Zero
These are scribblings originally set in motion by the raucous sounds of friends jamming, a stream of consciousness sparked from a passing moment, now half remembered at best, and later accumulating tangents as the weeks drift by; look for nothing too coherent here.
One
My small group went away for a beachside retreat.
We read through commentary on the the book of Colossians, from the book Inspired.
We sought to explore the context of this letter – of how the early spread of the Gospel radically challenged the oppressions of the Roman Empire and its institutions, while somehow still submitting to that power, as Jesus submitted to it on the Cross.
And so we reflected, what shape does the Empire take now, for us, in this time and this place?
“Capitalism”, someone said, to a few murmurs of agreement.
I felt an instinctive urge to challenge that, but as I couldn't quite articulate my thoughts, I held my tongue.
Two
Later my disagreement crystallized, while revealing itself as not perhaps any true disagreement at all.
Yes, Capitalism does have a lot in common with the Roman Empire, in the Life of Brian sense:
“Besides from automobiles, smartphones, the Internet[^1], modern pharmaceuticals, electrification, refrigeration, planes, canned foods, washing machines, container shipping, and more generally near everything manufactured, and most generally, the only ever retreat of near universal and absolute poverty since the dawn of agriculture, what has capitalism ever done for us?”
Yet also, I will concede that like the Empire, despite its many gifts, Capitalism is cruel, oppressive, destructive, and inhumane.
Human history is riddled with imperialism and colonialism, environmental degradation, alienation of people from their work, corruption of the politic, addictions to drugs and junk food and devices, the horrific mistreatment of animals, the idolisation of the rich and the powerful, the demonisation of the unfortunate.
I am clearly no Marxist and I blame capitalism for originating none of these things, but certainly it has at times been hugely culpable in the acceleration of them all.
I feel Capitalism's critics often miss how exceptionally good it is at giving us what we “want”. But what we “want” isn't what we actually want; or to frame it a little differently, we don't yet quite “want” the right things.[^2]
Three
The front line in the struggle between Good and Evil seems to have a kind of fractal nature.
I can't quite explain what I mean by that, other than to show you a fractal and let you mull over what I might be talking about for yourself.
(Or maybe I can't expand on the idea because it's not quite right, and I am rather grasping to evoke some “Mathsiness” I will try to flesh out later.)
This is the definition of the Mandelbrot set:
which when drawn, looks like this:
and when you zoom in you get:
and then:
and then:
and so on, forever and ever.
Four
If we elevate consent to lie the core of our ethics[^3], a kind of paradox emerges – a creature cannot consent to being created. So while without the creation of consciousness, there seemingly can be no Good[^4], is to create a conscious being itself inherently a kind of wrongdoing?
How might an omnibenevolent Creator thread the eye of this particular needle?
And might we need to find it in ourselves to forgive Him[^5] our Creation?
Five
Evil at it's most dangerous is not the decaying eldritch monster lurking in a pit, nor the cartoon villain reveling in their own villainy.
It's Good, corrupted.
This point has been argued by countless others and I think is at least somewhat appreciated, if not always accepted, on an intellectual level; but I despair of how hard it seems to be for us to develop as an instinct, to distrust how much we justify our own actions in the name of Good.
Do suicide bombers die knowing themselves to be anything other than heroes?
Was Marx's concern for the proletariat a mere fig leaf – did he secretly dream of the rise of Stalin?
Or consider Nazism. What was the average German who supported Hilter grasping for? Loathing, death, dectruction, genocide? Or was it Strength. Purity. Glory. Belonging. Fortitude. Loyalty. Domesticity. Virtue. Honour. Hope.
Think of Hitler's gifts, as an orator, a political strategist[^6]; and how these gifts might have changed the world if he had used them to serve love rather than hatred.
Six
The corrupted ideals of various failed ideologies are yet still close enough to something in the human spirit that many fall into their traps to this day, the brutal deaths of millions of innocents not lesson enough for some to learn.
What then of the movements whose fruits have not yet ripened[^7], whose errors are more subtle?
