Ways of Dealing with a Slump
‘Precepts that are not technically specific turn out to be quite ineffectual’ (Christian Duquoc). It is the genius of Catholicism to have, over the centuries, wrought technically specific precepts regarding religion and also to have combined a merciful set of dispensations when the technically specific is too demanding. So there is a technically specific law that Catholics should marry Catholics. One notes that the frequency and reliability of dispensations can undermine the law.
I was wondering what might be ‘technically specific’ precepts for dealing with a slump, and I suggest one might be, ‘if possible maintain your reasonable standard of living’. I do not mean ‘go into unsupportable debt and rely on the State to maintain your reasonable standard of living’. If you can transfer your debt to the debt of the State, the world is getting more heavily into debt.’
What I am trying to express is that if consumer demand is the engine of the economy, then if you are in a position to exercise it in a reasonable way, continue to do so. The position reminds me of Bishop Grant who said – he was a founder of CAFOD – ‘Whatever you do for Lent, don’t give up chocolate – you will ruin Ghana’! It is part of my life to go across to the Chinese restaurant which is struggling. I could imagine, because there is a slump, it would be a virtue to cook for my guests. But, if I have the finances, by going across to the Chinese I am helping them to survive. This in a humble way is an instance of ‘Le Bon Sens’, the sense of the Common Good, ‘Common Sense’ in an uncommon degree, ‘collective responsibility’.
On the radio, the correspondent found hermself the only guest in a 5 star hotel in Pakistan. The staff were so delighted, they ran around her. They hoped, against bazookas falling, that guests would return. May it be. Sic. Amen
Sunday, 30 November 2008
The Scale of Value and Human Intentionality
The scale of values is an ascending theme as notes on a piano – so there are values vital, social, cultural, personal and religious – but the structure achieved in a mature and holy person rests on the lowest level, on vital values, for as human beings we need to be alive for starters.
The scale of values as expounded by Lonergan and Doran is intimately connected to the scale of intentional consciousness as expounded by Lonergan. So we have sense experience, and alongside the data of sense, the data of consciousness. Correspondingly there is the level of vital values, such as the excellence of a cup of coffee, or, in the desert, a glass of water. Vital values include conscious spontaneity towards others and so perhaps a primordial sense of human unity, for as Pope Paul VI taught ‘God made man to be brothers not enemies’. There can be disorder in our spontaneity, dramatic bias, and the recognition that the censor can be worked upon to be constructive rather than repressive in Doran’s ‘psychological conversion’. Vital values include also the wider ecology, for example, problems arising from sun-spots, CO2 emissions and climate change or a disease affecting the world bee population which is essential for fertilising crops. Health problems have to do with vital values. Starvation, floods, earthquakes have to do with vital values.
One can see that vital values in their entirety compose a colossal agenda, with the health of the world on one side and the health of man including his basic psychic health on the other. As an agenda though, human intentionality must get involved. We witness other levels of value. For example it may be out of religious values that some people busy themselves heroically helping lepers.
One might suggest that higher levels of value, as they emerge, have nothing to do but sort out disorders at the vital level. Where disorder is as it were disorder made visible then the good works can be seen and all will praise the Father in Heaven. As we ascend the scale of values we find ‘disvalues’, disorder at a higher level, so here too good works are to be done. Indeed it is at the highest level of religious values that we find the disorder which is sin. It remains true though that disorders at the natural level of vital values show up human failure at the higher levels.
Ascending from vital values are social values. Social values move from inter-subjective organisation in families and friendships to rationally (or irrationally) organised entities whereby man’s capacity to transform the potencies of nature into a standard of living is organised. This level of operation corresponds to man’s intelligence rather than his rationality, to the understanding which believes what it is taught rather than to the level which asks ‘is it so?’ We learn by trusting others. So in our present society some people believe you ought to get married and some people believe marriage is only an unnecessary bit of paper.
