WEBVTT NOTE Two Roads, One Truth 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.100 Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics. 2 00:00:09.100 --> 00:00:16.400 Gerard Casey is a professor of philosophy in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, 3 00:00:16.400 --> 00:00:23.700 adjunct professor of the Maryville Institute, Birmingham, UK, and an adjunct scholar here at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 4 00:00:23.700 --> 00:00:31.980 He received his B.A. from University College Cork, then went on to receive an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. 5 00:00:31.980 --> 00:00:41.220 He also has a Bachelor of Law, a Bachelor of Laws, from the University of London and a Master of Laws from University College Dublin. 6 00:00:41.220 --> 00:00:46.060 Some of his more recent and notable publications are as follows. 7 00:00:46.060 --> 00:00:57.060 He has a book due out in May 2010 on Murray Rothbard, which is the volume 15 of major conservative and libertarian thinkers out from Continuum Press. 8 00:00:57.060 --> 00:01:14.060 He has also published in 2010 Legal Polycentrum in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Economic Liberalism and Social Justice, Economic Affairs with Jay Meadowcroft, and Constitutions of No Authority, Spunarian Reflections. 9 00:01:14.060 --> 00:01:28.060 His ASC presentation from 2009, which is the master, the indefensibility of political representation, has come out in philosophical inquiry. 10 00:01:28.060 --> 00:01:40.060 So without further ado, help me welcome Professor Gerard Casey. 11 00:01:40.060 --> 00:01:47.100 I'd like to begin by thanking the Mises Institute for the invitation to deliver this new church 12 00:01:47.100 --> 00:01:53.220 lecture in religion and economics. It's really very gratifying to be asked to speak to such 13 00:01:53.220 --> 00:01:58.860 a congenial group of like-minded people. As my academic mentor, the late Rath McInerney, 14 00:01:58.860 --> 00:02:03.320 recently deceased, said once about the fellowship of Catholic scholars, it's nice to be part 15 00:02:03.320 --> 00:02:09.420 of a group where you don't always have to begin from scratch. So I feel like that about 16 00:02:09.420 --> 00:02:14.220 of the AAC. And though there is no party line to which everyone has to adhere here, indeed 17 00:02:14.220 --> 00:02:20.020 the differences of opinion at this conference are both instructive and entertaining. The 18 00:02:20.020 --> 00:02:24.020 palpable and sort of red-blooded commitment of all the speakers in attendance to Liberty 19 00:02:24.020 --> 00:02:30.120 is refreshing and exhilarating. After three days of this conference, I attain a kind of 20 00:02:30.120 --> 00:02:35.060 natural non-chemical high. So much so that one of these days I'm going to attract the 21 00:02:35.060 --> 00:02:39.060 and the unwelcome attentions of the authorities as I go through. 22 00:02:39.060 --> 00:02:43.060 Now the bad news. The bad news is that there are no pictures. 23 00:02:43.060 --> 00:02:47.060 Okay, so sorry about that. The title is wrong. 24 00:02:47.060 --> 00:02:51.060 So the title was for another paper which I haven't written and this paper doesn't have a title. 25 00:02:51.060 --> 00:02:55.060 So we have a slight mismatch and so on. And there are remarkably 26 00:02:55.060 --> 00:02:59.060 few jokes. The reason for that is you can blame David Gordon. So on two 27 00:02:59.060 --> 00:03:03.060 trips to the Atlanta airport from here, I was 28 00:03:03.060 --> 00:03:26.060 Now, unlike the previous talks I've given at this conference, there's no knock-down drag-out argument here. This talk is meant to be tentative and exploratory, and I'm going to leave as much time as I can at the end for questions and for discussions. 29 00:03:26.060 --> 00:03:30.620 In fact, I feel a little bit confessional. It's almost like I'm sort of at an AA meeting. 30 00:03:30.620 --> 00:03:34.620 You know, my name is Gerard Casey, and I'm an Austrian. 31 00:03:34.620 --> 00:03:44.660 You know, in Irish politics, and sorry, in Irish polite circles, there's a rule which 32 00:03:44.660 --> 00:03:48.180 is that you're not allowed to talk about religion, politics and sex, which means that there's 33 00:03:48.180 --> 00:03:53.380 sort of, there's some awful long girls at dinner parties. What's there to talk about? 34 00:03:53.380 --> 00:03:57.500 But anyway, so I'm going to range over a number of topics, did I say something about not telling 35 00:03:57.500 --> 00:04:02.140 any jokes? I'd better stick with it. I'm going to range over a number of loosely related 36 00:04:02.140 --> 00:04:05.820 connected topics and open up some themes for discussion. Now, the first thing I'd like 37 00:04:05.820 --> 00:04:10.040 to point out with all due modesty is that I'm superbly qualified to talk about the issue 38 00:04:10.040 --> 00:04:15.620 of religion and economics. My wife always says to me, by the way, don't use irony, nobody 39 00:04:15.620 --> 00:04:21.580 ever understands it, so that was ironic. First of all, the reason is, as an ex-atheist who's 40 00:04:21.580 --> 00:04:37.900 If as a Catholic you ever hear yourself described as devout, you know you're in serious trouble. 41 00:04:37.900 --> 00:04:42.900 The second one is that I have no formal training in economics while little I know being gleaned 42 00:04:42.900 --> 00:04:47.900 from my conversion, and I use the term conversion advisedly, to Austrianism some five or six 43 00:04:47.900 --> 00:04:50.180 years ago. 44 00:04:50.180 --> 00:04:55.020 Conversion occurs when material that was once organized by one paradigm is suddenly and 45 00:04:55.020 --> 00:04:59.020 to some extent inexplicably reorganized by another. 46 00:04:59.020 --> 00:05:01.540 All the same data is there, all the same facts. 47 00:05:01.540 --> 00:05:04.340 What's different is the significance of those facts. 48 00:05:04.340 --> 00:05:08.820 There's a discontinuity, often times radical, between the two paradigms, the old one and 49 00:05:08.820 --> 00:05:09.820 the new. 50 00:05:09.820 --> 00:05:16.460 Nevertheless, the new paradigm is to use the computer term backwards compatible. 51 00:05:16.460 --> 00:05:20.380 Now I was converted to Catholicism when I was about 30. I won't bore you with the shocking 52 00:05:20.380 --> 00:05:24.940 details, you'll have to wait till my autograph becomes out in paperback. That was ironic 53 00:05:24.940 --> 00:05:30.900 as well. But in brief, the conversion was the result of a process in which the previously 54 00:05:30.900 --> 00:05:37.540 dominant paradigm, a sort of very non-militant, laid-back, almost comatose, almost Californian 55 00:05:37.540 --> 00:05:42.300 secularism had been undermined by a combination of personal circumstances, knowledge, changed 56 00:05:42.300 --> 00:05:46.860 behavior and personal influence which conspire to produce a particular outcome in which one 57 00:05:46.860 --> 00:05:51.460 and only one pattern made sense of all the data. A bit like C.S. Lewis, I found myself 58 00:05:51.460 --> 00:06:00.820 very surprised and not at all pleased to be Catholic, but there we are. It really sort 59 00:06:00.820 --> 00:06:06.820 of crabs your lifestyle, so I can say, but anyway. So many years later, I underwent a 60 00:06:06.820 --> 00:06:11.900 similar experience in respect of economics. For most of my life, I regarded economics 61 00:06:11.900 --> 00:06:17.780 Mises is a sort of mildly esoteric, if largely harmless, activity. I was broad-minded. I 62 00:06:17.780 --> 00:06:21.660 wasn't that way inclined myself, but so long as I didn't frighten the horses, I was prepared 63 00:06:21.660 --> 00:06:24.540 to tolerate these arcane activities and others. 64 00:06:24.540 --> 00:06:30.180 A friend of mine went to Germany on a sabbatical. Now, he knew I was interested in money, not 65 00:06:30.180 --> 00:06:34.060 just the perennial fact that I never seemed to have enough of it, but in the very notion 66 00:06:34.060 --> 00:06:37.540 itself. And he brought me back, little did he know what he was starting. He brought me 67 00:06:37.540 --> 00:06:53.940 Now, if you had to advise somebody where they were going to start, this is not the place. 68 00:06:53.940 --> 00:06:58.680 I don't have to tell you that this book is not exactly an airport novel, readable in one 69 00:06:58.680 --> 00:07:02.620 sort of large gulp. Most people presented with this work as their introduction to economics 70 00:07:02.620 --> 00:07:08.100 would have had a sort of minor heart attack. The effect on me, however, was mildly electric. 71 00:07:08.100 --> 00:07:11.100 Here for the first time was an explanation of the phenomenon of money which not only 72 00:07:11.100 --> 00:07:15.720 made sense to me, not that it explained why I didn't have enough of it myself, but which 73 00:07:15.720 --> 00:07:20.300 made sense to me, but which had a ring of necessity to it, not merely plausible but 74 00:07:20.300 --> 00:07:25.380 convincing. I quickly acquired most of Mises' other works and started to read Human Action. 