Unexpected Consequences

Anyone who spends a while with sincere Christians will become aware eventually that praying for someone, and especially telling them that you will pray for them, is not always without a certain agenda. It can often provide a psychological gloss for resentments and hostility, and a means of avoiding dealing with them. What you find yourself doing is praying that the other person will change their mind, fall in line with your agenda, and do what you would prefer they did. 

Of course this kind of praying is hopeless. If you're genuinely going to pray for someone, you must make an effort to understand where they're coming from, enter into their thinking, and desire the best for them regardless of what may have gone on between you and them, leaving the exact outcome to God.

Our doctrine tutor at college once said that he strove not to slag off any politician who he hadn't prayed for, a statement which has always remained with me. I do mention the Government and Opposition in my prayers, at least in general terms if rarely calling to mind individuals within them. However, at the moment I find it especially hard to be charitable, especially to the two posh boys who have plunged this country and more obliquely the rest of the world into chaos by pursuing the feud they began in the playground forty years ago. So I have done my best to pray for Mr Cameron and Mr Johnson over the last couple of days, aware, as they presumably are, of the colossal effects of the gamble they have, from their different directions, both taken.

And now the careers of not one but both of them are apparently over. Both have lost the game; both are humbled by failure - at least outwardly. I will say only that this puts a very strange complexion on my prayers.

Backwards and Forwards

In 1991/2 I lived in Leicester while doing my Museum Studies degree. God, Leicester was a dump. It was a post-industrial zombie city scattered with bits of Victorian civic largesse. I didn’t realise how much of a dump it was because a) I was naïve and b) the whole of Britain was pretty dumpish a generation ago.

In October I went back to visit the King and meet a friend I’d not seen in 20 years. The city has altered so much I couldn’t even recognise the street pattern. It’s full of neat squares, big plate-glass stores, and cafes spilling onto the street. It feels happy and vibrant. Even the Narborough Road looks smart. Leicester is ethnically diverse and culturally and economically active. This means it is part of the ‘spiritual London’, and accordingly voted to Remain. Of course some things have been lost in the change, but they have been replaced by much that is positive.

A century and a bit ago ordinary people knew where they stood. Large parts of Britain derived their identity from heavy industry – not just their economic identity, but their cultural and psychological identity as well. Even though that sort of activity mainly employed men, women were involved in it, and had a sense of self invested in it. This life was often extremely disagreeable, but pride and self-respect could be derived from surviving its very hardness. In agricultural districts the cultural experience was slightly different – less monochrome and with the realities of class division blunted and obscured by the longer history and tradition of that way of life. The basic economic facts were similar, though, self-respect being derived from work and the communal experience built around it.

Just to remind myself that this is a blog written by a clergyman, the Church also had varying roles in these different but parallel cultures. In rural or small-town communities the parish church mediated the relationships around it, provided a focus for communal self-expression which could, in theory, be accessed by different classes and social groups, and sometimes was. In newer, urban settings, its presence was more missionary and ideological, more concentrated on generating specifically Christian identities rather than communal ones, however much the Church may have wanted to create organic parishes along the old lines.

All that is gone. The kind of industry that generated communal identity and individual self-respect is never coming back, and the rural communities rooted in the experience of producing food are irrevocably disrupted. Nostalgia for that lost world is psychologically and politically harmful, as is the failure to deal with the grief arising from its dissolution, a grief which in England and Wales has gone largely unacknowledged and unprocessed (the Scots seem to have done rather better at redefining themselves). Grief left unprocessed expresses itself in pathological forms, as I think we saw last week.

The result of the referendum is at least partly a revolt against modernity, against the self-assurance of the Spiritual London that’s done moderately well out of the new arrangements of the world, out of globalisation and its attendant phenomena. The problem is that there is no other option that stands a chance of generating a better life for anyone.

What is our economic life for? Classic liberal political economy describes it in terms of providing the means for people to express their choices; more brutally put, making money. A socialist might contend that people ‘choose’ more or less the same sorts of goods – work, health, security, rest, interaction with other human beings, a roof over one’s head. It’s not rocket science. The test of an economy is how well it provides people with those things. As to what type of economy, I rather made my peace with capitalism as a result of coming to see it less as a means of providing material prosperity as such than of generating solutions to problems, and here you can again, boring though it may be, detect the influence of Tim Harford on my thinking.

