How come you can understand this….?

One of my 2024 reading objectives was to read Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion” from cover to cover over the year. I managed it in eleven months. Obviously I was not reading it in the original 1559 Latin, nor the sixteenth century French translations. Fortunately for me it has been translated into English, and I was enjoying the fruits of Ford Lewis Battles’ labours (along with an army of Calvin scholars), originally published just over sixty years ago. The combination of Calvin and Battles has proved itself to be highly effective and in some places even entertaining. Although separated by over 500 years and a number of intellectual and cultural revolutions (and a lot else), I think I can claim to have understood more than the gist of what Calvin was on about. I’m sure that there are many allusions I missed (notwithstanding the copious footnotes), and no doubt some of the arguments he takes up have lost their force and relevance. Yet over the months it appears I was able to follow along reasonably well. And yet there are those who would have you believe that this really should not be.

We have lived through (and some may still be in) a period in which the claim has been made that communication, particularly by means of texts (which obviously lack some of the information that we have when speaking to each other), is a fairly ropey business, particularly if you want to claim that authors are routinely able to transmit the contents of their minds accurately to their readers. Additionally it has been claimed that communication of ideas is rarely what anyone actually tries to do; more usually they are trying to manipulate (dominate, oppress) you. But even this is fraught with difficulty as words on pages do not carry meaning. Meaning is to be found in interpretations inside heads. So it turns out that I can have no (or at least little) legitimate expectation that you are following what I’m writing, and therefore only a slim hope that you now understand my (admittedly sketchy) outline of postmodernist theory. One wonders in that case why I’m trying. My general persistence in such exercises (this blog now runs to 145 posts) hints at a potential problem. Any theory has to be tested against what actually happens “in the wild”. And when this theory is tested, it turns out that it doesn’t do too well.

I rather like the illustration given by Don Carson in “The Gagging of God” (p102), when he relates what happened to him when he got into conversation with a student after having delivered some hermeneutics lectures. She took him to task for being stuck in a 19^th century positivist mindset, and listed all the reasons why he should be more open to the new (ie postmodern) approach. He tried to defend his position (which it should be said was neither modernism nor positivism), but with no success. Then in a burst of what he calls “sheer intellectual perversity” he changed tack and congratulated her for using irony to demonstrate the “objectivity of truth”. She began to get rather exasperated, at which point he congratulated her further for adding emotion to irony. Close to incandescence she finally worked out what he was up to. He quietly pointed out that in practice deconstructionists (the spear-point of postmodernism and her own position) only thought that other peoples’ writing could not communicate the thought of authors in any meaningful way. The writings (and 'speakings') of the deconstructionists themselves were mysteriously exempt from any difficulty with the transmission of their meaning, which is why we were all expected to pay careful attention to them.

If communication of ideas (and other contents) were all but impossible, presumably we would have all given up trying to do it a very long time ago. And yet the opposite has been observed. Language is one of the defining features of human beings; we want to communicate, we must communicate. Once the spoken word was all that we had; we had to speak. Writing, communication of spoken work in written, symbolic, form, appears to have developed several times in history, independently in different human civilisations. In Mesopotamia and Egypt symbolic representation of information developed some time before 3000BC. Once a minority sport, with the invention of printing writing (and reading) exploded. And for all that technology is claimed to be the death of writing, who can resist a good written caption on their Tik Tok video (just so it's understood).

 It was a while after the invention of writing that  Moses, who lived around 1300BC (probably), started to record the history of a particular group of people who would come to be known as the Jews. He clearly did so believing his efforts were of some value, and, it turns out, lots of folk throughout history (if what they have said and written are to be believed) have tended to agree with him. Such communication is not perfect (no human endeavour is). What Moses wrote, and indeed whether he actually wrote it, is contested territory. As with me and Calvin, you’ll probably have to read it in translation. Some of it will seem very odd, some perhaps disturbing. But have a go at reading it. The first five books of the Bible are attributed to him. Decide for yourself whether he says nothing, or whether you can make that particular material mean anything. You’ll certainly find it considerably less obscure than Derrida.

