Category: Goodness

Crazy evil and crazy good and the limits of science fiction

AI-generated image of Keziah Mordant, anti-heroine of my three novels, who is both crazy evil and crazy good

I have just now realized that the science fiction I loved as a youngster was all modernist propaganda.

Sourced in the 1950s and 1960s, the work of one of my childhood heroes, Arthur C Clarke, and others (including the original Star Trek), described a near-future world where Reason and Technology had solved most of our problems. And they promoted the assumption therefore that the key to the human problem was Education and Science. This is modernist propaganda, and it has happily been blown apart by later writers of SF and fantasy, both comic and serious.

Crazy evil gets in the way. As has been pointed out, a good education and a fine grounding in science can enable, rather than prevent, crazy evil. You need a good education and a fine grounding in science to create gas chambers (for example). And however we try to solve human problems, some human bias against the good and right, a bias we all have, gets us tangled in our shoelaces. Reasoning beings, we aren’t always ruled by reason; and science increases our capacities, rather than our moral sense. Malnutrition declines; obesity becomes a leading cause of death. Childhood illnesses are cured, thanks to medical advances; but one in four late-teen females in the UK report mental health problems. A society awash in reason and technology is a place of ill-health in new ways.

Our happy ending will never arrive by reason and technology alone. There’s too much crazy evil –in us, in society– for that. Yet the desire for a happy ending is so deep in us. Surely it can only be finally attained by crazy good, by grace, by the unearned. ‘I am creating a new heavens and a new earth’ says the book of Isaiah1. ‘If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come 2.’ It has to come from outside ourselves.

This helpful book got me thinking about this stuff (though I found a cheaper version):

And this wonderful book by Mary Doria Russell, about a Jesuit mission to alpha centauri, brilliantly shows as inadequate the modernist worldview in SF. (Russell won the Arthur C Clarke award with it, a tribute to both writers I think.) A pity the author, having written a classic, moved away to other genres.

Why academic theology departments should be subject to government cuts

Photo by Samuel Perez on Unsplash

There are several reasons for this.

  1. Theologians try to run before they can walk. I have written about this before, but nobody noticed, so I feel OK to write about it again. Before attempting something on The Meaning of Kenosis or The Problem of Evil they should prove their abilities on simpler matters. The Problem of Trapped Wind, for example, or the Problem of Notable Theologians Borrowing Your Study While You Are Out and Picking their Noses and Putting the Pickings on the Underside of Your Desk. Solve these, and you have an audience for life.
  2. Their training is deficient. No-one should be allowed to be in charge of anything or opine on anything unless they have (a) changed nappies and (b) organized and run a toddlers’ birthday party. The most advanced degrees should only be awarded to those who have personally sucked snot from an infant nose.1 We have had enough of academics marking their own homework and being of no practical use.
  3. They hide their work from their intended audience by having it traditionally published. Learned journals and academic textbooks keep your work and your audience well apart from each other. So you have written an insightful monograph on how future hope informs present praxis? Well done for putting it in inaccessible journals or expensive print books. Hardly anyone can reach it in there. The youth worker in Nigeria, the pastor in the Philippines, the church-planter among the Dalits in India won’t be able to study your stuff to nurture thoughtful, rounded, disciples of Christ, even though each has a mobile phone with lots of storage and data. They’ll have to make do with the free stuff from permatanned American 2 preachers instead. By hiding your work in antediluvian print, you ensure that discipleship for most Christian flocks will be reduced to saying some magic words to get rich quick.
  4. Well done!

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.

Everything we touch

Photo by Ruthson Zimmerman on Unsplash

We’ve noted before in this blog that we humans are all spliced together: what we do, even what we believe, is steered by the people around us. It’s been measured and proven to crazy extents: if you are slim, or self-harming, or right-wing there is a measurable effect on the slimness, self-harming tendencies or right-wing views of your friends’ friends’ friends.

And none of this is static. As we go about our days, all of us are processing the views of everyone else. The whole human network is humming to itself, tossing thoughts around.

