Eyre Lines

Having started in my last post with Ukraine, which is, of course, war, I thought I’d restructure the rest of what was going to be a very long post around a traditional order of the four horsemen of Revelation, though this is not the order you see in the actual text.  The second is frequently cited as pestilence, which for our purposes is, of course, Covid. That is not, perhaps, an existential threat to the world or even to the UK, but it’s an existential threat to me personally. It appears to hover around the point where it doesn’t kill quite a high enough percentage of those who suffer it to have major economic effects long term, though “long Covid” has to be a worry there, with some estimates indicating that a serious percentage of those infected end up with long term disabling conditions, and that might impact, for instance, the labour market enough to produce an uncomfortable or even catastrophic economic shift. The UK government seems to have decided that Covid is now “over”; they stopped providing free test kits on 1st April, and thus any figures for the prevalence of Covid cases are now going to be wildly inaccurate, as opposed to just somewhat inaccurate. However, on the eve of that change, there was an estimate that one in 14 people in England had Covid, which is actually a significantly higher percentage than at most of the times when we were panicking about it.

Perhaps foolishly, early on in the pandemic I fed in details of my various health conditions to a site which gave an estimate of my chances of survival were I to catch Covid. I expected something significantly worse than the general figure for adults, and even adults over 65, but was somewhat taken aback to find a probability of 86% that I would die if I contracted it. Yes, I am now triple jabbed. Yes, I’ve taken some comfort in the development of molnupiravir, which is a drug which apparently reduces mortality by 50% (that’s overall, not allowing for particular vulnerabilities like mine) and other similar antiviral drugs. However, in the opposite direction has been the emergence of the Omicron variant, which is significantly more transmissible, and may not be protected against quite as well by the existing vaccines. Data I’ve seen so far, however, seems to indicate that it is at the least no more deadly than previous strains, and might just be less damaging. Here’s a recent assessment of Omicron as at the time I started writing these posts.

Covid 19 could still mutate in the direction of something significantly more deadly, of course. It absolutely will mutate, and there will be new strains. That brings me to a tirade I’ve seen from a facebook friend criticising Bill Gates’ encouragement to governments to improve their pandemic response protocols and research into new viruses. He suggested that there has only been one Covid 19 in his lifetime, and such effort to protect against another raises the supposition that there’s a financial incentive. He is wrong, of course. There have been many pandemic or just sub-pandemic viruses – SARS and MERS, for instance, Ebola, Aids, Bird ‘Flu, Swine ‘Flu – not to mention the base ‘flu virus, which produces new strains yearly, and all of which have deadly potential. It’s just that Covid 19 hit a “sweet spot” of being just lethal enough to scare the public health establishment thoroughly while not being lethal enough (like Ebola, for instance, or the original SARS, remembering that Covid is a close relative of SARS) to kill people off too quickly for them to transmit the disease – and being transmitted by aerosol, which improves transmission remarkably. It currently seems that the Omicron variant has managed to improve on that by being significantly more transmissible but also somewhat less deadly, recalling that success for a virus means maximum replication, and if it kills people too quickly, that limits its spread.

After the government’s horribly bad handling of the early stages of the pandemic, a revelation of sorts about the competence of our government, I came to the conclusion that Covid 19 would become endemic, i.e. a constant presence in the population rather akin to ‘flu. Test and trace, coupled with early closing of borders, could have avoided that here, as it did in New Zealand (though whether New Zealand can continue doing this with endemic Covid is an interesting question). I’m thus looking at the probability that I’ll have to live with the possibility of contracting Covid for the rest of my life, and little possibility of it being eliminated or even reduced to an incidence which makes it unlikely I’ll even catch it. This means that I expect eventually to catch it, and I still expect if I do that I’ll quite possibly die of it (absent it being a strain which doesn’t do as much damage, as I’ve mentioned above). Yes, there are those who suggest that endemic diseases are never those transmitted by airborne particles, but I have in mind the common cold (perhaps the world champion at mutation rates destroying any hope of immunisation) and influenza, which mutates itself a new crop of variants each year which labs more or less manage to stay on top of.

Perhaps the biggest revelation Covid has provided me has been something which at some level I already knew, but which has been brought home to me forcibly. Much has been made of “essential workers” and the fact that, without them, our economy and standard of living declines catastrophically. One might think that those whose work is “essential” would be handsomely remunerated for their efforts, particularly when, during a pandemic, they are the members of society most in danger. But they are as a general rule the least well-paid among us. The nurses, supermarket cashiers, warehouse operatives, delivery drivers and refuse collectors are typically on fairly low earnings (nurses are very low-earning compared with the level of education they need, for instance). The combination with Brexit has underlined that seasonal agricultural workers and butchers (for instance) are also really badly paid compared to the work they do. For six months, we were encouraged to go out and clap for the NHS workers during the height of the pandemic. I would have preferred that we start paying them a reasonable wage, but that was forgotten once restrictions relaxed, and they got a measly percentage increase in their pay. Against that, the merchant bankers, corporate executives and, of course, billionaires have seen their remuneration increase remarkably.

Covid is, however, not likely to be the last disease which starts with zoonotic transfer. It certainly wasn’t the first, either; the mother of such diseases seems to have been AIDS. I put it down to zoonotic transfer, incidentally, because on balance I don’t buy the story of a lab leak. Lab leaks have been blamed for virtually every novel disease we have seen recently, and have never been found to be the actual source. Bio-labs dealing with transmissible diseases have spectacularly tight security, and those suggesting that Wuhan was anything other than exorbitantly careful are probably exhibiting a xenophobic contempt for those of a different nationality (and, of course, race). It won’t be the last because there will continue to be people eating wild animals – the area around Wuhan is particularly known for exotic viruses in the wild, but probably African bush meat is a more likely source for the next plague. The next could, of course, be far more deadly than Covid has proved to be, and Covid has demonstrated that our actual performance in the West in terms of disease control is horribly bad. We could, for instance, see something with the death toll of Ebola, but which has a longer incubation period before people exhibit symptoms, and therefore have longer to spread it before health organisations notice. As and when that happens, we would seem likely to be in real trouble…

So, features of appcalypse. We’ve learned we’re horribly badly prepared for pandemics. We spent time hoping for the “deus ex machina” to save us, in the form of science – vaccines and antivirals, notably. And we found some heroes to extol, even though we didn’t collectively want to recognise their actions by paying them.

I’ve been thinking about the incident at the Oscars in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Looking at the recording, it seemed slightly bizarre – Will initially seemed to be amused by Chris’ comment, but then looked over at his wife and immediately set off onto the stage and slapped Chris, with some unparliamentary words about not talking about his wife.

Now, I always want to understand how things happen before judging anyone. On the face of it, a full blooded slap to the face is not, from my point of view, an appropriate response to mere words. However, Jada Pinknett Smith has a history of problems with mental health, and her baldness is due to alopecia, which is a form of disability and is known to feed into her mental state. Re-watching the clip, it seemed to me that she was visibly hurt by Chris Rock’s comment, and Will is no doubt super-sensitive to her feelings, as I am to my wife’s.

So, was this “an exhibition of toxic masculinity” as some have claimed? I wonder about that, particularly because of my own history.

If I am triggered appropriately, I can fall into a berserk rage – I’m told that my face goes very pale and I look “scary”. From the inside, it’s a case of literally “seeing red” (everything has a kind of red halo round it). There’s a massive surge of adrenaline, and I temporarily become pretty insensitive to pain. But also most of the usual inhibitors to behaviour turn off. I’m not physically imposing, or physically fit – I never really have been – so a physical response to any situation for me would normally be “run away”, but that doesn’t happen if I “see red”. Remember that I “look scary”? There have been maybe half a dozen occasions in my adult life when this has been triggered, and people who could easily have wiped the floor with me have looked nervous and backed off (shades of some scenes in the first episode of the new “Jack Reacher” series – except that I’m not 6’5″ and built like a tank).

I believe this to be an hereditary thing. My father had it, as had his father. Dad had learned at an early age techniques for suppressing rage (probably because his rage versus his own father’s rage would not have been a pretty sight) and I can only maybe recall four or five times when he really “lost it”. Granddad, by all accounts, never actually tried much to suppress it, and as a result this 5’6″ guy ran a colliery, and the miners were all slightly terrified of him. Me, I’ve learned a lot of techniques for avoiding being triggered that way (because it tends to result in furniture and, sometimes, people getting broken), but there are still some triggers I just can’t override with any ease. * They seem, in all cases, to involve my sense of fairness. Fairness towards myself I can generally gloss over – but if a member of my family is involved, particularly where they can’t or won’t defend themselves? That’s dangerous territory.

