EH: Yes. But if you look at it slightly differently, a few years ago the anti-globalisation brigade - and this was when the system was working very well - said, "It's not really working very well, there are still poor people," and before that are the environmentalists who say, "We're ruining the world." And then you have this so-called crisis of the system which may get worse but as yet has affected only a very small part of the economy, the finance sector. It hasn't even bankrupted the bankers - there's some pain but it's of a pretty modest sort. And yet people say, "Obviously this discredits everything." It seems like it's a cause looking for an opportunity.

DJ: Throwing the baby out with the bath water.

SB: I'll tell you what I think is the root of it. It goes back to what Adam Smith said about the baker and the candlestick-maker and so on following only their own self-interest and yet benefiting their fellow men and women. And I think people have a great deal of difficulty understanding how the pursuit of self-interest - let's say self-interest rather than selfishness - can in the end achieve some moral purpose with the spreading of prosperity. And here we may encounter a slight difference between us.

EH: I think we will.

SB: Because I have always regarded the self-interest doctrine in a utilitarian sense. And one of the more surprising utilitarian teachings is that under certain circumstances - you don't have to be laissez-faire fanatics - the promotion of self-interest will also promote the interests of other people. Now this has to be done within certain ground-rules, about which we can argue, but if people knew something about utilitarian philosophy - if they read David Hume for instance, who I think was the wisest of those philosophers - they might feel a bit easier about this. But they can't bear the idea that people can be doing good without always feeling extremely unselfish. And this grates on them, and they think, like Old Testament prophets, that here judgment has come for worshipping Baal for so long.

EH: Well, I agree with part of that. I think that there is a general current of discontent, in some ways shaped by Marxism, which directs itself at the economy rather than other aspects of the modern world. But the fundamental issue - and I think Rowan Williams is, in his nebulous way, trying to get at this - is that people feel there is something wrong with the modern experiment: the great changes in the way that we look at God, the world, the family, society, our neighbours. They identify the problem as being connected to what I would consider probably the most successful aspect of the modern experiment, the economy. So instead of saying that there's something wrong with our attitude towards the family or religion, or the state, or the transcendental, they say there is something wrong with the economy, which has produced so much wealth and so much education and knowledge, so many other good things. It seems like a very odd target.