Mindscape and the Powers that be

I've been asked to chat with some clergy about 'spiritual warfare' which prompted me to think about what I'd say and realising as I did so that I needed to be able to say it succinctly and clearly and that a lot of the stuff I'm reading and thinking about at the moment may be getting in the way of that. So, time to try to boil down some basics. I realised that I'd been quietly cooking up a metaphor which may have the potential to hold together the various things that I think we need to keep hold of for this take on the Powers That Be to be a useful 'ministerable' approach for 21st century Christian leaders. Here I'm expressing myself more succinctly than I might speak, and so with a more condensed and sometimes scholarly style.

So, what do I think needs to be said to give a way in that could be useful to get people started in thinking about the powers that doesn't reproduce the mis-steps of the strategic-level spiritual warfare approach?

I think a good place to start might be to recall that humans are created social ("it is not good that the earthling should be alone") and one of the corollaries of that fact is that we tend to build a shared 'mindscape'. By that I mean that we share, mentally and affectively a range of things which we hold in common even if we appropriate them individually in terms of subjective experience. We co-create and co-curate images, language, metaphors, habits of mind and practice, artefacts and objects etc. If you think that this looks remarkably like 'culture' then I think you'd be right. I think that the overlap between 'culture' and what here I'm calling 'mindscape' is extensive. I'm choosing to use the term 'mindscape' because I think that 'culture' tends to be overused and i want to try to focus our attention on the sense of co-ownership and intimate connection to it. It seems to me that 'culture' so often gets used in an objectified way which wrests from us our own (admittedly small) individual participation and contribution to this collective endeavour. I also want to develop the metaphor of landscape implied by the term to help us to understand some important things about the Powers and corporisations.

If we think about the collectively shared ideas, images, understandings, ways of thinking and perceiving etc as a landscape in which we all roam and which to limited degrees we help to shape then we have a way to begin to grasp corporisations and the Powers that be. But first we need to understand the geography a bit in order to properly see these latter objects of attention. We can in our imaginations see hills and valleys. These we might link to culturally-shared contours making some ideas, perspectives and affections more or less easy to traverse and to navigate. the valleys mean that some ideas and perspectives more easily collect from various minds and flow together further contributing to the shaping of the collective thought-world while the cliffs, hills, and mountains are things that we can take our bearings by and make difficult certain moves across the idea space.

Some of the mindscape has 'beings' in it. Just as plants and animals in our physical world are made out of energy and matter, so in the mindscape there are beings made of the 'stuff' of our collective thoughts, emotions and imaginings. And don't forget that includes people: we are also objects of our own thinking, feelings and imaginings and appear as such in our collective mindscape. And since these mindly representations are attached to and/or associated with physical bodies, (and so too are various other physical-world objects like mountains and buildings, buses and bison), then the mindscape is something that interpenetrates physical reality -mediated by human brains. Or perhaps it's the other way round: physical reality underlies and (partly but definitively) shapes the mindscape.

Therefore the mindscape has in it things like institutions and organisations  which are formed from human bodies, conventions, ideas, values and artefacts held together in the mindscape and having bodily and physical reality as well as mindly reality. We should notice how the physical and the mindly mutually inform one another. The mindly aspects help to hold together and shape the physical and yet also the physical enables, constrains and partially fashions the mindly.

This landscape of human shared thought is spiritually significant and in fact spiritual in its own way. First of all, since we human beings are spiritual beings, then the 'things' that we compose or make up, like organisations and institutions -in short, corporisations- must share something of that spiritual nature and that is worked out by their helping or hindering our relationship with God, by sharing and in a sense mediating it (I don't mean in a salvific way, but in a peer-to-peer sort of way in which church can be implicated, for example). Mindscape, particularly through the corporisations that grow within it, obscures or clarifies things relating to God and human flourishing: it helps to further or to hinder God's purposes on earth.