As growing up and maturing in a society we trust others in learning a language, in learning to read, in learning what is good conduct and what is not, and on the whole we can make our way and even pass exams without asking deeper questions. We have to learn that the term ‘water’ applies to that wet stuff. We do not ask ‘why’ we use the term ‘water’, or why there are 26 letters in the alphabet. We accept the truths we are taught or how shall we get started? The social world I am presenting is full of affirmations and intelligibilities – you need petrol for the car – and the affirmations are based on unquestioning trust. Because our ancestors got it right we may hope to get it right. Of course at this level of simply operating intelligence you deal with cultural, personal and religious values. One goes to church with everyone else perhaps but does not think about the matter too much. As I am describing the level of social meanings and values, I think one can recognise Cardinal Newman’s ‘notional assent.’
The society we belong to has the task of seeing that vital values are somehow attended to for all and that the ecology is reasonably cared for. The society though may be biased in some way so that for example slaves don’t matter. The society is guided by higher values and disvalues, religious, personal and cultural.
Cultural values correspond with the level of consciousness described by Lonergan as ‘rational’. This level of consciousness belonged to Aquinas who described it in terms of ‘possible intellect’. Aquinas in turn was influenced by Augustine who recognised that our task was to recognise the truth. At the Council of Nicaea it was not claimed you could imagine the Son as equal to the Father as Tertullian tried to do and failed; or that you could understand the matter perfectly, as Origen might have tried to think; rather the matter was declared to be true, and to deny it merited an anathema. With divine matters we are saying Amen and then, with St Anselm and with Vatican One seeking deeper understanding reverently, diligently and piously. Rational consciousness though recognises the truth of other matters which are proportionate to the human intellect.
The matter is really important because philosophers have not understood the matter. So Lonergan could write ‘There is no modern philosopher who could say Amen’. If the Church were to attempt to base herself on such modern philosophy the faith would be disastrously undermined, for our faithful assents depend upon natural assents. Do we not see the result in a widespread way in current lapsation?
I will give two examples. In both cases, to make a judgement depends on evidence, but for some sorts of judgements the evidence may be very simple. I get a bank statement. The account seems low. The incomes are there, but what is this expenditure for £450? Of course, I had my car serviced and repaired. I accept the bank statement as true.
The President of the Royal College for Science declares that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions. Aquinas said the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments – so, what is the evidence? Some people think the problem might be to do with sunspots. I find I am not in a position to simply assent. I might agree that as a cautionary measure certain things should be done – the Amazon allowed to grow for example – but I would be distressed at cautionary measures which removed food from the tables of the poor. I find I am not in a muddle but in a state of having questions unanswered. I do not know what the case is.
The cultural level deals with what is and what is not the case, and so informs or possibly misinforms the social level of values. So for example if at the cultural level the philosophers fail to notice that it is possible to reach a conclusion, then it will be hard to argue that people ought to get married, for that is a sort of conclusion. Weakness at the cultural level will lead to a drift at the social level. That is our situation today and if we live by notional assents alone we will be adrift with the society.
Lonergan’s fourth level has to do with deliberation and decision and it gives rise to an area for personal values. The level follows on being alive, being socialised and having some level of understanding. Personal values entail knowing when one knows and knowing when one has a question. One has to decide about oneself as well as about other people. Should I eat so much? What shall I wear? How should I develop my understanding about climate change? Do I need to work on the censor which disallows certain images and affects so that I overcome a block in myself? Personal values inform cultural values in the sense that if I know I can know and know I can decide freely then certain cultural positions cannot stand, for example, human beings should be ruled by the stick and the carrot.
Personal values show up a problem of intentionality. We do not always carry out our good resolutions. We need help ‘from above’. We genuinely look for love, to receive, to give. I think one can claim that all human cultures witness to holiness, but such witness is not problem free. Can one identify holiness with the gift of God’s love in other world religions? I think that is Lonergan’s position. Love leads to family life and I think one should add in friendship. Lonergan refers to friendship in his essay on marriage, quoting the Greeks to the effect that friendship normally requires high virtue, but in marriage so much is going for the couple that all you need is decency and then you get friendship. I guess today that we are coming to realise that a reasonable level of virtue is required for marriage. One must though recognise that marriage is a help for ordinary people and in the Catholic world a help to holiness. There is then ‘love for the community’ witnessed to by soldiers but also for all of us as we give our assent to legitimate authority.