In seeking to communicate truth, Moses was doing no more than reflecting the truth that he claimed he was writing: that he (along with the rest of us) was created in the image of God (recorded at the beginning of his writing in Genesis 1 – easy to find). God is a speaking god. He has communicated by means of the spoken word, and of course the written word. Many other words have been written (and not just by postmodernists) to explain why this can’t really be true. And yet, in the experience of many of us He continues to speak. And if written words don’t impress you, consider this. Here we are approaching another Christmas, full of the usual nonsense. But at its core is a celebration of the event that demonstrates that God is not limited to words, written or spoken. To quote some words written in the New Testament “..in these last days he has spoken to us by his (lit: in) son…” (Hebrews 1:2).

If you’ve understood anything so far, have a go at understanding that.

Truth and trousers...

Spurgeon (as he makes clear) was actually quoting a popular proverb when he said in one of his sermons “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. Personally I prefer the version that replaces boots with trousers (it alliterates better). So pervasive and noticeable are the presence and power of lies, that essentially the same thing has been often repeated. Some trace it back to a comment by Virgil in the Aeneid (Book 4, line 174 - ‘Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster’, written about 25BC) , but in reality the problem of lies goes way further back than that. As recorded in Genesis 3:4, God (who cannot lie) had said X, the devil, represented by a serpent, had said Y, Eve (with tragic consequences) went with Y. Words have meaning, meaning drives behaviour, behaviour has consequences. Lies (essentially ‘wrong’ words) usually have bad consequences. But while lies are obviously nothing new, what is new (or at least newish) is their increased speed and greater range.

We need to look no further for examples than the online purveyors of conspiracy theories and other assorted lies. Alex Jones, the Infowars founder and fast-talking online host, used his platform to repeat again and again that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, in which 26 were killed (20 of them children) was a hoax. To support this assertion, he made up various supporting claims. These lies had real-world effects on those impacted by the shooting, prompting them to take him to court in civil actions. And it turns out that truth, a bit like gravity, has a way (usually) of eventually asserting itself. Jones’ claims, or more specifically the harms caused by them, were examined by two juries of his peers, one in Texas and one in Connecticut. Having calmly considered the evidence put to them in a court of law (albeit in civil rather than criminal courts), with all the rhetoric and bluster that Jones and his ilk routinely employ stripped away, both juries found Jones and his claims not to be credible and awarded substantial damages against him. It is revealing that while the Connecticut verdict was being read out in court, Jones was online mocking the jury’s decision and seeking to continue to make money from his lies (something he was particularly good at). To date, the plaintiffs in the Jones cases have yet to see much in the way of hard cash. He has sought to exploit various legal means of avoiding responsibility (or at least avoid paying out to the victims of his lies). But over a relatively short period of time his lies reached millions, compounding the distress of those who had already suffered at the hands of a madman with a gun. Sadly, his lying ways, and his use of the combination of the internet and lies to make money, both continue and have spawned (or at least emboldened) a number of imitators on this side of the Atlantic.

On the 22^nd May 2017, 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena in the UK were murdered in a terrorist bomb explosion. Many others were injured, including Martin Hibbert who was paralysed from the waist down and his daughter Eve who suffered brain damage. But Richard Hall, a former engineer and TV producer who claimed he was acting as a journalist, believed (as he told a court) that there “was no bomb” and that “no one was genuinely injured in the attack". So he took it upon himself to track down survivors, seeking to interview and video them, in a bid to show that the (true) narrative of a terrorist bombing causing loss of life and severe injury was a “lie”. He streamed and sold various DVD’s and produced a book promulgating his “theories”, seeking to monetise them. The Hibberts (again, not the state in the form of the prosecuting authorities) brought a claim of harassment against him, and last week a judge found in their favour (the full judgement is now available online here), saying among other things that Hall’s “course of conduct was a negligent, indeed reckless, abuse of media freedom”. Hall had treated the statements of witnesses, experts, authorities and indeed courts “as of no value”, and in the name of “journalism” invaded the privacy of the Hibberts causing distress. Hall was not only found to have harassed the Hibberts, but, the judge said, should have known as any ordinary person using common sense would have known, that he was distressing them. The case has yet to be settled, and it will be interesting too see what the judge considers the proper level of damages to be. But in the time that Hall’s offending videos have been available online (and his DVDs and book are still available through his website), tens of thousands (or more) have seen his material, again multiplying the distress of those already scarred by the bombing itself. The actual numbers of those engaging with Hall’s version of reality (actually an unreality) are unknowable. But the harm that he perpetrated, or at least a small proportion of it, was revealed in the legal proceedings. If this judgement is the turning point that some analysts have suggested, maybe accountability has arrived at last, and truth, rather than lies and conspiracy theories, is making a comeback. We shall see.

