Healing and social justice

One of our local miracle drugs

I’m struck (but then I’m a slow learner; it’s obvious when you think about it) how much health and social justice are linked. For churches, it’s fascinating how important this ‘pre-healing’ ministry is. And any church interested in ‘healing’ ought to be fascinated by the possibilities of pre-healing people before they ever get sick. The good we can do! The changes we can make! Look at this from the current Wired magazine 1, which finds its way to us among articles about virtual wards, remote robotic surgery, and unlocking the NHS’ troves of digital records.

… about one in five people live in poverty in the UK. Poverty has an awful impact on physical and mental health: it is associated with higher infant mortality, lower adult life expectancy, poorer mental health, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity. It has been estimated that getting your daily calories from healthy foods costs three times more compared to buying poor quality food.

Housing is another big problem. According to the Health Foundation, one in three people reports a problem with the affordability, security, or the quality of their housing. Issues such as mold and damp can lead to respiratory problems and headaches…

Green spaces are another massive issue. There’s a lot of evidence now proving that exercise is like a miracle drug. There is also plenty of evidence that if you provide more open, free, green spaces to people, you end up with higher levels of physical activity in the population, and improved mental health. In 2020, the government itself estimated that if every citizen had access to green spaces, it could save the NHS billions of pounds a year.

… We need to realize that almost all policy has an impact on population health, and think more holistically about what our health priorities are for the longer term.

Populist bingo

After another heavy day on the Select Committee. Ashish Upadhyay on Unsplash.

And so Boris is gone, sulking, in a spray of adjectives and grievances.

In the USA, justice is chasing down President Trump, suspected of hiding documents in his toilet.

The populist First Minister of Scotland has fallen, with the cops sniffing around her house and looking for (among other things) a motorhome and a wheelbarrow. The suspicion (still unproven and hotly denied) is that the Caledonian Cabal made off with party funds to buy a wheelbarrow. This is a misuse of the misuse of funds. If you’re going to misuse funds, I mean, don’t do it at B & Q.

Over in Russia, let us hope, the authority of the president is pouring away like the water from a (former) Ukrainian dam.

Let us play populist bingo. Cross off the words when your favourite populist departs:

Witch-hunt

Kangaroo court

I did not lie

Not a shred of evidence

I am innocent

I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true

I take my responsibilities seriously

They have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth

I am now being forced out of Parliament by a tiny handful of people

A political hit job

I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out

Anti-democratically

Egregious bias

A phrase book for your convenience

I’m also providing a phrase book since language means a different thing on whatever planet the populists’ heads reside:

‘Tiny handful of people’ = A majority of the House of Commons, of the consituency, and of the whole country.

‘Egregrious bias’ = fact-based

‘Anti democratically’ = democratically

‘I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out’ = I am bewildered and appalled that I have to obey the rules

‘They have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth’ = They have wilfully chosen to follow the evidence

‘Not a shred of evidence’ = pants round ankles, hand in the cookie jar

And this should not be

This post doesn’t need a commentary really. I have an interest in youth justice and this landed in my in-box. 1 On April 26 2023, just a few weeks ago, the Chief Inspector of Prisons wrote this about His Majesty’s Youth Offender Institution at Cookham Wood:

An inspection of a HMYOI Cookham Wood in April 2023 found that a quarter of the boys were being held in solitary confinement for extended periods, including two for more than 100 days, as a means of managing conflict between children. Records showed that it was not unusual for these boys to not come out of their cells for days on end, with no meaningful human interaction, education or other intervention. At the time of the inspection, 90% of children were subjected to ‘keep aparts’ meaning they were not allowed to mix with some of their peers, and staff were managing 583 individual conflicts in a population of 77 children.

Children told inspectors they felt unsafe, and were increasingly resorting to carrying weapons, many of which were made from metal which boys had scavenged from equipment in their cells, including kettles, in a bid to protect themselves. More than 200 weapons had been recovered in the six months preceding the inspection, despite inadequate searching procedures.