The three loves, religious, intimate and social witness to something more than sheer rationality and intentionality about man. Where one such love is at work the others are probably there too. Lonergan at the end of his life speaks very simply of ‘affective conversion’ and of how we become a part of something greater. One recalls St Augustine’s words: ‘When you love, look to the source of your love and you will find God.’
The scale of values as expounded by Lonergan and Doran is intimately connected to the scale of intentional consciousness as expounded by Lonergan. So we have sense experience, and alongside the data of sense, the data of consciousness. Correspondingly there is the level of vital values, such as the excellence of a cup of coffee, or, in the desert, a glass of water. Vital values include conscious spontaneity towards others and so perhaps a primordial sense of human unity, for as Pope Paul VI taught ‘God made man to be brothers not enemies’. There can be disorder in our spontaneity, dramatic bias, and the recognition that the censor can be worked upon to be constructive rather than repressive in Doran’s ‘psychological conversion’. Vital values include also the wider ecology, for example, problems arising from sun-spots, CO2 emissions and climate change or a disease affecting the world bee population which is essential for fertilising crops. Health problems have to do with vital values. Starvation, floods, earthquakes have to do with vital values.
One can see that vital values in their entirety compose a colossal agenda, with the health of the world on one side and the health of man including his basic psychic health on the other. As an agenda though, human intentionality must get involved. We witness other levels of value. For example it may be out of religious values that some people busy themselves heroically helping lepers.
One might suggest that higher levels of value, as they emerge, have nothing to do but sort out disorders at the vital level. Where disorder is as it were disorder made visible then the good works can be seen and all will praise the Father in Heaven. As we ascend the scale of values we find ‘disvalues’, disorder at a higher level, so here too good works are to be done. Indeed it is at the highest level of religious values that we find the disorder which is sin. It remains true though that disorders at the natural level of vital values show up human failure at the higher levels.
Ascending from vital values are social values. Social values move from inter-subjective organisation in families and friendships to rationally (or irrationally) organised entities whereby man’s capacity to transform the potencies of nature into a standard of living is organised. This level of operation corresponds to man’s intelligence rather than his rationality, to the understanding which believes what it is taught rather than to the level which asks ‘is it so?’ We learn by trusting others. So in our present society some people believe you ought to get married and some people believe marriage is only an unnecessary bit of paper.
As growing up and maturing in a society we trust others in learning a language, in learning to read, in learning what is good conduct and what is not, and on the whole we can make our way and even pass exams without asking deeper questions. We have to learn that the term ‘water’ applies to that wet stuff. We do not ask ‘why’ we use the term ‘water’, or why there are 26 letters in the alphabet. We accept the truths we are taught or how shall we get started? The social world I am presenting is full of affirmations and intelligibilities – you need petrol for the car – and the affirmations are based on unquestioning trust. Because our ancestors got it right we may hope to get it right. Of course at this level of simply operating intelligence you deal with cultural, personal and religious values. One goes to church with everyone else perhaps but does not think about the matter too much. As I am describing the level of social meanings and values, I think one can recognise Cardinal Newman’s ‘notional assent.’
The society we belong to has the task of seeing that vital values are somehow attended to for all and that the ecology is reasonably cared for. The society though may be biased in some way so that for example slaves don’t matter. The society is guided by higher values and disvalues, religious, personal and cultural.
Cultural values correspond with the level of consciousness described by Lonergan as ‘rational’. This level of consciousness belonged to Aquinas who described it in terms of ‘possible intellect’. Aquinas in turn was influenced by Augustine who recognised that our task was to recognise the truth. At the Council of Nicaea it was not claimed you could imagine the Son as equal to the Father as Tertullian tried to do and failed; or that you could understand the matter perfectly, as Origen might have tried to think; rather the matter was declared to be true, and to deny it merited an anathema. With divine matters we are saying Amen and then, with St Anselm and with Vatican One seeking deeper understanding reverently, diligently and piously. Rational consciousness though recognises the truth of other matters which are proportionate to the human intellect.
The matter is really important because philosophers have not understood the matter. So Lonergan could write ‘There is no modern philosopher who could say Amen’. If the Church were to attempt to base herself on such modern philosophy the faith would be disastrously undermined, for our faithful assents depend upon natural assents. Do we not see the result in a widespread way in current lapsation?
