Questions for billionaires, musings for limitarians

 Some contributions to a Mastodon thread on wealth and the wealthy seemed to me to be worth further reflection.

I really would like media interviewers to ask questions like this. The thread has a few other suggestions too.

One of the replies was helpful, I thought.

billionaires don't 'hoard money' they will 'never use'. the notional billion dollars isn't the amount of cash they have in the bank, it's an estimate of the amount of capital — ownership of stock, real estate, and so forth — they control and extract interest from. the idea of capitalists as 'money hoarders' is a child's understanding of what wealth inequality is & hampers any attempt to address its structural cause, which is social mechanisms of power placing a small group in a position to exploit the labour of the majority, not that small group somehow by their own efforts bringing in more money than they spend  -https://octodon.social/@esvrld/111806450875791439

This chimes with what has been mentioned earlier in the posts here on limitarianism, that it traces back to power and structural factors and that their own efforts are no more valuable than anyone else's; they just occupy a more powerful position to be able to extract rents. A subsequent toot elucidates:

if you accept that money abstracts agency, it's much of a muchness.
They have the money because they can compel conduct and (effectively) vampire your agency; you must do as they demand to live. That's where the money arises, even if it's a consequence rather than a cause. -https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/111818441705185094

I think that the idea that 'money abstracts agency' is worth considering further in this respect. It helps us to understand that money is a social construct and is, in a sense, 'owned' by us all; that is, in the sense that we construct it together by honouring it in re-use, to settle debts and acquire things ourselves. By using money as part of our agency in the social world, we empower others also to use it. I guess it's a kind of network effect. But it's a network which is exploitable if you are in the right position in the network and have means to siphon off some of the flows; to capture the surplus above strict costs -including labour. This was, I think, what Marx was noting about capital exploiting labour.

As to the response to these insights.

#greed used to be considered a bad thing.
We need a stronger, more widespread understanding that it is a threat to justice and freedom.
We desperately need to push for a culture where the accumulation of wealth and power is seen as a danger. -https://functional.cafe/@xarvh/111810773059876175

There are definite resonances to Jesus' teaching there. For Jesus, it was a more personal warning about what wealth does to our 'souls' -though I don't this that this excludes a consideration of the social, it's just a recognition of the relatively constrained political space of 1st century peasantry. In a society where we do have a bit more political agency (though it is hard fought and under threat) we should ask about the social and political dangers and work together to head them off as far as possible.

Going back to that first response, above. It helps us to recall, too, that money stands for the use or potential use of resources in a society which recognises that currency. Every currency unit represents the power to command some resource. The resource might be labour, it might be food, it might be finished goods or it might be raw materials. Very often, it's a combination of several of those things in actuality.

It is our communal faith that when we tender currency units, they will be accepted in exchange for goods or services that gives money its fundamental value. Absent that collective belief and monetary wealth evaporates. What is left in that case would be the raw holding of stuff and the raw volunteering or coercion of labour. At base, that is what money is.

Let's note, then, that the wealthy are relying on our communal faith to be able to be wealthy. Without us they are nothing. It is our existence and willingness to live and work within the monetary system that enables them to have their wealth in as far as they hold their wealth in monetary units or derivatives of them. Money is social, it is 'ours', the wealth have merely found themselves in a position to siphon off so-called 'surplus value'. They do this by dint of having various kinds of power to lay claim to the surplus and then to accumulate it. And note also, most often the power to lay claim is also socially constructed. It is 'given' by the rest of us -or at crucial points it is coerced that is to say, our consent is gained by threats of force. Often these threats are enshrined in what we call a legal system as a last resort enforcement of 'rights' to property.

They can only be wealthy because 'we' allow them to be. Their wealth depends on our consent (freely given or otherwise). They are 'licensed' by us to be wealthy.

What I think we need to do is to examine this license for its moral claims and downsides and ethically critique it. This involves questions like: what are just rewards? Why should power entitle one to more resources? What is the purpose of a monetary system? Are there justifications for wealth inequality? What effects does the accumulation of power (in the form of wealth) have on wider society and what is the basis for a society to morally limit those effects?

A Natural History of Scripture -book review.