Walter Wink is quoted as saying: 'History belongs to the intercessors'. Listening to him explain this and translating that into the metaphor of mindscape, i would say that he saw prayer as reshaping mindscape. In a sense prayer erodes strongholds (ie bastions of ideas resistent to the gospel), rechannels flows of information or clears ground for easier movement of the gospel. I'd add also the Eph.6:10ff stuff which is really about faithful Christian living and sometimes costly integrity in discipleship: living in opposite spirit to an untruthful and/or degrading ethos, speaking truth to power, mind-feeding and discernment, works of mercy, acts of solidarity and prophecy which are all things that the classic spiritual disciplines are about forming and fostering within us individually and collectively.

I am wary of the language of spiritual warfare in a context where (unlike the early church) militaristic language for Christian discipleship is sometimes taken literally. However if we were to use it, it is these classic disciplines that constitute spiritual warfare. This I would hold along with the insight that our battle is not against flesh and blood (ie not primarily against the employees, volunteers or office-holders in corporisation) but against spiritual wickedness which by virtue of making use of the opportunities in the mindscape or the particular constitution of a corporisation is able to marshal human collective effort into anti-gospel and counter-humane processes and ends.

self-esteem is socially constructed

 I have tended to think of self-esteem in individual terms. I guess if pressed to think further, I would have probably said that cultural values and the esteem of others would play a part. Now in this study of 5,000 young people worldwide, there is confirmation that to some degree, self-esteem is socially constructed, or at least co-created between individuals and their peers in relation to the cultural values of the group.

The researchers noted that their respondents' self-esteem was based, in all cultures, on four key factors: controlling one's life, doing one's duty, benefiting others and achieving social status. Nonetheless, the relative importance of each of these items for individual self-esteem varies between cultures. For example, participants in the survey who live in cultural contexts that prize values such as individual freedom and leading a stimulating life (in Western Europe and certain regions of South America) are more likely to derive their self-esteem from the impression of controlling their lives. On the other hand, for those living in cultures that value conformity, tradition and security (certain parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia) are comparatively more likely to base their self-esteem on the feeling of doing their duty.

 In that, there are two important things. One is the identification of the matrix lines along which self-esteem is constructed: agency, duty, benefaction (Chesed? Lovingkindness? Even love?) and status. The other thing is that cultural values form an important part of how we measure value including self-value:

self-esteem seems to be a mainly collaborative, as opposed to
individual, undertaking. These findings suggest that the system for
building self-esteem is an important channel through which individuals
internalize their culture's values at an implicit level, even if they
claim not to subscribe to these values when explicitly asked. These
subtle processes can encourage people to act according to the
expectations of the society they live in, thus helping maintain social
solidarity.

To me the interesting thing there is that self-esteem building is possibly something that we 'mime' into ourselves (that is the mimetic instinct disposes us to reproduce into our psyche) and we mime into ourselves these values because they have an instinctual substrate which culture gives a relative hierarchy of valuation to.



This suggests that we should 'measure' culture by what happens with the four matrix lines.

It suggests too a lens by which to examine the way that corporisations might marshall their human resources.



I'm also intrigued by the possibility that they could form the nexus of a theological anthropology of corporisations:  how are they disposed to reward or shame their human resources? (I'm not sure why I wrote 'shame' but I have a suspicion that it may be an important choice, so I'm letting it stand, at least pro tem). Those values seem to have a grounding God's purposes for humanity: love, choice, fidelity, relationship ...



I don't quite feel able yet to take this further, i have though a sense that it is important for understanding culture and corporisations.

Culture
influences young people's self-esteem: Fulfillment of value priorities
of other individuals important to youth -- ScienceDaily:

All Give and No Take -the dangers of TTIP

 On the basis of this article: All Give and No Take | George Monbiot.

On the basis of it I have just written to my MP. You might do the same, perhaps.

I was pleased to receive your response to my concerns
about TTIP and to learn that you share something of my concern. I would
also not wish to lightly turn down a potentially large amount of
investment and income for British industry and commerce. I am also
pleased to know that you are concerned enough to keep a watch on the
process and its outcomes. However, I remain a little concerned and would
like to mention to you a more precise concern which I didn't think I
saw represented in your response. I hope you'll feel able to comment
further and perhaps reassure me about your own concerns with the TTIP
negotiations.



