Elizaphanian Articles

Shutting down

2011-09-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

I think setting up a separate blog for my articles was a mistake. Hardly anyone reads them, and my main blog is suffering. So this is just to say that I'll not be posting here in the future, and over the next few weeks I shall transfer all the articles here on to the main blog and then shut this one down.

Joking about the end of the world

2011-09-14T03:01:00.000-07:00

Two contrasting stories about planning recently. One – if the letters page of the Courier is to be believed (and quite possibly it shouldn't be) – involves planning laws and permissions being ignored by a commercial operation in order to achieve their aims. The other involves planning laws and permissions being ignored by a community in order to achieve their aims. I think the contrasting treatment of the two cases tells us rather a lot about the state of our society.

Which brings me to Batman and the Joker. I love films, and I love superhero comics (we call them graphic novels these days) and 'The Dark Knight' is a superb combination on many levels. In particular, it illuminates the issue that I want to explore this week. At the heart of the Dark Knight is the idea that Gotham is corrupt – the rule of law is a sham, and wealthy criminals and vested interests are able to pursue their aims with impunity. This is the context which draws out the Batman – someone who is literally fighting for a more just society, someone who can act for the community in ways that the police force is failing to do. The paradox, however, is that because the Batman is himself acting outside of the rule of law, his actions draw out an even more extreme response – that of the Joker, who also acts outside of the rule of law but with far less benign motivations. Both the Batman and the Joker are symptoms of a corrupt society. This is why, in the film, Batman is so keen for there to be a 'White Knight' – that is, someone who can use the legitimate forces of order to combat crime and corruption, because Batman is conscious that his own activity is not a lasting solution – it is the proverbial band-aid in a situation where surgery is required. What is needed is the establishment of a just rule of law, under which all are equal, and to which all are accountable.

The truth is that all benefit from the establishment of such a rule of law. Where the rule of law is not respected there is much greater scope for bullying and oppression. This is why in Biblical times it was the poor who cried out for the day of judgement - for a 'white knight' that they called the Messiah – because this was when a rule of law (divinely perfect) would be established, and all those who had abused the poor in defiance of the law would get their just desserts. In the words of the Magnificat (the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she learns of her pregnancy - and therefore that the white knight was coming): “He hath shewed strength with his arm. He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things. And the rich he hath sent empty away”. The Magnificat is rightly described as one of the most radical and revolutionary texts in history, because it is all about God destroying a corrupt system and establishing a just one – in which those who are poor, suffering and struggling can finally find some rest and peace.

So how does this link in with those planning questions? Well, much of the criticism that I have seen about Dale Farm and the dwellings established there centres upon the lack of planning permission for those homes. There is much pious language about 'the law must be upheld, there mustn't be special treatment for them' and so on. What this language ignores is at least two things – firstly that 90% of planning applications from the travelling community are rejected by local authorities, compared to a 20% average otherwise – and secondly, the way in which planning permissions only seem to be enforced firmly against those who are otherwise weak, whilst the strong – those who can afford things like 'planning consultants', or repeated applications over several years – can pretty much get whatever they want. (I must not talk about supermarkets, I must not talk about supermarkets...)

I have no doubt that this is a systemic problem, not to do with personal qualities on the part of any planning officers, who are most likely decent people placed in impossible situations and who often have their hands tied by laws and regulations that have not been intelligently drafted. We do not live in Gotham City. Yet as a society we have become detached from our moral moorings, and we're now discovering that the shallows into which we have drifted are liable to break our vessel into small pieces. There comes a time when people of good-will recognise that the existing system is beyond salvation and turn their energies away from shoring up the status quo and establishing the new forms of community that preserve all the best things of the culture – a time when the captain recognises that the ship is definitely going to sink and it is time to get into the lifeboats. This too is an 'end of the world' and a judgement upon the seamanship of the skipper.

I believe that we have come to that point, and that the coming years are going to see a great toppling of the existing state structures. The future belongs to the local and the sustainable and the great bureaucracy that intrudes into our lives is neither of those things. I very much hope that some form of an established rule of law can be preserved - but the recent rioting and looting, and the disproportionate and hypocritical responses of the ruling classes, have not given me much hope. In the meantime please pray for the community at Dale Farm, especially the children about to be forcibly evicted from the only homes that they have ever known – from the land that they own – because some joker has decided that just for once the planning regulations are to be enforced to the fullest extent of the law.

The Old Testament Heart

2011-09-07T06:12:00.000-07:00

An adaptation of this post
Some years ago I read an outstandingly good book about survival, by an American author named Laurence Gonzales. I'd like to share this quotation with you - Gonzales is describing a group of people who have been cast adrift at sea in a small boat, and the way in which some of them were mentally ready to do the work of survival, whilst others were 'losing it' - and becoming a hazard that would potentially kill everyone. Hard decisions had to be made, and Gonzales quotes another writer in saying this:
To survive, you must at some point allow cool to become cold. Stockdale wrote, "In difficult situations, the leader with the heart, not the soft heart, not the bleeding heart, but the Old Testament heart, the hard heart, comes into his own." Survival means accepting reality, and accepting reality takes a hard heart. But it is a strange kind of coldness, for it has empathy at its center. Survivors discover a deep spiritual relationship to the world...."The Old Testament heart is the capacity to inflict pain for the greater good; to keep eyes fixed upon the essential aim, and to take the measures needed to ensure long term flourishing. It is when the heart is set wholly on God that priorities find their proper place, and God's hand guides the blade. It is when will power is allied to idolatry that darkness and destruction descend on the community.

One of the most disturbing elements of the recent looting and rioting was the absence of effective protection from the police for the average law-abiding person – those granted the authority to provide protection and order were unable to do so. Consequently there was no rule of law and the vulnerable were taken advantage of as the strong enjoyed the freedom given to them by the chaos.

What would have happened if the local storekeepers had shotguns, and a legal framework allowing them to use such weapons in defence of their property and livelihoods? Merely to raise such a question is to risk being tarred as a rabid and reactionary right-winger (and I plead 'mostly guilty' to that charge) but that simply shows the nature of the cultural shifts that have taken place within our country over the last century or so. For before about 1900 law and culture would indeed have supported the average law-abiding person against the depredations of a criminal, and such self-defence would have been seen as normal and reasonable.

The idea that we are not allowed to undertake our own self-defence, of life and property, and must instead rely upon the good offices of the state, is a remarkably novel idea in human history, and one that I don't personally believe will last for very much longer. Our present unhappy situation has many complex roots – for a very good analysis I would recommend reading Peter Hitchens' “The Abolition of Britain” – but for now I would like to pick out one in particular: the way in which the expansion of the state has developed hand-in-hand with a reduction in the status, responsibility and rights of the father. What our society has managed to achieve is the outlawing of the Old Testament heart – that is, the willingness and ability to cause pain in the short-term (to law-breakers) in order to minimise pain in the long-term (due to the benefits of an established and settled rule of law). As a society we are squeamish and soft-hearted and we shy away from a clear establishment of authority. It is, traditionally speaking, the role of the father to provide protection and order for the family – and then, by extension, for the community as a whole. That seems to be one of the most significant roots for these recent troubles – generations of young boys being raised without fathers, and therefore without a sense of the Old Testament heart, and how life-giving it is. Fathers are needed.

Consider the question of smacking, something which progressive thought sees as shocking. What such progressive thought seems to me to miss is the difference between a proper discipline and abuse. Personally, I can't believe that smacking is absolutely out of bounds. Not as a routine issue - and certainly not done with any instrument (in the way that I was 'slippered' at school) – but I believe that sometimes a child needs to see that a parent can be provoked into anger, and that that anger can have physical consequences to reinforce the lesson, the establishment of a boundary, an emphatic 'this is not acceptable behaviour'.

Of course, perhaps those benefits are false - it's just conforming somebody else's will to the will of the father, and who is the father to impose his will? Actually, who is he not to? That is precisely the point. Traditionally speaking, it is the father's job to raise a child able to enter into society and make their own way in life. The mother will identify with the child and seek to nurture and affirm. It is the father that must prune and shape. I think there is a biological basis to this, but actually the roles are not unequivocally biological. Sometimes it is the father who is the nurturing and affirming one whilst it is the mother that exercises discipline. In either case, it seems clear to me that some form of structured discipline is essential for the health of a community – and the community needs to support those, especially fathers, who are responsible for it. This is not a new thought but it is perhaps one that we need to give more attention to:
"Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgements which the LORD your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it. So that you and your son and your grandson might fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged." (Deuteronomy chapter 6)

Is this really the world we want?

2011-08-19T03:12:00.000-07:00

If you had the opportunity to commit a crime and were certain that you would not be punished for it – would you do it?

In amongst all the hand-wringing and over-analysis flowing about these “riots” it is worth spending a little time focusing on that one simple question. Most people – I hope and trust – would answer 'No'. That is because most of us have internalised a sense of right and wrong, a code of conduct that we seek to follow irrespective of immediate social pressures and forces. The great sadness of these recent days is watching the fruits of a society that has long ago forgotten how to cultivate such a moral sense, which has simply carried on drawing down the moral bank balance without making further deposits. These are not political protests against government 'cuts', social oppression or joblessness – however much such elements may have added fuel to the fire. These actions are the inevitable result of a society that has lost its moral moorings, and has ceased to cultivate those traits of character that are the only difference between a civilisation and the state of nature wherein human lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. We are a bankrupt culture both financially and morally. Now we see what a generation raised without character looks like.

Decisions and actions have consequences, and a mature person, and a mature society, will take responsibility for their decisions and actions. In the context of these recent obscene London riots I hope that our culture can begin to recognise what it has lost, and what needs to happen in order for a moral culture to be found again. What might that look like?

First, we need to understand that, whatever the social pressures are that the rioters may be responding to, the rule of law has to be upheld. Where there is no law there is but an illusion of freedom – in reality, in the absence of law rule is by the strong and the weak simply get bullied. The only foundation for a socially just order, where the widows and orphans can be protected, is an established and respected rule of law. That means that those responsible for these recent barbarities need to be pursued and held accountable for their actions.

Second, we need to understand that the roots of these problems go very deep. To me, the most significant root is simple selfishness. We have organised our culture around the idol of self-will, 'because I'm worth it'. Those who impose their will upon others are held up as strong; those too weak to do so are discarded and rejected. For everyone, the rights of the consumer are sacrosanct – these are my preferences (I want to shop in the supermarket I choose) and you have no right to speak against it. These are my opinions and they are just as valid as yours. These are my choices in life, and devil take the hindmost!

Consider, as just one example of the cult of selfishness that we have allowed to become so well-established in our society, the explosion in divorce rates and the radical dismantling of a marriage-friendly culture. I would readily accept – and I have seen a number of instances – where a divorce is the only humane way forward from a destructive relationship. Yet I do not believe that such genuine reasons make up a majority of grounds for divorce in our society – I would be surprised if they were even responsible for as many as 10%. No, the principal grounds for divorce in our society are the vintage sins of lust and sloth. Lust is obvious and needs no further explanation, but by sloth I refer to both an unwillingness to work at a relationship, to move past the inevitable hard times, and also an absence of patience and steadfastness – an inability to keep promises, which is something that requires moral effort and labour. The havoc caused by so many divorces are familiar to all I am sure – and the long term consequences we see on the streets today.

So what is the solution? It may well be true that some of the most odious words in the language are 'I told you so' but this is what I have been writing about for the last eighteen months in this newspaper. We need to return to a cultivation of the virtues, those building blocks of moral character without which peaceable society is but a thin crust above seething passions, and we are never far away from another outbreak of violent lawlessness. The most essential element of repairing our society involves recognising that we are accountable to something (or someone) more important than our own desires and preferences and choices. To insist on the latter is to step firmly upon the path to the lawlessness we have recently seen – for on what grounds can we criticise the looter stealing mobile phones from the smashed windows of shops? He is exercising his right to choose, he is affirming his preferences in life, he is the glorious and autonomous determiner of his own destiny - and that is the end to which our society tends. What has happened in recent days is that we have seen our reflection in a mirror, and, like Caliban, we don't particularly like it.

How, then, might we cultivate the essential virtues? Put simply, by joining a community which pursues them, and by practising the steadfastness and persistence needed to internalise them so that, when put to the test, we are not found wanting. To commit to something for the long term, not simply for as long as it suits our fleeting feelings. There are many such communities here on Mersea where important virtues can be followed – the Lions, Rotary, Blind Spot, lots of others – but, as you might expect, I think the key one is church. Church is the place wherein all the other virtues can be recognised and affirmed and placed within the largest context possible. Church is the community within which differences can be explored peaceably – cultivating the virtues of tolerance, peaceableness and forgiveness. The thing about church is not that church members have got it all sorted – clearly we haven't – it's simply that we recognise that we haven't, we are trying to do better and, thanks be to God, we have been given the tools to do the job. What we do with those tools is, of course, up to us.

How do we fight for what we believe in?

2011-08-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes an event lights up the landscape like a lightning flash in the night. September 11th 2001 was one of those; the actions of Anders Breivik are another. Breivik released a 1500 page manifesto to explain his actions which I have been dipping into. It is a remarkably rational, cold and frightening document, the testimony of a mind that has become wrapped up in its own certainties – a house with all the doors and windows closed so the air gets stuffier and stuffier and slowly dies. The structure of the house is still sound – Breivik was clearly meticulously logical and rational – but there is no breath of life there, no spirit. Doubtless there will be much armchair psychologising but I think that mythical and metaphorical language works best – Breivik chose an evil path and was captured by demons; or, to use a more contemporary idiom, Breivik turned to the dark side of the Force and ended up slaughtering the younglings.

What is the landscape that is revealed? After all, human nature hasn't changed very much down the centuries. We always have had, and always shall have, evil people amongst us – people who resolutely choose to turn against the light, as opposed to the majority of us who more or less successfully seek it. It is the opportunity and context that changes over time. Breivik was motivated by a fear of Muslim immigration, and a sense that all of the authorities subscribed to a particular 'multicultural' consensus which was going to lead inexorably to the vanishing of Christian Nordic culture and its replacement by an Islamic society. Breivik wanted to shock that consensus into a realisation of the predicament it faced – that if it supported things like the education of girls or the tolerant treatment of homosexuals then it should actively seek to ensure that those values were not undermined in substantial parts of the population.

Yet in order to address Breivik's concerns the wider society would need to be able to have a conversation about values as such – and we no longer have the capacity for this. As we have, as a society, abandoned Christianity as our guiding world-view we have not replaced it with anything of equivalent substance or sophistication – we are, instead, enjoined to be 'tolerant' of diversity. Sadly, without some overarching framework within which these arguments about values can be conducted and resolved we are left with a simple power struggle. Reason can no longer do the work of generating consensus so social pressure takes its place – and the consequence of that is that those who feel marginalised and locked out of the public conversation end up taking powerful actions of their own.

I suspect that there is nothing much that can be done to prevent particular acts of evil. The human heart is deceitful above all things and, as with Breivik, is perfectly capable of concealing itself for long periods of time. Yet there is something I can whole-heartedly recommend, and that is prayer. Breivik talks a little about prayer in his manifesto, yet what he means by it was a system of quietening the mind, to make himself more efficient and effective in his terrorism. Breivik called himself a Christian, but he was very clear that “If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform.” In other words, he was not a Christian in any sense that I would understand the term. He supported the shell and the externals, he had no awareness of the heart and the life, the internal spirit of faith.

For at the heart of Christian faith is precisely a relationship with God through Jesus. Rather than prayer being a way of making yourself more effective in the world – in other words, reinforcing the ego – prayer is all about becoming aware of a greater power that is at work in the world, and thereby being drawn out of oneself and one's own parochial concerns. Prayer is opening up the doors and windows of the mind so that the rooms can breathe fresh air. Prayer is the only cure for our pathologically narcissistic society, and the essential tool for fighting for what we believe in.

Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense

2011-07-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

The story goes that in the 14^thCentury, the King of England, Edward III was at court and dancingwith his first cousin, Joan of Kent. Her garter slipped down to herankle and there was sniggering amongst the courtiers at herembarrassment. The King then placed the garter around his own legsaying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – shame be to him who thinksevil of it. In other words, show some humanity and respect, when youlaugh in this context you are simply displaying a lack of nobility.Edward III then founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 in order touphold this ideal of chivalry.

How far we have come from then: asociety where human nature was clearly just the same as ours, butwhere the institutions and leaders of society sought to uphold a morehonourable way of life. I have been reflecting on this in the lightof the revelations about phone hacking carried out by the News of theWorld. The revelations first surfaced with regard to celebrities likeSienna Miller. This did not cause great controversy – there was nogreat outcry at the plight of a ‘celebrity’ – one might saythat we enjoyed seeing their garters fall to the floor. Yet the lackof courtesy and kindness revealed there is also the reason why we hadjournalists contacting Gordon Brown to ask for his reaction to hisson’s cystic fibrosis before the doctors had even confirmed thatdiagnosis to the parents.

Put simply the last few decades of ournational life have seen a steady erosion of all the values andvirtues that we had previously held up for emulation. When someonetries to stand up for those values – as with a recently notoriouspotential mother-in-law – they are exposed to vicious ridicule andderided as an archaic prig. Quite obviously those standards were notalways maintained in practice but there is all the difference in theworld between striving for greatness, recognising the difficulty ofmaking steady progress, and giving up the attempt out of despair ormoral laziness. Virtue is its own reward and there is nobility in theattempt, even if it fails.