 Lately, I've found myself more and more talking with other people about the Bible in terms of a kind of evolutionary pressures understanding of composition and preservation. In doing this, I guess I take it as plausible that writings that helped people tend to get preserved and copied while those that didn't got 'lost'. This means that where people found something in a writing that resonated with their sense of God, they would go back to it, and commend it to others. Where they found things that expanded their understanding of God and God's ways, they would copy it and pass it on. Where they found that challenges were productive, they'd engage with them and teach others to do similarly. Sometimes, I guess writings would be commended, and passed on because they had gained an aura of authority or because authoritative figures commended them. 

For this reason, I think it is important to talk about not just storytellers, but also editors and especially hearers and then readers. There would've been a reciprocal relationship around texts between these various people. Storytellers would adapt their telling to audience reactions -what 'tells well' would become a normal telling. Audiences would by their responses, requests and questions influence what was told and became an informal 'canon'. Editors would collect stories and writings with such matters in mind. But also they would have an eye to social and political conditions. 'Inspiration' in this view doesn't just belong to a writer but to the dialogical processes of telling, hearing, retelling, refining, reflecting, commending> I like to think that at key points were people paying attention to the divine resonances so that stories were also sifted for their spiritual value. Somewhere in all of this would be considerations of teaching and learning: what stories and texts promoted good reflection and wise conversations? This doesn't preclude 'divine inspiration' but it does take the focus off original authors being uniquely inspired -a model which seems suspiciously like the Romantic movement's views around the time when doctrinal bases dealing with scripture were being discussed, debated and codified.

An evolutionary approach suggests to me a survival of the fittest, and in this case that would mean that texts that were fittest for connecting people with God and God's purposes, would be the most likely to survive. 

Anyway, I thought I recognised in the title and blurb for this book, an approach that may help me to think about this approach more. So, I read with a question about how far this book would help me to develop and challenge this kind of approach.

Adkins sees what we now call Genesis 12:1-4 as the originating, kernel, story. And he spends some time in giving a potted version of the bigger narratives of the Hebrew scriptures. The book spends quite a lot of space retelling in summary the narratives and history of the accumulation of scriptures with some comment, history and framing to give a sense of development. I was intrigued by the naming of the NT as the Christian Sequel and will consider using this naming from time to time, myself. The rehearsal of the writings that become the bible raises the issue of canon, and canonisation is one of the matters that is touched on, as well as the non-canonisation of other writings.

I'd consider putting this book into the hands of people who were curious about the sweep of biblical history and open to consider how what we now call 'scriptures' interrelate with history. I think that there are challenges her to those who have a 'take it as it comes' approach to the writings of the Bible, and the author doesn't offer much to help such readers to consider and understand the critical scholarship which implicitly questions the 'straight forward' /face-value reading which doesn't really entertain the possibility that the texts we now have might have a back-story and not be written in the kind of way that someone now writing a novel or a textbook might write a complete work. Admittedly, something of the overview of critical scholarship comes when the history reaches the 1800s.

One of the interesting things that this book does, is to not only consider the formation of Jewish and Christian canons, but to incorporate consideration of the Qur'an alongside consideration of the Jewish Mishnah and Talmud. I think that this is a necessary consideration if one is taking a 'natural history' approach. The other interesting approach here, for me, is not to consider the Christian canon closed until the reformation is well underway. And indeed he points out that until the council of Trent, the 27 books were not considered a closed canon. It is also important that it considers the matter of translations and textual history which in actuality are big parts of discussions today about bible and authority in some parts of the church.

So, I didn't get my desired exploration of the kinds of forces that would drive 'natural' (cultural) selection nor a theology of canon, reception and inspiration that would take account of it. There are hints, to be sure, but mostly this is a historical summary of 4,000 years of story and reflection. It's a fair introduction but the further reflection I was hoping for is not part of it.

I may have to do that myself ...

Links

A Natural History of Scripture Website
Keith H. Adkins’ Website 

#ANaturalHistoryOfScripture

I should give a declaration of interest here. I received a pdf of this book as part of an agreement to review it, even if only briefly. There was no implication or explicit agreement that I should make the review favourable or otherwise. So I have simply stated what interested me and given my reactions.

"I can't justify it" a case for Limitarianism

 It's funny sometimes how things that are related pop up together and yet there's no intrinsic necessary connection, or it's that, alerted, a mind notices what it might otherwise have shrugged off. Either way, Chris O'Shea is the head of British Gas (now Centrica) and was given a £4.5m pay deal this year.