Of course there has always been one place to find truth, indeed the truth. The trouble is we tend to find it difficult to identify truth even when it is standing right before us. How else do we explain Pilate’s famous question “What is truth?” when it, or rather he, was standing right in front of him? It is almost as though humanity is conditioned to prefer lies. Hence Spurgeon’s contention, now amplified by modern technology.

I’ve decided to try and be constructive rather than just rant, even although the temptation to rant has been with me since mid-September. That’s when, once again, “X-mas Movies” started to appear on various TV channels, closely followed by adverts for assorted types of turkey roast, artificial fir trees, celebratory confectionery etc, etc, etc. And to cap it all, the contrast between Western commercialized end-of-year bonhomie and what is actually going on the world is perhaps starker this year than it has been for a while. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bogged-down into a meat-grinding bloody stalemate. And more tragically still (if that were possible) in the part of the world where the events supposedly commemorated at “Christmas” actually occurred, bloodshed on an appalling scale is a daily occurrence. This is accompanies the reignition of an inter-ethnic war-for-land that had been reduced to a smoulder (or at least largely forgotten about by the Western media) and a widening of the conflict by Iranian proxies in Yemen and Lebanon (two failed states that promise more conflict for the future). None of this is to forget the tangling of Philippino and Chinese boats in the South China Sea (something of a misnomer - the tangle in question was much closer to the Philippine than Chinese coast), civil war in Myanmar (and several more in the horn of Africa), and political chaos in the Anglo-Saxon world. Oh, and then there’s the prospect of another Trump presidency. But no, I am not going carry on listing reasons to be (un)cheerful, rant, or even just sink into deep despair, tempting though all of those may be. Precisely because this is a cursed world, there is an amazing contrast to be drawn between what’s actually going on and an event actually worth focussing on, although often either missed or mythologized.

It is an event with even greater resonance because of what is going on in Israel and Gaza. Arguably today, as in the time detailed in the Gospels, Bethlehem is occupied territory. Precisely who is doing the occupying is at the centre of the current dispute. But the absence this year of anything worth celebrating is not. So there will be no Christmas tree or Christmas lights in Manger Square; the Church of the Nativity will be all but silent. And yet this is all similar to the circumstances that God Himself decided to enter in the person of His eternal son, Jesus. The Bethlehem in which Jesus was born was just as gritty as today, although a lot less famous. It was far from the centre of the world’s attention, but was an obscure location, within an obscure, conquered and occupied region of the world empire of the day. There was no Manger Square of course. And there was arguably no stable either; only a manger is mentioned in Luke’s account – the stable is inferred. There may well have been no inn, in which there was no room. Only Luke mentions what is usually translated as  “inn”, and it may have been a guestroom in the house of a relative. At no point in this story do we find all the other things that stand in the foreground of the contemporary Christmas – trees, presents and old men with white beards. All of this stuff was invented (and became “traditional”) relatively recently; the Santa with white beard and red coat is essentially the product of 1930’s advertising designed to sell a particular US soft-drink. I would suggest this stuff is the bit that’s worth forgetting. The earlier stuff, of much older provenance, is it turns out, much more relevant to our current hard-pressed circumstances.

At some point after the baby was born in Bethlehem (essentially to two homeless people who were about to become refugees in a country not their own), ugly politics intervened in the form of the local power-broker. Alerted by some unexpected visiting dignitaries to the fact that a potential rival for the peoples’ affections had been born, King Herod decided that power was more important to him than basic humanity. So he instigated the slaughter of who knows how many male children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem. Given this further sickening resonance with what is currently occurring in Gaza, it will be a brave pastor or minister that will include this little nugget in their nativity stories this Christmas. But these were the circumstances surrounding Jesus birth, and they contrast with the sanitized version that decorates the front of many a Christmas card. It was a world of poverty and suffering, of scandal, of refugees, political violence and curse. In other words, this world, our world, not a made up one.

