To Put It Mildly I Remain Unconvinced

Late to the party as ever, I hadn’t heard of Accelerationism before Liber Faciorum decided to place before my eyes an article describing it. As a philosophy it’s nothing new: in a way Karl Marx was the original Accelerationist, positing the idea that the contradictions and conflicts within capitalism would intensify until they reached breaking point. Marxists, though, usually tend to prepare for the inevitable crisis rather than start monstrous capitalist monopoly businesses in an attempt to hasten it, which is the hallmark of all different brands of Accelerationism – that steps taken in the direction of breakdown and collapse are actually to be welcomed as they hasten us towards the catastrophic change we need. Contemporary sorts of Accelerationism spend time thinking about how technology fits into the picture, and they are often popular with those who work in, or are in charge of, tech businesses pushing the boundaries of what it can do.

The article pointed to the central influence of Nick Land. A philosopher at the University of Warwick in the 1980s and ‘90s, Mr Land developed a set of ideas about capitalism, technology, and how-we-know-what-we-know that eventually settled on the idea that we must ‘grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations’, that is, by facing the inevitable fact that our truths, hopes, dreams, pleasures, pains and thoughts are all ended by death, and that any form of apocalypse is to be welcomed as it forces us up against the limits of our illusions. Death, for Land, becomes the ultimate test of the validity of any system of thought. I wonder whether anyone has written more than in passing about his gathering of like-minded souls, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, as anything that nuts sounds something of a hoot. Nick Land resigned from Warwick in 1998, went off his head on amphetamines, and resurfaced in Shanghai where he has become an inspiration to the alt-right. I was led inexorably from him to various sorts of pessimist philosophy – to David Benatar’s Better Never to have Been of 2006, Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race of 2010, Ray Brassier, the Dark Enlightenment, and other kindred distractions. You can look all that up should you choose.

Pessimist philosophies, of their nature, are convinced of the unbearable horribleness of existence and that regarding it as unbearably horrible is the only rational response to life. David Benatar has a neat set of logical propositions about the nature of pleasure and suffering which prove that human life (and arguably all life) inevitably comprises more of the latter, and that any feeling we might have to the contrary is delusional. Reading them you can almost picture him sitting back and dusting off his hands: job done.

Back in the days when I would argue how little we could rely on the evidence of our senses as bases for moral systems, my friend The Heresiarch used to say to me, ‘These are just philosophical problems, most people just get on with life’. I was annoyed with him then, as it seemed to me to amount to a refusal to think, but I have more sympathy now than I once did. Yes, they do just get on with life, and with more of it behind me I rather think they are right to. Even David Benatar’s deft syllogisms are a bit of a trick, as they sidestep what people actually feel about their lives and declare that they are incorrect to feel it. I suspect that at the root of such pessimistic systems of thought is something like the following: I am really clever, and I am miserable. How can it be that the great majority of human beings appear existentially untroubled by the sheer levels of misery which seem so obvious to me? It can only be that they are able to ignore it because they are stupid, because they have failed to grasp the reality of their situation in the clearsighted way I have.

You can see how this conviction that you are part of at least one sort of elite (nobody ever seems to imagine they might not be) could push you towards the kind of far-right position Nick Land now seems to espouse from his eyrie in China, but you can also glimpse it in all sorts of extreme ideologies, both political and religious, that absolutely require convincing everyone that human life is much more wretched than they think it is. If this means you, you run the risk of falling into your own pit, as Nick Land did, and succumb to the logic of your misery. I think, perhaps, of William Perkins, the Puritan divine who, to accommodate the fact that Christians could say all the right things and maybe even feel all the right things and still remain inescapably sinners subject to the inscrutable and unaccountable will of God, developed the idea of ‘temporary faith’. This looked exactly like real faith even down to the internal feelings of conviction a believer might experience, and could conceivably last all the way to death; but it would not be the kind of faith that saved a person and you might pass beyond the Bar only to find you were damned after all. Not surprisingly, because he was not a psychopath, Perkins seems to have ended his life in a sort of depressive breakdown as a result of his own thought.

WH Auden was fond of dividing human beings into contrasting categories, and one of these was what he called Alices versus Muriels. Muriels, he described, were sensitive souls so shocked by the failure of the world to be perfect that they ended up regarding it as hopelessly corrupt and compromised, while Alices were pragmatic characters who just got on with life. You can imagine which group he thought he fell into. I suspect that much of my time I have been a bit of a Muriel, but strangely while being a Muriel has I think propelled me towards Christianity – how do I find a sense of meaning in a world which seems unable to support one of itself? – it has refashioned me into more of an Alice. Whether ‘life is worth living’ judged by balancing values and disvalues seems to me a meaningless question, and I am less interested even in the strictly existential question of ‘meaning’; I may have sought one, but I can easily see how the great majority of human beings rub along without one beyond what they experience.

If all you want is to lament how awful humans are and human life is, and you’re not interested in how it could be better, I really don’t want to know. Do shut up, and don’t expect a research grant.