We have exchanged that culture for oneof prurience. Prurience is the delight in seeing somebody’s garterfall to the floor, enjoying the humiliation and embarrassment thatfollows. Prurience is what leads the tabloids to build people up andthen tear them down; to turn a natural and desirable display of humanability and talent into a celebrity freak show.

I wonder when these changes reallybegan to take hold in our national life. Any complex phenomenon likethis clearly has many causes but, for want of a better symbol, Ithink of the Profumo scandal in 1963. Here there were at least somesignificant national interests at stake and yet we can see theprurient interests of the press emerging in all their smuttyboorishness. The deference and respect for a social order – whichis all that might protect those whose garters drop – is exploded bya ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’

Criminal behaviour has to beinvestigated, and that is the fig leaf behind which the press hasperpetrated their recent moral barbarities, but the fuel keepingthings going has been our own interest in scandal and gossip, our owninability to accept the exercise of authority by anyone who isn’t amoral paragon and saint. As our society used to be a Christian onethere was a general and tacit acceptance that ‘all have sinned andfallen short of the glory of God’. Whilst this did not excuseimmoral behaviour it did at least minimise the sense of scandal whensomething untoward happened, and it gave a realistic edge to thedesire to do better. What we have nowadays is a far more idealisticdelusion that we are in a position to cast the first stones at thelatest celebrities and politicians to find themselves in the stocksof public disgrace.

If we really believe that what the Newsof the World did – and indeed, what the rest of the journalisticprofession has been up to – is seriously morally wrong then we needto examine ourselves rather than simply enjoy the novelty of seeingjournalists get a rare come-uppance. We live in the society that wechoose for ourselves and it is possible to choose a different way oflife. It is possible to choose a society that shuns gossip andscapegoating, to not engage in a conversation geared around ‘didyou hear about…?’ and ‘isn’t it shocking…?’ To notpurchase the newspapers that profit from human misery, to turn offthe television shows that glamourise immorality. To not laugh whensomeone’s garter drops to the floor but instead to set our heartson things above.

UPDATE: have a read of this (h/t here)

Apologies and apologias

2011-07-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

This in an article that I wasn't goingto write. For some time I had been feeling unhappy about this columnand the arguments that it has generated, and I said to the Editorthat I wanted to stop. I felt that it was unconstructive and bringingthe church into disrepute. Not that being in disrepute is in itself abad thing for a Christian. Jesus is very explicit in warning thedisciples that they will become unpopular. The challenge is to makesure that you're unpopular for the right reasons not the wrong ones –and I felt that I had been failing.

A little bit of background might helpto explain things. When the Editor first asked me to start writingthis column I understood my commissioned task as being to write aboutnon-religious subjects (hence the articles about Peak Oil and so on).He then tasked me with writing about atheism, as there had been asimilar debate in the Tiptree paper which he wanted to foster here.As I'm someone who tries to say yes when I can, I went along with therequests. Sadly, whilst it has had the consequences that the Editorwanted, it hasn't had any of the consequences that I wanted!

In particular, it is quite shamefulthat the Rector in a parish has acquired a reputation for arrogance(the letter from two issues ago). That is not at all the sort of badreputation that Jesus had in mind (even if he was probably the rudestreligious teacher in history). My apologies for anything that I havewritten that has given that impression. I tried to be clear inseveral of my articles that I wasn't criticising all atheists, onlyone particular sort – but the sort of discriminating details thatare appropriate for knockabout debates in a university setting easilyget missed, and I would have benefited from taking more care with mywords. I AM very confident about the intellectual strength of theChristian faith but one of the marks of Christian truth is that themanner of speech cannot be separated from the content of the words.As one of my favourite Christian teachers put it: “Ofwhat use is it to discourse learnedly on the Trinity, if you lackhumility and therefore displease the Trinity?”(Thomas àKempis). I still have much to learn on that score.

I have now had a further conversationwith the Editor, and he's happy for me to write more broadly (so longas I don't simply regurgitate sermons). So I will have room to answeranother letter-writer who wanted to see another side of my character.Now that I'm free to talk in more simple and straightforward termsabout Christianity I'm hopeful that this column can be a morepositive force for good in our community, rather than simply yetanother source of contention, division and argument. There arealready too many of those.

So: an announcement of good intentions,but the proof will come over the coming months in terms of what Iwrite. Anyone interested in pursuing the atheism arguments can headfor my blog which is probably a much more appropriate venue for theknockabout stuff, and where there is time and space to tie down theknotty details. In the meantime, as a flavour of what I am reallyinterested in explaining and defending, here is the last verse ofwhat has become – despite one particularly controversial word in anearlier verse – one of my favourite hymns:

No guilt in life, no fear in death,this is the power of Christ in me.
From life's first cry to finalbreath Jesus commands my destiny.
No power of hell, no scheme ofman, could ever pluck me from His hand –
Til He returns or callsme home here in the power of Christ I stand. (Stuart Townend)

Seeking a good ending

2011-06-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

I'm coming to accept that this last sequence of articles about atheism and belief has run its course. I'm not sure that I can make my perspective much clearer, and just as clearly it isn't going to persuade my interlocutors. I tend to believe that such dialogues of the deaf are best undertaken by consenting adults in private rather than in the pages of a local newspaper. However, there is one element of J Thomson's last letter which is a good launch pad for what I want to talk about this week. As part of his assertion of possessing greater personal courage Thomson writes: “...there might well be no point to anything (or at least, no point that has an obvious significance for us). Others are quite happy with the idea that life may be no more than an inconsequential and infinitesimal interlude punctuating absolutely nothing for absolutely no reason.”

I wonder how far Thomson is willing to be consistent with this line of thought, as I have not yet met anyone who seriously believes in it as anything other than a momentarily useful rhetorical device. That is, if this perspective is genuinely accepted, then it means that no personal decisions have any inherent meaning, and no personal conversation has any inherent meaning, and therefore what Thomson is writing here has no inherent meaning. So there is no meaning in engaging with the discussion further.

The reason why I have not yet met anyone who genuinely believes there to be no meaning in our lives is because it is impossible to actually live in that way. Whenever a decision is made as to one choice being better than another choice – and we each make many such decisions on a daily basis – there is a tacit acceptance of meaning, for if there is no meaning then there is no 'better or worse' on which to ground any choice. As soon as it is accepted that decisions have to be made then we can talk about which decisions are better and which are worse, and then we are in the realm of meanings – which is a very short step from talking about faith and worship.

These sorts of questions tend to come to the forefront of people's minds in the context of death and bereavement. At the end of a life people instinctively ask questions about the meaning of life – what is it all about? What is it all for? And the different wisdom traditions could quite easily be classified according to their different answers to these questions. The Christian tradition would want to explore two lines of thought, taken from Jesus' summary of the two great commandments.

The first is 'how far did you love God'? This is not the same as asking 'did you attend church and sing hymns every week?' This is a question about the values that have informed a life – were your priorities in good order? In other words, did you recognise that the important things needed to be treated first, and the trivial things could be set aside? Or were you entangled in a thicket of distractions, allowing your great life's purpose to wither? There are many ways in which a positive answer to these questions can be expressed – as many as there are different people on the planet – but this is the question that comes first.

The second question is 'how far did you love your neighbour'? How far were you able to set aside all the inevitable distractions of selfish desire in order to serve other people? Jesus is quite clear that the division between sheep and goats will not be based upon the language used by people but about whether they clothed the naked, healed the sick or visited the indebted in prison. Compassion – the cultivation of which is largely in common across the different faiths – is at the heart of any positive answer to this question.

One of the core classical roles of a parish priest – in the days when clergy were actually enabled to act as a priest – was to enable people to make a 'good death'. What this involved was a sequence of conversations through which a person nearing death was enabled to tell the story of their lives in such a way that it was able to hold meaning, for them and for others. Where things had gone wrong then repentance, confession and absolution were the tools available to process them, in such a way that wounded memories were healed and a place of integrity could be found. In this way, death could be approached, not as a vision of terror but as an old familiar friend, the last and greatest gift of God's grace.

Of course, this might all be empty and meaningless, and such 'evidence' as I have for the truth of it (ignoring revelation) is anecdotal and not up to the pure and exalted standards of scientific experts. It is the experience of being alongside those facing the inevitability of death and being able in some small way to make that experience a meaningful one. Death is something that comes to us all in the end – but what we do now makes a difference, and it is possible to achieve a good ending.

I recently had a conversation with an academic researching the author of the great hymn 'Abide with Me', which is the most popular choice for funerals, and which is one of those rare hymns that can withstand sustained repetition in the singing. These are the last two verses, and I trust they make for a good ending to this article:

“I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” ( Henry F. Lyte )

Certainty, gullibility and belief

2011-06-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well, the editor of the Courier certainly seems to have achieved his aim of provoking a debate in the letters pages about the existence of God! Jane Mansell has taken me to task for accepting childish nonsense, implying that I am intellectually crippled if I, “as a grown man, [am] still prepared to believe in virgin births, resurrections from the dead and other so-called miracles”. There are two initial things I'd like to say in response, before moving on to the substantive issues.

The first is to question the notion that “It's about time that someone questioned the claims of the religious.” I may be misled, but as far as I can tell Christianity has been subject to sustained intellectual criticism in this country since at least the time of David Hume in the eighteenth century, and for various reasons, the success of that attack means that the 'default' position within society is to assume that Christianity has been proven false (and Jane Mansell expresses her agreement with that default position quite clearly).

The second point to make is to reiterate my language about atheism being 'intellectually crippled'. Not all atheisms are, only the ones that I would more precisely call 'Humourless', on which I have written previously, that is, those which can trace back their patterns of thinking to the very same David Hume, and who don't 'get the joke' when it comes to understanding the nature of a Christian perspective. (Cue the cheap reaction: the Rector thinks Christianity is a joke! Yes... very droll.) Humourless atheists accept an intellectual framework which means that the most important elements of human life – to do with wisdom and how we make good decisions – are closed off to their analysis. That seems to me to be a crippling – and it is a crippling which has had very significant practical consequences, not the least of which is leading us into the resource and environmental crisis that we are now having to endure (anyone checked their energy bills recently?). So I stand by that language.

At the risk of provoking more outrage, I want to share a quotation from my favourite philosopher, Wittgenstein. In his 'On Certainty' he writes “Very intelligent and well-educated people believe in the story of creation in the Bible, while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds of the latter are well known to the former.” The whole book is an investigation of how we are to justify our beliefs, indeed, whether that pursuit is a rational one or not. Clearly, given the language used, Jane Mansell does not believe that I might have any way in which to reconcile my Christian faith with the claims of reason. I wonder how far she is aware of the history of her perspective – that it derives from arguments put forward by John Locke in the seventeenth century which are themselves open to question? In other words, the idea that religious belief has to be rationally justified assumes certain things about what “reason” is capable of – and that if we come to a view that “reason” isn't capable of doing these things, a view now very widely shared by philosophers of all faiths and none – then the arguments used by John Locke no longer follow. The issue between the humourless atheists and the religious is not, in fact, one about whether Christian faith is intellectually respectable, it is about whether the humourless atheists have a leg to stand on in philosophical terms. The truth is that this battle was fought and won a generation ago; it just takes a long time for intellectual shifts to trickle down from the rarefied air of the academy into general conversation, or the letters pages of the Courier. Humourless atheists – and the most prominent example is, of course, Richard Dawkins – are simply slaves to a defunct philosophy, and for as long as they remain unaware of their own intellectual inheritance, they will simply continue to reproduce the 'memes' that have taken up residence in their brain (to use their own language). This is hardly 'resorting to philosophy to justify [my] dubious ideas'! I don't think that it is possible to rationally prove Christianity to be true; I do, however, think it is possible to show that Christianity is at least as rationally acceptable as any other coherent perspective (and I wouldn't count Humourless atheism as coherent).

The point about Christianity is not that it is the most rationally perfect perspective on life. That, in fact, is to subordinate faith to reason (what Locke argued for, and which is philosophically impossible). In truth, Christianity cannot be fully understood without talking about 'revelation' – which brings me to the last point that I would like to make in this column. Jane Mansell writes “It's well known that the Bible was written by men who never actually met Jesus.” Well, that's not true; or, to be more precise, that is an assertion which is highly dubious! For myself, I am quite happy to accept – having made some study of the relevant evidence – that the gospels are in fact what they were originally claimed to be: the 'memoirs of the apostles'. In particular, I would see the Gospel of Mark as being derived directly from St Peter's own testimony, and the gospels as a whole I would see as being stuffed full of 'eye-witness testimony'. This does not mean that they can be 'proven to be true' – but that is simply to perpetuate the philosophical mistakes of people like Locke, Hume and Dawkins. I believe that the writers of the gospels are being honest in recording what they have seen, and passing on what others have told them about what they have seen. I see them as being historically robust documents and, in the context of what was possible at the time – and using commonly accepted historical criteria – I think Christianity can have a very great deal of confidence in the historical reliability of what is reported. (I could say much more about this if people were interested).

There are strange things happening every day

2011-05-19T00:29:00.001-07:00

I found J Thomson's response to two of my articles here rather entertaining and rhetorically effective, albeit without much in the way of philosophical substance. However, as some of the most common tropes of the humourless atheist were wheeled out for inspection it may be worth giving one or two some patchouli-scented attention. (I don't know whether J Thomson is a Mr, Mrs or Ms, so I'll just use 'Thomson' for now, at the risk of sounding more rude than I intend to be).

For example – putting words in my mouth in an attempt, perhaps, to psychically channel what I'm thinking - Thomson writes “'Ridiculous' we hear him mutter, 'the book of Genesis has not been taken literally by serious theologians since the nineteenth century'.” What we have here is the idea that for most of Christian history, Christians have believed in the Bible in one way but, as a result of the wonders of science and the resultant political pressure, Christians have given up on their traditional way of understanding the Bible and now have to occupy some sort of non-literal and metaphorical understanding, which is all right if you like that sort of thing, but not what any serious thinker could ever respect. Which, presumably, is what Thomson believes to be my view. What then, to do with an argument such as this: “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.” That was St Augustine – a typical liberal of the Victorian era – writing on 'The Literal Interpretation of Genesis' in 415 AD. The truth is that the classical Christian intellectual tradition is much richer and more sophisticated than the humourless atheists would like to believe, principally because it is in the political interest of such atheists to preserve Christianity's position in the place of intellectual ridicule. Pointing out the historically impoverished nature of their perspective simply flushes out the emotional investments that atheists have in shielding themselves from the truth. Mr Pot, I'd like to introduce you to Mr Kettle.

More substantially in several places Thomson indicates the naïve view of science and vulgar conception of religious faith that is so characteristic of the humourless atheist – 'You need no more than a pinch of common sense, a dash of scepticism and a little independence of mind'. Independence of mind is indeed a wonderful thing, but that normally requires both self-knowledge and a knowledge of the subject under discussion – asserting opinion with brio and panache isn't really an adequate substitute (and let's put to one side Thomson's references to fideism – an understanding of Wittgenstein that was briefly fashionable in the 1960's, but refuting that might take us too far away from our main subject). Thomson asserts that 'hard-headed science' “has produced a perfectly credible and verifiable explanation of the universe and its origins” and that it “can produce a slew of proofs to show that [no] 'miracles' could possibly have occurred”. Well, science can do many interesting things, but it can do neither of those alleged wonders.

The first assertion – that science provides an adequate explanation of the universe – is a simple philosophical error called 'the genetic fallacy', which can be summed up as believing that you know the nature of something if you know where it has come from – as if, by knowing the parents, you know all that you need to know about the child. So in this case – let us assume for the sake of argument that present science has indeed reached a final causal account of the sequence of events between the Big Bang and today, and that no future Einstein or Newton will cause us to revise our understandings – even if we could fully understand those events it would still not amount to an 'explanation of the universe', and the idea that it might do so simply illuminates the materialist bias behind the assertion. If you give any value to the human elements of life, of love and purpose, of meaning and significance, then a causal explanation, however full, will always be insufficient. The what, and even the how, are not enough – for a full explanation we want to know the why also.

The second assertion is even more dubious, and can be refuted in several different ways – maybe in another column I will be more thorough – but I'll confine myself to one angle of response for now. Thomson is here assuming an understanding of miracles derived from Hume (yes, him again), but that understanding of miracles is not the classical Christian understanding of miracles (oh yes it is! Oh no it isn't!). Trust me, it's not. The most important element of a miracle is what it reveals about the actors involved in the process. In other words, when Jesus walks on the water or feeds the five thousand, this is a sign declaring something about Jesus' character and status. It is not about bending laws of nature or displaying power in a vulgar sense – that way of understanding miracles is entirely post-scientific in origin, and displays the preoccupations of the Enlightenment age which spawned it. Imagine an event which qualified as a miracle in any scientific way conceivable. Let us say: a man loses his legs in an industrial accident but then is taken to a television studio where a psychic says that he can enable the legs to grow back. There are more scientific instruments and recording devices present than you could shake the proverbial stick at, and the psychic proceeds to enable the legs to grow back. Everyone sees the legs grow back. There is total 'proof' that the legs have grown back – the man is now able to walk on them – but this is not a miracle in the Christian sense. This is an expression of power, and the proper response to such an event is to ask 'why?' and 'how?' It could turn out that there are aspects to the laws of physics that this event provokes scientists to uncover. Or it could turn out that it was an elaborate hoax.

The truth is that there are strange things happening every day, what is at issue on the question of miracles is not whether certain scientific rules apply or not, but the meaning of what happens. What distinguishes a miracle from the merely strange, improbable or monstrous is the question of religious significance, and that depends upon the entire outlook of the person viewing the event. This is why miracles cannot be produced on demand, and why they cannot be the foundation of a faith - the faith must come first.

