Eyre Lines

I’ve repeatedly been asked by individuals I’ve met for the first time or by groups I’ve joined to give a short explanation of where I’m coming from in religious (and sometimes philosophical) terms, and in conscience, all my attempts to do that briefly have been more or less failures. One online group, for instance, decided to label me “atheist”, which is, I suppose, correct for several God-concepts which I don’t or  can’t easily bring myself to use (such as the supernatural “Mr. Fix-it” – “the god who wears his knickers outside his tights”, as I’ve put it) but which is horribly misleading. As this doesn’t have to be an elevator pitch, I feel able to expand the narrative – no doubt too much!

Where I am is, in short, a mostly retired septuagenarian (inasmuch as I’m not retired or caring for a disabled wife, I’m a part-time theological editor and an occasional consultant with a company doing research and development in industrial chemistry – plus I’ve written a couple of books, one published (“A Holy Mystery” on the Trinity) and one, currently undergoing an agonisingly long editing process, on the development of the UK parliamentary system. My best subject at school (i.e. aged 18) was History, I did a degree in Physics (theoretical option) and then went to Law College. Any expertise I have in theology and biblical studies probably emanates from several years as chief moderator (“sysop”) of the Christianity section of the Religion Forum of Compuserve (and now, I suppose, AoL). Oh, and I’m a mystic (had it not been for that, I’d probably have remained a completely secular reductive materialist). Probably a panentheist, for want of any better term. I’ve written a lot about mystical experience, which you can find by searching “mystic” in this blog and also here.

A fuller history is definitely needed… and parts of it probably echo some of the thinking behind James Burke’s “Connections” series, which I recommend. It’s maybe a bit dated now, coming from the 70s to 90s, but I love the way in which it shows how various events which you’d think were unconnected gave rise to scientific or technological discoveries.

I was born a preacher’s kid; my father was a Methodist lay preacher (like his father and grandfather before him) and my mother soloed frequently with the church choir. As such, I was obviously going to be packed off to Sunday school at the earliest possible opportunity. I think that was when I was about 4.

The thing was, I was a precocious little toerag, and asked questions all the time, and the explanations given by the Sunday School teachers didn’t remotely satisfy me. This led to me being, by about the age of 7, an atheist. Everything they were telling me was, to my mind, somewhere between bunk and fairy story. What is more, I was an evangelical athiest. Had Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists been well-known at the time, I’d probably have been a great fan, but this was around 1960, and “The Selfish Gene” didn’t arrive until 1976. Being evangelical about it meant, of course, that I tried to persuade my fellow Sunday School students – and the teachers – that they too should be atheists. At 9 I parted company with Sunday School “by mutual agreement”, which is to say the School asked my parents not to send me there any more, and I was only too delighted not to go.

I had absolutely no thought at the time that this was a huge embarrassment to my parents. It also stopped mum singing in the choir, which she loved to do. Remember – toerag…

Anyhow, I went through school preferring scientific subjects, or at least somewhat scientific ones. I included history in that, not only because I was pretty good at it but because it seemed to me to deal with human behaviour in a way that, say, biology didn’t (psychology, sociology and politics were not offered at my school in those days). I read Machiavelli and Clausewitz (OK, I also read some Nietzsche). I was enthused about reductive scientific materialism as promising to explain everything, in due time. That was a part of my later decision to do a degree in Physics (rather than History, which was actually my better subject), plus a naive belief that STEM subjects were best for a future career.

And then, aged 13 or 14, I was lying on my bed during the summer vacation, appreciating the sun streaming through the window and, for a moment, setting on one side the book I was reading (I’ve no memory of what it was, but in those days I was reading all the 3 books I was allowed weekly from the library and also all the 6 books my parents got out – so it might have been SF or fantasy, it might have been adventure or crime, or it could have been history or biography). And something happened.

It was, as I later pieced together, a peak mystical experience. It was what Jean-Luc Marion describes as a “saturated phenomenon”. The boundaries of self disappeared, and left me at the same time conscious of being nothing beside the immensity of whatever it was I was experiencing and at the same time one with it, so all and nothing simultaneously. I fancied myself able to see for miles – light years, indeed – and nearby things with a kind of x-ray vision. Smell, touch and taste were likewise overwhelmed. And it was ecstatic. I’ve since written that it was “better than sex, drugs and rock & roll” – I couldn’t have written that then, because I hadn’t experienced any of them.

As I wrote about here, I had strong suspicions that something had gone seriously wrong with me. However, my GP seemed to think I was neurologically OK, and I could eliminate all of the likely candidates for producing similar experiences “artificially”. I might well have written it off as “just one of those things”, as quite a few people I’ve spoken with who have turned out to have had a somewhat similar experience and were not religious have done, but shortly after that my parents happened to take me to a lecture given by a local schoolteacher entitled “The mystical experience” and I listened rapt as he described accounts of experiences which were somewhat similar to mine. He made reference to a book by F.C. Happold “Mysticism: a Study and an Anthology” which I proceeded to go and buy, and I was cemented in my belief that what had happened to me was, indeed, a mystical experience. OK, a lot of the mystics in that book were Christian, which brought in, quite often, language with which I wasn’t comfortable, but Happold’s premise was that this was a form of experience which was common to very many religious traditions, and people’s accounts inevitably brought in some of the baggage of their belief-systems. And most of the mystics referred to this as an experience of God.

The thing was, it was a very good experience indeed, and I wanted more of the same. As a friend from the Religion Forum later commented, I was Jonesing for a repeat – addictive after one dose! Thus I spent a lot of time in my late teens and university years trying to find ways of producing similar experience. This was, admittedly, a form of sensation-seeking. (FWIW, most of the commonly used psychedelics weren’t available to me at the time, and the few I was offered were, frankly, disappointing compared with that initial experience.) I turned more to tinkering with physical conditions, to regimes of meditation and to playing with various concept-structures in an attempt to promote a repeat. I eventually decided that, while various things (some of them positively dangerous, such as partial asphyxiation) could probably increase the likelihood of a peak experience, but none, singly or in combination, could guarantee it. However, I did, over some years, arrive at a position where I could more or less at will drop into a meditative state which had much the same characteristics, although at a much lower intensity (I called this the “edge” of a full blooded mystical experience). It did have the major advantage that I could actually be in such a state and do other things at the same time!

Very occasionally, I had further peak experiences – maybe another three or four in total. One massively important take-home from these was that, as in such experience I perceived the boundary between myself and others as being at least somewhat fictional, what I did to others I was effectively doing to myself. From this (or possibly a side effect of the experience, or both) emerged a huge dose of empathy, which was something of a shock to the previously self-centered Chris (that’s when I started apologising to my parents…) Another was that in the process of the first peak experience, my whole life to date seemed exposed to me, and presented for judgment – and again, this was a major shock to the system. Indeed, it seemed to me as if this was the judgment referred to in the gospels, rather than anything in the remote future. I was, I may say, not very impressed with myself! I changed quite a bit as a result of these intuitions – and it’s worth mentioning that all this was very much a self-verifying experience – it felt absolutely true. Even if, with hindsight, I can question whether some of the information content was actually veridical, I would require a lot of evidence against it in order not to feel that I had been given an insight into the way things actually are.

I was at the same time exploring many religious traditions not just to appropriate their contemplative practices but also in an attempt to find language of expression for what I’d experienced beyond what a small group of mystics could offer. Generally I avoided the Christian ones, as I still had something of a revulsion towards that kind of language. I did find that Buddhism (particularly Zen), Taoism and Advaita Vedanta seemed to have the “best fit” for my experience, but in order to adopt any of those properly, I’d have to learn the culture (and possibly language) which they came from – and I was on the one hand somewhat lazy and on the other devoid of groups of practitioners of any of them in my area (that was then – now we have a Buddhist centre less than 10 miles away!). I thus gravitated towards speaking of mystical experience in broadly Christian language without accepting many of the biblical story-structures. However, I also kept several other concept-structures, including the kabbalistic one (not much like the American appropriation of kabbalah…) and some aspects of the Western systems of ritual magic (after all, one ritual within that was “to attain the knowledge and conversation of your holy guardian angel”!).

And there I left things for quite a while. After determining that Physics didn’t promise me the career path I had hoped for (partly because I’d found myself most interested in an area of Physics which wasn’t a grant magnet, partly because I was unsure that my maths was up to that area) I went to Law College, qualified as a solicitor, got married to a lady whose interests didn’t include the kind of practices I’d been playing with – in truth, a “cultural Christian” – and got involved in local politics.

In the interests of displaying “connections”, I was sharing a G&T with my former Religious Instruction teacher (who introduced me to Aquinas while I was still at school) in an university vacation when the subject of politics came up, and I said I had no-one to vote for. “But” he said “There’s always a Labour and a Conservative candidate”. “Yes”, I replied “But I don’t like either of them”. He, for what it’s worth, was also a local Labour councillor at Town and District level. I admitted to liking the Liberals (having been pitchforked into representing them at a school mock election some years earlier and, to most people’s surprise, winning – and converting myself to supporting them, having been deluged with policy statements and election materials, which none of the other parties offered their candidates). He suggested that if I had no Liberal candidate to vote for (and there hadn’t been a Liberal, i.e. third party, candidate locally since the 1940s) I should stand myself, and even suggested which ward I should stand for. So I got reluctant agreement from the supposedly local Liberal party, which was run from and centered about 15 miles away, to run my own campaign under their banner. The second time of trying, I got elected – with a wafer-thin majority which I kept up for the next four elections. (Jude swore me to secrecy about him having suggested that I stand and in which ward, but he’s now retired from politics so it’s probably OK).

