Eyre Lines

A friend was talking to me recently about how he had inadvertently used “he” when the person involved wanted to be referred to as “them/they”, speaking in an academic seminar setting on zoom, and had promptly got dogpiled in the chat section by people saying that he had “committed an act of violence” towards the individual in question. Of course, he apologised promptly, but apparently that wasn’t enough. He was, to me entirely understandably, very upset by this, partly because it ruined his learning experience and effectively silenced him for the rest of the session – and he’s now paranoid about it, and feels that he almost can’t speak at all, for fear of getting it wrong again.

Takeaway #1 – don’t cripple someone’s learning experience.

But look, I can also understand that for people whose gender identity is not simply allocatable to “he/him” or “she/her”, it is galling to be forced back into answering to pronouns which not only don’t fit, but are a reminder of a stereotype which they’ve had to struggle very hard to overcome. And yes, they also may have had their learning experience ruined, at least temporarily. They might even feel silenced by the wish not to have the error repeated. Yes, I was brought up with the phrase “sticks and stones may break my bones but words cannot hurt me” being dinned into me – and I decided at an early age that that was garbage, because I was easily hurt myself by other people’s words, and could see that others felt much as I did. “Man up” was not a helpful thing to say to me at that point (the person who said it is now dead, so that issue is sort of over…)

My friend is of similar age to myself, maybe a year or two younger. In my own case, I only woke up to the fact that people were really concerned about other people’s use of pronouns for them about 9 years ago (OK, in my defence, the previous ten plus years I’d been so focused on my own psychology and recovery that I wasn’t participating in any venues where it was an issue). Perhaps I should have woken up to this move in language earlier, at least had I been connecting with the rest of humanity. That means that I, at least, spent something like 60 years being acculturated into the use of he/him and she/her, and it is VERY difficult to change habits which have taken that long to be instilled. For what it’s worth, my father (born 1920) left some writings which I’m only now getting round to going through, 21 years after his death, and 8 after my mother died and left me the sole custodian. Some of the language he uses of other races leaves, shall we say, a lot to be desired, and although he was in general a very broad minded individual and made friends with a number of people not of white anglo-saxon stock (including nearly marrying an Indian lady) his language never became wholly politically correct. My mother for many years fought a losing rearguard action against the use of “gay” for those of same-sex orientation. She grew up with “gay” meaning happy and carefree, and resented having that meaning taken away from her – even though it was obsolete language by the time I was in my teens, and she died when I was 61.

I have got people’s pronouns wrong on occasion, been told about it, apologised and moved on, to try harder where that person is involved in a conversation. In all cases, my apology has been accepted, the person involved said they understood that it was difficult, and I tried harder. But I haven’t been dogpiled, particularly by people being offended on behalf of someone else (which, to me, seems wrong). If I were, I fancy I might have my defence mechanisms kick in without any conscious move on my part and say something REALLY unforgivable. Or I might just never talk to those people ever again, as I have a huge avoidant streak. In any event, it would ruin my engagement with them thereafter.

I fancy my friend is in much the same position, and commend him on not being strident in opposition to the dogpiling.

I got used to using the pronouns appropriate to a person’s outward appearance rather than enquiring more about gender fairly early on, and acted as lawyer for, on my calculation, all of the transsexuals in my (rather small and provincial) town at one time. They liked our (myself and staff’s) open mindedness and lack of judgment – and, of course, the fact that we were using the “right” pronouns for them. I’ve always had more problem with those whose appearance is ambiguous. Certainly I take offence at people who want to call nonbinary people “it” – that is obviously offensive (and, sadly, removes one of the possibilities for my referring to God, even though “he” is a deeply problematic usage and “she” just looks like an attempt to over-correct – I know plenty of people who are happy to say that, for instance, gravity is an “it”, but not God, even if they don’t really think of God as personal). The trouble is, “they” and “them” have a collossal association with being plural in my subconscious, and are very difficult for me to slip into using naturally, if I’m actually thinking about the content of what I’m trying to convey rather than about being politically correct (and I find it more and more difficult with age to do both at the same time). The recent fabrications like ze/zir/zirs are horribly difficult for me, not least because I can’t remember them or pronounce them with confidence, although the fact that I don’t actually interact with anyone who uses those in order to get practice may be the most important. What I generally try to do is just use the given name as much as my brain is capable of.

