Monthly Archives: December 2005

Some notes on Chomsky’s ‘Understanding Power’

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I find Chomsky a very interesting and stimulating read. I’m glad he’s around to provide his perspective, and I shall make sure I read more of him in future (I have Deterring Democracy and Manufacturing Consent on my shelves, which are next in line). I think he’s particularly good at exhuming otherwise ignored malefactions by the US Government – thinking of Central America in particular, but it does go more widely. (So as someone who doesn’t like state power in general, he’s good at providing ammunition for the dispelling of some illusions.) I think he’s particularly good on media bias, and with some quibbles (some of which he accepted in UP) I think his “Propaganda model” is basically right.

However I think that he is significantly wrong about capitalism. In particular I think his analysis is a) incoherent and naïve and b) parochial to the US.

a. The incoherence/naivete shows itself in his attribution of motives to businesses. On p391 of my copy he describes the “institutional necessity” that corporations work under as “to the extent that you have a competitive system based on private control over resources, you are forced to maximise short term gain”; on p394, as part of an analysis of how scientific research is corrupted by business patronage, he says “big corporations understand that if they want to keep making profits five years from now, there’d better be some science funded today”. Both of those can’t be true. Now he’s being colloquial in the book, which makes it more readable, but this was just one instance of a prevalent confusion in his perspective, ie that businessmen are rapacious short-term capitalists – except for when they’re rapacious long-term capitalists. I just find his comments on business processes weak, as compared to his foreign policy analysis.

b. More specifically I think that his criticisms have most force when applied to an Anglo-Saxon publicly listed company. I don’t think that they’re applicable to European companies/ social models, and they’re definitely not applicable to Asian companies. The cheibatsu/keiretsu model, for example, is geared around the maintenance or increase of long term market share. That’s very different to the maximisation of the bottom line.

Part of the underlying disagreement I have with his analysis rests upon his anthropology. A strongly left-wing analysis often minimises the role of individual choice, and in particular, it has the logical consequence of being forced to argue that most people (are forced to) choose the wrong things – whereas the anointed are free from such malign influences. I think Chomsky is guilty of this, and this is one of the key progressive/conservative debates. One of the most important disagreements flows from this: I think that he systematically underestimates the importance of individual choice and leadership. So he says “Nobody does anything on their own”, and to the extent that he is describing the importance of social organisation he is
right. But I think there is a necessary role for spokesmen who can articulate a vision which inspires the movement as a whole, and that no amount of organisation can make up for the lack of such a leader. (I don’t think I’m arguing for a Fuhrerprinzip here, just that “without a vision the people perish”).

So: worth reading, but best consumed with added salt.

The Virgin Birth

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I struggle with a literal account of the Virgin Birth. Once upon a time I was 100% heretical – rejected Jesus’ incarnation and divinity; resurrection was a spiritual experience; giving sight to the blind was psychosomatic etc etc. Over time and with further study all of those heresies have fallen away, leaving my questions about the Virgin Birth feeling rather lonely and missing their old friends. Yet those questions don’t go away. I’m aware I’m unorthodox on this, but belief isn’t volitional. In particular, I find it deeply depressing to be lining up on the same side as John Spong (nothing personal) – but I’m sure God’s grace is active here as everywhere, and though I am a stubborn mule God will eventually prevail.

These thoughts were prompted by an interesting article here, where I disagreed with “without a Virgin Birth, it seems that the Incarnation falls by the wayside”. If someone could persuade me that that was true, then I’d be more sympathetic to the VB. Yet John’s gospel is by some measure the most incarnational of the four, and as John not only does not have the VB but there is even a suggestion that he is opposed to it, it seems perfectly plausible to have Incarnation without the VB.

In my memory is a letter quoted in a book on reactions to John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’, from a “housewife” who said (paraphrase) that she had always found it difficult to relate to Jesus because she saw him as a Superman figure, with special abilities, and therefore not all that relevant to her life. From reading Robinson she had felt able to move closer to Him.

So the key issue for me is how to reconcile the VB with full-blooded humanity. Christ has to be one of us – and I can’t see how the VB allows him to be one of us. He must be one of us for ‘what he has not assumed he has not healed’.

I’m aware that I’m wrong – all the other heresies have been consistently overcome through the application of theological understanding (in other words, once I’ve realised what is being claimed, the objections tend to dissolve). I just haven’t got there yet. In so far as I ‘believe’ it, it is because I accept and trust the authority of the church, which has proven its truth to me in every other area. But I just don’t understand it – and that drives me nuts.

Ah well. I’ll keep plodding on.

What are gay men for?