My own wife suffers with mental illness, and can be completely demolished by a few words from someone – and I have to try very hard not to have the red mist rise. Very occasionally I fail at that.

Now, I don’t know if Will Smith has the same berserker propensity which seems to run in the male line of my family. But I have it, and I have to say that in Will’s position, and had it been a dig at my wife – well, I might well have done the same thing (though I’d probably have had to slap Chis Rock’s chest, as I might not reach his face). And I’d have been suitably apologetic afterwards, which it appears he has been. So I’m entirely ready to forgive him, and not put it down to “toxic masculinity”.

Whast of Chris Rock? Well, I don’t think he should have levelled a gibe at someone who is known to be sensitive about what she clearly regards as a disfiguring condition and who has a history of mental health challenges. That is just wrong. But he’s a stand-up comedian, and all the decent stand-ups I’ve known go into a kind of disinhibited (and adrenalised) state where normal restraints don’t always work properly. So, as he’s apologised as well, I can give him a pass as well.

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, perhaps?

 

* Trying to avoid that being triggered is one of the reasons why, if you’ve read my “About” posts, has prompted me to suppress Emotional Chris to such an extent – and that has damaged me. But I can live with that damage far easier than I could live with the damage I might do in a berserk rage.

I’ve been tinkering for a couple of months with a long post revolving around the various things in the news which people have called “apocalyptic” for one reason or another, but haven’t so far achieved something I’m completely happy with, so it hasn’t been published. However, in the last few weeks we have another potentially apocalyptic scenario in the form of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By the way, despite this article, I have nothing but condemnation for the Russian invasion and huge admiration for President Zelensky… but you’ll see “It’s complicated” several times.

Is it actually an apocalyptic scenario, one might ask? Well, just after the invasion started, Putin was implicitly threatening a first nuclear strike against anyone who interfered with his actions. One might be sanguine about that, given that it seems remarkably unlikely that the US, NATO, the EU or any NATO country would be prepared to put troops on the ground (or planes in the sky) in this situation, but what Putin sees as interference might not be what we in the West see in that light. That seems to have been underlined by him putting his nuclear forces on alert a few days later, citing some threat apparently made by “someone he wouldn’t name, but the British Foreign Secretary”. That got me going through everything Liz Truss has said on the topic of Ukraine, because I was seriously worried that she might have been stupid enough to say something which went over the line of direct military support for Ukraine (I have no great regard for her intellectual capabilities). But as far as I can tell, she said no such thing. That raises in my mind the possibility that Putin could react to something which no-one else would see as a threat to his forces in Ukraine with a nuclear strike.

Would that then precipitate a nuclear response, notably from the US? It would seem that it would have to if the strike was on a NATO member. What about a non-NATO member which was part of the EU? Less certain in the case of the US, perhaps, but France has its own nuclear capability, and in theory should be part of an EU response.

However, when someone threatens a nuclear strike and the only country mentioned specifically is Britain, I have to prick up my ears. Was this a specific threat aimed at the UK? Would Putin target us with one or more nukes “pour encourager les autres”? Certainly not being part of the EU any more increases the probability that he might feel he could get away with that (and I recall the Russian response to Brexit as at least some indication that this might be part of a Russian game plan). But we remain part of NATO. Surely a strike on us would be regarded as requiring the rest of that alliance taking retaliatory action?

But does Putin think that would be the case? He will be well aware that after our government’s imperilling of the Good Friday Agreement by questioning the Northern Ireland Protocol, we are not flavour of the month with the US any more. Would President Biden consider that an attack on us was sufficient to order a full-out nuclear strike on Russia, and thus World War III? I’m not certain, and if I’m not certain, Putin (who is a chancer) might well feel he could. Yes, there are still 13 US bases in the UK (including two which are uncomfortably close to where I live), and it would be difficult to see how Putin could manage such an attack without impinging on one or more of those (we’re a relatively small country, after all), and an attack on a US base would be a somewhat different matter. There’s also the consideration that the UK has its own nuclear capability, and although that is heavily dependent on the US (and leased from them), it is in theory wholly independent.

This possibility, of course, may be a reason why the UK government has been slow to sanction Russian interests, including, bizarrely, allowing 30 days for many to move money out of the country, where other European countries have allowed no grace period. It may not be merely the fact that so many Conservative MPs have been bought by Russian donations, though that has to factor into it.

There is, of course, no certainty that any of what I’ve just outlined is a real probability, but if nothing else it should be indicative of the many ways in which the Ukraine conflict could blow up into something which would involve much more than just Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, I’m concerned that given the fact that Russia almost certainly cannot win this conflict outright (let’s face it, they couldn’t take and hold Afghanistan), there may be a path-dependency which will inevitably lead to Putin using nukes (or chemical/biological weapons) and possibly forcing escalation to a global conflict.

This issue of how Putin is really thinking and of how things could escalate leads me to think of the polarised statements being made on both sides (and Putin’s side is supported by at least some people in the West). I am, for instance, seeing some people arguing that Ukraine is an artificial country, only created in 1991, with a substantial Russian population and historically part of Russia. And that is, in a way, true – prior to 1991, Ukraine had been a part of the USSR (while being theoretically an independent SSR), having had its own revolution in 1917, been properly independent for a brief period, been at war with Russia and lost. Before that, it was a much-occupied country with periods of occupation by Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Cossack Khanate and Turkey. But it had an independent identity irrespective of that political control, with its own language and customs from, probably, around the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Granted, those are similar to those of Russia, but then, the language and customs of the USA are similar to those of Britain, and even closer to those of Canada… One has to think of Ukraine as having existed as a country at the very least since 1917, and that’s around the same period as Ireland has been independent from the UK. Indeed, it was treated as another country by Russia in the 1930s, being subject to the Holodomor, a famine used as punishment (and now recognised as an attempted genocide of the Ukrainians). From an Ukrainian point of view, that is something which will not be readily forgotten, just as the Irish famine of the mid 1800s is unlikely to be forgotten by the Irish.

It is also correct that the country which gave its name to Russia and in which the Russian Orthodox Church was founded was originally based around Kyiv (I avoid the Russian spelling of Kiev!). However, they expanded north from the 8th to the 12th century, and then lost the original homeland (to the Mongols) in the 13th century, only to recover it in the 17th, during which time Ukraine has every opportunity to acquire its own language and culture. The centre of Russia has, however, been Moscow (or, for a while, St. Petersburg) since at least the 13th century. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine is now autocephalous (i.e. independent of Moscow) after being in tension with the Moscow Patriarch for very many years. Of course, being the founding city of a religion brings particular tensions if that religion doesn’t still have control – think of Jerusalem.

Those who see Ukraine as simply an independent country are wrong, but so are those who think it part of Russia. The situation is more complicated than that.

So is the situation regarding spheres of influence. It is true that Russia has for a very long time (and certainly ever since Ukraine became independent) regarded Ukraine as falling within its sphere of influence, as somewhere which would be a threat if a competing great power had military there – and NATO clearly counts as a great power. Arguing that Russia shouldn’t think this way, however, invites comparison with the American response to the Cuban missile crisis or the standard Western attitude to Israel and Palestine. The threat of joining NATO back in the early years of the century for both Georgia and Ukraine was one cause of a Russian invasion of Georgia (and a rapid climb down by Ukraine’s then president) and renewed talk from Ukraine of NATO and EU membership almost certainly helped to precipitate the Russian annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk from 2014.

Those keen on this line of argument point to an understanding in 1990/91 that there would be no Eastward expansion, which is very probably correctly the personal position of various Western diplomats at the time. However, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the Charter of Paris of 1990, the second signed by Gorbachev and the first by Brezhnev, make the right to self-determination of eastern European countries explicit , and even if that were not enough, in the 1995 Budapest Memorandum Russia specifically agreed to respect the territory and borders of Ukraine in exchange for giving up their nuclear capability (granted, control of that still rested with Russia). The USA and Britain also signed. But that was pre-Putin. This line of argument is, of course the “what did we do to deserve this catastrophe” line of thinking which often accompanies “apocalyptic” scenarios.