So, to anyone I may inadvertently offend this way in the future (and I probably will), I apologise. I do try, but it is very difficult for us old people to manage. Let’s face it, many of my generation haven’t got to grips with metric units yet, and they came in in the 1970s and the process was pretty much complete by 1980.

Takeaway #2 – older people have more difficulty with this than younger ones. Try for a bit of forgiveness – you know, love your neighbour as yourself, even if they get things wrong.

And I do really question whether people other than those who have actually been called something they don’t like are actually as offended as they claim, or whether they are actually making a power play to silence older people (i.e., in this case, my friend). After all, I used to knock around with a group of gay friends in my 20s, and had to get used to the fact that they referred to everyone female or male as “she/her”, including me (which was jarring for, say, half an hour…). OK, despite having now been happily married to one woman for some 40 years, I did have a period of some gender confusion in my early teens, am very impatient with male gender stereotypes (which I often don’t fit well) and I could for some time after puberty have best been described as “bisexual”, looking at sexual partners – so perhaps I was less wedded to a “he/him” identity than many. Add to that the fact that side effects of the medications which are keeping me alive and somewhat sane have rendered me effectively asexual, with neither capability nor libido (so I’ve gone from one of the “A”s in LGBTQIAA+ to another), and I’m honestly not worried what gendered or non-gendered pronouns you use for me, as long as I recognise they’re meant to refer to me. Which I probably won’t if it’s “ze/zir/zirs or the like.

I also see it as just plain bullying when more than one person does this. If someone is down, don’t keep kicking them.

I also think I detect a strong element of “virtue signalling”, and of demonstrating that “these are my people”. I understand that, but if you make it more and more difficult for people to be fully on board with your views, you are going to end up an increasingly tiny group. Politics 101 says you need to make alliances with those who are similar but not the same as you. So for goodness sake, cut people some slack…

Takeway #3 – if it isn’t your pronoun, it’s probably not your business.

(Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m taking up arms to support someone who I perceived as hurt by someone’s action, even though it isn’t me who is hurt. I felt sympathy for him, but also a level of indignation at the bullying aspect which might, on reflection, be over-the-top. But I’m not doing it in an environment which is calculated to silence anyone. Nor am I virtue signalling – indeed, perhaps the opposite, as this post will probably annoy some people who otherwise think very similarly to me.)

Takeaway #4 – don’t be a bully.

But don’t call people “it”… And yes, I’d be offended if someone in my presence called any human being “it”. But if it wasn’t me, I’d probably not call them out on it. I maybe wouldn’t even if it were me.

One of the keynote speakers at Wake this year was Richard Boothby, whose book “Blown Away” talks of his reactions to his son’s suicide some years ago. He’s a philosopher, with a strong interest in psychoanalysis, so fitted in well with Pete Rollins and with the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. She was mostly speaking at the GCAS seminars next door, but as the two shared some content, Jamieson was there for a three-way conversation with Richard and Pete.

I may well come back to Boothby, but one thing which slipped out was that he isn’t a great fan of St. Paul, something I most definitely share. As he said, Paul was capable of some amazingly evocative language (largely on the subject of love – 1 Cor. 1:13 is perhaps the crowning glory of those passages), but he also had some very unpalateable things to say about, for instance, slaves and women – and had some horribly authoritarian views. Pete, on the other hand, thinks that Paul is wonderful, perhaps taking his cue largely from Alan Badiou’s book “Saint Paul, the Foundation of Universalism”. Incidentally, unlike the other books I mention in this post, I have and have read this, and gone through a book group discussing it together with Zizek’s “The Puppet and the Dwarf”, which also focuses on Paul. Badiou definitely suggests that Paul created Christianity by either creating or noticing an “event”, i.e. an unrepeatable phenomenon which changes something about your view irrevocably. Badiou sees this as the “stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks” from 1 Cor. 1:23, something which calls into question the philosophical foundations of both Judaism and Greek philosophy. Zizek similarly sees an event, but one sweeping aside the then-existing distinctions between Jew and Greek, man and woman and slave and master (Gal. 3:28); Rollins sees a fundamental Hegelian/Lacanian contradiction in the concept of the death of God, which he regards as Paul’s overwhelming contribution (personally I think Jesus’ resurrection is a more key moment than his death, and his lifetime ministry is more key than either, so the gospels were an urgent corrective to the Pauline letters which were written first, but there you go…).