In Leicester and places like it you have an active, thriving commercial and cultural life which provides human beings with opportunities to get together, discover more about each other, and do creative things, things from which they derive their sense of self as much as from work alone. Bringing diverse people together within a capitalist economy makes it more likely that they will find solutions to the common problems they face. Even in an economy which is as desperately skewed towards financial services as the British economy is, that activity, no matter what you might think of it, helps to generate the stuff that really does make a difference to people’s lives, which is why the half-a-million-plus souls who work in the City and Canary Wharf (half a million plus! I had no idea it was that many until two days ago) are actually quite important to us all.

A commercial life that facilitates human creativity and interaction, and a capitalism that generates ways of solving human problems, is the only game in town. It's the only viable and humane future. It develops a more complicated sort of human selfhood than did the old world, but it’s just as capable of producing humane, loving individuals. We need a political life that works to make this more likely and spreads its benefits to those who have been left out of them, and a national narrative that describes what’s happening in a way people can grasp.

Some Dismal Science

My economist friend Dr Abacus responded to my previous post in such an interesting way that I thought I would present their comments, before I make my next grandiose statement.

"I agree that many people have gotten little out of the last forty years - but that isn't entirely for want of politicians trying. Labour created the national minimum wage, and spent a fortune on tax credits. They also hugely increased pensioner benefits. The coalition raised the tax allowance, to try to change the distribution of income. They also spent a fortune on pensioners, so that today - for the first time in history - you are less likely to be poor as a pensioner than as someone of working age. The current govt has announced big rises in the minimum wage - by almost 50% by the end of the parliament. 

"I agree that this doesn't recreate the jobs that once existed. Mechanisation can be brutal to livelihoods, as machine breakers have known throughout history. The Luddites, those who broke the new cotton machinery; containerisation destroyed the port jobs and self-driving cars will destroy the livelihoods of many Pakistani and Bangladeshi minicab drivers, as well as white working class London cabbies. (Note that the benefits of these changes are often the poorest - cheap clothes matter most to those with least money). I think we could go further to redistribute income. But bringing back the pride of earning a good income is tougher. It was easier 1900-1960, because in that era technology replaced skilled labour with unskilled - skilled bootmakers replaced by machine operators. This was tough on the few, but created well-paid jobs for the many. Since then we have had the reverse, with technology destroying low skill high pay jobs (train drivers are left, not many others). We don't know why technology has changed from being skill-replacing to skill-biased, but it has, and this has affected all of the developed world.

  

"I think Labour did try to help people through the dislocation of economic change. The deal was that rather than have a something for nothing welfare state, benefits would be much more generous to those in work, and crucially would be paid through the tax system to the main earner. So they would look and feel like earnings. The idea was to create some of the dignity of labour that comes from being able to provide for your family. You work, you get the self-respect. Furthermore, they deregulated the labour market so that pretty much anyone who wanted to work, could work. Very different to continental Europe, and to the US (where the indignity of being poor is called food stamps, and is explicit).

"Now that didn't work, but that was the plan. And it wasn't a bad one, compared with either the US or continental model. But it still wasn't good enough."

I thought this look back at the recent history of government's attempts to approach the dislocations whose results have been revealed in the referendum was enlightening. My beef with the political class is that they haven't proved capable of helping disadvantaged communities to work through those dislocations psychologically and culturally, as well as financially, a thought which will lead into my next set of musings. Perhaps that's not a realistic request to make of politicians and the media, but it seems instructive that although I'm a moderately well-informed person I have never thought of the actions of the Blair-Brown administration in the terms Dr Abacus describes; and if I haven't, it wouldn't be a surprise if the people intended as their beneficiaries haven't either. 

The Two Englands and Where to Go

The first four paragraphs below were originally posted in another well-known social media forum, aware of how a lot of my chums were feeling.

Lots of people I know are hurting a great deal. The result of the referendum feels like a kick in the teeth to nice, liberal, modern individuals, made all the more bitter because of the nature of those who have persuaded a majority of the UK to administer that kick. It feels like a rejection of the kind of world most of the people I know have lived in most of their adult lives, a world of aspiration towards kindness, inclusivity, and broadening experience of what it means to be human, a world in which national boundaries have little role to play. We feel rejected and left out.

Try to take a while to imagine, in turn, what it might feel like to have been left out of that nice, modern, perhaps stressful, but pretty prosperous liberal world in the first place. To have spent forty years watching your communities and families being devastated by economic change over which you have had no say and no control, removing the ways of life which, however hard and unsatisfactory, generated self-respect and identity. Forty years in which the political leaders of ‘your sort of people’ have shown themselves neither capable of nor interested in describing the real causes of your distress in ways that make sense to you. When finally, finally, given the chance to express how hurt and angry you feel, it’s understandable if you turn not against the forces which have really changed your world and removed your landmarks, which are vast and unnamed, but against things, against people, you can see and identify.