As John Mearsheimer remarks in this video, Putin does not think like a 21st century statesman, he thinks like, perhaps, a 19th or early 20th century leader, though frankly Russian attitudes in this area haven’t changed much since the days of Ivan the Terrible. It is all very well for us in the West to talk of the right of self-determination of independent states and self-identified nations, which is a fine principle with which I totally agree (and yes, that includes, for instance, Palestine, Yemen, Kurdistan and, closer to home, Scotland). But Putin does not recognise that, at least not in the cases of Ukraine, Belorus, Georgia and probably Kazakhstan. Has the West brought this conflict on themselves? Well, yes. Unless we could convince Putin of the merits of self-determination, we should not have ignored his position, unless we were prepared to go to war with Russia about it. I was exceptionally nervous when the Baltic states joined both the EU and NATO, but it would seem they aren’t of sufficient strategic importance for that to have triggered a major Russian response – but the Georgian invasion of 2008 was almost certainly a response to suggestions that Georgia and Ukraine join NATO, and Ukraine probably only escaped invasion then by back-peddling energetically, something which changed in 2014 – and that, of course, saw the annexation of the Crimea by Russia and their giving substantial aid to separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. New suggestions of joining the EU and NATO by the West-leaning Zelensky have no doubt precipitated the current invasion.

On the other side, people are arguing that the West has been too soft on Russia in respect of Crimea and Donestk-Luhansk (the Donbas) – but there again, the situation is not quite the clear cut annexation of territory and formenting of rebellion which they present. Crimea only got allocated to Ukraine by Kruschev in 1954, before which it was its own SSR with an originally ethnically distinct population, though the Crimean tartars had been removed en masse from Crimea during World War II – but it was at that point far more ethnically Russian than it ever was Ukrainian, and Russia held a referendum following their moving more troops in in 2014 (parts of Crimea were already leased to Russia, Sebastopol being the home of their Black Sea fleet) which was substantially in favour of joining Russia. Again, Donestk-Luhansk were far more ethnically Russian than the more westerly portions of Ukraine, and had previously supported closer ties with Russia rather than with Europe – and in both cases, the right of self-determination would seem to cut both ways. It was, in other words, not at all obvious that Russia had massively overstepped any marks there. One can be sceptical about referenda and elections run by Russia, but absent that, we would seem hypcritical espousing self-determination for Ukraine but not for Crimea or Donbas – though, in conscience, UK and UK policy has always been in favour of free and fair elections until the point where they elect someone we don’t approve of, and we’re otherwise only too happy to see authoritarians in power.

Putin has also advanced the idea that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-nazis (or even by outright nazis), which to most of us is ridiculous. But there is a certain amount of truth there, at least historically – there are definitely far-right elements in Ukrainian society, and some people with far-right sympathies remain part of government. The Azov Brigade (which Putin has accused of using the Mariupol Childrens’ Hospital as a base) is widely regarded as far-right, and was incorporated into Ukrainian regular forces rather than have it subsist as a separate militia. However, the far-right parties did not manage to get a single seat in the most recent elections. Zelensky is most definitely not far-right, and many commentators who mention this seem unable to distinguish between strong nationalism and nazism. There are, of course, far-right parties in most if not all European nations, and in some they actually have some measure of power (unlike in Ukraine), so to point to Ukraine in this respect is obviously being very selective with truth, and those commentators I’ve read are from the more extreme elements of the US Republican Party and UK Brexiters, all of whom would regard themselves as “strong nationalists”. Putin himself, of course, is a far right, authoritarian ultra-nationalist. For them to call other strong nationalists nazis invites the “first take the beam out of your own eye” response.

I opened by expressing admiration for Zelensky – but that does not mean that I think he is above reproach. He was not seen as doing particularly well as president before the invasion, and I think he miscalculated in assuming a level of support from the US and the EU which would extend to direct military involvement, and/or in thinking that Putin would be sufficiently deterred by the possibility of that. But then, I think Churchill was a maginficent wartime leader for my country, despite being an alcoholic, racist and patriarchal member of the aristocracy, and I’m pretty confident Zelensky is better than that, overall. I do note, however, that he is fulfilling the “hero” role which often crops up in apocalyptic times, the person who is admirable for some reason or reasons (often faithfulness in the face of danger or death) and who is “one of us” and thus makes us feel good about ourselves. Of course, one feature here is that prior to the invasion, probably very few people in the UK thought of Ukrainians as “one of us” – Ukraine was an obscure part of Eastern Europe, on a par with the Poles and Romanians who we were fearing being overwhelmed by a scant six years ago. We had to think of Ukraine as “us” in order to idolise Zelensky. I actually think this mechanism is more in play than is racism when I see posts from Islamic friends complaining that we haven’t exhibited the same support for Syrians or Afghans. Neither has really provided us with a sufficiently strong hero figure, though Khaled al-Assad probably ought to have qualified.

I’ve been prompted to write this post partly because I’ve recently finished editing a book by Elgin Hushbeck called “Seeking Truth” (forthcoming from Energion Publications) which seeks to undermine the way politics has become so partisan, and many of the factors Elgin deals with are apparent in discussions of Ukraine. Neither side seems willing to acknowledge that there might be any shred of justification in the other’s position, and I wanted to try for a more balanced view. The way of things these days probably means that I’ll be criticised by members of both camps! I am, however, thoroughly on the “support Ukraine” side. Slava Ukraini!

 

There’s a fine episode of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast with Bethany Soulereder out recently. I like the idea, from her book, of a “choose your own” approach to theodicy.

What got me thinking, however, was a section starting at around the 53 minute mark (yes, it’s a fairly long episode) on the climate crisis (and ecological crisis). My mind went back to an idea which has been lurking in the back of my brain for years.

What if the Creationists, Intelligent Designers, believers in a purpose (telos, final cause) for the universe, believers in the necessity of progress (rather than just change) are right? What if the whole of creation/evolution is aimed at one species?

And that species isn’t humanity.

One might argue, for instance, that the pinnacle of evolution is something like the cockroach, and that everything else just serves to provide a better environment for cockroaches to survive (and cockroaches are a very hardy species, and will almost certaintly survive anything which the impending ecological crisis might throw at them). Let’s face it, from an evolutionary point of view, cockroaches are brilliant. They haven’t had to evolve much further for a vast amount of time, and probably won’t have to do so even if our global warming manages to get to 4 or 5 degrees. Indeed, one could think that their main predator is humanity, and a massive reduction in the numbers of humans around and of their techological level would be great news for cockroaches. I’ve seen estimates that the biomass of cockroaches is far greater than that of humanity (certainly the biomass of insects generally is much higher), so just weight for weight, they do much better than humanity does.

Of course, that would argue that self-consciousness and things deriving from it are mere spandrels in the evolutionary process. Evolutionary theory doesn’t seem to have much to say about that, but if we were to go to the favorite scripture of Creationists and ID proponents, Genesis 1-3, on many readings of those verses one could easily argue that self-consciousness was actually a bad thing – certainly the bulk of Christian theology has drawn from that the concept of original sin, and even my own take on that argues that self-centredness is effectively a kind of  “original sin” (though an essential by-product of having self-consciousness at all). Indeed, one could argue that humanity is a kind of “Friday night job”, something made without due care and attention because the maker is going to go home for the weekend shortly. It’s very dubious that cockroaches have anything which could be called “self-consciousness”, so they might be regarded as in their original “state of grace” in that respect, so morally superior to humanity.

Then again, maybe they do have some rudimentary self-consciousness, and are therefore not entirely blameless. In that event, and in the light of the current pandemic, I could consider the claim of viruses. They pretty certainly aren’t self-conscious. True, they are parasitic – they can’t exist without other living organisms. But then, neither can humanity – we need something to eat, after all, and can’t process inanimate matter. Granted, they aren’t in a form which has been unchanged for millions of years, but perhaps the flexibility of being able to mutate multiple times a year is actually their strength – rather than, as in the case of the cockroach, looking at a very stable form, their sheer versatility is a pinnacle of evolutionary success.

Of course, I don’t personally believe in a specific creation, in any form of intelligent design, in the universe having any purpose or in progress being inevitable, but, having grown up with the Bible, there’s always going to be a bit of my consciousness which can run these as an hypothesis. Just for fun…

There’s a talk by Yuval Noah Harari which possibly summarises his “Homo Deus” book (though, at under half an hour, it can’t do justice to the whole sweep of the book).

