Grievance politics -ethical?

 Reading an article about the way populist leader turn grief into grievance and then to support, these sentences gave me pause for thought.

 pretty much every 

successful populist or authoritarian leader finds ways to riff on shared loss — falling living standards, defeat in war, loss of empire or status or prestige — as a source of grievance and thus political power.

My pause was around these two questions: how would a left-wing version of this go? And; would it be ethical to do so?

I guess the answer to the first is readily found in history. There have been revolutions and uprisings which have "riffed" on the losses experienced by the downtrodden (losses of just shares in wealth, of security, family life, respect etc) and the grievances turned (with some justice) upon those who perpetrate injustices and violence directly as well as upon the wealthy who operate and direct the systems to their own advantage. There is an element of a zero-sum situation. In such cases wealthy people and their collaborators have been targeted. Often there has been some justice in this: they have been people who have been held to account for real crimes small and large. Sometimes (and there are still arguments about how frequent or inherent) relatively innocent people have become suspect and 'rounded up' and the situation has become an opportunity to settle old scores that have little to do with justice.

The left wing version then would focus grievance on holders of structural power, usually mediated by holding much wealth particularly from being a rentier. And this raises the issue about how deserved the opprobrium may be.

Grievances can be deserved or relatively undeserved. To me, it looks like having a sense that there are powerful people who are maintaining their power (usually correlated with wealth) by inflicting degrees of misery on many others. The injustice of that deserves grievance. Blaming migrants for trying to make a better life and avoid misery seems relatively injust, particularly if on further investigation we discover their migration and seeking a better life is driven by the injustices of the aforementioned powerful.

Structural injustice isn't solely or even mainly about people, individually or collectively. Focussing on persons leaves the probability that removing office holders or staff leaves the system intact. One despot replaced by another despot still leaves oppression in place. And yet people still form the system and can be appealed to in order that they might not co-operate, or may sabotage. Leaders might, sometimes, be prevailed upon to make significant changes.

An ethics about this would recognise the harms that change might involve and what kind of changes might invoke what kinds of harm. Obviously that would be considered alongside the existing harms and the 'price' of business as usual.

I note a further dimension, captured later in the article:

how do we defuse this grief to grievance pipeline? If, as Vamik Volkan argues, it’s through a process of collective mourning, then what would that even look like in cases where what we’ve lost isn’t a person whom we loved, but a way of life, a sense of hopefulness about the future, or a healthy group identity with confidence and self-respect?

Now that's really interesting.

British Evo's and the shape of national life

An article recently published in Prospect magazine under the header The Marshall Plan, has a lot in it that seems well noted and there's a degree of sympathy in the writing, allowing for it to transcend being simply a 'hit piece'. As someone who has commented on allied matters on this very blog over the years, it is interesting to see some lacunae of mine closed with further information. I've been on the edge of the kind of Evangelical-Charismatic Christianity examined in the article most of my adult life. So I do recognise the truths in this description.

I think there are two things I want to pick up from this article. One is to note the way that the narratives of this particular brand of Christianity are pulled to the political right (and need not be). The other is to consider how (or maybe if) it can be called more fully into a better force for the good of the "least and the lost" to borrow a phrase that is popular -ish in such circles. 

I'll pick some quotes from the article to comment on.

The first one is a 'credit where credit is due' sort of thing. "...he is worth around £800m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List—Marshall lives relatively modestly." And that is good to learn. Though 'relatively modestly' is an elastic concept, I don't doubt that it involves not retaining all his income for himself and his family and investments. I do think that there are wealthy evangelicals who do indeed take seriously biblical teaching about modesty and almsgiving.

The next quote is both to affirm and to question. "Marshall is worried by the displacement of the Christian ethic in society. He has said that “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness” that is ultimately the consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On this view, we are all sinners, redeemed only by Christ’s death for us, so anything we have is an undeserved gift from God. What we do with our time, money and talents is a response to what God has done for us. This outlook reminds me of what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 12:48: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

I think that I recognise this from my years of insider acquaintance with this brand of Christian discipleship. Both the worry about 'liberalism' and the core focus on fallenness of humanity (it's in most evangelical bases of faith). I also recognise -with sympathy and gladness- the sense of responsibility and humility that this engenders. This fruit is Evangelical Christianity at its best. That said, I would want to do a bit more work with the fretting about 'liberalism' and the heavy lifting it is doing in a culture wars /moral panic sort of way. I'd also want to think more about the way that the fall narrative is functioning and whether it is a fair theological move.

I pick up comment on the phrase "Judeo-Christian" further down the article. It's also important to pick up the issue of the work that the Fall is pressed into ideologically.

Marshall is quoted as saying in 2012: “I am a committed Church of England Christian, I believe we are all made in God’s image, that we all have gifts and that education is the key to realising our potential.” And again, I want to affirm something of that: making a starting point with being made in God's image and recognising human giftedness. I think that this might not be doing all the work it should, however, in this kind of world view.

Politically speaking it is interesting to learnt that "he co-edited The Orange Book, which was a plea for a return to the core liberal philosophies of choice and freedom" This is important, I think, because it already indicates a capture by right-wing talking points and I think is probably symptomatic of a lack of rigour in theological thinking. The Orange Book was was enabled the LibDems, essentially, to go into coalition with David Cameron's conservative government in 2010 (was it?) enabling support for austerity politics and economics.

 Of great concern to me is to read the following. 

Marshall invested £10m in GB News, taking over as interim chair when Andrew Neil—who had been the founding chairman—jumped ship. The following year, with the station in financial and technical chaos, Marshall stepped in with a further multi-million-pound investment and gained, with others, significant control of the company. Most of the rest is owned by Legatum Ventures, a private equity firm and cousin of the right-wing Legatum Institute, 

This is recent history and as such is concerning in that it may indicate a trajectory more fully into the political right, if not fascism -at least that form of paternalistic and individualistic moralism that gave cover for some Christians in the 1930s to support Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. I think that some sentences from later in the article raise similar concern: 

Marshall’s latest reform project is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (the acronym serving as a second take on the Ark theme). Its glitzy inaugural conference, attended by 1,500 people last November, culminated with a keynote speech from Jordan Peterson in the O2. This Arc is crewed by right-wing politicians, activists and influencers, whose aim is to repair what their research describes as “the fraying of the social fabric”. While not explicitly religious, it is clear that faith—in its Judeo-Christian expression—underpins the enterprise. Once again, Legatum is providing finance and infrastructure for the movement

Fascism, of course, won't arrive saying "Look, we think Mussolini got a bunch of stuff right". No, it's going to talk about traditional values, citizenship and it's going to pick up and amplify fears about the fraying of the social fabric and suggesting that we need to discipline people for their own good. -Without, of course, noting that the fraying is pretty much a direct result of the financial shenanigans let loose by 40 years of financialisation, privatisation etc which is driven by these same Old-school-Tie-ers making millions in usury, derivatives and hedge funds and eroding the safety nets and protections for the many vulnerable and precarious members of society. No, (they think): better redirect concern to personal morality and culture-wars and in doing so find a way to ridicule and blame those most concerned and who have ideas to address the inequalities that fray the fabric. (I note that Pickett and Wilkinson's thesis, based in good research, about inequality and worse social outcomes remains a standing rebuke to right-wing political postures -somehow Marshall et al manage to 'miss' that addressing this societally would actually help with a lot of the fraying they claim they are fretting about).

