncertainty, even danger in the planet’s financial system (the oil keeping the global engine running) it is always comforting to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury as a shining source of Moral Insight and Spiritual Leadership.

He invariably shows us the right path to follow.

Namely the opposite of the one he proposes.

Here he is in the Spectator (via his website, which helps us behold his priorities in listing his Interviews, Articles and Speeches above his Sermons):

We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make.

They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors.

If this is a mistake, surely those who talk about ‘society’ and ‘the community’ are making the same error?

Such as the Archbishop:

The biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality — the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.

The wider that sense is, the more senseless it becomes for any practical purpose?

On he goes:

Of course business is not philanthropy, securing profit is a legitimate (if not a morally supreme) motivation for people, and the definition of what’s good for the human community can be pretty widely drawn.

He needs to brush up on Ayn Rand, who argues that free men and women selling their minds and labour for exactly what other free people are prepared to pay for it is in fact a/the supreme moral norm. What is the alternative – slavery or looting or mooching? Not that Rand’s is necessarily the winning argument, but it needs to be taken seriously.

It’s true as well that, in some circumstances, loosening up a financial regime to allow for entrepreneurs and innovators to create wealth is necessary to draw whole populations out of poverty.

Boze, boze. In which circumstances is it not true? When has anything else worked, eg in Africa?

But it is a sort of fundamentalism to say that this alone will secure stable and just outcomes everywhere.

Who says that anyway? The point is not that the Market ‘secures’ stable and just outcomes – rather it is more likely to do that than any other system. See eg the fates of two small islands, Singapore and Cuba, over fifty years. Or the greatest social science experiment in human history, S Korea v N Korea.

Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem. Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else.

Disgraceful. Methinks the Archbishop would not quote Hitler who said much the same against capitalism, even though he was ‘right about that, if about little else’. So why his sly puff for the greatest Antichrist of modern times?

We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.

At last, something sensible to finish off.

The point about our having something to choose is that we need to learn through experience that poor choices have poor consequences.

Which is why (a) plundering taxpayers to pay for the excesses of private institutions, and (b) plunging in with more ‘regulation’ which necessarily diminishes personal and corporate choice and responsibility may not, in the decades to come, be seen as the best move to have made?