I can strongly recommend listening to it before you read further…

In it, he makes a strong case for the idea that technology is progressively replacing what humans do. It has already largely replaced manual labour, and is in the process of replacing intellectual labour, his instances being taken from driverless cars and doctors. I could see this trend before I retired from law, with “expert systems” beginning to do a lot of what had previously required a trained lawyer to do; I had already found that one person with a word processor could replace several members of a typing pool, particularly using “form letters”, and had the first solicitors office in town in which everyone except a receptionist/filing clerk had a computer on their desk. Harari talks about the likelihood that we will be faced with a majority of people being in the “useless class” in the future – people whose brawn and brains alike have been superseded by machines.

Arguably, that has already happened to a significant extent, because one potential solution is the multiplication of what David Graeber wrote about in “Bullshit Jobs”. We are employing vast numbers of people doing jobs which really have no basis for existing, and Graeber rightly criticises this, and the culture which demands that someone work if they are to have any money. Graeber sensibly points to the idea of Universal Basic Income to solve the problem, which is admittedly a better solution than that famously employed by the 1870 Paris Commune, which promised full employment, but in order to achieve that had people digging ditches and then filling them in – definitely an early form of “bullshit job”.

Graeber’s suggestion of UBI also solves two other problems. The first is that economics has traditionally been almost entirely “supply side” economics, and assumes that demand is virtually inexhaustible. Anyone involved in sales or marketing knows that demand has not been readily expandable for a long time, and has to be created, of course, but inexhaustible demand also requires that there be people with the money to buy things, and we really can’t carry on plugging that gap with credit. In other words, we need people to have the money to buy the things which industry produces, otherwise it will grind to a halt.

The second is that the labour market is hugely warped in favour of the employer (particularly as so many jobs are “bullshit jobs”), and “free markets” do not work unless there is a level playing field. If you are going to starve or be homeless if you don’t get that job, you really don’t have the same position as an employer who can choose between hundreds of applicants and can probably do without an extra employee anyhow (usually by getting the existing ones to work slightly harder).

What neither bullshit jobs nor UBI solves, however, is the pervasive belief that people need to work in order to live. This is particularly prevalent in Northern Europe and North America, and may stem from the “Protestant Work Ethic”, often justified to me by biblically literate people by quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10 “Those who do not work shall not eat”. In it’s bare form this is, of course, particularly tough on those who either cannot work at all or whose skills are not required for any work which needs doing, something which seems increasingly to threaten virtually every worker on the planet. I will note in passing that scholarship now indicates that those who were being criticised there were not “the idle poor”, as the work ethic seems to indicate, but those who were rich enough not to need to work and were therefore hogging the communal meal because they got there first and, in any event, had probably paid for it.

As Harari notes, there are increasing numbers of people who just cannot do any job which exists, and who are not capable of being trained to do new jobs which may arise. An ethos of valuing people merely because they are human beings, rather than because they can in some way be useful would seem overdue for adoption. We are, as a friend is fond of saying, human beings, not human doings. We probably also need to get rid of the myth that anyone can be trained to do any job, which is patently untrue (very few of us are able to assimilate the training needed to be a brain surgeon, for instance, for as long as that occupation has not been replaced by robots). It is almost as bad as the myth that anyone who works hard can succeed, and the combination of the two (work and education) condemns very many people to being Harari’s “useless class”, and to being blamed for their condition despite having no ability to change it. That way lies depression, which I note strikes particularly hard at those who lose their jobs, and significant numbers who retire…

I am very sensitive to this, given that I am largely a retired person, and even were that not the case on the grounds of age, I have too much wrong with me to be able to work anything like full time productively. Yes, I do still do some work, partly editing theology, partly in a chemical research company, partly as a carer, but neither of the first two pays anything remotely amounting to a living wage (nor, of course, does being a carer), and had my wife and myself not been fortunate enough to inherit money from our parents, we would be in severe financial distress – had I not become too ill to work a little under 20 years ago, I would probably have made enough to retire without those inheritances, but as it is, they lift us beyond what the State will provide sufficiently to be modestly comfortable for the time being.

Just possibly, religion might have something of an answer. If we could, perhaps, internalise the Christian view that everyone is a beloved child of God, irrespective of what they have done or might do, that would be a fine corrective.

Harari closes by saying that he cannot think of another quality which human have which machines cannot replace, and there, I think he misses something which he does in fact mention. That is emotion. So far as I know, there is no indication that machines can have emotions. Here, I have some insight from the illness which stopped me working – I acquired Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, with the usual accompaniments of Chronic Depression and Chronic Anxiety, and the depression became, for a time, sufficiently deep to result in anhedonia.

I have written about my anhedonia before. It’s a condition I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. In my case, nothing produced pleasure or the anticipation of pleasure, or even other emotions apart, perhaps, from anger (which was largely turned inward). It went beyond that to not being able to remember occasions when I had been happy, and when I say that, I don’t just mean not experiencing the memory of the pleasure at the time, I mean largely not remembering the occasions at all. OK, with effort, I could piece together a fragmentary account of some time when I thought I probably must have been happy, but it was missing so much of what made it pleasurable that it had no reality to it.

This meant that, when contemplating some course of action, I could still work out what the results of it would be likely to be, but there was no reason to take one course of action rather than another. Would it result in excruciating pain? Why on earth was that less desirable than the pleasure I couldn’t anticipate feeling (and wouldn’t feel anyhow)? (I have in mind there Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt”, best in Johnny Cash’s version…)

This, I fancy, was the nearest a human could get to being like a machine in terms of mental function. Even the attempted work-round of imagining what someone who did feel emotions normally didn’t work at all well, as I couldn’t truly envisage those emotions any more. The best I could do was construct a framework of rules, and operate according to those. Many of them I’d had for a long time anyhow, but I needed to add to them to avoid outcomes which those around me (chiefly my wife) indicated were not desirable – such as me dying or doing serious damage to myself or others.

That is something I see as being particularly necessary with machines. Isaac Asimov famously posited the “three laws of robotics” in the 1940s, and there was definitely an element of that in the rules which carried me through until the depression lifted in 2013 after seven years of the extreme depths of it, but it needed a lot more rules than that – perhaps because I don’t typically think as fast as Asimov’s robots could do. Perhaps, also, because it is horribly difficult to codify a set of rules of behaviour, something which I came to know very well as a lawyer, a profession which supremely deals with rules for humans to follow (laws, of course, but also clauses in contracts and the like). Producing a set of wording which covers every eventuality in a watertight manner in any even slightly complex situation is an extremely difficult endeavour (maybe impossible) – and the Law does not manage that well (and, famously, might produce “justice”, but justice without mercy is frankly Satanic – hence the ever-present need for human judges). Games designers and computer programmers will be well aware of this problem of making the wording as watertight as possible, just as are lawyers… and, of course, the computer programmers will ultimately be setting up the rules which govern autonomous machines. There are plenty of stories about the problems which driverless vehicles are encountering to back this up!

Again, though, it is not just a matter of what to do next which is the province of emotion. What of humour? Of music, art, architecture? Of the appreciation of natural beauty? Indeed, of love – and some theology suggests that “God is love”. Personally, I find that too simplistic, but without emotion, I don’t see that religion can exist, and if you balk at “religion”, can I suggest “meaning” or “value”?

If machines can manage those, maybe humanity is overdue for replacement…

A couple of incidents recently got me thinking in roughly the same direction. OK, that probably means that I should wait for a third, but I’ve a few minutes to write now, so…

The first stems from my editing. I’ve been working on a book about the collaboration between a Tibetan Buddhist priest and a Christian minister, in which the Buddhist taught a Buddhist spiritual practice to the Christian, she worked with it for a period and journalled about the results and they then collaborated to do the same with an inter-religious test group. It’s been fascinating. I’d tell you to look out for the title, but that’s still something being argued about.

The thing is, the Buddhist practice verbally references Buddha, Dharma and Sanghya (awakened teacher, living tradition and community of saints, to approximate the meanings). After a while, the Christian substituted the terms Jesus, the Holy Spirit and El Roi (“the God who sees me” in Hebrew) as being the nearest equivalents she could think of from her tradition. Otherwise the practice stayed exactly the same, including breathing and visualisation as well as the words (and presumably the sentiment of) “I take refuge in…” preceding the words used. I suggested a subtitle along the lines of “A Buddhist practice used by a Christian”, and my Buddhist author objected, saying that it was now a Christian practice because of the words used.

