No one is safe until everyone is safe – we applied it to the pandemic, but why not our economy? | Rowan Williams
A few weeks ago, a friend reminded me of that old song, All My Trials: “If living were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.” Which, of course, they do. Just how many unnecessary deaths will result from the lethal combination of extreme cold and soaring energy costs this winter remains to be seen, but no one needs an economics degree to work out that the figures will be weighted towards those who lack choices and resources.
It is not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; it is also that all those things financial security makes possible – the freedom to celebrate, to plan for your children, to give gifts to people you love – become monstrously complicated. Living with any fullness or imagination recedes over the horizon when choices are all about survival. Who goes hungry – you, or your child? How many jobs can you take on to keep the family fed without wrecking your physical and mental health?
In a society that prioritised security for everyone, the “cost” of living would be virtually invisible. The systems and rhythms of exchange that support us – work, wages, welfare – could be taken for granted. The natural and instinctive concern to keep one another safe that holds cohesive communities together would shape the way our economy operated, so that no one had to constantly calculate how much “living” they could afford.
A “cost of living” crisis is a sign that something basic about how we imagine society has gone fantastically wrong. When “living” becomes a commodity that some can afford and some can’t, the assumption that we ought to be able to trust one another to sustain our security is being challenged at the root. We are being lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is as an individual purchaser acquiring desirable goods – not a contributor to the building of a trustworthy network of relations, dependable enough to allow more people to become active and generous contributors.
Not everyone who recycles the mantra of “growth” as the answer to everything does so out of ideological fanaticism. For some it is a means for creating more active citizens by creating more active consumers. But when growth is sold to us as a self-evident priority, the mechanisms by which it might be used in service of our shared security seem to fade out of sight. What “trickles down” is risk, not profit.
Over the past 15 years, we have had a succession of stark reminders about this. The 2008 crisis underlined the fact that profit-driven risk-taking in financial sectors was more costly for society than for the well-cushioned risk-takers. The pandemic showed that those who really provided the safety nets of skill and care in the face of international disaster were among the least fairly rewarded workers in the community (I pass over the disgracefulness of those whose priority was to make profits from the marketing of defective or unsuitable medical equipment). And now we are once again faced with the question of how we can construct a society that gives its members reason to trust they will not constantly be asked to bear the cost of other people’s greed, recklessness or folly.
The cost of living crisis is in fact an example of costs being transferred from the powerful to the powerless – from ambitious speculators, market fundamentalists (in and out of government), naked profiteers and, in the past horrendous 10 months of war in Ukraine, foreign dictators, to a population pushed with increasing aggressiveness into debt, housing, food and energy poverty, and insecure working conditions. It is a sign that we have once again forgotten the “covenantal” character of community. It was repeated often enough during the pandemic that no one is safe unless everyone is safe: have we really not noticed that this applies to our economic as much as to our medical wellbeing?
Much has been said about the decline of Christian practice and belief in the UK. But if nearly half the population of England and Wales still identify as Christian, they still, presumably, believe at some level that the Christian and Jewish model of a community in which each person is responsible for all, where cost is not automatically transferred from rich to poor, makes moral and practical sense. Add to this the number of adherents to other faiths who would have much the same basic assumption about human interdependence, and you have the conundrum of why we tolerate a social order where precariousness is so unevenly shared.
The story we heard in the carol services is about a moment in human history when it was confirmed, once and for all, that the deepest force and pressure within all reality “bends toward justice”, in Martin Luther King’s phrase – and not to an abstract distributive justice but to a loving, attentive, generous valuing of each person that sets them free in turn for love, attention and generosity.
It is a story about what human living might be if we finally turned our backs on our addiction to commodifying everything we touch, reducing things and people to calculations of cost. If living were a thing that money could not buy, all might be free to live. The refusal to see this is the real crisis. The forgetting of this is the real religious and moral sea change.
