from the teach-in - and, on the spur of the moment, he agreed to come instead. So now my first years, who signed up for a course on secularism and wound up with a professor of religious studies, have met two members of the economics faculty, too! Mysterious ways...But it gets even better. Anwar made some of the same points I've been making in class - specifically about the quasi-religious faith people have in the market (a legacy of faith in providence) or, in his terms, faith in the ideology of capitalism. (I'm sure the students assumed I'd asked him to mention these things.) For Anwar, as a "heterodox economist," the dominant views of neoclassical economists are a religious faith in the possibility of perfect knowledge and perfect competition - a faith which maintains itself in the face of contrary views and evidence by ignoring or suppressing them, and so has contributed to an economic crisis in which the opacity or duplicity of everyone's imperfect knowledge is coming home to roost: economics is waking up from a religious stupor. "See?" I wanted to say, "I'm not making this economics-religion connection up!"
Turns out Anwar's just now reading a book by a repentant ex-neoclassical economist called Economics as Religion! Providence may have let the economy down, but it was smiling on this university today.
