Gilbert NMO-Morris

Professor Gilbert NMO Morris is one of the world's leading experts on financial centres. He was Professor at George Mason University, Chairman of the Turks and Caicos National Investment Agency TC Invest, and was a Special Envoy from the office of the Premier to the All Party Group at the House of Lords. Morris is a Distinguished Fellow of the Sir William Goodenough College in London, and has written five books, notably: Rescue America, with Chris Salamone, and the forthcoming Shifting Ground in Sinking Sand: The G20 Pogrom Against International Financial Centres.

Morris' main concern which leads him to the deepest philosophical questions is the stability of human value; which, fundamentally makes him an ethicist. He has written: "I was raised in a devout household. Now in philosophical terms, I remain in the neighbourhood, but I occupy a different house. And when I speak of ethics, I speak between two or perhaps three impossibles: a). St. Paul's admonition in Romans 7:7 "I had not know sin but for the law'; b). Wittgenstein's refrain in the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus: "Whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent" and finally, Kierkegaard's proposition concerning a faith that lies beyond the ethical. Together these animate my thoughts and my pen. However, they have meaning for me, only within an ontology provided by Anaximander in his final fragment: "At the point at which things have their origns, thereto they have their decline; and all things shall pay a recompense for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time".

Anaximanderian ontology says that nothing remains dominant indefinitely. It suggests that there will be recompense for all forms of domination, no matter how benign. How then, do we live in such a context and keep what Morris calls this "existential imperative" before us? Morris argues that his "three impossibles" are the means. When St. Paul says "I had not known sin....", Morris takes that to mean that "before and beyond law" is the conscience "from whence human value is derived and in which it is maintained".

But what is its "disciplining content"?

According to Morris the conscience must possess two features: a). It must have Kierkegaard's faith, which means a 'revolutionary faith' and b). the humility or discipline of Wittgenstein's "silence". This silence means humility; both attitudinal, epistemological and spiritual.

Morris deals with these questions first in his forthcoming work: "The Creative Lacunae: A Study of Philosophy in Poetry from Aristotle to T.S. Eliot" and in Volume II, titled "Faith: The Absence That Gives Presence".

Morris' vision has been called terrifying, and his colleague Dr. Jack Censer, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at George Mason University once said, "Gilbert Morris is asking what is the most ethical we can be without or beyond religion?

Professor Gilbert NMO Morris is not an atheist. However, he believes that "to arrive at the threshold for belief in the divine or the 'mysterium tremendum' we must exhaust our capacity "action-by and from-conscience. In reading this author, this question is at the root of everything he writes.

SQM