But of course, the blind spot about what works is probably rooted in a blind spot shared by background. 

"Culturally, Holy Trinity is rooted in the public school system and the ethos of English exceptionalism. Several of the clergy who have led the church into its current dominant position are Old Etonians, like Welby, and have been friends since meeting at Cambridge in the 1970s." 

And unfortunately, the Christianity that is sincerely and wholeheartedly taken up by these folk is so focused on individual salvation and evangelism that it cannot see the social except very blurrily. Their position in large part depends on not knowing the social. I know, because I've been there -not as public school product but by trying to be part of the Christian Union at university and beyond that, being in circles which were often significantly influenced and led by the public school Evangelical networks. These networks are very suspicious of people who don't 'fit' unless they have done the necessary gymnastics to pass soundness tests and the 'one of us' social-fit tests. This resonates with what is said later on in the article: "The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful." -Interestingly, the latter is a precarious proof, for many biblically aware Christians know that persecution is rather to be expected for being faithful. They then look at themselves and wonder why that's not the case, and wanting to justify themselves they find tiny little frictions where people disagree or push back against them and try to make out that this is persecution -so "See! We are the faithful". Never mind that much of the time they bring these 'persecutions' on themselves by being insensitive, not reading the room, arrogant and even bullying. It's a 'heads we win, tails you lose' sort of situation. See below in the quotation where Michael Gove is mentioned, it ends with 'signs that God is at work'. So heads -we are blessed by God and tails -we are persecuted, so we know God is at work with us which is also a blessing.

I'm also a bit suspicious of the work that the term "Judeo-Christian" is doing in this discourse. I think that the term is probably meant to capture something that is judged to be common to the two religious traditions, and the Hebrew scriptures and particularly the 10 Commandments probably lies at the bottom of that. "Judeo-Christian" is probably code for the 10 Commandments for the most part. I think too that for those in power, the more individualist morality of the commandments is congenial. What is omitted in this framing is the more social dimensions and redistributive elements as well as the ban on usury -charging interest, for example.

In relation to redistributive strands of the Torah, the vision is clearly of levelling, preventing the accumulation of power through the accumulation of wealth, enjoining a duty of the better-off to care in practical terms for the less well-off and so forth. To this end the laws of Sabbath and jubilee envisage a return of land acquired to the original holders, this would have had the effect of re-distributing wealth and re-levelling the playing field -by giving all families access to means of production- as well as putting back the accumulation of wealth and power to more equal terms. I find it funny-sad that the spirit of these laws is rarely invoked in evangelical Christian discourse about social and economic relationships and governance while far more marginal and dubious laws are made shibboleths for orthodoxy. 

I'd like evangelicals to consider the example of John Wesley who supposedly had an annual income of £28 when he started out and although his income rose during his life, he still lived on £28 pa and gave the rest away (hat tip to Howard Snyder, I think it was this book that first tipped me off about Wesley and money: New Wineskins ).

Going now to banning the charging interest as part of the actual Judeo-Christian traditions (and recall that it was only in the medieval period that usury was redefined by the Church as 'excessive interest'). This alone should give pause to many of the bank-roll-ers of western evangelical endeavours. It seems from this article that many of them are deep in the practices that the Judeo-Christian laws against usury are arguably meant to disallow or curtail. These would include the idea of making money from money rather than from production or offering goods or services. Money should 'stand for' actual goods and services and the licensed gambling in money markets, derivatives and the like should be very much looked at askance by inheritors of the Judeo-Christian traditions. It's salutary to read David Bentley-Hart's Jacobin article in relation to this.

Whatever we might make of wealth and usury in relation to modern life, I think we who claim to be Christians should be wary of straying too far from the concern for the perils of wealth accumulation and exploitative means for doing that. Since much of the political right wing is essentially about defending wealth accumulation and has shown itself extremely sanguine about unjust and exploitative practices which enable it, I think that as Christians we should be very wary, at peril of our souls, of supporting the political right.

Of course, we should look at the theological justification for supporting right-wing political-economics. This is where the prioritisation of the Fall comes in. The line of thinking takes greed and selfishness as givens in human affairs and these are taken to be signs that "Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty..." (UCCF Doctrinal Basis) and the harnessing of these fallen characteristics by the theory of free-market capitalism is taken to be a happy mitigation in a 'fallen world'. Never mind that the theory is a crock and the actual results of following that theory tend towards accumulation of wealth and power on the basis of injustice and exploitation. The point of the correlation being made is to provide cover for the mammonists to continue serving Mammon and to head-off measures that might substantially restrict that service or seek to make a more just and fair social settlement in relation to the common goods that God has bestowed upon the earth. 

"Don't resist this greed, make it work for the common good" is what they say, in effect -ignoring that the Market doesn't, in fact, do that. In fact, it's made into a way to avoid doing justice and loving mercy (Micah 6:8) -matters which would overwhelmingly benefit the poorer, the marginalised, the least. These are in such dire straights because of the injustice and lack of mercy in the political economy of the West. Shouldn't we rather be taking the idea of the Fall to mean that we need to set up systems to disable greed from producing such disparities, misery and unfairness? Shouldn't we rather follow the example of the Torah in putting in place measures to capture ill-gotten gains for re-distribution back to the society which actually enables the wealth so captured? -Especially to the poor and vulnerable who are often those exploited and extorted of their just rewards. That we are all 'undeserving' theologically, does not mean that those who are defrauded should continue to endure the fraud while the perpetrators get away with it.

And, let's also note that 'bearing false witness against your neighbour' covers maintaining falsehoods that prop up a system of extraction from the most powerless of our neighbours. That's a Judeo-Christian principle for you but the big money uses its muscle to commission think tanks to sow seeds of doubt about markets, inequality (and don't forget climate change) which is already impoverishing and immiserating many globally. I note 'against' in that commandment; a special emphasis on the harms that such falsity brings about?

"The resentment industry"

Germane to that prior observation, is this following quote which I have also seen and heard echoes of among Evangelicals I have been in fellowship with.

"He believes that large parts of the leadership of the Church have fallen captive to what his friend Gove, speaking in a broader context, has called “the resentment industry”. But in evangelical theology, attacks—whether from outside or inside the church—are to be expected. In fact, they are a sign that God is at work."