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Michael Vasey was a lovely man, whom I met a handful of times before his very untimely death. He sometimes asked the question, what are gay men for? Mark Vernon gives one answer here. “So what are gay men and lesbians for now? They are a reminder, in a world coloured by the cold calculations of competitiveness, that people can love one another.”

SUV spirituality

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Consider the appeal of an SUV (what we in England call ‘4X4’s or, more to the point, ‘Chelsea Tractors’).

You are strong. You are safe. You are independent and self-sufficient, accountable to no-one. If there is a collision, the other car will come off worst. You are elevated above the common herd, able to look further into the distance. You can trek across exotic locations, you can even cross the Strood when the tide is high.

The appeal of an SUV is to a particular mentality – a mentality which owes just about everything to Modern philosophy. It is the Cartesian ego transformed by the parameters of the internal combustion engine. Iris Murdoch describes it as presented by Kant:

“How recognisable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy.” (From ‘The Sovereignty of the Good’)

This man drives an SUV, for the SUV expresses all those virtues in kinematic form. The culture which reveres these attributes calls forth in mechanical expression an embodiment of it’s own soul – and so we arrive at the crisis of our culture. We are, in James Howard Kunstler’s words, up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV with an empty tank.

This is a spiritual problem: the roots of the crisis are spritual; the only possible solution is spiritual. Consider those virtues expressed in the SUV; consider most of all the virtue of autonomy – the independent man, accountable to none, moving off to decide by the light of his own conscience and his own reason what is good. The child of Martin Luther permanently protesting against external authority.

Now consider the voice of a Modern atheist: I do not need an external authority to tell me be to be good. I do not need to find a purpose for my life from a religious tradition. I choose my own tradition! I am the master of my destiny!
I SHALL DRIVE MY OWN SPIRITUAL UTILITY VEHICLE!

The point of a religious tradition – the definition of one perhaps – is that we are accountable to a higher authority. That authority need not be a God as understood by theistic tradition. It might simply be ‘the truth’, or – as with Plato and Aristotle – ‘the good’. The key thing is that it is not amenable to personal choice. A person is accountable, and shall give an account. The person is open to being engaged by other people who also consider themselves accountable, and that shared accountability and shared purpose provides the irreplaceable glue of human society. It is precisely that communal glue which the driver of the SUV repudiates. For the driver of the SUV must at all costs be a sovereign ego at the centre of his body – the homunculus this time, not watching a screen, but behind the wheel.

The SUV – sport and spiritual, car and soul – symbolises all that will be left behind on the other side of Peak Oil.

Bob puts it well:

You may be a construction worker working on a home,
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome,
You might own guns and you might even own tanks,
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

King Kong

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Watched the new Kong film this afternoon.

On the whole – worth going to the cinema for. The realisation of the great ape was greatly impressive, and, in particular, the astonishing middle section fight sequence raises the bar for any who come after.

But the ‘creepy crawly’ section was horrific and redundant – would belong better in a higher rated film than this (in the cinema I was sat next to a 10? year old girl taken there by her father – not sure I would want a ten year old child of mine watching men being eaten alive by maggots…)

It was also at least half an hour too long, had some serious plot lacunae (what happened to the villagers?) and a bathetic ending.

So – good to very good; not great.

Misplacing the Apocalypse

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Have a (brief) look at this site. It’s a very interesting perspective, and the main point can be simply stated: the earth can only support around 1.5 billion people sustainably; the rest are being sustained by easy access to fossil fuels (something like ten calories of fossil fuels for each calorie consumed). Thus, when the fossil fuels run out (soon) most people will die; more or less swiftly, more or less horribly.

Those who buy into this perspective are called ‘doomers’, and it seems to me that a theological perspective has something to say about the subject. For what I think we have is a use of apocalyptic language (“the world is going to end!”) abstracted away from a context in which it makes coherent sense. In other words, the foundation of the ‘doomer’ perspective is implicitly theological – and as such is open to theological critique.

Consider what Tom Wright says on apocalyptic language (from New Testament and the People of God) “Within the mainline Jewish writings of this period, covering a wide range of styles, genres, political persuasions and theological perspectives, there is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events. There is almost nothing to suggest that they followed the Stoics into the belief that the world itself would come to an end; and there is almost everything to suggest that they did not.”

In other words the primary use of apocalyptic language is as a critique of the political and economic status quo, and to express a longing, and expectation, that God’s judgement upon that status quo was coming. Apocalypse was the genre adopted by the downtrodden, those who were most victimised in the present arrangements – for obviously, if you benefited from the present arrangements you wouldn’t want to see them destroyed – and God’s judgement would ‘cast down the mighty from their thrones… and scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts’. So apocalypse is driven by, at root, a righteous indignation and hatred of an existing political or social arrangement, and a longing and expectation that God will act to re-establish justice, ie the Kingdom of God.

