The Philosophy of the Churchyard

My walk to work this morning took me, as it does every Tuesday, across St Paul's Churchyard in the heart of the City of London.  I knew, of course, that things had changed there since last Tuesday, the area having been been, well, occupied by the Occupy the London Stock Exchange (OLSX) protest.  I had seen the makeshift campsite in the media, and had heard the indefatigable (and unpredictable) Giles Fraser, chancellor of the cathedral, explain on TV why he had welcomed the protestors and assured the police that, for the cathedral's part, they need not worry unduly about the small tented village that had sprung up in the shadow of Wren's imposing portico.

The village is the London expression of the Occupy Wall Street protest which has occupied a piazza in the financial district of lower Manhattan for a few weeks now (they have not been allowed into Wall Street itself) in protest against the world debt crisis and those who are said to have caused it.  Similar demonstrations have taken place in other cities around the world.  As if to mirror what is happening in New York, the OLSX protestors have not been allowed into Paternoster Square where the London Stock Exchange is to be found, so have taken up residence in front of St Paul's, next door.

The scene when I witnessed it was untidy, but in no way intimidating.  I made a point of following my usual route across the churchyard.  This involved skirting tents and other outdoor-living impedimenta, ducking under a clothesline, and generally avoiding bumping into tent-people, some of them (mainly the men) with the sort of red, D H Lawrence-style beard I had in 1973 and was very proud of.  Although the camp is well away from the roadway, its presence seemed nonetheless to be causing some traffic congestion and this, together with the usual groups of young tourists milling on the cathedral steps, conspired to create an atmosphere of benign chaos - all bathed in the sharp sunshine of an October morning.  Some banners lay on the paving stones, unattended and unwaved; and Queen Anne's statue, surrounded by its famous railings, had been adorned with a bit of not-very-festive bunting.

Things had livened up a bit when I emerged later from my cloistered workplace.  The sun was still shining, the traffic was still jammed, but there were more people.  It was lunchtime, and some City workers and tourists looked on, half-listening to a man with a megaphone, surrounded by a little crowd, giving an earnest talk the gist of which I could not discern.  Young people moved around the general melee, now denser and livelier, distributing leaflets; and the churchyard was dominated by a huge blue banner with pink lettering: "Capitalism IS Crisis".

Capitalism IS Crisis.  I thought about this during the afternoon, and wondered what it meant.  And then it dawned on me: it doesn't mean anything specific.  It's a generalised protest about the way the world is run.  To point out that the crisis has not been caused by stock exchanges, but by banks and those who were supposed to regulate them, seems pedantic. The fact that, therefore, the demo should really be outside, say, RBS, the Bank of England, and the offices of the party that formed the last Government, seems irrelevant.  The incoherency of the protest is neither here nor there.  The point is: the way the world is run is not the way it ought to be run.  And there is more than a whiff of the Nazareth carpenter about that.

And yet.  The same, unpredictable, Canon Fraser who has welcomed the OLSX campers has previously defended capitalism, observing that it has brought prosperity to rather a lot of people, and not just the wealthy.  And he is right.  The computer on which I write this, the clothes I wear, indeed everything I own, I do so because of someone's desire to make it and sell it to me.  The freedom to trade is closely linked to my freedom as an individual.  It's just that some individuals are freer than others.  And the behaviour of those of us who are most free impinges on the lives of those who are less free.

During the course of the afternoon, I was listening to some Nigerian clergy describe what they saw as the differences between African and European Christians.  "Africans are full of hope." one of them said.  "They want to pray down the Kingdom of Heaven, to see the reign of God here on earth, and fervently yearn for that great day to dawn.  In Europe, by contrast, you sometimes get the impression that Church people are happy with the way things are."

Photo credit: Neil Cummings, http://flic.kr/p/awi9rK