I will give two examples. In both cases, to make a judgement depends on evidence, but for some sorts of judgements the evidence may be very simple. I get a bank statement. The account seems low. The incomes are there, but what is this expenditure for £450? Of course, I had my car serviced and repaired. I accept the bank statement as true.
The President of the Royal College for Science declares that the world is warming because of CO2 emissions. Aquinas said the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments – so, what is the evidence? Some people think the problem might be to do with sunspots. I find I am not in a position to simply assent. I might agree that as a cautionary measure certain things should be done – the Amazon allowed to grow for example – but I would be distressed at cautionary measures which removed food from the tables of the poor. I find I am not in a muddle but in a state of having questions unanswered. I do not know what the case is.
The cultural level deals with what is and what is not the case, and so informs or possibly misinforms the social level of values. So for example if at the cultural level the philosophers fail to notice that it is possible to reach a conclusion, then it will be hard to argue that people ought to get married, for that is a sort of conclusion. Weakness at the cultural level will lead to a drift at the social level. That is our situation today and if we live by notional assents alone we will be adrift with the society.
Lonergan’s fourth level has to do with deliberation and decision and it gives rise to an area for personal values. The level follows on being alive, being socialised and having some level of understanding. Personal values entail knowing when one knows and knowing when one has a question. One has to decide about oneself as well as about other people. Should I eat so much? What shall I wear? How should I develop my understanding about climate change? Do I need to work on the censor which disallows certain images and affects so that I overcome a block in myself? Personal values inform cultural values in the sense that if I know I can know and know I can decide freely then certain cultural positions cannot stand, for example, human beings should be ruled by the stick and the carrot.
Personal values show up a problem of intentionality. We do not always carry out our good resolutions. We need help ‘from above’. We genuinely look for love, to receive, to give. I think one can claim that all human cultures witness to holiness, but such witness is not problem free. Can one identify holiness with the gift of God’s love in other world religions? I think that is Lonergan’s position. Love leads to family life and I think one should add in friendship. Lonergan refers to friendship in his essay on marriage, quoting the Greeks to the effect that friendship normally requires high virtue, but in marriage so much is going for the couple that all you need is decency and then you get friendship. I guess today that we are coming to realise that a reasonable level of virtue is required for marriage. One must though recognise that marriage is a help for ordinary people and in the Catholic world a help to holiness. There is then ‘love for the community’ witnessed to by soldiers but also for all of us as we give our assent to legitimate authority.
The three loves, religious, intimate and social witness to something more than sheer rationality and intentionality about man. Where one such love is at work the others are probably there too. Lonergan at the end of his life speaks very simply of ‘affective conversion’ and of how we become a part of something greater. One recalls St Augustine’s words: ‘When you love, look to the source of your love and you will find God.’
Monday, 17 November 2008
Economic Supplement 4
In the 1960’s, around the name Schumaker, there was concern for an intermediate technology to help the Third World develop. With plentiful labour forks might be better than tractors, especially as tractors need skilled repair. A slogan was ‘small is beautiful’.
At the same time, in the advanced world, the thing was ‘economies of scale’ augmented by technical progress. In those days if the battery in the car went flat you could crank it by hand. Now technical progress has made it inconceivable that the battery goes flat . . . so if it does, (when it does!) cranking is not a solution.
With modern technology most managers have the job of hoping it will work and calling on the experts if it does not. The chap working in the shop can’t do much if the credit card machine breaks down.
Lonergan sees that our technology needs to be efficient so that the world’s teeming millions are fed, but he also sees that there is a problem if our personal capacity is not developed. The Popes make the same point.
I suspect that technology around consumption again could be simplified. I recall a post war wireless which clearly indicated where you turned the dial to get the Light Service or the Third Service. To day I find myself pressing buttons in a random way and occasionally coming up with what I am looking for.
Today in the Chilterns one sees occasionally shepherdless sheep, the odd cow, a stray tractor – what one does not see is any degree of labour intensive agriculture. The fewness of farm workers makes for a lonely life I suspect. In the shops our food comes from the ends of the earth, is very wonderful (I am grateful) and costs a good deal.