This was not an issue on which I wanted to argue with my authors, but it did get me thinking about whether just a chance of word could change something from being in one tradition to being in another.

The second was when I played to a friend (who is non-religious and somewhere in the hard agnostic-to-atheist spectrum) the beginning of The Hooters’ “All You Zombies”, which I fancied he’d quoted from earlier (he hadn’t – he’d never heard the song). It opens ‘Holy Moses met the Pharoah/ Yeah, he tried to set him straight/ Looked him in the eye/ “Let my people go”‘. And my friend immediately said “I don’t like Christian music” and was generally derogatory about it.

Now, I didn’t really pick him up on this, apart from to mention that The Hooters weren’t usually regarded as “Christian” – he was obviously thoroughly set against considering it any further. So I didn’t, for instance, mention that though it does mention Moses and Noah, these are figures taken from the Hebrew scriptures, not the New Testament. I will grant that, if you listen to the whole song, the message is very much “the first shall be last and the last shall be first”, which is thoroughly in tune with Jesus – but also with a wide swathe of Jewish thinking. And, for that matter, Socialist or Marxist thinking. OK, in conscience, the writer (Eriz Bazilian) also wrote “What if God was one of us?”; whether that can be considered “Christian” is an interesting question, given that it scandalises some of my Christian friends. It does mention God, it does imply incarnation and it does reference the Pope, but “just a slob like one of us” is calculated to get up the backs of anyone who hasn’t really considered what incarnation has to mean. I can’t trace anything else he’s written with as much religious reference…

I did mention to my friend that if this was Christian music, so were a significant number of Leonard Cohen songs, but the ears were closed, as far as I can tell as soon as he heard the words “Holy Moses”.

Now, this concern about a name is not new to me. I’ve written before about a very long running thread on a French language forum in which I addressed a number of French and Belgian atheists, eventually finding that all of them had had some kind of experience of what I’ll call “the numinous” (though I’d personally label them as lower-level mystical experiences). During this exchange I used [    ] to represent a box with contents unknown which was the root cause of those experiences (or was that which was being experienced). Eventually, after around a year of those exchanges, I suggested that we put a label on the box (which conveniently takes the four letter of “Dieu”), and further suggested that, taking the accounts of a lot of mystics from various traditions as a cue, we use the label “Dieu” (God in French) for the box which we’d managed to agree existed in some sense.

All of them promptly backtracked like crazy. It seemed that the mere use of a label with which they had a set of negative associations was enough to negate the whole course of agreement they’d expressed as we inched towards that moment. To me, of course, this was not a problem – I knew of massively multiple accounts of what “God” means even just within Christianity, and there are more in other faiths; I do not think that a single definition can catch all of those possible meanings, thinking of them as more a cluster of loosely associated “family resemblance” concepts (à la Wittgenstein).

I’ve also been involved in discussions with Conservative Christians who have made statements along the lines of “We worship God, Muslims worship Allah, who is a false God”. Now, of course, “Allah” is merely the word in Arabic (and some connected languages) which translates as “God”, and Arabic-speaking Christians will pray to Allah. As far as those Conservatives were concerned, however, Allah could not possibly be God, whatever the dictionaries said. Pointing out that in Christianity and Judaism we actually have a name for God (YHVH) and that the word “god” is not in any of the original texts (the Hebrew will use “El” or “Elohim” as more generic terms, the Greek of the New Testament will use “Theos”) and thus “god” was already a translation was to no avail.

I wonder at this point whether there’s still operating in peoples’ subconsciouses the idea that words have power irrespective of what they signify. This is a concept which has been prominent in magic through the ages, but it wouldn’t be espoused, I think, by any of those I’ve indicated as having problems with the use of or change of the label used. It’s possible that, for instance, the French atheists were largely influenced by the fact that, to them, the word “Dieu” had considerable baggage, and they couldn’t use it without the baggage welling up from the backs of their minds. I fancy that might also explain my friend cavilling at “Holy Moses”, though I’m sure that having grown up in a culture steeped in Christianity for over a thousand years, the meme of freeing the enslaved which, for me, goes with the name “Moses” resonates with him. It just doesn’t resonate quite as much as a load of other baggage, it seems.

Returning to my authors, though, I don’t think that the use of either “Buddha, dharma, sanghya” or “Jesus, spirit, El Roi” would have time when chanted to produce significant conceptual baggage; they are more of a mantra in the actual practice, it seems to me, something akin to the generally gabbled “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths”, which I don’t think often excites the cognitive, deliberative part of the brain of those using the rosary. I fancy the same is commonly true of those chanting repetitively “Nam myoho renge kyo” in the Buddhist tradition (which I’m told doesn’t literally mean quite the same thing as the chant is intended to express). In addition, the second set of words were carefully chosen to, as much as possible, represent the same underlying meanings as attached to the first, and perhaps slightly adjust the word-signification in the process.

Why, therefore, I asked myself, was what was clearly a Buddhist practice suddenly transformed into a Christian one? OK, in a spirit of confession, I’ve frequently ended up substituting Christian-origin words in what is otherwise mantra yoga so far as I’m concerned, because the words I use maybe have some added connections in my mind (though note what I say above about the Hail Mary and Nam myoho renge kyo). I don’t, however, think I’m thus using a Christian practice – it’s a modified Hindu practice or perhaps an interfaith practice.

Perhaps, though, one cannot actually say that the practice itself belongs to any faith? If you were to use, for instance, nonsense words…? For me, however, it was a Buddhist practice, because it came from a Buddhist tradition.

I don’t know the answer to how a Buddhist practice becomes a Christian one. What I do know is that I can’t accuse my authors, my friend or the group of French atheists of being wrong about their understanding of the use of the relevant words. OK, I probably should say the same about the Conservative Christians as well, though suggesting that when (say) a Canadian or an Australian use the term “Prime Minister”, that has to refer to Boris Johnson rather than to Pierre Trudeau or Jacinta Ardern strikes me as an analogy – you can be just plain wrong about your interpretation of a use of words. Words are however going to mean what they are going to mean in the mind of the person hearing them, not necessarily what they were intended to mean by the person who spoke them, and that doesn’t necessarily mean the hearer is wrong or that the speaker meant something other than what was intended. This is, more or less, the “Death of the Author” principle, which has annoyed so many authors, including myself.

Why the title I chose? Obviously I reference Shakespeare’s “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, but also Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, in the postscript to which he wrote  of his title “because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left”. Did I also think of Seal’s “Kiss from a rose”? Clearly I did, because I mention it, and I do so because listeners are divided on what Seal actually means by “rose” in the song. He isn’t willing to help us on that, either.

 

The recent announcement that the government are postponing doing any checks on imports from the EU to July 2022 (from January 2022, from October 2021, from January 2021) has got me thinking about the various promises made by Boris Johnson and his cabinet of horrors.

Let’s start with “Let’s Get Brexit Done”, the slogan which I’m confident won him his 80 seat majority in 2019. (If you haven’t read it, can I reference my “This will never end” post from some years ago now). Obviously this is further postponing anything looking remotely like “getting Brexit done”. I will concede that in one sense it’s a very sensible move – were we to introduce physical border checks next month, I think the probability of food shortages which would eclipse those we’re already seeing would rise to nearly 100%. After all, the labour shortages caused by removing upwards of 200,000 EU workers from the economy have already made us more dependent on imports of food than we were before Brexit. But it is absolutely NOT “getting Brexit done”.

Let’s move on to the Leave campaign’s “taking control of our borders”. Now, the EU managed very efficiently to take control of their borders with effect from January 1st of this year, instituting customs checks which have resulted in days of delay at ports and many millions of pounds of rejected and spoiled goods. But we were not ready, despite having had from 2016 to 2020 to put systems in place, and we still apparently aren’t. We are not controlling our borders with the EU at all so far as goods is concerned (except for the one EU border they were unable to take control of, because it is within the UK, in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and England, Scotland and Wales). All our attempts with the NI border so far to comply with our treaty obligations and actually do the necessary checks properly have partly failed, partly just resulted in economic and political turmoil. Add to that that while we seem keen to make life difficult for EU citizens with a perfect right to come to the UK, we are so unable to stem the flow of refugees across the Channel that we’ve asked the French for help.