Is it fair to speculate that every cause humans pursue, every system and structure they build – no matter how well-intentioned – has within it the seeds of further oppression[^8]? That whenever we overthrow illegitimate power rather than disarming it, the very act of overthrowing carries the temptation to further abuses. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
For believers, our hope must surely lie in God staying one step ahead, turning evil to good more surely than good turns to evil.
Seven
Of course none of this is to say that we should give up; but rather the opposite. We must boldly find and pursue our causes
What must temper this is skepticism that we are good. Just as a scientist must retain a deep and close awareness that her theories may be mistaken, the activist must at all times remember that his moral knowledge[^9] could be wrong.
Eight
And yet, God chooses to work through us. And yet.
Nine
We drove back from our weekend of sea breezes and worship; once more the fierce red sun and attendant haze of smoke hung oppressively in the sky, like an omen of old.
Ten
Our studied passage had included some of every left-leaning churchgoer's favourite Bible verses.
Colossians 3:18 – “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”
Colossians 3:22 – “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.”
I wondered if somehow the discomfort in the former drove home more sharply, more salient as it was to to our lives and our context.
I've seen Christian writers describe the Bible's overall position on slavery as a retrieval ethic – trying to make the best of a bad circumstance.
Has anyone ever made the parallel argument about marriage, given how other New Testament passages are at best confusing or even ambiguous leaning to disapproval on it's role on Earth; and conversely quite clear on the institution's long term propspects.
More broadly – could not we frame all God has done since Adam and Eve as working to a retrieval ethic of sorts?
Eleven
“I told the priest, don't count on any Second Coming
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming
He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us
No, I don't wonder why – I wonder what He thought it would get us”
Down here in the muck, where we're betrayed and betrayers. Where we trip to grasp at enlightenment, where we drink to forget our inhibitions and our sorrows. Where churches are known to shelter evildoers and cast out the vulnerable. We have to live down here, and make do; who is God to judge us for it?
Is it only the incarnation that in the end gives Him the right?
“Only God says jump, so I set the time
Coz if He ever saw her it was through these eyes of mine
And if He ever suffered it was me who did His crying”
Of course, there is John 11:35 – “Jesus wept.”
Twelve
So we are not do overthrow but to disarm, which seems to require forgiveness. But can forgiveness be required?
Dare we even ask the abused not to hate their abusers?
Perhaps it is not such a strange or unapproachable thing, remembering we are first of all commanded to love.
Thirteen
Or maybe original sin is nothing more nor less than this – that, knowing Good and Evil, we yet choose Evil?
So what then is Good? As has been famously said of pornography, do we know it when we see it – except somehow, on some level, we prefer ignorance?
Fourteen
I wonder about the old theodicy – that Evil only exists because God gave humans free will, and humans chose to sin. So will Heaven be free from sin? And if so, will there no longer be free will?
Perhaps.
But then, why this era of free will and Evil, or at least the illusion thereof?
Fifteen
Still, the fires burn. The world watches, and judges.
The Prime Minister falters in the face of national rage. Every misstep – to my eyes, some all too real and some quite imagined – is now amplified. Every attempt to make amends for the last mistake seems to entail fresh misjudgment of its own. Where there should be unity and leadership to calm the fears of the crisis, we have only division and rancor, fanning the flames.
With what feels a queasy sense of inevitably, I observe his enemies and allies both wanting to turn the conversation to the Prime Minister's faith; a particular breed of partisanship that once would have felt strange and foreign to this land. Will the world soon have in common only its fault lines?
Sixteen
Another confession to maybe make some of my friends from church uncomfortable: one of my favorite religious songs is Battle Hymn of the Republic.
I have yet to find a good version on the internet. They desecrate lyrics (“let us die to make men free”!) They omit verses – sometimes even the last and possibly my favorite verse:
“He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave
He is wisdom to the mighty, he is honor to the brave
And the world shall be His footstool and the soul of wrong His slave!
Our God is marching on”
Yes, it is unabashedly militaristic.
If we know death of one can bring life to all, cannot we embrace that feeling of being soldiers in the ultimate war, of fighting on behalf of eternal peace?
It's important here to emphasize that while the song was written about a real war, I speak not (necessarily) of any war of men[^10]
I mean that other war we are surely fighting.