“You can’t justify a salary of that size,” O’Shea told BBC Breakfast on Friday. “It’s a huge amount of money; I am incredibly fortunate. I don’t set my own pay; that’s set by our remuneration committee.” (report here)

At least he has the grace to say its 'fortunate' and not try to make out he's super gifted or somesuch. The last post I put up introduced limitarianism, and this report advances the argument a little. One of the things I mentioned was that a big part of such high pay is power. In this case O'Shea disavows that power but it is set by a committee. So the power thing needs some tweaking.

He went on to say,

All of us sitting here on this sofa will make substantially more than £30,000. It’s not for me to set my own pay. It’s not for you to set your own pay.

Typically, such remuneration committees will justify their decisions by talking about "attracting talent" or some kind of idea of "benchmarking" -that is setting pay or bonuses in line with others in the same sort of work. What this reveals, I think, is a kind of oligopolistic mindset. So it is still about power, it's just that the power is diffused but we should notice it is still exercised  on behalf of those who are well paid -normally by people who themselves are well-paid. There're elements of groupthink, arms-length self-justification and a kind of closing ranks, all cloaked in a pseudo-objectivity. Someone in the kind of position that O'Shea is in can be sure that such a committee is going to set pay awards high because they know that the people making it will tacitly benchmark first by their own remuneration (as a baseline) and will be quite untroubled about whether 'the going rate' is actually justified in terms other than a vague sense of 'the market' in CEOs. It's a bit of a vicious circle: they pay high because others pay high and because they can since they hold the purse strings. And if they didn't pay high, what would that say by implication about their own high pay? It's grounded in little more than the idea that the wealthy should be paid wealthily. The fact that a committee makes the disbursement decision does not overcome the mindset they begin with or the power that they have to operationalise it. These are often the same people who are content to pay ordinary workers less than minimum wage if they can get away with it. It's about mindset, notions of value, ideas of 'markets', class solidarity.

To be fair to O'Shea, he claims that he'd turned down previous years' bonuses: it was “the first bonus I’ve taken in my time at Centrica; for a number of years, I’ve given up bonuses because of hardships that customers were facing”. Well, good for him. But ... why accept now? -Apparently he's not forced to have it. Presumably he could insist that they pay him a lesser 'fairer' amount. He could take it and set up a democratic committee to disburse the rest to, say, alleviate poverty -and challenge fellow high earners to do the same with a limitarian narrative. He could challenge the committee to come up with a justification for paying so highly that is grounded in more objective standards related to work: hours, productivity, responsibility ... and ultimately social cohesion. They'd hate it of course, because it'd require them to consider their own wealth accumulation.

I note that much of this is covered briefly in the remarks at the end of the article by someone representing a thinktank called the High Pay Centre,

“... one would expect someone paid such a huge sum to show greater leadership and responsibility and actively challenge the pay-setting process rather than saying he doesn’t deserve it, before shrugging and accepting it anyway. ... how much an executive is paid is rarely aligned with how well their company has served its customers and wider society. Mandating workers on boards would be one step towards ending this culture of rewarding failure.”

It's not just 'rewarding failure' but also over-rewarding effort and ability that many people could actually do. These are not people with superhuman abilities or extraordinary work efforts. There are millions of people with similar abilities and even more millions whose work rates and efforts put these execs to shame but without the power to set their rates their efforts go relatively unrewarded. It is much about power and the class solidarity of the rich.

 

Starting to think about Limitarianism

 I came across this article recently that explores something I'd recently begun thinking about. In part I was thinking about it because of recent conversations and also the persistent thought that there must be a limit to how much one can spend in a lifetime and perhaps that should inform a policy about how much one should accumulate.

“I contend,” Robeyns argues, “that for people who live in a society with a solid pension system, the ethical limit [on wealth] will be around 1 million pounds, dollars or euros per person.” 

This lines up with what I had started out thinking. Partly noting that when I was a kid, being a millionaire was a big thing. No-one was, as far as know /knew a billionaire. It seemed to me that multimillionaires had more than enough for a rather nice looking life in material terms.

A lot of people say: ‘I’ve been thinking this all my life.’ 

There is even some recognition among some of the ultra wealthy that something must change:

    Some, such as the Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney, who made his money from a monopoly of duty-free shops at airports, have enjoyed nothing so much as giving all their money away. Mackenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has been shedding billions of her divorce settlement a year, on the basis that “she is giving it back to [society] where it came from”. Others, such as the entertainment heiress Abigail Disney, or the British-based group “Patriotic Millionaires”, are sympathetic to the fundamentals of Robeyns’s ideas, recognising that “policies that favour the richest are unsustainable”.