This meant that after about eight years on the council, my turn came up to be mayor for a year. The council had been split between Labour and Conservative pretty much equally for decades, and the two parties had agreed that each councillor be offered the position of mayor once everyone who had been elected before them (and wanted to take the position) had been mayor. As it happened, four of the councillors who predated me and hadn’t had a turn while I was there were no longer on the council by then, so my turn came up earlier than the 11 years I’d have expected.

The first official engagement was the twinning trip to Carentan in Normandy, and I was told I’d have to make a speech at the twinning dinner. In French. Now, French had been one of my bunch of A-levels, so I thought that would be easy. I sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper – and three hours later got up from a still blank piece of paper. I found some inspiration then – a friend who had a French wife and spoke French at home – and I asked him to help me with a speech.

He performed magnificently, with a speech in perfect colloquial French with suitable political jokes, and I started on making sure I understood all of it and could pronounce it decently (I’d done a French exchange trip with my school in my teens, and the family I was with spent all their efforts on improving my accent, which more or less came back to me). When we got to Carentan I found they’d recently had a calamity when an arsonist set fire to part of their Town Hall, and inserted a line about that into the speech. On the night, I delivered it, and then set off back to my seat, at which one of the French members stopped me and said “I don’t think all of our English visitors will have understood that – could you do it again in English”. So I did – and it was obvious that I was translating it in the process.

So the French reaction was “Here’s a young(ish) English mayor who comes here, writes a speech in colloquial French (because of the town hall reference it was assumed to date from during the visit), not translated from English, and gives it in a pretty fair accent. He’s fluent! Which was, of course, far from the truth, but earned me another speech, this time extempore, at the other end of the trip (for which I rehashed some of the introductory speech and cut it short). The next year the French came to us, and I got asked to translate. Simultaneously, in two cases. I have the greatest possible respect for simultaneous translators – it’s a completely different skill set from just speaking another language, and an order of magnitude more difficult! (No, I didn’t do a particularly good job).

I therefore felt I could do to keep up my French between twinning trips, and went into Compuserve’s forums, looking for French language ones. The Canada Forum Quebec section, for instance. The Foreign Languages forum French section. And the same in the European Forum.

In the European Forum I found myself after some time discussing religion with a set of French and Belgian atheists. My argument, very gently developed, was that there was a form of experience of something – I labelled it [    ], as a something yet to be named, a box (which, incidentally could eventually hold the letters d-i-e-u), and many of them actually agreed that yes, they had felt/experienced something roughly similar to what I described – something numinous, perhaps, something surprising, something really rather wonderful. I likened it to the feeling of “getting” a joke, of discovering something new, perhaps in science, to the impact of wide stretches of nature or that of great art or architecture. Perhaps the contents of the box were just a mirror in which we saw ourselves for the first time? And they went along with me until I tried to stick the letters d-i-e-u on it as a label, at which point they universally back-pedalled like crazy.

A friend remarked on me doing this (the thread “Dieu?” had gone on for over a year and several thousand messages) and invited me to come and argue with some of the resident atheists in the MENSA forum – she was a staff member there. I demurred, as I’m not a MENSA member (I never took the test – another friend did and got rejected, and I avoided it out of solidarity) but was cajoled into doing so. I didn’t restrict myself to religion, of course, but was the resident “token theist”. There it might have stuck, but the friend who invited me had a major falling-out with some of the other staff and left in high dudgeon, and again out of solidarity I left with her – and having the urge to carry on discussing religion, went to the Religion Forum. That was the scene of lots of atheist -v- fundamentalist spats, and I decided to try to calm the waters and see (as I had in EurFor) if I could find some common ground, and hopefully stop all the fundys getting banned for passing moral judgment on everyone else, and sometimes each other. After about two weeks I got invited to become a sysop (moderator) with particular responsibility for the Christianity section. I complained that I did not self-identify as a Christian, and was told “Not to worry, you seem to have the respect of both the atheists and the fundys”.

RF had, some time earlier, absorbed the Free Thought forum, which meant there were a couple of sections devoted to atheism and free-thinking, and the denizens of the Christianity section used to stray into those, and into the Judaism section, and try to convert people – which was hugely frowned on, and also invited forays from the Jews and Atheists into the Christianity section (less frequently into the then Episcopalian or RC sections). I was in the UK, so well-suited to pick up late-night forays by US or Canadian posters, so got to be a more general sweeper-up of arguments, and where possible, conciliator of them.

After about a year, I got private messages more or less at the same time from two Anglican lay readers who were regulars, both telling me that I was most definitely a Christian (granted, from their liberal-Christian standpoint). I argued, but came to kind of agree with them – then one of them added “And you see moderating this forum as a pastoral mission”. Which I denied flatly. But after thinking about it, I had to agree with that as well. I should stress that none of the fundamentalist Christians I was exchanging messages with would have been likely to admit that I was a Christian – the best I could maybe do was “heretic”. But by their standards, I was pretty much indistinguishable from the forum atheists!

A few years doing that gave me well over the mythical “10,000 hours” talking Christianity – it was at the time a very active forum, putting on maybe a couple of thousand messages a day. That was in the days when Compuserve was a subscription service; when AoL took over and opened the forums to general unpaid access, the quality of discussion declined markedly, the regular members went elsewhere, and while the forum still survives (sort of), it doesn’t have the message count or interest which it did in those days.

Fast forward a little more, and I had a bit of a mental collapse following the legal system turning and biting me – indeed, I was deeply clinically depressed for something like 17 years in all, had a generalised anxiety disorder and was diagnosed with PTSD into the bargain. Being an intelligent kind of guy, I tried self-medicating depression and anxiety with alcohol, a depressive drug which makes you anxious when you stop taking it, and that gave me a fourth problem to deal with. That led to the collapse of my legal practice, insolvency and institutionalisation for some time, from which I emerged in 2013, unable to resume practice as a solicitor or, indeed, anything which involved even trivial levels of stress. I need to thank AA and NA, despite not being a poster boy for either, for helping me get out of one of those problems, and The Retreat in York (now closed) and Dr. Gill Smith for helping me with the others. I still have many contacts in the twelve-step and mental health communities, and do some volunteer work with my local NHS mental health trust.

Incidentally, AA and my church both thought that they were probably responsible for my abrupt exit from the deepest depression. However, that had involved me changing antidepressant (due to a shortage of the previous one) and being put on sertraline. After about a week I was significantly worse, and I made an urgent GP appointment and pleaded for her to do something, as I didn’t feel safe for myself, and possibly others (she said she’d watched me walk up the corridor to her, and that was sufficient for her to be convinced she needed to do something…). She switched me to mirtazipine, ramping down the sertraline as I upped the mirtazipine – and the day after I took the first mirtazipine, not only did I not feel depressed, I was manic, and stayed that way for twelve days (just after the last sertraline dose). My wife said it was like living with an AD/HD fourteen year old. I got an insight into friends who are bipolar and resist medication because it robs them of the highs. (Incidentally, I had a couple of repeat appointments with my GP to monitor my condition, and she was getting somewhat worried, but the mania subsided of it’s own accord – and FWIW, I would love to be able to go back to that high say one day a fortnight, but no more!). Personally I think it probably stemmed as much as anything from my GP having accepted that I was in trouble and acting instantly, which was not something I’d been used to from the medical/psychological establishment.

At around that point, the sponsor of the RF Christianity section reached out to me and asked if I’d like to do some proofreading for his company, which publishes Christian literature – theology, bible study and devotional – as a kind of rehabilitation. I agreed; fairly shortly it became obvious that I couldn’t just proofread, I wanted to tweak the text. By stages, I came to be “Editor-in-Chief” at Energion Publications, which sounds far grander than it actually is. (Another friend reached out similarly, and I spent some years working part time in his Chemistry lab – the idea was that my degree gave me basic familiarity with scientific method and with the kind of apparatus involved…). The first of those, of course, also gave me a lot more experience with theology and biblical studies.

And the owner of Energion persuaded me that I should blog, which I did, initially fairly frequently, but more recently very spasmodically. I found that I’d already written about most things which really interested me – and that led to me saying, in conversation with Henry, that I thought I’d covered all the main points of Christian doctrine in some way. He said I hadn’t done Trinity, which was true (I’m not a committed Trinitarian) – and I set to write a blog post on the topic, influenced by the fact that virtually no-one I knew in the pews at church was not some kind of heretic on the subject (and most clergy who I listened to were also not quite in line with total orthodoxy) and also that two friends at church were going on to ordination, and both asked me to help them with their Bishop’s interview, the then Archbishop being known to ask candidates about their view of the Trinity. Once that reached 10,000 words, I commented to Henry that it wasn’t really a blog post any more, and he suggested I expand it into a short book in his “Topical Line Drives” series. So I now have a book on theology in print!

One of the authors I edit for Energion, by the way, refers to me as his “unsaved friend”, as evidence (if needed) that for a wide spectrum of Christians I’m not one. Equally, for most atheists, I’m a Christian – or a sort-of Christian, given that I agree with most of the standard atheistic criticisms of religion, and Christianity in particular.

This has been thrown into the forefront of my thinking by Slavoj Zizek’s recent book “Christian Atheism” on which Philosophy Portal has recently done a course. Am I an atheist? I’m certainly as much an atheist as the early Christians were accused of being because they denied the reality of the Roman gods (including in the category of gods, perhaps especially, the Emperors). I’m an atheist of sorts as far as many Conservative Christians are concerned. But I don’t know. I certainly can’t live with the concept of the God who has direct agency in the world – I am hugely skeptical about all claims of miracles, including those in scripture – and indeed a God who had to keep interfering with his creation in order to readjust it strikes me as a bit like the guy who drives a beat-up old car and forever has his head under the bonnet. A divine creation should, surely, work a little better than that. And yet my peak mystical experiences have seemed to me as if they are an intervention from outside me.