To say of something that it is a miracle is not to say anything factual about it, it is to provoke a particular way of seeing it. A student once asked the Buddha, ‘How did you perceive the world before you were enlightened?’ The Buddha answered, ‘Before I was enlightened, when I looked at a mountain all I saw was a mountain, when I looked at a tree all I saw was a tree, when I looked at a stream all I saw was a stream’. ‘Ah!’ said the student, ‘Now that you are enlightened, what can you see now?’ The Buddha answered, ‘Now that I am enlightened, when I look at a mountain all I see is a mountain, when I look at a tree all I see is a tree, when I look at a stream all I see is a stream’. Which, of course, is just more New Age nonsense (2500 year old new age nonsense in this case).

Humourless and sophisticated atheisms

2011-05-19T00:28:00.001-07:00

In my last column I talked about what atheists and fundamentalists have in common over against what I see as traditional Christianity. I want to take some time in this article to spell out a difference between two sorts of atheism. One sort I have a great deal of respect for, one sort I definitely don't – and as I will be a little rude about the latter's lack of intellectual credibility I think I need to make the distinction clear, in case I cause needless offence (and it is the definition of a gentleman, according to my mother in law, that they do not cause needless offence).

For reasons that will become clear I want to call the first sort of atheist 'humourless', and the second 'sophisticated'. The first sort of atheist has a perspective which I would see as descending from the Scottish philosopher David Hume (although it has much deeper roots in Christian theology), and this tends to be the dominant form of atheist expression in our culture – as with Richard Dawkins. A classic expression of the attitude might be Hume's declaration about books: “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

This sort of atheism sees no value whatsoever in any religious perspective, considering it illusion at best - and a prop for the psychologically inadequate, evidence of neurosis, and fuel for sociopathic behaviour at worst. This is the sort of atheism that I see as aspect blind, in that there is an entire way of seeing the world which is cast away when religious perspectives are cast away. I see this form of atheism as, at best, ignorant of philosophical history (let alone theology) and intellectually crippled at worst. The crippling lies precisely in the way that the wisdom traditions of the different religions in the world become opaque to a humourless atheist, they become simply more or less variable manifestations of the human capacity for self-delusion. This crippling ties in with a particular attitude which tends to exalt science as being hard-headed and reasonable, a fit pursuit for strong and manly men; whereas religious flummery is suitable only for weak-willed women who crave emotional gruel to get them through their days. There is a clear historical genealogy for this perspective but, philosophically speaking, this position is not just inadequate it is manifestly inadequate. I don't believe that anyone who enquires into the matter, who is equipped with a modicum of good sense, compassion and open-mindedness, could now be persuaded of the rightness of this view.

So why am I calling it 'humourless'? Simply because it seems analogous to having a sense of humour. You either get the joke or you don't. You either get the sense of what a wisdom tradition can provide, or you think it's all meaningless gibberish. The image that best encapsulates the poverty of this perspective is, for me, a story about Wittgenstein (those who know me will not be surprised). In the 1920's Wittgenstein visited the Vienna Circle, who revered Wittgenstein's Tractatus as the apotheosis of the Humean perspective. Wittgenstein realised that the Circle had completely failed to 'get' what he was driving at (Wittgenstein being very much someone who had a 'religious point of view') and so he turned his chair around, so that he had his back to the circle, and then began reciting the poetry of Rabindranath Tagoreto them.

I must emphasise that this form of atheism, whilst common, is not at all the only form of atheism that is intellectually possible and so I want to describe a sophisticated form of atheism, and I'm calling it sophisticated not simply because it is intellectually flexible and creative but because it recognises wisdom – which is sophia in Greek (the word philosophy simply means a love of wisdom; I call the humourless perspective asophic because it is blind to wisdom). This sophisticated atheism can be distinguished from the humourless sort most clearly by a) a recognition of the need for a wisdom tradition in human life, and (most pertinently from my point of view) b) a willingness to consider seriously the teachings of the different wisdom traditions that exist in the world. They don't, therefore, see wisdom traditions as by definition meaningless.

Such a person may, for example, ponder the Christian tradition deeply, ponder the problem of evil even more deeply, and come to the considered view that the Christian intellectual tradition is inadequate to serve as a guide within the world today. Or they might ponder the historical narratives of the gospels, become persuaded that the resurrection simply didn't happen in any way related to what is described, and find that they simply cannot believe Christianity. They might therefore adopt one of various non-Christian perspectives, Buddhism perhaps, or a form of Stoicism. Such perspectives are demonstrably atheist, but they are also intellectually sophisticated and humanly rich; they aren't simply abstract philosophical structures but parameters within which a meaningful life can be pursued (the Philosopher A C Grayling has just published a 'Good Book' which attempts to gather some of this relevant material together).

Humourless atheism is essentially a parasitic exercise: it tends to focus on criticisms of one religious tradition (normally North American fundamentalist Christianity) rather than advancing any positive project of its own; it tends to rely on an inherited epistemology that places scientifically established truth at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge; and it displays no grasp of any theological tradition (whether that be Christian, Buddhist or any other). There are various arguments that get used repetitiously and, more often than not, a failure to actually listen to what is being claimed from a religious perspective. In particular I have often found that when I describe a theological perspective that doesn't fit with what is being criticised I am described as being 'modern' or 'liberal' which a) isn't true as my position is basically orthodox, eg I completely accept the resurrection, and b) serves only to reassure the humourless atheist in their prejudice that Christianity is intellectually defunct, and so cannot evolve in any way.

So, to sum up: humourless atheism is intellectually weak and humanly myopic whereas sophisticated atheism is well-informed, self-aware and rich with insight and possibility. Whenever I go on a rant about “atheism” - which I expect to do on a regular basis in this series - it will always be the former that I have in mind.

Advert: on two Saturdays in May I am doing some structured teaching on 'The New Atheists' and the philosophical background that I touch on in these columns. If any readers are interested in coming along, please send me an email and I can provide further details.

What the atheists and fundamentalists agree on

2011-03-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

In my last article I described the way in which I came to realise that Christianity was misrepresented by both its most vocal critics – like Richard Dawkins – and also by some of the most vocal defenders – like the fundamentalists. What I want to do this week is to describe what these two views have in common, and in particular how their views both differ from that of a traditional Christian.

So what do I mean by fundamentalism? Historically, the origin of this movement lies in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, and especially in a sequence of publications called 'The Fundamentals' that began in 1910. These were concerned to defend the Christian faith against what was seen as 'Modernism' – academic study of the Bible – which seemed to be destroying the principal claims of Christianity, especially those associated with the miraculous, such as the resurrection. Over against this Modernism, the Fundamentalists asserted the truth of certain propositions – such as the Virgin Birth, the truth of the miraculous accounts of Jesus and the literal truth of the Bible wherever it was presented as history. Present day fundamentalists adhere to this inheritance.

Now in what way does this attitude match up with that of Richard Dawkins, who quite clearly denies all those things that the Fundamentalist would assert? The key point is the idea that a scientific claim and a religious claim are the same sort of thing. If you look at the original Fundamentalist tracts you may be surprised to discover how insistent the writers were that their approach was scientific - “simply an attempt at a careful unbiased, systematic, through-going, inductive study and statement of Bible truth... The methods of modern science are applied to Bible study – thorough analysis followed by careful synthesis” said one prominent leader at the time. What this reveals is that science was implicitly seen as bearing the highest authority, that, put differently, the truths that matter most are scientific truths. Therefore, if the Bible was to matter, it had to be shown to be scientifically true. This is something that Dawkins would agree with: “around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since.” What is being debated here is the highest quality scientific explanation of our existence. For the Fundamentalist the Bible gives the best scientific explanation; for Dawkins it is the theory of evolution. From my point of view, both positions completely miss the point.

Why do I say this? I say this because I see science, however useful and fun it might be to pursue, as ultimately trivial. My favourite philosopher once wrote, in his first book “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” That is the perspective of traditional Christianity, which draws a distinction between matters of factual understanding which it called _scientia_ (what we now call science) and matters of human judgement which it called _sapientia_ (what we would call wisdom). Take, for example, the question of how we are going to generate enough energy to keep something like our civilisation going for the next several decades. The catastrophe at Fukushima has concentrated attention on the future of nuclear power – something of interest to Mersea people given the likelihood of another nuclear power station being built at Bradwell. Doubtless there are many scientists who could be brought forward to argue for one side or the other – one might say that, given the extremity of the situation at Fukushima, it actually proves to be a robust argument for the safety of a nuclear power station. Another might argue that the fact that we haven't worked out a way of solving long-term storage of nuclear waste, that nuclear power has never been economic and has always required government subsidies, and that it locks our society into a centralised and highly inefficient nationalised grid system means that we need to turn away from nuclear completely. Another scientist might then chip in with analysis of the alternatives, arguing that although nuclear has problems, the alternatives are worse – and so on and so forth.

My point is that to try and reach a decision about whether to have a new nuclear station at Bradwell does not rest upon questions of scientific fact. All the parties involved might come to an agreement on the science involved. We might come to agree on the level of power generated, what that would mean in terms of security of supply over the next few decades and everything else – but that would not mean that we would agree on whether to proceed with a new Bradwell or not. This is because the clash would be one of values, not one of fact. One person may view it as unacceptable to risk a release of radiation into the Blackwater, due to the risks against human and marine life (and the industries that depend on them). Another might view it as unacceptable to run the risk of having rolling blackouts in the 2020s because we didn't invest in new power generation, and this would have consequences for human life and industry as well.

The conflict, therefore, is not about questions of fact (science) but about how to weight those facts and decide which ones are more important and which ones are less important (wisdom – the discernment of values). We are facing a conflict of values, and where there are no shared values to draw upon then this conflict devolves into a simple power struggle, with the various parties involved using the “science” as a proxy for asserting their own perspective. This is the fractured world that we live in, where our society no longer holds to a common framework of understanding and we have become progressively less and less civilised.

This is the context within which to understand the nature of Christian faith. Christian faith is not first and foremost a claim about matters of scientific fact – although there are some factual implications of Christian faith. Christian faith is first and foremost a matter of seeking wisdom, that is, it is primarily a way of seeking to understand the world and to live within it in such a way that we enjoy abundant life. In short, Christianity – alongside the other major world faiths – is a wisdom tradition. It embodies an outlook on the world, it seeks to express and share certain values. It is not a collection of factual propositions – which is how both Dawkins and the Fundamentalists view it – it is a way of life that leads to life. I'll say more on this next time.

When I stopped being an atheist

2011-03-14T02:13:00.002-07:00

In order to describe when – and why – I stopped being an atheist, I need to first describe why I became an atheist in the first place. It happened at school when I was about 14 years old. I had been raised in what I would now describe as a classically Anglican household – belief in God was assumed, the Bible was occasionally referred to, and church was attended at Christmas and Easter and perhaps one or two other occasions during the year. So belief in God was a background to my life.

When I was 14 I became friends with someone that I would now describe as a fundamentalist, who had very strict and clear views about what was and what was not acceptable as Christian belief. One particular morning – if memory serves it was after a biology lesson – we ended up having a vigorous disagreement about Gandhi. Gandhi has always been one of my heroes; I look up to him as someone of tremendous spiritual stature who, in consequence, made a great and positive difference to both his people and the world more widely. I also believe he could teach many Christians about what it means to follow Christ's teaching – but more on that another time. My friend assured me that, because Gandhi did not accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Saviour, he was going to hell. This did not make any sense to me – it seemed profoundly unjust – and as I believed what my friend was telling me about Christianity I came to the conclusion that Christianity simply couldn't be true.

Filled with the zeal of the freshly converted I started to read a little more widely. One of the first things that I read was Richard Dawkins' “The Blind Watchmaker”, which was a very readable discussion of the theory of evolution – but structured as a critique of one argument for the existence of God. I was thoroughly convinced by this, and my atheism became militant. I delighted in developing better and better arguments with which to attack my Christian friends (that they stayed friendly with me is good evidence for the existence of miracles, but I digress...) This continued for several years, all the way through school and into University – not least because I chose to study Philosophy and Theology at University, as I wanted to get the best possible arguments to use against Christians. I had read several books – like 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' which referred to all sorts of ways in which the church had suppressed the truth down the ages, had banned alternative gospels and accounts of Jesus' life, that in fact Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene – all the things which Dan Brown eventually turned into 'The Da Vinci Code' in fact. These all seemed highly plausible to me, so I dived in to my studies eager to have all my prejudices reinforced.

What I was shocked to discover – and what a very patient and gentle tutor played an important role in getting me to understand – was that the form of Christianity that I had been rejecting for so long was not, in fact, the historical faith. It was a caricature. More than this, as I slowly began to understand what the historic faith actually claimed about Jesus it began to make more and more sense – and my previously fond attachment to the arguments of Richard Dawkins and the like started to seem very thin.

This came to a head in the summer of 1990, when I was at home reading a book on 'Green Christianity' written from a more-or-less fundamentalist perspective (those who know me will recognise that my interests haven't changed much in the last 20 years). I disagreed vehemently with the writer and argued 'But God isn't like that!' - and I then caught myself thinking that and realising that whilst I was still publicly atheist – my pride wouldn't have let me back down from my public position – I no longer believed in atheism. In fact, I realised that I loved God and always had. I had what is sometimes referred to as a 'Road to Damascus' moment, which was important and meaningful for me, but largely irrelevant to anyone else. A secular parallel might be something like Archimedes jumping out of his bath, shouting 'Eureka!' and running down the street naked, because he had finally found an answer to a problem that had been troubling him for a long time. I didn't quite do that (for which my neighbours were doubtless grateful) but my life did take a rather different course.

The most important conclusion that I reached was that Christianity – that is, the historic faith – was profoundly misunderstood in our society. The problem, however, wasn't so much that it was misunderstood – for then, a simple and patient process of explanation, as my tutor had undertaken with me, would have been enough to remedy the situation – rather, the problem was that both the most vocal critics of Christianity, like Dawkins, and some of the most vocal defenders of Christianity, like the fundamentalists, shared the same misunderstandings. This meant that what might seem to be a vigorous debate, which we might expect to get to the heart of the matter, in actual fact simply served to make the historic faith more and more obscured. The noise generated from each side drowned out the traditional voice. What I would like to do, over the next several articles, is explain this in more detail – and give, if I can, a traditional apology for Christianity.

On not being worried about global warming

2011-03-14T02:13:00.000-07:00

(images missing)

In this final article about the science hovering behind 'global warming' I want to explain why I don't find the doom-mongering all that convincing. Let me emphasise that there is a great deal of relevant science which I do not doubt – which I'm not qualified to doubt! - and this includes all the things mentioned in this picture:

Where I become 'sceptical' is with regard to the predictions being made, and this is on two grounds – the amount of carbon available to be burnt, and the dynamic nature of human society. Let me expand on those two things.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes forecasts every few years, giving their best estimate of the likely change in global temperature. The forecasts look like this:

The black line on the left is the observed historic temperature change, the different coloured lines on the right are the different scenarios generated by different ideas about what may happen in the future regarding our fossil fuel use, and how that use is then modelled by the IPCC's computers. The green and red lines are the ones that generate the most frightening forecasts, the orange line (the lowest one) shows what happens on the assumption that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere remains constant from 2007 onwards (which is what the campaigners are seeking).

What is often not brought out in discussions is the assumption about fossil fuel availability in a 'business as usual' case. That is, the IPCC assume that there is enough fossil fuel available to keep economic growth going, producing CO2, throughout the 21^st century. This I find extremely implausible – as do a good number of other researchers. Simply put, there aren't enough fossil fuels available – even on the most optimistic estimates – to generate those red and green lines. For example, coal extraction would have to increase by over 600% above current levels for this to be possible. As around 90% of coal comes from just six nations (US, China, India, Russia, South Africa and Australia) and we have good information on how much coal is available in half of them, we can know with a very great deal of certainty that it is impossible to reach the CO2 levels assumed in the IPCC reports.

The most detailed analysis of this has been done by Professor Dave Rutledge of the California Institute of Technology. This is his estimate of total carbon available, compared to that assumed by the IPCC:

Put simply, even if we burnt every last drop of oil, gasp of gas and crumb of coal available – we still won't generate enough carbon dioxide to justify the worst fears of the climate change campaigners. If we burn it all, the rise in temperature (from today) will be limited to around 0.7°C – which is well within the observed historical variation.

As it happens, I don't think that we will burn that much fossil fuel, and that brings me to perhaps the most fundamental point of all, which is that human society is very dynamic. Economists like to use a Latin phrase, when developing their models, “ceteris paribus” which means “other things being equal”. In other words, assuming that nothing else changes, this is likely to happen. The trouble is that in human life nothing else ever does remain the same. What Peak Oil and the associated other peaks in fossil fuel production has already started to do is change human behaviour. The rise in the oil price has forced people to economise, to change their purchasing priorities, to start to live their lives differently. Those industries which are built around cheap and easy to obtain fossil fuels are the ones that have begun to suffer, and will carry on suffering. Those industries which are adapted to a more expensive energy situation, or which provide alternative energies (solar, wind, geothermal etc) will do extremely well.

The thing is: 'the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones'. We have been through energy transitions in the past, and – my optimism emerging here – I think that we will survive this next energy transition as well, even though I expect the change to be very difficult, and very painful. We still have many choices to make, both domestically and internationally. If those choices are made wisely then a positive future is still possible for our children and grandchildren. If those choices are not made wisely then, frankly, we will be back to a Hobbesian vision of life:

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” (from Leviathan)

What counts as evidence for global warming?