And yet beneath the surface something important, joyful even, was happening. Jesus birth is not the whole story, but it was the beginning of something with staggering implications. Angels in the Gospel accounts are not always perceived to be good news, even if it’s good news they bring. The angel that came to Mary initially terrified her. And the news that was communicated to her was scary too. While no gynaecologist, Mary knew fine and well where babies came from, and so did her betrothed, Joseph. So it took another angel appearing in a dream, who also had to pacify Joseph and calm his fears, before telling him to continue with his plan to take Mary as his wife, notwithstanding the fact that she was pregnant, and not by him. All credit to him to reverting from Plan B (quietly divorcing Mary) to Plan A. The angel that encountered a bunch of Bethlehem shepherds initially terrified them too. Yet what they are told is “..good news of great joy..”: a long-promised rescuer had been born. Some rescuer, lying helpless in a feeding trough! Others also identified the baby as a deliverer of peace with significance way beyond the borders of Israel (Simeon in the temple at Jerusalem). Something was stirring in this world. It would be missed by the vast majority of those who lived at time, just as the Jesus’ significance continues to missed today.

So you could do a lot worse for yourself than forget about the made up man with the red coat and white beard, and focus on the real baby born in weakness, frailty and vulnerability in Bethlehem of all places. I wonder what became of Him?

A Bible fit for a King…...

When I was young I confess I was fairly cynical. But cynicism is easy when you’re young. Life is simple, and you have all the answers. And even if you don’t, you’re fairly sure that there are answers within easy reach. The fact that you have experienced nothing (or at least very little) of life’s complexities doesn’t give you pause. Now I am older. I have learned that even the simple things in life come with their complexities, so I try not to be cynical. Where others are concerned, whom I might have rushed to criticise in the past, I have learned that their motives and inner workings are closed to me. I can observe their behaviour and infer motives from that. But I am as likely to be wrong as I am to be right. Given that my own deepest motives are often opaque even to me, and given the common human capacity for self-deception, even when someone actually articulates their motives it is only prudent to treat them with a degree of respect and scepticism.

I also have to confess that as well as being a cynic, I was also a bit of an iconoclast, taking great delight in criticising cherished beliefs and institutions, particularity those of others. The institutions that I happened to like or admire (there are always some) were somehow immune to criticism. But when you have nothing invested in a particular institution (because of a lack of age or interest), one to which you have contributed nothing, why not throw few (metaphorical) rocks at it? What then was one to make of the events of today, Saturday 6th May, 2023 – the coronation of King Charles III?

First of all, it was a dramatic reminder that, for all its pretensions, the United Kingdom is not constituted as a secular state. A recent Guardian editorial fairly pointed out that “….modern Britain is not a holy nation. Nor is it even a largely Protestant one. Britain instead is increasingly secular….”. And yet this ceremony, the formal public recognition of our head of state as our head of state and King, and of his wife as our Queen, was a religious, indeed specifically a Christian, service. Hymns and anthems were sung, there were Bible readings, prayers were offered and there was a (short) sermon. At the heart of proceedings, the King was anointed with oil in a ritual lifted deliberately and knowingly from the Old Testament, and communion was celebrated. Less than half of the population may now identify as Christian, but apparently the state both thinks in such terms (if the “state” thinks), and wants to be seen in such terms. This presumably reflected the desires of the King, but it involved many other state actors. The Prime Minster, no less, a practising and for all I know an entirely sincere Hindu, read from Colossians 1:9-17.

But there is a problem. The Prime Minister does not believe that the words that he read are true. And it gets worse, for things were not entirely as they seem. Many other participants either explicitly or implicitly don’t believe much of what was read and sung either. Consider the Bible that was presented to the King. It was accompanied by the following words: “Receive this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; this is the royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God. More valuable than the gold about to be placed on his head is the word of God which shows us our failings and leads us to Christ.” The Christ in question is the one who, in the words read by the PM “is the image of the invisible God”. Such truth is now so hedged about with caveats and redefinitions by many of the clerical participants in today’s proceedings, that it has been emptied of much of its truth. As for Him being the “..firstborn from among the dead..” or the one in whom “the fullness of God was pleased to dwell”, this has become so mangled as to be meaningless. To have the current Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London recommend the Bible as the Word of God to the King added a certain irony to the proceedings, given how they are now viewed by the overwhelming majority (up to 85%) of the world Anglican communion. And at the centre of the debate within the Anglican communion is precisely the authority of the same book presented to the King.