Can our instincts to dominate, to defeat, to conquer and to triumph, not themselves also be redeemed? Are they not merely a corrupted version of something good, like all the rest; a necessary piece of the final puzzle?
Seventeen
Still, the fires burn, as the scientists have so long prophesied.
And there is blood in the political waters, now.
Not since many Prime Ministers ago, when our first trading scheme legislation was outflanked on all sides, have I felt such hope for action. Alas! It is a twisted and ill-formed hope.
We need to win this argument, or else for decades to come see fires burn ever hotter and longer still; but who could want such a victory, bought on the back of so many lost homes, lives, dreams?
We need to win this argument, more urgently and more desperately than any political argument of the age; but if we win only as we collectively grow in bitterness and despair and contempt, what else besides victory might we reap?
How are we to pray for our leaders? Do I ask God that the Prime Minister lose office and an opponent heal these wounds and do what needs to be done? Or do I ask that the Prime Minister repent of his errors and bring the country back together, though that might not serve my own instincts in other ways?
Am I to simply be as non-committal as most of the political prayers I hear, and ask merely that whoever lead the country might be wise? But how could God ever use such a prayer to lead me to right action?
Surely God wants me to be at least as honest with Him as I am with the ballot box.
“Not my will, but yours be done.”
Eighteen
Do not mistake me. I aspire to stand neither always on the left, nor right, nor in any form of the centre; but only on God's side, at every last point upon the Mandelbrot frontier. I seek not balance between the competing interests of this world, nor to pursue any one isolated facet of what is right, but to act exactly and completely for Good. I want to be, not a moderate, but the most extreme of extremists, in the only dimension that counts.
Nineteen
People who struggled with mathematics may think it complex, but in some sense it is a kind of search for the simplest description of any given thing that is still correct. [^11]
What, exactly, are Rotation? Distance? Change? Opposites? Computation? Size? Shape? Order? Finitude? Symmetry?
How do the basic building blocks of the universe function?
For these, we have discovered much in the way descriptions that cannot likely be squeezed any simpler.
Less so, those things that are messy on the order of an Ecosystem or an Economy.
I have now finally and accidentally arrived at something long sought, namely, an explanation of the sense in which I consider myself a “utilitarian”: that I hold Good itself to be complex, perhaps more so than any other thing; but it has an equation nonetheless, and God knows it, and wants us to learn it, lest we perish.
[^1] Necessary disclaimer for the nitpickers: Yes, the core technologies of the Internet were invented by government funded military and academic efforts, as was also later the case for the World Wide Web; but in both instances the subsequent evolution of the technology and nearly all everyday applications of it arose in the market.
[^2] Economists often contrast stated preferences – what people say they want – from revealed preferences – what they act as if they want. Capitalism tends to optimize the latter more than the former. Which is unfortunate when e.g. people's stated preference is for a healthy environment but revealed preference is to use a lot of fossil fuels.
[^3] I presume there is a whole moral philosophy literature dealing with this concept. It seems to fall out quite naturally from various strands of thought in feminism, libertarianism, etc.
[^4] Itself a thesis which demands slightly more of a defense than a mere footnote could provide, yes.
[^5] I considered not gendering God's pronoun throughout this post, with “Them” for “Him”; but in the end felt that's a goad for another day, that would in this instance only detract from the point.
[^6] I feel at times people retrospectively underestimate the likes of Hitler, in the sense of dismissing his ability to shape the world in his image as down to luck or other purely extrinsic factors. It would be comforting if evil could only succeed by fluke and not skill, but I don't think history bears that out.
[^7]It's a shame Zhou Enlai probably didn't actually assess the French Revolution as “too soon to say”
[^8] This, perhaps, might to some feel a more comfortable framing of original sin than the traditional.
[^9] I say moral knowledge (despite the awkwardness of the phrasing), and neither beliefs nor values, because I am trying to capture that the driver of our morality feels like it lies between something built into us and and something we learn; something in a way akin to a taste or an opinion, and yet something also about we may decide we were once mistaken. There's probably a piece in the sequences that better captures this point, or indeed most of the non-religious parts of what I am trying to say.
[^10] In fact I remain unsure if Christ commands His followers to total pacifism.
[^11] So why is it so hard? Consider Twain – “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
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