Parsing Prejudices

People seem to find it quite hard to distinguish between criticism of the actions of the state of Israel and antisemitic comment. I don’t think it’s that difficult. As examples, someone I don’t know directly, but a friend-of-a-friend, not long ago shared two images which I am not going to pass on here, but which illustrate the matter well. The first was a United States flag with the stars replaced by a menorah. The political relationship between the US and Israel and the violence both are willing to engage in is a legitimate issue of concern, certainly if you are an American or an Israeli. But the menorah is a religious symbol; it is a symbol not of Israel the secular state, but of the faith of the Jewish people. The message of that image is not ‘the alliance of the United States and Israel is an unhealthy one with deleterious effects for the world’, but ‘Jews control America’. Antisemitic tick. The second image showed an anonymous figure labelled ‘Jews’ watering a plant, a plant which grows to form a gallows bearing the title ‘Israel’; a noose hangs from the gallows around the figure’s neck. As the gallows-plant grows, the figure will be throttled. Here the intended message is that it’s unwise for Jewish people to connect their sense of self and wellbeing with the political entity that is the state of Israel. That may be debatable, but the image does it by showing a Jew with a noose around his neck. The only way it could be worse would be to present a figure with stereotypical Jewish features rather than something that looks like Morph. Second antisemitic tick. Of course the people who compose and promote these images don’t think they are antisemites; they think they are antiZionists. They think they are people of high principle. They are uncomprehending and angry at any suggestion that these images and the ways of thinking they embody might be questionable.

The ways of thinking they embody. It is not unreasonable to debate the morality of what the state of Israel does, but anyone doing so ought to recognise that, sadly, what it does is not unique. In the Chechen Wars the Russians carpet-bombed Grozny, killed 12,000 people, and replaced them with Russians in the city they built in its place. It’s on a smaller scale than Gaza, but it’s the same thing (the Israelis haven't got to that final stage yet). In terms of sheer numbers, vastly more souls have perished in genocides committed in Africa over the last thirty years, but we largely ignore them because they involve faraway places of which we know little. The only unique aspect to the conflict in what we call the Holy Land – theology aside – is that one party is an ally of this country; that’s a matter for proper criticism, perhaps, but the event is, unfortunately, far from an unprecedented instance of human evildoing. As for comment about what Jews should or should not think about it, or whether they are in some way betraying their own past by support for Israel now – that may be a matter for the Jewish community to debate themselves, but it has zero relevance to anyone else. You have to question why anyone who isn’t a Jew is so very fascinated with what Jews think.

And if, in any way, you are tempted to use an international political situation to ‘contextualise’ the attempted, or actual, murder of British citizens, well, you can’t see what’s in front of you. Context is not required: such an act is wrong, and if your first response to it is ‘Yes, that’s bad, but’, no matter what the ‘but’ is, please think it through again.

Cross and Flag

Remember my stricture about not saying anything, if you can't say anything good? This afternoon's Radio 4 drama about a local community struggling to come to terms with the election of a radical right-wing council (who could they be thinking about as a model?) tested that resolution, so I will draw a veil over that save to mention that one of the strands of the story concerned the sudden arrival of an influx of new worshippers in the parish church whose motivations might be other than strictly spiritual. 'This is Christian nationalism, Cath. That's what it is, it's got to be!' 'Twice the congregation again, wouldn't you say?... They want to spread the word of the Lord, love and kindness, and that's what I want to do too!' Not only is this kind of dialogue used by no-one, anywhere, but I wouldn't like anyone to get the idea that anything like this is actually happening. I've heard colleagues wondering whether the 'Quiet Revival' might partly be a reflection of people being tempted in the direction of Christian nationalism, but not only do we now know the Quiet Revival was a myth but there is absolutely no sign at all that such people find their way to traditional Anglican parish churches (I discount the tweedy young fellows who have always turned up at high-class shrines such as Fr Rubric's in the West End, as they are a very different brand of soul).

Another of my strictures is to avoid political partisanship, but Reform UK did rather smoke me out this week by announcing an intention to 'restore Britain's Christian heritage' by various means. I will not get into the meat of this now as you can predict what my line might be, but instead think a little about what the circumstances are in which I do feel obliged to speak. It's a matter of conviction for me that there can be conservative courses of action which flow from Christian ideas as there can be progressive ones, and so I am deeply reluctant, most of the time, to use the platforms given to me to critique specific policies. I think the line must be when policies, or a political platform generally, are explicitly given a Christian justification and understanding: then it becomes absolutely incumbent on Christian ministers to talk about what the Christian understanding of a matter might be, and especially the principles behind that thinking. That's part of our mission, not to comment on civil public life as such, so much as to explain the Faith.

In this case, the relationship between Christianity and nationhood is not simple. A nation's law may be more informed by Christian ideas or less, and a polity may make it easier to pursue a Christian life or harder. But it is absolutely clear that God never had any relationship with a nation of people, as such, other than ancient Israel, and the whole understanding of the Christian faith is that the Church is the nova Israel, the covenant extended to all humankind through the shedding of Christ's blood. 'Nations' are of very secondary importance, and the concept of 'a Christian nation' in anything other than historical terms is something close to an oxymoron. 

Oh dear, I've fallen into talking about actual political stuff. Probably doesn't do too much harm, I suppose.