Let's notice what work Gove's rhetoric is doing and hiding: he doesn't argue but merely labels something as 'resentment'. By that he seems (in common with many on the political right) to imply that people noticing wealth and privilege and seeking ways to address the injustices produced and the lack of mercy involved, are acting from resentment. It's not a new accusation: I heard the like back in the Thatcher era to disparage the idea of taxing the rich at higher rates. In Gove's discourse "resentment" is a framing of legitimate concerns about inequality to imply they are not legitimate and the sour grapes of the losers -as if it was a 'fair competition' in the first place rather than the rigged 'game' where "to those who have, more will be given". A better word than 'resentment' might be 'fairness'. And once we've noted that, let's note too, that there might be actual resentments, and that they might be well deserved pointing to a need for redress. I may resent someone having stolen from me, disparaging the resentment doesn't make the injustice go away. It also obscures the possibility that a resentment might be just: you've had your efforts and fruits of your labour misappropriated by others through bullying tactics or systemic discrimination -that would be just cause for resentment, would it not?

So, there's no real reason to think that church leaders (which?) have fallen to the "resentment industry" -rather those that champion the poor and social justice are simply doing two things. One is to attempt to apply the teaching of Jesus and Torah in a world of system-built inequalities. The myth being constructed behind this word in Gove's discourse is that church leaders should be pushing the lines 'rich man in his castle/ The poor man at his gate/ God made them high and lowly/ And ordered their estate'. -A position which gives a free pass to the immoral means by which wealth and power were obtained and maintained. A position which elevates the expediency of the powerless to an eternal virtue -disallowing redress even when it is legally and strategically possible.

The second thing is to bring the truths about how inequality and poverty is formed and maintained in a world that is really pretty abundant. The actual resentment, it seems to me, is that of the rich at having their self-congratulatory narratives challenged and shredded by those they consider less worthy than themselves. The claim of those church leaders that Gove so dislikes is that the actual 'resentment industry' -more properly designated as movements for social and environmental justice- are a sign that God is at work: anointing people to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, setting prisoners free ...

British evangelicalism going forward

I hope that Graystone is right when he writes the following.

Despite all this, we’re not likely to see the emergence of a religious right in Britain comparable with the evangelical movement in the US any time soon. The historic social liberalism of the Church of England means the identification between evangelicals and the political right is nowhere near as potent. In the forthcoming UK general election, very few politicians will campaign on issues such as abortion rights, and few British pastors would dare to instruct their flocks how to vote.

 I think that in many ways this is correct. I hope it is right that British evangelicalism may resist the capture that we see in much of USAmerican evangelicalism. However, I'm not quite as sanguine about it as Graystone seems to be. There is clearly money being deployed from the USA to influence things on this side of the Atlantic. It's worrying that MP Steve Baker, a member of an evangelical church in High Wycombe, has become meshed in with climate denialist and oil-extraction interests.

British evangelicalism has been increasingly influenced by USAmerican evangelicalism through the greater output of books, songs, and other media products. Many of them are innocuous in themselves but by building brand loyalty and on-selling techniques, enable exposure over time to more noxious content veiled as Christian but in fact betraying the spirit of Christ and the church of the first centuries in relation to wealth and power and keeping faith with the spirit of the parable of the good Samaritan.

The veiling is accomplished through bringing to the fore less weighty matters with a particular spin on application and pushing them in such a way as, over time, to make them central in the consciousness of evangelicals to the point where the position so named can be activated without dissonance to what should be central matters of faith expression like compassion, mercy, neighbour-love and so forth. Abortion is a good example. 

I suspect that the abortive Franklyn Graham evangelistic campaign which was being planned in 2018-19 (if memory serves aright) was less an evangelistic campaign (and let's face it, the format is largely unsuccessful and a waste of money and effort, be honest; it's more a test of orthodoxy than a means to win hearts and minds of unbelievers) than a means to network British evangelical leaders with a significant chunk of USAmerican-based right wing pressure-groupees. I resent that our faith and notions of fellowship are being viewed as social capital for recruitment to causes that betray the spirit of Christ.

I think British evangelicals are not sufficiently aware and wary of these overtures and avenues of capturing the evangelical mind and I fear we may have reached a tipping point. In part this tipping point is because there are numbers of ex-evangelicals who have left evangelical churches or Christian corporate practice altogether and the drivers of the exodus are the increasingly uncharitable, insensitive, unnuanced teaching they are hearing, the bullying and abuse they experience and see and the failure of large evangelical churches to be able to resource spiritual growth beyond a certain point (so people leave for more spiritually nourishing churches). At this point my evidence is experiential based on the number of people I interact with who report having been evangelical at some point but left for the kinds of reasons implied by what I've just mentioned. I visit churches where people tell me this, I interact with students in ministerial training who have this in their personal history. There are a lot of ex-evos out there.

Philanthropy, power and democracy

As I was thinking about this article, I found myself considering Jesus' words in the gospels to 'sell all you have and give to the poor'. This because 'give to the poor' is a different dynamic to 'set up a charity to do things for the poor', though at first it might seem like they are outworkings of the same thing. The latter is actually a form of paternalism while the former actually puts the poor in charge of how they use the money given to them. The latter is usually based on a fear on the part of the donor that the poor will spend it frivolously or harmfully, and so a means to give is devised that prevents that but leaves the donor in charge and often breeds resentment. We should bear in mind that there is research to indicate that putting the poor in charge of their own affairs is actually better in general terms. This relates to the issue of philanthropy more generally. Philanthropists mostly give money for pet projects but do not open up a democratic door into the donation and use processes. "Nothing about us without us" should apply to receipt of charity and is generally regarded as good practice in third sector work while paternalism is rightly frowned upon. I note also that the same power-divesting dynamic is at work when Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him to the villages and towns around and effectively tells the disciples (12 at one point and 70 or 72 at another) to rely on the hospitality of those they are proclaiming to, to be vulnerable to their welcome. 

The other dimension of this is trickier for many of us which is the 'Sell all you have' bit. This is reinforced by the example of the church in Acts where people sold stuff and shared the proceeds with the church. It's also clear in the background of the epistles that there was quite a lot of looking after the poor going on.

At the very least, I think we should consider what it would look like to encourage discipleship built on John Wesley's example, mentioned above where the money is genuinely given away or at least put into democratically-run trusts like Marlene Engelhorn did with her inheritance.

My suggestion for Marshall, his fellow evangelical Old Etonians and their networks is to decide what the equivalent of Wesley's £28 per annum is and give away everything in excess -preferably by giving it over to citizens' assembly-like trusts (Christian or otherwise) drawn from the ranks of those likely to be beneficiaries. This latter because other research indicates that simply giving aid directly to the homeless or the poor results in better use of the money or assets. It may be that Marshall is doing this. However, I get the impression that his lifestyle far exceeds what could be afforded on a median-sort-of income which might be a better starting point for consideration. I would commend taking in the insights of limitarianism as a starting point.

Fall theology as ideology

As mentioned above, Marshall is quoted: “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness”.

Ironically, as I mentioned above, the "sense of fallenness" has been selective: happy to see it in political opponents of mammonism but giving a pass to those benefiting from the channels of wealth accumulation and retention which are normally the flip side of misappropriation, wage-theft, and the use of power to suppress claims for just reward or fair shares. As long as the latter is dressed up with a veneer of legality, it is ignored. The Hebrew prophets and many a psalm would disagree that this is moral.