75 00:07:25.380 --> 00:07:30.180 Now if the effect of Theory of Money and Credit was mildly electric, the effect of reading 76 00:07:30.180 --> 00:07:38.820 I got so excited reading this book, particularly the methodological section, the one that sends 77 00:07:38.820 --> 00:07:44.620 most people to sleep, up to page 142. I even remember the page that I sometimes had to 78 00:07:44.620 --> 00:07:49.300 put the book down and walk around the room to cool off. Now most books that produce that 79 00:07:49.300 --> 00:08:00.140 effect in people have a different content. I don't read those books, not since the age 80 00:08:00.140 --> 00:08:09.540 Now, while at a distance of some years the first fine, kind of careless rapture has diminished 81 00:08:09.540 --> 00:08:14.940 somewhat, I still get a frisson of excitement every time I read this material. Seriously. 82 00:08:14.940 --> 00:08:20.460 If I want to sort of brighten up a dull February afternoon, I just pick up that book and read 83 00:08:20.460 --> 00:08:24.900 that stuff. Five or ten pages the book goes down, I have to walk around the room. It's 84 00:08:24.900 --> 00:08:29.660 great. Now here was an account of human action, which at once gelled with what I knew from 85 00:08:29.660 --> 00:08:32.980 from the philosophical tradition to be broadly correct, and that was one of the most exciting 86 00:08:32.980 --> 00:08:36.620 parts of it for me, in other words, the way in which it dovetailed with what I had learned 87 00:08:36.620 --> 00:08:41.820 from Maris Uttle and from Aquinas. It was really exciting. But an account which went 88 00:08:41.820 --> 00:08:46.540 beyond the tradition to open up to theoretical consideration a realm of knowledge which I 89 00:08:46.540 --> 00:08:51.420 had simply assumed to be at best open to historical treatment. Here was another paradigm which 90 00:08:51.420 --> 00:08:55.660 provided a framework into which whole suites of material could be fitted and which provided 91 00:08:55.660 --> 00:08:59.100 a basis for opening up new questions and new lines of enquiry. 92 00:08:59.100 --> 00:09:02.380 I have to tell you, I mean, I'm sure it's the experience of most people involved in academia here 93 00:09:02.380 --> 00:09:08.220 that you reach a stage in your teaching where you thought, didn't I say that last year? 94 00:09:08.220 --> 00:09:12.420 Five years ago? Ten years? God, my brain has stopped working. 95 00:09:12.420 --> 00:09:17.820 One of the reasons I did some low degree some years ago was just to make sure that my brain was, in fact, still functioning. 96 00:09:17.820 --> 00:09:20.540 I'm still not sure whether taking a low degree was the right way to find that out. 97 00:09:20.540 --> 00:09:33.020 Without ever explicitly realising the fact, we tend to assume that religion by its very 98 00:09:33.020 --> 00:09:37.260 nature has something to do with God, and moreover with a God who has a certain relationship 99 00:09:37.260 --> 00:09:44.940 with the universe. And while the religions that we in the West know best, Judaism, Christianity 100 00:09:44.940 --> 00:09:50.820 in Islam, all follow this pattern, not every system of belief that is commonly recognized 101 00:09:50.820 --> 00:09:55.840 as a religion in fact does. Confucianism, for example, has at best a shadowy conception 102 00:09:55.840 --> 00:10:00.500 of a transcendent realm, which he calls Tien, as in Tiananmen Square. And by the way, Confucius 103 00:10:00.500 --> 00:10:05.700 advises us, I like Confucius, he says have as little as possible to do with this realm, 104 00:10:05.700 --> 00:10:11.020 don't mess with it. And Buddhism seems to have no conception of anything at all resembling 105 00:10:11.020 --> 00:10:12.500 and Theistic God. 106 00:10:12.500 --> 00:10:17.500 Hinduism of course has many gods, perhaps too many, several million in fact, which seems 107 00:10:17.500 --> 00:10:22.860 to me to be overdoing it slightly, but only in certain versions does it resemble the theism 108 00:10:22.860 --> 00:10:26.080 with which we are familiar. 109 00:10:26.080 --> 00:10:31.140 Religion then is not necessarily concerned with God, or with an afterlife, but with the 110 00:10:31.140 --> 00:10:33.500 ultimate source and ground of meaning. 111 00:10:33.500 --> 00:10:38.020 Robert Nelson in his book called The New Holy Wars, Economic Religion versus Environmental 112 00:10:38.020 --> 00:10:41.620 religion, from which I am plagiarising shamelessly in parts. I won't tell you which because 113 00:10:41.620 --> 00:10:47.020 you think the good bits are mine. It says the following, a religion does not necessarily 114 00:10:47.020 --> 00:10:51.780 have to involve the existence of a transcendent God outside this world. Most people have a 115 00:10:51.780 --> 00:10:55.740 set of fundamental beliefs that both explains the place of human beings in the world and 116 00:10:55.740 --> 00:11:00.380 guides their lives and the intellectual articulation of these beliefs in a formal way becomes a 117 00:11:00.380 --> 00:11:06.140 theology. And he refers to a definition of religion given by Max Stackhouse as, quote, 118 00:11:06.140 --> 00:11:20.140 A comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be, in itself, basically true and just, even if all dimensions of it cannot be either finally confirmed or refuted. 119 00:11:20.140 --> 00:11:33.140 So then, religions don't necessarily involve the conception of God, but they provide overarching schemas of meaningfulness and significance within which one can locate one's own particular and limited experiences. 120 00:11:33.140 --> 00:11:42.140 provide, in effect, a system of ultimate values, of ultimate explanatory concepts which enable one to make sense of one's experience and one's environment. 121 00:11:42.140 --> 00:11:47.140 And so some things that don't look like religions on the face of it turn out to be religions. 122 00:11:47.140 --> 00:11:56.140 Alright, now I want to bear that in mind because that definition of religion, and it's not unarguable, is going to be important for what I have to say. 123 00:11:56.140 --> 00:11:59.140 Let me just shift gears slightly before I come back to my main point. 124 00:11:59.140 --> 00:12:03.620 There are many perfectly respectable modes of human enquiry – history, economics, 125 00:12:03.620 --> 00:12:08.500 psychology, physics, chemistry, biology – and all such enquiries have both a formal 126 00:12:08.500 --> 00:12:12.740 and a material object. That is, they study some range of phenomena under a particular description. 127 00:12:13.780 --> 00:12:19.700 While the human sciences, the Geistes Wissenschaften, all take man as their material object of study, 128 00:12:19.700 --> 00:12:23.220 they differ from one another in their formal approaches. History studies human actions 129 00:12:23.220 --> 00:12:27.620 under its own specific formality, psychology likewise and so on with the other disciplines. 130 00:12:27.620 --> 00:12:31.620 And while there may be border disputes between various disciplines, say, for example, it's 131 00:12:31.620 --> 00:12:35.220 between physical chemistry and chemistry, generally it doesn't lead to sort of fights, 132 00:12:35.220 --> 00:12:39.660 but there can be border disputes, for the most part, each discipline is reasonably clearly 133 00:12:39.660 --> 00:12:45.300 circumscribed and so they can coexist peacefully. Here as elsewhere, good neighbours, sorry, 134 00:12:45.300 --> 00:12:48.180 good fences make good neighbours. I don't know if good neighbours make good fences, 135 00:12:48.180 --> 00:12:53.900 but certainly who operates the other way around. Each mode of enquiring is intrinsically circumscribed 136 00:12:53.900 --> 00:12:56.060 both by its material and by its formal object. 137 00:12:56.060 --> 00:12:59.340 If a chemist, for example, starts measuring the reaction times 138 00:12:59.340 --> 00:13:03.100 not of chemical substances but of the experimenters in his lab, 139 00:13:03.100 --> 00:13:05.020 then he's no longer doing chemistry. 140 00:13:05.020 --> 00:13:06.940 He's doing psychology. 141 00:13:06.940 --> 00:13:09.020 It's important to realize this. 142 00:13:09.020 --> 00:13:13.180 Now, disciplines tend to have imperialistic tendencies 143 00:13:13.180 --> 00:13:15.580 that sometimes find expression as sort of lust for expansion, 144 00:13:15.580 --> 00:13:18.300 a kind of desire for Lebensraum. 145 00:13:18.300 --> 00:13:20.140 So it's been said that to a man with a hammer, 146 00:13:20.140 --> 00:13:21.420 everything looks like a nail. 147 00:13:21.420 --> 00:13:26.020 and as a father of three engineers, I tend to believe that engineers tend to perceive 148 00:13:26.020 --> 00:13:33.580 the world as a set of problems requiring technical solutions, and likewise for other practices. 149 00:13:33.580 --> 00:13:38.260 You know the way when you buy a car, the roads are full of that model, suddenly there are 150 00:13:38.260 --> 00:13:40.340 millions of them out there, you see them everywhere. 