How about Boris’ “Oven ready deal”, which was another slogan which contributed to his 2019 win. That phrasing related mostly to the Northern Ireland protocol, which kept NI in the common market and customs union so as not to have a land border in Ireland and tear up the Good Friday agreement. Now, David Frost, the man who actually negotiated the oven ready deal, is saying it’s a bad deal and has to be renegotiated. And he got made a Lord for his work on that – and a member of the Cabinet. Which makes him an “unelected bureucrat” running the country. Do I not remember “get rid of unelected bureucrats running the country” as another clarion call of the Brexiteers as something we’d get rid of?

Lastly, at least for the moment, is the “stop foreigners stealing our jobs” which was not an official campaign slogan in 2016, but which was muttered by a huge proportion of Brexiteer voters. Well, we’ve persuaded or forced over 200,000 EU nationals to leave – and we’re flying in fruit pickers from as far away as Nepal to fill the jobs which, apparently, no-one in this country wants to do.  We’re short of lorry drivers, warehouse workers, food production workers, nurses, doctors, hospitality industry staff… and the list goes on.

(Edited to add) Boris assured us, back in 2016, that once Brexit went through we would see cheaper energy. We now face a hike in wholesale gas prices of around 300%. OK, the wholesale prices in Europe have gone up too – but only by around 50%… we, on the other hand, also left the EU energy market And, speaking personally, our energy supplier has gone bust; we’re not sure what the repercussions of that are going to be, apart from everything costing more.

What we’re not short of, it seems, is lying Conservative politicians. Though other MPs aren’t allowed to point out that they’ve lied – it’s the person pointing it out, not the liar, who is excluded from the House of Commons. And, of course, no-one who can be “got at” by the government (which, sadly, includes the BBC) is allowed to blame Brexit for anything at all…

Yorkshire bylines thinks we’re in danger of seeing the England of Orwell’s nightmare vision in “1984” realised. I just trust that we’ll have an election earlier rather than later, hope above hope that Labour and the LibDems can get some electoral pact going and form a non-Tory government together – and undo as much as possible of the nonsense which is Brexit. Because if we don’t, I can see no option other than a revolution to shift them, and I really don’t want a revolution.

Just in passing, we seem to have most of what was decried as a ridiculous “worst case scenario”:-

 

We are about to have another anniversary of 9/11, this being the 20th, and it is also marked by a rather messy withdrawal from Afghanistan by US and UK troops at the end of last month. No doubt we will hear a lot more about the events of that day; as I finish writing this, there’s someone on the radio talking about it. I wrote at some length about my reaction to our military incursions in the Middle East which stemmed from 9/11 some years ago; while I might criticise the manner of the withdrawal, withdrawing is definitely something I regard as overdue.

Tripp Fuller, of Homebrewed Christianity, has joined with Brian McLaren and Diana Butler-Bass to do a set of meditations on Christianity in the years since 9/11 which is in its third week now. I wasn’t going to subscribe to that, for two main reasons. The first is that the shock of 9/11 was primarily an American one. Yes, I can remember where I was when I heard of it – I was in a coffee break from a Law Society continuing education course (on money laundering) at a Leeds hotel and was telephoned while in the car park by a friend who was in international banking, and he told me about the first plane strike and suggested that I find a television. A friend on the course said I looked as if I’d had a severe shock – which I had; my banker friend and myself had a couple of mutual acquaintances who should have been in the Twin Towers (as it happened, we found out later that they weren’t there at the time). Going back into the hotel, we found many staff members in the hotel office, and watched over their shoulders as the second plane impacted the towers.

It was intrinsically shocking. But it wasn’t as shocking as it was to my American friends. It wasn’t my country’s iconic skyscrapers which were falling down, after all, and whereas the States had prior to that been free of major terrorist attacks (OK, with the exception of some home-grown ones), I’d lived through the “troubles” in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998, and quite apart from being a weekly event in Northern Ireland those not infrequently spilled over into bomb attacks in England. We were used to terrorist attacks, and we were not used to feeling completely safe from them – even those of us who were not, like me, from the now disbanded Civil Defence establishment and were therefore used to thinking of potential dangers to society beyond the nuclear attacks which the system was primarily intended to deal with. Tripp suggested in one of the sessions that the whole Western World was shocked, but in conscience I think that is elevating the USA to the leadership status it would like to think it had, but which the rest of the West have been less willing to acknowledge. I didn’t, for instance, feel any great sense of shock that this huge military power could be “proved weak” in this way, if indeed that represented weakness.

I also fancied that the sessions would be far more about the effects in American Christianity than in that in the UK. OK, I’ll admit here that I succumbed after getting a taster of the first session, and will probably follow until the end, but I think I’m right in thinking that they will continue to have far more applicability to Americans than to the British (or, indeed, Europeans more generally), and that is not a criticism, just an observation.

The second reason, though, is a purely personal one. Barry Taylor recently mused in a patron-only reflection on the fact that we can be moved by far off catastrophes but things are completely different when someone close to you is involved. In my case, the personal is the fact that on 9/12/2001, my father died suddenly and unexpectedly, and a fixed light of my life until then vanished. He felt unwell in the mid-afternoon, and was dead by 9 p.m.

And, of course, every time 9/11 comes round and is remembered, it is my own loss the next day which looms largest in my mind, even as people quite reasonably mourn the deaths on 9/11 (after all, I’m very keen on John Donne’s “No man is an island”, so
“Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee”),
and I have to confess to feeling irritated by that reminder. I feel guilty about this, even though it’s a completely natural reaction, because one death after a very full life hardly equates to nearly three thousand, many of them with many years cut short. But they weren’t people I knew, and in particular they weren’t the man I most looked up to for 48 years.

But then, maybe it is actually good that I be reminded every year. I’ve lost many other relatives and friends, and with one exception I don’t remember their dates of death and pause then to think of them – I do that when something else reminds me of them, and in some cases that’s fairly seldom. I wouldn’t want to let my dad’s memory fade, and it isn’t likely to.

The exception? Well, that’s my mother, who died on New Years’ Eve 2014, halfway through eating her pudding at dinner time, missing seeing in 2015 by about 6 hours.

Following my posts emanating from the murder of George Floyd, last year I followed a course run by Tripp Fuller and Adam Clark centering on the work of James Cone, but in general terms being “Black Theology”. I thought that there really could be no better time to be learning more about this species of theology, which I’ve encountered from time to time but never really dived into.

I usually blog along with courses I’m doing, both to amuse readers and to clarify my thinking about them; at the point of starting writing this we were several sessions down and I hadn’t written anything, and as I finish writing, the course finished some months ago. This is not just because I’ve had quite a bit of other stuff to do (though that has contributed), it’s also partly because I don’t really have a position to stand on, aside being an interested (and sympathetic) onlooker, and I’ve been revising and revising in an attempt not to lack in sensitivity while having no real connection with the issue. However, as it’s part of my process for understanding things, I really need to write. I’m not black, and I don’t live in a place where I come into contact with many black people. I liked the provocation of “can white people be saved?”, but where I live, that’s pretty much equivalent to “can anyone be saved?”.

16 years ago, when I gave up my legal practice in order to have a psychological meltdown for some years, I could identify three black people living in town, two of whom I was acquainted with (I knew rather more people of subcontinental or Chinese origin), but I haven’t actually seen any of those three since then (I was somewhat reclusive for a long time – arguably, I still am). When I was commenting earlier in the year on someone else’s facebook post on the Floyd killing, they did helpfully suggest that I make a point of going out and making some black friends – but without leaving town (which I almost never do these days) that’s an impossibility, except online. Yes, I have a few black online friends (or at least acquaintances – the word “friend” seems to me devalued in online settings…) And I wouldn’t usually dream of bringing up the question of how they consider their skin colour affects their lives unless they mentioned it first – that would, firstly, seem rude to me as a general proposition (I am English, after all), and secondly would put me in the position of effectively demanding of them the task of educating me, inviting the danger of a breakdown of any relationship which was there. After all, in friendships I strive to look for commonalities, not differences, most of the time.

