"Doing Things": Finances and the Climate

by David Nussbaum

The latest gathering of the Anabaptist Network Steering Group took place at a time of disturbance: in Kenya following the elections, in Pakistan in the aftermath of the assassination of Bhutto, and for rail travellers in the UK following the latest over-running engineering works on the line.

The theory was that if we arranged the meeting for early January there would be few clashes with other meetings. This is because of the unwritten rule that you can’t arrange meetings for just after new year, because everybody will be ‘doing things’ – whatever those things may be.

Globally, there are at least two ongoing, big disturbances: in the financial markets, and in the climate. Both are happening because everybody is – or has been - ‘doing things’.

We saw how people doing things brought down Northern Rock. Some people became worried that the bank might have financial difficulties. So they did something: they took their money out. They anticipated that if other people thought that the bank was going to have financial problems, those other people would try to do something: take their money out. That would lead to the bank running out of money, and then it really would have financial problems. So they acted quickly, before everyone else could. They got their money, but triggered the very event they were trying to pre-empt: a ‘run’ on the bank. Thus proving that they were right to do what they did (or perhaps just prudent, though under our present Prime Minister there may not be much difference). It seems like Adam Smith’s idyllic world of perfect markets in which the outcome of individual self-interest is societal benefit doesn’t work when it comes to banks – or perhaps to financial markets more generally.

More widely in financial markets there’s big disturbance. One reason is that people have been doing things – like buying stuff – using lots of borrowed money, which banks and other financial institutions have been happy to lend them. These borrowings have got so huge that they might not get fully repaid, and so other banks worry that things might get pretty unsettled. Consequently, banks don’t trust each other as much as they did, and so the money markets are shaken up. This puts up the cost of money – which makes it all the more likely that those people who borrowed too much won’t be able to repay on time, or indeed at all. Which will make banks less worthy of trust, proving that the ‘credit crunch’ is rational. Isn’t it?

We are also seeing disturbance in the climate: the world is warming and the atmosphere is changing because of people ‘doing things’. Things like having an industrial revolution a couple of centuries ago, or liking to travel a lot now. If we humans do some prudent things (which in this case would also be the right thing to do), the climate disturbance will be more manageable. If we don’t, it could spiral out of control, like a run on a bank - as melting ice (which reflects the sunlight) becomes land surface or sea (which absorbs more of the sun’s heat) and leads to more melted ice.

This can all seem rather disturbing, and perhaps it should be. But Jesus’ message was of a different kind of disturbance. A disturbance arising from the breaking in of a new way; of people doing things, not to express or harness individual self interest, but to demonstrate their commitment to a new vision. A vision in which economic rationality is not the primary arbiter of ethical action, and having stuff now and paying later is not praised as the driving force of economic growth. Living the vision led Jesus to break with conventional wisdom, in both his life and his teaching.

But it also made him a disturbance – about which the powerful people decided to do something. But just as getting your money out of a bank that is rumoured to be at risk catalyses the very risk you feared, so with Jesus, doing away with him created – through his resurrection – a movement (Christianity) which the authorities who executed Jesus thought they were pre-empting.

We thought that if the Anabaptist Network Steering Group broke with convention, and arranged a meeting for early January, participation wouldn’t be prevented by other meetings. So we did meet in early January and (at least for those of us who were there!) the timing worked well. But we were still disturbed – by the world and the things we are doing in and to it. Happy New Year?