Dr Rowan Williams risks causing a new controversy by inviting a comparison between Gordon Brown’s response to the economic downturn and the Third Reich.
In an article for The Daily Telegraph, he claims Germany in the 1930s pursued a “principle” that worked consistently but only on the basis that “quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t”.
Dr Williams, the most senior cleric in the Church of England, then appears to draw a parallel between the Nazis and the UK Government’s policies for tackling the downturn, which he says fails to take account of the “particular human costs” to the most vulnerable in society.
In my heart I know the ABC is right, but there is the temptation to compare him with Neville Chamberlain as well in matters over which he has a direct influence.
I just skimmed this piece, but it seems as if the archbishop is tending to say that stories are good and principles are suspect. But I think it would be better to say that principles work best when embedded in narratives–and that good stories and good principles work together. The Nazis were putting forth not only bad, rigid, exclusionary principles; they were deriving these from a narrative that characterized some as inferior and to be got rid of, and others as pure and noble no matter what. The Christian narrative tells an altogether different story, yes (and good!), but it is more useful and helpful when guiding principles are derived from it. Both Archbishop Williams and Karl Barth, one can easily see, do just that–even though Barth supposedly eschewed “rule-deontology” in favor of “act-deontology”: being responsive to and bound by the commands of God in the present. But it seems to me that, for example, loyalty to Christ above all other loyalties (as in the Barmen Dec.) is, among other things, a moral action-guide, or “principle.”
The Nazis had their stories about the Arian nation and its golden age. They gloried in their myths and founded a new religion based on them. Hitler was involved in the occult. He consulted astrologers and sought prophecies about the Third Reich in Nostradamus. I find the comparison unconvincing.
[i] There is the temptation to compare him with Neville Chamberlain . . . in matters over which he has a direct influence [/i] —Adam 12
True, but understated. Let’s be more direct:
Abp. Williams makes big, resonant statements about economic policy, a subject in which he lacks expertise and on which people do not look to him for guidance.
Yet he clams up, wimps out, and sidetracks action on pressing Anglican controversies, over which he has more influence that anyone else in the world.
Indeed, he has taken to acting—in his sly, bookish, indabalated way—as a dog in the manger. He does not act himself, nor does he permit action by the Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, or the Lambeth Conference. Neville again.