2011-02-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you will all have seen the news of the cyclone that hit Queensland in Australia recently. The public services there need to be commended for their work as it would seem that loss of life has been minimised. Such events are often presented as being evidence of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) – that is, human caused climate change. What I want to do this week is to talk about what does count as evidence of AGW and, more importantly, what does not.

Even the most avid proponent of AGW would accept that no single weather event is attributable to all the carbon emissions that industrial civilisation has been putting out through the last few centuries. The argument, rather, is that over a long stretch of time, the chances of such events happening increase. Consider the tossing of a coin. Predicting the result of any one coin toss is impossible, but predicting the proportion of heads after a thousand tosses is much more achievable. This is the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' – predicting whether it will rain on Tuesday next week is hard, predicting how much rain will fall on average over the next year is much more achievable. So the argument that proponents of AGW are making is analagous to saying, because of what industrial civilisation has been doing, of the next thousand coin tosses, only 45% will turn up heads. It is not a prediction of what any one coin toss will turn out as – so not a prediction of any one single weather event – it is a question of the averaging over time.

That is a reasonably good argument, so far as it goes. However, what is missed by the proponents of AGW is something much more fundamental which is this: there are no weather events which count as evidence of AGW, even aggregated over time. Let me explain what I mean by this. The point at issue between proponents of AGW and those who are more sceptical is not about whether the global average temperature has increased since the middle of the nineteenth century. Whilst there are valid questions about the reliability of the temperature record it is generally accepted that the earth in the second half of the twentieth century was significantly warmer than the earth in the nineteenth century.

My point is that this warming, and all the associated evidence, such as changes in weather patterns, changes in locations of various fauna, changes in the migratory patterns of animals, the decline in the arctic ice cap and so on – none of this is evidence for AGW. To be precise it is evidence of the GW part – it is evidence that the globe is indeed warming – none of it is direct evidence for that warming being anthropogenic, human caused.

For this warming to be shown to be anthropogenic in origin we would need to establish what the global temperature would have been like without any carbon emissions – and that is difficult, because there is only one earth and we can't run different experiments upon it. More than this, we know from study of the earth's history that the earth has been through many cycles of warming and cooling without any human input whatsoever. Consider, for example, this graph of temperature changes in Greenland over the last ten thousand years or so:

Given the size of the swings in temperature seen here, compared with the size of the rise since the start of the industrial era, it is very much a debatable question how much of the rise in global temperature is down to carbon emissions, and how much is down to a natural swing. (This is, in fact, one of the key questions that climate scientists are investigating, and the honest ones admit that there is still a very great deal that is not known, most importantly relating to what is called the 'sensitivity' of the environment to carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases.)

So if evidence of a warming planet is not evidence of AGW, and if we also know that there is a lot of natural variation in global temperature irrespective of what humanity gets up to, does that mean that the hypothesis of AGW is just so much hot air? Not so fast. We do know some things with a fair degree of certainty. First, we know that the globe has been warming since around 1860 or so. Second, we know that industrial civilisation has been pumping out significant quantities of carbon dioxide. Third, we can be certain that carbon dioxide does have a warming effect in the atmosphere other things being equal (that last phrase being rather important, as climate science has not yet reached the point when all the different potential positive and negative feedbacks have been integrated into the models). I would argue, therefore, that the notion of AGW is, at the very least, a plausible hypothesis, with some supporting evidence. It is reasonable to accept that industrial civilisation is responsible for some degree of warming, the extent of which, and the implications of which, are at present known with significantly less certainty. That is why climate scientists have an important job to do, slowly beating down the ignorance in this field, and it helps no one if they start taking intellectual short-cuts in service of a political agenda.

Which brings me to the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose predictions will be the subject of my next article.

It's time for a Reformation in Climate Science

2011-02-17T08:51:00.001-08:00

Is anyone else a bit fed up with 'climate change'? There are many things that annoy me about the way that this area of scientific research is presented (and presented by the scientists themselves, I'm not blaming the press on this one) but I think the one that irritates the most is the imposition of an alleged consensus. “There is no argument anymore” or “these are incontrovertible scientific facts” - whenever these phrases are presented I get suspicious, and it makes me think of small children and the courtiers around the Emperor telling him how wonderful his fine new clothes are. As a general point, demonstrating that there is a consensus has some force as an argument. Even though, philosophically speaking it is an appeal to authority, and as such, it has no logical force (literally none!) and is irrelevant to truth, in human terms I see it as significant, and reasonable to take into account. The question is: is the child seeing something that everyone else can see when it is pointed out? Or is the child not seeing something because it requires education or maturity in order to see it?

When Luther nailed his theses to the church door, he was protesting against corruption in the church. The reason that his protest triggered the Reformation was because of two principal things: a widespread acceptance that the church was rotten, which undermined the support for the church from within, and the political situation in Germany which allowed Luther to gain practical support and shelter. I've always found it intriguing that the countries which ended up Roman Catholic were the countries where there was an existing realpolitik settlement with the Vatican in 1517.

Now some of you may recall a fuss at the end of 2009 about scientific research being carried out at a University in Norwich, the so-called 'Climategate' controversy (wouldn't it be good if journalists didn't have to append '-gate' to scandals?) I won't go into the details now, but the questions raised were about the current practice of that scientific investigation, most especially with regard to paleo-climatology and the weight given to certain alleged results in that field. The underlying issue was whether the current practice of peer-review was sufficient for establishing truth, or whether, in this particular case as an exemplar, the process of peer-review has been corrupted, allowing vested interests to control the flow of funding and research. In other words, that the alleged 'consensus' was simply a case of one group controlling who was allowed to speak with authority, in just the same way as the medieval church preserved the rhetoric of Christianity whilst collapsing into corruption and turning salvation into a cash-cow. Was the scientific establishment now colluding in the covering up of malpractice in order to keep the lines of funding open?

In the medieval era the priests were the embodiment of authority, with the ability to excommunicate all rebels. In the contemporary era scientific excommunication takes the form of withholding or withdrawing funding, and suppressing or refusing to publish dissident research. Just as priests had the capacity to bully, eg through the confessional, so too do present scientific authorities have the capacity to distort processes in their own interests, eg through blackballing particular researchers or boycotting or belittling particular publications that do not toe the line. This was what 'climategate' was about. As repeated by most of the participants, the actual truth of the science in dispute was in itself pretty marginal to the question of global warming as a whole. What it is not marginal to is the question of the legitimacy of the scientific establishment. A light has been shone into the inner workings, and just as the church tried to obscure the reasons for Luther's protests (called the Counter-Reformation) so too do the propagandists for the establishment say, either, 'move along now, nothing to see, everything is fine', or else, 'just a few bad apples, the rest of science is healthy and fine'.

Which brings me back to the question of the Emperor's New Clothes and how we are to argue about the science. Those who defend the scientists involved assume good faith on the part of that branch of the scientific community. If that good faith is held in question then there is nothing else to be done except to begin to investigate the points at issue. To say that this can only be done by the qualified scientists is to accept the closed circle of authority - it is the equivalent of the church saying 'trust us' to Luther (and this is exactly what the Parliamentary inquiries have done). That does not mean that everyone has equivalent authority – the Protestant error - what it means is that the only way to establish truth is for all the arguments and assumptions to be brought out into the open.

It is this which has most persuaded me that the climate science establishment is hiding something. The response of that establishment to questioning has been to close ranks and stonewall. What an outsider can do most effectively is raise up settled assumptions to the light. A genuinely scientific community will be able to defend those assumptions, or, if they are indefensible, be able to creatively renew itself by revising those assumptions. Although I am not a trained scientist, I am a trained philosopher, and what that training has given me is the ability to judge a good argument. In other words, it is beyond my capacity to assess, eg, the impact of cloud cover in climate models (it seems to this outsider that the modellers are still awaiting a Copernicus - the models seem like Ptolemaic systems about to collapse under the weight of their own complexity). It is not beyond my capacity to assess whether the relevant scientific community is engaging with the arguments that critics are raising. When I see evasion, equivocation, deception and the refusal to release information - in short, when I see science not treated as a holy endeavour, which is what it most essentially is - then red flags go up and I start to suspect that indulgences are being flogged to build a new St Peter's.

If this discussion about climate change was a purely abstract argument then the scientific community could be left to get on with it, and the necessary paradigm shifts can be allowed to happen on generational time-scales (which is normal – basically the opposition dies out). The difference is that the climate change thesis is highly politicised, not just in the vast funding being put towards it, but in prospect. It very much matters how much truth there is here – to put it bluntly, if we choose to close down our coal-powered electricity generation due to fears about the atmosphere, with the result that people die from cold – which will happen – then we need to be sure that it is for a good reason.

In the end, the best arguments will win - and the best arguments are those that expose themselves completely to the judgement of the community. They are the ones that allow little children to ask obvious questions, and run the risk of being found naked. They are not the ones that employ a vast retinue of retainers to suppress all dissent, and ostracise such small children from the conversation. Climate science needs a Martin Luther.

Get ready for the bumpy ride

2011-01-19T01:27:00.000-08:00

In this first article of 2011 I'd like to return to the topic that I began discussing in the very first of my articles last year: Peak Oil. Since those first articles, the reality of Peak Oil seems to have gained wider acceptance. Even the International Energy Agency – long a sceptic – has now officially stated, in their last annual report, that production of conventional oil peaked in 2006. So whilst there is still wriggle room to argue about the exact date of the peak – it wouldn't surprise me if there was one final uptick in production, if Saudi Arabia opens up all of their taps – to all intents and purposes we are currently at peak oil production.

So what does this mean in practice? When I first started to talk about Peak Oil around five years ago I used lots of graphs to describe what it meant – showing the rise in production in various fields, the inevitable 'peaking' of production, and the ensuing fall in output that takes place in every field (our North Sea fields peaked in 1999 and have been declining at about 7.5% ever since). However there was one graph that I used which, as time has gone on, seems to me to capture the most important elements of our present situation, and it is this one:

This is a graph produced by a man named Colin Campbell, and you can see when it was produced (late 2006). As you will remember, the price went up to $147 a barrel in 2008 – double the high point of the above graph! - before collapsing down to a low of $40. This is exactly what Campbell was predicting. It has now crept back up to around $90 and, if trends continue through this year on their present basis, I think (bold prediction coming) that we will again see an oil price spike in 2011. Demand from China and India continues to rise – they haven't been as affected by the recession as we have – and so I expect to see the price continue to rise until that high price again destroys demand – at which point the price of oil will come down again. The sad fact is that, even if we don't ever again see oil go past the $147 mark, that will simply be because oil at a lower price is still too expensive to use. (Paradoxically, however much we might resent it, we in the UK are somewhat cushioned from the effects of the rise in the oil price due to the high levels of tax that we pay on our petrol. In a sense, we have already absorbed the price rise.) The real trouble is that, in world terms, this constant spiking and crashing of the oil price will end up destroying the present basis of our economies.

I'd like to share with you an image, stolen shamelessly from one of my favourite books, which I hope will help you picture what is involved. This is an extract from 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert Pirsig: “In a motorcycle... precision isn't maintained for any romantic or perfectionist reasons. It's simply that the enormous forces of heat and explosive pressure inside this engine can only be controlled through the kind of precision these instruments give. When each explosion takes place it drives a connecting rod onto the crankshaft with a surface pressure of many tons per square inch. If the fit of the rod to the crankshaft is precise the explosion force will be transferred smoothly and the metal will be able to stand it. But if the fit is loose by a distance of only a few thousandths of an inch the force will be delivered suddenly, like a hammer blow, and the rod, bearing and crankshaft surface will soon be pounded flat, creating a noise which at first sounds like loose tappets. That's the reason I'm checking it now. If it is a loose rod and I try to make it to the mountains without an overhaul, it will soon get louder and louder until the rod tears itself free, slams into the spinning crankshaft and destroys the engine. Sometimes broken rods will pile right down through the crankcase and dump all the oil onto the road. All you can do then is start walking.”

What Pirsig is describing is the phenomenon of positive feedback – when something happens, which causes something else to happen, which causes the first thing to happen even more, and so on. It's the opposite of a thermostat (negative feedback) which, when the house is too cold, will put the heating on; when it is too hot, it turns the heating off. With positive feedback, when the house is too hot, more heating gets added on until fire breaks out and the house, or motorcycle engine, or world economy is destroyed. All we can do then is start walking.

Now it may well be that there are other elements in the worldwide economic system that will act to moderate this impact of a fluctuating oil price. I am hopeful that there is more resilience available than this simple model would suggest – but it will take time and a lot of pain before we get to that new equilibrium. It may be that, even if the motorcycle engine is destroyed, we can end up with a fully functioning bicycle – but I suspect it will be a very bumpy ride before we get there.

Some whys for Christmas traditions

2011-01-19T01:23:00.001-08:00

Our very 'traditional' Christmases are in fact a hodge-podge of practices that derive from all sorts of different times and cultures. Here are twelve 'whys' for pondering as you digest your Christmas dinner!

1. Why December 25th? Well there are lots of supposed explanations, one being that it coincided with the winter solstice (the shortest day) and therefore marked the time when the light was coming back, which was marked in Roman times by the feast of “Dies Natalis Soli Invictus” - the birthday of the Sun god, not an inappropriate feast to hijack for Christian purposes.

2. Why trees? This was originally a Northern German custom from the 16th Century which became customary in this country during the reign of Queen Victoria, especially after her marriage to Prince Albert. The wonderful trees in Trafalgar Square are a gift from the King of Norway, to perennially say thank you for our assistance to them during World War 2.

3. Why Santa Claus? Santa Claus is Saint Nicolas about whom the legend is told: there was a man with three daughters who was very poor, and without a dowry to enable them to be married, the daughters would live in penury and (probably) prostitution. Saint Nicolas decided to anonymously give each one a small bag of gold on the night before they 'came of age' – the first two times he succeeded anonymously, but on the third occasion the father wanted to thank his benefactor, so waited up. Saint Nicolas realised what was happening, so dropped the bag of gold down the chimney instead! (Of rather more reliable historicity is the fact that the real St Nicolas – a bishop of the church – once punched another bishop on the nose because of his great heresy!)

4. Why does Santa wear red and white? Simply because in the 1930's the Coca-Cola company decided to develop an advertising strategy featuring these colours!

5. Why are people 'dreaming of a white Christmas'? Despite how it may seem this winter, white Christmases are very rare in this country. However, when Charles Dickens was growing up, he experienced several before he was twelve years old. This was the memory on which he drew when writing 'A Christmas Carol' – which, as a result of its popularity, has dominated our mental conception of Christmas ever since.

6. Why do we sing carols? Because we enjoy them! Carols were originally a dance, which over time developed into a song, and they flourished especially in the high middle ages. The sourpusses of the Reformation tended to ban them (see next 'why') but they were reclaimed in the Victorian period and most of the carols we sing today stem from that time.

7. Why did Cromwell ban Christmas? The Puritans, including Cromwell, thought that feasting and revelry on a holy day were immoral. So by an Act of Parliament in 1647, celebrating Christmas in such 'pagan' fashion was prohibited. This was probably one of the main reasons why people wanted to bring back the monarchy!

8. Why does the monarch give a speech on Christmas Day afternoon? Well why not? This tradition began with George V using the radio in 1932, and has been continued by our Queen – except in 1969. I don't know why. When I was younger I thought it was the most boring event imaginable on what was quite an exciting day; these days I make a point of listening (even only on the web a few hours later!)

9. Why do we have Christmas crackers? Because they're fun. They were invented by a man named Thomas Smith in 1846 – initially they just had sweets inside, but then they had the 'bang' added, and the sweets were replaced by a gift or novelty.

10. Why are there 'twelve days of Christmas'? This is the gap between the birth of Jesus and the arrival of the three kings (called 'The Epiphany') with their presents of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Strictly speaking, we should only be singing Christmas carols after December 25th, and then throughout the next twelve days – but it would be a bit Cromwellian to enforce that! It does mean that it's quite OK to have articles about Christmas that come out after Christmas Day though...

11. Why do we eat a turkey on Christmas Day? This is actually a twentieth century innovation – the 'traditional' meat for Christmas was previously a goose – and is down to two factors: intensive farming of the birds making them affordable, and the influence of the United States.

12. Why do Christians celebrate Christmas? Because it is what we call 'the Incarnation' – the moment when the purpose of existence took shape as a vulnerable human baby, one destined for great pain and great love, and through whom we can now see the light. So Christians celebrate Christmas as the time when the darkness is driven back, and now we can see.

May you and all those whom you love have a marvellously happy Christmas.

The Truth shall set us free

2011-01-19T01:22:00.001-08:00

I have become very interested in the “wikileaks controversy” where an as yet unconfirmed source in the US downloaded and copied some 250,000 confidential 'cables', ie letters, sent through the US State Department. All this information has been shared with several newspapers around the world, in this country with The Guardian, and has enabled us to look into the diplomatic process in a new way.

Although some of the revelations wouldn't really count as a surprise – the Saudi government wants to see the United States 'decapitate' the Iranian regime, for example – some of the information shared has been disturbing. Who knew, for example, that we released the Lockerbie bomber to Libya because we were afraid of what Gaddafi's government would do? Apparently, the British Ambassador in Libya said to his US counterpart “that the consequences if Megrahi were to die in prison… would be harsh, immediate and not easily remedied… specific threats have included the immediate cessation of all UK commercial activity in Libya, a diminishment or severing of political ties, and demonstrations against official UK facilities”, in other words he was worried that Libya “could have cut us off at the knees”. When did the UK government become so afraid of what Libya might or might not do? What a sad state of affairs, and what a change to our response to the murder of Yvonne Fletcher back in 1984.

