Original sin

Another beautiful sunny morning and a fine woodland run.

This morning, on the radio, a speaker was discussing the current US national debt – a staggering 14.3 trillion dollars. He was a theologian, not an economist, and he questioned on moral grounds the widespread premise that the solution to profound debt is always for the economy to grow its way out of trouble. The fundamental problem of such growth is that it seems to be based on further borrowing, so settlement of the debt is effectively deferred for future generations to deal with. The radical alternative suggested by this speaker was for affluent societies such as the US & UK to say: not only have we grown far enough already, but we will pay our debts now. If an individual was in financial trouble, they would be expected to stop spending extravagantly, and to confront their own debts. Why not whole societies ? Being a theologian, he cited Adam & Eve as a parable of people being dissatisfied with what they had (Paradise, in their particular instance), asking for too much, and screwing things up for everybody.

The next discussion was also about facing uncomfortable truths – a brief debate on whether Breivik’s actions in Norway should be considered as madness or terrorism. Essentially the two experts (a professor of terrorism studies and an ex-Islamic extremist) agreed that in very few such cases are the perpetrators clinically mad but that society is inclined to opt for that definition in order to avoid confronting the underlying motivation – whether that be fascism, religious fundamentalism, extreme nationalism or anything else, when judging and punishing. By labelling such acts as madness, we neither have to look at ourselves too closely to see if there may have been some justification, nor care too much about how the perpetrator is treated.