When the Wolves Were Running

I suppose on a personal level I should be grateful to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mr Miller, who over recent days has provided me with material for a Facebook post, a newsletter article, a sermon, and now a blog entry. That’s good going for the following few words, spoken to US TV channel CNN in reference to recent events in Venezuela:

The US is operating in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world from the beginning of time.

Generously, you could say, yes, they are. International relationships are indeed shaped by balances and imbalances of economic and military power and, as the Lord himself said, if a king goes to war with another king he first decides if he has enough resources to do so. Any nation must have the wherewithal to defend the things it holds important from those who would destroy or steal them. In World War Two the Allies did many immoral things to secure our way of life, ranging from simple deceit to the mass killing of civilians. We know this is the case.

But ‘securing our way of life’ is the point here. Then, we deployed strength, force, and power to defend a state of living which, however imperfectly, said it valued every human being as an individual, which recognised their worth and dignity, and which was expressed in a political and legal system which the human race has, over centuries, devised to protect the ordinary majority from the powerful, the cruel and the violent: the psychopaths who believe there’s nothing wrong with the rule of strength and force. We call it ‘democracy’, and it includes not just periodic elections (tyrants are content with those as they are so easy to manipulate), but limited, accountable government as a whole; free exchange of ideas; universal free education; security of property; and equality before the law. You know full well that this is not what the current US administration intends its strength, force, and power to defend. Instead, they are the kind of people that system is designed to constrain, the wolves it attempts to defang. That’s something of an injustice to wolves, but you get the point. And you know, too, that when they call strength, force, and power ‘the iron laws of the world’ they don’t just apply it to foreign adventures: the world is the whole of life. It’s why, in this view, it’s right not to allow extra support for the poor or marginalised, why law doesn’t matter, why the deaths of small people don’t matter, why there’s no problem with the powerful doing what they like. That’s just the way it’s always been.

By coincidence (or providence) tomorrow is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ; the Old Testament lesson set for the day is Isaiah 42.1-9, which describes the character of the Messiah: ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out’. He will not crush the weak, because they are children who can yet grow Godwards. Such bold restraint, such heroic tenderness, is what we are summoned to as well if we are baptised into his death and resurrection. And remember: the world was made through the Word, and ultimately it stands under the hand of God. He is in charge of it, and the Christ shows how he works. The laws of the world belong to him, not the apes and the wolves.

Go Tell That Fox

The Borough Deans gathered for lunch yesterday. What the role will mean exactly once the local governmental structures of Surrey go through the solve et coagula of reform over the next couple of years we are not sure. Nor are we sure what the elections to the ‘shadow authorities’ next year will bring, but expect a significant number of Reform councillors to emerge whereas there are hardly any at the moment. And Reform is a new and untried quantity: will it be, and be committed to being, a constitutional party of the Right which operates within the boundaries of the liberal-democratic order, or will it recklessly lay the groundwork for something worse later? How are we to engage with this new situation?

A couple of weeks ago two members of the congregation here who are local councillors were accosted by a member of the public at an event who told them ‘When Nigel becomes Prime Minister there’s a short rope with a long drop waiting for people like you’. Now on one level this is the kind of loose-tongued rubbish people say when they are angry and resentful, but on another it’s part of a worrying violence in public discourse in a country where two MPs have been assassinated in recent years, where such acts are not theoretical and people ought to be careful about what they say. Presuming my congregants' accuser was referring to the leader of Reform rather than a random Nigel we knew nothing of, I ended up writing to Mr Farage, arguing that though he was not in any way responsible for the words of a random supporter, nevertheless he was responsible for the perception of his party and for not using violent rhetoric or allowing it to be used without comment. That seemed to me a reasonable action. This was a situation that came close to home as far as I was concerned, and there was a principle involved that wasn’t exclusively tied to that particular exchange, but to the whole of our public life. I am very reticent about this kind of involvement but I felt a certain weight on this occasion.

Christ got as far as calling King Herod a fox, but his main concern was to probe beneath the surface of what people said and did to the assumptions and deep spiritual structures that produced those words and actions, and in the same way the Church now should not be partisan but try to get people to step back from the noise and think about what is going on and what their responsibilities are – not to expect change from others, but from themselves. How many will listen is another question, but it’s our best hope and our urgent task. 

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

The Limits of Engagement

My thinking regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved over the course of the Gaza war. I’ve occasionally referred to the entrenched anti-Israel stance of nice liberal British Christians which, on one occasion, slipped into open anti-semitism in front me, out of the mouth of a member of my own congregation who was given to wearing a keffiyeh from time to time. I have remained suspicious of Christians wearing keffiyehs, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations and activism no matter what the good intentions of most of the people involved may have been. My niece, no stranger to radical politics, said she has steered clear of the issue at her university for the same reason. I have questioned why so many British people, perhaps Christians especially, feel the need to comment on this conflict out of all the brutal struggles which deface the world: there are various answers, some less pleasant than others.