Equally, I may or may not be a Christian. Certainly the author I referenced above doesn’t think I am one, at least not yet. If I am, I’m not a very good one. I follow the red-letter statements of Jesus in the synoptic gospels to a significant extent, but not so assiduously as to abandon mother, father or family, or to give everything I have to the poor, which is possibly what following Jesus should entail (Matt. 19:5, 19:21). I will readily admit to being a panentheistic mystic with a largely Christian praxis and language of expression. But I’m not the kind of Christian Atheist whom Zizek imagines. Zizek is, above all, a philosopher with a psychoanalytic bent, and looks to give a philosophical and psychoanalytic account. I am not a philosopher – indeed, talking some years ago with Keith Ward, who is the only person I’ve ever come across who has MA and DD degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, he asked me if I found a particular rendition of the ontological argument for the existence of God interesting (in which case I was probably a philosopher) or pointless (in which case I wasn’t). I found it pointless. OK, I’d previously wrestled for around a week with a similar proof from Alvin Plantinga, and finally managed to delve into the excess verbiage enough to satisfy myself that it was the same old ontological argument i’d seen from Aquinas, which I thought was rubbish (I think such arguments assume the point they wish to prove, though it’s sometimes very well disguised…)

I’m also very sceptical about psychoanalysis. Admittedly, I’ve never gone through analysis – the NHS locally is also sceptical about psychoanalysis and is reluctant to provide it as a service, and I’ve never been in a position where I felt the rather large amount of money it costs (and the amount of time it takes) was warranted by the more or less complete failure of the discipline to offer substantive changes which would make my life easier. I look at the structures psycohanalysis proposes for the human conscious and unconscious (yes, including that one) and am not at all sure that those categories are more useful than, say, Myers-Briggs or spirodynamics (and I personally find transactional analysis categories more illuminating). Do I need psychoanalysis to persuade me that the “big other” does not exist? No, that’s a conclusion I reached in my teens. And it isn’t an aspect of God which I ever thought was likely to be the case… Subjectively, in mystical experience, big – yes. Other – well, sort of, but also very much not other.

But it’s all a way of interpreting scripture, and I consider all ways of interpreting scripture interesting, even if they don’t resonate with me. There does not have to be a single valid answer. Light can be a wave and a particle…

“God, the Divine Eros of the Universe, is the origin of the prophetic restlessness that reveals the distance between our current personal and social structure and what could be in God’s realm of Shalom.  The ultimate source of the order of the universe, God is also the primary challenger to the status quo. The 8^th century BCE prophet Amos experiences God’s dream for the world and seeks to embody the Divine dream in the lives of the Northern Kingdom of Israel: 

Let justice roll down like water
            and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  (Amos 5:24)

God inspires the laughter of children, the devotion of scientists and parents, the creativity of poets and musicians, and the protest of prophets. God is the inner voice inspiring the cries of those who protest against unlimited war, human trafficking, environmental degradation, economic injustice, demagoguery, racism, and white nationalism.”  So writes Bruce Epperly in his new book “The God of the Growing Edge” (at the point of writing, forthcoming from Energion Publications).

It has tended in recent times to be the case in theology that we see the opening words of Genesis “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day…” as indicating an ordering of what was previously chaotic “without form and void” rather than the older idea of “creatio ex nihilo” (creation out of nothing). Certainly, God is then seen in a lot of scripture as the force of order – God gives rather copious instructions to the Israelites (Judaism has counted 613 commandments, not just 10) and is then seen as enforcing those against the hapless Israelites time and time again. And yet, as Bruce points out here, there is a constant countervailing force of disruption of the status quo, of questioning the priestly wisdom, which runs through the prophetic tradition – and this arguably chaotic activity is also sponsored by God. One can perhaps recall the passage from Isaiah “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.“

In passing, I should mention that “tohu wabohu” in the Hebrew (“without form and void”) cannot on the face of the words of the passage (as early Latin theologians wrongly argued), mean absolute nonexistence. There is an earth. There is a deep (“tehom”, which some scholars link linguistically to Tiamat, the Babylonian’s chaotic serpent slain by Marduk in their creation myth), and there are waters. We are not, therefore, looking at creation out of nothing “creatio ex nihilo”. It is clearly an imposition of order, just as in Gen. 2:19 God presents animals to Adam for him to name – this is a first alphabeticisation of the animal kingdom, an ordering of it. Indeed, it might be argued that naming of things is the actual act of creation of them (perhaps a very strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Naming something is traditionally held to give you power over it, and while the concept is sometimes scoffed at as a “magical” idea, it seems to me that the process of categorisation of things does give us a sense of control. We feel better if a doctor  can give a name to the complaint we’re suffering from, even if there’s no cure proffered. It certainly is an idea prominent in some magical traditions, but it seems to me that it also betrays a psychological reality. And if, indeed, tehom is a form of Tiamat, then rather than a slaying of the forces of chaos (the deep, waters) this is a story of chaos being tamed – at least somewhat – by naming, categorisation. Indeed, we often feel that if we can name something we have some control over it…

Against the reservation of destruction to God in creation, however, perhaps the most major Biblical story of God causing destruction is the Flood, though I rather prefer the Tower of Babel, where God intervenes specifically to prevent too much uniformity (something I might like to see mobilised against Macdonalds, Starbucks, Hilton and many others). Of course, in the current world, linguistic uniformity is a threat – English is probably the likely winner there, though Mandarin and Spanish are worthy contenders. I wonder in passing whether this is as much of a threat as is monoculture, particularly of cereal crops – one very specific plant disease could wipe out a massive amount of food production, as imagined by the Science Fiction book “The Death of Grass”. I don’t personally subscribe to the stong form of Sapir-Whorf, but am well aware that I think differently in English and French, and that there are concepts in French and Koine Greek (to name just two) which I can’t express with any accuracy in English. How much does the supremacy of English suppress possible thoughts, I wonder? How much might it do so if it were to become the true world language?

Then, too, I need to note the current of particularly scholastic theology starting with Augustine and continuing at least as far as Altizer’s “God and the Nothing” (chapter 4) equating evil with the privation of being or, in other words, nothingness, In this conception, the Genesis creation establishes evil not just by the action of Adam and Eve in Gen. 2-3 (which I’ve questioned elsewhere) but by the very act of creation in Gen. 1. However, I cannot (for the reasons listed here) regard that as establishing a nothingness, and so as establishing evil. Nothing, in addition, is just nothing, and so is not some particular thing (i.e. evil) nor is it the absence of a specific thing (i.e. good). The nothing of Gen. 1 is at most the nothing of my son, when asked what he’s seen on a trip out “Nothing”, he responds, despite haveing had his eyes open the whole time. Nothing, in other words, which he can name, nothing he can bring into control by alphabeticising it.

Most seriously, however, it seems to me that life is perched on a balance between order and chaos. Too much order, and you have something which is unchangeable – and the only things which are unchangeable are dead (and I apologise to theologians who hold that God is immutable… to me, their god-concept seems more like an impersonal law of nature than anything god-like). Too much chaos, and everything falls apart. Life requires the ability to grow – and yes, the ability to decline and die. Thus Bruce’s title “The God of the Growing Edge” is very appropriate, although he does not make an order -v- chaos point in the book!

At this point it occurs to me that there are some in the Radical Theology tradition (if it can be called a tradition) who would say “so God is the divide between order and chaos” (following a tendency to state that God is a cut, a tension, an opposition – and nothing more). Again I have to say that this feels too impersonal, too much like a law of nature. I incline towards the position taken by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp in “The Predicament of Belief”  in saying that, for me, God is nothing if not personal – and persons are not simple (they also very reasonably find quite a few other positive statements to make about God, not all of which I’m with them on). Of course, to be a person is to be alive, and as I’ve remarked, life is by its nature perched on the divide between order and chaos, but I don’t feel that that is a full explanation of why God has this ambivalent position (among the many other potential ambivalent positions God may have…).

It follows, therefore, that I cannot associate God with either entropy nor with negentropy, though it seems to me that life is the chief negentropic force in the universe, and it feels slightly “off” not to associate God with life. As I’ve remarked, however, life seems to me to require a balance between order and chaos, so presumably between entropy and negentropy as well.

I just knew it was going to happen. People are backing up on their previous support of proportional representation on the basis that if we had PR, there would be a lot more Reform MPs. The strongest expression of that I’ve seen today is, in talking of Reform “demanding PR so they can bring more nazis in”.

They are, of course, right. And that is absolutely no reason not to have PR: we are a representative democracy, and parliament should therefore represent the views of the UK electorate – and it doesn’t.

Even some supporters of my old party, the Liberal Democrats, have been saying “But look, under PR, there would be a load more Reform MPs than LibDem MPs”. Probably yes. But we are a representative democracy. OK, the party has the highest number of MPs since 1923, with 71.

I’ve been seeing comments like “this is a sweeping mandate for Labour”. No, it isn’t. They got 34% of the votes. 34%, and a 174 majority – they have nearly two thirds of the House of Commons. And that is just wrong.

For the benefit of the LibDems, under an accurate PR, they would have 78 MPs, so they’re still underrepresented. Reform would have 91. But the Greens would have 45, not 4, and few LibDem supporters I know would be upset with that. OK, the Conservatives would have 156, so they’re now slightly underrepresented as well (a novelty for them!). Labour, of course, would have around 221 rather than the 412 they currently sport.