Personally, I don’t think picking out one or two passages from a larger body of work and using them as the touchstone for the entire remainder is a valid move, which all of Badiou, Zizek and Rollins seem to me to do to a great extent – add to that that I have the hugest doubts that Paul would agree with or perhaps even understand what any of them have written or talked about in him. However, “Death of the Author” and all that – you consign the words to the page, and the rest of the work is in the head of the reader, and as author you don’t really get to tell people not to read you that way. Being dead, that is… I can’t see, for instance, that Hegel and Zizek would get along well, were Hegel not dead.

I’m therefore aiming to buy a couple of other books. One of those is “Jesus I have loved, but Paul” by J. Daniel Kirk (whose “A Man Attested by God” I much enjoyed. The other I only stumbled across today, called “Profaning Paul”. It sounds strongly as if it might fit very well with the current state of my thinking on the man!

I particularly liked that in the review, mention was made of Colcannon not dealing with the issue of which Pauline letters are actually Paul, which may be a bit Paul, and which are basically forgeries. Let’s face it, I’m not competent in koine Greek, nor am I a textual scholar, and while I can do a bit of theme analysis and come to some conclusions which pretty much match the general run of non-conservative Biblical scholarship, my opinion isn’t worth much, and delving into the rationales is a bit beyond me. Add to that that, whoever actually wrote them, they’ve been part of our canon for at least 1650 years, probably longer. I can do without the argument that I can’t go criticising the authorship from my more conservative friends, given that they’ll criticise me anyhow for not taking scripture as something perfect given to us by divine dictation for all time, or bending with the times. To both of those, I’ll plead guilty and defend my position, which is rather akin to why I don’t think we should still be operating in the UK according to Norman-French laws of the 11th century.

Looking at the description, it seems the author, Cavan Concannon, is not scared of a little scatological language (and neither was Paul), so I’ll sum it up as thinking that Paul is like a shit sandwich – you may get some sustenance, but you have to contend with a very nasty taste in your mouth.

And I’ll still, on occasion, say “My Jesus trumps your Paul”. Even if Paul managed to go to print before the four evangelists…

(there’s a follow-on…)

Brian McLaren has a new book “Do I stay Christian“, and the link gives access to an interview with Tripp Fuller as well as to a group and a forthcoming reading group around the book.

Having just got back from Peter Rollins “Wake” festival (which revolves around his Pyrotheology concept, combining Radical Theology, Philosophy and the Arts, generally the more subversive arts), I was reminded of a parable Pete told again this year (here’s a link to a previous telling).

Now, being a Christian is something which I was told I was by a couple of people some time after I started moderating the Christianity section of the then Compuserve Religion Forum (effectively defunct since AoL took over, but there’s still a group of that name). I, of course, denied it at least three times before rather reluctantly accepting that yes, at least by their standards, maybe I was. But if I am, I’m not a very good one. Maya Angelou said “I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I go, ‘Already?'”, and I can pretty much identify with that. I’m very impressed by Jesus (not so much by the Christ of Pauline and subsequent theology), but I don’t remotely measure up to Jesus’ very high standards. At least, I’ve got this idea in my head that they’re very high standards, despite Jesus also allowing as followers some strikingly imperfect people – but then, I have this immensely irritating perfectionist streak, which I seem to apply only to myself. Perhaps I need to love myself as I love others? Incidentally, Dave Tomlinson has written a book about being a bad Christian (and being a better human being) which I recommend.

I’m definitely not a Christian by the standards of a lot of Christian groupings, including the Catholics and most Evangelicals. Indeed, there’s one of the authors I’ve edited a couple of times who likes to call me his “unsaved friend”. That brings me to the idea on which Brian and Tripp agree, early in their discussion, that Christianity is (per Brian) a “team sport”. Now, as they discuss, there are a lot of reasons not to stay a Christian (all of which have influenced me in the past), and as they say, anyone might find it impossible to stay within a tradition which (for instance) has been a set of complete shits towards those of their mother religion, Judaism. I actually find that individual congregations can be similarly really good reasons not to be a member of them, particularly if they would take major exception to what I said if I were to outline what I actually do think is (at least probably) the case – and in the past, some have done just that, and I’ve followed the Biblical injunction to shake the dust off my sandals as I left. But, in conscience, I’ve never found a congregation in which I feel totally free to talk about my theological ideas, which is one reason why I so much value the Wake festival. Harking back to another discussion which went on this year (in one of the GCAS seminars which accompanied the event this time), I’ve tended to be liminal in any congregation I worship with, just as two of the GCAS doctoral students were as they pursued PhDs in Radical Theology while serving confessional congregations as clergy.