The point I want to make is a broader one than that, though – I'm very glad that we know this information. Here is something that David Cameron said back in February: “We understand that people want government to be more effective in what it does, and to do it for less money. That means transforming the way the state goes about its business, using decentralisation, accountability and transparency to reduce dramatically the cost of government. And because sunlight is the best disinfectant, we will bring the operation of government out into the open so that everyone can see whether we are delivering good value for money.” I think that he was sincere when he said that, and I agree with it. And that's a good thing isn't it? Perhaps then the scariest words in the English language will no longer be 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'.

This is, in fact, the motivation of Julian Assange, the somewhat beleaguered founder of wikileaks (held on bail in the UK at the time of writing). He has been very explicit in articulating his motivation in founding wikileaks – which will, of course, keep on going no matter what happens to Assange himself. His intention is to bring the workings of government into the light, in order to change the balance of power between the rulers and the ruled. His argument is that the restriction of information necessarily tends to make a government more authoritarian, whereas the free sharing of information necessarily makes the government more honest and more responsive.

Now obviously there are limits to this. There are in fact limits to the extent of all good things – any good thing can be taken so far that it becomes a toxic or evil thing (Christians call this turning something into an 'idol') – but I think that our danger is, by far, on the other side of the equation, that is, our several governments are far too secretive and closed off from the public for our good. After all, how many of you agree with the release of the Lockerbie bomber? Or, more seriously, how many agree with the West's strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan – a much more frightening situation which these leaks have shed light on: “Money alone will not solve the problem of Al Qaeda or the Taliban operating in Pakistan,” wrote the US Ambassador, “a grand bargain that promises development or military assistance in exchange for severing ties will be insufficient to wean Pakistan from policies that reflect accurately its most deep-seated fears.”

There is a spiritual truth here, which is often expressed in the truism that 'confession is good for the soul', or, in positive terms, 'the truth shall set you free'. So often we tie ourselves up in knots with a desire to, for example, protect ourselves from unpleasant truths – things which might change our perception of ourselves or damage our pride or self-respect. And we end up going to strenuous lengths trying to avoid the truth, laying pretence upon pretence, and avoidance upon avoidance, because we are afraid to confront those things which frighten us. The trouble is, nobody is deceived, not even ourselves. We know, deep down, what the truth is – if we didn't know, then we wouldn't be afraid of it. So all that happens when the truth is finally confronted is to achieve integrity, that is, we are no longer lying to ourselves. This can be awkward and embarrassing, but it is also liberating, freeing up an immense amount of energy – because keeping up the pretence is tremendously hard work. Honesty is by far the easiest path to take.

The trouble is – as these wikileaks revelations have shown – our governments don't really trust us to have a grown-up conversation about what is going on in the world. They do not share crucial information with us – in foreign affairs, as above, but also in terms of the resource crisis and our financial mess – and the result is to infantilise us: “There, there electorate, don't bother your pretty head about such things, leave it to the adults in the room.” Well I don't know about you, but I don't trust the “adults”, not least because they have made such an appalling mess of things. I sometimes wonder if the last leader to have a really honest conversation with the electorate in this country was Winston, when he said “We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering”. Would that we had a leader of such stature today.

Of Marginal Use

2010-12-09T02:59:00.000-08:00

Of marginal use

“If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito” - so said the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop chain. I've always loved that quotation, as it encapsulates a sense that, no matter how small or insignificant we might consider ourselves to be, what we do makes a difference.

We are faced with many stories about catastrophe – and, frankly, many of them are very well grounded. The list might include: climate change (although I might do an article some time about why I have some doubts about that one); peak oil – which even the International Energy Agency now admits happened in 2005; overpopulation; the depletion of topsoil, especially in the breadbaskets like the Mid-West United States; the rapid rise in water scarcity and water poverty, which doesn't just mean that people die of thirst, it means that there will be wars for water; overfishing internationally – and so on and so forth. Of course, those are just the environmental ones that I'm interested in – we could also consider the ongoing financial meltdown, now moving into phase two and sinking Greece and Ireland, soon to be followed by other countries and possibly (probably) the Euro and the US Dollar itself. Then there are the random factors like North Korea's attack on the South, and what will happen about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. What a lot to worry about! I think it's perfectly possible to look at the world today and quite soberly assess our chances of civilisational survival as less than 100%.

So what might we do about it? Clearly there is very little that we as individuals, or even our country as a whole, can do to prevent or even mitigate most of the problems. Does that mean that we should do nothing? Simply 'eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die'? Attractive though that might sound, I think it would be a mistake to give in to the temptation of despair, and I would like to explain why. To do so, I'm going to use an analogy from the field of economics; in particular, I would like to talk about what economists mean when they talk about something being of marginal impact.

Imagine that you have a factory that makes something, like the proverbial widget. To run your factory there are certain things that you need to pay for no matter how many widgets that you sell – for example, the rent for the factory itself, heating and lighting, insurance and so on. There are then some things that are a little more flexible – staff costs might be one, although it can be quite expensive to make people redundant. There are then some other costs that you can adjust at will – for example, the raw materials that go into making a particular widget, which you can purchase more of according to demand. The first sorts of costs are called fixed costs, the latter are marginal costs. This fundamentally affects how a business can be made profitable or not. For example, it may be that, for this particular widget-maker, 50,000 widgets need to be sold to cover the fixed cost of the factory, a further 20,000 widgets sold bring the factory to the break-even point, and every widget sold after that – assuming in this example that the raw materials make up 10% of the cost – returns a 90% profit. So if this business is able to sell 80,000 widgets then they are doing very well. But now imagine that the business hits a recession, and can only sell 69,000 widgets – 1,000 short of the break-even point. Selling 1,000 widgets – not even 2% of total sales – makes the difference between the business surviving and the business going under. And if you are the customer who is only looking to buy 1,000 widgets, your custom will make the difference – it will be a marginal difference, but it will be all the difference in the world to the person running the business.

When faced with a recession, sales in most businesses decline, which reduces profitability and puts a lot of pressure on meeting the fixed costs and overheads of the business. Which is where those businesses with deep pockets have a particular advantage, as they can sustain losses for a longer period of time (possibly driving competitors out of business). They might also benefit from being able to make better deals in the first place. Imagine that you are someone who buys a lot of widgets – say 50,000 a year. You might be able to go to our hypothetical factory owner and drive a hard bargain, because the factory owner knows that, so long as the price of those 50,000 widgets covers the fixed costs of his factory, it is in his interest to get that trade even without making any profit, as it makes it more possible to then make a profit on later sales.

Let's leave the widgets behind for a second, and bring the focus back to more local considerations. As you can guess, I have certain particular large companies in mind. It might feel as if, making a decision to shop in one place rather than another doesn't matter very much. After all, what difference does it make? Actually, it might make all the difference in the world – that extra trade which you can bring to a shop might only have a marginal impact – but that marginal impact is what makes the difference between the shop surviving or going under – and therefore a difference to local employment and the overall, health, wealth and happiness of the community within which you live. It matters where we shop – and from a Christian point of view, it matters a great deal more than those things about which church people so often get hot and bothered about (and that's yet another article for the future).

But I wanted to make a broader point than simply to repeat my rants about certain particular large companies. When faced with that long litany of disasters and potential disasters, it can be very dispiriting and we might think that nothing that we do can make a difference. Yet the same principle applies to saving the planet as applies to saving our local shops and trades. Sometimes it is the smallest decisions that have the greatest consequences, sometimes one loose stone is what causes the avalanche, sometimes it's the beating of a butterfly's wings in Beijing that cause the storm over the Amazon – et cetera. This is a point that we all know to be true.

In other words, our decisions may seem marginal – of small account – but they are, nonetheless, of tremendous importance – and this coming festive season those choices will be even more important than usual. The choice is between spending our lives being part of the problem or spending them being part of the solution; so let's spend our time and wealth wisely.

Dark caves and dark waters: struggling with the Satan

2010-11-17T07:50:00.002-08:00

Who or what is the devil? After all, hovering behind concerns with astrology or spiritualism lies the fear that, in the end, they will lead you into the darkest waters of all. In this final article in the sequence I want to set out how Christians understand this area, and why it is important.

In his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul writes “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” (Eph 6.12, NLT) When Christians talk about the devil, we are not talking about the classic medieval image of a red-skinned half-goat figure with horns and a tail. We are talking about particular ways of living and behaving that tend to destroy life, and we see those ways of living and behaving as having a particular logic and integrity that can be said to derive from an ill-will – which we call the Devil, or, more precisely, the Satan. So what exactly does that all mean?

Well, let's begin by considering the equator. Does the equator exist? It certainly makes a difference to how a great many people carry out their lives and decisions, eg those responsible for navigating at sea. Yet you couldn't go anywhere on earth and point to something and say 'that is the equator'. It is a concept, but a concept that has significant practical consequences. Similarly, does the government exist? We might wish that it didn't, but when we see the taxes taken out of our salaries each month we know that they go somewhere. There is no single place or object to which we can point and say 'that is the government' (Parliament? No 10? Council Hall in Colchester?). Again, 'the government' is an abstraction, a concept – but it is one that has a very great deal of influence on how people choose to live and die. Even though such things like the equator and the government are not 'flesh and blood' – that is, they are not discernible to empirically based science, they are human conventions – they are very real all the same.

We can best start to understand the Satan in an analogous fashion to this. The word 'Satan' simply comes from the Hebrew meaning 'the accuser' and can best be understood as akin to a prosecuting counsel in a law court. The Satan is the one who accuses, who points the finger, who says 'you are to blame', the one who will trap you into making a mistake and revealing all the things that you have done wrong. So to talk about the Satan is to talk about all the ways in which human behaviour can be warped and corrupted by the desire to point the finger and assign blame, eg 'it's all his fault!' Most often, this tendency focusses in upon one particular person or group which takes the blame for all the problems being suffered by the majority, and the majority then persecute the minority group or person as a way of preserving their own sense of identity. This is called 'scapegoating' and the most obvious example is what happened to the Jews in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's. Again, this may seem abstract but it is something that has very real consequences.

Notice that the Satan has no power except through influence – not being a creature of flesh and blood the only way in which Satan can exercise that influence is by inciting human beings to act in certain ways. This is why one of the classic titles for Satan in Christian thinking is 'the father of lies' (John 8.44) – for spreading lies and gossiping is the principal way in which the devil does his work (hence the frequent prohibitions on gossip in Scripture – it is an 'abomination'). Another classic title for the Satan is 'prince of this world' (eg John 14.30), by which is meant the idea that the Satan is the ruler of worldly values, ie public opinion or social respect. To link back to scapegoating, the dynamic that drives scapegoating is the granting or removing of social respect: ostracism is the first step on the path to murder (hence Matthew 5.22). So, with the Jews in Nazi Germany, the process that ended up in Auschwitz began with things like segregating out the Jewish population by requiring the wearing of yellow stars; the propaganda that blamed the Jews for everything that had gone wrong in German life at that point; and the progressive legalised discrimination against the Jewish population. The Jews were first blamed, then isolated, and then destroyed. When Christians talk about the Satan, this is what we are talking about.

To be a Christian is to forswear the desire for public respect and social acceptability, for 'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?' One of the most essential things to understand about Jesus is that he was rejected by the world (the crucifixion) yet vindicated by God (the resurrection). In other words, to be orthodox, to walk with faith, is to set no store by all the powers that might crucify us, the engines of public opinion which might end up scapegoating us, and to not be afraid of them; rather, it is to trust in God's ultimate judgement and vindication. In other words, when struggling with the Satan, the one sure remedy against lies and calumny is to sing that Jesus Christ is risen, and that there is no need to be afraid. The truth is, in the end, that it is not doubt that is the enemy of faith (they are in fact Siamese twins) but fear – and it is fear that provides the fuel for the Satan, most especially fear of what people might do to us if we were no longer approved of.

To live without fear, to not engage in gossip, to be committed to the path of truth and peace – this is what it is to struggle with the Satan. It is not a simple or straightforward task, it is not a broad and easy way, but it does lead to the only life worth living: to the streams of living water, not the dark caves and dark waters within which we would otherwise drown.

Dark caves and dark waters: mediums and spiritualism

2010-11-17T07:50:00.000-08:00

I think the first question that I would want to ask on this topic is: if we were genuinely communicating with the dead, why is what they say so boring? After all, if you were able to communicate from the other side, wouldn't you want to say something profound to the world, rather than tell Aunt Nelly where she left the house keys? Mediums and spiritualism – psychic “channelling” and séances – seem to have never been more popular, and yet the problems and dangers inherent in the practice have never gone away.

As with last issue's column about astrology, I don't want to spend too much time arguing here about the “science”. I'm quite happy to accept that a) there are some very strange things that happen in our world, and that b) our present state of scientific knowledge is not the last word on the subject (any subject!). It's also true that Scripture contains one account of a medium summoning a dead spirit to be talked to (Saul and the Witch of Endor – though how to interpret that passage, is, of course, a very interesting conversation). What I want to explore is the motivation for pursuing this sort of 'direct contact' with the dead, and touch on the very real hazards that are associated with it.

Death, especially when a death is sudden and tragic, is not something that we can ever be comfortable with. We do not understand it. It is a mystery, representing the end of all that we know. It is a challenge to us, it unsettles us and disturbs us; it shakes the foundations that we have built our lives upon. To be bereaved, to have a loved one torn away from us, is to be shattered, to have our hearts bruised, our emotions stirred up. We are left like a plate broken on the kitchen floor. We can see what we once were, but there is no longer any way back to what we used to be.

Seeking to overcome the barrier of death through our own efforts is a desire to break out of the limits within which human life is lived, it is a desire to put things back to the way that they were. It is not an action that proceeds from a quietness of soul, or a settled spirituality. In my experience, those who become involved with such activities are either idly curious – and who soon move on to the next stimulus for their jaded appetites once they have had their evening's entertainment – or else they are themselves vulnerable and fragile, and ripe for exploitation. I have seen many examples where someone who is vulnerable becomes involved with a medium and who subsequently collapses into what the medical profession tends to call 'mental illness' – something which, I would argue, is just as often an entirely spiritual condition needing spiritual remedies (not spiritualist remedies). It is because these questions engage us at our deepest levels, and they raise the most basic questions about the meanings of our lives, that we can find our sense of identity crumbling. In such a situation, the importance of right teaching and wise guidance cannot be overemphasised.

There is one sign that can robustly tell whether exploitation is taking place or not, and which should be a very clear warning to anyone concerned with their long term sanity to keep well clear – and that is whether money changes hands. There are such things as spiritual gifts – the atheistically minded are welcome to describe them as 'highly developed intuition' or some such – but the majority of us who are religious can hold on to the traditional language. The difference between the healthy use of spiritual gifts, and the exploitational and damaging use of such gifts, is whether they have been handed over to God – that is, are they being used in a spirit of service, or are they being used for self-aggrandisement and personal advancement? The payment of money is a clear signal between the two. If someone is acting out of love then no money will change hands; if someone has a different motive, then mercenary factors enter in.

In the face of death, when we are bereaved, it is understandable to seek some sort of immediate reassurance, to have some sort of hope given that death is not the end, that one day we will meet again with our loved ones. In many ways, this is a need that Christianity directly answers – after all, Christianity was born when Jesus rose again from the dead, and the shockwaves from that event are still rolling around our world. The resurrection functions for Christians as the single promise necessary – that death does not have the last word, that we don't need to be afraid of the bad guys, that loving someone is worth it. Christians are encouraged to remember their loved ones before God – and we have a special festival each year that concentrates on just this, when we light a candle to remember our dear departed – The Feast of All Souls, this year on Sunday October 31st at 6.30pm, to which all are invited.

The difference between Christianity and spiritualism, however, is that for Christians the resurrection is enough. What is important now is how to live day by day. We have been given sufficient information to go on – now the issue is how far we trust and believe in what we have been told. Spiritualism, in contrast to this, seems seem to be motivated by a basic lack of trust, a fear of loss and failure – a desire to hold on to something that is no longer present. Fundamentally, actions and thoughts that proceed from fear and a lack of trust can only lead to further suffering. I feel like I'm channelling Yoda here: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering...” - but then, I believe in quoting the truth wherever I find it.

Next time: who or what is the devil?

Dark caves and dark waters: astrology

2010-10-14T02:28:00.001-07:00

In the days of my dissolute youth, when I was an aggressively atheist teenager, I spent a lot of time exploring the occult. I often muse upon Kahlil Gibran's words from the Prophet, which I think describe that time in my life quite well:

"Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters."

I would like, over the next few articles to say a few things about the occult, and why it counts as 'dark caves and dark waters', starting this week with astrology.

[Let me begin by quickly touching on two areas of concern: Scriptural and scientific. Scripture seems to me to be ambiguous about astrology. On the one hand there are clear prohibitions against divination in both Old and New Testaments; on the other hand the great story which we celebrate at Christmas unambiguously has wise men being led to Christ by their astrological learning. Beyond that, passages like Ezekiel 1 are clearly informed by the Babylonian culture from which present day astrology derives, and the four beasts correspond to the four fixed signs of the zodiac - as do the four signs traditionally given to the four evangelists. As I say, an ambiguous picture.

With regard to science I am well aware of all the arguments adduced on both sides of the debate - the Dawkins-esque dismissals and the statistical work of Michel Gauquelin, and my feeling is that this is a no-man's land, blasted to smithereens, where no intelligent discernment is possible. I suspect that horoscopes may function as a type of Rorschach test and simply dig out material from our own unconscious, ie there is nothing external to the personality involved.