Nervous left-leaning people should rather easily be able to work out that the right-leaning parties (Con and Ref) wouldn’t remotely have a majority, but Labour plus LibDem plus Greens definitely would have, and that is a very conceivable coalition. And if 14% of the country favours Reform, they should have 14% of the MPs (they already have had a disproportionate amount of air time, at least with the BBC…)

Now, this election (as the by-election we had here last year) I voted Labour. Mostly I voted that way tactically, as I really dislike the Tories these days; OK, I quite like Keir Mather (who got elected both times, this time with a doubled majority) but while I respect Starmer’s abilities and character, so far as I can know those, he has positioned the party somewhere right of where the Conservative Party of my youth used to be. It isn’t a Socialist party any more, so far as I can see – the LibDems are probably still more socialist than they are, even though they have also moved rightwards. The most socialist party with MPs (if you exclude Jeremy Corbyn, who hasn’t formed his own party but is back as an independent) is probably the Greens.

I would like to be able to vote for the party which most closely represents my views. I would like to be able to cast a positive vote for a party I like, rather than a negative one against a party I dislike, and I think my view is shared by a massive number of people. Indeed, thinking back to my days of knocking on people’s doors soliciting their votes, more than half of those I talked to were voting the way they did because they disliked either Labour of Conservative, not because they actually liked the other one of that pair.

And that would also free the parties from the need to try to move their policies to capture a slice of the electorate which concerns them, which has fuelled Labour’s great leap rightward under Blair and ongoing and is currently fuelling Conservative hand-wringing discussions of whether they can be more like Reform. Or, as the commenter I started with would put it, more Nazi. This is also, I fear, why despite the fact that around two-thirds of the country would vote to rejoin the EU, given the chance, none of the three major parties were prepared to commit to it in their manifestoes (and, of course, Reform don’t think Brexit has gone far enough!).

Please can this be the last national election where I’m forced to vote negatively…

Finally got round to watching Oppenheimer with Nel, Eleanor and Christian last week. I was impressed with it, not so much for the exposure of Oppenheimer’s sex life, which I hadn’t known about and was frankly wholly uninterested in, but for a really good rendition of the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings without actually using significant shock material, and its effect on Oppenheimer, and also the exposure of the machinations which led to Openheimer’s security clearance being revoked and his career blighted.

This was material close to my heart. As a physics undergraduate in the 70’s, one of the physics professors at the time and my college tutor had both worked on the Manhattan project and both had major guilt complexes about their involvement. I’d become aware of the threat of nuclear war at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when I was 8, and have lived with that threat ever since, though it became somewhat less all-encompassing when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. At 16, I painted a picture of an industrial wasteland with a mushroom cloud in the background, titled “The sinks of iniquity, the haunts of the ungodly”, in which the explosion was the beautiful thing, and the rest of the scene ugly. I was reminded of that when Nel commented that the explosion was, in an awful way, beautiful. It was an awful beauty, epitomising the word “awful”. An entirely fitting reference for the texts Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” and “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one” in my opinion, though I gather an Indian official has decided that the use of these quotations (attributed to Krishna) is an insult to Hindus, notably to non-violent Hindus.

I don’t remotely think that Oppenheimer meant any insult – more a strong admiration for this major work of literature. He clearly admired Indian civilisation enough to learn Sanskrit, after all. Perhaps the Indian official was aping the attitudes of some Muslims who regard the Koran as something divine, and take any apparent disrespect of it as a cause for violence, not something I’ve tended to associate with Hinduism. But then, there are those within Christianity who adhere to “the Bible is the word of God” school of thought (ignoring the text in John 1 which clearly states that Christ is the logos, the word of God) and would clearly like to feel able to take the same view – and, in the past, some have. That is by-the-by for my purposes – the Gita, and Hindu theology, clearly identifies Krishna as being not only the source of good but also the source of destruction. Of course, the Koran also has passages identifying Allah as the source of destruction (for instance 47:10) and the Bible contains Isaiah 45:7.

Unjust prosecutions are also something I have strong feelings about, having struggled against a few of them, once with some success (although whether you can repair that kind of damage is a moot point).

1962 to 1989 were not just fear-engendering in the same way as most of my friends and family, either. Firstly, I had a keen appreciation of the effects of nuclear explosions from my time studying physics, but also during the latter half of that period, as someone involved in local politics with a science degree, I was enlisted as a volunteer Civil Defence Scientific Advisor, which meant regular training in predicting fallout in various blast scenarios and the assurance that in the event of a nuclear alert, I’d be summoned to go with others to an underground facility in order to do that in earnest. I’ll note that I wouldn’t have been allowed to take my family with me, which meant that I’d have had an agonising decision if that ever came to pass – and I’m not sure I’d have abandoned them. It did not, of course, happen, and the government of the day abandoned the Civil Defence volunteer system in the early 90s, with it vanishing completely by 1993 – although local councils were still theoretically obliged to have plans and infrastructure in place against the event.

In conscience, I’m not sure the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union ended my nervousness about possible nuclear threats. There are still huge nuclear stockpiles in the hands of Russia, the USA and China, and quite a few countries (including my own) have some nuclear capability. It isn’t certain that all of the former Soviet republics have eliminated stockpiles of nuclear weapons which were on their soil, and Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea (at the least) have nuclear weapons. The fact that India and Pakistan both have this capability and have actually been at war with each other in the meantime is deeply worrying, though it seems unlikely that either of them (or, indeed, North Korea or Israel) would detonate something which would have much of an effect here. The situation is different with Russia, which is currently at war with an European country in the form of Ukraine, and which has threatened several others which are actually members of NATO – in effect, we do have a Russia -v- the West war ongoing at the moment. This is a serious source of concern, given that both Russia and the USA have doctrines regarding use of nukes which are not foolproof.

Indeed, the Ukraine war is more of a concern in terms of threat to my country than is the Israeli assault on Gaza. That does not seem to have the capability of spreading to here – the Ukraine conflict does. I don’t think I’m exhibiting any racism by being more concerned about Ukraine (and about the fact that our media seems to be forgetting about Ukraine) as has been suggested by some acquaintances. I feel the same horror (and helplessness) when I learn of civilian deaths in either location, admittedly far more of those recently in Gaza, and I bitterly resent the fact that my government continues (as at the point of writing) to provide weapons to Israel to continue the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians. I do not want to be complicit in that genocide, and my government makes me. The thing is, the Gaza conflict is not going to spread to here. Ukraine could do…

Do I wish that Oppenheimer and his team had not developed the bomb? Nor really. The science was already there, and someone would have done it, if not then, then in the intervening years. Do I think that Truman should not have dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That’s difficult for me. My own country’s bomber command under Harris (who was the pawn of Churchill in that) caused as much and more devastation in Dresden, Leipzig and Hamburg using conventional weapons in an attempt to break the will of the population, not attacking purely military targets. Hiroshima seems to me at least marginally justified when weighed against the probable loss of life in an invasion of Japan, despite also being a broadly civilian target. Nagasaki? Well, it seems that might have been more to prove to the Russians that it could be done again than out of any need to convince Japan – Truman did not wait long enough between the two to know if resistance had been crushed. Killing perhaps another 70,000 civilians in order to make that point? Well, that starts sounding like Israel’s attitude to Palestinians.

 

I’ve just come across the political philosopher John Grey. Here’s a conversation he had with Aaron Bastani. It makes for depressing listening to me, as I think he’s right on a lot of his points (and not as far off the mark as I’d wish for on others).

Of course, the title (“Everything you know about the future is wrong”) is sensationalist and outstrips the ambit of the actual conversation. However, some extremely good points fall out of it. First is the complete negation of Francis Fukayama’s thesis of “The End of History”. I think Fukayama himself has been moving away from the idea that we have arrived (or very nearly arrived) at an inevitable historical conclusion in which Western style liberal democracy had, in effect, won history – we were, per Fukayama, at a situation in which it was inevitable that the whole world would adopt the ideas of liberal democracy, but Grey is adamant that in actuality we passed the point of maximum liberal democracy just after the Soviet Union collapsed. when it did seem that some kind of Western democratic system was inevitable. In fact he points out not only that populist movements have taken root in the USA (and to an extent in Britain) but also that much of Europe is showing signs of a resurgence of far-right nationalist populism.

I could also point out the more or less universal failure of the West’s fatuous “nation building” programme – Grey is absolutely right that a significant proportion of people (and I think a majority in most countries in the world) don’t really want democracy. A reasonably benevolent dictatorship seems much more to their taste – and possibly even a not-very-benevolent dictatorship as long as, to use the terminology of pre-war Germany, “the trains run on time”.

OK, he does point to that as a reason why we might actually celebrate the fact that Brexit has happened and we are not inevitably wedded to Europe, and to my eyes that is a huge overstatement. Yes, there are resurgent nationalist-populist movements all over Europe, and he points to Germany and France as examples (as I write, indeed, Holland has elected a far-right party as its largest). In fact, there are no European countries I know which are free of such impulses. But nowhere is there a working majority (at least as yet) and if there were, I fancy that its worst excesses would probably be tempered by EU membership (and, as Grey remarks, membership of the Euro, which it would be extremely difficult to disentangle a country from).

He points out, rightly, I think, that membership of the EU precludes a socialist government – it’s a fundamentally liberal-democratic, economically neoliberal organisation. However, I think he underplays the fact that this is largely irrelevant for the UK – as long as our economy is tied in to global markets and in particular as long as we have a national debt, I don’t think very much socialism is possible for us (and I don’t see Starmer trying it). What I’d have liked to see him discuss (and maybe he does this elsewhere) is the fact that neoliberal economics, which was part of Fukayama’s end of history, is doomed, and we (and the rest of the world) is going to have to institute some other way of doing things. The climate crisis is one factor which is going to make the dependence on growth of neoliberal economics impossible, but at the moment I rather fancy that the advances in AI are going to render most people’s jobs redundant first, at which point we have a massive demand hole. Clearly people with no income can’t afford to keep on buying consumer goods, and I can’t see our billionaire classes willingly spreading out their mountains of cash in order to keep the machinery of capitalism going for at least a while. This guy touches on the problem, but mostly sees pluses in AI.