If we had clever software, or a suitable imagination (another novel, anyone?), we could watch opinions flood through the human network like the networked pulses of neurons they are. Surveys catch some of it: see how cultures change their views on marriage, divorce, violence. Flowing through the human network are endless upgrades to human cultures. Like software upgrades, some of them are even worth having.

Who changes the network? We all do. We all do. Everything we touch, every word we speak, every response we make, filters into the humming background of inter-human processing.

The implications of this for those of us who seek to be shepherded by Jesus Christ are enormous. I have just finished reading the Letter to the Philippians in the Bible, in my attempt to read the whole NT in Greek, and I noticed that the apostle Paul got this. He thought like a networked being. My imprisonment makes other people bold, he says. What’s happened to me has stiffened the spines of others. And later on he sails into that magnificient passage: whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me, put it into practice. 1 He was encouraging his hearers to bear the image of Christ themselves, and to praise it in whatever unlikely spots they saw it.

The sticky, fluid culture

A hugely cool thing about influencing networks is that things can stay set up for generations. Our imprint on the culture outlives us. What we are and how we believe and behave, as a nation for example, bears the imprint of culture-changers long-departed. As one of the 16th century Protestant martyrs said to another, as the barbecue underneath him was being lit: ‘we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out’ 2 –and nor has it.

I recently read the resignation letter of the UK’s Lord Chief Justice. He said this: ‘I have been honoured to lead a wholly independent judiciary dedicated to the rule of law, the administration of justice and public service which confidently celebrates its traditions yet has quietly assimilated very many modern working practices.‘ Having worked in bits of the justice system over the years, I tend to agree with him. The judicial types I work with are passionate about justice, rather than, for example, using their position to leverage money from claimants. Who set that culture up? Who maintained and refined it? Generations before us, I suppose, and (while it can be corrupted) it has been embedded and passed down to the current lot of wig-wearers.

The great subversive

Everything we touch or talk about. It’s Advent as I write this 3, and so we’re thinking about the Incarnation, and it makes a lot of sense that God, wanting to reclaim the human species to himself, should deploy the tactic of becoming a single fertilized cell– undermining the whole human network by being born to a teenage mum and raised in a peasant village; embedding himself in the network. As we see churches spreading or having spread through the Mediterranean, through Europe, through all the Americas, through sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific, across the Philippines and China and Indonesia, and now in various irruptions across the Islamic world, and with Christ now standing as a kind of Morning Star for a third of the earth’s inhabitants–his subversive scheme seems to be working.

The quiet power

Drop by beautiful drop. Photo by Rudrendu Sharma on Unsplash

Someone kindly sent me a book about the church that first discipled me after I committed my life to Jesus in my teens. It isn’t that big a church even now, but people will publish books about anything these days and it was a good read, partly because I knew many of the people and partly because, a generation later, you can look back with a bit of perspective.

The church was founded by four then-young people, refugees from the rather liberal Methodist tradition that was embodied in dozens of churches around West Yorkshire. They started, in true late ’60s Christian style, with a coffee bar in a church basement. Then they rented some premises of their own and ran their own services, listening to sermons on reel-to-reel tapes. They employed a 24-year-old pastor and his wife, church members numbers 5 and 6. (Pastors are always male in this tradition.)

When I arrived at the church about nine years later, it already felt like a proper church, with a membership of perhaps 50 or 70. In the few years I attended, before leaving West Yorkshire for university in London, it was busy acquiring and fitting out a new building. Since then it’s seen two or three churches come into being in other little Northern market towns, all in the FIEC, reformed evangelical fold. It’s moved again, into a still bigger building. People have retired.

They welcomed me, befriended me, taught me, loved me and gave me a grounding in faith I’ve drawn on ever since, and I’m still in occasional touch with two of the early leaders. Add up those who stayed and those (like me) who moved on, the churches must have played a part in the lives of hundreds of us.