But, not being clergy, nor having any sensible chance of becoming clergy (though one of the two people I mentioned earlier also suggested that I regarded my moderating of the Christianity section as a “pastoral mission”, and again after a LOT of argument, I reluctantly conceded that he was right), I don’t have the same need to stick with a congregation.

Is it reallyt a “team sport”, though? Again, in a conversation at Wake, someone quoted “when two or three are gathered together”, implying that community is foundational. I held my tongue, as I could have quoted back the Gospel of Thomas Oxyrhyncus version as translated by Oresse “Jesus says: “Where there are [two (?) they are] not without God, and where there is one, I say <to you>, I am with him. Raise the stone, and there thou wilt find me; split the wood: I am even there!” “ As long as you’re broad minded about what constitutes scripture, that’s the counterpoint – and, indeed, one translation (Attridge) renders that “Where there are [three], they are without God, and where there is but [a single one], I say that I am with [him].” So no, I don’t think it has to be a team sport. But I’d massively prefer that it was, thus the pilgrimage to Belfast, postponed by Covid from 2020.

And I’m really sad to hear that there won’t be one next year. Being with “your” group only for a few days every two years – well, it just isn’t enough. Thank goodness for Zoom! Although even then, I’m not sure how much it’s community, for me, and how much it’s just getting sparked with new ideas. There will probably be quite a few posts coming based on this year’s Wake!

If you’ve been reading through the sequence of “apocalyptic” posts I’ve put up recently, you’ll have read war, pestilence and famine. I actually started writing following an extremely timely piece which George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian some while ago, given that at the time the COP26 talks in Glasgow were just starting. I agree with virtually everything he says, but think the chances of the world generally taking sufficient action to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures are very slim indeed. The end result of COP26 doesn’t improve my outlook, unfortunately. I also agree with the UN’s take on the situation. A meter of rise in sea level would be fairly disastrous, but probably supportable, but at present we’re headed for something between 2.5 degrees and 6 degrees. That would be wholly unsupportable, given predictions of somewhat over two meters of rise for each degree in temperature. Many of the world’s biggest cities would be underwater, the crop-growing temperate zone would be in Siberia and Canada, leaving all the current agricultural powerhouses desert or semi-desert, there would be an even greater destruction of wildlife including, perhaps most importantly, insects. My own house, 40 miles inland but only about 4 meters above sea level, would probably be flooded (I live in mid-Yorkshire, just south of York, and am in the middle of the red splotch in Yorkshire on this very cautious projection), along with the large area of productive farmland around it.

The targets set at Paris (which would have produced a rise toward the bottom end of that bracket) have not been met, and this is COP26. There have been 25 previous meetings, and very little has been achieved, particularly in the biggest current contributors to climate change, China, India and the United States. It is now over three years since Greta Thunberg walked out of school and sparked a global movement, but her message has so far fallen on deaf ears (though she does, I think, represent another feature of apocalytic scenarios, that they throw up someone who is a shining example to the rest of us, even if doomed to failure). A dishonorable mention here to Brazil and Indonesia, both of which are busily removing old rain forests which fix large amounts of carbon. Hansi Freinacht wrote (in 2013) “If we are to globally make the cli­mate goal of keeping the temperature below a 2°C increase (which is still possi­bly catastrophic, as we’ll have more carbon in the atmosphere than for millions of years), we need to re­duce our carbon emissions by something to the tune of 25 billion tons per year before 2060 (as compared to the “bus­iness as usual” scenario). Now imagine this. Re­ducing with one (!) bil­lion tons would require either doub­ling the world’s nuclear power output, or expanding our wind power output by 50 times (some two million new mills), or expanding solar pow­er by a factor of 700, or using a sixth of all globally available arable land to grow biofuels to replace fossil fuels… And if we do all four (linearly increa­sing the output over the period 2013-2060), we are still only done with a small fraction of the overall necessary carbon red­uction; four out of the nec­ess­ary 25 billion tons reduced. And as things stand today, carbon emiss­ions are still grow­ing according to the “business as usual” scenario.” It seems extremely far-fetched to think that we can now, 8 years later and with no significant progress, reach that goal.