It seems ironic that the way we are likely to stop being a society revolving round ever-increasing consuming and producing is to make production costs of many things (particularly entertainment and intellectual property) trivially small, while removing the actual markets for these things…

I was reading about the thinking of a pastor regarding pronouns and God. They try to make a habit of using “she” and “her” of God, and I can’t remotely criticise that from a theological point of view, though I’m an old guy who has spent over 50 years in environments where God was most definitely “he” and “him”, and the use of female designators jars a bit with me – it shifts my attention to gender, where in all probability the aspect of that-which-is-God has nothing to do with gender. And I thought “I could probably cause a stir in those circles by using “it””. After all, “it” is the way we, in English, denote something which does not have a sex, or is neutral as regards sex and gender. Let’s face it, I’d be in even more trouble there if I started talking about sexual organs in respect of God, though I assume Jesus had a penis and testes, and trinitarian thinking in Christianity, plus the traditional interpretation of the introduction to the Fourth Gospel, both identify Jesus as God – in some way, at least. (The “word” in the title might refer to a pronoun – but see below).

The thing is, if I want to think of God in terms of a person (and again, that is definitely trinitarian thinking, though in that paradigm there may be three persons), I need to think about gender. And at least some of the time I do want to think of God in those terms. Clayton and Knapp, in “The Predicament of Belief” do suggest that we should relate to God as a person, or at least as person-like, and I think that has to be right – huge numbers of mystics have written or spoken of God in that kind of language, and that cannot be ignored (my own testimony would be that I sometimes experience God in that kind of way). More mystics, I think, than those who have written or spoken of God as being some kind of impersonal force or principle (which I can also attest to, and which is common among Eastern traditions).

Clearly, I approach the question of what-it-is-that-is God as a scientist, not as a philosophical theologian. So much talk about God says, in effect, “start with your doctrine of God” or “define God”, and I think that is exactly the wrong way to approach the issue. There is a phenomenon. It, or something very like it, is attested by very many people. Those among them who seem to me to be trying the hardest to describe what this phenomenon is, starting from the phenomenon rather than some tiny aspect of what someone has previously written about God, are the mystics. This is company I’m very comfortable with, having had mystical experience thrust upon me in my teens and having spent a lot of time in my teens and 20’s trying to develop a way of entering the mystical space reasonably reliably (I never did hit on a guaranteed way of doing that, merely various factors which tended to make it more likely).

As my second paragraph rather indicates, I never did arrive at a definition on which I felt I could build any dogmatic theology. It’s not just the “personal/impersonal” dichotomy there, there’s also the transcendent/immanent dichotomy. I note that in finding dichotomies in my attempts to describe that-which-is-God I do not indicate that I subscribe to Peter Rollins concept of an ontological split or opposition at the heart of existence – I think that is going too far on the basis of the available evidence, given that our thinking seems to me to throw up dichotomies wherever I look; I think that human cognition creates dichotomies, and whether or not there actually is a dichotomy there has to be uncertain. Indeed, where Pete sees oppositions, I am more inclined to see fuzziness. Philosophy, it seems to me, tends to a misplaced confidence in its ability to be precise.

In the case of theology, perhaps because it ultimately (in my opinion) has to draw on mystical experience, and one of the features of mystical experience is just that “coincidenta oppositorum” (coincidence of opposites) which I’ve outlined some of above, an even greater problem is that it tries to over-specify. Perhaps at the root of that is taking similes from the mystics (God is like a father, for instance) and making them into specifications (God is our father), which clearly meets with problems when we also encounter scripture which says God is (or at least is like) our mother.

But let’s also look in more detail at the introduction to the Fourth Gospel for a moment. The NIV version says:- 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. ⁸ He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

⁹ The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Let’s think about that a bit. What do we actually mean by “Word” (which is capitalised in this version of the text)? Well, we certainly don’t mean just a collection of letters which, taken together, signify some thing (or action, or…). I was alerted to the fact that there may be more to this wording than meets the eye when, some years ago, I bought myself a Bible de Jérusalem in order not to be constantly translating from English when discussing Christianity online with some French people, and found to my surprise that the translation in French of the original Greek word, logos, was “verbe”. I would instinctively have rendered “word” as “mot”, but “verbe” carries a strong significance of being an action. As it happens, I would have been less surprised if I’d bought a different French translation, as all the others I know of use the term “parole” instead (which carries an equally strong significance of being something spoken), but I’d still have felt the pull of the English word “word”, which has no particular connotation either of action or of being spoken. (As an aside, it’s a thing, which makes me think of my comments above – it isn’t a person…)

That made me look at what this greek word “logos” actually meant to the Greeks using it in the past. What I found was that it meant in classical Greek something like “rationally understandable principle”, which makes a lot of sense when inserted into John 1:1-5 in the place of “word”. But then I happened on an account of what Philo of Alexandria wrote about “logos” in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which blew my mind.

Philo was a hugely prominent Jewish philosopher and theologian from Alexandria in the early years of the first century. He was very active at and before the time of Jesus’ ministry, and for a few years after that, and was a sufficiently respected individual to be selected to head a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the Emperor Caligula in around 38 CE, but has been largely sidelined in Jewish intellectual circles since then, possibly because he wrote in Greek, which was already under pressure in Judaism as not being the authentic language and also perhaps because his writings have been so attractive to Christians; he was quoted widely by several of the early Church Fathers including Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

As you can see from the linked article, Philo had twelve meanings for the term “logos”. Among them are:-
The utterance of God (“parole” as a French translation?);
First-born son of God (well, that could explain a lot about the Christology of the Fourth Gospel!);
Immanent reason (that seems fairly close to the classical meaning of “logos”);
Mediator of the physical universe (very definitely a fount of Christology) and intermediary between the divine and man;
The Angel of the Lord (which seems to be close to the idea of Jesus which is evidenced in the synoptic gospels);
Manna and wisdom (I’ll come back to this);
God him, her or it’s self (on which one builds trinity).

There is a huge amount of reasoning and exegesis behind Philo’s set of meanings, but the element I’d like to focus on at the moment is that he effectively equates uses of wisdom (“sophia” in Greek) in the Hebrew Scriptures with “logos”, which is primarily, prior to the New Testament, a Greek philosophical term and not one from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures from which Greek speakers generally drew their scriptural references). In passing, in the Hebrew Scriptures, wisdom is “chokmah”, word is “davar” or “memra” – and in Hebrew too “davar” and “memra” like “parole” carry a suggestion of being spoken; davar/memra and chokmah are generally regarded as very distinct – except by Philo and those following him. Much of the meaning Philo advances is in fact attributions for wisdom drawn from Proverbs – the most obvious example, to my eyes, is Prov. 8:22-36. However, there’s also Psalm 33, which has a different term for word in the Hebrew (bid-bar, “by the word”), which is translated “logos” in the Septuagint, so Philo had some significant clues in the pre-existing text.

Picking up on my earlier comment, that theology tends to over-specify, Philo’s set of meanings might well be thought of as an example of that (and one which ends up carried over into the huge set of titles of Jesus!). Starting at the end, God=manna=wisdom=his own angel=mediator=reason=his own son=utterance. It is, frankly, enough to make one throw up one’s hands in confusion – they can’t, surely, all be simultaneously correct? However, I do see one possibility, and that’s again picking up from earlier, the fact that I see things as fuzzy, as incompletely defined, and not infrequently as being best described as a coincidence of opposites. If things are indeed fuzzy, there may still be some aspect of all of this terminology which does apply, or something which it is pointing at which is not directly communicable, at least at the moment.

So God may be father-like and mother-like without us positing hermaphroditism (or gender fluidity, these days).

I’ve still no idea what pronoun to use, though…

This post has been prompted partly by a discussion on Tripp Fuller’s Homebrewed site about the legal and particularly the penal systems in the light of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology and life. It’s a Q&A session from a recent course on Bonhoeffer, which I wasn’t subscribed to, but I think it stands on it’s own as a discussion. The source lecture is probably available on a “pay what you can” basis, as are all the Homebrewed courses at present when released.

I add to that the news that Ben Roberts-Smith, an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (which, for those outside the Commonwealth, is the supreme award for bravery given rarely by the British monarch and virtually never awarded these days to anyone who survives their act of heroism) has been found by an Australian civil court to very probably have been guilty of a number of civilian deaths (which would rank as war crimes if proved in a criminal court), and watching pictures of the former presenter of ITV’s “This Morning” programme, Philip Schofield, talking about how the revelation of an affair with a younger male ITV employee which he had previously denied had ended his career. Schofield is right to say that there is almost certainly no way back for him after that; similarly I doubt there is any way back for Roberts-Smith. Millions of people had looked up to both those men (obviously for totally different reasons), and the venom people express towards their former heroes who are found to have feet of clay is well known.

I hasten to say that it is not a collossal surprise to me to find that the man who exhibited heroism in a war situation was also guilty of atrocities – we create elite soldiers as killing machines, and are happy as long as we are at war and “need” them, and scandalised when they turn out not to be able to turn those impulses off on command (notably when their services are no longer needed, though that is not the case with Roberts-Smith). Nor is it a surprise to find that an extremely capable and engaging TV host and theatre performer was guilty of sexual misconduct (in my eyes, possibly only misconduct because he was married) and covered it up – particularly as it was a same sex liaison with suspicions of abuse of a dominant position (if not actually grooming, given they met when the other employee was 15 and Schofield suggested work experience at ITV). Schofield denies that anything improper occurred until the man was 20, and I have no reason to disbelieve that, though many might – on the basis that if he lied about one thing, he “is a liar”. There is still a slur over homosexuality in the UK, particularly when someone has denied their leanings and is, like Schofield, married with adult daughters.