There was a level of ambition, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Much of its most successful work was among young people, a so-called ‘social event’ one Friday, a Bible study the next. And camps and things. And church teas. And hospitality. And of course the regular work of maintaining a church community and preaching the Bible.

It was the quiet power of faithfulness that struck me. Baking flapjacks. Buying self-raising flour to make cakes for church teas. Hosting unruly teenagers year after year. Vaccuuming the house before, and probably after the meetings. All the work of running camps. Prayer. On and on, over forty years. There really was nothing spectacular, no radical innovation (except the gospel itself) no ‘quick wins’, just the awesome inertia of faithfulness, everybody doing their bit, again and again and again.

The inside-out church

Solid at the core, fluid at the edges

Reshape to renew

I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going. Image by Marianne Aldridge from Pixabay

We were talking with a couple recently who were part of a church that had turned itself inside out. They had sold their (Baptist) church building, and moved into a community centre that was owned by a mental health charity. The charity, a non-religious outfit, had been set up to provide community-based care but were short of volunteers. The church had volunteers but no building. Bringing the two together brought two half-formed visions together. Fascinating (even if I’ve somewhat garbled the story).

Much more could be done. I have sometimes wondered if a church, instead of employing a family worker or a youth worker, could employ a professional mental health nurse. She or he could supervise lay work in the community and provide professional backing. Many community mental health needs can be met by lay people. They are often at the level of dropping in on someone for a cup of coffee, or phoning them to make sure they’ve taken their meds, or helping with cooking, shopping or budgeting. Such community concern (also known as ‘friendship’) can be transforming in the life of someone struggling alone with mental health issues.

Similarly, I am very impressed by the work of legal aid charities, who provide free legal services. Some of this work doesn’t need trained lawyers – for example helping people get justice via disability or Special Educational Needs tribunals. It just needs suitably skilled and trained volunteers. A church could easily pay a legal professional to manage a community law centre who could in turn lead a team of enthusiastic (though trained) amateurs and perhaps the odd intern.

Imagine a community legal centre or mental health centre that became a worshipping community on Sundays and the evenings!

These are all examples of churches turning themselves inside out, or perhaps more strictly, dissolving their outer structures and seeking fluidly to fit themselves to pre-existing vulnerabilities in the community. Solid at the core, fuzzy or fluid at the edges. Becoming less like bacteria and more like viruses perhaps. The churches get to do all the good they want to, the community gets served. Better, surely, than worshippers in a building, and needy people in their homes, each alone in their own way.

What does revolution look like?

Nice try, but hélas! Photo by Pierre Herman on Unsplash

What does a revolution look like? Most of them involve armed thugs, which is hardly a good start.

That kind of revolution –which is most so-called revolutions — is only a revolution in the sense once defined by Terry Prachett: they call them revolutions because everything goes round and round.

What does a real revolution look like, one that actually changes things? The Kingdom of God, heralded and inaugurated in the New Testament, is supposed to be such a thing. What would it look like?