Cookham Wood was in a poor overall condition, with dirty living units and broken equipment. Prison staff were exhausted, with significant shortfalls on wings, and, while many clearly cared about the children, they felt unsupported by senior managers and had given up hope that improvement was possible. Four-hundred-and-fifty staff were employed at Cookham Wood, including 44 directly employed managers, of whom 24 were senior leaders. The fact that such rich resources were delivering this unacceptable service for just 77 children indicated that much of it was currently wasted, underused or in need of reorganisation to improve outcomes at the site.

The findings of this inspection represented the culmination of a steady decline in standards documented in inspections since 2016 that cannot be allowed to continue.

I’m glad we have a Chief Inspector of Prisons, that their work is public, that (on government directions) they require immediate action from the government, and that we ordinary people can write about this stuff without people turning up in vans accusing me of ‘insubordination’ or ‘spreading instability’ as might happen in many countries. I’m glad there are caring people at Cookham Wood and others who will campaign and fight. I’m glad we don’t incarcerate that many children (fewer than 1000 in the whole country). But the good news stops somewhere there.

A vote is like a prayer

Maybe we won’t bother with voting. Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

OK, so what is the difference between a nation and an organized crime network?

Sometimes, not much. I understand the civil conflict in Sudan (and the one in Libya too) is between two people who would like to be president. They are not fighting to set the nation free from tyranny; they’re just unhappy with someone else being the tyrant. The winner will join the world of gold-plated bathroom fittings on a personalized jumbo, and can conveniently use the army, the courts, the prisons and the police to make sure the racket continues.

(There is, or was, a wonderful democracy movement in Sudan that toppled the old tyrant but the would-be replacement tyrants unfortunately have lots of guns.)

Our own history in the UK shades this way sometimes. When our soldiers went around Ireland or India collecting taxes in a famine and hanging those who declined to fill out a tax return, which did we look like more? A nation or a criminal gang?

Augustine addressed this problem in the City of God (book 3-ish?), applying it pointedly to Rome, which was rather proud of being a nation and an empire. I believe his solution was that a nation is only a nation when it has a principle of justice for all the nation’s stakeholders. Everyone gets a say. In his context, that included God, since Rome was officially Christian by then.

Including God makes slightly more sense of our recent coronation, which seemed to me a thing wobbling indeterminedly between a national bowing to God and an old man sitting on an old chair holding a ball and a stick. But even including God doesn’t seem to be quite enough on its own. The Iranian republic is big on God but his role seems to be a big stick – as used by the clerics to hit people with. Unless you include the people who don’t do God in the decision-making, I’m afraid I’m not sure you can only trust those who do.

Eventually, I think, we have to get to democracy, that rambunctuous process that tries to act on those those weighty words, ‘We, the people‘. The people are the employers. The rulers have to reapply for their jobs every few years. The tyrant says to the people, ‘You work for me.’ The democrat says, at least in principle, ‘I work for you.’ So slow. So messy. So prone to spasms of populism. So ugly and unseemly and cruel and abusive and vulgar at times. But not a criminal gang most of the time, because everyone over whom the nation rules has a say in who rules it. We, the people.

The light touch(2)

Thinking more about the way we do things in community, and most especially if it’s on you to lead it.

I wrote last week about the subtle, partial, fertile, creative light touch that achieves more than the all-spelt-out, big, heavy, full-throated approach. I think this is because the light touch respects people’s humanity. They can work stuff out for themselves. They don’t need to be infantilized. Dropping seeds into their hearts may at times be more productive – though less predictable – than taking them through the procedure manual.

The more you think about this, though, the more complicated it gets. You need to select the right leadership tool for the job. Here (making it up as I go along) are some.