All of which reinforces my sense that perhaps we should be talking and thinking about this way more than we do. The thing that I'm most interested in at this point, is the reasons for proposing this and making sure we have a solid basis for making the proposal founded in ethically defensible insights. And I think this bit gets us started on that.

... the idea that any discussion of a limit to wealth must be born out of envy, for example; or that most seductive of all myths, that people somehow deserve the wealth (or poverty) of their lives – that multimillions are made mostly by hard work and talent, not by luck and vast inequalities of opportunity... Despite the fact that “trickle down” economics has long been discredited as an idea, we apparently remain in thrall to the mythology of “wealth creators”

So what sorts of principles would soundly and ethically undergird a limitarian set of policies? Taking the hints above into account. We'd need to have a good sense of 'desert' in relation to wealth 'creation' or accumulation. This would include considerations of 'luck' and social-positionality (aka. systemic factors relating to opportunity). I guess also that the vast multiples in relation to basic wages being gained by the very rich also need to be questioned in relation to the influence power that such wealth buys; it accumulates power because to a large degree wealth is power. In a democracy, we can't ignore this.

However, I think that there are some other fairly fundamental things to pay attention to. Most fundamental of all is to think about how wealth is created and distributed. Another story: when I started work at around 13 years old (part time, I think there was a maximum of 12 hours or so a week we could legally work because we were also at school) I began to think about why it was pay rates were so different. We were told  that a different shop further down the mall paid their workers much better (but then their prices were higher too). I became aware that the more senior one was, the more pay people got. But I wasn't entirely sure why. I had gained the impression that hard work was praiseworthy and so I had an idea that hard work ought to be better rewarded. 'Hard' work being work that was physically or mentally more tiring -and that would include longer hours. I came to appreciate that there may be a case for paying someone for responsibility, that is if they had to make decisions which could affect other people's well-being to some degree. I guess that would amount to a form of 'hard work' in terms of emotional labour -especially anxiety.

In the light of such musings, it does feel ridiculous that someone should be paid multiples of many thousands in relation to the lowest paid. It is hard to find some kind of justification in terms of hard work or even rewarding risk or innovation for such differentials. On the other hand, what it does seem that such differentials are 'rewarding' is the holding of power: power to set rates (whether by rent or positional/hierarchical means). However, power is not necessarily fair, and usually is not unless held to account. Obviously, this consideration of pay and reward, shades into thinking about monopolistic power in markets which is a helpful reference point, I suspect.

Relatedly, there is sometimes an argument made to pay higher rates to attract people to do jobs that might be hard to recruit for otherwise. But it seems to me that this manifestly does not work in the case of menial and dirty jobs which are often among the worst paid and I can't really see why a CEO is 'worth' so much more than a sewage worker. In fact, to me, by standards of hard work and slog it seems to me they may be the wrong way round in remuneration. Furthermore, in terms of the anxiety-labour mentioned above, it seems to me that in actual fact, many CEO's are being rewarded for not caring and are in fact rewarded for failure oftentimes: they "fall upward".

I've just sketched out my concerns about concerns regarding reward and pay. I think that a lot of differentials are actually about social and hierarchical power in a way that is fundamentally similar to the power of monopolies or oligopolies to be rate setters in a market. My concern going forward from here, is to consider what kind of basis there might be for limiting the pay and wealth of the richest. It seems to me that this most fundamentally requires a consideration of 'just' 'rewards'. This would also require us to think about what unjust rewards are and how they work -which I've begun to alight on in considering hierarchical power ("controlling the purse strings", in popular saying). 

It feels now like this is a kind of introduction. I think that I will try to develop some of these threads a bit further is subsequent posts rather than here.

----------------------------------------

PS -as many blogs no longer link to an article or other web address at the title, I think that there's a danger that some readers may not be aware of this former custom that you can click on the title to be taken to the main post or article or page being commented on. In case that's so, the article quoted above at several points can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/how-much-personal-wealth-is-enough-ingrid-robeyns-limitarianism

Poor talkative Christianity and its discontenteds

 I found this informal survey being reported and the result seemed to me to be something really significant. Something that those of us interested in the future of Christian faith probably need to pay attention to.

