One year after Lehman: We need more priests, fewer financiers

One year ago this week, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, signaling more than anything else that our economy was bound for more than your garden-variety recession. Since then, while a seemingly endless supply of financial reform proposals have been offered up by activists, scholars, and politicians from all walks of political life, little attention has been paid to the other side of the reform coin–how not to overhaul our economy, but our way of life that precipitated the crisis. In the new issue of Democracy journal, out today, I take a crack at explaing how we might do just that. My proposal, essentially: the creation of a new clergy class, while discouraing as many people from entering the ranks of finance and law as do today.

The piece is here; here’s an excerpt, to give you a taste:

If we are to emerge from the current morass as not merely a prosperous nation once again, but a better one, we will have to confront the crisis underlying the economic crisis: one of meaning, of which the economic crisis is but a symptom. We have shirked the most profound questions for the sake of a vulgar materialism. To the extent that it can restore a sense of meaning and begin to chip away at the hollowness of our shared lives, organized religion may be an ideal candidate to step into the breach.

Obviously I’d like it if you read the whole thing, but would like to make two quick points. First, I’m not endorsing the abandonment of science as an academic pursuit. Far from it. Instead, I make my point while thinking that, especially among liberals like myself, religion as scholarship, and even as social good, gets short shrift. Second, I am not in any way advocating the dissolution of the barrier separating church and state. I am instead reacting to the fact that the state already value education as a public good, and provides it with accordant tax benefits. To the greatest extent possible, we should make use of this fact in order to create a less materialistic society. Creating a new clergy class would likely assist in accomplishing just that.