But we are 18 months of slaughter on now, and I have come to admit that this is different. It’s partly the scale, partly the open avowal of ethnic cleansing by some Israeli ministers, and partly the lies which it seems to me quite clear that the Israelis want the world to believe. Il Rettore also gave me a book, Faith in the Face of Empire by Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb. This examines the interesting question of why God chose to be incarnate in this part of the world when he could have picked anywhere; its answer is the geopolitical position of the Holy Land on the contested border of great empires, in the past as much as now. This is the right location for God to critique human lusts and insecurities and offer an alternative to them, Kingdom against Empire, Cross against sword. The Word didn't become incarnate in Judaea because that’s where the chosen people were, but the Israelites became the chosen people because they inhabited the land where the Word would become incarnate. So perhaps this conflict does have cosmic significance in a way others do not.

I mention lies. There are few nations and governments which always tell the truth, but few whose falsehoods extend to their military killing aid workers and burying not just their bodies but the vehicle they were travelling in and then maintaining an entirely false account of events until caught in the lie. It is very clear the statements the Israelis give are untrue, and if I were responsible for policy at an august news organisation such as the BBC I would have begun treating them as such, in the same way that we quite reasonably gave up routinely asking the Russians to comment on the war in Ukraine. In both cases, you occasionally need to be reminded of the argument, and whether people do themselves believe the lies they tell is an interesting and useful question to consider. I think the Israelis probably do tell themselves that their state is a liberal democracy the same as other liberal democracies because they had a trans woman win Eurovision in 1998 (except those who loathe the fact). But there’s limited value to wasting your time on untruths. Remember how long it took the BBC to decide that it didn’t actually have to have a climate change denier on every time the issue got mentioned.

There is a broader point here. I always approach any disagreement (if I have my wits about me) along the Dominican lines of identifying assumptions you have in common with your interlocutor and proceeding from there. But there is no point rehearsing lies. You have to distinguish the people from whom you might genuinely learn something from those who are only trying to defeat you. Such people are not even interested in being understood, in affecting the way you think: they would really rather you were not there at all. There is nothing to be gained in dealing with them.

‘Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes’ run two adjoining verses in the Book of Proverbs. Christ negotiates this treacherous landscape with skill. He encounters and distinguishes between those who ask him questions in order to elicit a genuine answer, and those who ask them in order to entrap him: the latter attacks he turns round in their own terms, exposing the falsehood of the premises by bringing in some other idea or statement from Scripture.

So here is a relevant question. When King David numbered the people of Israel, how did the Lord respond? He sent a plague. Where did the plague end? At the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. What did David do? He bought the threshing-floor. What did the threshing-floor become later? It became the site of the Temple. Now David was king: he could have done what he wanted. Araunah even offered him the place for free. But David insisted on buying it lawfully, so his offerings would not have cost him nothing. He did not seize it, not even from a foreigner, one of the People of the Land who the Israelites were supposed to have displaced.

Live and Let Die

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, and all Fr Weepingcross can think to post about is some woman’s rattled-off opinions on Goth. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about the Assisted Dying Bill: I just wasn’t in any way surprised by the outcome.

Christians can’t all be found on one side of this question: it was Pope John Paul II who originated, or at least popularised, the ringing phrase ‘the Culture of Death’ to net together euthanasia (as we used to call ‘assisted dying’), abortion, execution, and war; but not all of us go along with it. What we seem to have, in this particular matter, is a culture of autonomy before all else – assuming as an obvious fact that the sandcastle of individual choice can stand against the tide of social expectation. And I am not sure that Christians themselves know what it is they support, or oppose, in this as in many other respects. For centuries the law has defended us against our own ignorance and incuriosity, bolstered our assumption that we are right, and allowed us to continue without examining the basis for what we think we think. That protection has long, long been rolling back, and this is just another step.

But I find myself drawn, the more I think, more in the direction of mad things I would hesitate to say out loud. That the Enemy wants us dead. That he wants us out of the ring as soon as possible, where we can do no more good. That when we begin believing that one life is worth less than another, we make his work easier. That when we take our own life, or someone else’s, it’s like prising open the door of a plane: the air and the other passengers begin to be sucked out along with us. That there are, essentially, no individual choices.

Except I can’t go all that way. I revolt against making someone else fall in line with what I think in this most radical way. Maybe one day our long, bitter process of discernment will resolve that, as well.

Until then, in my imagination, I look to the potential time thirty years hence when medical professionals and others will start subtly hinting to me that the money spent on keeping me going could be better used elsewhere, on more worthy subjects, on children for heaven’s sake, and steeling myself to say, No. I might sacrifice myself for a child, but not for abstract children the State conjures in front of me to persuade me I am worth less. I demand my right to be a burden. I will not disappear for your convenience, I will not weigh my worth against others, not because I’m anything important, but because all human beings are, and accidentally I am one.