151 00:13:40.340 --> 00:13:46.100 Similarly, when you have your own particular discipline, everything seems to be, you know, 152 00:13:46.100 --> 00:13:49.740 beware of going to a doctor who specializes in a particular disease, you may have that 153 00:13:49.740 --> 00:13:59.100 When a particular discipline aspires to universal domination, it ceases to be that discipline, 154 00:13:59.100 --> 00:14:04.100 it has given up any claim to empirical grounding and it has become in fact an ersatz religion 155 00:14:04.100 --> 00:14:09.620 in the sense in which I have sketched above. Thus history can become historicism. Evolution 156 00:14:09.620 --> 00:14:14.500 can evolve in the hands of the dreaded Dees, Dawkins and Adenor for example, into evolutionism 157 00:14:14.500 --> 00:14:19.500 By the way, you should see Jerry Fodor's latest book on this. Well, Darwin got wrong. If you haven't read it, read it. It's good read. 158 00:14:19.500 --> 00:14:24.500 Psychology turns into psychologism and science into scientism. 159 00:14:24.500 --> 00:14:32.500 Similarly, economics can become economism and the study of our environment can become, and here I coin a term of art. 160 00:14:32.500 --> 00:14:40.500 I would normally use environmentalism, but I want to coin a term of art for the, if you like, universal expansion of the legitimate study of environment. 161 00:14:40.500 --> 00:14:45.500 of Environment, I'm going to call it environmentism, just for the sake of this paper. 162 00:14:45.500 --> 00:14:49.900 Now we might regard these developments as forms of intellectual cancer, in which a proper 163 00:14:49.900 --> 00:14:53.780 part of the whole aspires to become the whole and so abandons its natural limitation. That's 164 00:14:53.780 --> 00:14:57.180 what happens to real cancer. Some cells get above themselves and want to take over the 165 00:14:57.180 --> 00:15:02.580 whole body. It's really bad for you. Now if there is one thing I do believe, it is that 166 00:15:02.580 --> 00:15:07.620 all truths are co-possible. Despite this, it is still possible for one to experience 167 00:15:07.620 --> 00:15:13.620 and certain elements of cognitive dissonance in one's epistemic commitments, and this is a spur to further enquiry. 168 00:15:13.620 --> 00:15:18.620 So many of the topics that are dealt with in discussions of religion and economics have to do with areas of possible overlap, 169 00:15:18.620 --> 00:15:24.620 in which it appears that one's religion dictates X when one's economics dictates not X. 170 00:15:24.620 --> 00:15:34.620 If you subscribe, as I do, to an authoritative, if you don't believe in an authoritarian, authoritative religion, this can be a particular problem. 171 00:15:34.620 --> 00:15:43.980 OK, if your commitments are to religion that historically tends to be marked by resistance and revolution, then you probably have more scope. 172 00:15:43.980 --> 00:15:51.660 So I'm not saying these areas are only problems for Catholics, but Catholics seem to experience them in a particular way. 173 00:15:51.660 --> 00:15:57.260 Sometimes the overlap can be represented, then, if you like, as an overlap between religion on top and then economics underneath, 174 00:15:57.260 --> 00:16:04.380 or sometimes as a sort of tripartite between religion, ethics, sort of more or less on the same level and then economics underneath. 175 00:16:04.380 --> 00:16:06.460 sort of vertical relationship. 176 00:16:06.460 --> 00:16:11.340 Now, much good and definitive work has been done along these lines, not least by Dr. Thomas Woods 177 00:16:11.340 --> 00:16:14.780 in his superlative book, The Church and the Market. 178 00:16:14.780 --> 00:16:16.860 Again, if you haven't read it, do. 179 00:16:16.860 --> 00:16:19.060 If better still, buy it and read it. 180 00:16:19.060 --> 00:16:19.980 The book is downstairs. 181 00:16:19.980 --> 00:16:21.460 I thought we could also do that. 182 00:16:21.460 --> 00:16:25.740 I get a kickback from tomorrow, right? 183 00:16:25.740 --> 00:16:27.180 I don't, actually. 184 00:16:27.180 --> 00:16:32.900 The history of the 20th century is in part a history of the rise and fall of a variety of secular, 185 00:16:32.900 --> 00:16:44.660 are what I'm going to call intramundane religions, Marxism, fascism, national socialism, Freudianism, secular humanism, evolutionism, and the latest fashionable intramundane religion called our environmentism. 186 00:16:44.660 --> 00:16:47.940 I'm going to look at this in a bit more detail. 187 00:16:47.940 --> 00:16:59.380 So I'm going to look at one of them, Economism and Environmentism, where Economism is the standard neo-orthodox school understood as the ideological wing of the progressive political movement. 188 00:16:59.380 --> 00:17:06.340 and environmentalism is the elevation of environmental issues to the status of unchallengeable religious dogma. 189 00:17:06.340 --> 00:17:10.340 It's important to note in this context that the relationship between religion and 190 00:17:10.340 --> 00:17:14.340 economism and religion and environmentalism and religion here now used in the sort of 191 00:17:14.340 --> 00:17:18.860 standard way in which we use it is not the vertical relationship I've talked about earlier 192 00:17:18.860 --> 00:17:23.580 but a horizontal relationship between competing religious frameworks. 193 00:17:23.580 --> 00:17:27.260 So it's not one over the other but they're all now starting out here on the same level 194 00:17:27.260 --> 00:17:35.580 Despite the emergence and burgeoning of the inter-mundane religions, it's interesting 195 00:17:35.580 --> 00:17:40.860 to realize that even in a rapidly expanding post-Christian world, our thoughts and experiences 196 00:17:40.860 --> 00:17:46.340 are still shaped by our Christian past, so much so that we are hugely influenced by it 197 00:17:46.340 --> 00:17:52.820 even though largely unaware of this continuing shaping. 198 00:17:52.820 --> 00:17:59.620 Islamic and environmental religions are secularisations of the core messages of Christianity. 199 00:17:59.620 --> 00:18:04.420 The power of potential civic religions such as feminism or left puritanism, nowadays the 200 00:18:04.420 --> 00:18:09.220 dominant civic religion is, as I said, the not-so-jolly green giant, is that they claim 201 00:18:09.220 --> 00:18:14.220 to be tolerant while being every bit as totalitarian and oppressive as any of more traditional 202 00:18:14.220 --> 00:18:18.940 religions has ever been, assuming that to be correct, for the sake of the argument. 203 00:18:18.940 --> 00:18:23.940 Rothbard, interestingly true, believed that society must, of necessity, have some overarching 204 00:18:23.940 --> 00:18:29.300 set of constituted beliefs. If it is not one set, it will be another. He said, some religion 205 00:18:29.300 --> 00:18:34.060 is going to be dominant in every society. If Christianity, for example, is scorned and 206 00:18:34.060 --> 00:18:39.300 tossed out, some horrendous form of religion is going to take its place, whether it be 207 00:18:39.300 --> 00:18:43.100 communism, New Age occultism, feminism or left Puritanism. 208 00:18:43.100 --> 00:18:49.460 I have to tell a joke. A man is walking down the street at about five late at night and 209 00:18:49.460 --> 00:18:53.100 he feels a gun press on the back of his head and the voice goes, Catholic or Protestant? 210 00:18:53.100 --> 00:18:59.100 And he thinks rapidly and he goes, atheist? And there's a moment of baffled silence and 211 00:18:59.100 --> 00:19:04.460 then the voice goes, Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist? 212 00:19:04.460 --> 00:19:34.460 To illustrate my point, I've constructed a table here, which is incomplete by the way and you can take it as an exercise to fill in some of the blanks, which lists some of the central concepts of a theistic religion, this time Christianity, but it could have taken other ones but it's the one I know best, and then locates, in part at least, the equivalent concepts in Economism and Environmentism. 213 00:19:34.460 --> 00:19:39.540 So, let's take the central notion of God in Christianity. 214 00:19:39.540 --> 00:19:47.100 For me, the corresponding notion in environmentalism is, well, nature, or the planet, described 215 00:19:47.100 --> 00:19:50.940 in Earth First, for example, as, Earth is the goddess and the proper object of human 216 00:19:50.940 --> 00:19:51.940 worship. 217 00:19:51.940 --> 00:19:55.540 What would it be for economism? 218 00:19:55.540 --> 00:20:00.700 The answer is, well, the government. 219 00:20:00.700 --> 00:20:01.700 Sin 220 00:20:01.700 --> 00:20:09.700 Well, for environmentalism it's consumption or pollution, for economists it's scarcity. 221 00:20:09.700 --> 00:20:18.700 Punishment, environmental disaster, global warming, inflation, recession. 222 00:20:18.700 --> 00:20:23.700 Salvation, sustainability, economic progress. 223 00:20:23.700 --> 00:20:27.700 Original sin, now there's an interesting one. 224 00:20:27.700 --> 00:20:37.700 Agriculture, the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago. That was a bad move. 225 00:20:37.700 --> 00:20:42.700 That leads to alienation from nature and then even worse things like the Industrial Revolution. 226 00:20:42.700 --> 00:20:52.700 On this side, poverty. Eden, the Garden of Eden, harmony with nature, disturbed by agriculture, not the servant. 227 00:20:52.700 --> 00:21:07.700 Heaven, restored nature, unspoiled nature, abolition of scarcity, churches and cathedrals, 228 00:21:07.700 --> 00:21:15.700 wilderness, untouched areas, banks. 