What has however struck me forcibly is that the theologies being talked about are supremely American – and I’m also not an American. I’m very well aware of the lamentable history of my own country (The UK) in fostering the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the enrichment of at least some of my countrymen by the sugar and cotton trades, which were built on slave labour. Whether that could be said to have benefited me or my family significantly is rather dubious, given that I don’t believe that trickle down economics works, and my family was largely, during those periods and the 19th century, digging coal for the wool mills of Yorkshire rather than the cotton mills of Lancashire, or on my mother’s side, working in shipyards in Scotland and potteries in the Midlands; the same could probably be said for the majority of people in the country, although few if any of the “upper crust” can be regarded as familialy “without sin”.

But we didn’t really have slaves in England (or the rest of Britain) – OK, before Somersett’s Case, there were a few. In conscience, there still are some slaves; human traficking does continue, despite being illegal and punishable by long prison sentences; it isn’t usually or predominantly black people these days, though. The black people I’ve got to know on anything more than a nodding basis here have not been the descendants of slaves either, they’ve been from families immigrating directly from Africa in the 20th century. Yes, a majority of the black population in this country are Afro-Carribeans, and come from people originally slaves in the sugar plantations in the Carribean, but not those I’ve met anywhere around here.

So I’d rather been hoping that “Black Theology” might include the perspective of sub-saharan Africans, who almost universally have a history of European colonisation rather than of slavery as such (and, in conscience, there are a lot more sub-saharan Africans than there are African-Americans). Even the perspective of Afro-Carribeans is different – enfranchisement came earlier for them. The transition from the slave economy to a wage labourer economy was not without lingering effects there, but the Carribean islands, which were majority black, were self-governing by the mid 20th century and were electing their own governments significantly earlier than that. That isn’t the same context as that of African-Americans. Neither, for completeness, is it exactly the context of what used to be the largest slave population in the Americas in Brazil or the other continental slave populations in South and Central America.

Are we talking, perhaps, of an attempt to impose upon the inhabitants of the actual continent of Africa the particular perspective of African-Americans? Maybe, inadvertently. In an early session, Adam Clark was including in “Africans” the inhabitants of North Africa, who have never been particularly similar to Sub-Saharan Africans (and haven’t often been enslaved since classical times). Yes, many North Africans (notably Egyptians, but also people from points west of there) were notable figures in the early church and contributed a vast amount to the theological baggage which the church, and particularly the Catholic and Protestant churches, carry. Augustine is a notable example, but there are very many others. But they weren’t Sub-Saharan Africans; they were also, as a generality, Romans in the wide sense of those assimilated into Greco-Roman culture. Dr. Clark made the salient point that Jesus was not white (something which it seems to me many North Americans and – thankfully – a declining number of Europeans seem unable to grasp), but sought, perhaps ironically, to elide the Middle East into the generic “African” designation, via the fact that the border between the Middle East and Egypt (thus Africa) has, historically, been very porous, at least until the advent of the modern Israeli state. Jesus was indeed almost certainly not anything remotely like white, but he was equally almost certainly not anything remotely like black, unless you are including in “black” the entire range from Berbers in the West through Arabs and Iranians to the various peoples of the Indian subcontinent. To be fair to him, I suspect that, to a white North American, Middle Easterners possibly are “black” – they certainly would have been 200 years ago. The “one drop of black blood” principle seems potentially operative there.

That, to me, was definitely a step too far. It smacked of erasure of Jews and Judaism, or at the least subsuming them into an identity most (but not all) Jews would think foreign to them, and they have their own long history of oppression (chiefly, since the First Century, by Europeans, but also by Arabs). This includes, in their own narrative, a period of slavery (under the Egyptians, a North African people, so one might want to be cautious about including them as “Africans” when recontextualising theology). Jesus was absolutely Jewish, and partook of Jewish particularities, and Christianity is thus in origin a child of Judaism – and Jewish particularities are historically very distinct from Sub-Saharan Black particularities, let alone African-American particularities. Indeed, they’re different from Egyptian perspectives, or Mesapotamian (Iraq, Iran) ones, or Anatolian ones.

Yes, I am aware of the invidious position of a white, non-Jewish English European arguing for the recognition of the particular situations of Jews and of Sub-Saharan Africans, but I didn’t see others in the course arguing that way. What was being presented as “Black Theology” was overwhelmingly a North American Black Theology, just as when “European” was mentioned during the sessions it was largely a North American European position. The temptation to identify this as another example of American cultural imperialism is beckoning me…

I have, however, been encouraged by some of Tripp’s later comments, which have striven to expand the critique to more general oppressions, including those of the neoliberal financialised free market capitalism which is, to my mind, massively more ubiquitous and poisonous than is “whiteness” (it certainly is where I live, where “whiteness” is hardly a factor). After all, it oppresses 99% of white Europeans and North Americans as well as those of other skin colours. [As an aside, I actually tend to blame capitalism for the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries – the burgeoning capitalist economies of England, Spain, Portugal and to some extent Holland found sources of cheap labour in Africa already available, and were typically morality and ethics-free in exploiting and massively increasing those.]

If I am to make use of the perspectives in this course, I need to find those loci of oppression which parallel as closely as possible those of African-Americans and which are also notable in my own society, and attend to them – travelling to another town just in order to find some black people to befriend seems foolish, although if there are ever any BLM protests reasonably near me, I might well join in.

Who, I ask myself, are the people of Han near me (to use Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s helpful use in one of the sessions of a Korean concept of the state of being or having been oppressed, in the Korean case principally by Japanese imperialists)? I can most definitely identify the Jews historically as a “people of Han”, though there are even fewer Jews locally to me than there are black people. Having said that, I might equally identify the Koreans under Japanese rule and the North American black population as being “crucified people” (referencing, perhaps, Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree”).

The group which I do some work with and attempt to support as much as possible, as I am one of them, albeit in some form of recovery, is those suffering from mental illness. This is a group which is, in my country, possibly just as vulnerable to police brutality as are black people; I see some evidence that the situation is similar in the USA.  The mentally ill and mentally handicapped are massively disproportionately represented among the homeless, are discriminated against in the jobs market and, on one estimate, constitute as much as a third of our prison population since we stopped incarcerating the mentally ill in asylums (a switch which, to my mind, has merely shifted those locked up from environments which were at least nominally therapeutic to environments which are just punitive and restrictive). They also (in common with other disabled people) induce in those who do not identify as part of the group a kind of fragility which appears at least similar to “white fragility”. I think “Han” is appropriate for the mentally ill (and other disabled groups) as well, and possibly more so than would be the expression “crucified people”. The issue of intersectionality does, of course, apply – it is correspondingly worse to be a person of colour and mentally ill here than just to have one source of “othering”.

I must not in the process forget those people-groups which have been oppressed here for far longer than have immigrant populations, and who unlike many of those immigrants are not people of colour. In the process, it is useful to contemplate the history of the treatment of people who, to the Greeks, were “barbaroi”, barbarians, something less than wholly human and, of course, prime candidates for being enslaved. We often forget that classical Athens was a slave state (and does this invalidate the whole of Greek philosophy and art?) The Romans continued that tradition with massive slavery, and so, for very many years, did the North Africans. Until the European nations took over to a huge extent in the 16th and 17th centuries, North Africans were probably the preeminent slavers in the world, and took considerable numbers of “white” people, as did the Ottoman Turks, whose Janissary troops were drawn from slaves. From the 7th century, North Africa was Muslim, and most slavers were Muslim (there was equally a flourishing slave trade from East Africa controlled by Muslims). As an aside, it seems to me odd that Malcolm X would take Islam as being less besmirched with the legacy of slavery than Christianity, based on that history, although perhaps not when viewed from a specifically North American perspective.

To the English, the earliest “savages” were the Welsh (and possibly the Scots), then the Irish. As I noted in the post I linked to at the beginning of this piece, to be Irish in the England I grew up in was still to be “not one of us” (“no blacks, dogs or Irish” signs in boarding house windows). The Irish were actually the second English colonial empire (Wales was first, but became so assimilated by, say, the 16th century that the vestiges of colonialism there are not particularly easy to find, aside from the suppression of the language, which was still continuing when I was born), and Southern Ireland remained an effective colony despite being notionally part of “The United Kingdom” until their own wars of independence in 1916 and 1919-1921. Northern Ireland is arguably still a colony, and certainly remained so in effective reality significantly after 1921. There was a lot of labour movement from Ireland to England from the 17th century onwards, and there are still very many people of Irish extraction and a degree of Irish identity living near me, their “otherness” being exacerbated by mostly being Catholics, who were regarded as potential agents of a foreign power (the Pope) as recently as the 19th century (in England – they still are by many NI protestants), and who were still felt by many during my childhood as not being quite “us” due in substantial part to their religion.