We recently asked our Upworthy audience on Facebook, "What's something that you really enjoy that other people can't seem to understand?" and over 1,700 people weighed in. ... one answer dominated the list of responses. It came in various wordings, but by far the most common answer to the question was "silent solitude." Here are a few examples:

"Feeling perfectly content, when I’m all alone."

"Being home. Alone. In silence."

"That I enjoy being alone and my soul is at peace in the silence. I don't need to be around others to feel content, and it takes me days to recharge from being overstimulated after having an eventful day surrounded by others."

"Enjoying your own company. Being alone isn’t isolating oneself. It’s intentional peace and healthy… especially for deep feelers/thinkers."

I think this is significant because it sounds like it ought to be something that religious groups and organisations can offer, encourage and nurture. Yet I suspect that this is not how it's perceived. I suspect that Christians and our churches are perceived as rather talkative, noisy and not having much to offer the more contemplative or any real understanding of silence. 

This despite a history replete with silent, hermit-inclined figures and much teaching about the use of silence and the ways of meditation and self-understanding. What we appear to have managed to project to the wider world is rather more 'busy' and social. 

And it is fine to have that, but I can't help feeling that we could do with expressions of church that lead with the contemplative offer and give support to the intentionally solitary or the solitude and quietness that many people clearly crave.

There's a pitfall to this in terms of strategy. Of necessity a huge amount of what this would look like would not make it to the spreadsheets of church statisticians. It probably wouldn't show up directly in church attendance figures or similar measures of 'engagement' in church life. These might well be people, in the main, who would find many of the main services offered by churches to be too distracting and fast-paced, and find the sermons insufficiently reflective or supportive of meditative spirituality. They may well find the over-certain, and over-defined talkative kataphatic style of worship too hard to bear.

Maybe I'm projecting. But if I am, it's from a background of loving that noisy and social Christianity and now finding it doesn't nourish the deepest parts of my soul. I now find relative quiet and dwelling in the slow reflective sort of spiritual practice to be important. I suspect that this informal survey opens a window onto what we should be sharing from the churches in addition to the other offer.

I'd always felt some pull towards the more contemplative, even in my noisier days. And I do still find I can worship among the noisier and more content-driven. However, it seems like the balance has shifted. I do think we need both celebratory and quiet dimensions to our spiritual practice and we each need to find our own balance and be prepared for that balance to shift and its contents to change over time. There's a definite change in the relation to words in worship and reflection. At one point for me the language was important, it pointed me and helped me to home in on God (at least at its best). Now less so, and I'm more aware of how inadequate the words are; that they cannot contain God or the experience of God and God's world. Again, it's a shift of balance not a total dichotomy.

The other thing in that survey that I find interesting is the appearance of ordinary things (and the assumption that others will not understand the attraction). This is another element of contemplative spirituality:paying attention to 'little' and 'ordinary' things, discovering the joy or at least contentment in the mundane and appreciating it. Again, it's not unknown to Christian traditions, just not presented so much or signposted or even valued, it seems. But if we could simply help it to be known that there are Christ-following ways to integrate these appreciations of the ordinary into spiritual practice and awareness, we'd be a lot more use, I suspect.

"We tried" -an open letter to Manning

(If you want to follow suit before 31 Dec 2023 get some further info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ew0EjM1b5MQwS8QmmI-UHLuX8xYh49A8JLv1kA8cEVw/edit )

Dear Mr Manning,
As a popular music listener of several decades -more than I care to enumerate now!- I think it's important to draw your attention to what happened during The Big Top 40 Countdown on Sunday 24th December 2023.
During the Countdown, the song “We Tried” by Louise Harris was, very surprisingly and rather shockingly, not played. Perversely it was not announced as no.4. (Mariah Carey given out as no.6, nobody was called as no.5, Wham! was then wrongly stated to be no.4). A recap of the Top 10 was then made, during which Wham! was announced as no.5, and “Louise Harris - We Tried - re-entry” was announced as no.4, and no more than approximately 10 seconds of the song was played.
I've got to say: this came over as suspiciously like censorship wrapped around by a cock-up. 

To be fair and more fully contextual: “We Tried” by Louise Harris was not the only song in the Countdown that wasn’t played in full. Jimin’s song “Closer Than This” was announced as no.26, and about 20-30 seconds of the song was played before moving on. Fred Again’s “leavemealone” was announced as no.21, but then the song wasn’t played at all – only 10 seconds of it was played during the recap of the 20s. And note: these are songs in the 20+ placings not the top 5.