Even the particular Bible presented by the Archbishop appears to be more about the look and ritual than substance. It turns out to be a specially commissioned copy of the edition prepared in 2011 for the 400^th anniversary of the production of the King James version of the Bible. But this rather goes out of its way to preserve not just the mistranslations inherent in the KJV, but about 350 misprints that were produced in the 1611 original. Of course, if the Bible is just a book, then none of this really matters. The misprints kind of take on a charm of their own. On cold nights in a draughty Royal palace, one can imagine “spot the misprint” becoming an entertaining diversion. But if the Bible is authoritative Scripture, indeed in the form of the autographs the very words of God, then accurate translation becomes an important issue. If not quite a matter of life or death (because God’s truth will out), perhaps not far off that. Fortunately, His Majesty has both the means and the intelligence to lay his hands on an improved translation should he wish to do so.

It is at this point that it would be fairly easy for my former cynicism and iconoclasm to manifest themselves. Except that much of what was said (and sung) in today’s ceremony was actually true, even although it is barely recognised as such. And to hear it at the centre of this national occasion is at least faintly heart-warming. It is in the Bible (as was said) that we learn that the King of Kings really did come to serve rather be served, and that this is a model for those in authority. If our King (and our politicians) were to take this to heart, this would be a major turning point for this nation. And the book the King was given is all that he was told it is. And more. For it has a power not confined by the inadequacies of those who were reading it publicly today. For all that we have had a couple of centuries of naive belief in the inevitability of human progress, and the development of multiple human philosophies that have sought to displace Bible truth and the God and Saviour it reveals, actual Truth was at the centre of today’s proceedings. 

Contained in a Bible that is fit for a King. And not just for the King.

Bookending Boris

As one layer of political dust falls out of the air and begins to settle, another cloud is kicked up by the shuffle of political feet, stinging the eyes and clogging the back of the throat. Boris is no more. Not quite true of course. Like so much else about him, what is said, and what has actually transpired do not quite tally. They might, in time; hopefully they will. But with Boris, one just never knows. I am referring of course to our current and (probably) soon to be former Prime Minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He became PM on the 24^th July, 2019, and stepped through the Number 10 door to announce his intention to resign at 12.30pm, July 7^th, 2022. When the Conservative party has elected a new leader, Boris will tender his resignation to her Majesty, who will then invite his replacement as Conservative party leader to form a new administration.

To digress and to be clear, the people of the UK to not elect Prime Ministers. We each of us have a vote for a constituency MP. In theory, the PM is anyone who can command a majority in the House of Commons (usually, but not always, determined by a general election), and he or she then chairs a cabinet of equals to implement a manifesto and govern the country. In practice, for much of the last 200 years this has been done on a party basis, and the leader of the largest party (which usually holds an absolute majority in the Commons) is the PM. Parties and manifestos have become less important as first mass and then social media have turned politics into a personality-driven affair focusing on one person. But our system does not work well this way. The kind of checks and balances in the US presidential system (of the kind Trump tried to subvert with partial success) do not actually exist here. In a way, because our PM holds lots of executive and legislative power, the position of PM is the more powerful (and therefore dangerous) position. This is something Boris has amply demonstrated.

He has been displaced without an election, even although it took an election to (only just) dispense with Trump – at least for now. There is no great policy divide in his party. Everyone is now a brexiteer, and believes in a small state and reduced taxation. It was Boris personally, rather than politically, who had become unacceptable and had to be replaced. It was his colleagues in government who provided the mechanism, not the people at large. This is not in the least anti-democratic, provided that Boris’ Conservative successor is committed to implementing the manifest on which all Conservatives were elected back in December 2019. There’s no point huffing and puffing that the next PM is being imposed on the rest of us by a selectorate of mainly southern bluerinsers. We don’t elect the PM, and we never have. Anyway, back to Boris.

Although he has not yet departed, it is worth identifying what has done for him, because it is both troubling and heartening. His lack of attention to the requirements of governing (as opposed to campaigning), observing important rules and conventions, paying attention to detail, caused problems which afflicted his administration right from the start. But it was his complete inability to act honestly and transparently that really hurt him. Latterly, there was even an attempt to institutionalise what looked like his contempt for honesty by making none-too-subtle tweaks to the “ministerial code” – a venerable but toothless set of guidance authored by each PM, and provided to serving ministers. Boris’ problems with honestly and consistency, as evidenced by his inability to apply the code to himself and one of his friends, cost him two ethics advisors who were both serious and non-political public servants with copious experience in public life. This all began catching up with Boris when his Health Secretary and then his Chancellor resigned, to be followed by a gathering avalanche of other resignations. So the central issue was not policy; it was entirely to do with Boris’ unsuitability for the role because of his lack of personal integrity. What’s troubling is not only that all of this was predictable, but that it was predicted.

