HSBC head versus Stanford professor

Can you indicate some readings that might help towards a better understanding of the world's financial and economic crisis, besides the encyclical?

There are two books I came across last week. They offer different and even in some ways opposed interpretations of what is happening. The first is Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World by Stephen Green. He is both the chairman of HSBC and an ordained clergyman. His annual salary is £1.25 million.

In the book, he says that for him to give away the biblical tithe (or one-tenth) of one's earnings would be to fall very short of what is expected of a Christian. The implication is that he gives away most of his, although he keeps his writing completely free of any hint of sermonising or self-congratulation.

The impression he gives on the whole is that the current crisis is merely due to the moral failures of a small number of members of the banking community. He also holds that it is impossible to ensure through regulation the prevention of such mishaps.

His remedy is to urge the concept of 'servant-leadership' and giving priority to the common good over individual interest. He admits that his attitude is not very fashionable today. "One of my daughters once said, 'Dad, you are a man of the nineties' which I thought doesn't sound too bad, until I realised she meant the 1890s."

So Green does not even believe that any structural reform is necessary, but just the recovery of the basic principles of human conduct that should prevail in a Christian culture.

Which is the other book you refer to?

In French, its title is La Marque du Sacre, but since its author, Jean- Pierre Dupuy, a polytecnicien, is now a professor at Stanford University, I am sure the book, like others by him, has also been published in English.

Unlike Green, Dupuy has an apocalyptic view of our situation. He thinks we are on the verge of catastrophe, and not so much because of any doom inscribed in the events themselves that are happening, but rather because of what he regards as the total failure of analysts to figure out why and how the critical global situation has come about.

By way of exemplifying what he means, Dupuy cites the following:

Governments have taken measures on a hitherto unheard-of scale and devoted astronomical amounts of resources to restore confidence in the financial markets. But the reaction of these markets was to conclude that the action of the governments showed they were panicking. The result of the governments' action was exactly the opposite of what it was intended to achieve.

In the marketeers' view, to propose 'the reconstruction of capitalism' by means of regulating the market is a contradiction. They did not believe for an instant that the policy of pumping loads of public money into the coffers of private financial institutions was in the least bit rational.

Dupuy belongs to the school of political philosophers like René Girard and Ivan Illich, who believe that human societies work in ways in which the supra-rational as well as the infra-rational have to be taken into full account and that is a principal reason why the human sciences always differ radically from the physico-chemical.

History shows, according to this school of thinkers, that human beings get out of trouble by what has been called 'boot-strapping'. The prototype of this operation is the Baron de Muenchhausen, who in the novel by Rudolf Erich Raspe, somehow manages to draw himself out of a quagmire into which he had fallen, by pulling at his own hair.

The belief that such a physical impossibility happens in human affairs supposes that there are also at work forces that are more powerful than either nature that can, of course, wreak havoc through earthquakes and the like, or those petty, wicked bankers whose actions Green acknowledged.

Dupuy devotes the rest of his book to an attempt at uncovering the traces of these forces, using as his model the Father Brown detective stories by G.K. Chesterton and the surrealist novels of J. L. Borges.

The irrationality in economic behaviour is finally traced to the trait in human beings that Keynes had clearly discerned and that Girard has labelled mimetism. Basically, it is said, we desire an object because its being desired by someone else designates it as desirable for us.

This psychological principle had been stated by David Hume: "The minds of men are mirrors to one another." His colleague as professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh was Adam Smith. He came to be regarded as the founder of economics as a field of study and agreed that such psychological traits were the real basis of the social sciences.

Dupuy sounds more convincing to me because his theory attributes macro-events such as the global crisis to a generally operative feature of human nature rather than to a condition which is taken to result in only occasional fallibility.

How do these readings of the signs of the times relate to the Pope's latest encyclical?

Both Green and Dupuy write in their different ways in perspectives that ultimately suppose a religious background. Green, in spite of his status in the Anglican church, writes in a style that addresses a secularised and conformist culture. Dupuy interprets the current conjuncture in history in terms of the Gospel passage about Satan expelling Satan and of the household divided within itself which cannot stand for much longer.

Curiously, Green's tone is much closer to that of Pope Benedict (although his manner sounds almost naïve in comparison with the intellectualism of the Pope) than the eschatological emphasis of Dupuy.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.