  1. The routine procedure. Some things are just best approached as procedures to be learnt. They become routine, mechanical memory. For example, the crash team electrocuting the stopped heart, the pilot working through a preflight checklist. Mechanical memory (and its first cousin, tradition) embeds and even automates the proven learning of the past. It saves us having to think, which is exhausting and can be error-strewn or just not as good.
  2. The precision task. Related to the routine procedure, the precision task differs from it because it requires a deep understanding. A checklist won’t do. Somewhere in your head you have to carry a precise working model of the system. Chernobyl exploded when they powered-up a powering-down reactor, without knowing the detail. They thought it probably would be OK, these reactors are safe anyway, leadership was on their back and it was nearly goodbye to Europe. Apollo 13 came home safe because the main actors mastered the detail., and had room to contribute more than just obedience to orders.
  3. The judgement. Sometimes a situation just needs someone to decide even if they have incomplete information. As recipients we may bridle, we may chafe, it will be the wrong decision in small or large ways, but it will have been decided and we can all move on. That is why we elect politicians. They aren’t super-people but we pay them to make the call. Court judgements are like that, elections are like that, Brexit was like that: a poor decision but least a decision. We are spared the agony of not resolving anything. Now we can reset and go again.
  4. The light touch and now here it is again, part of the tool box, ready to be applied, creative, open-ended, unexpected, hated by the control-type, slow, requiring humility and an open hand, but a way to reach unexpected solutions to complex problems. The gospel is like that. Forget the religious clutter, says Paul, it boils down to faith working through love. Work things out from there. May it never be missing from the toolkit.

The beautiful light touch

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

I wonder if the light touch is what makes genius. So many areas: the penalty taker in soccer: does he (or she) just thump into the top corner, English centre-forward style? Or do they send the keeper the wrong with a little shimmy–a light touch–then side-foot the ball into the net? Does the music, or the writing, or the engineering, tend towards the sound and thunder, the power, or the elegant, effective, quiet, light touch?

I see it in my own field. When faced with a scandal, it’s easy to over-write, loading up the text with adjectives. But as good journalists everywhere appear to know, it’s more forceful to focus on one human story, telling it simply, letting it gnaw at the reader’s psyche. Sure, you can follow your story with your substantial evidence and research, but it’s the light touch that gets under the skin.

At the heart of ‘light touch’ is a virtue that I do not hear routinely praised in my neighbourhood: creativity, originality, looking at things in a fresh way.

We who claim to be Christians are of all people those with the least excuse for not seeking creative solutions. We are not chained to a rule book or a procedure manual, we serve a living and creative Christ. We herald and anticipate a new heavens and new earth that is preparing to burst out of this maggoty old one like a butterfly from its sleeping bag. If we resort to old, traditional, heavy-duty, heavy-weather approaches we are of all people most to be pitied or perhaps even despised.

Was Jesus ‘light touch’? Not when denouncing pharisees, one feels, calling them out as snakes. Nor when ordering demons around. But in his stories, in his dealings with the vulnerable, in his meek suffering, there was such a gentle hand and such an open hand. There was also such creative genius and novel approaches. He taught, then walked, rather than making the sale. The light touch and the creativity did much of the rest.

I like that.

Radar charts and the management of complexity

Radar charts are a way of putting lots of different scales in one picture. (If you speak Excel – I don’t – you can probably either build them already or find an internet reference about building them that you understand.)

Here’s an example of what you could depict, the textbook Romantic Hero.

The Romantic Hero

Tallness5
Solvency
5
Capacity for brooding/smouldering5
Position in British Aristocracy5
Vulnerability despite all the above3

That gives you five axes.

Then, give a score to each axis. On a scale of 1-5, your proper Romantic Hero would score fives on each axis (five is high and 1 is low), with the exception of Vulnerability, where he gets a 3… enough for some tenderness but he’s not looking for another mother.

The current option on the table, however, is Ed from Accounts, let us say. Here’s his score:

Ed from accounts

Tallness2
Solvency
4
Capacity for brooding/smouldering1
Position in British Aristocracy1
Vulnerability despite all the above4

He’s OK with solvency, intriguing with vulnerability, hopeless at brooding because he’s a chirpy, upbeat sort of chap, has no links with the aristocracy and is fun-sized, rather than premium, when it comes to stature.