We who are part of the ‘spiritual London’, a land of fluid race and gender, a realm of digital identity and opportunity, have benefited greatly from those forty years. Our lives are freer and richer than they would otherwise have been. We have friends who hail from many different parts of the world and who move around freely across borders, we cook complicated meals from cosmopolitan cookbooks. Even those of us who came from the working classes in the first place are long since separated from those backgrounds by education, work, and relationships. The paradox is that, although many of us think of ourselves as liberal, lefty people, we’ve benefited from the same globalising capitalism which has laid waste swathes of this and other countries and left lots of other people behind. They don’t have the same experiences we have, the same relationships we have. For us (even when we don’t really like the way it works) the EU represents all the good things we have; for others, it epitomises all the things they’ve had stolen from them.

What happened on Thursday tips everything into the melting pot – political parties, allegiances, economies, the EU itself. It’s a moment of great danger, but not without hope. I think it’s vital that we start building a national narrative that somehow can include both the beneficiaries of the massive social changes that have engulfed our land and those alienated by them. But who can do it? Where can we find them? Is anyone really interested in doing it, or will we fritter away the opportunity in delusion and mucking about?

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The role of clergy, I told the poor, unsuspecting folk of Swanvale Halt this morning, is perhaps to try as best we can to interpret these two uncommunicating blocs of experience to one another, and reduce the risk of demonisation and barbarism. Not easy to pull off, though, even if anyone's listening.

Something In The Air

Recently I decided that I don't pay enough attention to the important institutions of the parish and make myself available to them, with the exception of our Church school. So yesterday I called in at the old people's Day Centre not to do anything in particular beyond seeing who was around and what was happening. I found Audrey, the manager, in her office in a mood to complain.

"You should have been here a minute ago. I was having to deal with a group of very rude people. They came in to complain about the annual trip to Eastbourne, that they didn't know about it."

"But you don't organise that, and everyone knows it happens every year. And there's still three weeks to go."

"I know! And they were so hostile. There was no call for that. I don't know, everyone seems so bad-tempered at the moment. There isn't a lot of community spirit about."

Well, I wonder why that should be, just at this point in time. I find myself subscribing to a kind of spiritual version of miasma theory: that big events in which everyone is involved, or a community is involved, and the things that are said about them, do have an effect on the way people behave towards one another. Put like that it seems absurd that we should think any differently. Human beings do not, however much they may tell themselves they do, live their lives in a succession of discrete boxes separated by reason. When they get annoyed about one thing, they're likely to get more annoyed about others than they would otherwise be.

Praise, Indeed

‘Numbers at Shimley had slipped a bit by the time I left, I think people were just bored with me’, said Derek, the retired hospital chaplain who comes to say Mattins with us every now and again, recalling his days as a parish priest thirty years ago.

‘Perhaps that’s what’s happening here’, I suggested with a certain degree of ruefulness, calling attention to the gentle slide in attendance at Swanvale Halt over the last two years after five of gently rising support since I arrived. Derek clearly decided it was time to be supportive.

‘It seems to me that what you’re providing here as a church is a traditional model of doing things which is about thoughtful preaching, well-prepared liturgy, working with people pastorally, and faithful, dedicated prayer, and it’s good. It’s doing things properly, about consistency and faithfulness. It’s not exciting, it’s often dull, it’s hard work. But it’s what will keep the Church going when all the flummery has gone, and in the end it doesn’t matter how many people are there. That’s not what’s important.’

That was a summary of what he said, anyway. It’s all very well, and appreciated for its kindness. But in the end the bills have to be paid and you have to have at least sufficient people to provide that thoughtful preaching, well-prepared liturgy, and so on. All this is true, but can easily become an excuse for not challenging ourselves. 

Oddments

What on earth could I say at Assembly at the infants school tomorrow? Last time I happened to meet one of the children with his parents in the café and as a result of that conversation decided I'd talk about going to the beach, but that hasn't happened this week. Eventually, as I read a book to clear my distracted mind while cooking Sunday lunch, I thought: books! I will speak about books, leading into talking about what the Bible is and what it means to religious people. I looked back at my old assembly plan notes and discovered that I did this about five years ago. I must have gone through exactly the same thought processes then. It was a bit like the occasion, many years ago, when I found my own name in the visitors' book of a church I had no recollection of ever having been to before.

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'Oh, it's been a long day', Trevor sighed on Friday as he sat in my kitchen with a cup of tea. 'When did you get up?' I asked. 'About twelve,' he said. 'It's 3.30,', I pointed out.