So, my first beef with this is about the omission and shortening of songs in general during The Big Top 40 Countdown. If you're doing a ‘Top 40’ countdown, surely the point is to play all of the top 40 songs. And if you're not going to do so, then have a consistent and easily surmisable policy about it as the random-seeming approach heard on Christmas Eve is unfair on artists and on fans who have invested in supporting these songs – sometimes specifically to get them into the Charts, so that they are played on radio to the masses.
Beef no.2 is specifically about leaving out “We Tried” by Louise Harris. This was the only song in the entire Countdown that was not announced in its rightful place, at no.4. It wasn’t announced at all, in any place – other than during the recap of the Top 10. (Not to forget either that no.5 was mysteriously skipped completely, and Wham! was incorrectly announced at no.4 where Louise was meant to be).

It is very peculiar (or, as I wrote above, "suspicious") that, on the biggest music day of the year (the Xmas No.1 Countdown) on what is advertised as “the UK’s biggest chart show”, such a huge cluster of errors was made. It is even more 'peculiar' that, following the recap of the Top 10 whereby the correct Countdown was announced, the team including yourself as announcer did not seem to notice – nor point out – that this huge mistake had been made. Furthermore, when the Christmas Top 10 list was posted on social media, no apology nor explanation of the error was issued here either. At the very least this should happen and some act of reparation be made -like giving extra airtime to 'We tried' over the next month.

I'm normally a cock-up rather than a conspiracy theorist. However, given the maintstream media's more recent apparent alignment with current government attitudes, it's harder to dismiss the conspiracy point of view.I note that Louise Harris is an unsigned, independent and unknown artist, who was robbed of a huge opportunity for her music to be played to millions of people, who had never heard of her or her song before. This appears to be not only an injustice, but one that aligns with the interests of the big players in the music industry. Recall please that Capital and Heart radio stations both have listenerships of millions, and The Big Top 40 Countdown is advertised as “the UK’s biggest chart show”. Receiving radioplay like this can be the make or break of an unknown artist’s career – with their music reaching a whole new audience, of a whole new scale, for the first (and perhaps only) time.
“We Tried” is a song Louise wrote about the climate crisis, and what will happen if we don’t act. The powerful song and its emotive music video have already touched the hearts of so many people, mine included -the first time for a long time that a popular music chart entry has done so. I think it is important that a song inviting listeners to emotionally connect with the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced should be played particularly in a season which has among its themes the recollection of the importance of doing good and paying attention to the poor and needy (including those directly impacted by climate change: Do They Know it's Christmas?). Assuming Louise is basically correct (and the scientific community concur) this is a song that could encourage them into collective climate action – which many see as the only hopeful solution left, given the inaction, and deliberate harmful actions, of world governments. And please don't brush this aside as somehow not being the concern of popular music: I've already alluded to the LiveAid single in the 80s, and we all know that a slew of well-selling (and airtimed) singles down the decades could be cited for their social and political commentary -as well as their sales!
If this song had been heard by millions of people, like it was meant to have been, this could have inspired millions of people to help to tackle the climate and ecolagical crises – which ultimately could have saved lives. One person dies every 28 seconds in East Africa due to famine, resulting from crop failure, caused by drought – an effect of the climate crisis. Over 50 million people are starving in East Africa. Right. Now. (Reprise my allusion to Live Aid).The more time that goes by without climate action, the higher the number of people who die unnecessarily. Therefore, preventing this song from being played, and its message from being heard, has hindered the possibility of lives being saved through climate action, and has allowed harm to continue to be inflicted on millions around the world due to the climate crisis. We are running out of time to prevent irreversible climate catastrophe, meaning every day gone by without climate action counts.

I personally felt angry and disgusted  when I heard that “We Tried” was not played nor announced in its rightful place because. And yet I was somehow not surprised given the corporate apparent determination to deny, obfuscate or marginalise anything that seems to remind us of an uncomfortable and therefor inconvenient truth.

There is no way you could ever possibly fully make up for this act of omission, because the Christmas Countdown is the biggest one of the year, with the most listeners. That specific audience, and that specific opportunity, has now been permanently lost. However, there are certain things that you could do, to attempt to make up for this loss and injustice.