  1. A culture where leaders are accountable, to law, to being sacked by the people they rule.
  2. A culture grown kinder so that people are more patient, more honest, more generous, more likely to share your load.
  3. A culture where personal integrity is valued. Personal integrity forms, drip by drip, over a lifetime, like a stalagmite. Once formed, and if genuine, it reaches deep and extends far into the networks of people around us. When it connects with the integrity of others it provides a scaffold upon which decent human cultures can grow and thrive.
  4. A healing culture. That would be nice: people restored to joy and usefulness as part of a community, love flowing, even as lives bloom and decay.
  5. A worshipping culture. Perhaps all cultures are worshipping cultures; but this would be worshipping the maker rather than the made.
  6. A culture committed to living at peace: in harmony with creation; with forgiveness and forbearance to others at its heart; aiming to restore the broken.
  7. A learning culture, so that we are curious about the world around us; able to experiment; able to fail; willing to change.
  8. A culture committed to changing. I think much of what is loosely called ‘progress’ fits here. We can learn stuff and discover how to do things better. I personally prefer, for example, hi-tech, unnatural births over having all these dead babies or mothers taking up needless space in graveyards. Free markets distribute the good things of the earth around with great efficiency. Property rights and the rule of law ensure that the whole of society rises together, like boats on a rising tide. Unjust leaders get moved on. The Old Testament appears to regulate rather than abhor all these things.
  9. A remembering culture that knows other generations walked this way too and knew and did stuff and are owed respect at times.
  10. A respectful culture, sensing the preciousness and autonomy of every human, and letting that inform our corporate life.
  11. A creative culture, valuing playfulness, and invention, and engineering, and hypothesising, and art, and music, and literature.
  12. An ambitious culture, ambitious for human thriving, dreaming of still more goodness piled on the goodness of earlier years, like bank upon bank of clouds in the sky, all reflecting the sun from different angles.
  13. A culture committed to the long term. I’ve walked round a reservoir in the Peak District that was built in the 1930s, built to solve permanently the need of nearby cities for water. Ninety years on, our generation and culture doesn’t have to worry so much. Then in the 1940s Clement Attlee, that modest man ‘with much to be modest about’ in Churchill’s phrase, implemented across the nation the ideal of free healthcare for everyone. Eighty years on, for all the problems, we still stand in the good of that. What will we add? Imagine, for example, if we solved the problem of generating electricity sustainably; imagine if future generations hardly had to worry about flicking a power switch. Imagine if we found better ways of keeping warm, or feeding ourselves, or doing construction, or living alongside a thriving Earth. What gifts all that would be to generation after generation, to the grandchildren of our grandchildren, leaving them free to work on other stuff.
  14. A hopeful culture – when all the above is ripped apart, or becomes a monstrous idol of its own self, when everything is back to square 1 or square minus 10: still straining for ‘church bells beyond the stars heard’ (as George Herbert wrote) that make us stand and go again.

Navalny

We recently watched the documentary on BBC iPlayer about Alexi Navalny, the Russian opposition leader. So moving and astonishing. At the same time I am listening to an audio book called Putin’s People by Catherine Belton, a book I bought because it was a way of supporting a journalist who was being dragged through the courts by the oligarcocracy. She and Harper Collins fought them off I believe.

So I am on an intensive Putin course at the moment. And Alex Navalny and his wife Yulia and their children are such a breath of fresh air in all the thuggishness. Brave, of course, but witty too and perhaps there is no better way to profoundly disturb an autocrat than to joke about him. The documentary showed how the sinister and powerful FSB, successors to the KGB, tried and failed to poison Navalny’s underpants. Such grim incompentence is a joy to behold. Then, thanks to OSINT (open source intelligence) characters like the people at Bellingcat, he and they were able to find the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the death squad. And ring them up.

In some of the most compelling TV I have watched this year, Alex Navalny then pretended to be a senior FSB type asking for a report from the poisoner. And he got it, to the astonishment of those listening. Possibly that would mar the promotion prospects of the poor FSB man who was tricked. All this stuff was broadcast around the world, to the extreme discomforture of the people in charge in Russia.

And then Navalny went back. To immediate arrest and jail in some bleak corner of Siberia. What courage. What sacrifice. What cost. What a relief that there are still such people in this world, this world of thugs and autocrats. And now, without wishing to be unduly political, Russia has the wrong person in jail and the wrong person in charge.

What will happen next? What will happen next is that someone has taken the slow, brave path, a cheerful smile against the murderers and thieves. Surely it will resonate.

The joys of decline

Not something many people like to talk about

I have supplied copies of the pre-publication edition of my book Bread to about 40 people by now, and some have come back with comments. At one point my book talks about ‘doing small things well’ even if ‘big things have collapsed all around you’ (p 39 of the draft).

Both my suppliers-of-comments applied that idea helpfully to aging and decline. I hadn’t thought of that. In my book I’d applied it to failure and shattered hopes. Perhaps I should start thinking about decline: certainly I notice that on walks that I have taken for thirty years, formerly with our dog, and now alone, lots of extra hills and slopes have apparently been fitted. I couldn’t probably manage a dog now though that is strictly speaking a health issue rather than age in my case.