However, I don't really want to get involved in those two debates.] What I want to explore is why I think exploring astrological lore is at best unhelpful to our spiritual journey, and at worse actively malefic and harmful. My concerns centre on two things: motive and trust.

For me, the thirst driving the exploration of astrology was a thirst for knowledge. I wanted to know what fate had in store for me. More subtly, and more defensibly, I used astrology as a means to greater self-knowledge. Whatever the objective truth of the situation - and whether it was simply coincidence or not - discovering the meaning of the various elements in my own chart was very helpful in allowing me to come to terms with the different bits of my personality.

However, my thirst for knowledge wasn't satisfied by self-knowledge, I wanted to know about other people, and I wanted to know about the world - about what was going to happen to it, what was going to happen to the people I loved. This is where the dangerous side of astrology started to become clear to me. To begin with my experience was that nothing could be predicted, and I understood this to be simply a reflection of my own lack of expertise. So I studied and delved all the more deeply.

God's grace being what it is, however, I came to a realisation soon after turning thirty that the problem did not lie in my lack of expertise so much as in my motivation. That is, what was driving me was rooted in spiritual ill-health, principally fear and greed. I was afraid of bad things happening to me; I wanted to be in control of my life; I wanted to get a comparative advantage over those without this occult knowledge. I came to realise that all these motivations are antithetical to Christian faith; that in truth Christian faith is precisely the dissolving of such motivations.

That discovery is what removed my motivation to explore astrology any more. What is at issue is whether we trust God or not; in particular, whether we trust God to lead us in our daily lives. If, for example, we pray, and we seek the light of Christ, and we trust that we will be shown what to do - then what need is there for this further knowledge that astrology claims to provide?

My belief is that Christian understandings are always predicated on love - that a situation, and most especially a person, can only be known when they are loved; that love is the highest form of knowledge. This will, from a human point of view, always involve risk, putting something at stake. It cannot be fostered from a position of safety, for that is isolation from the other – whereas love is an engagement with the other. Christians are called to walk with faith - to trust that the Lord will enlighten our path, that we will be led forward in the way, even if only one step at a time - and, most profoundly of all, the path of faith is precisely the path of trusting in what may come, trusting that God is in charge and that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. The conclusion I reached was that astrology violates that approach and attitude - it is a snare of anti-faith and an inhibition of love - and that this is why divination is prohibited in such strong terms in Scripture. It's not a question of knowledge, it's not a question of whether astrology is 'true' or not - that's beside the point from this perspective - it's a question of who or what we put our trust in. The thirst that drove me into the occult has found a living stream from which to drink, and now I simply want to learn how to love.

Next time: spiritualism, mediums and “talking to the dead”.

What do I mean when I talk about God?

2010-09-30T02:48:00.000-07:00

It's a fair question - after all, I am employed to talk about God and I'm sure many on Mersea would consider it nonsense. Let me begin by quoting from my favourite philosopher:

'I should like to say that ... the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of *certain particular* words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer... It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to say it. Practice gives the words their sense'. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, from 'Culture and Value', in remarks dated 1950.)

So what do I mean when I talk about 'God'? It's a troublesome word. It's normally (that is, normally in non-Christian circles, and even in some that are Christian) understood to refer to a being, of supernatural origin, who acts and intervenes in the world. The God I believe in is not a being - because he is not a anything. God is not the member of a class - any class. So is the word 'God' a metaphor? Of course. We cannot capture God in our language; all attempts ultimately fail; and yet the attempt is edifying and enlarging. It is like climbing a ladder. In order to climb, one must first place all one's weight upon a particular step, but to progress, one must abandon it completely.

(I have found it very difficult to get atheists to understand that point. That could be because they have much invested in the concept of God remaining ridiculous.)

So what do I mean when I talk about 'God'? Several things, in no particular order other than the order I've thought of them.

Firstly I have a sense - I guess most people have a sense - of when I have started down a wrong path; or, conversely, when I am pursuing a right path. This could be compared to the physical sense of balance; or, an image I've used elsewhere, it is like the 'tilt' mechanism on a pinball machine. I will sometimes use the word God to refer to that which is calling me into balance, or warning me against being off balance.

Related to this is the sense of vocation, that is, that I am on a path with a particular destination, and that I am being led along this path from moment to moment. I will talk about God in this context, as that which is illuminating my next steps - a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path. In this sense God is a lure - an active and intentional agent drawing me forwards.

This broadens out into something about intimacy and concern. The creativity and desire which is drawing me forward is personal; that is, I relate to it as I would to a person. I don't normally have a conversation - not in the sense that I would have a conversation with another human being - but that I am communicated with is undeniable to me. Indeed, it's routine, it's a large part of my prayer life, listening to what God might have to say to me.

Sometimes I have visions. I distinguish these from daydreams and the routine permutations of my imagination by the sense of seriousness and conviction with which they seize me (not all are equally serious). When this happens I take these to be particular and specific messages from God (and yes, I'm aware that this makes me sound like a loon).

Another aspect to this is to do with truth. There was an occasion recently when I realised that I was not speaking the truth (that is, I was not persuaded of something that I was arguing for). I was not IN the truth. When I reflect on a situation like this then the distinction between one set of attitudes, beliefs and propositions and another set is very strong, and one set will seem much more attractive and luminous. I will use the word God to talk about the difference between them. Most frequently this will involve some sort of personal interrogation about motives, and the process of illumination will often disinter some sort of personal hurt or bad habit or vice which is preventing me from living in, and listening to, the truth. In other words, discerning the truth is a spiritual task, and this is one of the most important ways in which God makes himself clear to me. Crucially, all that I refer to when I talk about God is independent of my own conscious will and desiring.

Finally, I would want to talk about God in the external world, as an agent in the world. God is not an agent like other agents, however; not a cause alongside other causes. Rather, God is the precondition for all things that are held in being. When I see God at work in the world what I am really saying is that here my eyesight has been clarified; I'm not saying anything all that specific about God. God does not specially 'intervene', for God is always present. What changes is in me.

Now, to gather some of these strands together, I would want to talk about that which is intimately involved in my life leading me forward into truth and life and integrity and full human flourishing - and with which I can communicate in a personal way. That's what I mean when I talk about God. Yet there is one thing more. In the same way that as you walk into the light it becomes more possible to see, so too as I have slowly walked into the light of God, I have been more able - ever so slowly - to discern what God looks like. He looks like this:

Defending Auntie

2010-09-30T02:46:00.001-07:00

This week, an interruption to the regular programming about the collapse of Western Civilisation. I want to say something about the BBC, which is coming under some pressure from the new government. The themes that this argument highlights are very much at the heart of what I have been trying to cover in these Courier articles over the last few months: difficult circumstances leading to hard choices, and those hard choices revealing our core values. Put simply, I think the BBC, for all its faults, represents something that is worth conserving, and I worry that we would only properly appreciate it if it was gone.

Clearly the government is seeking to enforce financial austerity, and there is no reason why this should exclude the BBC via the level of the license fee. However, hovering behind that defensible argument is a suspicion of close links between Number 10 Downing Street and the offices of Rupert Murdoch. It may no longer be true (if it ever was) that 'It's the Sun wot won it' but it is undoubtedly true that Murdoch has a very significant presence in the British media, in newspapers, television and book publishing – indeed, the extent of the control by one company (indeed, one non-citizen) in our country would be considered excessive and grounds for anti-monopoly action in other countries. (To get a sense of the scale, consider the fact that Sky spends more on marketing than ITV spends on making programmes.) The trouble is that this excessive influence has become deeply rooted, and it is difficult to blame a politician for dealing with present-day realities and seeking to foster positive relationships with the media behemoth.

Make no mistake, the Murdoch machine has the BBC in its sights. Last year, Lachlan Murdoch – Rupert's son and heir apparent – gave a lecture in Edinburgh which argued “There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.” In other words, if we trim away the fat of circumlocutions in the rest of his speech, here Murdoch is articulating his faith in the free market as the source of 'a better society'. This is an example of what, in a previous column, I defined as idolatry – making something to be more important than it is. The free market, whatever virtues it may embody (and it does embody some) is not a panacea to solve social problems. Indeed, our time is seeing the collapse of free market nostrums simply because the underlying social problems were not addressed, eg the absence of honesty and prudence and other virtues on the part of senior bankers.

The BBC, on the other hand, is a throwback. It is a corporation – not a charity, not a company, not even a co-operative – and it has very explicitly to work towards good social ends. The charter of the BBC was renewed in 2006 and now states that the BBC has as its public purposes, inter alia:
Sustaining citizenship and civil society;
Promoting education and learning;
Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence.
These count as principal purposes of the corporation, in other words the BBC has explicitly to work towards particular values, values which are very necessary for a healthy society. In contrast, the principal purposes of a public company are to maximise value for shareholders. That might conceivably involve attention to similar aims as the BBC, but if ever there is a conflict then the need to give value to shareholders will win out. (This is the logic that leads companies to do things like cutting back on safety in order to save money – a risk that pays off until the one day that it doesn't, see BP in the Gulf of Mexico for the latest example.)
I find it baffling that a supposedly conservative government is even thinking about supporting the Murdoch line in this struggle. Conservatism as a political philosophy was born out of a reaction to the French Revolution – that period of time when people were caught up with great enthusiasm for particular ideas, and which ended up in the Terror and the queues at the guillotine. A Conservative perspective tends to scepticism towards "good ideas", and prefers the tried and tested institutions. More fundamentally, it means a great deal of admiration for Burke's 'little platoons', ie the local institutions and voluntary societies which provide the humus within which a full humanity can grow.

Such a vision of human society depends to a very great extent on the ability of civil society to regulate human conduct, ie the development of social virtues, and for this it looks to support the family (and the church) for here is where the social regulation of human behaviour is established. I believe it also supports a tried and tested institution like the BBC – not uncritically, but loyally, and with a recognition of the distinctive and positive part that Auntie plays in our national life.

Of multipliers and Mersea

2010-09-02T02:02:00.001-07:00

There once was a man who went to a hotel in a foreign country, a country that was significantly less well off than his own. For various reasons, that need not detain us, he paid for his room in cash, up front. The manager of the hotel was delighted! As soon as the man was comfortably ensconced in his room, the manager took the cash and ran round the corner of the street to the local butcher, to whom was owed a similar sum for supplying the hotel restaurant. The butcher was delighted with the settling of his bill! He, of course, owed some money to the local tailor, who had recently provided the butcher with a new set of white aprons for all of the staff there, and the tailor, in turn, was delighted to have his bill settled – not least because he owed the hotel manager for providing a room for his mother-in-law when she turned up for a surprise visit two weeks previously, and so he trotted round to see the hotel manager to settle his bill. Which was providential, on the whole, because the original man who had come to stay at the hotel had received an urgent message from his company in his home country urging him to return home with all good speed, and came down to claim back his hotel fee before departure...

An apocryphal tale, but one that conveys an important truth. It describes what economists call the multiplier effect, which is, simply put, that a given quantity of money can do much more for an economy than simply be spent a single time. One transaction can lead to another transaction, and this multiplies the effect of the original cash – so, in the example above, the original cash came from the man using the hotel, but it didn't just help out the hotel manager, it also helped out the butcher and tailor as well. It is important to keep money circulating in an economy. If the amount of money circulating starts to decline then it has a disproportionate impact upon the overall level of wealth in that economy – that is what deflation is, a reduction in the quantity of money in circulation, leading to a haemorrhaging of overall wealth.

In my last two columns I have been talking about civilisational collapse, which can be understood as a reduction in complexity. I want to begin looking in more detail at what that larger, more abstract discussion might mean for our own local area, and what we might be able to do to mitigate some of the worst effects.

I'm sure many of you will be aware of the increase in the costs of energy that have come about over the last few years; we only need to look at our quarterly bills for proof. When someone on Mersea pays for their energy, eg heating oil, that amount of money leaves the local economy of Mersea. As the cost of energy rises, the proportion of the amount of money circulating on Mersea starts to shrink – and this has a depressing effect on Mersea's own economy. (I'm aware of massively simplifying things here, of course, but the broad point stands.) What is, at present, a marginal effect, and one which is offset by the amount of money earned by Mersea residents who work elsewhere, will become a more severe problem over time, as the cost of energy continues to increase, and the availability of jobs also diminishes.

So what might be done about it? Well, go back to my original story. Here is an input into the local economy from a visitor, and that input is then allowed to circulate around the local economy, benefitting several members of that economy, before being returned to the original visitor and allowed to leave. In other words, slowing down the movement of money out of the local economy significantly strengthens that local economy and enables it to withstand external shocks like sudden increases in the cost of energy.

So how might this be done? Put simply, having a local currency, one which is restricted in use to Mersea shops, would act as a 'brake' on the use of that currency and encourage it to be circulated in Mersea to the fullest extent possible, preserving wealth and livelihoods on the island, before heading elsewhere. This is not a novel idea – it was used in the 1930's to great effect in some communities – and it is starting to be used again in this country. For example, last month the Prince of Wales visited Brixton and spent some 'Brixton Pounds' at the local market there. The most fully developed local currency in the UK at the moment is probably the Totnes Pound (where Transition Town originated) and more information on that can be found here: http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/totnespound/home

The aims of having a local currency are listed there as being:
To build resilience in the local economy by keeping money circulating in the community and building new relationships
To get people thinking and talking about how they spend their money
To encourage more local trade and thus reduce food and trade miles
To encourage tourists to use local businesses

Seems like a good idea to me.

The collapse of civilisation (part two)

2010-09-02T02:01:00.005-07:00

In my last column I briefly reviewed a book by Joseph Tainter on the collapse of civilisations. His principal argument is that societies collapse into lower levels of complexity as a direct result of decreasing marginal returns on investment. In other words, there comes a point when investing more resources into maintaining the status quo actually makes the situation worse, not better. How far Tainter is correct in this thesis is something that professionals in his field can take forward. My interest is with the implications for our present crisis, for it seems unarguable that our existing society has entered the realm of diminishing returns on investment (seen most clearly through peak oil – the Deepwater Horizon disaster can stand as the symbol for that).

Here are some thoughts about the implications of Tainter's argument, including why I come away from studying it with a sense of optimism.

To begin with, there is a trade off between efficiency and resilience; that is, the most efficient forms of complexity are the most susceptible to a sudden collapse. In contrast, those that are less efficient have deeper levels of resilience. This can actually be seen with regard to the collapse of the USSR in the 1990's, the most recent example of a civilisational collapse. As the Soviet state was incredibly inefficient, most citizens had actually developed ways of coping without the central state, especially with regard to growing their own food. This meant that they were well placed to cope with the withdrawal of central state services when the collapse came.

Secondly, armed with Tainter's insights, the theme of diminishing returns on complexity appears to explain much of contemporary politics. In the UK for example we have over the last ten years or so seen a significant increase in the resources made available from the centre for various purposes, eg health care. Sadly, much of that new investment has gone towards increasing the level of central control, and has failed in every respect. The new coalition government's emphasis upon the 'Big Society' is, I would say, simply a recognition that the central government can no longer afford to exercise such direct control.

Thirdly, a large part of the 'green' critique of our contemporary society chimes strongly with Tainter's emphases. Underlying the idea that constant growth of the economy is a dangerous delusion is an entire vision called 'permaculture', or, sustainability. In other words, the idea is that a particular arrangement of human habits and lifestyles can be maintained over the long term, in a harmonious balance with the natural environment which supports such lifestyles. Lifestyles which take too much out of the environment are unsustainable – in other words, they will come to an end, they will collapse. What Tainter provides is a way of analysing our present activities that helps to indicate whether they are sustainable in the long run, or not.

Tainter writes that "Collapse, if and when it comes again, will be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilisation will disintegrate as a whole." It seems unarguable to me that our present form of industrial civilisation will collapse; what is not clear to me is whether it makes sense to equate 'industrial civilisation' with 'technically advanced and humane civilisation'. In particular there seems no reason why it should not be possible to shift to a 'steady-state' type of economy, which is precisely what the green movement is advocating.

The crucial point is that I do not see our existing levels of complexity as inherently desirable, rather the opposite. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed it came about after a long period of the centre increasing taxation on the periphery – the Roman elite taxing the farmers in order to sustain their own lifestyles. As might be predicted, this simply resulted in a decrease in agricultural production and the seeds of rebellion. Just as the late-Roman farmers found it in their interest to let the central structures collapse, so too might the majority of the industrialised nations find it in their interest to let the gigantic state structures, built up through the twentieth century, collapse in turn. (What future the EU?)

So why have I come away from Tainter with an optimistic outlook? The answer is that Tainter makes plain that the collapse of complexity is not necessarily a universal bane. On the contrary, whilst those most closely invested in the centralised structures do badly in a collapse, it is quite possible that the majority of a community will benefit, not least because for a long time leading up to a collapse the maintenance of the status quo had exacted an increasing burden upon ordinary citizens, through the increase of taxes and the restrictions on human freedom. The removal of a particular level of human complexity does not, of itself, lead to depopulation. It seems quite possible that the twenty-first century future will be local, resilient and humane, and without an over-bearing state recklessly absorbing and wasting scarce resources that prospect seems very attractive. Of course, getting to that point will likely be very scary...

In my next column, I'll be narrowing down the focus even more to talk about what these things might mean for Mersea.

The collapse of civilisation (part one)

2010-09-02T02:01:00.003-07:00

Pretty much every civilisation that has ever existed has come to an end (we can argue about China another time). Our civilisation will be no different. There has, as you might expect, been a fair bit of academic research into why this is the case. What I'd like to do in the next few articles is describe how this collapse might be understood, first in general terms with a book review; then thinking more locally, in terms of the UK and Mersea itself; finally thinking about what sort of response we might make.

