Category: Hmmm

The joy of letting people down

Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash

You hate it, of course, contacting someone with the news that that thing you were going to do for them, you are no longer going to do. And yet I’ve come to believe that letting people down is a tool in our social armoury, a key to a happy life, and a secret to reducing our pace.

Illness years ago opened my eyes to it. There’s nothing like a stay in hospital for revealing that (a) you can cancel everything and the world continues to spin and (b) the really important things are loving relationships and the things you do best and you love and give you life. Other things must be fitted in around these.

You can’t be a person who never lets anyone down. The only choice you have is whom you let down; in a sense, whom or what you serve. If you stretch yourself to be at every important meeting at work, you have decided to stick the boot into your spouse and your kids. You can let them down again and again while you achieve stuff. But who or what are you serving? So–a challenge– let someone down this week, someone who isn’t as important as those you love.

PS: Hope I’m not letting you down too badly… but this blog is taking August off, while we go on holiday…

Like a subscription to a sweetshop

So. I just discovered Perlego.com and it is like having a subscription to a sweetshop, or an all-you-can-eat buffet, or a pizza restaurant. I think it was originally for students. It stores a million textbooks and for a simple monthly fee, you can download and read them all. (Note that it is perlego and not perlogo. The alternate spelling in my experience is a site that has been taken over by cybersquatters who intend you harm.)

Here’s my usage over the past two months.

  • Our church has a teaching series on the biblical book of Nehemiah, which I’m speaking on in August. Want a commentary on Nehemiah? Perlego offers 94 of them across the range of Biblical scholarship. I tucked into Derek Kidner’s 2015 Tyndale commentary for starters.
  • I helped myself to Tom Wright’s biography of Paul, which I just read in hardback and wanted to review.
  • I was able to hunt down all John Walton’s books, which are revolutionizing studies of Genesis and read in detail The Lost World of the Flood, very much enjoying his blend of Biblical scholarship, from a conservative perspective no less, and his receptivity to God’s other book, the book of nature as opened and read by modern science. His secret sauce that blends these two ingredients is a renewed study of the ancient literature and an awareness of the cultural flow of the times. If we know what they meant then, today’s science isn’t a problem.
  • I chewed without finishing Joshua Swamidass’ book The Genealogical Adam and Eve, which I have blogged about in a previous year. It claims that you can have a historic literal Adam and Eve and they can be ancestors of everyone, provided they weren’t the only humans on earth at the time. I haven’t eaten my crusts so far as this book is concerned because (a) it’s quite dense and my eyes glazed over and (b) I’m not wedded to a literal Adam and Eve,especially after reading Walton. But still.
  • Fancying something a little more spiritually improving, I looked to see what the scholar-archbishop (and Cambridge resident) Rowan Williams had on offer and dug out probably the most difficult of the alternatives, his book Passions of the Soul which is, broadly, a study of what the Greek-speaking Desert Fathers did all day in terms of scrutinizing the human psyche’s response to God. One wonders if the Desert Fathers rather pushed to the background the Second Great Commandment, love your neighbour, but it’s nevertheless interesting.
  • Then I’ve been listening to Justin Brierley’s excellent podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God which is also a book and isn’t yet available on the sainted Perlego, but his previous title Why I’m Still a Christian is. The podcast had an episode on a woman called Louise Perry, who, starting with impeccable feminist credentials, has come to conclude that the best way for most people and for societies as a whole to thrive is to aim at a life not incompatible with many of the Christian values. (I don’t think she herself is at the moment a Christian believer, saying she stumbles on the metaphysics.) She was so eloquent, gracious, honest and deeply, deeply smart in the interview that I put her in Perlego and lo! There her book appeared, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I can read that too. I can read them all. For my £12 or so monthly subscription.

Cue the rumble of the earth moving around me. I have written about how sad it is that thousands of pieces of excellent writing (in my particular world, Christian academic writing) are hidden inaccessible behind mighty paywalls. Woe to you if you are Nigerian youth leader or a Filipina pastor or, frankly, an ordinary Joe in the West whose budget doesn’t stretch to this literary feasting. The seven titles I’ve mentioned here would empty your wallet of the best part of £100 to buy, even assuming you could find them.

The Internet was always supposed to give us access to every film ever made, every piece of music ever recorded, and every book ever written. Big tech has muscled in mostly, so the films are divided between different streamers, and the music is being buried under a weight of AI generated elevator sound. Amateur films, books and music are everywhere, creators far outstripping the capacity of consumers.