Asking the Question

If you listen to coverage of the violent riots and disturbances disrupting various English towns and cities at the moment, one of the more powerful sentiments expressed by people who form the crowds that eventually turn nasty – whether they stick around to take part or not – is that they were never asked whether they wanted their country to change the way it has. They weren’t consulted about it becoming multiracial, multicultural, or however you want to term it, and have ended up in an unsettling and unfamiliar place, or at least that’s what they think. There are many sorts of perceived hurt and neglect behind this – as William Cobbett famously said, ‘I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach’ – and, were anyone of progressive opinions ever to have a conversation with someone who thinks it, you might want to explore whether those changes have actually had any negative impact on their wellbeing at all. But put that aside for a moment. On the face of it, the complaint is true: the UK has never formally asked itself what kind of future it preferred. True; but that’s because it couldn’t have.

The biggest changes within a society are never consulted about, mainly because we don’t know they’re happening, and by the time they have it’s too late to do anything about it. We look back and, contrasting where we are now with where we were once, we can characterise the change in a single pithy phrase such as ‘multicultural society’, but we can only do so in retrospect. In retrospect, we might be able to identify a symbolic point when the shift, whatever it was, began, or even when it had taken effect. But it’s precisely that perspective that enables us to do so.

The UK was never asked in about 1962 whether it wanted to become a society in which Christianity was marginalised from public discourse and influence. The UK was never asked in about 1980 whether it wanted to move to an economy significantly powered by property price inflation with all the attendant social problems. The UK, and the world in general, was never asked, when the building of the Old Forge at Coalbrookdale in 1709 began the Industrial Revolution, whether it wanted to begin the process of exploitation of fossil fuels which would, possibly, threaten the continued existence of our civilisation. All the biggest changes that affect us are never consulted on, because we never see them happening. As far as a multicultural society is concerned, we could stop immigration tomorrow and it wouldn’t change what Britain now is, with 12% of its population non-white and an increasing proportion mixed-race. Nobody is going to undo that. During the Brexit referendum campaign, my spiritual director overheard an elderly couple talking at a bus stop and complaining that though they couldn’t see a GP it would get better once we were out of the EU because there’d be so much more money to spend on the NHS, ‘And then’, the old chap said to the old woman beside him, ‘we can start sending the darkies back’. ‘Of course’, commented the half-Indian Ms Formerly Aldgate when I related this to her, ‘because that’s where the darkies come from, Romania’. That absurdity reveals the fantasy of return to the past for what it is.

In a way, the question is asked, but it’s asked in a million tiny decisions rather than one big one. It’s asked, and answered, in the individual choices people make, and in the election of governments who don’t do anything to reverse the movement in a particular direction. As far as race is concerned, we had an opportunity to choose a National Front-dominated government in the 1970s, but chose not to elect even a single MP. Sometimes, and this is far worse, a government suggests in its rhetoric that it’s going to reverse something, it will, for instance, ‘Stop the Boats’, and then doesn’t. In that specific example there’s little excuse because there were plenty of people telling the last administration that it couldn’t succeed, which raises the question of whether it was pure cynicism or the ministers concerned managed to convince themselves that they meant it. Either way, they now find the phrase thrown back along with bricks and bottles.

Sometimes, there is indeed a moment when a society is asked a question that marks a decisive move in one direction or another. In 2015 and 2018 the people of the Irish Republic voted to legalise same-sex relationships and abortion, marking an unmistakable shift away from being a conservative religious country to being a secular liberal one. But it’s worth noting that the very majorities achieved in those referendums, about two thirds to one third, proved that the shift in attitude had already happened. I recall Malawian comedian Daliso Chaponda remarking that the UK should have learned from Africa ‘where we only ever have a referendum when the government already knows the result’. The joke has a good point: referenda whose outcome is uncertainly close don’t bring any debate to an end. The only sensible referendum is one that confirms what people already think.

You could play a game, maybe, as to what symbolic question you could ask the British public to make them feel they had indeed been consulted over whether to remain a multicultural society. Finding one that would simultaneously be both meaningful and yet bound to be answered one way would test anyone's ingenuity. But, if the research is correct to show that the British at least want to be liberal about immigration more than virtually any other country, it wouldn't break it. 

A Brush with the Dark

When I met up with Dr Bones and LadySunHouse for lunch on Saturday, I jokingly apologized for having been obstructed by fascists in Trafalgar Square. Dr Bones quite reasonably asked me whether that was an insult or whether that’s how they’d think about themselves. It turned out it was the demonstration addressed by Tommy Robinson before he fled the country for breaching a court order forbidding him to repeat libels against a Syrian refugee.

Nigel Farage suggested this morning that the public might be being lied to about recent violent acts around the country, including the awful murders of three children in Southport. He doesn’t say explicitly that Muslims are responsible for these acts and the authorities are hiding it, but he doesn’t need to: it's plausible deniability. Like Mr Trump in the States, he can insinuate to the extent that everyone knows what he means, without being indictably precise.

This is a conscious campaign to undermine social discourse, to set up an alternative narrative. It may well be that there are communities in the UK who have reasons not to be well-disposed towards the police, but this is different: it’s about hinting that the police, the courts, the government, and the media are all part of a grand cover-up keeping the truth from ordinary people. It’s about saying, You can’t trust what these structures tell you: you can only trust what we tell you. And you cannot rely on them to protect you: you can only rely on us, and on your own willingness to take up arms, to throw paving slabs at a mosque in a Lancashire town.

