No one is safe until everyone is safe – we applied it to the pandemic but why not our economy? | Rowan Williams

A A few weeks ago a friend reminded me of the old All My Trials song: “If living were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.” Which of course they do. How many needless deaths this winter will be caused by the deadly combination of extreme cold and rising energy costs remains to be seen, but it doesn’t take an economics degree to calculate the numbers are weighted for those lacking choices and resources .

It’s not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; It’s also that all of the things that financial security enables—the freedom to party, plan for your kids, give gifts to the people you love—become tremendously complicated. Life in abundance or imagination takes a back seat when decisions are all about survival. Who is starving – you or your child? How many jobs can you take to support the family without ruining your physical and mental health?

In a society that prioritizes safety for all, the “cost of living” would be virtually invisible. The systems and rhythms of exchange that support us—work, wages, welfare—could be taken for granted. The natural and instinctive concern to protect one another that holds cohesive communities together would shape the way our economy works, so nobody has to constantly calculate how much “life” they can afford.

A “cost of living” crisis is a sign that something fundamental has gone fantastically wrong in our conception of society. When “life” becomes a commodity that some can afford and others cannot, the assumption that we should be able to trust one another to maintain our security is fundamentally challenged. We are lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is to be an individual shopper acquiring desirable goods—rather than a contributor to building a trusted network of relationships reliable enough to enable more people to be active and to become generous contributors .

Not everyone who recycles the mantra “growth” as the answer to everything does so out of ideological fanaticism. For some, it is a means of creating more active citizens by creating more active consumers. But when growth is sold to us as a self-evident priority, the mechanisms by which it could be harnessed in the service of our common security seem to disappear from view. What “trickles down” is risk, not gain.

Over the last 15 years we have been reminded of this again and again. The 2008 crisis underscored the fact that profit-seeking risk-taking in the financial sector was more expensive for society than for well-hedged risk-takers. The pandemic has shown that those who truly provided the safety nets of skill and care in the face of international catastrophe were among the least equitably paid workers in the community (I pass over the shame of those whose priority was making profits from the to achieve marketing of defective workers or inappropriate medical devices). And now we are again faced with the question of how to build a society that gives its members confidence that they will not constantly have to bear the expense of other people’s greed, recklessness or folly.

The cost-of-living crisis is indeed an example of costs being shifted from the powerful to the powerless – from ambitious speculators, market fundamentalists (inside and outside government), naked profiteers and, in the past horrific 10 months of war in Ukraine, foreign dictators a population that is being pushed with increasing aggressiveness into debt, housing shortages, food and energy poverty and unsafe working conditions. It is a sign that we have once again forgotten the “cohesive” nature of fellowship. It has been reiterated often enough during the pandemic that no one is safe unless everyone is safe: have we really not realized that this applies to both our economic and medical well-being?

Much has been said about the decline of Christian practice and faith in the UK. But if nearly half the population of England and Wales still identifies as Christian, they probably still believe at some level that the Christian and Jewish model of a community where everyone is responsible for everyone, where the costs are not automatic be taken over by the rich too poor, morally and practically sensible. Add to this the number of adherents of other faiths who would have roughly the same basic assumption of human interdependence, and you are left with a puzzle as to why we tolerate a society where precarity is so unequally distributed.

The story we heard at the Christmas services is about a moment in human history when it was confirmed once and for all that the deepest power and pressure in all of reality is “turning to justice” to deal with Martin To say Luther King’s words – and not to an abstract distributive justice, but to a loving, mindful, generous appreciation of every human being, which in turn frees them for love, attention and generosity.

It’s a story about what human life could be like if we finally turned our backs on our addiction to commodifying everything we touch and reducing things and people to cost calculations. If life were something money couldn’t buy, everyone could live freely. The refusal to see this is the real crisis. To forget that is the real religious and moral turning point.