March 2023 – Glenn Myers

Overcome evil with good (and slow)

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 perils of music

Especially if you’re trying to avoid invisible beings

It can bite. Photo by Raúl Cacho Oses on Unsplash

I had to write an article recently about what happens to people who leave God and God-stuff alone ¹.

I wrote about my suspicion that God doesn’t leave them alone.

One culprit was music:

Perhaps this is a stretch for some of us. But theology teaches us that music is a shared feature of heaven and earth. Both realms ring with song, heaven more so than earth, and for a reason. Think of an orchestral or choral performance: unity, diversity, individual gifts, some performers with a great range and others just bashing triangles at appropriate moments, all blended into a completeness that is not static or boring, but fluid and dynamic; at its best, an ever-flowing perfection of fulfilled performers harmonizing together. Isn’t it, can’t it be, a heavy hint of what God and his people are destined finally to be? When you hear or perform music, are you distantly echoing what the divine is and does? Are your expressing a desire for something greater than what you have now? Are you reaching for transcendence? If I may say so, I think you may be. Even some of the most hard-boiled atheists I know seek transcendence in music.

Food for thought.

‘To no-one sell, to no-one deny justice’

Eight hundred and eight years ago, they got it right.

I was at King’s Cross Station and I had some time so I popped over to the British Library to see its treasures. (I’ve done this, and blogged about this, before.) It’s rich.

The Codex Siniaticus, in its fading capital Greek letters, mother lode of all the Bibles in the world:

A Gutenburg Bible, all beautifully neat and Germanic.

Some decorated gospels, astonishingly intricate, every page a painting.

St Cuthbert’s pocket Bible, the oldest bound book in Europe, c. ad 700, handwritten, carried by the saint in his travels and placed with him in his grave.

There’s a folio from Mozart, hand-scribbled, his crochets little dots:

You can run your eye over Jane Austen’s portable writing desk…

or a letter from Gandhi from prison or a suffragette appeal to the Prime Minister. All in one place…

Just to be greedy, the British Library has two copies of the Magna Carta, one illegible. It also displays its full text, and tells about its chequered history, revoked, altered, reissued, but still a foundation stone because it anchored in English law the Biblical idea: not rex lex (the king is the law) but lex rex (the law is king).

One historian (I think it was Neall Ferguson) has discussed what he calls ‘apps’ that when set to run in a nation, make it prosper and its peoples thrive. Here’s one that has survived down the years in English law from the Magna Carta, enshrined there still despite all the revocations and revisions:

To no-one will we sell, to no-one will we delay or deny right or justice.

Plenty of people in the UK could perhaps argue that justice for them has been delayed or denied. Nevertheless. I’ve had the privilege of knowing many justice workers over the years and, articulated or not, attributed to the Magna Carta or not, I think the fire still burns and is the motive force behind those who serve.

Slow, inconvenient, annoying to some in power. May it be so always.

Sneaky transcendence

It keeps slipping in

I wrote last week how the great classic science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was really modernism in the clothes of fiction. (This is a discovery for me. Sorry if it was obvious to you.) It argued, throw enough Reason and Technology at the world, and its problems will be solved. In a way it was a continuation of the 19th century idea of ‘Progress’ where with enough steam and civilisation, all the ‘savages’ would be tamed. ‘Space,’ said James T Kirk, representing both 1960s SF, and a Victorian mindset: ‘the final frontier.’

I mentioned Arthur C Clarke, science and science fiction writer, my writing hero when I was younger. I have read everything I can find that he wrote, a compliment I’ve paid to no other writer. I studied at the same college as him, and much the same subject. (He did a joint honours in maths and physics at King’s College London, I did physics only, and not so well.) I’ve read about him, his work with the British Interplanetary Society, his meeting at the Eastgate pub in Oxford with Val Kilner, C S Lewis, and J R R Tolkien, his admission of not being exactly ‘gay’ (though he surely was) but ‘merely mildly cheerful’.

He said religion was mumbo jumbo and implied science was the surer answer. (Lewis and Tolkien, both Christians, were technophobes and I’m not sure they possessed a fridge between them. Clarke, at the same time, was calculating orbital mechanics to get his short stories right. So their pub meeting failed, shall we say, to find consensus.)

Clarke’s worlds, set a century or so from the his 1950s present, were places where reason and technology had continued to fuel the upward march of progress. So Clarke was, in worldview, an old-fashioned 19th century liberal, albeit working into the 21st.

Clarke insisted on ‘absolutely no religious rites of any kind’ for his funeral. And yet. The transcendant kept sneaking in to his work. It’s there in Childhood’s End and it’s powerfully present in the Nine Billion Names of God, where a computer successfully prints out all God’s (apparently) nine billion names, thus fulfilling the purpose for which humans were created. Then the programmers, who are on their way home, look up, and in one of the most striking ends to any short story, ever, they see, ‘overhead, without any fuss, the stars were all going out.’

Transcendence. Hard to stamp out.