'Nazis gonna Nazi', commented a friend, but while this is so, I think it's important that those of us who are broadly on the progressive side of things understand the process, which is why I keep posting about the links between violence, corruption, and the undermining of truth. It's not just 'these people are right wing so they are nasty'. You can be a perfectly constitutional, lawful party of the Right, even a long way to the Right, and still not be an intrinsic threat to the liberal order which protects our persons. These people are not constitutional and lawful, and there's a link between the malignity of Mr Farage and the corruption of Boris Johnson which is more than just being on the same side of the spectrum.

This is pre-fascism: this is the stage of deliberately softening society up for polarisation and violence. This is the condition we are in.

Democracy in Action

Chairing the Churches Together-organised General Election hustings at Hornington Baptist Church yesterday was one of the most intense 90-minute periods I've ever spent. People had submitted questions - fewer than I anticipated, to be honest - which I then grouped into subjects and reworded so a single question was asked for each. It became clear that a set of questions were being asked not so much by individuals as by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arundel & Brighton using those individuals, so I put a discount on those when assembling a list actually to be put to the candidates. All the candidates got back to me, apart from the Womens' Equality Party (though I think their candidate attended another hustings not far away), while the Greens had a bit of an internal issue after the national party imposed a candidate on the local Greens who preferred to stand aside and allow the Lib Dem standardbearer a free run at the incumbent Tory: a local councillor stood in for her. So we had a full podium and to get through at least six questions I intended to limit each candidate to a statement of two minutes only.

Given some of the statements of the leader of Reform and the opinion of some of the party's candidates, I was rather worried about how to handle their local representative if he started claiming there were streets in Oldham where nobody spoke English, for instance. So I warned the candidates that, as well as expecting them to concentrate on their own policies and not one anothers' record or proposals, if any of them came up with statements I couldn't see the basis for I might ask them to elaborate. In the end I did this with the Conservative candidate who seemed to suggest that there were potential illegal immigrants waiting on the French coast for a Labour administration to take control ('You can't know that', I said), and the Labour candidate, just to confirm that some very optimistic-sounding figures were in the manifesto. The Lib Dem candidate and Green spokesperson needed restraining from some negative rhetorical flourishes, ad hominem attacks and straying from the point. Ironically the only person I didn't take to task in any way was the gentleman from Reform who, even if you might disagree with him about this or that point, did express himself in a completely unobjectionable and well-behaved way.

Constantly trying to watch the clock, remember who should speak next, and concentrating on what the candidates were saying in case I felt I should intervene, while all the time striving to make sure I put my own personal opinions to one side, was surprisingly hard work. Il Rettore told me that when he'd done the same job once in Devon he'd ended up telling all the candidates to shut up, which I'm glad was farther than I reached. I'm glad it's over and not sure I want to repeat the experience. 

I finished by pointing out the dangers MPs now face and how we should appreciate the willingness of anyone who wanted to do the job, even if we disagree with them - and by asking anyone who was in the habit of praying to do so for our nation on July 4th. The number of plain-clothes police in the church, and their uniformed colleagues keeping an eye on the pro-Palestinian demo outside, brought home the point.

Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Perpetual Guest

It took the local council a matter of minutes after the Prime Minister stood in the rain in Downing Street and announced the date of the General Election to phone up Grant the churchwarden to book the church as a polling station on July 4^th. In fact I expect it’s the hall that will be used rather than the church, as it was for the Police & Crime Commissioner election in May, a rather less exciting affair it must be said but our first experience of performing this public role. This week I’ve also been trying to sort out the hustings event traditionally hosted by Churches Together in Hornington & District, which won’t be at Swanvale Halt because of the limited parking locally. The Greens have yet to nominate a candidate for the constituency (they only have till tomorrow) and our incumbent Tory MP has yet to reply; disconcertingly it was the Reform candidate who was first back to me. Perhaps he has more time to check emails, or alternatively a laid-back agent who doesn’t do it for him.

It all leads me to reflect again on the oddness of the Church of England parson’s position in society. In so many ways we are the go-to persons, and our churches the default venues, for such events. But equally we operate in a society whose assumptions are secular and non-sectarian and I would really not have it any other way. On Tuesday morning I looked in my diary and found the inscription ‘2pm Willow Grange’ and embarrassingly had to contact the Bishop’s secretary to remind me what it was I’d agreed to come to. The event was part of what the diocesan staff call ‘Tent Week’ when the bishop invites cohorts of folk across the diocese to have tea in a marquee in his garden. This particular gathering was for those involved in ‘the ministry of listening’ for which I qualified as a Local Vocations Adviser, apparently, along with the Chaplains, Mentors, and Spiritual Directors. Anyway, the point I am coming to is that we had a short talk by a pleasant woman priest whose name and role I can’t remember who mentioned the experience of ministering in contexts we do not control, where we are guests, and which are sometimes indifferent to us and sometimes actively hostile. It made the event slightly more than pointless (though there may have been a point in simply showing my face as it's likely to be the only time I will be in the proximity of the bishop for some time). 