But Perlego is, I think, where publishers’ backlists go, a far superior place to the literary Hades which is the nether end of the Amazon bestseller lists, where books crowd in semi-darkness, waiting usually in vain to be called up higher by an Order. (This is where my books reside, incidentally, at least until I get my move to Substack sorted out, of which more sometime.)

Enjoy it while it lasts.

My challenge now is to find le temps juste when I can moot to my wife the idea of an annual Perlego subscription (£100 or so, so a saving really) and perhaps a compact little Android e-reader like this to read it on.

Faith and patience.

Doing fun things with old people

The world is ageing fast. Every day, 10,000 American baby boomers turn 65. Figuring out what to do with them (/us 1) is something we need to think about. Better yet if it can increase well-being across the world.

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

A recent Economist article described how some university campuses in the United States are building retirement homes. I hope they will forgive me quoting large parts of their article.

Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.

In their dorms, four restaurants serve better food than college grub and amenities include an art studio, a pool and gym, and a games room. Only the second floor feels institutional, with a memory-care centre and rooms for residents who need round-the-clock attention …

This is part of a wider trend. An estimated 85 colleges in America are affiliated with some form of senior living. The idea sprang from two college presidents who wanted to retire on campus in the 1980s. Today, universities from Central Florida to Iowa State to Stanford offer senior-living arrangements. Andrew Carle, at Georgetown University, estimates that as many as 20,000 older Americans live like this …

Bill Gates—not that one, but an 80-year-old former newspaper editor—moved to [one of these communities] with his wife, who has a PhD in chemistry, two years ago. They have made friends with residents but also, to their surprise, with younger students. “Being among young people is really invigorating,” says Mr Gates. At “pizza and a slice of future”, a discussion group about AI with pizza served halfway through, one of the topics was whether a lifespan of 200 or 250 years would be desirable. “The 20-year-olds were enthusiastic,” he reflects, but those in their 70s and 80s “had some reservations”, he chuckles.

When I saw this, I thought it was a downpayment on heaven. Being in community, attending lectures and discussion groups, surrounded by young people … oh man … what a fantastic way to spend your life’s teatime.

I heard another example from the UK. Our church used to run a day centre for the elderly. I heard of a similar day centre that had combined with a toddler group. So instead of the elderly looking at each across a circle of high-backed chairs, the elderly were looking at each other across a circle of high-backed chairs over a space filled with toddlers doing toddlery things. I can’t imagine how this wouldn’t be fun, perhaps even for all concerned.

Old people are changing. But the picture I have had of them so far in the UK is people on the edge of things, and unbelievably lonely, and deprived of the things that really matter, namely purpose and people. How astonishing and lovely it could be if they were folded back into new forms of extended families and communities; such healing, such wholeness.

Simple

Am in the midst of a book that my son bought me, lamenting ultra-processed food (UPF). Not news for many, I suppose, but an intriguing read for me. UPF is food that contains ingredients that you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen. It’s put in to make products cheaper, longer lasting, easier; food designed for the poor.

I’m not sure I quite buy the idea that Big Food is evil like Big Tobacco (but I might be wrong). While Big Food makes a profit for shareholders, a lot of the shareholders who are thus enriched are poor people with pension funds, not the uber wealthy. And I think the scientists behind UPF were doing their best to make interesting and enjoyable food available to the masses. I’m sure I could, given a few changes of path, have become a food technologist myself with altruistic aims, spending my life on a good thing, not needing to channel my inner Cruella d’Eville.

But there are problems. Because UPF isn’t food, though it may have been once, it isn’t (so the argument goes) suited for human consumption. Obesity and many diseases follow in its train, and it targets the poor and nestles among those who struggle to make ends meet. (Or as Terry Pratchett described a maker of dodgy sausages, struggling ‘to make ends meat’.)

There are problems with this kind of book. How many books have been published over the years promising to be the definitive answer to the problems of good diet? Many. How many were backed by research? Many. How many have fallen out fashion? All of them. What will people think of this theory in 10 or 20 years? We shall see.

And yet the book’s appeal to make and cook food out of simple ingredients that belong in a kitchen, rather than engineered substances that are developed in a factory or delivered by a tanker, is appealing. Today I made a tomato soup for my grandchildren from just four ingredients (tinned tomatoes, an onion, chicken stock, and a wedge of butter. I deployed a slow cooker and a blender.) I make my own granola from honey, a neutral oil like sunflower oil, and oats, adding nuts, seeds and dried fruit and no funny stuff. I make my own bread on the same principles.

Better and deeper: I want to be simple before God. I love the description of bread back in the Old Testament, the bread for offerings: finest flour and the oil of squeezed olives: simple, simple. Pure, actually, because simple. That’s how I want to be before God, finest flour and oil mixed into a cake, not a packaged, complex, looks-good-but-isn’t convenience food.

