I came across a reference to something that President Obama said last year in Strasbourg: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Category Archives: politics
TBTE20100707
Why Christians must grieve
and, via Byron, a good, simple post on Peak Oil
What are demons, really? A post that deserves a proper response – in God’s good time.
As it was in the beginning – what liturgy looked like in the early days
How to plant a church
Why Cameron was lucky not to win outright
TBTM20100623
On agw as a big red herring
Byron asked: “Sam, do you agree that there is a significant body of hard-core deniers who are not open to evidence? I am not saying that every contrarian belongs to this group (nor that pathological behaviour is confined to contrarians), simply that there are powerful economic, ideological and social forces leading many to a place of epistemic closure on this matter. Would you agree?”
My simple answer is ‘yes’. Anthropogenic Global Warming (agw) as presented is a major challenge to the status quo, and so all those with interests in preserving the status quo will have a bias to resist the conclusions of agw. These can take many stripes; often, I would accept, there is a reactionary element involved, and there may even be some legacy influence from fossil-fuel providers funding propaganda.
However, it is also true – so it seems to me – that there are hard-core ‘affirmers’ who are equivalently immune to evidence, and that there are “powerful economic, ideological and social forces leading many to a place of epistemic closure” in favour of the agw hypothesis.
To my mind, agw is a plausible hypothesis with a significant amount of supporting evidence. It is less than certain; most of all, the dire predictions are much less than certain, and I tend to see bad theology in them.
Beyond this, I tend to see Liebig’s law as relevant. The dire predictions associated with the IPCC tend to assume, more or less business as usual, ongoing into through the twenty first century. This seems mindless to me. There is not a hope of business being anything like usual for the next fifteen years, let alone the next fifty or hundred. That is seen most explicitly for me in the assumptions employed re: fossil fuel use, but it applies to all the other limits to growth that we are hitting (and Byron has a useful list here). If we take Liebig’s law to apply to the world system as a whole (which I think is reasonable) then it seems highly likely to me that a very great number of the measures and results being sought by agw advocates will be imposed upon human society by reality. Our carbon dioxide emissions, and the whole impact of industrialisation upon the ecosphere, will substantially reduce from present levels. I see this as beyond any choice, whether that choice be made by individuals, nations or humanity as a whole. We in the industrial world are going to have to get used to using a great deal less energy, and soon (my wild-assed guess: 50% less energy in 15 years).
Which is why I see agw as a red herring. Although it makes for some dramatic pictures, the science behind agw is less certain than the science behind other ecological concerns (Peak Oil, deforestation, water scarcity etc), and the prognoses from agw are even less certain. Worse than this, they are alarmist and appeal to fear, and that has theological problems too. I simply do not see what is either achieved or achievable by the IPCC and its cohorts. Whereas something like Transition Towns (on the practical side) and the Dark Mountain project (on the human culture side) – these I find exciting, practical and inspiring.
Constitutional wish list
In the light of the fascinating post-election negotiations, I thought I’d sketch my ideal political reforms – if I was made dictator for a day:
– retain constituencies for the House of Commons, but replace FPTP with “AV” (not AV+);
– make all constituencies approximately equal in size;
– fixed terms of five years;
– potential for recall/dismissal of an MP in some circumstances;
– impose pure PR on the House of Lords (party lists);
– also have equivalent of party lists (the great and the good, eg bishops) to represent the non-voting proportion in the Upper House (eg if only 65% of population vote, then 35% of seats in Upper House are allocated to non-party Lords);
– give Upper House power to impose referendum on disputed legislation;
– bring in an English Parliament.
I am rather hoping that Cameron and Clegg can create a coalition. It would be good in all sorts of ways (and very much in the LibDem interest).