229 00:21:15.700 --> 00:21:21.500 The Bible, I don't know what to put over here, right? 230 00:21:21.500 --> 00:21:27.500 Samuelson's Phenolics, already getting honourable mention earlier today. 231 00:21:27.500 --> 00:21:29.020 The priesthood or the pope? 232 00:21:29.020 --> 00:21:32.260 Well, I don't know who to put in for the priesthood over here on the environmentalist side, 233 00:21:32.260 --> 00:21:35.020 but certainly Al Gore gets the pope. 234 00:21:35.020 --> 00:21:36.380 There's a question about that. 235 00:21:36.380 --> 00:21:40.740 And economists at large, constitute the priesthood. 236 00:21:40.740 --> 00:21:42.140 Latin as a hieratic language? 237 00:21:42.140 --> 00:21:43.300 Well, I don't know what to put over here. 238 00:21:43.300 --> 00:21:52.460 and so on, indulgences, I don't know what to put over here for the economists, but carbon 239 00:21:52.460 --> 00:21:57.620 offsets go over here, and so on, so you can have a lot of fun with these, so if anyone 240 00:21:57.620 --> 00:22:01.140 wants to help me out with the blanks, feel free to do it. 241 00:22:01.140 --> 00:22:03.820 We could even construct, I hope nobody will take this in their part, it's not meant to 242 00:22:03.820 --> 00:22:07.940 be blasphemous, but we could even construct a sort of creed, but there's not only had 243 00:22:07.940 --> 00:22:12.100 time to sort of sketch out the first few words, so here would be this sort of environmental 244 00:22:12.100 --> 00:22:16.100 You have to do one yourself for the economist's creed and you have to fill in the blanks. 245 00:22:16.100 --> 00:22:20.100 So instead of, I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, of 246 00:22:20.100 --> 00:22:25.100 all that is seen and unseen, you get, I believe in the unity of nature, or Mother, the all-encompassing, 247 00:22:25.100 --> 00:22:28.100 who is heaven and earth, I believe all that is clean and not unclean. 248 00:22:28.100 --> 00:22:29.100 Okay? 249 00:22:29.100 --> 00:22:30.100 And so on. 250 00:22:30.100 --> 00:22:31.100 And you finish off. 251 00:22:31.100 --> 00:22:32.100 So the exercise is for you. 252 00:22:32.100 --> 00:22:36.100 Now, let me just a few more remarks on this, then, just to try and illustrate the point 253 00:22:36.100 --> 00:22:37.100 here. 254 00:22:37.100 --> 00:22:41.100 Again, I'm not talking about economics operating within its own particular limits, indeed, 255 00:22:41.100 --> 00:22:46.100 and even environmentalism working within its own limits, but the extended and expanded form of both. 256 00:22:46.100 --> 00:22:49.100 Nelson writes again in his book, and I quote, 257 00:22:49.100 --> 00:22:53.100 Economic religion for much of the 20th century exalted human control over nature. 258 00:22:53.100 --> 00:22:57.100 Environmental religion today offers a precisely opposite view. 259 00:22:57.100 --> 00:23:00.100 And he says the progressive gospel was, quote, 260 00:23:00.100 --> 00:23:04.100 there must be a central coordinating intelligence for all of American society 261 00:23:04.100 --> 00:23:08.100 and it would fall to the federal government to fulfill this role. 262 00:23:08.100 --> 00:23:21.380 global warming isn't a tactical problem to be solved by appropriate means, it's a sin, 263 00:23:21.380 --> 00:23:28.500 and sin in religion is non-negotiable. You can't say, well, I'll pay prices, what do 264 00:23:28.500 --> 00:23:33.820 you need to offset? Sins are not things you can commit. So whenever, I've often, when 265 00:23:33.820 --> 00:23:37.260 talking about these things on the radio or discussing them, and you say, well, there's 266 00:23:37.260 --> 00:23:42.260 There are hundreds of ways of solving this and you have to look at the cost-benefit and cost-benefit must-benefit. 267 00:23:42.260 --> 00:23:46.260 Global warming is always wrong, no matter what solution you come up with or what you suggest, 268 00:23:46.260 --> 00:23:49.260 it's always wrong, it's always a problem. 269 00:23:49.260 --> 00:23:54.260 For some radical environmentalists, indeed, human beings are a blight on the face of the Earth, 270 00:23:54.260 --> 00:23:58.260 so David Foreman thinks we're cancer, and Paul Watson the aides of the Earth. 271 00:23:58.260 --> 00:24:03.260 And while these are extreme opinions, I suggest that many environmentalists, in the radical sense of which I'm talking about them, 272 00:24:03.260 --> 00:24:06.260 have similar sort of views. 273 00:24:06.260 --> 00:24:11.900 In fact, environmentalism is probably the last acceptable mode of racism, because it 274 00:24:11.900 --> 00:24:15.500 turns out that there are too many people. And when you press people on it, they always 275 00:24:15.500 --> 00:24:20.740 turn out to be too many of the wrong kinds of people. Although in polite society you would 276 00:24:20.740 --> 00:24:30.400 never say what those are, but they're not us. I leave it to you to figure it out. 277 00:24:30.400 --> 00:24:34.180 I noticed, by the way, that I was up at five o'clock this morning because I couldn't sleep. 278 00:24:34.180 --> 00:25:04.180 Well, I slept from six last night till five and then I was awake so I worked on this paper and one of the reasons I'm more incoherent than normal is A. I'm sleep deprived and B. I've written all over this paper and I can't read it properly but I noticed that reading USA Today, they regard was, I guess, Professor Michael Mann, okay, they report, by the way, without a trace of irony that Professor Michael Mann, one of the people at the centre of the so-called climate gate scandal, is being investigated by his university 279 00:25:04.180 --> 00:25:10.260 University, Penn State, to determine whether his actions, quote-unquote, undermine faith 280 00:25:10.260 --> 00:25:14.460 in the science of climate change. 281 00:25:14.460 --> 00:25:17.340 I couldn't believe that when I read it at five o'clock this morning, I thought there 282 00:25:17.340 --> 00:25:18.340 is a God. 283 00:25:19.340 --> 00:25:22.340 It fell right into my lap. 284 00:25:22.340 --> 00:25:26.820 Okay, where are we? 285 00:25:26.820 --> 00:25:31.180 Now I want to talk about, okay, so religion understood in the expanded sense in which 286 00:25:31.180 --> 00:25:33.680 which I'm talking about it, and environmentism and 287 00:25:33.680 --> 00:25:36.140 and economism in the sense in which they are religions 288 00:25:36.140 --> 00:25:37.820 are all working, if you like, on the same plane 289 00:25:37.820 --> 00:25:39.660 jostling each other for positions. 290 00:25:39.660 --> 00:25:42.640 Now, there's a strategy here, which is the sort of 291 00:25:42.640 --> 00:25:44.460 strategy of positioning yourself in the sort of 292 00:25:44.460 --> 00:25:47.140 naked public square, where you portray yourself 293 00:25:47.140 --> 00:25:49.740 in your own position as being perfectly clean 294 00:25:49.740 --> 00:25:51.740 and everybody else, if you like, is having dirty hands. 295 00:25:51.740 --> 00:25:53.820 I want to show you how this works in this area. 296 00:25:53.820 --> 00:25:55.540 So there's a powerful incentive for each of the 297 00:25:55.540 --> 00:25:57.660 secular religions to position themselves 298 00:25:57.660 --> 00:26:00.500 as uncontroversial factual positions, when in fact 299 00:26:00.500 --> 00:26:05.300 They are imbued with a whole raft of normative and metaphysical assumptions. 300 00:26:05.300 --> 00:26:06.300 And Nelson agrees. 301 00:26:06.300 --> 00:26:09.900 He talks about, quote, the powerful normative assumptions and the processes of theological 302 00:26:09.900 --> 00:26:14.300 reasoning that underlie the thinking of economists, environmentalists, the like. 303 00:26:14.300 --> 00:26:17.580 Traditional religions, on the other hand, we are told, must be quarantined, kept well 304 00:26:17.580 --> 00:26:22.660 away from polite society, but our secular religions are neutral, uncontaminated by value 305 00:26:22.660 --> 00:26:25.620 preferences and so everyone can be forced to practice them. 306 00:26:25.620 --> 00:26:28.340 Of course, the agents of diffusion are the schools. 307 00:26:28.340 --> 00:26:29.860 That's how it works. 308 00:26:29.860 --> 00:26:34.500 The problems then with religious disputes is that they involve disagreement about fundamentals. 309 00:26:34.500 --> 00:26:40.020 The rules of engagement, the description of the problem, the efficacy of solutions, all 310 00:26:40.020 --> 00:26:44.740 these are disputed matters. Nothing can be taken for granted. It's a clash of worldviews 311 00:26:44.740 --> 00:26:50.440 or to use the philosopher R. J. Collingwood's term, clash of absolute presuppositions. 312 00:26:50.440 --> 00:26:54.340 And so the sort of non-religion versus religion strategy, in other words, what you've got 313 00:26:54.340 --> 00:26:58.380 is religion but mine is just an ordinary factual position, is in fact a version of the no position 314 00:26:58.380 --> 00:27:04.660 It is a rhetorical attempt to win the argument before the argument even starts. In fact, 315 00:27:04.660 --> 00:27:09.860 on this level, it is one religion against another, so there cannot be a neutral position. 