I guess that the "arrogance of the Enlightenment" is meant to be the idea that 'man (sic) is the measure of all things' and/or that reason is somehow not subject to fallenness. In the case of the latter, I think that this is in need of more nuance. Reason is properly a collective rather than individual matter, Enlightenment reason is the idea that some version of peer review will over time solve problems and come to better and better understandings of things -but the key is not to allow the formation of pockets of group-think, epistemic privilege or shared prejudice. I agree that probably considering that 'man is the measure' is a problem but mainly because it cuts us loose from our (God-given) ecological roots and embeddedness. In practice it also makes wealthy white males the actual measure of all things and without a sense of accountability (to God, ultimately) ends up justifying genocide, ecocide, misogyny, racism and so forth -basically treating other humans as lesser and forming systems of life and habits that sustain the lessening of these others. In Christian terms, this is neglect of love, justice and mercy -the weightier matters of the Law.

 A sense of fallenness would seek a Tower of Babel resolution -that is to decentralise power. It would put in place robust means to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power (and recognise that the latter is often a product of the former) or mechanisms for the removal of excess wealth and redeploying back into the ecosystems and social networks that enabled it to be created in the first place. And the means and mechanisms would themselves be scrutinised democratically.

Beware the Liberalism my son...

It's worth noting that the term is used in a weasely manner. 'Liberalism' can be a kind of way of thinking about politics, human rights, government and in the quotes above that is to the fore. However, we should notice that for evangelicals it is more frequently a boo-word designating churches and theologians who go 'too far' in adapting Christian thought to the culture and times. So we should be aware of this double-entendre when hearing evangelicals speaking. Part of what is being done often is activating the framing which disposes evangelical hearers well-trained in their tradition to put the concepts or ideas into the mental rubbish bin -and by association, the people who use the concepts and ideas. It is a logical fallacy but since it rarely reaches conscious thought, it is not seen as such and it then becomes simply a part of the outlook.

It's actually more a felt thing most of the time and because it's not fully conscious it is deployed inconsistently and hypocritically quite a lot.

In practice 'liberals' are Christians who might not express Christian ideas in vocabulary that fits the evangelical norm (this despite a professed desire to not speak or write 'Christianese'). One is becoming liberal if (too many and too hard) questions are asked about received ideas in the evangelical traditions -this despite setting up enquirers' processes which claim that any question is allowed; at some point one must put up or shut up.  Liberals are people who "don't accept the bible as God's word" this is a lie in many cases. I've come across many people who are looked at askance or written off by evangelicals who take the bible with utmost seriousness as an artefact which conveys to them the voice of God. And because thy take it seriously, they find they have to think about what kind of communication it offers, how to think around the inconsistencies it has in it and what those differences one part to another mean for how we need to read and receive it as God's word. (And, btw, never mind that the Word of God is theologically speaking, Christ primarily). Too often those who don't treat the bible as a kind of textbook are regarded as liberals and metaphorically booed. These 'liberals' are people who are often putting The Quiet Time into practice, and if you enquire of many of their evangelical detractors -these latter are often only reading scripture when they attend church or a bible study and relying on others to tell them stuff rather than hearing God for themselves in scripture.

Evangelicals may agree that "God has yet more light to break out of His Word", but all too often they are discouraged (both by authority figures and from internalised self-censorship) from actually listening to discern whether this might be so.

Explicit link to article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news

Further reading: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/christianity-poor-debt-jesus-moses-wealth/   

https://discipleshipresearch.com/2017/02/millennials-bible-readers-or-bible-admirers/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13644-013-0109-2

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2021/04/evangelicals-and-their-politics-dispatches-from-the-field/ 

"Here again we see that more Bible reading is positively related with higher scores on the liberal policy views scale." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235410637_Reading_the_Bible_in_America_The_Moral_and_Political_Attitude_Effect

Comment on evangelical recent history in USA by Barbara Bass Butler.

Innoculating British Christians against USAmerican rightist ambitions

I just read this:

Franklin Graham invested $10 million of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s money in his 2016 Decision America Tour to each state house in the country. Billed as “nonpartisan” prayer rallies, these gatherings framed the “moral crisis” as a decision between progressive atheist values and God. After the election, Graham called Trump’s victory an answer to prayer. 

The reason I'm concerned is that about 2 years ago, we nearly had a BGEA tour of the UK headed up by Franklin Graham. I was concerned at the time and this has made me more so. I was concerned that Graham was at least as much about networking so-called Christian right personnel with British Evangelicals with a view to creating a bridge-head to amplify an approach to values consonant with the USAmerican right-wing agenda. I wondered whether I was being too 'conspiracy theorist', but now reading this, I'm minded to think it would be precisely that bridgehead-building.

The article goes on to say this:

Today these influences — the Christian and religious nationalist organizations, religious capitalist and prosperity gospel movements, and independent charismatics — have access to the current administration in the form of its “court evangelicals.” The Values Voter Summit has become an important focus point for this coalition and its narrative. Through federal contracts and student aid, Liberty University has become the largest private Christian university in the country 

I'm thinking, having thought over the last 5 years in British politics, and recalling things I've read about the increasing reach of the American right into funding campaigns in Europe and further afield, that this is precisely an aim of Graham's deployment of the BGEA in this way. I think that they see an opportunity to leverage the current situation to build a stable if smaller base of right-wing support using somewhat Christian themes in the way they have in the USA.

As such I think that we need to be moving away from naivety in British Christian, especially evangelical and charismatic circles. We need to be in a position to resist Graham's next overtures. I'm pretty sure they will come once the dust is settling after the pandemic emergency.

So, my question is what do we need to do now to enable British evangelicals in particular to see through the rhetoric to the political agenda? To understand that this isn't the relatively benign BGEA of the 1980s and '90s but rather a vehicle for right-wing agendas which would struggle to answer 'WWJD' with responses that weren't more like responses to 'WWCD' (what would Caesar do?). There are UK evangelicals and charismatics who would covet the 'court evangelical' role, how do we pre-empt that? How do we innoculate against the cunning use of single issues to marginalise more Godly values (check out here for further reflection). It is a characteristic of some of the Pharisaism that Jesus criticised -maybe that's the way to pursue? (WWPD? -what would Pharisees do?)

My hope in this is that it seems that British Evangelicalism has tended to be more focused on justice and mercy than the USAmerican counterpart. I hope I'm not wrong in that, and I hope it is not too shallowly rooted.

This is going to be occupying some of my prayer-time for weeks or months to come.

And for the record, I think that such cynical usage of evangelism and co-option of the good will of those concerned for sharing the Good News of Jesus is despicable. If this is what Mr Graham is doing (and it does look likely given the history) then I think that puts him and those others who do it in the place of those pharisees and sadducees whom Jesus laid into for misleading the poor and the seeking. At the best they may be acting the part of 'useful idiots' at worst ... shudder ...