The Homebrewed discussion is very strong on the principle that people should not be judged purely for what they did on their worst day, and that “the crime” does not define the person – indeed, it may be a very small part of a complex character much of which may be on the whole good.That, I like a lot. And, of course, Christianity is a religion of forgiveness – including enemies.

I do however take issue with Tripp’s comment (which I think he borrowed from Dom Crossan) that the function of the law is not to deliver justice but to obstruct justice. I spent 30 years of my life as a practising lawyer, and can attest that the vast majority of my fellow lawyers saw themselves as trying to get the law to deliver something like justice. The thing is, it is eminently the case that the law is not, in and of itself, just. At best it is an attempt by human beings to create a system which is predictable and which delivers something approaching justice (and avoids people descending to violence or escalating it), but of course at worst it is a system which perpetuates the status quo. Indeed, the earliest instances of law I am aware of (in Babylon) involve the protection of property (without heed to whether that property was entirely ethically obtained, for instance through the exploitation of others) as well as the protection of life and the prevention of physical harm to others. And, of course, the need to pay taxes. I resonate far more with Derrida’s observation that justice is an “undeconstructible” principle, and that we are never going to achieve justice – the best we can do is work toward it.

I worry too about any decrying of law coming from Christian theologians. Jesus said that the Law (of Moses) would stand “until heaven and earth passed away”. OK, he also said “until all is accomplished”, which Christians have been taking as meaning you can throw away the Mosaic Law once Christ had been resurrected, but I don’t think he meant that – it is, after all, hardly the case that heaven and earth have passed away. It smacks of supersessionism, the idea that Christianity replaces Judaism which, with the Law as a whole, is now outmoded, superseded – if, indeed, it was ever valid (which some passages from Paul, notably much of his argument in Romans, might be taken to indicate). It is, frankly, inconceivable to me that the Almighty might lay down a code of conduct for his chosen people which is in its entirety capable of being superseded,  saving the fact that some of it is clearly context-dependent. Paul suggested it was designed to increase sin in Romans 2-3, and, indeed, both that it is impossible to keep the law (despite the fact that many Jews of my acquaintance are confident of being super-compliant with the law) and that without the law there would actually be no sin, which would scandalise every ethicist I know who is not a deontologist. Which, thinking about it, is all of them!

OK, I accept that there is a tendency in humans to see prohibitions and want to contravene them – without a “do not walk on the grass”, some people, at least, wouldn’t be tempted to walk on the grass. Psychoanalysts seem very keen on this mechanism. For me, it’s a childish or adolescent phase to do so, one in which all boundaries must be pushed, and adults commonly don’t do that. Maybe Paul was a proto-psychoanalyst? Personally, as no great friend of Paul, I suspect he was taking from a position of arrested development, whether or not he actually suffered from that personally.

What I think may well have been behind Dom’s and Tripp’s attitude is that the law in the US (and in most of the rest of the world) does not focus either on restorative justice or on distributive justice. I’ll come back to those.

We have, I think, to try to accept the principle that the law must be upheld in any reasonably functioning society¹. Anarchism is superficially attractive, but as far as I can see unworkable in any sizeable group, though I do sometimes ask myself when reading the synoptic gospels whether Jesus might have had an anarchist streak to him (although he may just have thought, with Jeremiah, that the law would in the future be written on people’s hearts and thus not need enforcement). Without law, the main foundation of civil society vanishes, though it may not quite be Hobbe’s vision of life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In that context, I can criticise the systems we have in both the US and the UK not just for ignoring restoration and distribution but also for being sufficiently complicated that to a significant extent you “get the best law you can pay for” (he or she who has the best lawyers very often wins regardless of the merits of the case, and the best lawyers are often but not always the most expensive). Sadly, this is largely a function of the way the law develops. Legislators come up with a form of wording which is designed to prevent some behaviour. Judges look to apply that, and find that in the peculiar circumstances of the case in front of them, that produces an injustice, so they find an additional principle which exculpates the potential victim of the injustice. But that principle is applied in a later case and produces a different injustice, so the law gets complicated once more (it matters little whether it’s the judges who make the change or whether it’s later legislators trying to repair the system).²

The Homebrewed panel also discuss the fact that we do not work on the basis that punishment “pays ones debt to society”. Actually, once one has a criminal record, that removes the possibility of many occupations as well as making it extremely difficult to obtain employment in others – in the US, one is “a felon” for life. In the UK, one “has a record”, and while we have a thing called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act which is supposed to wipe the slate clean after some years, it does not – particularly in respect of things like insurance and credit. And, of course, in the minds of the police, who will always focus more on the person “with a record” than on those who have no convictions. I’m sure it wasn’t designed that way, but the net effect is that someone with a criminal record may find themselves with no possibilities for earning money other than criminal ones, thus underlining the finality of judging on the basis of what people did on their worst day.³

There are, of course, several reasons for imposing punishment on those who break the law (or, indeed, act contrary to the mores of society). One is retribution, which often seems to be key to the responses of victims and, indeed, society more generally – personally I fail to understand huge antagonism to someone who has not injured me personally, but many seem to feel that. Unfortunately, revenge is a poisonous motivation for the one seeking it, and seems fairly rarely if at all to be really satisfying to the victim. Harbouring a desire for revenge has been likened to drinking poison and expecting the other person to suffer – it is certainly corrosive. Far better, if you can actually do it, is to follow the Christian principle of forgiving (and keeping forgiving, seventy times seven if necessary).

Another is deterrence. The idea is that if people think about what the consequences of their criminal action might be, they will not do it for fear of being found out and punished. It is this which lies behind a lot of the clamour for more severe prison sentences, I believe. Unfortunately a common factor of most of those facing criminal conviction is (in my fairly extensive experience) that they did not expect to get caught, or didn’t think about consequences at all (crimes of passion, for instance) so deterrence was totally ineffective. OK, I have also talked with a few career criminals for whom the possible punishment is a potential “cost of doing business”, and in those cases deterrence might actually work to an extent. I fancy that that lies behind the reluctance of many criminals in the UK to use guns – the sentence here is massively increased if guns are involved. (The career criminal is also likely to be so used to prison that it isn’t as distasteful or terrifying to them as it would be to most of us.)

Outright prevention is another. This one actually works sometimes – people who are imprisoned, for instance, are not committing crimes in normal society (though they may be doing just that in prison). There, I’m recalling a conversation with a couple of the detectives from our local police station some years ago. They had managed to get a conviction of an extremely prolific 17 year old burglar with a custodial sentence (the first time the magistrates had been persuaded to imprison him) the previous year, and the rate of burglaries in the area had dropped by 75%. Of course, that only worked until his release! It seems to me that this might be at the root of US “three strikes and you’re out” provisions, which have only the downsides that firstly life imprisonment for (say) a trivial theft just seems totally disproportionate and secondly that locking someone up actually costs a very large amount of money. It costs a fairly large amount even if (as in the States) you force prisoners to work for peanuts (the “prison-industrial complex”) which, to me, offends my instincts against slavery and also risks major undercutting of prices which can be achieved outside the system, having subsidised labour – and thus penalising workers outside the system. For what it’s worth, while the UK prison system hugely incentivises prisoners working, the system is generally at pains not to compete unfairly with the free market.

It is, I have to concede, potentially effective to have a death penalty in this regard – those who are dead are not going to reoffend. Quite apart from the fact that after you are dead, an appeal against conviction is rather pointless, and far too high a percentage of convictions are unsafe (some have estimated as many as 30% in the UK), this offends my ethics as a Christian and a member of the Anglican Church, which is the established church of the country (and so whose ethics ought to have some bearing on our laws). I am against killing people more or less regardless of the circumstances, and massively oppose my country doing it “on my behalf”. (Incidentally, if anyone wishes to bring up abortion here, please see these posts.) I do include wars – I’m not happy that my country keeps involving itself in them, or that armaments is a major export industry for us. There, however, I don’t expect “not in my name” to have any real traction.

I could probably get behind a penal system which concentrated on reforming and educating the prisoner. There are countries which try very hard to achieve this, and on the whole I believe their approach works, or at least works better for society than no attempt at all. Sadly, neither my country or the States seem to be among them (mine gives lip service to educating prisoners, but little more than that). There are people who do not benefit from this approach, of course, though I do wonder whether some form of intensive psychological intervention might catch some of those (and one always has to consider whether the cost of the exercise is warranted).

However, what I eventually come down to as a “fair” system is one which largely aims at restitution. Sometimes that is impossible (murder is the most obvious example, and also often someone who has caused harm does not have the resources to compensate fairly), but for a very wide range of offences and situations, it is entirely possible and has the huge “plus” of putting the victim back as nearly as possible in the position they would have been in had the crime not occurred. Even a genuine attempt to make some restitution, even if inadequate, seems to be very acceptable to many. Most of the systems of criminal law which aim at retribution, deterrence or prevention just ignore the victim. Civil law does, of course, attempt to compensate people for injury on the basis of restitution, though it is generally really bad at assessing fair compensation. In some places (the USA, with its Jury trials of civil matters, for instance) the figures awarded are ridiculously large; in others (and I have in mind looking at possible compensation in the Greek courts some years ago) the figures available are stupidly small. That said, civil law systems do something there which criminal law systems often do not. OK, yes, the UK has a system of “criminal injuries compensation”, which is not funded by offenders, but ostensibly aims at making some restitution. I found the awards made under that system laughably small, however.

