What is Mark Carney’s Visit to China Other than a Crucial Instance,,in the Liberal-Marxist Dialogue with Global Implications?
Hugh Williams
What is Mark Carney’s Visit to China Other than a Crucial Instance
in the Liberal-Marxist Dialogue with Global Implications?
Many people have asked me my opinion of Mark Carney, and I have been reserved in my response. He has written a very thoughtful book on Value(s): Building a Better World for All (2021). I haven’t read all of it, in fact truth be known I have not read any of it. However, I have listened to a good part of it as an audio book while travelling around the Gaspe early this past fall. And at the time I was deeply impressed by the scholarship and his serious effort to help us understand ‘value’ and especially the value of money and its role in economy.
Thus, for me, this political leader’s visit to China is highly significant given the world situation and the crisis in World Liberal Order, i.e., capitalism. This leads me to share these somewhat lengthy reflections below much of which is a recycling of ideas that in my view warrant careful reconsideration.
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In our view there clearly is what can only be called a revolutionary dimension to Lonergan’s work which has been given a special focus in Philip McShane’s reading and interpretation of this work, and which Christians in particular should be considering carefully. It can be given striking focus in two recurring questions that occur in McShane’s late writings. The first question is posed by McShane: “Do you view humanity as possibly maturing—in some serious way—or just messing along between good and evil, whatever you think they are?” The second question was posed by Lonergan in 1935: “What is to be done? Shall the matter be left to providence to solve according to its own plan, or does one consider that providence intends to use (us and) our leaders as conscious agents in the furtherance of what it has already done?” See McShane’s essay “Foundations of Communications” in Seeding Global Collaboration, Patrick Brown and James Duffy, Editors, (Vancouver: Axial Publishing, 2016) at pages 163 and 169.
I believe then that there is very good reason for us to reconsider McShane’s efforts for us to be more programmatic in our discussions and work. My repeated references to Christian-Marxist dialogue, after my encounter with John and Pierre’s good text “Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable and Responsible” have vaguely hoped for this. I recall and use these references upon the good and firm basis Lonergan gave us in saying his work could be interpreted as an effort to achieve some synthesis between Liberal thesis and Marxist anti-thesis. Let’s simplify this by referring to this as an ongoing tension between Liberalism and Marxism. I will at some point attempt to give some more technical precision to this ‘tension’ by some reference to the recent good efforts by Terry Quinn and John Benton to place again in front of us the two competing interpretations of economy in terms of one or two circuits/flows of economic activity. But for now I’d like to return to my own best effort to come to grips with the revolutionary dimensions of this project through an earlier draft of a paper “Reinterpreting the Motor Car Analogy in Bernard Lonergan’s For a New Political Economy” written for the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 12 (2020) pp.96-103) (see attached link).[1] In preparing this draft, James Duffy and I had an excellent and very rare exchange (see attached ...) that goes a long way towards bringing into the light the issue and what is at stake, at least in terms of how Phil McShane saw it, especially towards the end of his days with us …
Hugh
Doug Mounce
next decade." although I think he was willing to consider change over time in centuries.
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Hugh Williams
Doug,
Yes, Phil, as I understand it,
was reaching with Lonergan (and Marx)
for a comprehensive revolutionary analytic ...
this often is what is hard for people to grasp
and even upon grasping - harder to accept ...
... but things change ...
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do you think that AI has agency
through conscious 'acts of understanding'
(as we've been attributing to Lonergan's notion of human understanding)?
Hugh
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PIERRE WHALON
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Hugh Williams
Pierre,
I certainly do not make reference to Marx hoping all or some become what Schumpeter called Marxologists. That’s not at all the point … It does somehow have to do with Phil’s relentless revolutionary efforts with and within the so-called ‘Lonergan school’.
I believe Phil’s interest in Marx and contemporary Marxist thinking towards the end of his days with us had to do with the major difficulty he along with the rest of us encountered in the 2011-2017 online seminars. The central problem as I understood it was cast as the inability of the group to sustain an effective research focus. And this was because of the absence of any serious grasp of a ‘standard model’ which by contrast he felt was present in the physical sciences but almost totally absent from philosophy and theology in our time.
This means that the desire for ‘cumulative and progressive results’ for an effective human science remains extremely difficult. This in my view is where Marx and Marxism come in for Phil, in that it does by and large have a highly developed analysis and perspective on what we may call the standard model, and it is ‘liberal capitalism’, or let’s call it ‘economic liberalism’. In Lonergan’s more technical terms, it is this insistence upon a one circuit view of economy as Quinn and Benton just recently laid out for us again.