You could:
-Play “We Tried” by Louise Harris in full on your next Big Top 40 Countdown radio show.
-During this show, explain, and apologise for, the error that was made on the Christmas Countdown: no.5 was not announced at all, Wham! was incorrectly announced as no.4 when they were no.5, and Louise Harris was not announced at all, when she was actually no.4. Also, Louise Harris’ song was not played in full, like all of the other Top 10 songs were. Explain that this song was written by Louise “about the climate crisis, and what will happen if we don’t act”.
-Post a Tweet, Instagram post AND Instagram story, and Facebook post, on all of your social media accounts (Will Manning, Big Top 40, Capital, Heart, Global & Global Player) explaining, and apologising for, the error that was made on the Christmas Countdown: (for ease of reference when you cut and paste this into your socials I repeat:) no.5 was not announced at all, Wham! was incorrectly announced as no.4 when they were no.5, and Louise Harris was not announced at all, when she was actually no.4. And Louise Harris’ song was not played in full, like all of the other Top 10 songs were. Explain that this song was written by Louise “about the climate crisis, and what will happen if we don’t act”. In this post, tag @louiseharrismusic on Instagram & Facebook, and @louisehmusic on Twitter.

A social media post is requested is because this can help partly make up for the lost audience – as a new audience, your social media followers, would be reached and informed about the song, and the error made.

I appreciate that, as “the UK’s biggest chart show”, you would not want to do a disservice or injustice to unsigned, independent artists, nor to those trying to raise the alarm about the climate crisis.
ɷˡˡ̷
Andii Bowsher
"Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease; or was it made to preserve all her children?” - Gerrard Winstanley, 1649, founder of ‘The True Levellers’I blogWe pray

Foundation, Empire -and the mission of the church

 I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything but an outline and some character names. A lot has happened in my life since I read the series and now watch it adapted to television. For one thing, I committed my ways to Christ and have a role which involves official ministry in the church's mission.

In the intervening years, a constant companion for me has been concern for ecology, for creation. Latterly this has become a more urgent concern and I have realised that we have collectively run out of time. We are living on borrowed time. In fact, some of us, globally speaking, are not even living on borrowed time. All through my adult life I have unconsciously (I now realise) assumed that we would have time, that there was time to persuade and to change and to head off the worst. That assumption, that naive hope, has now been stripped from me.

The situation of living on borrowed time  needs to be spelled out in greater detail. And this is where the connection in my mind with Hari Seldon and Foundation starts to kick in. In Foundation, the scenario is that the Empire is about to decline and collapse, giving way to a dark age, an age of vast human suffering and misery. For me that scenario has clicked with the likely paths our own current civilisation seems to be on. Whatever happens now, some global warming is 'baked in' and we have already seen the kinds of effects it is having. The prospect is that such effects will continue and worsen. How much worse is unknown. 

It seems likely that parts of the earth will become uninhabitable for humans. It seems that there will be greater extremes of weather, including drought and storms. It is inevitable that coastal and low-lying cities like London will have to find ways to cope with encroachment of tides or be abandoned in part or wholly. The clear implications of that basket of effects will be population movements, migration. We should also reckon on food supplies becoming erratic as land becomes unsuitable for cultivation. This "erratic" food supply will, as usual, be dire for the most vulnerable and stressful for those who are usually less vulnerable. More migration. These kinds of stresses in the past have exacerbated intercommunal and international tensions. We might be unsurprised to see wars or at least armed 'incidents' and also insurgencies, civil disorder and revolutions.

So, in many ways, it wouldn't be unfair to call what we are embarked upon, a "dark age". An age when more and more people die, suffer loss, are undernourished, unhoused and displaced, fall into servitude, are brutalised, exploited and traumatised.

None of this is to imply that things up to the moment have been idyllic (far from it), just to say that it could -probably will- get worse by a number of measures. This too reminds me of the Foundation story. The dark age is relative, the Empire is cruel and brutal in keeping order but one catches glimpses of many people living lives which are at least okay: materially speaking they are well fed, have homes and good things in their lives -provided they don't threaten Empire's power. However, the dark age multiplies the detriments. In both Foundation and in our real world trajectory now, the further dangers are that human collective knowledge and now-how are eroded making reconstruction harder. This can be further triangulated with the medieval period in western Europe -the so-called dark ages*- where the monasteries played a role in preserving information which could later be retrieved and added to. They also, let's note in passing, played a role in healthcare, agricultural know-how and sometimes, at their best, in protecting the interests of ordinary people or at least mitigating some of the worst effects of bad, venial, governance.

