News from The Vestry 04/02/25

We are wholly inured to the logics of money.

This is Praise-God Barebones who liked a bit of ascetism. Cheer up, mate! It might never happen! His son Nicholas Barbon was an early advocate for fire insurance (after the Great Fire of London).

Prometheans!

After creating a couple of videos - one for the new ‘Welcome' Post’ on the Vestry and another for The Vestry page on churchofburn.org - I’m a bit videoed out, today.

I do feel the need for a bit of rant, though. So…

Ann Pettifor

has written about ‘Our Uninsurable Future’ here and here. The gist is that the effects of climate change cannot be mitigated by insurers. Our losses look to be so catastrophic as to make monetary compensation both impossible and - ultimately - meaningless.

James Buchan gives us this insight in his masterful Frozen Desire (1997)

“…insurance is the lottery in a mirror. Both imagine a cataclysm, of vanishingly small probability, value it in money and distribute it around a population so as to mitigate its force: in one the event is good, a prize of cash or an annuity… in the other it is that fire will break out in a baker’s shop, or a storm will run your ships aground.”

The rub, of course, is that climate change is anything but a ‘vanishingly small probability’. The certainty of it sounds with every extreme event. Ann’s piece is written in response to the Los Angeles fires.

And whereas our imaginations may continue mitigate the metacrisis through the cults of denial, conspiracy and techno-utopianism - money and finance are forced to confront the reality of events and their material effects.

Buchan observes that, prior to the late Middle Ages, certainty was afforded to us by our faith in God - and a belief that society and the cosmos were fundamentally static. As the Enlightenment dawned ‘men sought to reconstruct the old certainties on the foundation of money’.

That foundation is now crumbling.

The rationality and logics that inhere to money - and that have driven science, technology and modernity itself - have a fatal sting in their tail. Our attempts to inoculate the soul of humankind from money are failing.

Our social body responds by a turn to asceticism. We see it as the cure-all.

We’re fooling ourselves, though. Asceticism is to the metacrisis as bloodletting was to a medieval physician.

And like those medieval physicians, the academics and activists who seek to administer the hair shirt treatment are well-versed in the theologies that dominate our socio-economic world. In case you hadn’t realised, economics is more theology than science.

On Substack

Matt Orsagh

writes ‘Degrowth Is the Answer’. He recently published a post on the Lancet paper Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries. It’s written by the academic stars of the Degrowth movement - including Jason Hickel and Kate Raworth.

Leaving aside the difficulties of marketing the idea of Degrowth to the wider public (I note that Post-growth is now replacing Degrowth in the nomenclature), there is, of course a coherence to the their arguments.

As a species we are living beyond our means, depleting our natural resources, destroying our beautiful planet and killing it’s creatures. Degrowthers say we should stop doing this (we all agree, surely?). They believe their goal (our goal) will be best achieved by managing the economy in a new way - specifically we must “replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries”.

I remember inviting Jason Hickel to be a Bishop in Church of Burn’s 2019 Synod. I didn’t receive a response. This is a shame because it would have been interesting to hear him discuss his ideas with one of our other Bishops David Graeber. Perhaps it might’ve have got a little spiky? Because a couple of weeks after our event David gave a talk titled “From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Class” where he says;

“…a production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. I mean, even when you talk about degrowth you know, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? And to do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.”

For context, at our Synod David had argued that to ‘save the world’ (our Synod question was ‘How do we save the world?’) we must replace the categories of production and consumption with care and freedom.

And, although I’ve told this story many times, to give a little more context - and to take us to the crux of the issue - I’d managed to persuade David to be a Bishop because just a couple of weeks prior, he’d published Against Economics in the New York Review of Books. In that he’d said;

[There is] …an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win — for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money.

I emailed that he couldn’t write that final line and then not come to Church of Burn.

And that really is the point.

Money - and our relationship to it - is at the heart of all this.

That infernal question ‘What is money?’ just won’t go away. More than anyone economists love to wish it away. That Lancet paper on Degrowth makes just one mention of money in the main text.

How do we imagine we can change the way we are in the world without changing how we are with money?

It doesn’t really matter what theory of money academics put their faith in. It doesn’t matter how convinced they are of that money is a social relation. Or that it’s a thing - a commodity, or the symbol of a commodity.

It doesn’t matter because our individual experience of money will always have the final say. And so those who seek power will align their arguments with our individual experience of money and so recreate it at the socio-political level.

Money is a trap of our own making. We can remake it differently. We can immediately expand the scope of our relationship with it by burning some every once in a while! At any event we must think beyond its current confines or - as David Graeber points out - we’re doomed.

Sadly, I find so much that’s presented as a potential solution to the metacrisis is wholly inured to the logics of money. And lacking in radical imagination.