316 00:27:09.860 --> 00:27:25.740 No one can claim neutrality. Many traditional heresies involve an attempt to eliminate the 317 00:27:25.740 --> 00:27:30.220 distinction between the human and the divine, to make gods of men or to make gods of the 318 00:27:30.220 --> 00:27:36.100 natural world as indeed did the pagan religions against which Judaism and Christianity contended. 319 00:27:36.100 --> 00:27:41.580 What we see in environmentalism is a return to paganism where God or the gods are immanent 320 00:27:41.580 --> 00:27:46.740 in or identified with aspects of the natural world. To see nature as God is very different 321 00:27:46.740 --> 00:27:51.420 from seeing nature as evidencing or showing forth the glory of God. Celtic Christianity 322 00:27:51.420 --> 00:27:56.160 Society, for example, had a genius for reading nature as evidencing the glory of God. The 323 00:27:56.160 --> 00:28:01.280 earlier monks often saw the glory of God reflected in the beauty of nature, a view captured in 324 00:28:01.280 --> 00:28:07.160 an early 20th century poem by Joseph Plunkett. 325 00:28:07.160 --> 00:28:13.120 I see his blood upon the rose, and in the stars the glory of his eyes. His body gleams 326 00:28:13.120 --> 00:28:18.920 amid eternal snows, his tears fall from the skies. I see his face in every flower, the 327 00:28:18.920 --> 00:28:26.400 The Thunder and the singing of the birds are but his voice, and carven by his power, rocks are his written word. 328 00:28:26.400 --> 00:28:37.640 All pathways by his feet are worn, his strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, his crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, his cross is every tree. 329 00:28:37.640 --> 00:28:46.600 I know even though that poem was written in the early 20th century by Joseph Plunkett, who, by the way, was shot by firing squad as one of the revolutionaries in 1916, 330 00:28:46.600 --> 00:28:52.400 It's very much indicative of, if you like, a tradition of seeing God in nature. 331 00:28:52.400 --> 00:28:57.040 But for these Christians, if traces of God could, as it were, be seen in the world of nature, 332 00:28:57.040 --> 00:29:01.320 they were quite clear that nature was not, repeat, not God. 333 00:29:01.320 --> 00:29:05.240 This is the genius of the Judeo-Christian and, indeed, subsequently, the Islamic tradition. 334 00:29:05.240 --> 00:29:08.800 Nature, whatever it is, is not God. 335 00:29:08.800 --> 00:29:11.680 Now, common to both economists and environmentalists, on the other hand, 336 00:29:11.680 --> 00:29:13.800 common indeed to all inter-mundane religions, 337 00:29:13.800 --> 00:29:16.860 is the belief that heaven on earth is possible. 338 00:29:16.860 --> 00:29:20.360 This is probably one of the greatest of all heresies, right? 339 00:29:20.360 --> 00:29:22.440 The kingdom of God, if you're a Christian, 340 00:29:22.440 --> 00:29:25.760 is not, repeat, not of this world. 341 00:29:26.600 --> 00:29:28.960 For economists, it's progress towards a world 342 00:29:28.960 --> 00:29:30.820 without scarcity or approaching that world, 343 00:29:30.820 --> 00:29:33.640 while for economists, it's return to Eden, 344 00:29:33.640 --> 00:29:35.380 to a world either without man 345 00:29:35.380 --> 00:29:37.840 or with a significantly reduced human population. 346 00:29:38.880 --> 00:29:40.080 Environmentalism in the end, then, 347 00:29:40.080 --> 00:29:42.240 is a kind of atavistic romanticism, 348 00:29:42.240 --> 00:29:45.880 and back to nature, return to Eden, to the myth of the golden age. 349 00:29:45.880 --> 00:29:50.440 Now, in this final section, I want to again change gears once more. 350 00:29:50.440 --> 00:29:53.880 I hope that you'll have many questions and maybe we'll knit up some of these somewhat 351 00:29:53.880 --> 00:29:54.880 diverse themes. 352 00:29:54.880 --> 00:30:01.000 I want to talk about the current crisis from the perspective of economics and religion. 353 00:30:01.000 --> 00:30:05.520 The current global financial crisis that began in 2008 has been widely touted as evidence 354 00:30:05.520 --> 00:30:10.000 of the failure of what the popular press and electronic media like to call unrestrained 355 00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:18.040 and Capitalism. Writing in Barents in March 2009, Randall Forsyde noted wryly, quote, 356 00:30:18.040 --> 00:30:22.480 Will capitalism survive? was the question before the lunch table on Wednesday. It hasn't 357 00:30:22.480 --> 00:30:26.920 been tried, I replied, at least not since the McKinley administration and certainly 358 00:30:26.920 --> 00:30:32.760 not since 1914, when the Federal Reserve started operations in earnest. 359 00:30:32.760 --> 00:30:38.840 And again, I'd like to draw your attention to The Fount of All Wisdom. It was that paper 360 00:30:38.840 --> 00:30:54.800 Two top economists worry that Washington is wasting the financial crisis, squandering 361 00:30:54.800 --> 00:31:01.440 a chance to prevent a repeat of Wall Street's 2008 meltdown. Notice, it's not wasting money 362 00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:07.000 or resources or your future, it's wasting the crisis. I couldn't believe this again, 363 00:31:07.000 --> 00:31:11.000 and I thought, there is a God and he loves me, thank you for two good quotes from the USA today. 364 00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:17.000 Simon Johnson and who else, Joseph Stiglitz, chastise policy makers for believing that 365 00:31:17.000 --> 00:31:21.000 quote, financial markets could police themselves and correct their own excesses. 366 00:31:21.000 --> 00:31:23.000 Bring on the state. 367 00:31:23.000 --> 00:31:25.000 Anyway. 368 00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:31.000 So what the crisis is evidence for however, is not the failure of capitalism as such, 369 00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:35.000 about which one might say as Ghani has reported have said about western civilization, that would be a good idea. 370 00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:40.640 But the peculiar nature of modern banking, in particular the incestuous relationship 371 00:31:40.640 --> 00:31:44.600 between the commercial investment banks, the central banks such as the Federal Reserve or 372 00:31:44.600 --> 00:31:47.880 the European Central Bank and governments, a topic on which Rothbard and other Austrians 373 00:31:47.880 --> 00:31:50.640 have written extensively. 374 00:31:50.640 --> 00:31:54.840 The immediate solution to the problem is masterly inactivity. 375 00:31:54.840 --> 00:31:59.480 Unfortunately, governments are not in the business of doing nothing and so either failing 376 00:31:59.480 --> 00:32:02.720 to recognise or denying that it was their policy interventions and their state-supported 377 00:32:02.720 --> 00:32:06.240 The central banks that produced the boom-buzz cycle in the first place feel compelled to 378 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:09.720 intervene again to rescue society from what they fondly imagined to be the excesses of 379 00:32:09.720 --> 00:32:12.000 unrestrained capitalism. 380 00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:17.360 But leaving to one side the economic inappropriateness of the responses to the financial crisis, 381 00:32:17.360 --> 00:32:22.720 what we also witness is the use of the crisis for the legitimation of an ever-increasing 382 00:32:22.720 --> 00:32:27.320 range of interventions in the market economy and ever more irksome restrictions on our 383 00:32:27.320 --> 00:32:30.000 personal liberties. 384 00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:36.360 I had a peculiar experience coming through Atlanta Airport. I had to go through security on the way out. 385 00:32:36.360 --> 00:32:42.160 I knew if I raised a question they were going to strip search me so I didn't say anything. 386 00:32:42.160 --> 00:32:43.840 But I couldn't figure that one out. 387 00:32:43.840 --> 00:32:49.120 What am I going to smuggle out of the airport that is going to do damage to Atlanta or the USA? 388 00:32:49.120 --> 00:32:52.560 I couldn't figure that one out. It's a mystery to me. I still don't know. Anyway. 389 00:32:52.560 --> 00:32:56.440 The motto might be, never let a good crisis go to waste. 390 00:32:56.440 --> 00:33:03.560 As we saw with Stiglitz, the criticism of the government is that it is wasting the crisis. 391 00:33:03.560 --> 00:33:07.900 As in the case of military and political crises, which though invariably generated by government 392 00:33:07.900 --> 00:33:14.260 action are to be cured by what else? Yet more government action, so too with economic crises. 393 00:33:14.260 --> 00:33:18.840 For the critics of capitalism, the problem is market freedom, the solution is tighter 394 00:33:18.840 --> 00:33:22.760 regulation and control of the market. In reality, of course, the problem is the unholy trinity 395 00:33:22.760 --> 00:33:26.880 of Government Banks and All Forms of Welfare, whether global, corporate or individual. 