Freedom’s laughter

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

Just went to a fascinating seminar with my wife on ‘teacher retention and recruitment’, part of this year’s Cambridge Festival.

No, fascinating it really was. There were perhaps a number of messages but one struck home. Those with long memories have seen every trend in education come, go, and come again.

We are apparently–hopefully– at ‘peak prescription’. That is, teachers are being told (prescribed) how to teach. Teachers who mentor early career teachers are (it is feared) being told how to mentor them, the right framework, the right steps.

Never mind that children are complex, teachers are complex, solutions are complex and based on a teacher’s own style and personality. The teaching force is being trained like an army, and delivering a lesson is taught like cleaning and assembling a rifle, this way, or the wrong way.

The panel of speakers were lamenting that joy and laughter was disappearing – the joy and laughter that had kept some of them in the classroom for 30 years. It’s a bad sign when the laughter dies away.

Next to me, I could sense my normally-calm wife stirring in agreement. (As P G Wodehouse might have said of Jeeves, the eyebrow was raised a full quarter-inch).

There were other complaints. Pay has diverged from graduate equivalents in the past handful of years – – ten years ago, that wasn’t a problem. Workload has eased but still teachers aren’t given the opportunity to learn, grow, take on board the current research, deepen their practice. Management needs improvement. An HR department might help.

But how many times do we have to go round this? Central control looks like a short-cut to widespread efficiency, but it stifles the creativity that makes teachers excel. Education is not the same as training. The very thing you want to unleash (flourishing in staff and students) is flattened and numbed by standardization and mechanization. The shortcut, the quick way, runs into the sand.

Then look at other pieces of our austerity-savaged public services. Junior doctors? Defence lawyers? Pay, conditions, space, respect. Saving money has cost us so much.

person wearing blue and black blazer holding bag
Photo by Godisable Jacob on Pexels.com

The slow-step of freedom

If you like to control things, you do not do well with freedom. You don’t have to look far to see this. You may see it in your workplace or even your home. We certainly see it in nations.

In some countries (Egypt, Pakistan, Eritrea, North Korea for example but even in these days, the New York City subway apparently), people call in the army to do non-military stuff. The army is efficient, or cheap, or a machine capable of being ordered around, people believe. And they like it for that reason.

In Egypt and Pakistan, generals, proper generals who have been exposed to army for a lifetime, and should know better, believe the army is efficient, so they give it jobs like building airports or retailing soap-powder. It is perhaps no surprise that these same generals also have the IMF Bailout Department on speed-dial.

I am a fan of freedom, but I am also my culture’s child. I like living in a country where you can say most things without a van turning up at your doorstep filled with people who mean you harm. I like the way people can start businesses without having to look over their shoulders in case the state (or the Party) seeks control or the army has already cornered that part of the market.

But is there an argument for freedom as a good thing in itself, a way to make a society prosper, despite freedom’s raucous and rowdy ways, so disturbing to the serenity of the autocrat’s pillow?

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), whom I heard about because of Lesslie Newbigin, was a Hungarian polymath. After earning cojones as a scientist (two of his students and one of his sons won Nobel Prizes), he changed roles at the University of Manchester from Professor of Physical Chemistry to Professor of Social Studies. He was a Catholic Christian. And he started writing about freedom and knowledge.

One of the ways to get wonderful things to emerge, he wrote, though I paraphrase, is to:

  1. set some boundary conditions
  2. let free agents do their stuff, freely, within the boundaries set.

It is (I think) classic liberal economics. It is also (as Polanyi taught), the driver of great science:

S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.

Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about.

Any attempt to organize the group … under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives, and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their co-operation

Michael Polanyi quoted, yes, in Wikipedia, which sort of proves the point.

I like this, a lot, because it is a rationale for freedom, not just in economics or science, and a rationale that goes beyond the idea that freedom is generally a nice thing to have. It is, given good guardrails, the way to get human societies to thrive and flourish further and wider than any single individual is capable of imagining or delivering. Being a herd, rather than being led by a demogogue, is our superpower.

Freedom looks inefficient, and slow, and awkward, and a roundabout way of getting things done– particularly if you like the idea of being in control. But it is not nearly so inefficient as the army.

Compounding

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

My grandad was disabled because, as an 18-year-old, a month or two before the Armistice in the first war, he was gassed. He ended up losing a lung. All his life he had a mighty cough, and he never slept lying down. I knew him and look like him and apparently act like him.