Spider (or radar) diagrams save you much tedious working and turn all this data into useful pictures. The picture broadly summarizes all you know and helps you make a decision. (Do you invest in Ed, who is conveniently at hand, or do you keep singing ‘One day my prince will come’? Tricky, but a radar chart may help.)

Countries

You can do the same for countries. Some countries claim to be ‘democratic’ because they are ruled by a benign father figure who, in a lifetime of public service, always acts for the good of the nation. And anyone expressing an alternate view finds large people bursting into their house and bundling them into the back of a van.

Other countries also claim to be democratic and they also possess a free press, a robust and plausible opposition and the kind of independent courts that enable an individual to prove the goverment is acting unlawfully. All these can be put on a scale and in fact probably are put on a scale somewhere conveniently for us by hard-working NGOs.

Other spheres too

I wonder if plotting things on multiple axes might help us see, and manage complexity, in other spheres too? For example, perhaps in medicine, Western practice can often be a bit one-dimensional: you count the infection markers in the blood, you apply antibiotic, you watch the infection markers go down again over time. (I think.) It’s possible to attempt a more rounded picture (are you sad, lonely, overweight, under-exercised, an adult victim of childhood trauma, or surrounded and nurtured by people like that, and is that really why you are so often off sick?)

There was a trendy theory of church growth that could work the same way. A church will usually grow, the theory says, until it reaches a limit caused by the one thing the church is least good at. Fix that, and it will grow again until it reaches a limit caused by the next-least-good quality of the church. And so on. All this could be conveniently mapped on a radar diagram.

Finally, the total witness of all the people of God could be summarized on a radar chart, though I suspect this can only be viewed in heaven. It would be nice if we (the church) scored a five on all the axes, doing social justice, witnessing to the truth, exercising hospitality, treating people with respect, sharing our goods with the poor, lifting the fallen, committed to creatively, worshipping Christ and introducing people to him…)

Where does this lead us?

Er- wish I knew.

Overcome evil with good (and slow)

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

In Erzin county in Turkey, despite the two earthquakes, not a single building collapsed. The Economist reported that ‘the local mayor and his predecessor told local media that they did not allow any illegal construction. Both used the same phrase: “My conscience is clear.”‘1. Another theory is that the geology of that area is different from more damaged places. Perhaps the answer is a complex mix of factors; or perhaps integrity was enough.

Lots of press commentary implies that, though Turkey has strict building codes, a little informal negotiation with local officials usually meant you could reinforce your steel with less iron or add another floor or two. These were the buildings that fell like concrete Jenga blocks on their sleeping tenants.

Was that evil? And is ‘evil’ (if it exists) the reason lots of hopeful optimism about the benefits of reason and technology are overstated or misplaced? If people were reasonable, and if we got the tech right, perhaps we could build buildings on earthquake zones that didn’t fall down. But as soon as developers suck their teeth, and bend a bit, and hand over some cash, and ease down on what are very restrictive and expensive rules, which shut out ordinary people from buying homes at reasonable prices…

We are all of us suspects in these crimes. What do any of us do when (as we think) an overfussy law stands inconveniently in our way? When does a little flexing and bending, or even a little transgressing, become ‘evil’? Food for thought.

The healing before the healing

Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

The wonderful ‘MD’ from the magazine ‘Private Eye’ is cheaper and quicker than any number of inquiries into the National Health Service. One of his main points is that the NHS suffers when society suffers. It is free, like schools, the police, and even the prison service. Hospital doors are always open. So if people can’t get the help they really need, they seek out the hospital or the doctor.

Or to put it another way, there is a link between poverty, unstable homes, abuse, poor living conditions, poor nutrition, generally not being able to cope with being an adult; and ill-health. But ill-health is the easiest to address because all you have to do is troll up to the accident and emergency department.