396 00:33:26.880 --> 00:33:30.560 The solution is to allow markets to operate with real freedom, not the phantom simulacrum 397 00:33:30.560 --> 00:33:36.280 of freedom that they currently enjoy, to require banks to operate in non-bankrupt mode, interest 398 00:33:36.280 --> 00:33:40.200 rates to be determined by the demand for and supply of money, preferably real money, and 399 00:33:40.200 --> 00:33:44.200 to insist upon the immediate cessation of confiscatory state policies that are used 400 00:33:44.200 --> 00:33:47.160 to fund all forms of clientelistic welfare. 401 00:33:47.160 --> 00:33:50.240 The Austrian approach to economics, of which Rothbard was a leading exponent, has never 402 00:33:50.240 --> 00:34:01.240 have never been more needed, nor has it ever been more relevant. Unfortunately, it's never been more likely to be ignored, or even to be attacked as part of the problem, rather than accepted at the heart of the solution. 403 00:34:01.240 --> 00:34:03.240 Coming to the end. 404 00:34:03.240 --> 00:34:12.240 I'd like to finish with just some reflections, these more personal perhaps than anything I've said before, on Christianity and freedom. 405 00:34:12.240 --> 00:34:18.840 With the exception of strict Calvinism, and possibly some less than orthodox strands of 406 00:34:18.840 --> 00:34:23.120 Catholicism such as Jansenism, Christianity by and large is committed to the belief that 407 00:34:23.120 --> 00:34:26.560 God is free and so is man. 408 00:34:26.560 --> 00:34:30.200 Man is free metaphysically inasmuch as his actions, though conditioned by factors such 409 00:34:30.200 --> 00:34:35.080 as heredity, environment, training, education, association and so on, are nevertheless not 410 00:34:35.080 --> 00:34:41.280 determined, practically inasmuch as his actions are not constrained by factors outside himself. 411 00:34:41.280 --> 00:34:45.740 Now, for those of us who are Christians, we believe that man is created in the image and 412 00:34:45.740 --> 00:34:50.440 likeness of God, that likeness is most obviously manifest in our possession of intellect and 413 00:34:50.440 --> 00:34:55.680 will. Our capacity to grasp reality by means of our intellect is a dim reflection of God's 414 00:34:55.680 --> 00:35:00.400 creative knowledge, limited intrinsically by our finite nature. Our freedom too mirrors 415 00:35:00.400 --> 00:35:07.280 the divine freedom. Milton, in Paradise Lost, has God speak of man thus, I formed of them 416 00:35:07.280 --> 00:35:25.480 So this really is a central Christian belief. 417 00:35:25.480 --> 00:35:29.480 For those of you who are theologically sophisticated, you might recall the theological controversies 418 00:35:29.480 --> 00:35:31.880 regarding the relationship of graced freedom. 419 00:35:31.880 --> 00:35:35.160 There were five, maybe even more, schools of thought. 420 00:35:35.160 --> 00:35:38.680 Thomism, Augustinianism, Molinism, Congruism and syncretism. 421 00:35:38.680 --> 00:35:41.640 All of these various systems, however, respect the basic data 422 00:35:41.640 --> 00:35:44.200 founded upon scripture and tradition that God is omnipotent 423 00:35:44.200 --> 00:35:48.440 and that the human will remains free under the influence of efficacious grace, 424 00:35:48.440 --> 00:35:50.200 which is not irresistible. 425 00:35:50.200 --> 00:35:52.680 In fact, the disputes between the five schools got so bitter 426 00:35:52.680 --> 00:35:55.640 that in the end the Pope told them all to shut up, right? 427 00:35:55.640 --> 00:35:58.680 Stop arguing among yourselves, stop calling each other rude names. 428 00:35:58.680 --> 00:36:00.840 As long as you hold on to those two central data, 429 00:36:00.840 --> 00:36:04.280 Any theory that's consistent with it is acceptable. Now get on with the job. 430 00:36:05.560 --> 00:36:10.280 Freedom, then, is a constitutive element of man, both metaphysically in the indetermination of his 431 00:36:10.280 --> 00:36:15.640 will and practically in the non-limitation of his actions. I believe that God made us to know, love 432 00:36:15.640 --> 00:36:20.360 and serve him in this life. I believe that God loves us with a love that is utterly disproportionate 433 00:36:20.360 --> 00:36:26.920 to our merits and that he wishes us to love him back in return. Why? That's a mystery. But that 434 00:36:26.920 --> 00:36:31.680 That love must be a free response to his overtures. Even in the sphere of human actions, love 435 00:36:31.680 --> 00:36:37.640 to be love must be free and unconstrained. However much we way want someone to love us, 436 00:36:37.640 --> 00:36:42.080 that love is to be worth anything, must be freely given and not coerced. 437 00:36:42.080 --> 00:36:46.200 The burden of many fairy tales, operas, films is that pseudo-love, produced by Magic Potion 438 00:36:46.200 --> 00:36:52.480 or its latter-day technological equivalent, is no love at all. The desired end, the love 439 00:36:52.480 --> 00:36:56.800 of the beloved, has been attained only by the means of the very destruction of the beloved, 440 00:36:56.800 --> 00:37:06.300 God who loves us in a measure that passes all understanding will not force us to love him. 441 00:37:06.300 --> 00:37:13.680 In the end he respects our choice even if that choice is mysteriously to reject him. 442 00:37:13.680 --> 00:37:21.260 Here then is my key point and I mean this with the absolute, I'm absolutely serious 443 00:37:21.260 --> 00:37:22.440 on this. 444 00:37:22.440 --> 00:37:29.000 If God, who manifestly has the right to do with his creation what he wills, will not 445 00:37:29.000 --> 00:37:37.440 coerce us, what creature can presume to take it upon himself so to do? 446 00:37:37.440 --> 00:37:42.120 I believe therefore that my religion is not only consistent with libertarianism, properly 447 00:37:42.120 --> 00:37:45.960 understood, but that in fact, and here I'm pushing the boat out a little, it actually 448 00:37:45.960 --> 00:37:46.960 entails it. 449 00:37:46.960 --> 00:37:49.880 Alright, let's just start some fights. 450 00:37:49.880 --> 00:37:56.840 Okay. So let me then finish. Given the commitment to liberty then that lies at the heart of 451 00:37:56.840 --> 00:38:01.440 my religious beliefs and the commitment to the core truths of Austrian economics demanded 452 00:38:01.440 --> 00:38:06.040 by reflective rationality, if all truths are composable then there can be no fundamental 453 00:38:06.040 --> 00:38:11.600 conflict between my religion and my economics. There may be apparent conflicts but I know 454 00:38:11.600 --> 00:38:17.800 a priori that those apparent conflicts are indeed apparent. As Rothbard recognised, some 455 00:38:17.800 --> 00:38:23.200 Some perhaps many libertarians are libertines and libertinism is in conflict with my religious 456 00:38:23.200 --> 00:38:30.000 commitments but libertinism is not a necessary consequence of libertarianism, any more than 457 00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:33.880 statism is a necessary consequence of religion. 458 00:38:33.880 --> 00:38:38.480 In reflecting then on the supposed quarrel between religion, sorry, the supposed quarrel 459 00:38:38.480 --> 00:38:42.680 between religion and science, to take an example from the past, is exemplified in the dispute 460 00:38:42.680 --> 00:38:47.960 between Galileo and the Church, it was said that religion teaches us how to go to heaven 461 00:38:47.960 --> 00:38:54.440 and not how the heavens go. So religion does not teach us how the heavens go and it doesn't 462 00:38:54.440 --> 00:39:01.540 teach us how chemistry goes or physics goes or economics goes, that's not its job. Mark 463 00:39:01.540 --> 00:39:05.820 Twain once noted that rumours of his death had been greatly exaggerated and we can say 464 00:39:05.820 --> 00:39:12.440 the same for the supposed quarrel between religion and economics, provided that that 465 00:39:12.440 --> 00:39:15.600 that religion allows for the reality of human freedom. 466 00:39:15.600 --> 00:39:17.920 The quarrel between them has been much exaggerated. 467 00:39:17.920 --> 00:39:18.920 Thank you very much. 468 00:39:18.920 --> 00:39:37.920 So, if you have any questions, exhortations, expostulations? 469 00:39:37.920 --> 00:39:54.040 I'll have him read the Gospels again. 470 00:39:54.040 --> 00:39:57.480 The question was, what would I say to people who say that Jesus is the first socialist 471 00:39:57.480 --> 00:39:59.520 and I'd say read the Gospels. 472 00:39:59.520 --> 00:40:03.440 I don't deal with it here but I've written a short paper on this and I went through and 473 00:40:03.440 --> 00:40:05.760 found all of the passages where Jesus talks about these things. 474 00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:09.760 I mean, there are all sorts of interesting things, like the parable of the talents. 475 00:40:09.760 --> 00:40:11.760 Anybody pay attention to that? 476 00:40:11.760 --> 00:40:14.760 Okay, so one guy gets five, one guy gets two, and one guy gets one. 477 00:40:14.760 --> 00:40:15.760 Right? 478 00:40:15.760 --> 00:40:18.760 And the guy who gets five has to go off and he turns up with another five. 479 00:40:18.760 --> 00:40:21.760 I hope I got it right, so correct me if I'm wrong. 