However, this story of ‘the standard model’ takes on some additional complexity, where if we fast forward to Phil’s publication of “Piketty’s Plight and the Global Future” after the relative wide success of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, we have Phil offering a solid critique of Piketty’s Marxist inspired analysis of the problem with the ‘standard economic model’ being solely or largely understood in terms of growing inequality. Not that inequality is not the social problem Piketty says it is, but that the analysis of the problem’s causes and remedies in terms of re-distribution for the most part is seriously incomplete.
Despite this, in Phil’s critique of the Piketty critique, I believe we do have Phil looking earnestly for allies in this effort to foment the revolution required to overcome the ‘dominant model’ and its disastrous consequences for our future on this planet. And in this search, I believe Phil felt he might be as likely to find this solidarity as much among thinkers sympathetic to the Marxist tradition of thought and practice as he would among the Lonergan school and its often-Christian adherents.
This is why I’m putting such emphasis on this seemingly ‘old’ and even 'odd' category of Christian-Marxist dialogue as a very general zone of inquiry that might aide some of us to carry on and deepen the struggle Phil was committed to and to introduce us to new partners from whom we can learn.
Thus, I’d like to believe Carney’s visit to China can be seen or interpreted in this promising light.
Hugh
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PIERRE WHALON
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Hugh Williams
Pierre et al,
When Joseph Schumpeter talked about his plan for his History of Economic Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1954) he goes out of his way to carefully and respectfully consider the unique challenges any treatment of the Marxist system might pose for his plan of approach. There is something about the ‘whole’ of Marxism as a comprehensive system that is lost when one begins to break it apart for a certain type of analytical treatment of the parts. He is willing to concede that this is to some degree a problem with other economic thinkers as well. This is because the whole of an able thinker’s thought is more than the sum of its parts. And yet there are these extraordinarily seminal thinkers like Marx where you have this ‘totality of vision’ that is uniquely present and asserts its rights in every and all parts. This powerful interrelationship between whole and parts in a thinker like Marx is especially unique and Schumpeter says it is likely the source of this profound attraction or fascination so many have found, both friend and foe, in attempting any serious engagement and study. Schumpeter ultimately admits to being unable to do justice to Marx’s work and yet he will proceed to include him in his history of economic analysis because in fact there is much economic analysis in Marx’s work though most orthodox Marxists will unlikely be satisfied with his treatment.
This unusual admission by Schumpeter, I think, has a certain philosophical-epistemological significance. It has significance in the sense that we may be facing a profound pluralism in our efforts to give a comprehensive account of 'our' social reality. There may well be what Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus very recently called this need for a ‘robust pluralist realism’. This realism in its pluralist dimension would acknowledge that given the world’s dynamic complexity we can’t forget that when we try and account for natural systems through various efforts at mental formalization (modelling) we meet with only partial success. It seems there are always aspects that our paradigm/formalization fails to capture. This failure, or epistemological limitation, tells us of the inability of any one formalism to adequately capture the full complexity of the ‘real-world system’. Thus, it may very well be that there are plural ways of interacting with complex systems. Distinctly different in the sense that when we make successful models, the formal systems needed to describe each distinct aspect are not derivable from each other, thus there is a robustness of the pluralism.
Might it be then that there is no one formalization for describing our social reality, and yet there may very well be many formalizations that correctly describe various aspects of this reality? This I surmise is the philosophical position or question of Charles Taylor’s robust pluralist realism that he has developed with Hubert Dreyfus in a little but mighty text entitled Retrieving Realism (2015). It is a position making three fundamental claims: 1) there may be multiple ways of inquiring into reality – thus the pluralism; 2) these ways reveal truths independent of us in the sense that we will be required to adapt and revise our thinking in order to grasp things, this is the robustness of the realism; and 3) we may yet fail in bringing these different ways of inquiry into a single unified mode of inquiry or model – thus the robustness of the pluralism.
This philosophical-epistemological consideration, for which Schumpeter gives us some slight but serious sense of in his careful and cautious approach to Marxism, may prove to be highly relevant for any serious effort to engage in Christian-Marxist or Liberal-Marxist dialogue.
I'm not sure Phil McShane would have been entirely comfortable with what he might consider as these 'post-modern' musings of mine that inevitably arise when one honestly confronts a thinker like Marx ... (or perhaps even a Xi Jinping).
Hugh
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