Sometimes, of course, restitution is the wrong answer; I have in mind the originating crime of Valjean in “Les Miserables”, which is the theft of a loaf of bread by a man whose family is starving. In effect, he receives a life sentence – although released after 20 years, he’s still on parole for life. In conscience, I look at a situation where one person has ample bread and the person next to them is starving, and, using the principle of distributive justice, consider that the real wrongdoer here is the one who does not gladly give his loaf to the starving (within reason, of course) – and I have in mind the Abbé in Les Mis, and the effect of his generosity and mercy. Consider here also Jesus’ injunction to the rich young man. I’m minded also of the story of the granaries. I can’t see how any legal system with which I’m familiar would adopt distributive justice, however (except using the discretion of magistrates and judges to mitigate penalties); that has to be a function of the State more generally. And, to my mind, no state in which some of its citizens consistently go hungry or homeless† can call itself civilised, let alone a “Christian nation”.

To summarise, when a wrong is committed, our first avenue should be to put right, as nearly as possible, that wrong – i.e. restitution. By and large, we don’t do that.

Secondly, we should look to prevent it happening again. As I’ve outlined, locking the offender up is effective, but costly, and unless you’re prepared to see a significant proportion of your population in jail for life (which it sometimes seems to me is the case in the USA), that has a limited time of efficacy. Capital punishment is also effective, but morally dubious even if you ignore the number of wrongful convictions our systems seem to manage. Deterrence is ineffective in most cases. What would be beneficial is to use a combination of education and behavioural modification, coupled with putting ex-offenders into viable work on their release. But we also largely don’t do that.

What we do do is double down on punishment, i.e. retribution. And that, I’d argue, damages us more than it damages the offenders, even if we’re ethically comfortable with it – which I’m not.

 

¹ Yes, there are laws which I consider grossly unjust, and yes, I support breaking those laws as an act of civil disobedience (the recently introduced laws which prevent many forms of public protest in the UK are a prime example) – but I also think that when you do break those laws, you should not complain about being punished.
² It is worth noting that the same kind of principles operate in the expansion of Jewish law from 613 mitzvot in the Torah to something occupying many volumes.
³ It is illustrative of this mechanism that a man who as a youth, when very drunk, peed into a public fountain, acquired a conviction for “exposing himlf in a public place”, which is sufficient to put him on the sexual offences register and prevent him doing anything involving children for life.
† OK, with an exception for a very few who make an informed choice to be homeless, not those whose mental illnesses make the choice for them.

 

OK, the title should probably be “to” rather than “at” – but some of my online friends have been doing more “at” than “to”…

I’m feeling somewhat conflicted about the coronation (which was today as I started writing this – I’ve spent far too long tinkering with it). Significant numbers of friends have been posting things critical of the monarchy recently, either on the basis that it’s an opportune time to review whether we want a king (it isn’t – we should have done that, if we wanted to, before he was acclaimed by the PM, let alone actually crowned) or (and I suspect this of being the motive in most cases) they are republicans, and annoyed by the amount of attention the coronation is getting when matters which they consider more important are sidelined. One very measured but impassioned piece comes from my Australian friend John Squires. Some others are vicious, to be honest. I don’t tend to unfriend people who express views contrary to mine, even when they’re fairly abusive to my own position, but they have certainly suprpised me about a few people…

I have sympathy with the irritation many are feeling. In conscience, the amount of coverage the coronation has got in the media before and during the event has been too much. I look at monarchy as a system and consider the alternative of a republic, and a republic appears by far the more logical system. If the monarch still had much real power, I’d probably be advocating that that power were removed, if not going all the way and proposing a republic. It was also a very costly event, at a time when it seems government will not spend money on things like keeping people fed, healthy or educated. That said, it cost rather less than many movies do these days, and entertained at least as many people…

Also… some years ago I looked at the cost of the monarchy and the amount of publicity and tourism it gives Britain, comparing it with the cost to countries of various presidents. I actually concluded that there wasn’t a great deal to choose between our then Queen and the then President of France in terms of cost to the country (and I don’t see people from abroad queuing up to visit Paris in the hopes of seeing Macron or his family). I also consider who we might potentially vote into office as president, and shudder at the thought of President Johnson or (God forfend!) President Farage.

OK, that was the late Queen, and even her critics tended to acknowledge that she did a pretty good job of being a national figurehead. Charles is obviously a different person, and has had his share of really bad publicity (mostly associated with the late Princess Diana and much encouraged by Rupert Murdoch). I won’t rehash that controversy – it’s one of those issues which divided the country along a mostly non-political fracture line, but my own sympathies were largely with Charles. He won’t be the same as his mother, which some think is a very bad thing. However, some of his instincts I approve of thoroughly. For instance (and in some response to John’s piece) when acknowledging, in November, the change of head of state of Barbados to himself, he expressed an apology for the history of slavery in which Britain and previous monarchs were complicit, which his mother never felt able to do, which may augur well for the future. He is thoroughly in favour of the environment, conservation and the de-linking of the monarchy from the headship of the Church of England. OK, to an extent. The coronation ceremony thoroughly confirms that headship – but he involved leaders of several other major faith communities in the country, and has asked to be regarded as “defender of faiths” rather than “defender of the faith” (a title ironically given by the then pope to his ancestor Henry VIII shortly before Henry declared UDI from the Catholic Church and set up exactly that headship…) He supports the preservation of traditional crafts, children (particularly underprivileged ones through the Prince’s Trust) and several disadvantaged groups. He doesn’t like modern architecture (OK, I snuck that one in mischievously). He has a good sense of humour, and seems to be at least a bit impatient with ceremony.

I am not an uncritical admirer, though. He didn’t handle his marriage to Diana at all well, including not standing up to pressure from his family (and I have the late Queen Mother and his father directly in mind there) to marry someone “acceptable”, which actually left him with a fairly small pool of potential wives. He still has the ingrained legacy of generations of entitlement baked into his subconscious. He hasn’t divested himself of the vast majority of the vast wealth the family (and its head in particular) has accumulated. And I rather doubt he has the backbone to use his residual power to go against government if they propose something even more egregious than they have already (a power which exists, but which could probably only be used once before he was removed…) He has continued to speak out about the environment, which is something positive, but I’d like him to add refugees and government corruption – and maybe even the idiocy of Brexit.

I have considered at huge length the selection of someone to act as figurehead for the nation. Although hereditary monarchy seems rationally indefensible, there is actually something to be said for having someone brought up from birth to understand the way things are done, something which our recent crop of politicians have not been good at doing, to the extent that our unwritten constitution has been trampled on in several important ways. Having an unwritten constitution is also rationally indefensible, but has actually worked pretty well for quite some time, just as has the actual monarchy, though I’m coming to the conclusion that we’re going to have to have a written constitution, and it may be the time to rethink monarchy as well. However, as things stand,  Charles has had 70 years to get used to the idea of being our figurehead, and in his case, I think has taken the lessons thoroughly to heart. I’ll confess that despite the vast wealth (and the power that potentially confers), the fancy houses and vehicles and the “soft power” of both having the current PM come and talk with you weekly and of having every word you say listened to in a way which even prime ministers might envy, I would not have wanted to be him, save for a brief time in my teens (when he was “the most eligible bachelor in Europe”…). The perceived compulsion to marry someone suitable and to produce an heir (and yes, sorry Harry, a spare), the fact that every word or action will be scrutinised, the pressure of exactly that “this is how things are done” meant that he was born into a cage.

Granted, it was a gilded cage. Granted equally that he could have walked away from it, expressing an intention to abdicate as soon as his mother died (back when he married, marrying someone “unsuitable” might well have resulted in his removal from the line of succession – that is, of course, something which parliament can decide). His second son, after all, has done something of the sort. (In passing, I’m glad to see that his sons haven’t been subjected to quite the same degree of pressure to marry “properly”, at least it doesn’t seem so).

But, in Charles’ case, I think the weight of duty has been accepted. And the weight of his “possessions”. I have long remarked, having an acquaintance who lives in what could reasonably be called a “Stately Home”, that when a house (or land) gets to a certain size, it isn’t the individual/family who owns the land, it’s the land or house which owns the individual/family. Similarly I was struck by the late Queen, in a programme about the Royal Regalia, commenting when they brought out St. Edward’s Crown, that “they haven’t let me touch this since the coronation”. We’d think of that as “her possession”, but it appears it really wasn’t, at least in her eyes and those of people around her. I rather doubt that much of the wealth in money and possessions “feels like” it belongs to the monarch to them. Also, I think I detected considerable unease in both Charles and Camilla about the extent of pomp and ceremony. That, for me, it a good thing – I’d rather like to disqualify from positions of power and influence those who desperately want power and influence, and it seems to me that Charles would really rather prefer not to be in his position – which makes him better qualified for the position than any of our front ranking politicians in my eyes!

So, when it came to the point in the ceremony when the people generally were invited to swear allegiance to Charles, I joined in. To be fair, I could feel the pressure from my wife to do that, and from other family members present and past. All of my father, myself, my son, my wife and both her parents swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, which leaves basically my mother and daughter as outliers. All except myself did it because we were involved with the armed services. I had non-military, but public service reasons. Prior to this coronation, however, it wasn’t the norm for the people generally to be invited to do that – there had to be a special reason. I’m conflicted about that too. I’d have been prepared to fight for Elizabeth back when I swore to her, but I’m now pretty much a pacifist (having been immersed in the synoptic gospels for some years), and too old and unwell to be of any use fighting, so my support is pretty much limited to “yes, I’d probably vote against a republic”. But if what was on the table was a radically more egalitarian and caring society under the cover of a general constitutional settlement (which, as I mention above, I rather fancy we need) – well, then I’d have problems supporting the status quo.

But I don’t expect ever to be offered a transition to what has been described as “fully automated luxury comunism“. I hope at most that I might be offered some small steps in that direction, and, frankly, I approve of small steps. I’m nervous of complete revolutions; my historical knowledge tells me they never produce what was hoped for, and frequently cause untold suffering in the process. And, to my republican friends, I’ll say that I think there are a large number of those small steps which I’d take before contemplating getting rid of the monarchy.