I find myself wondering whether there is not scope for an intermediate technology here which involves man more in the way of labour which develops skills and adapts intelligently to problems.
I look after a small vineyard with 400 vines. There is a slow process of coming to understand the vine and the branches – grapes never grow from the main stem. There is the challenge of not using insecticide but keeping the vineyard clear of weeds – a challenge which meets my declining energy levels. There is, occasionally, the undeserved excellence of a good bottle of wine. I am developing and at times failing adequately to develop an intermediate technology. I find there is nothing I do, beyond disturbing about one mouse’s nest a year, that disrupts the ecology. I am free to combine prayer with labour. The task of regular physical labour is a matter of personal discipline and also, I think, understanding oneself.
In vineyards and in moving to intermediate technology – festina lente!
At the same time, in the advanced world, the thing was ‘economies of scale’ augmented by technical progress. In those days if the battery in the car went flat you could crank it by hand. Now technical progress has made it inconceivable that the battery goes flat . . . so if it does, (when it does!) cranking is not a solution.
With modern technology most managers have the job of hoping it will work and calling on the experts if it does not. The chap working in the shop can’t do much if the credit card machine breaks down.
Lonergan sees that our technology needs to be efficient so that the world’s teeming millions are fed, but he also sees that there is a problem if our personal capacity is not developed. The Popes make the same point.
I suspect that technology around consumption again could be simplified. I recall a post war wireless which clearly indicated where you turned the dial to get the Light Service or the Third Service. To day I find myself pressing buttons in a random way and occasionally coming up with what I am looking for.
Today in the Chilterns one sees occasionally shepherdless sheep, the odd cow, a stray tractor – what one does not see is any degree of labour intensive agriculture. The fewness of farm workers makes for a lonely life I suspect. In the shops our food comes from the ends of the earth, is very wonderful (I am grateful) and costs a good deal.
I find myself wondering whether there is not scope for an intermediate technology here which involves man more in the way of labour which develops skills and adapts intelligently to problems.
I look after a small vineyard with 400 vines. There is a slow process of coming to understand the vine and the branches – grapes never grow from the main stem. There is the challenge of not using insecticide but keeping the vineyard clear of weeds – a challenge which meets my declining energy levels. There is, occasionally, the undeserved excellence of a good bottle of wine. I am developing and at times failing adequately to develop an intermediate technology. I find there is nothing I do, beyond disturbing about one mouse’s nest a year, that disrupts the ecology. I am free to combine prayer with labour. The task of regular physical labour is a matter of personal discipline and also, I think, understanding oneself.
In vineyards and in moving to intermediate technology – festina lente!
Commitment
While no one wishes to be a drifter most of the troubles in the world come from people who are committed, but there is something wrong with their commitment. There are those who make a fortune but lack honesty, those who advance in politics but lack humanity. There are norms which are disregarded or only partially regarded – attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility – and authenticity is demanding for it is a cumulative product. A block of some sort, a bias provides an emerging problem which is consistently ignored.
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?
Economic Supplement 3
Households
If there is a slump, even as the wishful thinkers would have it, a mini-slump, a recession, the problem in the economy is not a failure in the capacity to supply but a failure in the capacity to demand. It is not that the oil wells have run dry or ship makers are over extended or that General Motors can’t produce any more cars, but rather that the Joneses have decided not to take a holiday this year and the Smiths have stopped eating out. There is a shortage of cash about the person. It is not that Mr Average is losing his house but that, forced by payments made, forced by income levels the careless ésprit is lost. It is not that everyone has become a saver but everyone is seeking to balance the books.
It is important to realise that decisions to restrain consumption are not irrational. They are born from experience. The Jones went to Euroland last year and discovered how expensive everything is. They got a little into debt, but nothing too serious. Now they would like to get a little out of debt. Keynes, who made a bob or two on the Stock Exchange for King’s College, Cambridge used an unfortunate phrase to describe economic motivation: ‘animal spirits’, as if one was dealing with a mass of lemmings. Lonergan proposed rather that people’s past experience gave them grounds for some sort of rational decision. If a share has been going down for a couple of years, this might be time to get out. We read about ‘panic’ in the stock market. Fortunes have nearly halved. But actually most of the stocks being held are being held with the prospect of gain.