This is usefully illustrated by two columns written by Max Hastings, the first in June 2019 and the second last Thursday, (7^th July). Two bookends for Boris’ time as PM. Hastings is a distinguished (indeed Knighted) journalist and historian, and one of Boris’ previous bosses. He has observed him from afar and up close, and while never a chum, was not a natural enemy. While I suspect Hastings is a natural, small “c” conservative, he has actually voted both Conservative and Labour in the past. In 2019 he was excoriating; he is now relieved, while sounding somewhat apprehensive about the future. He is clearly a remainer, although in his more recent article he makes it clear that for the time being re-joining the EU is off the agenda (the current political consensus), even while arguing that he expects the issue to be revisited in the future. But while thinking that Brexit is folly, this is not at the centre of his critique.

Writing in 2019, Hastings quickly honed in on the character flaw that would eventually lead to Boris’ downfall: “He would not recognize the truth…if confronted by it in an identity parade”. He was unfit for national office because “…he cares for no interest save his own frame and gratification”. He then predicted that Boris’ premiership “..will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”. Prescient indeed. Writing after Boris’ demise, with the evidence clear to see, Hastings wrote “[Boris] is a stranger to truth who has sooner or later betrayed every man, woman and cause with which he associates”. Nothing has changed though, Boris was “the same moral bankrupt as when the Conservative party chose him”. Of course both the Conservative party and the country connived in the Boris phenomenon. Pushing issues of personal morality aside, he was voted for to achieve what was deemed of more importance than things like truth and integrity. I understand this; I struggled with it myself at onepoint.

The heartening bit is that, having flirted with disaster, we have avoided it. The unwritten British constitution has been flexible enough to both survive and remove Boris, without mass violence. This is not something to be dismissed lightly, as events in the US demonstrated. It looks like the system there has also survived but only after mass violence that cost lives. We have apparently decided that integrity matters, even if accompanied by a dash of hypocrisy and political calculation. It may not be everything, but I’ll take it as a promising sign that all is not lost.

One other heartening aspect is that according to Sajid Javid, whose resignation got the ball rolling, it was the sermon of the Rev Les Isaac, “Serving the Common Good”, at the National Prayer Breakfast early on the 5^th July that pushed him across the line. He went straight back to his office to write his letter of resignation. The cynics will claim that this is just convenient cover for ambition and disloyalty. But it sounds to me more like Providence being kind to us (again), and doing what we could not do ourselves – focus on, and value, truth over expediency.

Life in the Pandemic XVIII: Truth in trouble…?

Truth is having a hard time. This statement of the obvious is worth stating for two reasons. Firstly, it implies that there is something called truth, and that, in my view, is something worth implying and indeed asserting. Given that you probably have a fairly instant and rough idea of what I mean (whether you agree with me or not), suggests that such a statement is neither incoherent or meaningless. The second reason that it’s worth stating is that while obvious, it alludes to the observation that something interesting is going on. On one level truth has always had a hard time. Defining and debating what “it” is, has kept busy both amateur and professional philosophers for thousands of years. And yet, as I’ve noted before, at least as far as public and political life in the West is concerned, we seem to have moved into a new phase of hardship.

In the US, the “big lie” is not yet dead. Nor has it yet been driven from the field by the “big truth”. According to CNN (not an entirely unbiased source of information I grant you), former president Trump has just had his impeachment legal team quit/fired because of a disagreement over strategy. This disagreement, it is claimed, comes about because Trump wants to maintain the fiction that the election was stolen from him. His lawyers apparently thought that this was not a viable strategy for the trial in the Senate that he now faces. It is unclear (at least to me) whether this is just about the narrow strategic issue, or because the lawyers understand that they cannot assert what they know to be manifestly untrue. However, at a minimum this shows a certain level of dedication to the lie on Trump’s part. Again, this could all be a strategy. But it could also be because he actually believes it. We shall probably never know the truth (as it were). Strength of belief, while often admirable, can’t turn a lie into the truth. Trump does still have his supporters, and they number in the tens of millions. This again is not sufficient to make the lie true. It just means that it’s a widely believed lie. Who knows which way this story is going to end. Is a complete partisan detachment from facts and truth simply going to become one more viable path to power with no accountability? Or will the political culture in the US revert to the more normal pattern of a commitment to at least the semblance of prizing and speaking the truth, with suitable wiggle room provided by the careful use of words?  So to this extent, in this particular context, the truth is still in trouble. It remains to be see whether this approach to life, this particular and brazen abuse of truth, will successfully spread to this side of the Atlantic.