My concerns arise from the investigations of George Monbiot
(reported here )
in which he says "The most dangerous aspect of the talks is the
insistence on both sides
on a mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)(10).

ISDS allows corporations to sue governments at offshore arbitration
panels of corporate lawyers, bypassing domestic courts. Inserted into
other trade treaties, it has been used by big business to strike down
laws that impinge on its profits: the plain packaging of cigarettes;
tougher financial rules; stronger standards on water pollution and
public health; attempts to leave fossil fuels in the ground" This forms
the heart of my concern as it seems to form an effective trump card for
corporations over democratic governments who may wish to steer away from
a corporatist interpretation of neo-liberalism (a kind of government I
would like to help to elect, in fact).



Monbiot goes on to question the value of a clause/section designed
for situations where the rule of law might be inconstant: "what is it
doing in a US-EU treaty? A report commissioned by the UK
government found that ISDS “is highly unlikely to encourage investment”
and is “likely to provide the UK with few or no benefits.”(15)
But it could allow corporations on both sides of the ocean to sue the
living daylights out of governments that stand in their way."



My concern is for proper democratic scrutiny of the TTIP and I
support Monbiot's proposals for that: (1) all negotiating positions, on
both sides, would be released to the public as soon as they are tabled.

(2) every chapter of the agreement [sh]ould be subject to a separate vote in the European parliament.

(3) TTIP would contain a sunset clause. After five years it would be reconsidered

I wonder whether you would be prepared to help press those propositions upon the negotiators?

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (9)

Analogy: human to divine and back again

Recently I re-read a series of  my posts from last year  on forgiveness and atonement. I noticed that one of the issues I'd posed in the first post in the series I had not properly returned to:

 Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy? Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1):

So I'm going to try to sidle up to that issue here.


 As I see it, this issue is how far is it meaningful to see God as loving, lovingly-angry, being hurt and even 'experiencing' such materially-based responses. These questions devolve to understanding the nature of God and the relationship between God/eternity and the world /temporality. Of course, those are huge topics and in themselves the subject of books and articles. So I'm not aiming to resolve or contribute anything particularly new, merely to position the issues in relation to the kind of perspectives and insights that seem to be helped or to help in this case.

Really it comes down to whether and how we can think or speak about God's love given that our primary understandings of it are formed in relation to human experience which is finite and has at least some basis in hormones, neurochemistry and culture. Similarly anger -with the added difficulty that it tends to be perceived negatively and as somehow unworthy of God. So can an infinite, essentially unmaterial being ('without parts and passions') experience emotions in any sense we can relate to as humans? Can a being for whom Time is not necessarily 'sequentially present' in the way we are accustomed to knowing it, be understood to have any similarity of experience to our sequential processing of love, anger and forgiveness?

I think that the previous posts in this series have given a broadly adequate account of the emotional dynamics of forgiveness in human terms. I think, too, that they have offered a bridge, via the motif of the eikon of forgiveness, to God's forgiveness. But can that bridge carry the traffic and is it well-anchored on the far shore? Or is God actually too different from us for that anchor to hold over there?

I think that we need to start with 'God is love' (1 Jn.4:16) which derives, in turn, from reflection on the incarnation (the combination being caught in John V Taylor's book The Christlike God alluding to the paraphrase 'God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all'). in the fact that this quality of Deity is expressed thus, we get a sense that something in our human experience is shared in some essential way with Deity: love. So the point of rooting my analysis in love is underlined. Though we may be aware that God's love exceeds our love, it is not a difference of kind but rather of degree and translation (from eternity to temporality, from infinite to finite).

This opens up the possibility, in principle, that offense against love could result in love-born anger in Deity and that such anger could be forsworn and reined back. This is further evidenced by the use of terms to do with anger and offense as well as forgiveness applied to God as subject. The same logic would apply as mentioned in a previous post: if God is not outraged by the detriments to those God loves, then surely we would doubt that God cares for us creatures: in effect we would not believe that God actually loves us. And if there is no reaction against harm to the beloved, then what would be forgiven? These are the necessary correlates of God's love.

