Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

John Meynard Keynes is remembered as an influential economist. However, he was also a philosopher, a fact of which his following famous observation in the final chapter of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is a reminder:

‘The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas… (S)oon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.’

For those who aspire to make a difference, the validity of Mr. Keynes’ observation matters. If his observation is correct, its ideas that drive change, not institutions, and this driver of change is dangerous because it is virtually invisible until it has achieved its objective.

Mr. Keynes’ observation is profound not only because he identified not only the power of ideas but also a key to their success — gradual encroachment.

The Gradual Encroachment of Ideas

Examples that demonstrate that Mr. Keynes is right surround us. For example, banks have taken it upon themselves to be society’s moral guardians. They have decided that it is their responsibility to save the planet and are refusing to finance coal-related activity and now, it seems, gas-related activity.

If the response of the recent federal Coalition government is an indicator, it seems that governments, which are elected by us, are powerless to resist the leaders of banks who are not.

Prior to that Qantas decided that it had a job in addition to flying aeroplanes —  to determine what is socially acceptable thought by putting pressure on Australian Rugby Union to sack a football player who would not toe what they considered to be the line of acceptable thought.

Despite notions of freedom of speech, governments were impotent.

Last year an AFL football club in Melbourne decided it was its job to be a sheriff for enforcing codes of socially acceptable thought. It sacked a CEO it had appointed 24 hours before because he was the chairman of a church which promotes views which are politically incorrect.

Christianity and Its Competing Ideas

This event puts Mr. Keynes’ proposition at Christianity’s front door. Stripped to its essence, Christianity markets an idea — there is life after humans depart planet Earth and the way to enter that life is through Jesus Christ.

That idea has dominated the West’s spiritual marketplace. In other parts of the world, Hinduism, Islam or forms of animism have dominated. Apart from Communist countries, atheism has not enjoyed substantial, public support.

Nevertheless, all these ideas are competing with each other. In the West, the recent development which appears to have left major Christian denominations, at least, flat-footed is the increasing influence of agnosticism and atheism. However, if at the heart of materialism is the idea that there is no guarantee of tomorrow, they do not have an excuse.

Christian denominations in the West are experiencing Mr. Keynes’ thesis — the gradual encroachment of a competing idea. Since the 1990s, the Census consistently has reported that the largest-growing category in religious identification has not been Muslims or Buddhist but no religion. That group now constitutes almost 40 per cent of the population.

One person who understood Mr. Keynes’ thesis and adopted it was Antoni Gramsci, arguably Communism’s greatest theoretician and a founder of the Italian Communist Party. Gramschi understood that the key to power was intellectual or ideological control of the establishment and that to achieve that required a strategy that became known as the Long March through the Institutions.

Gramschi died in 1937, but he has arrived — a testament to Keynes’ idea.

Ideas: Why Politics is of Limited Value

What both Keynes and Gramschi demonstrate is that politics has a limited value as a tool in which to engage in battles of ideas. Politics has value if its limits are understood. Political wins buy time but they do not guarantee winning a war.

People attest to this reality when they say that there is not any difference between the major parties, but persist in voting for them in lower houses, even though reluctantly and under protest, and not voting for minor parties or independents in large numbers.

If there were significant differences between the major parties the cultural challenges we face could be determined by politics.

One example demonstrates the point. In 2004, a federal Coalition Government amended the Family Law Act to provide that marriage is the union of a man and a woman for life to the exclusion of all others..

In 2017, a federal Coalition Government facilitated a plebiscite to amend the Family Law Act to repeal that 2004 amendment.

___

Photo by Juan Marin.