[PEN-L:33258] new Archibishop of Canterbury criticises market state

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rowan Williams, new Archbishop of Canterbury:

> So the problem of the market state looks rather like this. By pushing
> politics towards a consumerist model, with the state as the guarantor of
> 'purchasing power', it raises short-term expectations. By raising
> short-term expectations, it invites instability, reactive administration,
> rule by opinion poll and pressure. To facilitate some of its goals and to
> avoid chaos, government inevitably relies more on centralised managerial
> authority. So there will be a dangerous tension between excessive
> government and the paralysis that can result from trying to respond
> adequately to consumer demand. To put it in another way, government and
> culture drift apart: government abandons the attempt to give shape to society.


Dimbleby lecture 19 Dec 2002

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/021219.html#top


He appears to have read some of Philip Bobbit, Clinton's National Security
Council director of intelligence.

The lecture is a show piece talk to the BBC and related media dignitaries.
Williams, personally mild but intellectually aggressive radical new head of
the Church of England, is obviously using it as a platform soon after
taking up his post. It was interesting that it was on his website within an
hour but much more difficult to track down on the BBC.

Williams is young enough and radical enough, that during his leadership of
the Cof E it will finally get disestablished, in England as it is in his
homeland, Wales. This would be a progressive liberal move.

Although the lecture has some annoying patronising features, it is
ideologically important, because it provides a strong authoritative
criticism from within the religious communities, of the trend to a
consensus state built around appeasing voters as consumers, and avoiding
anatagonising capital. Williams is also explicitly very aware of how this
links into the world-wide scenario undermining the sovereignty of the
nation state. He is watching closely, and can be expected to take a stand
criticising intervention in Iraq.

He is a liberal but he is signalling a more socially coherent critique of
the atomised civil society, which Marx criticised, and which has become
even more systematically atomised.

Largely directed against the managerial tendencies of New Labour and New
Democrats, Williams shades his lecture enough to be able to keep in
dialogue if necessary with people like Tony Blair, who would have no
difficulty putting an amiable gloss on the lecture, as an allegedly sincere
Christian himself.

So this  lecture suggests that at least one focus of opposition to the
powerful trends of late capitalism, domestically and internationally, not
incompatible with a marxist analysis, since Williams represents the
aspirations of an old society towards social coherence and social capital.

The lecture is somewhat hard work, but is crafted also for people with no
theoretical religious faith. Worth a click.

Chris Burford