The seminal work in this field is 'The Collapse of Complex Civilisations' by Joseph Tainter. Tainter's work was originally published in 1988 and has the feel of a work which is establishing a new field of study. Tainter is concerned to explore what 'collapse' means, when applied to a society; how collapse happens; and, in the conclusion, to draw some possible lessons for our present situation. The first chapter is a swift survey of eighteen historical examples of collapsed societies around the world, from the Harappans to the Hohokams. This serves to introduce the field that Tainter wishes to study, and also indicates the absence of rigorous empirical investigation. This is the cue for Tainter to begin his systematic analysis. He outlines what is meant by 'collapse', describing it as "a matter of rapid substantial decline in an established level of complexity. A society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, less differentiated and heterogeneous, and characterised by fewer specialised parts..." Then in chapter three, Tainter surveys the explanations commonly given for why a particular society collapses, finding them all more or less deficient, and saving an especial scorn for 'mystical explanations' (eg Spengler or Toynbee), about which he writes: "Mystical explanations fail totally to account scientifically for collapse. They are crippled by reliance on a biological growth analogy, by value judgements, and by explanation by reference to intangibles." In the course of this chapter he also gives a resounding declaration of the benefit of excluding value-judgements: "A scholar trained in anthropology learns early on that such valuations are scientifically inadmissible, detrimental to the cause of understanding, intellectually indefensible, and simply unfair".

Tainter then takes the best existing explanation for collapse (economic) and proceeds to develop a hypothesis to explain why complex societies might suddenly shift from a more complex to a less complex state. His thesis can be concisely stated: increasing complexity gives rise to diminishing marginal returns on investment; when those returns become negative, the society has a progressively diminishing capacity to withstand stress, and is vulnerable to collapse.

Essentially at point C3 there is no benefit from the increase of complexity (C3-C1) - hence the collapse from C3 to C1.

This thesis is built upon four working assumptions:
- human societies are problem-solving organisations;
- sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
- increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
- investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

What happens is that, as a complex society initially develops, there is a very high return on investment in complexity - the resources made available through that adoption of complexity are far higher than are used up through the complex organisation itself. However, over time, the 'low hanging fruit' are used up, and for every increase in complexity there is a lower and lower resource return until there comes a point where simply maintaining the existing complexity has a negative impact upon available resources - in other words, the resources are more efficiently deployed through a less complex system.

Tainter gives a number of different specific and small-scale examples where this decline in marginal returns applies, for example in terms of the return on research and development investment, or medical research, but his next chapter applies the theory to understanding three different examples of collapse. The most telling example, to my mind, was that of the farmers in the latter stages of the Western Roman Empire, who were taxed more and more heavily in order to maintain the apparatus of the Roman state, and who eventually welcomed the barbarian invasions as a release from what had become Roman oppression. A Roman structure of high complexity had been viable for as long as there were increasing resources made available - and this was accomplished through conquest. However, once the limits of conquest were reached (either with the German tribes, whose relative poverty made their conquest uneconomic, or through coming up against another Empire strong enough to resist Rome, eg the Parthian) then that model of development became untenable. The accumulated resources available to Rome were drawn down, its capacity to absorb shocks to the system was eroded, and thus the collapse of that form of complexity became a matter of time. As Tainter writes, "Once a complex society enters the stage of declining marginal returns, collapse becomes a mathematical likelihood, requiring little more than sufficient passage of time to make probable an insurmountable calamity". As a complex society enters into this terminal phase, the advantages to retreating to a previously existing level of complexity become more and more obvious, and local communities start to shift their allegiance: "...a society reaches a state where the benefits available for a level of investment are no higher than those available for some lower level...Complexity at such a point is decidedly not advantageous, and the society is in danger of collapse from decomposition or external threat".

Next time, I'll start to link these generalities with the specifics that we face in England generally, and on Mersea in particular.

Happiness is a team sport

2010-09-02T02:00:00.001-07:00

I wonder how many people on Mersea were closely following the fortunes of the England team in the World Cup. By the time this gets published we'll know who has won it this year. Personally I'd like it if a country that has never won it before wins the prize – so Holland or Spain – but the form of the German team (playing their semi-final tonight as I write this) is ominous.

Before watching the England-Germany game – for which I didn't entertain much hope, although I thought we'd limit it to a 3-1 defeat – I was watching the BBC build-up, and there was an interview with Boris Becker, where he said (rather smugly, it must be admitted) “football is a team sport, and Germany has the better team”. It was annoying to admit it, but he was right. Doubtless there are all sorts of long-term reasons why England doesn't do well at international tournaments but the sight of our players doing their best to impersonate cranially-challenged poultry was unnerving. I'm sure that Capello's slavish adherence to 4-4-2 had something to do with it, but....

There was another bit of feedback from the victorious Germans after the match. Thomas Muller – who scored twice against us – said “"It is difficult to have so many 'alpha males' and have them row in the same direction. You don't only need chiefs, you also need a few Indians. You need people who are willing to do the hard work. It may be a problem with England that players are simply not mentally prepared to go that extra mile for their team-mates." It was annoying to admit it, but he was right.

Football is a team sport. It doesn't matter how many 'new Maradonas' or 'new Zidanes' a team might have – if they don't work together, if they don't have a common purpose, if they are not prepared to make personal sacrifices in pursuit of a larger goal – then they will fail. The failures will be both individual and corporate. The team of brilliant individuals will always lose out to the team of lesser talents prepared to work together.

The great French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA” - the RUA being his football team, for whom he kept goal. It is, in truth, not a complicated lesson to learn. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

This doesn't just apply to leisure pursuits like football. It applies to every sphere of our lives, and in our context of increasing economic misery, it will apply most of all to the fundamental matters of life – having enough to eat, having a roof over our head, having clothes for our children to wear. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

When exploring the context of our contemporary crises – of economic collapse, resource exhaustion, wars and the rumours of wars – I am very struck by the way in which the best-informed commentators continually return to one basic truth. There are so many things that can be done to help prepare people for what is coming – getting out of debt, learning to grow our own food, investing in alternative energy – but the single most important thing is to build up a community. This is because a community working together can withstand a very great deal more than a loose collection of individuals all looking out for their own interests.

Which is one of the blessings that Mersea enjoys. Partly – but not just – because of the geographical accident of being an island, Mersea does have a community identity, and we need to do as much as we can to support and foster it. There are many ways in which that can be done – and I'll return to what they are in later columns – but one way is to be involved with, and supportive of, the West Mersea Mayor and Council, and the work that they do. In an ideal world the local council would have much more authority within Mersea than they presently enjoy – and Colchester Borough, and Essex County, and, indeed, Whitehall and Westminster would all have much less – but it will take some time for rationality to break through the entrenched bureaucracy. In the meantime we need to work with what we've got and work as constructively and co-operatively as we can. If we don't hang together, we will most assuredly hang separately.

Our common future will only be reached collaboratively. That is, our happiness is a team sport, and if we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

The future is not what it was

2010-09-02T01:59:00.003-07:00

I write this on the day that Mr Osborne has raised the rate of VAT to 20%. This is necessary, we are to understand, because without that extra income, the budget will not balance and the country will go bankrupt. Sadly, barring a miracle, I don't see any way in which some form of bankruptcy can be avoided. Now, before I go further, I should say: this is going to be a very depressing article, so don't read it until you're in a robustly positive frame of mind (that, or quite convinced, with me, that the Rector's reckoning can be wrong).

OK.

The future that we face over the next, say, eighteen months to five years, is one of financial depression, specifically deflation. Why do I say this? Well, let us begin by pondering some figures – these are in TRILLIONS of US dollars:

World gross product per year: 55
Total value of global issued currency: 65
Total value of world stock markets: 100
Total value of world real estate: 125
(So far so good, now for the kicker)
Total value of financial derivatives: 1600

Financial derivatives are all those complicated things we've heard about on the news over the last few years, like 'sub-prime mortgages' and 'credit default swaps'. The simple conclusion from the above figures is that the financial world has long-since lost touch with the real world of tangible wealth. There simply isn't enough real wealth corresponding to all the financial obligations that have now been entered into. To put this in simpler, more graphic terms – imagine the amount of wealth in the world as a cake. What the comparatively recent explosion in nominal financial wealth has done is to give a great many different people legal claims to the same bit of cake. On paper, the financial world says that we have a great many cakes – unfortunately there is only the one.

What this means is that the financial system is irretrievably bankrupt. Over the next few years we are going to see something called 'deleveraging' – in essence, all the debts are going to be called in. In Warren Buffett's famous image, 'we're going to watch the tide go out and find out who has been swimming without their trunks on'. We are in what I think of as a 'Wile E Coyote moment' – remember the great Looney Tunes character, who sprints after the road runner over the edge of the cliff, and manages to keep running on thin air until the moment that he looks down?

Our political leadership has been committed to keeping the show on the road for as long as possible – or at least for long enough to ensure that the movers and shakers are able to get some measure of safety for themselves, eg with the bonuses still being given to Goldman Sachs and other bankers – but they are rapidly running out of options. What we are going to end up living through is a severe contraction of the money supply, what the economists call deflation. Most people are familiar with inflation – the price of everthing goes up – but we're less familiar with deflation. It sounds at first like a good thing – the price of everything goes down – but the problem is that in a deflation our ability to pay goes down faster. It won't matter if the average shopping bill comes down to £50 a week rather than £80 if the impact of unemployment and bankruptcies now means that families can only afford to pay £30 rather than £75.

We have been here before – in the 1930s most spectacularly – and the consequences are frightening. One way to get a handle on what it means is to consider real interest rates. If a bank charges a 5% interest rate, and inflation is running at 2%, then the real interest rate is 3% (bank charge minus inflation). However, in a time of deflation, the cost of money could become very high (with consequent damage to the economy) even when the nominal rate of interest is low, or zero (eg bank rate of 1%, deflation of -3% gives a real rate of 4% - the two negatives become a positive). Governments who try to stimulate activity in this context are 'pushing on a string', with just as much effect (look at Japan's recent history). In this context, the very worst place to be is in debt, because the real value of the debt will increase rapidly. That applies especially to mortgages, as the nominal price of housing is likely to plummet leaving a great many people with massive negative equity.

Thomas Hardy once wrote, 'If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst'. I've only skimmed over the nature of our financial crisis in this article - those who want to explore the background for this post might like to visit a blog site called 'The Automatic Earth' which is where I got the figures from. There is a very great deal that people can do to prepare for these and the other crises that are accumulating around us, linked to the Transition process – but I'll have to give the positive side in another article.

This is what Peak Oil looks like

2010-09-02T01:59:00.001-07:00

The problems caused by the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico show no sign of easing off any time soon; rather the opposite. The local fishing, shrimping and oyster industries in the Southern US are going to bear the brunt of the suffering, but the effects will go much further than this. For example, the greater the punitive sanctions imposed on BP – ie more than the straightforward compensation – the greater the impact on pensions in this country, as something like £1 in every seven paid into pension funds comes from BP. Bear that in mind as you listen to President Obama trying to compensate for his own incompetence by blaming the Brits.

However, what I really want to say about this oil spill is: this is what Peak Oil looks like. I spoke a little about Peak Oil in an earlier article; to recap – Peak Oil is when the total production of oil starts to decline. It is not when the oil runs out completely, it is when the amount of oil available at any point in time starts to irreversibly shrink.

Now one way of getting a handle on the implications of this is to consider fruit. If you are harvesting fruit from a tree – say, apples from an orchard (remember them?) - the easiest fruit to claim is the fruit which is within reach, the 'low-hanging' fruit. To continue to harvest apples from a tree involves more and more complicated activities – like ladders, or harnesses to get to the top of the tree. In other words, harvesting starts out easy and ends up hard.

The same applies to oil. The low-hanging fruit came from the oil wells that were a) easy to access (on land, at shallow depths) and b) had high quality oil in them. These were found in places like Texas and Saudi Arabia, and one measure of how easy it was to gain oil from them is the 'net energy' ratio, the 'energy returned on energy invested', or EROEI. Those first wells had a ratio of around 100:1, in other words, for the expenditure of a barrel of oil in creating the well, you tended to get around 100 barrels of oil back. This was the low-hanging fruit. As these wells started to get used up (to deplete) the oil industry started to search further and further afield. Current industry average, world-wide, is an EROEI of around 30:1. Still good, although a significant decline from the glorious early days. The EROEI from oil recovered from deep-water drilling, like that of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, is around 5. In other words, we are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. (By the way, this is the reason why some proposed solutions to Peak Oil, like ethanol from plants, or exploiting the Tar Sands in Canada, will never work – the EROEI of these resources is too low.)

In other words, although there is still a fair amount of oil available in the world, the industries are forced to go further and further afield, in more and more dangerous locations, in order to answer the demand. Which is why it is rather asinine for some voices in the US to be calling for a boycott of BP – that is simply the childish cry of wanting someone to blame when things aren't going the way that the child wants them to. Changing the label on the petrol nozzle will do absolutely nothing to address the fundamental questions here, which, to return to the main theme of this column, is all about questions of value.

After all, what is it that we are seeking to preserve, and what is it that we most value? Mersea and the area around us here is a similar habitat in some ways to the Southern US – similar historic industries, and a similar vulnerability to pollution. This is the size of the spill, if the broken pipe was on Mersea, and it is by no means unthinkable that a similar catastrophe could happen in the North Sea (Norway has already suspended further licensing for Deep Water drilling, until more is known about the causes of the recent disaster.

If we find the thought of an accident like the Deepwater Horizon happening in the North Sea frightening, and we want to take steps to avoid such a thing happening – then we cannot avoid facing the truth that our own actions and behaviours are intimately connected to the disaster. It is because we are, as a society and civilisation, addicted to oil that we compel the oil industry to seek out oil supplies in ever more risky and hazardous contexts. As time goes on, the odds on further disasters will simply continue to shrink. If we believe that there are elements of our culture which are worth preserving – say, the oyster industry here in Mersea – then it means that we have to start planning and acting now to work with less fossil fuels. We need to take things like the Transition process seriously. It is a choice about what we value.

Diamonds and Pearls

2010-09-02T01:58:00.002-07:00

I've been talking a little bit about values – about how we value the world and the many wonderful things in it – and about how to understand what theologians call 'idolatry', which is simply what happens when we get our priorities wrong. I want this week to talk about some of the pressures that lead us to get our values muddled, and to do that I want to share talk about diamonds.

Everybody knows that diamonds are a girl's best friend. Everybody also knows that they are a girl's best friend because they are incredibly valuable, and can be counted on to remain committed to the girl even if the boy ups and leaves. Why, though, are diamonds valuable? After all, they are basically just a stone, a rock, something that is dug up from the ground. Yes, when they are cut and polished they can look very pretty, but why should that make them valuable? Yes, they are extremely hard, and therefore useful in industrial processes (and industrial processes can now manufacture diamonds at will), but why should that make them valuable? Most of all, why are diamonds seen as more valuable than rubies and emeralds and sapphires – all at least as beautiful, and in fact much rarer.

The simple answer is: Advertising. In 1947 an advertising agency working for De Beers (who used to control over 80% of the diamond market – imagine Murdoch controlling not just Sky and the Times but BBC, ITV, the Daily Mirror and even our humble Courier and you get an idea of how dominant De Beers was) came up with a new advertising slogan, “A Diamond is Forever”, and began to associate the purchase of diamonds with the idea of eternal love. All the talk about 'how to make one month's salary last a lifetime' and how to show the seriousness of your love for your fiancee – all this was created for marketing purposes. After all, why should the giving of a clear lump of carbon symbolise love? Why couldn't it be rubies (red for the heart)? Or something else completely different, like the keys to a house, or a portrait, or a meal?

My point here is simply that the cultural significance of diamonds is something that was created, and created not all that long ago. Yes, there is some intrinsic value to a diamond, but not much, and certainly not as much as our culture gives. In other words, I see diamonds as a perfect example of the way in which our values can be distorted by wordly pressures. We as individuals value diamonds because our culture as a whole has accepted the advertising slogans about diamonds. It's all an illusion.

Of course, it isn't just with diamonds that we go along with peer pressure and value what other people value. It applies to what we eat and how we dress, how we travel and how we entertain ourselves. We do it with most of our choices, and doing so actually makes life easier and more convenient for everyone. Imagine what it would be like if there were no shared values! There wouldn't be much of a community left. Yet alongside the positive 'social glue' there is the danger that who we are, who we are meant to be, gets squashed by the majority.

For in the end, if we simply go along with the crowd, we stand to lose all that is most essential in our own lives. We gain the world, but lose our own soul. When Jesus talks about this, he uses the language of 'living in the Kingdom'. He said “the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great price, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” (Matthew 13.45) In other words, rather than simply going with the flow, and accepting the values that the wider society have given to us, finding heaven involves finding the one thing that needs to be given a higher value than anything else in our lives. Once we have that in place – and we can give up everything else in order to get it – then we get everything else as well, in its proper place. We see the world clearly, and we have our lives in proportion.

I believe that our present way of life has rather too much of diamonds, and not enough of pearls. We have accepted certain things as having a very high value – such as economic growth and technological progress – but we have ended up giving them too much value. As a result, we are destroying the ecological basis for our existence, and losing our humanity in the process. We need to recover a proper sense of priorities, and remember what it means to be human.

Next time: a bit more on how we go about discovering pearls of great price.