Since I starting writing, we have the recent IPCC report – which gives us three years to start seriously reducing emissions (not just stopping the increase), if we are to have a chance of 1.5 degrees of warming. I see little chance that this will happen, despite the pious mutterings of world leaders, 195 of whom have signed off on those proposals. (This post has been hanging around for quite some time, most recently delayed by personal sampling of Covid, which I do not recommend – but have survived).

Is this an apocalyptic scenario? Well, in the sense of apocalyptic used in Biblical studies, meaning an unveiling of a hidden truth, what has been the case since the beginning of the industrial revolution has been progressively revealed over the last 30 or 40 years. It has been a hard sell for many of those of my generation, who grew up with the opposite fear, that a nuclear exchange could bring about a “nuclear winter”. What it has most definitely revealed is that governments everywhere (though somewhat less in Europe than elsewhere) are afraid to take the steps necessary to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature, presumably because they don’t think they can sell the concept to their electorates. It has also revealed that there are many among us (particularly, it seems, in the USA) who are prepared to use any excuse, including blatant falsehoods, to avoid limiting their profligate use of natural resources – so the governments are, perhaps, right. There is clearly a massive failure of public education going on, given the number of people who kick and scream against what the science is telling us (and telling us more and more forcibly as time goes by); at least in a substantial number of European countries, there seems to be some generalised appreciation that things cannot continue along the trajectory they are doing, but this is by no means shared worldwide.

Companies are hamstrung both by the tragedy of the commons and the neoliberal dictum that shareholder value is the only consideration, which leads to incredibly short-term thinking. We cannot expect companies in the grip of this belief system to act in a communally responsible way, they need government action to compel them. Arguably, just government action is insufficient, we need global government action, and there is no functioning global government (and little prospect that there will be).

Is it apocalyptic in the more popular sense of the end of civilisation, Mad Max style? The best known Biblical apocalypse, Revelation, obviously has a large amount of doom and gloom scenarios in it as well as “revealing hidden truths”, so the popular understanding is hardly without precedent.We might, however, want to recall that Revelation includes the lines  (Rev. 21) “Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Even in the Bible’s most “doom and gloom” book, there is a promise of something better…

Well, with a lot of careful planning, the vast populations which would be flooded out or find themselves living in deserts might be moved to newly agriculturally productive areas and those might be sufficient to provide for the surviving population – but that’s the sort of careful planning which could remove the need for such massive relocations and which is clearly not being done. Add to that the generally joyous reception given to large scale migration in the world (sarcasm alert), and I see a recipe for a lot of wars and rumours of wars. Not quite, however, Mad Max territory, perhaps, unless you add in the possibility of killing off pollinating insects or one of the vast grain monocultures such as wheat or rice. Without those, we could possibly get away by killing off only, say, 95% of the world’s population. With them, we’d probably be looking at something more like 99.9%. Even that would, of course, still leave several millions of humans potentially alive. It wouldn’t however, leave our economic systems intact.

And, indeed, Monbiot is almost certainly correct in suggesting that in order to achieve climate change goals at all, we need a radical restructuring of our economic systems, which would probably also demand a radical restructuring of our political systems. Conservation, protection of the planet, is just incompatible with economic systems which demand constant growth in order to continue functioning. The report “The Limits to Growth” is now nearly 50 years old. The Guardian commented on it at around the 40 year mark, and was not optimistic. There seems little reason to be any more optimistic now. The only way I can see that the world might move towards the kind of systems Monbiot envisages is a worldwide popular uprising, sweeping away most of the economic and political structures we have in place at the moment. Gradual change is something we are probably already too late to rely on – and that kind of popular uprising might be nearly as catastrophic as the anarchy which I envisage when climate change renders much of the globe uninhabitable. Tad DeLay, on the other hand, is pessimistic about the likelihood we will do this.

There are, of course, those who have a touching faith in the ability of science to find a solution where none currently exists. To me, it resembles the faith of Biblical apocalypticists that God would intervene and create a new world order, which I might point out has not happened in the nearly 2000 years since the last of those canonised was written. The days of the “Deus ex machina” appear to be over. Yes, maybe science will find some solution (though wholesale alteration of our climate in the short term seems to be an incredibly risky prospect), but that is wholely in the area of “hope over experience” at present.