Again, one might imagine it is irrational for banks not to lend to each other. From lending to each other they have had bad experiences. Why not let them not lend, if that is what their experience bids? Why pump money into the system so they do lend? It will surely happen that some will see they have some money lying idle overnight, and there is a reliable way of earning a % point by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
If the basic problem in the economy is household demand, then the basic problem is that prices are too high. VAT could be eliminated across Europe. Business tax could be eliminated. People could be taught the nature of the problem: prices need to be reduced, so that households on their incomes can buy.
For Lonergan, the theoretical point is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If money is raised somehow and pumped into the system all systems might go for a day or two or a year or two, but the disequilibrium will manifest itself again. Policy makers might be proud of their decisiveness and the immediate success of what they have done.
What is to be desired is a situation which allows recurrence. The financial flow to companies is sufficient to keep everyone working. Financial flows to the households (including the finite States) are sufficient to allow next year to be as good as this. If there has been technical progress there might even be an increase in standards.
If there is a slump, even as the wishful thinkers would have it, a mini-slump, a recession, the problem in the economy is not a failure in the capacity to supply but a failure in the capacity to demand. It is not that the oil wells have run dry or ship makers are over extended or that General Motors can’t produce any more cars, but rather that the Joneses have decided not to take a holiday this year and the Smiths have stopped eating out. There is a shortage of cash about the person. It is not that Mr Average is losing his house but that, forced by payments made, forced by income levels the careless ésprit is lost. It is not that everyone has become a saver but everyone is seeking to balance the books.
It is important to realise that decisions to restrain consumption are not irrational. They are born from experience. The Jones went to Euroland last year and discovered how expensive everything is. They got a little into debt, but nothing too serious. Now they would like to get a little out of debt. Keynes, who made a bob or two on the Stock Exchange for King’s College, Cambridge used an unfortunate phrase to describe economic motivation: ‘animal spirits’, as if one was dealing with a mass of lemmings. Lonergan proposed rather that people’s past experience gave them grounds for some sort of rational decision. If a share has been going down for a couple of years, this might be time to get out. We read about ‘panic’ in the stock market. Fortunes have nearly halved. But actually most of the stocks being held are being held with the prospect of gain.
Again, one might imagine it is irrational for banks not to lend to each other. From lending to each other they have had bad experiences. Why not let them not lend, if that is what their experience bids? Why pump money into the system so they do lend? It will surely happen that some will see they have some money lying idle overnight, and there is a reliable way of earning a % point by 10 a.m. tomorrow.
If the basic problem in the economy is household demand, then the basic problem is that prices are too high. VAT could be eliminated across Europe. Business tax could be eliminated. People could be taught the nature of the problem: prices need to be reduced, so that households on their incomes can buy.
For Lonergan, the theoretical point is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If money is raised somehow and pumped into the system all systems might go for a day or two or a year or two, but the disequilibrium will manifest itself again. Policy makers might be proud of their decisiveness and the immediate success of what they have done.
What is to be desired is a situation which allows recurrence. The financial flow to companies is sufficient to keep everyone working. Financial flows to the households (including the finite States) are sufficient to allow next year to be as good as this. If there has been technical progress there might even be an increase in standards.
Love, Commitment, Values
The scale of values moves from vital to social to cultural to personal to religious. Everything depends on vital values. More particularly, each level of values takes direction from the next higher level and depends immediately on the lower level; so social values are informed by cultural values and dependent on vital values.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.
Friday, 14 November 2008
Economic Supplement 2
Cause of the Slump
In the 1940’s Lonergan, after reading Schumpeter, came to an understanding of the trade cycle which he expressed in two works which are almost impossible to read. His philosophy helped him to identify the purpose of the economy – purchase of goods and services by the consumer. To help analysis I think it is I who have added in the government too as a household of households and also as a consumer. This helps one to the healthy realisation that States too are finite entities, whereas I grew up in a post-war world where it seemed to many the solution of every problem lay with the State.