Is it ridiculous to swear allegiance to him? Well, somewhat – he’s never going to be leading troops into battle (though earlier in his life he just might have). But my American friends swear allegiance to a flag, and it seems to me much less ridiculous swearing allegiance to a human being than to a piece of cloth.

Finally, a note to republican friends from former colonies. I think, were I Australian, or NZ, or Canadian, I’d probably come down on the republican side of the issue. Our monarchs turn up there once every few years for a day or two, and aren’t present in the way they are in the UK – or, at least, in England and Scotland. They don’t really contribute much in the way of tourism and international kudos for, say, the Australians. Even more so for those territories which were built on the back of slave labour, where the impetus to break with history must be that bit stronger.

I’ve written about four “apocalyptic” scenarios last year, in posts titled war, pestilence, famine and the end is nigh (which, in context, should probably have been titled “death”).We still have the war in Ukraine and, both here and in the US, political situations which could turn very unpleasant. And, of course, nothing much has been done about climate change, with indications of a tipping point of 1.5 degrees centigrade by the early 2030s. Covid, our pestilence, however, has largely vanished from the media. It’s still killing a fair number of people – on 20th March there were over 500 Covid-related deaths worldwide – but we aren’t terribly interested any more in what has gone from pandemic to endemic.

One thing I haven’t mentioned in connection with these is the phenomenon of a few people predicting the disasters, our modern day prophets, or that of our finding heroes. Ukraine doesn’t really have any prominent prophet associated with it (though various people did predict something of this kind), but does have President Zelensky as its hero, at least from where I sit (the hero of the situation from a Russian perspective may be Putin, and if it’s a Russian perspective there are probably other places which share the view; any “hero” is likely to be someone else’s villain). Among the various apocalypses I’n talking about, Zelensky is the one who best fits the image of a hero popularised by media, that of some courageous individual who fights against the odds. It remains to be seen whether he’s going to be the ever-victorious Hollywood hero or the tragic hero, who dies in the struggle…

Covid had a number of people who predicted a global pandemic, none widely hailed as prophets, some of whom were engaged by the UK government to write a plan to deal with such events (something close to my heart, as I was for some years involved in emergency planning locally). Sadly, our government of the time didn’t follow the plan they had (though Vietnam did follow it, and had a far lower death rate than we did). Global pandemics were also predicted by Bill Gates, whose foundation had put some money into combatting similar infections, but curiously rather than being hailed as a prophet, he has been condemned by much of the American right as, somehow, being responsible. The same impulse, it seems to me, may lie behind the popular blaming of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, set up to study and combat just this kind of virus, and from which much of the information which was used to create vaccines emanated. It’s very unlikely, though marginally possible, that a lab leak was responsible. If there’s an individual hero of Covid, it’s probably Jacinta Ardern in New Zealand, who took the kind of drastic action which our own government didn’t have the nerve to do, and similarly produced a much lower death toll. Curiously, however, for a prief period, Big Pharma was the hero of the day in producing vaccines. It may still be something of a hero with continuing vaccine programmes and various forms of treatment which have massively lessened the lethality of the virus.

Our erstwhile Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has attempted to present himself as the hero of both Covid and Brexit through claiming to have been responsible for a faster roll-out of vaccines than elsewhere and that this could not have been achieved without Brexit. The second is an outright lie – it was achieved while EU rules still applied. He did spend a very large amount of money persuading pharmaceutical companies to supply us rather than other countries – whether that qualifies him as a local hero I beg to question, though it certainly qualifies him as a villain from the point of view of those countries priced out of the vaccine market. Is he a hero as the man who “got Brexit done”? He’d like to claim that too. The snag is, not only does it appear to have no pluses and very many minuses, but it isn’t actually “done”. Parliament has just given the OK to an amendment of the Northern Ireland protocol, but the Democratic Unionist party has voted 100% against it and refused to re-enter power sharing in NI, we still haven’t instituted proper customs checks on goods coming into the country (which the EU managed from day 1) and the absence of various vegetables and fruits from our supermarket shelves rather gives the lie to any claim of success. But then, Brexit hasn’t really generated any heroes, just a sizeable crop of villains. Although, for some Conservatives, maybe those are actually heroes?

Onward to climate change, which has produced (at least here in the UK) two prophet-heroes in the shape of Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. Thunberg might yet just possibly manage to mobilise enough very embarrassed politicians to do something about the root problem of excess CO2 emissions and thus be a fully-fledged hero, but it’s looking unlikely that she will prove to have been successful. She has also been the victim of a large amount of rage from some conservatives, and may be a villain of the piece from their point of view – how DARE a youngster, and a girl at that, point out that we have been fouling our own nest for years? Clearly she is just a mouthpiece for forces which want to destroy free market capitalism as we know it, probably in favour of those nations which have not made a success of it… (the fact that they haven’t “made a success of it” due to massive exploitation by the “developed world” seems not to register).

It’s in the field of climate change where we see most prominently the belief in a “deus ex machina”, the supernatural force which will turn up and save the day at the last moment. The deus ex machina in that case is generally expected to be science, at least where I live (there may be places where divine intervention is the dominant hope, of course). I’m not a great fan of the deus ex machina.; For one thing, I don’t really believe in them. I don’t believe in a supernatural interventionist God, and I don’t see the moves in the scientific community which would be needed for them to come up with a wonderful solution. Science takes time, and we don’t have much of it at this point. In addition, to move to the kind of world which could reduce carbon emissions to manageable levels would probably mean the end of our current globalised, financialised, state-subsidised market economy. I don’t say “free market” because in most of the developed world, big business has captured government and turned it into a source of funding – consider, for instance, the various bank bail-outs which have happened since 2008, or the vast sums being poured into “green energy” by the USA at the moment to the consternation of green energy companies elsewhere, all alongside the fact that oil and gas production is still subsidised in many places. OK, going back to what I said earlier, the conservatives who see Thunberg as attacking capitalism are probably ultimately correct. And, as Mark Fisher (or possibly Jameson or Zizek) has said, it is easier to contemplate the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

So that’s probably what we’re going to see happen…

 

In the second of two interviews with Richard Boothby about his new book “Embracing the Void” (ok, warning, this may not be available to non-Patreon supporters for a couple of months), Pete Rollins sniping at mystics was combatted somewhat by Richard, which I much appreciated. Richard stressed something which William James wrote of:- “This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states, we both become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, we find the same recurring note.” (from this wider treatment).

Pete and Richard are both philosophers, so when faced with the contrast between unity and diversity, are, it seems to me,  naturally going to be looking for one to “win out” over the other. Pete is very keen on the concept of a fundamental, ontological lack, separation, fault or opposition within reality as a whole. Neither of them are likely, given that background, to arrive at the typical mystic’s response “So they don’t agree with each other? Fine, they’re two viewpoints… we can use both”. As I’m a mystic rather than a philosopher, I tend far more to that point of view than the wrestling with apparently incompatible concepts to try to find some synthesis which seems typical of philosophers, and I shudder at the suggestion that reality is at root “faulty”. If I’m able to assimilate Pete’s point of view at all, it’s via the observation that yes, I have two ways of looking at things which don’t agree with each other, so there’s a fundamental division there.

However, I was interested that in playing also with the two concepts of lack and excess, which are both features of Lacan’s work (which is foundational to what Richard is writing about), the two of them started sounding a little like emanationists (at a little after the 35 minute mark). There’s a long philosophical and mystical tradition of emanationism, which this article delves into somewhat. I’m most familiar with it from the point of view of the neoplatonist Plotinus, whose thinking was used considerably by western esotericists, and from that of the Kabbalah, which has a very elaborated emanationist substructure. At around 43 minutes, Richard talks about needing first to create a vacuum, which to me evokes the Jewish mystical concept of tzimtzum, which is, of course, the first and foundational requirement of emanationist cosmologies. (I personally question whether the creation of a void is a necessary prerequisite of creation, but that’s just me…)

It takes a while after that, but at around the 1h15 mark, Richard is talking of an excess which always exceeds the container – our signifier for something always falls short of the reality of the signified. That in turn strongly echoes the emanationist picture of a creation following tzimtzum where the abundance of divine energy, having created vessels to hold its energies, outstrips the ability of those vessels to hold it and results in a fundamentally broken creation. They don’t elaborate further, unfortunately. This made me recall something from Wake 2019, in a discussion between Pete, Todd McGowan and Jamieson Webster in which my recollection is that there was brief mention of the excess breaking the system (sadly, having gone back to the recording of that session, I can’t find the snippet in question – I do recall however, that I wanted to get some expansion of that but the session ended before I could do that!).

Now, I’m perfectly well aware that the neoplatonists and kabbalists are talking ontologically. OK, Pete talks about an ontolological divide in reality, but I generally discount his mentions of ontology because I don’t think any of us is equipped to talk in anything other than speculative terms about ontology (I’m somewhat Kantian, or perhaps Humian, in that). However, it does seem to me that this emanationist thinking might be applied to the products of language. The signifier always signifies either less or more than the signifier can support, and there’s always a lack or an excess in the meaning behind the signifier (and I wonder if “both” isn’t perhaps a more usual condition).

Whether or not there’s any merit in starting to develop these bare bones of an emanationist account into something more escapes me. The neoplatonist/kabbalist stream definitely does elaborate, and in the process uses nunerology and a startling number of additional concepts (kabbalah ends up with four realms each with ten centres of meaning, those being connected by 22 paths). It’s a system which fascinated me for some time in my teens and 20s, but which I abandoned as it didn’t seem to me to have adequate traction in the way things actually were – it was more a system of arrangement which was imposed over the phenomenological reality than one which illuminated aspects of that. But I could be wrong, and maybe there’s an emanationist development of pyrotheology, or even of Lacan?