480 00:40:21.760 --> 00:40:23.760 And the guy who does two does likewise. 481 00:40:23.760 --> 00:40:24.760 And the guy who got one said, 482 00:40:24.760 --> 00:40:27.760 Master, I was afraid that I would lose the money and I buried it. 483 00:40:27.760 --> 00:40:30.760 And here it is, you get it back, just as you gave to me. 484 00:40:30.760 --> 00:40:31.760 And what did he do? 485 00:40:31.760 --> 00:40:32.760 Gets a pat on the back? 486 00:40:32.760 --> 00:40:37.880 No, no, he gets a kick up a certain part of this anatomy until he didn't do his job. 487 00:40:37.880 --> 00:40:43.000 Now, hang on a second, there's a presupposition in this parable, right, which is, you got 488 00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:44.000 five talents? 489 00:40:44.000 --> 00:40:45.000 You better go use them. 490 00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:50.440 Don't let them sit there, find some entrepreneurial activities and go make some money, right? 491 00:40:50.440 --> 00:40:53.040 How does that square with Jesus as a socialist, right? 492 00:40:53.040 --> 00:40:58.000 How about the parable of the workers in the vineyard, right? 493 00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:03.000 Right? Guys come along, he goes to the workers and he says, takes them on with crackadon 494 00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:06.720 six o'clock in the morning and says, I'll give you one denarius, one penny and they 495 00:41:06.720 --> 00:41:09.680 say, great, we'll do that and they work all day and then he picks up some more people 496 00:41:09.680 --> 00:41:13.600 later on in the day and picks up some more and then he goes, picks up some guys with 497 00:41:13.600 --> 00:41:20.520 just one hour to go and they all turn up and when the pay time comes, he pays the guys 498 00:41:20.520 --> 00:41:26.320 who came in last first and gives them one denarius. So when the guys who were hired 499 00:41:26.320 --> 00:41:30.680 But first, they come up, they think, that's great, we're going to get some more money. 500 00:41:30.680 --> 00:41:31.880 And they don't. 501 00:41:31.880 --> 00:41:32.880 And they complain. 502 00:41:32.880 --> 00:41:38.440 And then he says, it's my money. 503 00:41:38.440 --> 00:41:41.120 I can do, did I cheat you? 504 00:41:41.120 --> 00:41:42.760 Did I break our agreement? 505 00:41:42.760 --> 00:41:47.160 Have I not a right to do with my own as I please? 506 00:41:47.160 --> 00:41:48.160 So read the Gospels. 507 00:41:48.160 --> 00:41:55.160 Say to your friend, read the Gospels, yeah? 508 00:42:02.900 --> 00:42:09.900 Again, 509 00:42:09.900 --> 00:42:12.040 OK, the question is, 510 00:42:12.040 --> 00:42:14.400 in the context of 511 00:42:14.400 --> 00:42:27.400 I'm not a Muslim, I can't speak with authority on this, but from the little I know, I'm told 512 00:42:27.400 --> 00:42:32.400 that just as in Christianity there are very different views and very different understandings 513 00:42:32.400 --> 00:42:35.680 of what is required. 514 00:42:35.680 --> 00:42:42.160 I once was at a conference in Switzerland and there was a chap there from Morocco who 515 00:42:42.160 --> 00:42:48.640 who gave a paper in French, which I was struggling to figure out. 516 00:42:48.640 --> 00:42:50.440 But I thought I understood most of it. 517 00:42:50.440 --> 00:42:54.880 And at the end of it, I said to him, I found that very interesting, 518 00:42:54.880 --> 00:42:58.560 could you say those things in Morocco? 519 00:42:58.560 --> 00:42:59.560 And he said, no. 520 00:42:59.560 --> 00:43:03.040 And I said, well, come and talk to me when you can. 521 00:43:03.040 --> 00:43:04.200 So I don't know. 522 00:43:04.200 --> 00:43:05.800 It's a short answer to that question. 523 00:43:05.800 --> 00:43:06.480 I simply don't know. 524 00:43:06.480 --> 00:43:07.520 There are some people who say yes. 525 00:43:07.520 --> 00:43:08.280 Some people say no. 526 00:43:08.280 --> 00:43:28.280 How would you separate economists from Murray Rothbard? 527 00:43:28.280 --> 00:43:33.280 __________ 528 00:43:33.280 --> 00:43:44.280 Well, okay, in Rothbard's case, it's quite clear that if you look, for example, in Power of Market 529 00:43:44.280 --> 00:43:50.280 and the chapter in there, what he's doing in there, the normative ethics doesn't come in. 530 00:43:50.280 --> 00:43:56.280 When he wants to do that stuff, he wastedly gets to the ethics of liberty, and then he's quite cured about it. 531 00:43:56.280 --> 00:44:08.280 Okay, so it's an atom, and so when he's talking about, even in the context of ethics when he's talking about it, he makes a clear distinction between, if you like, the requirements of justice on the one hand, and a fully developed ethical life. 532 00:44:08.280 --> 00:44:19.280 It's interesting, by the way, that this is actually what you find, despite the fact that Rothbard was extremely, extremely critical of Adam Smith, this is what you find in the theory of moral sentiments. 533 00:44:19.280 --> 00:44:25.080 This is Smith's idea in Theory of Moral Sentiments, justice are the things that are demanded of 534 00:44:25.080 --> 00:44:29.440 you by all, simply by virtue of your being human. They are things you may not deny to 535 00:44:29.440 --> 00:44:35.800 anyone in which you must require of everybody. But this is not the prescription for the ideal 536 00:44:35.800 --> 00:44:39.880 of the complete moral life. You can satisfy all the requirements of justice and be a miserable 537 00:44:39.880 --> 00:44:43.980 person, in other words, and no one can love you. You could effectively be a sort of Scrooge-like 538 00:44:43.980 --> 00:44:47.320 character and satisfy all the requirements of justice. So you have to be careful about 539 00:44:47.320 --> 00:45:04.480 Rothbard clearly acknowledges that when he's talking, he's confining himself to this very limited sphere and people persist in misunderstanding what he's doing and take him to be talking about, if you like, the entire moral life and he says, no, of course not, it doesn't make any sense, please don't misunderstand me. 540 00:45:04.480 --> 00:45:09.080 Economism, I mean, so even Austrian economics could become 541 00:45:09.080 --> 00:45:12.520 Economism if you took it, if you like, to be the answer to 542 00:45:12.520 --> 00:45:16.760 all of life's questions, to provide all of your ultimate values, and if that's what it was doing 543 00:45:16.760 --> 00:45:21.440 then you will have problems between Austrian economics thus understood 544 00:45:21.440 --> 00:45:25.720 and your religious values. But as long as each of them, but again, 545 00:45:25.720 --> 00:45:30.520 by the way, I mean, look, I mean, I'm a Catholic, I believe the Pope is infallible, does that mean that if he thinks 546 00:45:30.520 --> 00:45:34.400 that, you know, Golden Girl is going to win the 230th New Market, then I'm going to put my 547 00:45:34.400 --> 00:45:36.400 No, what do I look like, a fool? 548 00:45:36.400 --> 00:45:38.400 Right? 549 00:45:38.400 --> 00:45:40.400 Okay, I mean, unless the focus has been 550 00:45:40.400 --> 00:45:42.400 spotting racing form for a long time 551 00:45:42.400 --> 00:45:44.400 and even then I would think about it 552 00:45:44.400 --> 00:45:46.400 its infallibility does not extend 553 00:45:46.400 --> 00:45:48.400 to the racing results 554 00:45:48.400 --> 00:45:50.400 it extends to matters of 555 00:45:50.400 --> 00:45:52.400 faith and morals 556 00:45:52.400 --> 00:45:54.400 not to economics 557 00:45:54.400 --> 00:45:56.400 not to chemists 558 00:45:56.400 --> 00:45:58.400 there is no Catholic chemistry 559 00:45:58.400 --> 00:46:00.400 there is no Catholic physics 560 00:46:00.400 --> 00:46:02.400 and there is no Catholic economics 561 00:46:02.400 --> 00:46:12.400 I mean, this point seems to me sort of so blatantly obvious that I don't quite, when people sort of question, I don't quite understand what the argument might be. 562 00:46:12.400 --> 00:46:18.400 I mean, I've had all of these things. People say to me, how can you be a Catholic and hold all of these horrible libertarian views? 563 00:46:18.400 --> 00:46:25.400 And I go, well, I hold these horrible libertarian views actually because I am a Catholic, because I believed, as I said towards the end, 564 00:46:25.400 --> 00:46:30.720 that according to my faith right at the heart of it right at the very heart of 565 00:46:30.720 --> 00:46:36.120 it is this mysterious freedom which is given to us which extends right down to 566 00:46:36.120 --> 00:46:40.320 the extent that we can actually reject the ultimate gift which is offered to us 567 00:46:40.320 --> 00:46:43.720 however though you know there is no such thing as a free lunch except salvation 568 00:46:43.720 --> 00:46:47.880 okay that is actually completely and utterly free that's probably why we're 569 00:46:47.880 --> 00:46:53.760 so suspicious okay here take this what's the cost nothing 570 00:46:53.760 --> 00:47:13.760 You could have it, but happily you don't have to do it, and for the most part, I don't know of any, maybe there are crazy Austrian economists out there, I'm sure there are, who might, if you like, become economists in the sense in which I use it, but I don't know any, and if they are, we'll expel them. 571 00:47:23.760 --> 00:47:29.760 about a dispute I was having with some sort of individual server that's about marketing 572 00:47:29.760 --> 00:47:35.760 and what I loved about it was I thought I was taking a part for a line and your argument 573 00:47:35.760 --> 00:47:39.760 was my only problem was that I was too timid. 