In my parish, I do have a clear identity and status signalled by my distinctive dress and my link with the big old stone building with the little steeple in the centre of the community, but in another way the parish isn’t mine at all. It is a space I have a responsibility for, and yet do not control in any way. There is nobody I can command. I am always a guest, and just occasionally one who nobody is quite sure what to do with. But then I suspect that may have been the Lord’s position as well.

Post Offices and Pointy Hats

At the time, the time being early 2018, Paula Vennells’s personal involvement in the case of our Swanvale Halt subpostmaster’s suspension, and the transfer of the license (or whatever it is technically) to a relative so the post office could reopen, seemed like an act of generous flexibility. Having written to her more than once to complain about what was happening, I felt it was only fair to write again to thank her for finding some way for the service to resume, without the subpostmaster being prosecuted. Even then, only about 18 months before Mr Justice Fraser’s excoriating judgement on the Post Office’s behaviour since introducing the Horizon accounting system in 1999, Ms Vennells maintained to me that ‘I can’t go into the circumstances in this case, but we never suspend a post office without good reason’, and to others that there was no problem with the system at all.

A long while later, when things were clearer, the redoubtable Estelle had discovered that Ms Vennells was also the Revd Vennells, holding a license to officiate in the diocese of St Albans. Estelle wanted to write to the Bishop there to protest, and asked for copies of my correspondence. As I had, indeed, written, I felt I couldn’t say no, but I warned our Bishop that I was agreeing just in case the Bishop of St Albans might corner him in a corridor at the House of Lords waving my letters at him and shouting ‘What’s this?! What’s this?!’ I can’t recall how our Bishop replied to me – I think it must have been in person at a rare moment we were in the same place at the same time – but I do remember he said something to the effect that he’d ‘always found Paula Vennells very impressive’, which he may have done, but it was an entirely otiose thing to say. And what were the circumstances in which he came to any conclusions at all about an NSM working in an obscure parish in another diocese?

We now know exactly how impressive the hierarchy of the Church of England found her – enough to shortlist her for Bishop of London when that position was being filled in 2017, and for the Archbishop of Canterbury to support her candidacy personally. When the BBC reports that Ms Vennells is ‘an ordained Anglican priest but does not hold a senior position in the Church of England’ this is a bit of an understatement. She’s never been anything other than a Non Stipendiary Minister, part of a team in a group of rural parishes. To catapult such a person into the Church’s third most senior bishopric would be the most gobsmacking promotion since Thomas Becket. That it could even be thought of, let alone that it could reach the point of her being interviewed, is quite stunning. Thankfully there may have been angels making sure it didn’t happen.

For quite some time, the Church of England has been in an episode of bewitchment by the world of business and management: I hesitate to say it’s now passing out of it. Of course having a variety of backgrounds and experiences in your leadership to bring other viewpoints to the table is not a bad thing, and I wouldn’t want the Church to be composed entirely of Oxbridge arts graduates like me. Assuming that this equally narrow band of expertise is exactly the one which is going to save your organisation is quite a different matter, but that seems to be what the current cohort in control of the Church of England has thought. The Archbishop of Canterbury supports one individual businessperson-turned-priest’s promotion; another bishop thinks they’re ‘very impressive’; a third speaks up in their support, while carefully and typically not saying anything actually untrue.

You see what’s going on here. The first instinct of the hierarchy of the Church is to support the powerful, because that’s who they mix with. A priest made bishop can be ever so good and upright, but from the moment of their consecration they enter a world of MPs, Lords Lieutenant, CEOs and Chief Constables. They talk to them and get to know them. They can see their good points. Eventually they can see nothing but their good points, because they have become like them. The last sentence of Animal Farm comes to mind.

And here I am, a small and lowly counterpart, bathed in the beguiling warmth of the Establishment in this one place. It is a great privilege to be invited to schools, to turn on Christmas lights, to sit on committees, to bless this and that – to have an established and settled role in a community. A privilege, but a temptation. It is a great mercy that I would never, ever be a bishop, because I know what would happen. I’m exactly the same as them. I would kid myself that I could resist, and a year or two later would be as rusted and corroded as anyone else.

Coffee, Interrupted

'Are you working on sermons for Christmas?' asked the older gentleman who entered the café this morning, saw me, and came and sat at my table, leaving his companion scanning the menu at theirs. As a matter of fact I was, but I was quite happy to have a conversation with someone new.

He was a Quaker, he said, and asked what our church was doing to support the Palestinians. Not a great deal, I had to admit, although at the start of the war I'd observed the Patriarchs' call for prayer and fasting in a somewhat thin way as you may remember. My interlocutor was very disappointed at the Churches' response to the Gaza war, 'whereas they've fallen in line with what the Government's told us to feel about Ukraine, and that's a situation completely of the West's own making'. He was wearing a keffiyeh: although I think for a Christian to wear a keffiyeh as a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians is a bit like a White person blacking up to protest against racism, people will have different opinions about that and I didn't raise it. 'It's a terrible situation in which there is much evil', I offered, 'But there are many terrible situations in which there is much evil around the world, and I never quite see why so many people who aren't involved feel so invested in this one particularly'.

