Le Grand RéCIT
Fortunately, for those lacking spiritual direction in these troubled economic times, there comes the antidote: Moral Compass, a weekly TV panel discussion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2015). There, the assembled guests politely discuss topics such as Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, in which its author roundly condemns systemic evil attendant upon the fallacy of limitless capitalistic expansion and “economic growth.”
At the prompting of host Geraldine Doogue, The Pope’s encyclical is casually dismissed—by Paul Kelly, an economic pundit hailing from Australia’s journalistic elite—as nothing more than a “grand narrative,” the publication and dissemination of which shows just how hopelessly un-modern and off-kilter Pope Francis really is.
But as Kelly’s objection to The Pope’s humanistic wisdom mounts, he himself is compelled to call into service that very grandest of narratives: you know, the dominant one in which Progress and Technology and Economic Development gradually lift humanity, including the global poor, from the miry depths of its suffering (see Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 1984).
True, Pope Francis probably should have added curbing human population to his “anti-growth” agenda. But it is apparent from the hypocritical behaviour of pundits like Kelly, that The Pope is merely playing the flipside, spinning the grand narrative backwards, revealing malevolent and sinister forces that continue to guide the Invisible Hand of capitalist exploitation—or, at least, a litany of planetary ill effects.
At the prompting of host Geraldine Doogue, The Pope’s encyclical is casually dismissed—by Paul Kelly, an economic pundit hailing from Australia’s journalistic elite—as nothing more than a “grand narrative,” the publication and dissemination of which shows just how hopelessly un-modern and off-kilter Pope Francis really is.
But as Kelly’s objection to The Pope’s humanistic wisdom mounts, he himself is compelled to call into service that very grandest of narratives: you know, the dominant one in which Progress and Technology and Economic Development gradually lift humanity, including the global poor, from the miry depths of its suffering (see Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 1984).
True, Pope Francis probably should have added curbing human population to his “anti-growth” agenda. But it is apparent from the hypocritical behaviour of pundits like Kelly, that The Pope is merely playing the flipside, spinning the grand narrative backwards, revealing malevolent and sinister forces that continue to guide the Invisible Hand of capitalist exploitation—or, at least, a litany of planetary ill effects.