574 00:47:39.760 --> 00:47:43.760 You're a wimp, okay. 575 00:47:43.760 --> 00:47:47.760 But my question is, I sort of haven't had an answer to this in quite a while, but I 576 00:47:47.760 --> 00:47:53.760 Can you be a Catholic and be a market anarchist? 577 00:48:17.760 --> 00:48:47.760 I don't know whether that's, that doesn't answer the question whether it's coherent or not, I don't mean to be frivolous, no there isn't, seriously yes, I think so, I don't quite, I can't grasp the cogency, if you like, of any argument against that particular position, it seems to me that, look, one of the things I tend to get from my Catholic friends on this is, you're being really sort of mean and you're, what about the preferential option for the poor and all the people I'm saying, look, 578 00:48:47.760 --> 00:48:49.760 Do with your money as you will. 579 00:48:49.760 --> 00:48:52.760 Okay, and the example I always give, and sorry if it's a bit hackneyed, is this. 580 00:48:52.760 --> 00:48:55.760 And Grafton Street, by the way, is the main shopping street in Dublin. 581 00:48:55.760 --> 00:48:57.760 It's important to know this for this story. 582 00:48:57.760 --> 00:49:01.760 Okay, so Tom Woods and I are going down Grafton Street. 583 00:49:01.760 --> 00:49:04.760 And Tom, being a generous soul, there's somebody panhandling. 584 00:49:04.760 --> 00:49:07.760 And Tom reaches into his wallet and takes out a ten-euro note 585 00:49:07.760 --> 00:49:09.760 and throws it into the guy's hat. 586 00:49:09.760 --> 00:49:12.760 And he says to me, Casey, don't be so mean, come on, give something to the guy. 587 00:49:12.760 --> 00:49:14.760 And I go, no. 588 00:49:14.760 --> 00:49:20.440 and he goes, oh come on, I mean, you know, he's obviously in need and I go, no 589 00:49:20.440 --> 00:49:23.160 and he says, I'll never speak to you again and I say, don't tempt me 590 00:49:23.160 --> 00:49:27.640 but he says, you know, I refuse to associate with you unless you do it 591 00:49:27.640 --> 00:49:30.440 and he tries to persuade me and he tries to do all sorts of things to do it 592 00:49:30.440 --> 00:49:34.200 and I say, no, no, no, no, no 593 00:49:34.200 --> 00:49:35.800 he can do all of those things 594 00:49:35.800 --> 00:49:38.040 all of those are perfectly legitimate 595 00:49:38.040 --> 00:49:40.040 the one thing he cannot do 596 00:49:40.040 --> 00:49:41.640 is reach into my pocket 597 00:49:41.640 --> 00:49:43.200 take out my wallet 598 00:49:43.200 --> 00:49:51.040 No matter how deserving the cause, no matter how sound your judgement is on that, no matter 599 00:49:51.040 --> 00:49:57.680 how defective my understanding is, you cannot make those decisions for me. 600 00:49:57.680 --> 00:50:02.640 If I'm a Christian, as I am, I believe I have an obligation, which extends well beyond the 601 00:50:02.640 --> 00:50:12.560 requirements of justice, but the way in which I satisfy that obligation is down to me. 602 00:50:12.560 --> 00:50:18.520 And in the end, the only one who can judge whether or not I have satisfied my religious 603 00:50:18.520 --> 00:50:23.840 requirements to look after those who are less well-off than myself is not the state, it's 604 00:50:23.840 --> 00:50:27.120 not Tom Woods even, though I'd much rather Tom did it, okay? 605 00:50:27.120 --> 00:50:28.440 It's actually God. 606 00:50:28.440 --> 00:50:32.360 In the end, the only judge who will stand over me to ask me, in other words, to say, 607 00:50:32.360 --> 00:50:34.120 I was thirsty, did you give me to drink? 608 00:50:34.120 --> 00:50:37.240 I was hungry, did you give me to eat? 609 00:50:37.240 --> 00:50:39.640 And if the answer is yes, then I've satisfied my obligations. 610 00:50:39.640 --> 00:50:41.680 Nobody else can make that judgment. 611 00:50:41.680 --> 00:50:44.360 And that of course is what the state does, that is what the state does all the time. 612 00:50:44.360 --> 00:50:48.520 It says there are all these poor people they need looking after, here, take your money 613 00:50:48.520 --> 00:50:49.520 and we'll do it for you. 614 00:50:49.520 --> 00:50:55.720 Now apart from the fact that it's theft, which it is, it's also remarkably inefficient. 615 00:50:55.720 --> 00:50:59.600 A lot of the money seems to disappear before it ever comes out of the other end. 616 00:50:59.600 --> 00:51:02.600 So that's the utilitarian argument, but the principal argument is it's theft. 617 00:51:02.600 --> 00:51:05.960 So the question is, can a Catholic be a market anarchist? 618 00:51:05.960 --> 00:51:10.400 Yes, I have not seen any argument to persuade me that there's any problem here and I don't 619 00:51:10.400 --> 00:51:19.400 So I don't expect, I'm confident to expect, confident in expecting that I won't find any argument, and I actually did like your piece, as you know. 620 00:51:19.400 --> 00:51:21.400 Yes? 621 00:51:21.400 --> 00:51:34.400 So, a long ago, Mises spoke of state knowledge, which I think is a pretty great word to play on the mission that the state set itself up in respect to the stock. 622 00:51:34.400 --> 00:51:44.400 What's happening, bizarre to me, especially, you know, I'm not a person on the fly, but only a little carrying for a few years now, 623 00:51:44.400 --> 00:52:00.400 and what absolutely shocked me is how state psychology has made an interesting difference in terms of the church and I'm not a catholic but my experience is that when there's a lot of church, there's a lot of business. 624 00:52:00.400 --> 00:52:18.780 ... 625 00:52:18.780 --> 00:52:23.460 yeah no no it's a very good question 626 00:52:23.460 --> 00:52:27.560 pardon me wants to say I don't know but I'll offer you some 627 00:52:27.560 --> 00:52:46.560 I'm often impressed when I go into Church of Ireland, which is the Anglican Church in Ireland, it's called the Church of Ireland, and I sometimes go for various reasons, or in England, you look at all the plaques on the walls to colonel this and colonel that, and so on, and you think, am I in the wrong place? 628 00:52:46.560 --> 00:52:53.560 I'm always shocked, by the way, when I go into a church in this country and see the stars and stripes. 629 00:52:53.560 --> 00:52:58.560 That's... I mean, even in Ireland, you won't find the Irish flag up. 630 00:52:58.560 --> 00:53:01.960 It's quite striking, what everyone thinks about it. 631 00:53:01.960 --> 00:53:04.160 And I'm not trying to denigrate the particular symbol and so on. 632 00:53:04.160 --> 00:53:05.960 It's just not the place for it. 633 00:53:05.960 --> 00:53:09.160 And on a Sunday morning, we often have prayers of the faithful 634 00:53:09.160 --> 00:53:11.760 and some of them pray for our civil leaders. 635 00:53:11.760 --> 00:53:14.160 And I say, yeah, they need a lot of praying for us, or do I, if it comes to that, 636 00:53:14.160 --> 00:53:17.760 but not for the reason you think, not to guide us and do all that, 637 00:53:17.760 --> 00:53:19.560 but basically to go and leave us alone. 638 00:53:19.560 --> 00:53:22.360 So I never say amen to that one. 639 00:53:22.360 --> 00:53:27.360 I always opt out of that one. 640 00:53:27.360 --> 00:53:30.360 Can I come back to the main point? 641 00:53:30.360 --> 00:53:33.360 How entrenched the state auditory is. 642 00:53:33.360 --> 00:53:34.360 It is absolutely amazing. 643 00:53:34.360 --> 00:53:36.360 I'm teaching several courses now. 644 00:53:36.360 --> 00:53:39.360 I've come out of the closet as a libertarian 645 00:53:39.360 --> 00:53:41.360 and shocked all my colleagues and students. 646 00:53:41.360 --> 00:53:46.360 They can't quite believe that I'm serious, but I am. 647 00:53:46.360 --> 00:53:48.360 The protestations always begin with, 648 00:53:48.360 --> 00:53:57.360 What would you do about roads? What would you do about schools? What would you do about 649 00:53:57.360 --> 00:54:00.520 this? And I say we have answers to all of these things. In fact, we had schools before 650 00:54:00.520 --> 00:54:03.960 we ever had the state doing it. We had roads. All the roads were private. All the rails 651 00:54:03.960 --> 00:54:09.080 were private and so on. And they go, but, but, but, but. And of course, Rothbard's point 652 00:54:09.080 --> 00:54:17.840 in most of his works is just that, in other words, the ideological imprinting of this from 653 00:54:17.840 --> 00:54:23.600 from the earliest age is so deep that even when you convince people by arguments, the 654 00:54:23.600 --> 00:54:28.760 kind of cobwebs that still remain, allow it to retain, to remain in position. And so once 655 00:54:28.760 --> 00:54:34.800 they leave your baleful influence, it asserts itself. They kind of go, oh, it's crazy. It's 656 00:54:34.800 --> 00:54:35.800 a sort of mental straw. 657 00:54:35.800 --> 00:54:38.160 All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. We're finished.