The world is living at a kairos or opportune moment in human history—a turning point in human affairs, said Professor Gerald Pillay, Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University, when he addressed an Initiatives of Change forum on ‘Building trust for our future’, held at the university on 14 November, 2009.
‘You and I are living at such a time,’ he said. The crisis of human values was so fundamental that we can take ‘a journey into despair or a journey into hope’.
The 21st century began on an unthinkable low with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001. Yet the connection between the Twin Towers in New York and Afghanistan had never been fully established. ‘We have got into a spiral of violence.’ The financial crisis has put us into another spiral. Bankers gave loans to those who could not afford them and there was a need for ‘depths of honesty which we are only beginning to understand’. And the UK was the only country where ‘postcodes can plot the economy’. They indicate of areas of wealth and deprivation and ‘your postcode becomes your destiny’.
The scandal of MPs’ expense claims had exposed a ‘culture of entitlement’ in British society in which ‘absolute honesty is completely absent in the public square’, leading to ‘a vicious spiral of scepticism’. Statistics showed that students would rather attend a religious meeting than a political meeting, such was the lack of trust in politicians.
When it came to the financial crisis, ‘the missing element in business schools was a consensus on business ethics,’ suggested Professor Pillay. Yet no amount of courses in business ethics could address the zeitgeist.
Three figures had shaped human thought in a secular world: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin, he said. Marx had stated the myth that it was impossible to change the person without changing the environment. ‘There was no sense of personal responsibility’ and this had led to a culture of blame. Freud had said that everything becomes psychological through suppressed phobias. Therefore shed your inhibitions. This had created the phenomenon of children blaming their parents for something hidden in their past. And Darwin’s emphasis on evolution based on the survival of the fittest had been twisted to a ‘social Darwinism’ that fed colonialism. Taken to its logical conclusion this created Apartheid and the Nazi death camps where ‘people were got rid of by the fittest’. There was no place for the weak. ‘All three were sceptical about religion. All three had no place for God,’ Professor Pillay said.
‘What can we do against the historic forces that shape us?’ he asked. Hope breaks through history, he said, through the vision of faith. ‘We can have a society that is held together by the best of the human spirit. One of the ways of reaching our human potential is through community. The restoring of relationships is the basis of trust-building: neighbour to neighbour, strong to disenfranchised, black and white. God help us if we fail to do that. A small act of love can affect great change,’ he concluded.
The international forum opened the previous evening with a panel of speakers from the UK, Australia, Latvia, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Professor Pillay spoke in his address of his hope that the forum could lead on to a summer academy at the university next year, in which ‘a germ of an idea could become a major opportunity’—to take ‘that great work of healing and reconciliation’ at the annual IofC conferences in Caux, Switzerland, which he had attended, and bring it to his university. Liverpool Hope University is renowned as Europe’s leading ecumenical university, with close links to Liverpool’s Anglican and Catholic cathedrals.
English