This post is the fourth of the series, corresponding to the Fourth Horseman:- “When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.”— Revelation 6:7–8 (New American Standard Bible)

It is very tempting to see that passage as a prediction of the effects of climate change, which will bring war, famine and probably pestilence with it, and most certainly chaos. Not, however, so much of the wild beasts of the earth, as we are in the middle of a great extinction and many species are disappearing before humanity. But I don’t, except inasmuch as all total failures of a society look somewhat similar. The probable target of that vision of the future was of a collapse of the Roman Empire, which the writer no doubt saw coming in or around the second century (whereas it didn’t happen until the fifth century for the Western Empire and, arguably, the fifteenth for the Eastern). For the writer, the Roman Empire was essentially the whole world. Climate change, however, IS  a whole world problem.

I hope above hope that I might be being unduly pessimistic here, but in conscience, I just think I’m being realistic. My generation and that before it, in particular, have failed our descendants. I apologise on their behalves. We will not be around to see the full effects and apologies then…

Speaking as an UK national and resident, we are lost. We’re in an unpleasant place (with 9% inflation, stagnant growth, a major cost of living crisis affecting disproportionately the poorest among us, difficulties recruiting labour for all sorts of occupations, not least the NHS… and I could go on virtually ad nauseam).

Most of us, including those who voted Brexit and still seem wedded to the concept, are prepared to acknowledge that we’re lost. Gone are the days when Leave voters would say “we haven’t given it a chance yet”, aside from a few die-hards.

The thing is, when you’re lost and asking for directions, the first question you’re going to be asked is “where are you?”. And we’re apparently not allowed to mention Brexit. Economists are broadly agreed that a significant amount of the inflation and the stagnant growth are due to Brexit, but the government will not allow talk of Brexit, and the BBC and much other broadcast media seem to have been cowed into avoiding any mention of Brexit as well (not to mention that the majority of the press is still trying to find positives in Brexit). The BBC’s “Countryfile” programme recently had a short piece on difficulties caused by Brexit in farming, and there was a deluge of protest from Leave-voting viewers that they had dared to suggest there was anything negative about Brexit.

It is not always useful to rehearse how you got there when describing where you are. That, I think, is the main thing which produced those howls of protest – the thought is that they voted Leave, it’s clearly a disaster, and they are therefore to blame. No-one really likes admitting that they’re to blame, and some (including our PM) avoid doing it like the plague. We can’t, in any event, retrace our steps on Brexit completely. Many things have changed irreversibly, such as the movement of companies and European institutions out of the country. We could never expect to get back the discount we had on membership contributions. I’ve no wish to berate people for their vote back in 2016 – what is done is done, and we need to move on.

But we can’t move on successfully if, returning to my analogy of being lost and asking for directions, we won’t consider one or more of the possible routes out. Clearly, in this case, we could massively improve our trading position by regulatory alignment (which would remove the need for a large number of checks at borders, “non-tariff barriers”), rejoining the customs union (removing more) or rejoining the single market (removing all of them plus allowing us to get migrant workers from Europe again and restoring the position of our Financial Services industry). None of those would require rejoining the EU, so the sanctity of the Brexit decision would be preserved. The trouble is, our hypothetical friend on the phone is suggesting that we take the road marked “regulatory alignment” (for instance), and we’re being told that isn’t a route. We can’t do that, despite the fact that the original set of Brexit options included all three of those possibilities.

No, instead, the government rejects three of the four directions available and doesn’t even stop at the crossroads we’re at, it keeps suggesting that we motor on down the same disastrous road by tearing up the Northern Ireland protocol. Which will give us a trade war with Europe on top of our existing woes, and (as it will be a breach of the Withdrawal Agreement and probably prejudice the Good Friday Agreement as well) will break international law and demolish what’s left of our international reputation. No-one will want to make agreements with us after that.

The route we’re on runs over a cliff. Please can we pause, accept where we are, and decide that we don’t have to plummet to an even worse national disaster.

Following on earlier posts on (loosely) war and pestilence, I am British, and am seeing a steadily worsening “apocalyptic” situation in the progress of Brexit, which, in brief, was the ripping up of trade agreements of 40 years standing with Europe (with whom much of our trade was, and on which trade we rely, not being self-sufficient in very much), and their replacement with trade barriers. Against the background of this, the current government, with 43% support in the country but a massive 80 seat controlling majority in Parliament, is tearing up safeguards against arbitrary rule, such as the power of the courts to restain government actions, the ability to protest peacefully, Human Rights legislation, the ability of parliament to control what the government does and a fixed term for parliaments. It is not difficult to see authoritarian government on the horizon, even if it maybe isn’t quite already here – and this is against the background of record business insolvencies, shortages of labour, goods and medicines and, of course, a sluggish-to-nonexistent growth in the economy after a substantial contraction due to Covid. Oh, and the likely departure of Northern Ireland and Scotland from the United Kingdom, which will no longer have any claim to that title. Scotland leaving would remove the right to the title “Great Britain” and if Wales were to leave as well (not particularly likely as things stand, but possible), we’d just be England.