The fun part about decline, my correspondents tell me, lies precisely in doing small things well even when big things have slipped out of one’s grasp. How wonderful, when declining, to aim to be the sort of person who lifts the spirits of everyone who they meet. How wonderful to be joyful, kind, giving, happy, even as the body seizes up.

And you meet people like that. For them the downward slope to physical dissolution is rather overtaken by the upward slope towards the glory of God.

A fine thing to aspire to, as the night falls.

You can still download a free pre-publication copy of Bread just here:

this inconsequential-looking BuTTOn Enables you to Download a free copy of bread

And a reminder: I do welcome comments, via the comment section here, and I especially welcome honest reviews. To do those, go to your favourite review site (Amazon, for example) and just share a few honeyed words about what you think. Readers are smart: be honest about the deficiencies; it won’t necessarily stop them buying the book. I think you may have to wait till after publication day on Feb 19 2022 to paste in your honeyed words.

The healing in your head

It’s here that it matters

Sorry to be writing about healing again. But I keep learning new things. For the longest time I had two ideas about healing, which were complementary if incomplete:

  1. See a doctor, and the result will be somewhere on the spectrum between no cure at all and a complete cure. Quite a lot of conditions can be eased, slowed, ameliarated, sometimes with pills, sometimes with pills and side effects and it’s great. Or at least it’s better than the alternative and it’s pretty good.
  2. Visit the New Testament where there is a quite a lot of instanteous healing, and some instances of progressive healing. This observation influences a lot of Christian practice, both in high-octane mass healing meetings and also sometimes when people are prayed for ad hoc by their Christian peers.

I generally have come to prefer the medical route to (this particular) Christian-inspired paradigm. Each route, doctors or hoped-for miracles, leads to highs and some lows; the Christian route, as described, in my experience, tends to result in more lows than highs. One big reason for this is that doctors are better at managing expectations and describing likely outcomes than Christian pray-ers are. Plus, doctors are less likely to blame people for their sickness (even when they deserve it). Christians in my experience don’t usually blame the patient overtly but do say things like ‘God we don’t understand why you haven’t healed this person,’ while fixing a troubled eye on you. Doctors are professional and Christians are amateur and it rather shows.

Doctors are better at managing expectations and describing likely outcomes than Christian pray-ers are.

I think God is active in both realms. In the week I write this, the much anticipated £1bn Astra-Zeneca headquarters has just opened, a short bus-ride from my home, further cementing Cambridge’s position as a biomedical centre, employing thousands of people, some of whom are friends of mine, busy researching and pioneering further medical cures.

Because of their work, all over the world, mothers will not be parted early from their children, granddads will get to play with their grandchildren, life will be extended and tragedy deferred or defused. God cannot not be in this great project for the common good.

What’s going on inside the head

I feel both these routes towards wellness are incomplete as they stand. And I know that doctors know this too and also talk about the ‘pyscho-social’ aspects of wellness. What is this? Two people can have identical MRI scans, say of their spines. One will say, ‘it’s terrible, my spine is crumbling’ and their disability, and bitterness, will cast a long shadow into their family. They will be a pain as much as their spine is. The other will say, ‘basically I’m fine’ and carry on much as before. Same crumbly spine: different head and heart.

A few weeks ago we visited a National Trust property with my family. I get breathless very easily. For the first time ever (I think) I borrowed one of their electric buggies. This all-terrain craft let me join everyone as we rambled round the gardens. It was wonderful: no pain, no breathlessness, no pretending to be interested in a leaf while my breathing caught up, no struggling to talk, no watching everyone get cold as they kindly adjusted to my slower-than-toddler pace. It felt like healing. It was healing. Of course, physically I was just as before; but in my head, where I live, I was thriving. Healing is thriving, being at peace, content, happy. It happens through Christ. My National Trust buggy was a healing. Really. Miss that and you miss quite a lot.

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