Constitutional wish list
In the light of the fascinating post-election negotiations, I thought I’d sketch my ideal political reforms – if I was made dictator for a day:
– retain constituencies for the House of Commons, but replace FPTP with “AV” (not AV+);
– make all constituencies approximately equal in size;
– fixed terms of five years;
– potential for recall/dismissal of an MP in some circumstances;
– impose pure PR on the House of Lords (party lists);
– also have equivalent of party lists (the great and the good, eg bishops) to represent the non-voting proportion in the Upper House (eg if only 65% of population vote, then 35% of seats in Upper House are allocated to non-party Lords);
– give Upper House power to impose referendum on disputed legislation;
– bring in an English Parliament.
I am rather hoping that Cameron and Clegg can create a coalition. It would be good in all sorts of ways (and very much in the LibDem interest).
A little bit on Laws
With thanks to Simon Sarmiento who sent me the link. This is part of yesterday’s sermon, but given the content I think it belongs on this blog more than my sermons one.
For those who haven’t been following the case, a Christian working for the charity Relate had refused to provide marital counselling for same-sex couples and been dismissed for that reason. The Christian had appealed the decision on the grounds that it represented religious discrimination, and the judgement this week was to reject that argument. In other words, as seems very reasonable, a charity set up with explicit provision to provide guidance for same sex couples had the right to dismiss an employee that didn’t agree with the purposes of that charity – so far so straightforward.
Lord Laws, however, in his judgement, went a little further than that – partly because the former ABC made a rather public intervention in the process. Lord Laws said this:
“…the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims. The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic…”
Let’s leave aside his frankly rather quaint adherence to Modernist philosophical categories, especially his naïve use of “subjective” and “objective”, and look at the underlying logic. For I wonder how far this can be pushed.
The first thing to point out is that actually we are a theocracy – more so than Iran – for our head of state is also the head of the established church! Is the monarch guilty of discrimination when he or she takes the coronation oath? The church is involved in that, after all:
The Archbishop of Canterbury: “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?”
The Monarch: “All this I promise to do. The things which I have here before promised, I will perform, and keep. So help me God.”
The second point is that his judgement applied to Relate – a secular agency with secular purposes – what about adoption agencies? If there are Catholic agencies with Catholic purposes, are they allowed to only employ Catholics or those who accept a Catholic agenda? Or is that discrimination? How about issues such as abortion – at present a Christian doctor is allowed to refuse an abortion – will that always be the case, or will a Christian doctor be required, by virtue of working in a secular institution, to carry out procedures that he finds abhorrent – and what about euthanasia? The same thing applies. Does it even apply to a nurse offering to pray with a patient? Put differently, is the secular state in the business of mandating and enforcing a division between care of the body and care of the spirit that medical practice itself would not acknowledge? I once read that in the future christians will be marked out as the people who don’t kill babies and don’t kill old people – I think that there is something in that
What is at issue here is the purported neutrality of the state, an intellectual position which Lord Justice Laws seems to hold but which is, at the very least, open to question. According to the rhetoric the state is able to hold the ring as a safe space within which different interests can operate – but the rhetoric disguises two things.
1. The state has a definite agenda, a secular agenda, and it is intolerant of dissent. Following the somewhat misnamed wars of religion and the peace of Westphalia the state has progressively centralised power, and it is ultimately ruthless in eliminating opposition (for various reasons, mostly associated with the fact that our society is crashing into the limits to growth, I think that historical period is over, and the future belongs to resilient local communities like transition towns – but that’s a whole other story) What we see with Lord Justice Laws is simply an echo of that position.
2. For specific historical reasons our political settlement can’t really cope with assertive religious believers. This is seen most particularly at the moment with issues around the Muslim faith. The philosopher John Locke, who stands at the origin of this process, put in place the framework by which the ethics of religious belief were judged by the state – and in England, this had the consequence that all enthusiasm became suspect. If you were actively and sincerely religious then you were not quite sound, you couldn’t quite be trusted – the danger perceived was that you might be tempted to pick up a mace and break open your opponents head. All sorts of cultural habits have followed on from that, and the Church of England has been happy to accept a position of pampered privilege – sadly at the price of proclaiming the gospel.
