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The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser |
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Earlier last year the credit risk agency Experian produced a league table showing the most indebted parts of the country. My parish of Putney came second. Apparently, each of my parishioners, on average, is sitting on £47,000 worth of personal debt. As the house prices against which much of this money has been borrowed continues to fall, and as many loose their jobs, my role as a parish priest in a place like Putney gives me an unusual degree of access to the private misery that is the hidden face of the credit crunch.
But what is private is also political. In his new year message, the Conservative leader David Cameron has accused the government of having 'lost its moral compass' because they are encouraging the country to borrow more and thus to get ever deeper into debt. The prime minister, on the other hand, has insisted that only by encouraging spending can we stimulate the economy thereby safeguarding the jobs and businesses upon which our prosperity depends.
Much of this debate is a technical one, bound up with the workings of global finance. Some of us who are not economists struggle to keep up. Indeed, this is itself is a real problem; for the complexity of much technical economic language makes it very tricky for the non-specialist to track the ways of the economy with a moral instinct. How can public moral reasoning be brought to bear on the financial world of derivatives and securitisations when most of us have little experience of what these things are or how they work? Perhaps this is why many worry that the ways of the market seems to have become less and less answerable to our sense of what is right and wrong.
It's worth remembering that it was not ever thus. In 1904, the great philosopher Max Weber published his monumental essay 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". Weber noticed that capitalism seemed to flourish best in countries with a broadly Puritan heritage. In such places, the values of thrift and hard work, and the suspicion of self-indulgence, formed a moral platform enabling the market economy to do well. In such an environment, debt itself was viewed with some suspicion. Sure, credit helps people buy homes and start businesses. But alongside this recognition existed a deeply ingrained cultural instinct that it was morally suspect to allow debt to run ahead of one's ability to repay.
Somehow, over the last thirty years, we have lost sight of the idea that debt is a moral issue. Thrift and frugality seem such stingy and old-fashioned ideas. But my New Year prediction is that these virtues will make a comeback in 2009. For now we see more clearly how debt and easy money can ruin lives. It's an evasion of responsibility simply to blame the government or the bankers or the way the economy works. In truth, we've all been a part of the problem, all fooled by what the Archbishop of Canterbury called "fairy gold". And now, simply put, we all need to think again.