This post is in the position in the sequence which should be occupied by famine, and though we have seen a shortage of some foodstuffs, we haven’t yet got to the stage of food riots, which were predicted by some of my fellow Remainers to occur within six months of leaving the EU. But, of course, we haven’t yet completed the process. The EU were carrying out checks on our exports to them, notably phytosanitary, which can, for instance, deny access for nursery plants if they have any soil on them, and rules of origin, which can impose the tariffs the free trade agreement was supposed to avoid if some of the materials used in making the product were from outside the UK, something which is horribly common given transnational supply chains from day 1. We, however, have delayed and delayed carrying out similar checks on imports from the EU. It seems we lack the capacity to do that, and will be delaying again in summer, which, of course, gives EU suppliers a competitive advantage over our own. As and when we do “our side” of the effects of leaving the Customs Union and regulatory alignment, food supply is going to be a major headache – we import a vast amount of our food from the EU.

Add to that the fact that lack of EU labour has meant that crops went unharvested and animals had to be killed and burned, the latter due to the lack of vets in slaughterhouses. Farmers faced with those losses are, of course, not planting this year, and not buying in young animals to rear – so our domestic supply of some foods will reduce, and we weren’t remotely self-sufficient in food to start with.

What I definitely see already is a massive increase in the number of people who need to use food banks in order to survive, and that is going to get substantially worse given that energy costs to households are going up by over 50% as I write, with another increase due in the Autumn. Granted, the energy crisis is not directly a result of Brexit, that is down to world conditions including slowness in recovering capacity not needed during the pandemic and the Ukraine war putting into question Russian (and Ukrainian) supplies of gas and other fossil fuels. But the effect on the consumer is massively impacted by Brexit – we are not in the common energy market of the EU, and that has allowed France (for instance) to limit the increase in its energy bills to the customer to 4%. Do you stay relatively warm or eat? We may not be in famine as a country yet, but the poorest among us are already in famine conditions.

Note that I bemoan earlier the lack of growth in the economy. Yes, I believe we need to try not to rely on economic growth given the reality of climate change, but I don’t relish the prospect of trying to do it as a country alone (as what the rest of the world does or rather is not doing is going to impact us far more than anything we might do by ourselves), and in the process civil unrest and possibly even revolution is a possible scenario. We have, for instance, seen that a reduction of maybe 10,000 HGV drivers threw our supply system into complete disarray. The figure often given for the shortage was 100,000, but other European countries have not far short of that nominal shortfall, but no supply chain difficulties; it appears that the absence of a relatively few European drivers has had a disproportionate effect, though the lack of the ability of our own drivers to pick up and drop off consignments throughout Europe (cabotage) is definitely another factor. It is not difficult to extrapolate that small shortfalls in other areas will have similarly disproportionate effects, and obvious candidates are the lack of seasonal agricultural workers, vets and immigrant staff in the NHS and private care systems. Our economic system is built on growth – if you don’t grow, don’t increase productivity, your business will probably fail. There seems a fair chance that a national decline will mean that the country fails.

So, I see a possible end to my nation, both in the breakup of the UK and in a possible fascist-like state in what remains, with a disintegrating economy.

The revelation of unknown knowledge there is, of course, the idiocy of Brexit as a concept. Admittedly, perhaps 48% of those who voted in the 2016 referendum already knew this, but they were (just) not a majority. Hope for a “deus ex machina” has pretty much faded – back in 2016-19, there remained some hope that MPs would find some solution short of a near-complete severing of ties with Europe, but the 2019 election delivering an 80 seat majority to a Conservative party purged of any but die-hard Brexiteers pretty much destroyed that, and Labour consistently denying any possibility of rejoining has done the rest. For those who, like me, consider Brexit to be possibly the worst national decision we have ever made, there aren’t really any heroes either – perhaps the likes of Steve Bray, who has been demonstrating outside Parliament since 2016 on a fairly consistent basis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, perhaps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that species isn’t humanity.

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

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

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

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