The economy is an immense worldwide collaboration upon the potentialities of nature to bring about a flow of goods and services which are destined to be purchased. By work man transforms things and gets paid. The money he earns enables him to buy the products of the economy. When he buys, the finance he has earned flows back into the firms, so that they can continue paying workers and others.
There is then a circulation of finance, money coming from households and States to purchase goods and services, and money going from firms to pay or reward or obey households – wages, rents, dividends, taxes.
Lonergan’s main assertion is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If prices are too high households maintaining their standard of living will go into debt. Via the banking system, firms will be able to supply the cash banks need to lend to households. Such a condition is incapable of recurrence year on year as interest payments mount up.
To illustrate the point I am going to put two situations, one entirely imaginable, one too vast for our imagination, yet understandable.
Henry Ford was asked why he paid his workers so well. He replied, if I don’t, how can they buy my cars? It is a joke of course, but it shows awareness that wages must be sufficient for output to be purchased.
Let us now consider the global economy, all the earners and their households, and the financial flow, as if it were one currency, going to those households. Include all the States as households. That financial flow conditions the possible debt free flow of households to firms in the purchase of goods and services. Here too, the financial crossovers must equal. There must be then a normative mark up on goods and services or the resultant price level will be too high.
In a free world economy what must guide the norms other than informed consciences of producers, who understand that they must cover their costs including costs to repair equipment? If they charge too high a price they are effectively making themselves thieves. They are ruining households and perhaps ruining their own market in the process. The concern for the outcome, the concern for the common good, le bon sens belongs to all participants in the economy.
In boom times, basic commodity prices rise in the markets. Such prices are not fixed by mark ups. The % mark up though will yield a greater return per item. When basic prices fall the amount raised by the same % mark up will fall per item. Revenues though will hold up if sales increase sufficiently. This should be the object of policy and hope in times of recession and slump.
In the 1940’s Lonergan, after reading Schumpeter, came to an understanding of the trade cycle which he expressed in two works which are almost impossible to read. His philosophy helped him to identify the purpose of the economy – purchase of goods and services by the consumer. To help analysis I think it is I who have added in the government too as a household of households and also as a consumer. This helps one to the healthy realisation that States too are finite entities, whereas I grew up in a post-war world where it seemed to many the solution of every problem lay with the State.
The economy is an immense worldwide collaboration upon the potentialities of nature to bring about a flow of goods and services which are destined to be purchased. By work man transforms things and gets paid. The money he earns enables him to buy the products of the economy. When he buys, the finance he has earned flows back into the firms, so that they can continue paying workers and others.
There is then a circulation of finance, money coming from households and States to purchase goods and services, and money going from firms to pay or reward or obey households – wages, rents, dividends, taxes.
Lonergan’s main assertion is that ‘the crossovers must equal’. If prices are too high households maintaining their standard of living will go into debt. Via the banking system, firms will be able to supply the cash banks need to lend to households. Such a condition is incapable of recurrence year on year as interest payments mount up.
To illustrate the point I am going to put two situations, one entirely imaginable, one too vast for our imagination, yet understandable.
Henry Ford was asked why he paid his workers so well. He replied, if I don’t, how can they buy my cars? It is a joke of course, but it shows awareness that wages must be sufficient for output to be purchased.
Let us now consider the global economy, all the earners and their households, and the financial flow, as if it were one currency, going to those households. Include all the States as households. That financial flow conditions the possible debt free flow of households to firms in the purchase of goods and services. Here too, the financial crossovers must equal. There must be then a normative mark up on goods and services or the resultant price level will be too high.
In a free world economy what must guide the norms other than informed consciences of producers, who understand that they must cover their costs including costs to repair equipment? If they charge too high a price they are effectively making themselves thieves. They are ruining households and perhaps ruining their own market in the process. The concern for the outcome, the concern for the common good, le bon sens belongs to all participants in the economy.
In boom times, basic commodity prices rise in the markets. Such prices are not fixed by mark ups. The % mark up though will yield a greater return per item. When basic prices fall the amount raised by the same % mark up will fall per item. Revenues though will hold up if sales increase sufficiently. This should be the object of policy and hope in times of recession and slump.
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