With all the other things, if the state can fix them at all, there’s the problem of finding whom to ask, and then a process, delays, bureaucracy, forms to fill, queues to be at the end of, and if you reach the front of the queue they may not have what you need.

Schools are the same; they have to take the kids even if their lives elsewhere are crumbling. And prisons have to take whomever the courts send, so they find space for the mentally ill who, if other parts of the state were working effectively, wouldn’t be there at all.

An issue for politicians, then, and perhaps for the Christian community: the main way to fix the NHS, and schools at the same time, and with a side order of reducing the prison population, is to fix everything upstream that leads to people crowding towards the easily-accessed freebies. And the way to fix national budgets, perhaps, is to shift them towards the slow: stable, warm homes, good nutrition, fitness, and friendship and social support that stops people falling ill (and incidentally keeps them happier and more fruitful) in the first place.

Much easier, of course, said than done, not least because it is long-term and even if done well only addresses part of the ‘problem’ of the NHS. (Another part of its ‘problem’ is the Health Service’s ability to keep many of us alive, which requires a lot of maintenance, rather than dead, which doesn’t. The NHS’s successes poisons its own well.)

This affects healing in the Christian context too. A lot of the best healing ministry is, or perhaps should be, not healing at all but pre-healing: the network of love, the care, the personal disciplines, the pursuit of joy and vocation and indeed the pursuit of God himself, which save us from being ill. Real healing restores these; but really real healing prevents us from becoming sick in the first place, at least sometimes.

Of course all this is simplistic, obvious, easy to point out, hard to do, and is anyway only a temporary fix. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is coming for us. We will disassemble soon. The only permanent solution is the Christian hope. But I’m reminded how much healing should have a wide focus –the whole person in a loving network–not a narrow one — such as increasing the anti-depressant dose.

Carbon offsets and indulgences

An indulgence? Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

History recurs as farce. I was thinking today of how offsetting your carbon is like the medieval practice of buying indulgences. With indulgences, a bit of money handed over bought you some excess righteousness- credit from someone who had plenty, a saint say – and used it to redeem souls from bad places. Carbon offsets are 21st century indulgences, spending money in one area in order to redeem transgression in another.

My wife and I, for example, pay extra for zero-carbon electricity and suitably offsetted gas, and we’ve cut a lot of meat out of our diets, in order to generate some indulgence for our flights to Spain (which we also offset) to where both our brothers have flats that need occupying. (I have tried renaming these holidays ‘retreats’, which appears to justify them at a certain level, though I don’t believe it reduces the carbon dioxide emissions.)

Of course indulgences were made up, a theological convenience, and perhaps there is an argument that carbon credits are the same. Just as sin continued to build up on medieval Earth, so carbon dioxide builds up on 21st century Earth.

Indulgences meanwhile deluded and defrauded thousands of peasants, turned grace into mercantilism, and debased the church. What did the human species get in return? St Peter’s in Rome. Nice though St Peter’s is, surely that was not a net gain.

Carbon offsets, on the other hand, go towards replacing all the forest our species has cleared over the years. All those tonnes of growing trees are made up of tonnes of atmospheric carbon, so we’re (eventually) just putting back what our ancestors took out.

But maybe the earth would happily re-wild itself just if it were left alone, without us setting up an industrial-scale tree-planting operation, complete with fossil-fuel powered earth-moving equipment and unbiogdegradable plastic collars round all the little saplings?

Is offsetting a net gain for the human species? A blundering, flawed first attempt to repair damage? Or a convenient cover for sucking out more fossil carbon from under the earth? Be good to know.

My personal guess is that you’ve got to start somewhere. Down the line are ways to replace kerosene with sustainable jet fuel, and petrol with batteries, and natural gas with all the net-zero electric generation tech. Hopefully offsetting is not just a cover for further climate sin, but a small net gain for us and the planet. A slow start is better than no start. In that way they are unlike medieval indulgences.

We can hope.