You can't always get what you want

2010-09-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

I have to say I've been rather impressed with our shiny new Con-Dem Nation. It seems to be an example of grown-up politics, of rolling up sleeves and hammering out an agreement with which neither side is totally happy but with which (hopefully) both sides can live for the next five years. In other words, it seems that both sides have got their priorities in proper proportion – which brings me to what I want to say this week.

Last time out I talked about Phineas Gage, the man with the hole in his head who lost all capacity for judgement, and I promised to say a little bit more about how this fits in to a Christian world view. Everyone has a hierarchy of values, it’s impossible to be human and not have a sense of some things being more important that others. As Mr Zimmerman once sang “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

Where people articulate and express their values then we can talk about what they worship, which is simply how we orient ourselves to what we see as most valuable. For the faithful, God is the single most important thing in life. Moreover, we also believe that if God is at the centre then everything else falls into its proper place – in other words, everything is given a proper place, neither overvalued nor undervalued.

So how do theologians describe the ways in which, from a Christian point of view, values can be distorted? Where the value system is severely distorted then theologians use the word idolatry to describe it. This is when one thing within the world becomes the most important thing in a person's world and everything else has to shift around it. It might be an absolutely dedicated football fan who has to go to every match that their team plays. It might be getting obsessive about a television serial and insist on watching every episode no matter what else is happening. (Once you have grasped what this is you can see it in all sorts of surprising places).

Idolatry can be understood in parallel with addiction – eg a drug addict – where the wider richness of life gets drained out and all that the junkie can do is think about their next fix. They gear their life around getting the money to get their next high. That is a very good image of what idolatry is (it doesn’t have to be a physical addiction, it can be a mental addiction as well). An important truth about idols is that idols give what they promise. If an idol is worshipped, the idol will grant the worshippers’ requests. Heroin, to take that example, does give a tremendous high – it gives what it promises – but it takes away life in exchange. That is what an idol is. Mammon, for example, the god of money or wealth (an idol which Jesus talks about which is still very prevalent in our society) – if you worship mammon, if you structure your life around mammon, you will gain wealth. That is a spiritual, practical law, if you worship wealth, you will become wealthy. The kick is that you will lose your life in the process. Your life will be drained away. For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?

For most people, however, it’s not as clear as this and in practice you have polytheism, many gods. It might be – “my family has this much importance, my work has this much importance, my friendships have this much importance, my pleasures in life, this has this much importance and there is nothing beyond them”. This is where most people actually live, navigating between different competing interests, muddling along, but there is nothing which integrates them. There is nothing which puts them all in their proper place and actually allows them to flourish fully, to be fully human. Another option is simply chaos. This is the position that Phineas Gage ended up in. He was driven by the momentary impulse; rather like the dogs in 'Up' whenever a squirrel is mentioned, the dogs just forgot what they're doing and concentrate on the squirrel.

So at the core of a religious tradition like Christianity lies a commitment to valuing the world properly. This is why there is such an insistence upon truth, for it is the truth that makes us free. Learning a faith is all about getting things in proper proportion, learning to see the world as it truly is – as God has intended and created it. A different way of putting this is to say: only the holy can see truly, it is only the saints who can see the world clearly. In so far as our hearts are set on God then we see the truth. If we don’t have our hearts set on God and God alone then our vision of the world is more or less distorted. As Jesus put it: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Next time – a bit more on idolatry, and how understanding it illuminates our cultural predicament.

Hard choices, and a hole in the head

2010-09-02T01:57:00.001-07:00

In the rather cheesy disaster-fest “The Day After Tomorrow” there is a very dramatic moment when the hero draws a line across the middle of the United States and tells the President 'evacuate everyone South of this line'. The President asks, 'what about the people to the North?' 'It's too late for them' comes the reply. Now, I happen to think that this film is even more implausible than most, but what this scene does is exemplify the nature of a hard choice. Sometimes we are forced to make a decision between different outcomes – to choose the least worst from a series of bad options (a bit like the general election perhaps). What comes to the fore in such situations is that we reveal what it is that we value the most and, most importantly, what we value expresses who we are. In a context of declining energy resources, who will we choose to be?

I would like to talk about an obscure railroad foreman from the nineteenth century by the name of Phineas Gage. Gage was working in the Vermont area clearing land for the building of a new railroad when he had a rather dramatic accident – a tamping rod (used in the controlled explosions) was propelled up through his head, entering just below the eye and leaving through the top of his skull. Those who were with him thought that it must have been a fatal accident, but Gage survived. That is, the physical form of Gage survived, for following the accident his personality seemed to be completely different. Whereas previously he had been sober and responsible, now he couldn't hold down a job and was delinquent and uncouth. He ended up being part of PT Barnum's travelling circus, where he was exhibited – with the tamping rod – as a modern miracle.

According to a modern neuro-scientist's reconstruction, what had happened to Gage was that his capacity to exercise judgement had been destroyed. Consider what happens in a game of chess. There are a vast number of moves that are possible at any one point in the game and a competent player will immediately discount some of those moves as being ones likely to cause a defeat. Unlike with a computer, this is very rarely done on the basis of a full analysis of all the permutations that might follow (our brains are not that efficient); rather it is done on the basis of a judgement about what constitutes good and bad moves. That is, we react emotionally to certain outcomes and rule them out.

In the same way, in order to function in our normal, daily human lives we have to exercise judgement regularly, from when we get up in the morning, through all our daily interactions and deciding when to go to bed. Without that capacity to judge and decide we relinquish something essential. The particular area of the brain that was damaged in Gage related to the ability of the brain to process information from the body, especially the viscera – in other words, our emotional reactions. What seems to be happening in some neuro-scientific circles today is a return to the classical understanding of human understandings and cognition – that our emotions are an essential part of the process, that they are the means by which we evaluate information and make decisions.

This is where the great religious traditions of the world come in. For each religious tradition might be better characterised as a 'wisdom tradition', that is, they are ways of educating people's emotions so that they can make better decisions. This starts very simply, such as in teaching children to delay gratification – 'if you eat up your supper you can get pudding' – or with adults, 'if you work hard for three years you will get a degree and a better job'. It expands to include all the language of virtues and vices, that is, how to cultivate in ourselves things like courage, honesty, patience, self-control, tolerance and so on. Essentially, all the things that make for a good society flow from emotional maturity.

Sadly, in our society, this truth was obscured by the Enlightenment perspective that reason and emotion are necessarily opposed, and that the path to Enlightenment lay in repressing and controlling our emotions wherever possible (and, as a corollary, that religion was all about emotionality, fit only for women and children, not the hard-headed strong rationality exhibited by manly men.) This had the sad result that we lost our ability to judge what is good and what is not. As a society we handed over our ability to assess good and evil to the scientists – who are, of course, so very rational – and now we are in a situation where the scientists say 'if we carry on like this we are doomed' – and we lack the emotional maturity to respond to this information correctly. As a civilisation, we are like poor Phineas Gage – once we knew who we were, and were competent and capable. Now we are a circus exhibit, fit only for a world of reality TV and game shows. How to get out of this predicament – and where our historic Christian faith has something to say – I will start to explain next time.

Are humans smarter than yeast?

2010-09-02T01:56:00.002-07:00

Imagine the classic scientist's petri dish, in which is growing a culture of yeast. Some sugar is introduced into the dish, and the yeast thinks 'food!' - so the yeast population expands as it gorges on the sugar. Sadly, there are bounds to the petri dish, and the amount of sugar is limited. The yeast population expands rapidly, bumps into the limits to growth, and then collapses. For the yeast, think of human population; for the sugar, think of fossil fuels; for the boundaries of the petri dish, think of the earth. Put simply, the problem faced by the yeast, and the problem faced by the human community on earth, is the same – exponential growth cannot continue for ever in a finite space. Human society is facing a similar situation, and the only question is – can we do better than the yeast?

Exponential growth occurs whenever something grows at a constant rate – for example, an economy that is growing at 5% a year. So if we begin with 100 widgets of production, and our production grows by 5% then after 1 year we will have 105 widgets. If the growth continues then after another year we will have 110.25 widgets. After another year we will have 115.7625 widgets. Notice that the amount added on increases each time – 5 widgets in the first year, 5 and a quarter in the second year, five and a half in the third year. That is because the underlying quantity has increased. So exponential growth is not simply adding on a fixed amount each year, it is adding on an increasing amount each year.

The interesting thing about exponential growth, and what makes it so marvellous and miraculous and devastating, is something called 'doubling time'. When a certain percentage of growth is maintained over time then we can expect the underlying quantity to double at a particular rate. For example, if growth is maintained at 7.5% a year then the underlying quantity will double (approximately) every ten years. Which brings us to the famous tale of the chessboard and the king. The tale goes – and it is entirely apocryphal so it has been told many ways – that a great inventor gave the king a chess set. The king was greatly pleased with the gift and asked the inventor what he would like as a reward. The inventor asked that a grain of rice be placed on the first square, two grains of rice on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on round all the 64 squares of the chessboard, doubling each time, and that he be given the total quantity of rice that would end up on the board. The king readily agreed and asked his treasurer to dispense the rice. After taking some time to work out how much this would be, the treasurer told the king that it amounted to more rice than was available in the whole world – at which point the king decided the inventor was more trouble than he was worth and had his head chopped off.

When a population embarks upon exponential growth in response to a sudden abundance of food ecologists call it 'overshoot'. In a situation of temporary abundance (the food supply for the yeast) there is a short period of exponential growth leading to a population explosion (lots more yeast); once the temporary abundance has been exhausted then there is a crash while the system returns to an equilibrium (a very small part of the yeast population survives). The human population of the earth has been growing exponentially, and the numbers have exploded through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. However, just as with the yeast, exponential growth cannot go on forever and it will come to an end.

This is not a new insight. It was first popularised through work sponsored by the Club of Rome in the early 1970's and published as 'The Limits to Growth'. This was a work that was more misunderstood and maligned than actually read and considered. However, time has shown the essential insights of that report to be correct. The conclusion of the report was that, if nothing was done to amend the path that our culture had embarked upon then, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, our economy would start to hit the ecological resource limits and further growth would be prevented. In other words, around about now.

The best way to understand this is to think about physical economic growth as a cancer. Just as a tumour is a part of a body which is growing rapidly, without any regard to the health of the wider organism, so too is exponential growth of our physical economy something which will destroy the wider human and planetary ecology on which it depends. If we continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, then a fate very much like that of the yeast in the petri dish awaits us. Can we do better than the yeast? (Something to ponder at this time of a general election, when politicians promises to restore “growth”).

To my mind, the predicament we face is not a practical problem requiring practical solutions, but a challenge to our values. We need to work out what it is that we really want to preserve in our society, and what we are prepared to do without. This is an essentially spiritual task. More on that in the next issue.

The Only Way is Down

2010-09-02T01:56:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed that Richard Branson was part of an industry task force that recently released a report on the dangers of 'Peak Oil' – something that will make the financial crisis the equivalent of a 'little local difficulty'. Personally speaking I'm glad that the message is finally breaking through to the powers that be. Readers with a long memory might remember that I wrote about this in the Courier back in December of 2005!

Consider the supply of oil from the UK fields in the North Sea:

(Production had a dip in the mid-1980s for two reasons: the collapse in the oil price and the Piper Alpha disaster.)

UK production of oil began in 1975, hit a maximum rate of flow (the 'peak') in 1999 and has been declining ever since. Since 2006 the UK has been a net importer of oil – we had gone from being a major exporter to an importer in seven years (this is very significant, and I'll come back to this issue in a later article) – and as a consequence our balance-of-payments as a nation has been crippled, yet one more example of the financial black hole that our country is presently in.

The real trouble is that this issue of an oil-field beginning production, increasing to a peak, and then inexorably declining with malign consequences, isn't something that only applies to the UK. The US went through the same situation in 1970. For them, it meant losing control of the oil market, ceding that control to OPEC, and living through the consequent energy crises of the 1970's. In fact, of some 65 nations who produce oil, around 54 have now passed their peak. The real question then is: at what point will oil supply for the world peak? Sadly, the answer to that is 'round about now' – the world is now in roughly the place that the UK was in in the late 1990s. There is more oil being produced than ever before, and if we simply use the past as a guide to the future, then all seems rosy. Sadly, nature doesn't allow oil to be extracted forever. There is a limited amount, and we are facing a future with much less available.

What does it actually mean on the ground? Well, to explain Peak Oil to people that have never heard of it before I like to develop an analogy. Let's say that a new pub opens on Mersea, and this pub has a wonderful new beer selling for £1 a pint. They haven't done any publicity, so on the opening night, only one person comes along. Of course, he thinks this is marvellous, and so the next night he brings a friend. The next night, they both bring friends; the night after, they all bring friends. The pub is a success! Demand for this wonderful beer is increasing. However, success brings its own problems. There comes a point when the demand for pints is greater than the publican is able to supply. At that point there are realistically only three possibilities:
1) the publican puts the price up, which helps to reduce demand to a manageable level;
2) the publican sets up a rationing system – you can all have two pints each; or
3) the customers start fighting to get to the bar.

This is the situation that we face. We have seen 1) in the price of oil going up to almost $150 a barrel in 2008 – not an insignificant factor in our present recession. We have also seen 3) in the occupation of Iraq and various other realpolitik manoeuvrings by China in particular. In reality, especially after the fuel-tax protests of 2000, the government has already put plans in place with regard to 2) which we are likely to hear much more about over the next decade.

What Peak Oil means is that the supply of oil will first become expensive, and then become scarce. This will have a major impact upon most facets of our lives. Take a moment to think about what you have done today, and then think about how oil has enabled certain things to happen. From the clothes that we wear, to the toothpaste we clean our teeth with, to the food on our breakfast table, to the transport we so often take for granted, oil is the necessary underpinning for our contemporary society. All of this is at risk. The transport sector is the most vulnerable, but the ripples from the peaking of the oil supply extend much more widely.

The US government commissioned a report on Peak Oil which was published in 2005. The exact date of the peak is a matter of controversy – not least because it would have a major impact on the share prices of oil companies, and others – so the researchers were not asked to talk about when Peak Oil would happen, only what the implications were. The report said this: “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and long-lasting. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and discontinuous.”

So: what is to be done? More on that in the next issue.

Bradwell: the wrong answer to the wrong question

2010-09-02T01:55:00.000-07:00

One of the issues on Mersea at the moment is the proposed installation of new nuclear reactors at Bradwell, just across the water. This has raised a lot of strong emotions. But why is the government looking to build new nuclear power stations? The simple reason is that it has belatedly realised that we have entered into an energy crisis and, if it doesn't build new power stations, a lot of people will be trying to function without electricity in the near future.

Ponder this graph:

This shows the amount of nuclear generating capacity that is expected to go 'off-line' over the next decade or so. Simply to maintain a power supply equivalent to what we have today we need to find some 8 Giga-watts (GW) of generation capacity (from a total of around 56GW nationally). Of course, the 'equivalent to what we have today' understates the issue. We are facing an energy crunch from several different directions: coal plants (the majority of our generation capacity) are being forced to close down due to EU regulations; the oil supply has almost certainly peaked – hence the price rises – and will become progressively more expensive and scarce; and the same applies to gas, although on a slightly later scale. For comparison, the Gunfleet Sands wind farm that we can see from the beach (phase one) has a maximum capacity of 0.1GW.

Even if we ignore the problematic nature of depending on fossil fuels over the coming years, we are facing a shortfall of generating capacity. This is why the Government indicated in 2006 that they would look to build some new nuclear power stations, as part of the requirement to generate some 25GW of new capacity.

Now, there are many issues associated with establishing new nuclear capacity. BANNG have rehearsed many reasons why Bradwell is the wrong answer to the predicament that we face. My concern, however, is that the wrong question is being asked. Essentially the government is trying to work out a way of continuing business as usual, and this, frankly, is daft. Two principal reasons for why:

First, our present energy infrastructure is built around centralised generation of electricity, which is then distributed through the national grid to homes and industry. Taken as a whole (from energy source to eventual use) this is incredibly inefficient, and is only possible in the context of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. In the context of scarce and expensive energy, the future forms that power generation will take will be both more local and more resilient. For example, Woking has been a pioneer in establishing combined heat and power systems and Mersea is not too small to explore doing something similar. It would certainly be a more reasonable course of action than complaining about both the development of nuclear and windpower at the same time!

Second, there is the proverbial snowball's chance in hell that we will be able to maintain our present, high-energy lifestyle. This is why the Transition Town process (Transition Island in Mersea's case!) is so very important. We need, as individuals and even more as a community, to begin to prepare for energy descent – a context within which energy will be both scarcer and much more expensive than it is now. This doesn't have to be a frightening prospect, rather the opposite. We will be growing much more of our own food, using much more human-powered transport, and enjoying much more human-scale and homegrown entertainment. What we will not have very much of are things like private cars or homes warm enough to wear just T-shirts in the middle of winter.

The real question for us is about what we are going to prioritise. What are the things that are really important for us, that are worth fighting for? What, on the other hand, are we prepared to do without?

Personally speaking, I believe that the government has woken up a little too late to do anything substantial the energy crisis (although I hope I'm wrong), and for that reason we probably won't be faced with a new nuclear power station at Bradwell. We simply won't be able to afford one (and bear in mind that nuclear power has never yet turned a profit). Yet that will be a very literal cold comfort when we face a harsh winter again, and people find that they are unable to heat their homes. If we are to face our energy constrained future honestly then we need to focus much more closely on preparations now – such as ensuring that homes are properly insulated, that, wherever possible, we have passive solar hot water supplies installed, and so on.

I plan over the coming issues to explore aspects of this energy crisis in more depth. Next time: an explanation of 'Peak Oil' and why it matters.