Source for initiating quotes: Our Demands – Poor People's Campaign:

The gods, corporisations and the politics of a Psalm

Psalm 82 has been intriguing me for some months now, each time it turns up in the daily readings for morning prayer. Here it is in the translation the CofE uses for worship.

God has taken his stand in the council of heaven; •   in the midst of the gods he gives judgement:2  ‘How long will you judge unjustly •   and show such favour to the wicked? 3  ‘You were to judge the weak and the orphan; •   defend the right of the humble and needy; 4  ‘Rescue the weak and the poor; •   deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5  ‘They have no knowledge or wisdom;      they walk on still in darkness: •   all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6  ‘Therefore I say that though you are gods •   and all of you children of the Most High, 7  ‘Nevertheless, you shall die like mortals •   and fall like one of their princes.’ 8  Arise, O God and judge the earth, •   for it is you that shall take all nations for your possession.

I guess the central move, for me, is to read 'the gods' as corporisations -what commonly gets called 'principalities and powers' (based on NT language). I've had a look at some commentaries and a number of them favour this sort of interpretation.So I notice, if we take it that way, that this passage implicitly asserts a divine mission for corporisations to do justly, do well by the marginalised and to lighten their darkness with wisdom and knowledge. It also strengthens the 'originally good but fallen' understanding of them. I'm also thinking that in those days, pretty much the only corporisations would have been imperial admin and religious networks -often two sides of the same coin. Nowadays we would start to include branded corporations and NGOs etc.

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Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

A belief in meritocracy makes us selfish

It has seemed obvious to me for a very long time that the Bill Gates, Richard Bransons and Elon Musks of this world are not the exceptional geniuses they are sometimes painted to be but individuals who have had the luck to be in the right place and the right time for the talents and perspectives that they had to prosper. The corollary of this is that there are dozen, in fact probably thousands or even millions of people with a similar level of skill and insight and ability to all of those who 'make it' in whatever field who have simply not had the background or the opportunities (often delivered by sheer fluke) to make the money or come to the prominence that the lionised have. I seems my observation and reflection may be being borne out.

Furthermore, the idea that nurtures this belief in the exceptional deservingness of these men (as it nearly always is) is actually bad for us as societies for ...

...a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

Which suggests that we should be spreading the awareness of 'success' as a product most prominently of the vicissitudes of life, biases in the social system and favourable accumulation of good fortune. We need to help people at large to realise that there are many of us who could do just as well if we had been in the right place at the right time.

Now, that can sound a bit like 'the politics of envy' -and it could of course fuel such a thing. However, I'm not sure that some of that is not called for. But we could develop an attitude of "Well ,good for you, lucky you: but don't go around thinking you are so much better than others; be aware of your good fortune and be humble, recognise that so many others are just as deserving but without the breaks you have had and act accordingly".

It might also make us less squeamish about recognising that the monetary accumulations that come with many versions of 'success' are also products of good fortune and the tendencies for 'more to become more' as illustrated in the game of monopoly -in other words the accumulative nature of what in economics is called rent.



A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Aeon Ideas:

Does the Moral Arc of the Universe Really Bend Toward Justice?

I like this quote:

What we must always be aware of are the deep ideological structures that bolster the myths by which we live, and to make sure that those myths exist for us, and not us for those myths.

It echoes the saying o Jesus about the sabbath being made for humans rather than vice versa, and Walter Wink's related observation that the Powers are similarly so made. I would say that, in a sense, this is also related since Myths are one of the existential underpinnings of many of the Powers. Corporisations are partly constituted by hopeful stories and mission statements which function mythologically. The thing is to learn to narrate myths which tell a truth which liberates and edifies.

One of the things that this underlines for me is that working to educate and to change minds towards peace and justice is important work. It can sometimes seem like learning and teaching are a bit weak compared with curing disease or building sewage systems. But there is value in helping people to think in ways that build and sustain human flourishing. There is value in challenging ideas that denigrate or diminish others.

The article itself is worth pondering, not least because it raises the question of how far this saying (picked up by Martin Luther King Jr) can be taken on without some kind of faith in providence. I guess that Marxist philosophy embeds the idea of providence in the dialectic of history and offers an interpretation of history which seems to found that view in a reading of the arc of history thus far. And Christian thought would tend to look to the working of God in and through human affairs. Both views have to be wary of inculcating a passivity which just waits for the process to work itself out. And in reality we need to remember that we are ourselves part of 'history' and caught up in providence. That if the arc of history does indeed bend towards justice, it is because 'we' make it so.

The real question, once the proposition is accepted (however tentatively), is why we think it might be so. In what some would argue is an indifferent universe, how come we think we can observe greater justice coming about? Is not 'justice' simply a human preference for arranging our affairs? Or is it something that ultimate reality 'cares' about? Why do we humans even have a sense that justice is better than cruelty and indifference? -which is a perfectly understandable reading of the way the universe appears to work, at least from some perspectives.

God has set eternity in the human heart (Eccl.3:11). Eternity is about love and justice. It is hard to make the statement about the arc of the universe veering towards justice without some kind of faith that there is an underlying reality which cares about such things and has embedded within the created order something that keeps pushing towards what is cared about. That underlying reality Christians name as 'God' and the something is the strange attractor of eschatological/ressurection life. This something is within the created order but points beyond; to a completion, to a wholeness, to a point of Rest; where hints and longings come to their fulness.

When we hope that it may be that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, we are hoping that 'God' really does care and that providence therefore will support our efforts in broad terms to make things more fair, loving and joyful -that indeed, our efforts to do so actually are eternally valuable, are worth something and work with the 'deep magic' of what is.

Does the Arc of the Moral Universe Really Bend Toward Justice? | Portside:

Life at the end of Us vs Them

This is a book of essays but they share a family theme, so to say. The writer is a good communicator in prose. There is an amiable tone with a nice balance between well-chosen anecdotes and helpful and insightful comment and reflection drawn from the stories. These stories and the reflection on contemporary events through them would serve preachers and teachers well.

What I've enjoyed about reading this is the depth of analysis and the range of thinking-resources drawn upon. Sometimes that can leave a sense of 'where's this going?" but usually just after that, it gets resolved.

I've also enjoyed the masterclass it offers in how to think Girardianly and this has helped me to see more fully the power of Girardian analysis. I still remain a bit skeptical of the sacrificial thesis as '(pre-)history' but seeing the insights worked through the examples given has been really helpful.

Another thing that I've enjoyed has been to become re-acquainted with Ivan Illich's writing. And it's interesting to see how contemporary Illich still feels -even some 15 years after his death and considerably longer since some of his better known work. The thing that comes over as having been learnt from Illich is the humane-ness that we need to cultivate and the alertness to the way that human systems of care can be corrupted by, in effect, their dehumanisation, that is to say the loss of I-Thou from their heart.