It seems plausible to me that the ‘doomers’ share a hatred of the present system, yet it also seems plausible to me that their position cannot be reconciled with Christianity. “So what!” might be their response “who cares what theology has to say about this – theology is a useless waste of space!” – but hang on.

To accept the ‘doomer’ framework, is to assert that there is no way out from the present crisis – and that is to go beyond what the evidence as a whole supports. The evidence is clear that there is a major problem, but to assert that, eg, civilisation will come to an abrupt end is to move from the realm of demonstrable fact (imminent absence of resources on which we presently rely) to a contestable conjecture (there is nothing that we can do to mitigate the situation). At root, then, the ‘doomer’ perspective is a denial of hope, and a denial of the possibility of redemption. It is a theological perspective, not a scientific one.

Now it may well be the truth – it’s certainly possible that human civilisation is about to press the reset button and send us back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Yet it is equally possible that what we face is, eg, a cross between the black death and the 1930s, and that, just as in those situations (bad as they were) human society negotiates the passage more or less successfully, and we continue to move forward as a species and as a civilisation.

My point is simply that we cannot know what the future holds – despite all the suggestive parallels with Easter Island – because it hasn’t happened yet. So I repeat my point – those who have a convinced ‘doomer’ perspective are making a theological assertion, not a scientific one.

Now as a theological assertion, it is open to theological critique. The heart of the assertion is the denial of hope, and therefore of meaning, and it is therefore an embrace of nihilism, the notion that nothing matters (for if we are all going to die what is the point?). Hope is absolutely central to a Christian perspective – the insistence that God is acting within the world for our redemption, and that Christ came not to condemn the world but to save it. That there is no place to which we might fall which is beyond the reach of God’s creative Act – and therefore, no situation is as bleak as a nihilist might paint it. There is always point to what we do.

“If you knew that the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do?”

“I would plant a tree.”

The Old Testament prophets cannot be bettered in their denunciation of a corrupt status quo. Listen to Hosea:

“Hear the Word of the Lord, O people of Israel;
for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or kindness,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
There is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery;
they break all bounds and murder follows murder.
Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish,
and also the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air;
and even the fish of the sea are taken away.”

Or listen to Ezekiel:

“Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. You have not even conformed to the standards of the nations around you. Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the winds. Therefore as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your vile images and detestable practices, I myself will withdraw my favor; I will not look on you with pity or spare you. A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine inside you; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.”

I trust that the resemblance between this language and the language and expectations of the ‘doomers’ is clear. Yet always with the OT prophets there is the promise of restoration, of a new heaven and a new earth. That is what the ‘doomers’ miss. As with Isaiah:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD –
and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.”

It is a question of balance, and honesty. Balance in that the vision of apocalypse always offered a vision of hope for the faithful remnant, who would endure the tribulation and be brought back to a faithful and fulfilling life on the far side of the crisis. Honesty, more crucially, in that it requires an awareness of the limits to our knowledge, and therefore a consequent awareness of how far a more or less conscious perspective on the divine determines the interpretation of such evidence.

There is always hope; there are always things that we can do in the face of disaster; and at the heart of it all is the call to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before our God. It is the absence of those virtues that has led us to the brink of disaster; it is the restoration of those virtues that will guide our people through the coming forty years in the desert.

So I say with the prophets:

Come let us return to the Lord; for He has torn us, and He will heal us.

The Terminal

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A wonderful, whimsical film; interesting characters; Zeta Jones wasn’t annoying; a proper ending.

I also think it will be worth watching again. There must be an interpretation of the film which emphasises vocation (called to stand and wait), whereby we will be enabled to achieve the one thing needful (a signature) but we won’t necessarily be able to retain anything else – objects, loved ones (ZJ), any relationships (Gupta).

At the end I was thinking of the Truman Show, and how we have an allegory of our life on earth there. We arrive; we wait and relate; we achieve our vocation (or not); and then we go home.

I had low expectations. That might be why I enjoyed it so much.

US/UK separation

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…is something I worry about – and then wonder whether it is worth ‘worrying’ about at all. But I came across this article about the breakdown of defence co-operation between the two sides and I wonder where things are headed.

The last forty years or so have seen an undoubted strengthening of the ties between the UK and mainland Europe, and, at least at a popular level (eg dance music) a recognition of what is held in common amongst Europeans vis a vis the United States. Yet it could hardly be said that US influence on the UK has been light!

I just wonder how far the coming great dislocation is going to embed the UK firmly within Europe (not necessarily the EU), and start it on a separate path to the US, and maybe even the rest of the Anglosphere – a perspective with which I have much sympathy.

Ho hum. Pointless musing redux.