Trickier to handle is the relationship between our temporality and God's being not bound by it in the way we are.  Implicated in this is the issue about our emotional life being founded in bio-chemical processes and finite perceptions which can in no way be ascribed to God. Though perhaps that is not entirely true because the incarnation shows God taking on the experience of time- and space-boundedness and the materiality of bodily-based information processing via affective and cognitive systems. For the analogy cinched by 'God is love' to hold, it should be noted that the incarnation commits us to holding together the possibility that our material-bodily emotional systems are capable of paralleling and even expressing appropriate analogues of God's life -obviously in a form that is appropriate to a space-time bounded existence. In a sense, the incarnation is our guarantee that the analogy can hold, that the bridge from the human side can be well-secured on the divine side.

So this presumably means that the love-anger-forgiveness 'cycle' we can see in human affairs does model adequately, at least sometimes, something of God. But what we probably need to note is the fact that these things are, in fact, the same thing in different temporal modes. Anger is love confronted with the harming of the beloved. Forgiveness is love in the face of the anger-response of love against the beloved who has become a perpetrator of harm against one who is beloved. The 'eternal dimension' of each of those things is Love. The temporal dimension works out in different ways according to the temporal conditions love is refracted through.

Previous posts in the series:

Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further
posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness
posting 6 The cost of forgiving
posting 5 Counter mimesis
posting 4 Reacting to being wronged
posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?
posting 2 Forgiveness in human life
posting 1 Love and Anger

Genesis and the Rise of Civilization -a review

I have had to be careful how many books I pick up for review for Speakeasy -I've got a reading list to work through for various ongoing writing projects of my own. However, when I sow this being offered for review*, I knew I had to have a look at it. Genesis and the Rise of Civilization by J. Snodgrass:  The Goodreads review is short but captures what drew me in.

 Snodgrass Integrates Studies of World Mythologies, Ancient Near Eastern Tribes and Empires, Archaeology and Rabbinic Stories to Read Genesis as a Parable about the Agricultural Revolution, and God's Counter-Revolution.

You see I'm finding myself fascinated by all of those things, so having them in one book ... well, several birthdays came at once. And the Goodreads blurb is right. I've enjoyed the insights brought to bear on specific stories or sections of stories by archaeological anthropology: these have been very insightful. Not always will they be congenial to a certain kind of literalism that can't countenance history or even pre-history beyond 6,000 years ago, or those who can only conceive that truth can be told by straight-forward historiography and are suspicious of the truth that can be told by parable, legend and mythical storytelling. What Snodgrass does is enable us to appreciate the truths that these kinds of language can tell.

As I've read this, it has become more evident to me that I'm going to be returning to it when I'm reflecting on the early chapters of Genesis and due to preach about them.

one of the themes that emerges clearly from this reading based upon prehistory reconstructed from archaeology and anthropology, is the conflict between pastoralists and agriculturalists in which the latter emerged the victors.  The interesting thing it makes clear is the way that, contrary to the myths and legends of most other civilisations of the shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture, the Bible we have tends to exhibit sympathy for the pastoralists and to sound out the warnings about the downsides of agriculturally based ways of life.

The bigger picture of cultural difference and change is interspersed with little titbits of information which made me stop and think more. For example, what if it is right that Abram's wife Sarai's name reflects a background in her being an intentionally childless (ex)-priestess of the Moon-goddess cult. Could she and Abram have been fleeing a situation -eloping together for religious convictions?

The author is a teacher in church settings, and occasionally that background shows through in the writing in asides, puns and witticisms. I enjoyed these but i expect some readers might find them less scholarly and others that there aren't enough of them to properly lighten a scholarly book.

It's not a short book -though half of it is index etc.  There's something of interest on every page so reading it is not a hard job.

*Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the  publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255 -even though I am British, residing in Britain.