Of course, some would maintain that either it already had, or in fact crossed from here to there – the “all politicians are liars” school of thought. But it appears that here there still is an interest in at least seeming to tell the truth. In Scotland, the First Minister, may be in big trouble for misleading the Scottish Parliament. The story is complicated and not particularly edifying. But if it turns out she has said x when in fact y is true, she will be greatly diminished, even if not completely finished. And the x’s and y’s in this case are themselves matters of detail. It’s the misleading, if it is proved, that will do the damage, not the content of the misleading itself. On the pandemic front, there is still liberal quoting of science and evidence, because accurate, truthful information matters, and science is still seen as a way of procuring it. So truth may be fighting back. Of course if it turns out that it’s all just carefully crafted propaganda, then things might turn again. The idea that it somehow doesn't matter has yet to gain much traction.

All of this comes against a background of “truth” not really having had any clear moorings for a while. Plato et al argued for truth that was universal, ideal and unchanging, belonging to a different realm from the one which we inhabit. These ideas were adopted and rejigged by Augustine and others, so that truth found its foundation in God. And indeed the Bible reveals that the basis of all truth is personal, not primarily rational. It is found in the God Who is both true and truth and intimately linked to His truthful, faithful and true person. The clear answer to Pilate’s question (“what is truth?”) was the person standing in front of him; a person who both claimed to be truth (Jn 14:6), and whose enemies recognised as “true” (Matt 22:16).

Things worked fairly well until this foundation was “abolished”. Nietzsche succinctly captured it with his “death of God” ramblings. He called it the most important of recent events “that ‘god is dead’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief..”. The retreat from truth, truth that is true everywhere for all time, gathered pace and in more recent times culminated in some of the more radical proposals of first existentialism and now postmodernism. And how is that all working out? Well apparently it's not just that we won't ever know, but we can't ever know!

Fortunately, Nietzsche’s (probably syphilitic) ramblings were just that. As the apocryphal graffiti on the walls of countless University Philosophy department walls attests, it is in fact Nietzsche who is dead (“signed God”). Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that “Without God, everything is permitted” (although for some reason this is disputed in some quarters as false news; but see here). But as He is not dead, truth is still with is, and everything is not permitted. Hence the general idea (although again under assault) that truth is good and lies are bad. Even although such notions are inevitably inconvenient for all of us at some point, for most of us this should actually be a comfort. It is not necessary to walk in confusion, knowing nothing for sure and being able to communicate even less. Even in trouble, we can find and know truth. It’s to be found where it all has been, and always will be.

Life in the Pandemic XVII: Truth, like gravity, cannot forever be denied…

Time for the inevitable post-Christmas return to the pandemic. And while there was light at the end of the tunnel, it has dimmed somewhat. While this is partly down to the virus itself (i.e. with the emergence of new strains), it is also due to “human” factors. There has been a concatenation of politics and pandemic. And chickens, to change the metaphor from tunnels, have been coming home to roost. All this makes for a discomforting experience.

In the US we have had the outworking of four or five years of the lies and myths perpetrated by the outgoing President, his sycophants and his supporters. The biggest and most recent of the lies was of course that the US presidential election had been stolen from him. That big lie was laid on a carefully prepared foundation consisting of smaller lies repeated for months; that foundation rested on the bedrock of years of more lies about hoaxes, fake media, the perceived crimes of others in the Washington swamp (which is now much swampier) and the claimed manifest failures of his predecessors. Inspired by an almost entirely false narrative, the Donald assembled (in the words of Republican Congress-woman Liz Cheney), then roused a crowd to fever pitch and dispatched it to the Capitol. There then ensued mayhem, violence, death and (limited) destruction. The Capitol, of course, survived. The Congress, although interrupted, discharged its final duty of this presidential election cycle and counted and certified the votes of the electoral college that actually elects the US president and vice president. This act confirmed the truth of the situation: Biden won the election, and it wasn’t even particularly close. So US democracy, while somewhat bruised, also survived. Providence, it seems, has delivered large swathes of US evangelicalism from itself, and Donald Trump will have to slink south to his resort in Florida, probably around the 20^th January, the day of the inauguration the he predicted would never happen.