It has been interesting to note the portrayal of responses to the prognosis of Seldon and psychohistory in the Foundation story. Again, there are parallels. There is denial on the part of those in charge and a 'shoot the messenger' reaction. Tick: we are seeing that. There is a prioritising of dynastic concerns which minimises the responses. Tick. -Our billionaire overlords seem to be doing something rather like that, abetted (gaslit, cajoled, wealth-groomed) by those who hold the formal reins of governance.

As I've already nodded towards, there is a parallel too in the 'solution'. In the books and the TV series, the Foundation is set up to provide a repository of knowledge for reconstruction, and a means to help shorten the dark age. Interestingly, and making the parallel more visible, the Foundation spawns an order of monks, in effect, whose mission is to try to help shorten the period of darkness and to keep alive the 'light' of knowledge and humanity (in the sense of 'humane'). I can't help thinking that Asimov was giving a hat tip to the role of monastic communities in the European dark ages*.

This is what I think we need to take on board with regard to the mission of the churches in the coming century (or centuries). We need to be asking "what is God doing and calling us to collaborate with?" In answering that question, we may do well to consider the role of the churches (including monastic expressions) at their best during the 'dark ages' in western Europe. We would do well to consider also how they failed or fell short. In writing that, I'm also mindful that I have written 'western Europe' several times. I'm somewhat aware that we might also look at churches in other parts of the world during times of civilisational stress to learn from their experiences. And given that there are commonalities of desire for human flourishing and spiritual disciplines, it may be also that the experiences of people of other faiths can help us to consider our vocation as churches. And that's not to pass up that the encouragement to people of other faith traditions to similarly dig deep to retrieve their own resources to help human flourishing in such challenging circumstances. It wouldn't be the first time Christians have learned from other faiths. It is strongly arguable that the Renaissance was greatly indebted to the re-discovery of classical learning and manuscripts held and preserved by the Islamic nations which became available as a result of the Reconquista in the AD1400s.

We would do well also to consider the understandings we have amassed about sociology, economics, psychology as well as the physical sciences and their related technologies. It may be that capacity for advanced research in the latter is diminished but the ways of understanding and thinking can enable better adaptation for communities to changing conditions and harsher natural conditions. It is important also to consider that we have been coming to understand that some indigenous perspectives and accumulated understandings of biomes and skillful human living in them are worthy in seeking human flourishing. The collective wisdom and learning can inform people settling and/or adapting in new conditions. The attitude, at their best, of respect for natural process and reflexively understanding interconnection, an ecological instinct almost, is valuable. The attitude of considering how we might be good ancestors and trying to take the long view is one that we need to take on board. Not doing so is part of the reason why our civilisation is failing now.

As churches, then, we might consider our own part in Foundation. Not for a galactic empire, but for human flourishing in the long term on the only planet we have. The only planet we have been entrusted with. As churches, 'Foundation' means discovering together God's mission in the present keeping an eye on the likely future. It means adapting and renewing our discipling, our engagements with our communities, our structures (for surely we cannot continue as we are). We will need to listen to the Spirit and one another's discernments to "hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches". We will need to learn disciplines of simplicity of life, corporate discernment, and humble, patient learning. We will need to learn the discipline of sitting light to our preferences and to let of some, perhaps many, of the things we have grown attached to in the way that we 'do church together'. We will need to become peacemakers in earnest and set our hands to the plough of learning how to do that work (and find ourselves blessed in it!). We will need to face and process our own grief and bereavement of the kind of life we have come to expect and hope for, and our collective guilt in making the world worse for our afterbears (opposite of forebears). We will need to learn how to minister among the shocked and traumatised, the cynical and the dispirited (having faced those things ourselves).

I feel like this could be the introduction to a series of fuller considerations of those different dimensions to what I suspect we are called to. And probably some more too. Maybe I'll be able to do that. I'm sensing that the five marks of mission may be a helpful frame to hang some of that consideration on.

Well, a blog post is meant to be provisional, and that seems to be what this is! Let's see if I can pick up some of these strands in the coming weeks and months.

Footnote

*The term "dark ages" is contested by historians because there were at times some very good, hopeful and even progressive things occurred during the period often named such. However, as a label for a time when civilisational collapse, whether partial or more wholly, takes place, it serves. Especially as it is explicitly part of the Foundation storyline.