I was being slightly disingenuous: I have a pretty definite suspicion why, and there's a kind explanation and a less kind one. The kind one is that Christians read about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and all these other places in their Bibles, and feel a sense of connection with them as a result. (I am curious about the fact that I don't. I have absolutely no interest at all in travelling to the Holy Land, walking in Jesus's footsteps or anything of that kind, not when the whole point of the Christian religion is that you can walk in his footsteps perfectly well here rather than burning up hydrocarbons to visit a war zone. But anyway.) 

As for the second explanation, my unsought companion was about to prove it. 'Well', he said, 'How would you like it if someone was to hand your country over to the Jews? - Or anyone', he added hurriedly, editing his instinctive opinions in a way that made the original outburst worse. Thankfully by this point the café staff were very keen that he should return to his seat before it was time for him and his friend to leave.

It's not the first conversation I've had with a keffiyeh-wearing Christian who's made an eye-stretching comment about 'the Jews' - not just some Jews, not those Jews, note, but all of them. That this hides among ordinary people who talk a lot about Peace with a capital P shouldn't perhaps provoke such shocked disappointment, but it does.

Prayer and Fasting, Sort Of

'We call upon the people of our congregations and all those of goodwill around the world to observe a Day of Prayer and Fasting' ran the letter from the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, issued last Friday. More prayer can never be a bad thing, though only having got back to work (and found out about the letter) on Monday there wasn't time for me to organise anything collective. I put the appeal on the church LiberFaciorum page and prepared to keep the day in some way myself. 

You might ask what this actually means in practice. What it probably ought to mean is literally an entire day devoted to prayer about a particular matter, and a fast means abstinence from anything with any calorific value at least until the evening when, liturgically, the day is over. But I faced a number of problems. The first was that I'd come back from leave with a cold which first made itself known on Saturday/Sunday night: two covid tests have suggested it isn't that, in so far as you can rely on these things, but I do feel grotty, and prayer and fasting when you are ill are a particular challenge. The second issue was the number of other things I had to do - the usual midweek mass in the morning, a range of jobs mainly based on the computer, and a session at the Air Cadets in the evening. Prayer would have to fit around those.

So my fast was an etiolated observance which permitted some cups of black tea and dry bread until dinner-time, and prayer consisted of a couple of short interludes through the day when I laid the terrible current events in the Holy Land before the Lord. I got back from the Squadron where I discussed the deceptions and subterfuges of war to the news of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza, and not just a hospital but a hospital run by the Anglican Church. It seemed a sort of demonic mockery of any miserable prayers I'd been able to offer. 

Quantum of Thought

The BBC can be forgiven for saving money by rebroadcasting programmes when they suddenly become relevant again, and when I heard Sarah Montague and Brian Cox discussing Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lectures a few days ago in a show which first appeared in 2017, I assumed that was just what the Radio 4 authorities were up to – linking the discussion to the recent movie about the physicist. But in fact Reith Revisited is being repeated as a series wholesale over August. This means it was a coincidence, and it was an equal coincidence that I’d just finished reading a book that covered the same subject at the time.

According to the presenters, one of Oppenheimer’s points was to make suggestions about how quantum mechanics might affect not just the approach of scientists to their own endeavours, but also have implications for society more widely. Sometimes, he argued, you have to treat light as though it’s a particle, and sometimes you have to treat it like a wave. Neither sort of measurement comprehensively defines the observed phenomenon: you need both. If this is the case with something as ubiquitous and obvious as light, with the absolute basics of physics, surely it is just so with the scientific project as a whole, and even more with the complex and subtle matters of human social organisation, of politics and economics. No one single viewpoint can manage alone. It’s a prescription for pluralism.

The book was Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall’s The Quantum Society from 1993, which, according to the price label, I bought from a branch of Oxfam at some unknown date. It was (apparently) one of a trio of books examining essentially the same theme at rather greater length than Robert Oppenheimer’s Reith Lecture. Dr Zohar essentially wrote the text to which her husband Ian Marshall then contributed ideas, and she doesn’t refer to Oppenheimer at all so we have to assume that she came up with her concept independently. She treats the quantum model of the universe as a ‘metaphor’ for understanding society, but also regards it as affecting reality very concretely. So the shift she’s suggesting is from an individualistic, ‘Newtonian’ culture in which people regard themselves as tightly bounded beings like atomic particles, to a ‘quantum’ world in which we see ourselves as simultaneously particles and waves, overlapping and interacting, and building something different as a result of our interactions that we could not have otherwise; but she also suggests that this model has a basis not just in the concept of the quantum but in the actual mechanisms of brain function which seem to obey the quantum rules of superposition and indeterminacy. I don’t swallow this all wholesale, but you can see the point.

Dr Zohar stresses that her vision for human social organisation along ‘quantum’ lines is not in any way relativistic – it assumes there is a real truth to be discovered, even if we rely on each others’ conflicting approaches and viewpoints to get there. Just as well, because the great point I would feel compelled to make (though we know anyway that Schrodinger’s great thought-experiment was devised to ridicule the idea that observation determines reality) is that God can already see inside the box, and is well aware what’s happened to the cat.

And All The People Rejoiced

'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it. 

So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.

Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.

I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have. 

In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?