So am I arguing that Christians are suffering from persecution? If we are, then only very mildly. As Archbishop Rowan has pointed out with his customary good sense and profound spirituality, for Christians in the West to bleat about persecution at a time when more Christians in the world than ever before are being executed for their faith – this betrays a profound sense-of-proportion failure.
Nevertheless, I don’t see any reason to hold back on criticisms of our political culture, mild though the situation is. To do so is simply to accept the role of neutered house pet which the political settlement imposed on the church, and very unnatural it is too. To be a Christian is to be political – as one of my favourite theologians once put it, “If you ask one of the crucial theological questions–why was Jesus killed?–the answer isn’t `because God wants us to love one another.’ Why in the hell would anyone kill Jesus for that? That’s stupid. It’s not even interesting. Why did he get killed? Because he challenged the powers that be. The church is a political institution calling people to be an alternative to the world. That’s what the cross is about.” (Hauerwas)
In defence of the debates
Confession: I watched _almost_ every minute of the leadership debates, the exception being the first ten minutes of the second as I had set my Sky+ incorrectly! I found them to be very useful and, with minor caveats – like how useless the first two moderators were – I think they are a significant step forward for democracy in the UK. Why do I say this? How in particular to respond to the idea that they represent a regression, a capitulation to celebrity culture?
Well, in brief, we get a very great deal of information through non-verbal communication, and that information is relevant to our decision making, including the decision as to who we wish to be our leaders. We cannot escape displaying our identity when people see us react in difficult circumstances – and it seems perfectly sensible to make a voting decision based upon that identity.
The idea that policy must be placed above personality privileges a particular way of understanding politics – dare I say the anointed way? – and is one of the pernicious products of the idolatry of rationalism in our society. (Too many p’s in that sentence!) Of course, the blowback against that idolatry has its downside, but I don’t think watching 4.5 hours of debate between party leaders counts as a symptom of not taking matters seriously – and the uptick in voter registration tends to support that. The debates have engaged people in the political process, and that is surely healthy.
Gordon Brown, smeared and anointed
Although I disagree with most of his policies, I do think Gordon Brown is a good person. Most particularly I think he was most effective in the TV debates when he was talking about taking steps to alleviate poverty. I have no doubt that his commitment to social justice is genuine, heartfelt and commendable.
I was pondering that when thinking about the smearing he had to endure yesterday, as a result of his rude comments about Mrs Duffy. First off, let’s acknowledge that much of the drive to smear him comes from a Murdoch-driven agenda to get the Conservatives into power and thereby reduce the power of the BBC (something I very much oppose). Having said that, I do think that the episode reveals something of the mental framework of our governing class which is worth bringing into the light.
Rather similar to Obama’s comments about ‘clinging to guns and religion’ what the comment reveals is a commitment to the ‘vision of the anointed’, ie that the governing class has a better, more elevated understanding of the needs and priorities facing a country than do the ordinary people who live in the country. There is then an inevitable process of perception management (spin) to try and disguise the tension generated by seeking the approval and votes of people with whom you disagree. Occasionally the mask slips.
In contrast to this, for all sorts of theological and practical reasons, I think the most essential task is to return power to the local level so far as possible, in order to encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives. In their different ways, LibDems, Greens and Conservatives are all pursuing that objective. I hope that, whatever the actual outcome, there will be a reversal of the centralisation of power that has proceeded under both styles of government for the last few generations.
Five political confessions
1. The only political party I’ve ever been a full member of is the Liberal Democrats.
2. The only political party I’ve ever actively campaigned for is the Green Party.
3. The above applies to real elections. I was the Conservative candidate in my school’s mock election in 1987, and I wore a blue rosette inscribed “I ♥ Maggie”! I came in second, behind the anarchists 🙂
4. “I’ve never voted Labour before”. I never will either.
5. Whilst I view my vote in the next general election as pretty meaningless (the local MP will get re-elected) I think it important to exercise the right to vote. I haven’t decided how to cast my vote yet, though. I might vote for a party I’ve never voted for before.