I enjoyed in this book, also, the insight into the hinterland of Canadian issues related to their first nations and the genius of this book is how these become windows into how modern society often works -or rather doesn't work. Girard and Illich's insights are used to help us to see and begin to understand the gaps and contradictions and to gently consider how we might live otherwise.

I most value the thoughtfulness and the thought-provokingness of this collection of essays. I have valued too the unfolding example as I have read of taking seriously viewpoints with which we disagree; taking time to understand them argumentatively but most of all humanly. This is worth much in today's world.

And in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that though I received a copy of the e-book, it was for review purposes. The opinions about it are mine and not produced to order or under any sense of obligation for them to be good or bad.

Link-Love 

Life at the End of Us Versus Them on Amazon
Life at the End of Us Versus Them Website
The Ferment Podcast - "a farmer philosopher and a mystic folkie set out after the yeast of the kingdom."
Marcus Peter Rempel on Facebook
Church Matters Podcast Interview
Englewood Review of Books Interview
Common Word Author Reading

 #UsVsThem Home: 'via Blog this'

Surge pricing goes universal: some effects

Here's something I learnt today in an article which definitely deserves pondering by those concerned with culture, social justice and keeping an eye on corporate tactics.

In 1861 a shopkeeper in Philadelphia revolutionised the retail industry. John Wanamaker, who opened his department store in a Quaker district of the city, introduced price tags for his goods, along with the high-minded slogan: “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” The practice caught on. Up until then high-street retailers had generally operated a market-stall system of haggling on most products. Their best prices might be reserved for their best customers. Or they would weigh up each shopper and make a guess at what they could afford to pay and eventually come to an agreement.

Now, I never knew that history, though I suppose any of us would have guessed that perhaps there had to be a first place to move from haggling (and the personalised pricing that must have meant) to fixed ticket pricing. I am intrigued and delighted by the insight into how a simple change alters a whole culture for a couple of centuries across the globe. I note how it plays well with massification and the then-developing ideology of free trade.

Downsides not mentioned: this would blow a hole in rpi calculations and render difficult or impossible inflation calculations and thus problematise things like index-linked pensions or other payments relying on rpi systems (note the comment in the article "Increasingly, there is no such thing as a fixed price from which sale items deviate"). There's an interesting feed-back loop potential in that. And then there is the hint in the article that poorer people might not come out well, that they would be given higher quotes on the basis that they are less likely to buy lots.
It might also become difficult to argue for the price-lowering effects of the Market (capitalisation intended) if in fact such selective pricing is taking place. Interestingly this exposes, possibly, the reliance that market economics may have on fixed pricing as its ideological support. Now I understand that 'surge pricing' or whatever does rely on free-market justification but I suggest that offering a price based purely on demand at a particular point is not the same as offering personalised prices based on what the algorithm suggests that you are willing or able to pay. If the algorithms are using the same or similar digital shadows for you or me, they will all tend to offer similar 'deals' to us. Thus the possibility of shopping around with the consumer power that commands is nullified: this could become a sort of cartel/oligarchy arrangement powered by algorithms. This would create its own algorithmic feedback loop having the effect of ratchetting up prices over time. And I say that in contradiction to the article's assessment towards the end:
This looks a lot like the beginning of the end of John Wanamaker’s mission to establish “new, fair and most agreeable relations between the buyer and the seller” and to establish something closer to a comparison site that works both ways – we will be looking for the low-selling retailer, while the retailer will equally be scanning for the high-value customer.
I'm not sure that the algorithm's will be sufficiently differentiated. If you want a sense of how this might work, spend half an hour looking at the prices of rarer second-hand books on a variety of sites, asking yourself the question about who would buy at that price -yet probably the prices have been set by an algorithm: the idea that second hand means cheaper in most cases has been blown. Unless of course someone creates price-busting algorithms that have the consumer's better price interests at heart. Algorithm price-wars, anyone?

My own response is surprisingly visceral at a personal level. I feel that somehow this seems like a violation of natural justice -I resonate with Wanamaker's slogan about equal before God and price. And yet I find myself questioning how far that gut feeling is actually an artefact of a lifetime's exposure to fixed pricing and the way that it has become part of the way that I calculate swathes of everyday life.
Perhaps this kind of response is why "Horgan suggests that British retailers are still a bit terrified that customers will be put off by changing prices ".

I'm also thinking that it is likely to bring to the fore questions of profit; charging what the market /consumer will bear may increase an awareness of how questions of relative power are framed. Is the retailer really adding "that much" value to the product? Is the price of status projection really that high? Most of us don't quibble about the idea of a reasonable mark up for costs and a living wage, but some 'surge pricing' seems to be sheer profiteering and this would be a mechanism for that. 

So, I'm wondering whether we need to have a set of standards for algorithms which give a quality assurance which guarantees the protection of consumer interests?

Rules for Revolutionaries: a book review

I have a back history in coming to this book which I think I would be well to declare upfront. I'm a bit of a lefty. There: what you could probably guess by looking at other posts on this blog is now openly declared for this review. Furthermore I have been so for a long time and as a result of my Christian convictions. So this book was interesting at first sight to me because it promised to help show what was learnt by the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 (and a bit before). In this I have not been disappointed. Though it should be noticed that for Brits like me some of the details are a bit hazy in terms of comprehension and as a result there were some points in the middle of the book where I felt that I was getting more detail than I really wanted or at least could cope with.

What I do take away from this book though is an insight into the way that a mass movement can develop and be organised without the initiative being taken away from the ordinary people who matter, rather, in fact empowering them. I was a little reminded of the Podemos and Syriza campaigns in Spain and Greece respectively which I believe shared some of the same characteristics of people having distributed ways to organise around issues that matter to them.

It makes me think about the role of political parties which I think have traditionally been the way to try to pull things together under modernity. However, in the Bernie campaign and the Podemos and Syriza phenomena I think we see the start of a kind of 'party' organising that is more democratic and participatory.

The other thing that has left an impression on me is the analysis of the traction of the Bernie Sanders campaign. The stand-out for me is about laying before people something big and world-changing versus the careful incrementalism of contemporary managerial triangulation politics. The authors attribute the rapid gain in momentum of the Sanders campaign to the big ideas and the call to be a part of changing things. It seemed to me that this is something we in the churches should consider more fully. Perhaps too much of what we do is to triangulate Jesus' call on us rather than letting the whole Kingdom of God thing hang out...

Link-Love for this Review: 
Rules for Revolutionaries website
Rules for Revolutionaries at Amazon
Rules for Revolutionaries on Facebook
Becky Bond on Twitter
Zack Exley on Twitter
Robcast Interview - the conversation between Rob Bell and Zack Exley
BrandNewCongress.org  - Becky and Zack's new Big Organizing non-partisan initiative to upset the power balence of Congress in 2018! 

Tag as #RulesforRevolutionariesSpeakeasy

I do solemnly declare that although I got this book free as a review copy, I am *not* up to no good with it: I have commented freely and as honestly as I know how for good or for ill, for better or for worse. 

Is proportional representation a justice issue?