Possibly he would have praised the power of compounding that meant his life was easier than his father’s. My great-grandad was bedridden with gangrene, cared for by his wife, in a small house with few luxuries beyond a piano. (There were not enough chairs, for example, so my grandad ate his meals standing up as a child.)

The compounding wealth and compounding technology had meant my grandad had a job and a comfortable home, all supplied by the council, and electricity and water and TV and a pension and holidays. The boy who’d run down the street when someone said, ‘Look, a car!’, grew to be the old man who watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon, and he was amazed and grateful for it all.

My memory of him is seated in his chair, by the coal fire, books by his feet, reading, reading (though not when we grandchildren were around when his sense of fun gave full rein). He was a keen socialist, and a Methodist preacher, and he belonged to that era when town councils and public funds supplied things for the common good–like libraries and education–and socialism and the welfare state sort-of worked.

Two generations on and what has compounding achieving? Economic compounding means welfare benefits are more generous and people’s means are on average greater. Technological compounding means I have computers and the internet, an electric bike and electric buggy, a pacemaker in my chest that supplies the heartbeats I need. Today we test drove a new car and I’ve recently joined a gym, whose machines adjust themselves to me, work out a fitness scheme, and lead me into it. None of this is merited. I have just floated on the rising tide of compounding: other people making little steps to make things good or better, to do things well, repeated and repeated and repeated.

Surely this points to the power of quiet revolution, of patient progress, of slow purposefulness. This tide is rising all over the world, subverted constantly by evil, but rising, rising.

The lube

Without it, the world grinds and splinters and crunches.

Photo by jonathan ocampo on Unsplash

Here’s a thing. I was reading one feminist criticising another and she accused her of being ‘joyless.’

It is a missing piece.

You can be campaigning for social justice, but if you’re joyless you’re a bit brutal.

You can be a brave single mum, but if you’re joyless, you’re just tired and hard.

You can be someone carrying heavy responsibilities and onerous duties but if you have not joy you’re just stressy and self-pitying.

You can be working hard for very needy people, but joyless, you’re not too attractive a person to be with.

Joy lightens loads and eases tensions. It makes smooth work of heavy work. Joy respects the opponent. Joy understands we’re all broken, all needy, all in pieces, only anything at all because we’ve been scooped up and smiled on and loved. Joy looks into the grimmness but isn’t itself begrimed. Joy peers into the depths of darkness but finds a spark.

Joy is the lube.

Hope valley

Photo by Felix on Unsplash

Hope Valley is a place, in the English Peak District, where our men’s breakfast group held one of our annual walking weekends.

It’s also an emotional space, a rather life-saving one. So much about our world seems never to budge. The wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are in palaces. Lives are snuffed out at a dictator’s whim. Armies clash, soldiers die, loved ones mourn. Shells blow futures to smithereens. Praying people pray and pray and nothing happens.

‘God,’ said Desmond Tutu (I paraphrase), ‘we know you’re on the side of the right, but couldn’t you make it a little more obvious?”The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,’ famously quoted Martin Luther King.

Perhaps I could be allowed to add: sometimes this arc of history seems very long, longer than scurrying our little human lives can bear. Many lives aren’t long enough to see the good arrive.

Nor does the arc always bend in entirely pleasing ways. Mandela became president of South Africa, a happy geometry. Not long afterwards he was followed by a thief who plundered the country, rather than built it, and then by a good person, but who has, by some accounts, yet to get a grip. So a bad thing was followed by a different bad thing (plunder) and then by another different bad thing (unmended brokenness).

That arc of history has non-linear qualities. It wobbles. Sometimes it veers in the wrong direction.

Which is why you need hope, and why, for now, it’s a valley.

Thanks to hope we can know that the arc will be tamed someday, that symmetry will be restored.

That the arc will come to rest on a mountaintop.

How to organize a patient revolution. Except it can’t be organized.

Photo by Wim van ‘t Einde on Unsplash

It is intriguing how the Christian faith is revolutionary, but the way it is revolutionary is itself revolutionary.

In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 5, Jesus addresses a crowd and imparts instructions, beginning with “Blessed are:”

  • The spiritually bankrupt
  • Those who lament and mourn
  • Those with the gentleness that humility brings
  • Those gagging for justice and the right
  • The kind and tender-hearted
  • The pure-hearted
  • The peacemakers
  • The slandered-because-of-me

Years later, Paul sets out a similar programme for the young church in Galatia:

  • love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Much could be said about this revolutionary behaviour. It’s extremely hard to stamp out. And — why would you want to? It’s humanizing. Perhaps it’s unstoppable.