Much of this served to divert attention from what the virus was up to in the US. Apparently largely unaided by the new, more transmissible variant that has been afflicting the UK, infections, hospitalisations and deaths from COVID19 continued to climb; daily new cases of more than 200 000, daily deaths of the order of 4 000, with rates increasing. The credit that the Trump administration deserves for playing its role in the rapid development of vaccines, has been squandered by the spluttering vaccination effort. With the top of the Federal government apparently paralyzed by Trump’s fixation with the election steal that never was, the States and local authorities have struggled with the practicalities of vaccinating a population, a good proportion of which is, again, in denial. The incoming Biden administration hasn’t sought to minimize the scale of the tragedy that is unfolding and will begin its struggle shortly. But the situation is as bad as it is because of lies and denial.

Meanwhile, back here in Blighty, we’ve had a new lockdown to combat our very own new COVID19 variant. Things may now be stabilising or slightly improving. And vaccination efforts do seem to be proceeding well. Not without hiccups and a degree of argument of course. But credit where it’s due, progress is being made. It’s not pandemic lies that are the problem here, it’s the Brexit lies that are beginning to be revealed for what they were. This is evidenced by disrupted supply chains, major alterations in the economics of some type of business, actual (not virtual) barriers to trade, and empty supermarket shelves, particularly in Northern Ireland. All predictable, all predicted, and all dismissed as scaremongering. Of course it is claimed by some that these are just “teething problems”. It is also true that the pandemic has been further complicating matters. Whisper it softly, the pandemic will probably be blamed for some of the economic impact that should be laid at the door of Brexit. But the existence of the new non-tariff checks on goods flowing from GB to NI, forming precisely the type of “border in the Irish sea” that Boris and others claimed would never exist, has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Truth works a bit like gravity. Gravity can be difficult to describe and define. In part this is because it is just a given of our existence. We don’t usually need to give it much thought, and of course, for millennia, no-one did. It can be easily denied, although none of us really has any reason to deny it. But it is as easy as saying “gravity doesn’t exist”. If pushed, a gravity denier could think of situations which appear to provide evidence that it is a made up thing. After all, don’t aeroplanes rather give the lie to this all-pervading, all-encompassing force? Except of course, it turns out, that they don’t. Such a view would be based on ignorance about both gravity and aeroplanes. Ignorance of course, appears to not be a problem these days, and is positively encouraged by some. Sometimes, deniers resort not to denial, but to confusion and contradiction. It might seem that whether gravity does or does not exist isn’t something any of us should get upset about. If I believe it does exist, and you believe that it doesn’t, then provided you’re not hurting me or mine what does it matter? The problem with this is that sooner or later it will matter, and perhaps in a critical situation, like when standing at a precipice, or at the top of a flight of stairs. Gravity will exert its effects, regardless of denials. It is a way things are. There are true and untrue states of affairs; there is truth and the denial of truth – lies.

One can tell lies for a while, and to some advantage. The problem is that eventually truth, like gravity, will assert itself. That’s because it is woven into the fabric of the universe, and indeed the fabric of our minds. The basic notion of truth in absolute sense has been under attack for a surprising long time. One of the more obvious manifestations of this attack currently (other than almost anything Donald Trump claims) is the deconstructionist form of post-modernism. Truth even if it exists, if expressed in words is unknowable. The problem is deconstructionists expect their own words to successfully communicate their meaning of deconstructionism, they expect them to be regarded as true.  That is presumably why they seek to communicate their ideas in dense, indigestible, texts. Either they don’t really believe their own creed or is it self-defeating. In any case truth, while perhaps hard to define, and easy to abuse, as a concept continues to be understood and as a principle continues to operate. We will all find that in the long runs lies will not work, and they won’t satisfy.

Of course the issue of truth and lies goes to the very heart of the human condition. It was truth that was under attack in Eden; the apple was just a means to an end. Paul’s critique in the letter to the Romans is that humanity “..exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator..” (Romans 1:25). The answer was to send “truth” in the form of a person - Jesus (John 14:6). Sometime we are happier settling for the lie, or claiming that it’s all to difficult to work out what truth is. Even with truth literally standing in front of him, Pilot still asked “What is truth”? (John 18:38). Almost as pointless as asking “what is gravity” and trying to live as though it doesn’t apply to you.