Last week Bishop Martyn Jarrett argued in the Church Times that PR is a better way to elect a parliament. This week there is some pushback, first from Peter Ould:

It is an entirely subjective argument that says that forms of proportional representation (PR) are more just than plurality voting... You may think PR is more "just"; I just don't see it. Is proportional representation a justice issue, as Bishop Jarrett argues?.

I think that his dismissal is a little disingenuous. I think that it must surely be fairly clear that there is an injustice -let's call it a lack of fairness- at the level of a parliament not to represent votes more fairly than FPP regularly and necessarily does in a national multi-party scene. I do find it difficult to believe that he cannot discern some prima facie injustice/unfairness in the way that the 2015 General Election distributed seats in parliament in relation to national vote shares. To admit the discrepancy and to recognise it as having failure-to-represent effects is not necessarily to take stand either way on the advisability of one system or the other. It would merely be to admit that there are occasions in human affairs when claims of justice have to be weighed and may, to degrees, conflict.

A bit later in his letter, Mr Ould alleges that PR fails to offer direct accountability via MPs in constitutencies and thereby is less just:

Start moving to the single transferable vote, and you water down that direct connection. If you have straight national PR, then you lose that local accountability altogether. For some, this notion of local accountability is a factor that makes first-past-the-post far more just than PR systems.

In passing, I note that by writing 'more just', he accepts a degree of justice for PR. So I take it that his 'just not getting it' is a relative (and rhetorical) rather than an absolute point. and that we are weighing up two claims for relatively just outcomes.

More seriously, he is ignoring the Electoral Reform Sociey's preferred option of multimember constituencies (probably 4 or 5members in each constituency in Britain) which it is being suggested is the way that STV be operated. It is suggested precisely because it retains that local accountability prized by Mr Ould. Obvisouly this point considerably weakens the relative case for greater justice of the FPP system as put forward by him.

I read his letter to make a case that FPP is more just because it delivers local accountability whilst evading the force of the the argument for the fairness PR by not engaging with the national proportionality issue. However the local accountability issue can be addressed in the way that the ERS suggests while delivering results that are far more fair to a multiple of parties at a national level.

I'd have to say though that there is a further issue of principle involved which I believe undermines further the defence of FPP as made by Mr Ould. It is that the representative system as he portrays it, really only makes relatively good sense on the basis that the representation remains by persons rather than parties. I say this because the issue of justice or fairness arises here in relation to representation of parties at a national level. A government is formed from people elected to a national body -parliament-  whose commonality is their party political bond and manifesto. Therefore, at a national level, we should expect a relatively fair ('just') representation according to representatives' allegiance to party manifestos. That is the basis for the justice of the idea that a national parliament should represent reasonably well the spread of opinion in the nation as a whole.

If he wants to make the personal representation idea primary, then candidates for parliament should not be identified as belonging to political parties in elections and whip systems and other partisan behaviour in parliament should be outlawed. But as soon as you introduce party political allegiances then you weaken the personal accountability idea at a local level and scale up representation towards a view of ideas or manifestos being represented in national policy. The party 'brand' links to the national direction of political effort.
Furthermore, when we have more than two parties contending elections for national levels of government, then we have already begun to erode the personal accountability argument in favour of a 'brand' being franchised in local constituencies where the accountability goes also to a party discipline and personal favours, deals etc.

Since, at a national level, we have, in practice, parties forming governments, then proper acknowledgement of party politics should be taken into account in the voting system.

We should note that this party political branding of allegedly personal candidature already produces the manifest injustices of so-called safe seats in which elected members can, and sometimes do, take their personal accountability somewhat lightly since they know that the few hundred voters who may be dissatisfied with their less than properly accountable-to-constituents efforts in office will only tip the balance against them once in a blue moon (like an SNP resurgence in Scotland several generations and some very particular contextual happenstances in the making). And that is before we consider the arrogance of MPs towards constituents who don't appear to share their views, and the safer their seats the greater the temptation and more frequent the falls.
So if it's accountability that is desired and FPP remains the system, then finding a mechanism to 'unsafe' MPs seats and to unbrand their politics is what's wanted. But if we're making those kinds of reforms, we should note that STV in multi-member constituencies goes some considerable way to addressing the 'safe-seats' issue, diminishes the deleterious national effects of party branding by allowing plurality of views to be more fully represented (and indeed allows for independent candidates) and would help raise the game of lazy constituency MPs who would find themselves being outshone by more diligent colleagues and perhaps by PPC's in their own or other parties.

I'd have to say that it is not entirely subjective to say the PR might be better that FPP. We would have to agree of critera for judgment. But te decry the arguments as subjective as if that made them doubtful would be to fail to note his own arguments as putting another subjective point of view. In fact, both are offering reasons designed to appeal to senses of what 'ought to be' and these are rooted in something pretty close to objectivity in their appeals to fairness and to accountability. The question is what way does the best as far as we can tell according to criteria of fairness and accountability. This does not rule out a claim being made that one system is more just than another, provided we understand in what way justice is being defined.

As a codicil, I found another letter interesting from a Michael Cavaghan-Pack.

Proportional representation, for which Bishop Martyn Jarrett makes an impassioned plea, was rejected in the 2011 referendum by 67.9 per cent to 32.1 per cent.

While it is true there was a referendum on the voting system for elections of MPs to Parliament, it was not about proportional representation. Rather it was for the Alternative Vote which can sometimes deliver more proportional effects at a national level, but sometimes can deliver even less proportional effects. As such it can't really be said that we've had a referendum on PR. And in any case we should note the political context and have to ask how far it was actually being used by the electorate as a way to register dissatisfaction with the coalition government and the LibDems in particular. The irony being that AV was in the manifesto of Labour party and not the LibDems, presumably being accepted by the LibDems as about as much concession as they could get from the Conservatives which went a little way to their preference for STV.

And in any case, is there a set time between referenda on what might be judged the same or similar-enough topics? I think the simple answer is 'no'. But as this would be a different thing again, it doesn't apply in any case.

Monopoly games teach about The Deficit

The board game monopoly was originally designed to educate people about the dynamics of rentier capitalism with a view to advocating measures like a land value tax to control the worst excesses. The designer, Elizabeth Magie:

... hoped the famous game company would turn her “beautiful brainchild” into a popular way of disparaging greedy monopolists. The company had other ideas. Elizabeth Magie and the true origins of the board... - Austin Kleon

I have a dislike of Monopoly as I've blogged before. But recently it's occured to me that it could be a way to help people to think about the deficit and government spending which is more accurate and therefore helpful than the current austerity discourse which picks up Maggie Thatcher's misanalogy* to a household budget.
In the household spending misanalogy, the Micawber lesson ("Income 19 shillings, spending 20 shillings. Result, misery") seems obvious when applied to the 'tax and spend' idea of government deployment of money. There is an aspect of the game that is far more helpful in giving us a productive analogy for a body like a national government which is in charge of issuing money (and leaving aside, for the moment, the matter of the role of private banks in money supply). In many games in the latter phases, a cash crisis can often develop: the banker runs out of notes to enable transactions to take place. The rules allow the banker, at that point, to create their own notes. Informally, some players in some games come up with other solutions: iou's or ledgers are the most obvious and probably frequent.