What I find particularly interesting about the Irish is that they also arguably formed the bulk of the earliest slavery we exported to North America. (We still have the distinct possibility of strife there, as at the point of writing our Prime Minister has been talking of tearing up aspects of the “Good Friday Agreement” peace settlement for Northern Ireland, and we now have an effective international border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK courtesy of Brexit). To equate the Irish with black slavery is not a totally robust argument, given that they were initially exported as criminals (the justice system being used to criminalise large numbers of the subjugated population) or as “indentured servants”, and in either case would in due course be free, which was something not contemplated with black slaves.

Nevertheless, the effects of Irish subjugation remain a live issue in the politics of the United Kingdom, and while I don’t find myself identifying anyone as a particular threat based on the colour of their skin, there is a part of my subconscious which still identifies people with an Irish accent as potential threats. After all, the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, which produced many attacks in England, were a major feature from my teenage years up to 1998. We lived in fear that someone with an Irish accent might be planning to blow us up (and I note that those who were in that category were a vanishingly small proportion of Irish people in England, so the fear was and is definitely exaggerated).

Antisemitism, which was used as a bludgeon to demolish Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of our Labour Party, is also a live political issue in my country. I have to come back to the European treatment of Jews, given that it dates back to at least the first century AD with the persecutions of Nero, and possibly to those of Antiochus Epiphanes two centuries earlier, and the fact that it has continued to this day, not just licensed by the Church, as slavery has been, but generally supported by the Church until relatively recently. In Hitler’s Germany, although I think on balance that his singling out of Jews was largely a matter of political expediency, there was already a widespread and very longstanding church-fostered antisemitism on which he could capitalise, and there are well-recognised problems imbedded in Scripture such as the “blood libel” in Matthew and the persistent singling out of “the Jews” in John. Anyone who claims Christianity for themselves needs to be particularly sensitive to the position of any Jewish people around them (and, perhaps, avoid claiming Jews as being historically “black”?). Outside cyberspace, however, that doesn’t really affect me closely, as there is no Jewish population in my district so far as I’m aware.

I note in passing that Hitler’s other prime targets were the mentally ill, communists, homosexuals and gypsies, and gypsies are another group in my country who are still persecuted (and targets of police mistreatment). Again, I can identify in myself a stereotyping of Romanies as being low level criminals; that one is difficult to shake off, as I’ve represented and known quite well some Romanies, and their attitude to private property has very often been, to say the least, flexible. There are maybe 100 or so Romanies in my district, and since I retired from practice, I haven’t had any real contact with any of them, as they tend to keep a fairly low profile, a characteristic of oppressed groups. It may well be that, in this area, Romanies are the major group which is at “the bottom of society”, as Adam Clark mentions in the third “deep dive” session. Forty years ago, based on numbers plus status, I’d maybe have put “Irish” there. There are many more people of Irish ancestry here, but I don’t see the same level of instinctive distrust as was present 50 years ago.

There is also still a level of prejudice against homosexuals, despite many measures to improve their position during my lifetime (when I started in legal practice, some homosexual actions were still illegal, and the police not only failed to arrest people who beat up gays, they were often the ones who did it…)

That said, black people, in areas of the country where there is a significant population, are most definitely still discriminated against. It’s an issue which I feel strongly about – it’s just not one I have immediate access to.

So, I hope none of this reads as trying to minimise my concern for people identified as “black” or my consciousness that, compared with them, I have privilege. My reading of Jesus is very much that he supported all marginalised groups, and in following him “the last shall be first” and deserve my support – and my ear, which is why I signed up to the course.

Back to the provocative question which occurred early in the course, “Can white people be saved?”. I think my provisional answer to that is “white people don’t need saving”, which may come as a shock considering what I’ve said above about Romanies, Irish and the disabled and which also applies to a large swathe of other white people who are near, but maybe not quite at, the bottom of society. Hear me right on this – they don’t need saving as white people – but they may need saving as Romany, as Irish, as homosexual, as disabled. Or just as victims of neoliberal financialised free market capitalism.

 

There’s a recent post by Benjamin Corey which has attracted my attention. I have a significant amount of sympathy with this; Corey writes from a position very much like my own in terms of social gospel considerations.

But he’s from the anabaptist tradition, and is a non-voter, and advocates avoiding political power. There, I think he falls into a common trap which seems to me to pervade a lot of American political commentary, and an increasing amount of that in the UK as well – he sees governments as something set aside and different from the people. However, both he and I live in democracies, and the theory of democracies is that the people as a whole constitute the government via their elected representatives (unless you can run a direct democracy in which everyone votes on every issue of substance, which is only pratical in very small units). Thus I see his position as being one which refuses to involve itself in the organisation of the people. The way you do that, in a democracy, is called politics.

It seems to me that this is symptomatic of a desire in Christianity to set ourselves apart, to have nothing to do with society as a whole – and that is absolutely NOT “loving our neighbours as ourselves”, it’s more passing by on the other side of the road. It also falls into the trap of the “I’m not responsible for that, because I didn’t vote for it”, whereas unless someone voted against it, they are responsible. “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“ is the famous maxim of Edmund Burke.

Yes, in both countries the political system as it now exists is not actually very democratic. A party or leader who is opposed by a majority of voters can get into power (rather more easily in the UK than in the States; we have not had a government with the support of more than 50% of the population since the early 20th century here), and votes can be obtained by lying and by spending vast sums in advertising (on which there is no limit in the US). Both countries run first past the post voting systems, which tend to produce two party systems, and where there are only two parties, the internal machinations of the parties (which are not necessarily so democratic and which don’t involve the whole population) are perhaps more important than the actual electoral system. And the temptations of corruption are extreme when there is little jeapordy affecting elected representatives, as is the case with at least two thirds of MPs in the UK and possibly more in the US. Democracy is, as Winston Churchill said, a lousy system; it’s just better than all the others which have been tried.

There are ways of reducing the evils of the last paragraph. Voting by Proportional Representation, for instance, Term limits. Restrictions on political spending. Banning representatives from having outside interests both during and after their terms of office. You will not, however, reduce any of those evils by not voting or by remaining separate from politics. You need to organise (and Corey does acknowledge the value of organising) – but as soon as you have a group of people trying to work towards a common end, you are going to have politics. Some of the nastiest political infighting I have ever seen is, ironically, within churches…

This all smacks, to me, of the “Benedict Option”, a concept recently advocated by Rod Dreher. It’s a revamped monasticism. Now, monasticism is a really attractive idea for me, as an arrant introvert drawn to solitary contemplation rather than communal expressions of spirituality – but one which I feel I have to reject, for exactly the reason I gave above. In loving my neighbour as myself, I have to be involved with my neighbour, not to set myself apart from them in pursuit of some form of personal purity. The mendicant orders, the Friars, had it more right than did the monastics, to my mind. We need a “Francis Option”, not a “Benedict Option”.

As it happens, my Jesuit-trained Religious Instruction teacher, after I left school, gave me a piece of advice I commend to everyone else. I complained to him that I had no-one to vote for at the upcoming election. He replied that there were always Conservative and Labour candidates (in the US, think Republican and Democrat), and I said I didn’t like either of them. “So”, he said “Stand yourself”. And I did, and after a couple of tries, got elected, and then spent rather over 20 years as an elected representative at a local level and rather over 30 campaigning for what was then our third party, the Liberals (which became the Liberal Democrats shortly after I was elected).

He was, in fact, a Labour Councillor, and swore me to secrecy about his involvement (which included recommending which seat I should contest for the best chance of winning, advice I followed). However, he has now retired, so I don’t think letting the cat out of the bag will damage him. And, on the principle of “pay it forward”, I’ve since helped two people get elected as councillors for the Labour Party, so I don’t think his friends should criticise the decision.

As a parting shot, just because you’re an anabaptist doesn’t mean you need to be uninvolved in politics. I’ve recently been writing about the development of the UK parliament, and the hinge-point of that development has to be the English Civil War, where there was an armed conflict between King and Parliament. It was, however, as much a war of religion as it was of political structure, and Alec Ryrie of Gresham College has an excellent video “The Republic of King Jesus” on the topic.

Though I rather doubt that Mr. Corey is quite as extreme as our 17th century anabaptists!