It's the role of the game's banker in that situation of cash-undersupply that I want to focus on. Basically, in such a situation, we have money being created and injected into the game. The game-banker has not gained that money through tax. It is simply that the economy of the game at that point needs more cash for the economy, that is the game, to continue. We can see clearly here that the role of the game's banker is simply to make sure that there is enough money for the transactions that make up the game's economy to continue. That money does not need to be earned or pulled out of the game by tax. No, rather the point of the money is that it represents the economic activity going on round the board and facilitates exchange and further development of the game.

So now the analogy to government spending can begin to be made. Firstly by noting that the government is more like the Monopoly-game's banker than Dickens' Mr Micawber: the government issues money for the whole economy to use for settling payments and debts (or at least it can do, caveat as above). To picture the government as one of the players in the game who can only pick up £200 when they pass go and has only that and rents to play with is a fundamental mistake**. As the issuer of money, the banker's /government's role is simply and basically to make sure that there is sufficient money in the economy /system /game to keep exchanges flowing and the game going.
That's the main thing to get hold of. When you have taken that in and can basically see how the banker is not like an ordinary player and how a household budget is not like providing a medium of exchange, we can complicate a bit.

Making the analogy more model-like

If we take it that an analogy is a simple comparison and a model is like a bunch of analogies all tied together in a single theme or comparative object, then we can move the analogy we've just noted towards being a simple model by noting some other analogues. A model is a kind of allegory for the purpose of making sense of something.

So what other analogies does Monopoly offer to understand The Deficit***? Well, let's think about some situations that could arise in the game and match them up with an actual economy.

There are times in the game when, as mentioned already, the game's banker needs to issue more money to facilitate the continued exchanges (that is to keep the economy going). If the game's banker were to refuse to do so and insist that only money already present in the game could be used then there would be two or three (related) things that could happen.

One thing would be that there would be stagnation. Having no money to settle debts or to spend on land, houses or hotels, players would have to stop buying and selling in part or totally.

Another thing might be that there could be inflation of the value of money. This would, in the case of the game have to be by explicit mutual consent of the players (corresponding to the evolving mutually defined valuation that takes place through markets and experience of buying and selling that takes place in the real economy). The point is that the players could agree to revaluing the currency: say, £1 now means £10 and so on^. This is something that can and arguably does take place in the real economy in some circumstances^^.

And still another thing might be that a further development of the banking system could take place to get round the lack of liquidity, the gamers could issue each other IOUs but this would be increasingly inconvenient as the economy of the game continued to grow. IOUs could be improved by keeping ledgers and clearing funds every so often. This would be inventing a mini peer-to-peer banking system. Another trick would be for the game's banker to take in the 'savings' of the players and to write IOUs for the money that players have stashed away. This would, in effect, be a commercial banking system^^^.

That latter tactic would be a little model of the basics of the banking system where deposits formed the basis for loans. But we shan't go into that here because we need to get back to the main topic.

The point that I'm now moving us towards in this post is that a government with powers of sovereign money issuance is not restricted to the Austerity method of Micawber-Thatcher bookkeeping. The fact that at a national economy level the issue of money is 'backed' by the whole economy makes a difference. It means that restricting the supply of money (and this has several dimensions to it) throttles back the ability for exchange to take place. The converse is also the case: increasing the supply of money (and again, this can take place through various mechanisms) can, in appropriate circumstances and handled rightly, call forth more exchange and in turn this can encourage further production of goods and services.

To illustrate that latter point, in the game of Monopoly, increasing the supply of money would enable players to buy more land, houses and hotels more quickly (to a limit). A lack of money slows and stops the game unless more money is created and somehow fed back into the game's economic system. The game's banker does not need first to 'earn' that money, say through tax or fines from the players, they just need to supply money to support the current and immediately potential exchange activity. In these circumstances, to do the Austerity thing, ie restrict the money supply, would slow and crash the game.

This indicates that in a crash / crunch situation, what is needed is to make sure that money is put into the economy to call forth or maintain exchange potential. This is basically what John Maynard Keynes saw in the early 20th century and which has covertly been recognised with the use of Quantative Easing (however badly directed that has been).

Of course, more needs to be said about the ways that money supply can be increased or decreased (the devil and the solutions are in the detail) and the effects for good or ill that this can have. But the take-home point is that Austerity is a crock: it's founded on a faulty analogy and one that in the doing of it makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.
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* I well recall in the late 1970's, when the election campaign was raging that saw Mrs Thatcher become Britain's Prime Minister, realising that my A level Economics showed me how misleading it was to pretend that government spending was like a household budget. Once you've started to look at money supply issues, Keynsianism and the like, it doesn't seem such a straightforward or helpful analogy at all. For those educated outside Britain, A levels ('Advanced levels') were and are exams whose grades are used by universities to determine who to offer places to. It's worth noting that A level Economics is not widely taught and so most university Economics courses end up having to use the first year (perhaps more) to cover what an A level takes in.
** The mistake is one, without doubt, that neoliberal bankers and their political and industrial mates are happy for us to continue to make (and many of them probably believe it themselves. To be sure, it suits the ideology of shrinking state and putting finance in control, in effect.
*** The Deficit, in capitals like that, is my way of referring to the totem of what I'm calling 'Austerity Discourse'. Austerity discourse is a political fable used to justify reducing government spending and 'shrinking government'. The central totem is the analogy (or framing) of the household budget: income and outgoings. This construct enables austerity-promoters to disable the exercise of sovereign money by government which keeps the economic discourse within parameters that favour their projects. The Deficit is then a phrase that can be deployed to rein in any proposals that would use the powers of sovereign money in ways that don't fit the austerity narrative.
^ And this, of course, reminds us in passing that the value of money vis-a-vis goods and services in the real world is something that we construct socially. Money is a cultural artefact not a force of nature.
^^This is not to concede to monetarist theory, simply to recognise that in certain circumstances there is a reality, particularly in a circumstance like the game where a dynamic factor like velocity of circulation can't make up for shartfalls in quantity.
^^^ This is essentially a historical sort of model of the origins of commercial banking. There have been developments since: from lending out deposits, to fractional reserve banking through to money-creation-lending that we see today and which Positive Money (and others) critiques as, in effect, the privatising for profit of what should be a public good -a money supply that ensures a well functioning economy for the many not just the few.

PS (Posted 3Dec2016) I thought it affirming to find someone else using monopoly as a way to help us to understand some macroeconomics. So ...
In the game Monopoly, $200 is the amount every player gets for passing Go. Such cash infusions aren’t bad for the game; instead they help all players play the game. The same would happen in our real economy if everyone gets infusions of $200 a month. The extra money would relieve some burdens of working families and heighten their chances for success and satisfac­tion. And it would stimulate our economy without higher debt.