Fairtrade failing to deliver benefits ?

've been hearing rumours lately of serious questions about the benefits of FT: that it might not be benefitting people as much as the normal market. Well, it could well be that what I've been hearing was the harbinger of this report -picked up by the Observer here: Fairtrade accused of failing to deliver benefits to African farmworkers.

The summary in one sentence:

Sales of Fairtrade-certified products from Uganda and Ethiopia are not benefiting poor farmworkers as profits fail to trickle down to much of the workforce, says a groundbreaking study.

It does make concerning reading for those of us who have long supported the idea of Fair Trade. However, don't just read the first two thirds or so of the article which lay out the basic findings. You need to read the last part of the article to learn that there may be factors that put it in a different, less alarming, light. As the reports authors themselves suggest, for example:

"One possibility is that Fairtrade producer organisations are always
established in significantly poorer, more marginalised areas where an
accumulation of disadvantages means smallholder farmers are unable to
pay even the paltry wages offered by smallholders in other areas without
Fairtrade producer organisations,

And then a comment from the FT foundation:

When comparisons are based more on like-for-like situations, such as the
study's own analysis of Ugandan coffee in small scale coffee production
set-ups, it finds key areas where workers in areas with
Fairtrade-certified farmer organisations in fact had better conditions
compared with those in non-certified, such as free meals, overtime
payments and loans and wage advances for workers. 

All of which seems to indicate a more complex situation and more research and certainly doesn't mean we should give up FT buying just yet.

Before we agress the telesales caller ...

"Our fight is not against flesh and blood ..."

I often find myself thinking that when brushing off a telesales call. I try not to do so angrily, but I try not to engage them too much -I'm usually trying to do something else when I take the call and part of me doesn't want to give them false hope. And sometimes I'm working hard to keep a lid on my irritation.

Now, when I pick up the phone and realise it is a salesperson, I picture the caller sitting in a cubicle with my first duty manager glaring aggressively over their shoulder. I know they are probably only doing it for the money and that they would rather be visiting their sister and her new baby, or studying for a Masters degree in systems engineering. But they feel they have no choice – they need the job.

So while part of me wants to immediately press the red button and end the call, I do my best to focus on the caller and treat them with decency. In an effort to make a personal connection, I sometimes find out their name and where they are phoning from, which can lead to surprising – if usually short – conversations about their lives, and my own.How to empathise with a telesales caller | Roman Krznaric: 

I've got to say that they often don't help 'themselves'  by the scripts they have to follow (I assume). For example, I  presume that by asking after how I am, they are supposed to be creating empathy. But the fact is, the only people I've  never met before who ask after my health are people who are trying to fast-track a sense of empathy in order to try to sell me something. So I find that I get irritated because I've been asked something manipulatively. I'd rather they actually didn't go in for the spurious attempt to create rapport but simply said a bit more directly what they are about.

But I'm still left with that irritation. How to deal with that? I don't want to be irritated, but I also don't want to spend time being sold to when I really don't want to buy whatever it is. Perhaps, taking a leaf out of Mr Krznaric's book, I should immerse rather than push away. Perhaps I should ask them how they are and keep asking further questions until some kind of genuine connection is reached and I am no longer their mark and they are no longer my psychological mugger. Do I have the courage? Maybe. My big issue may actually turn out to be feeling that i have the time.

Institutions get inside you

A piece of research that seems to confirm that having institutions does indeed achieve one of the aims of having them in the first place: they create systems that supervene loyalties and judgements based mainly on in-group loyalties. This gives them the possiblity of, in effect, pushing out 'love your neighbour' to out-group people.

with supportive government services, food security and institutions that
meet their basic needs were very likely to follow impartial rules about
how to give out money. By contrast, those without effective, reliable
institutions showed favoritism toward members of their local community. Strong institutions reduce in-group favoritism -- ScienceDaily:

But then we should note, too, how this isn't something merely external. I first became aware of this explicitly when I started working at Northumbria University and became acquainted with the way that their policy relating to equality and diversity actually had far-reaching effects in that it required that people actually become vigilant about the effects of discrimination, harassment and so forth. Since we spend more time at work than almost anywhere, then the attitudes are brought into our habit-range. So no surprise that one of the conclusions should be this:

In a world with well-functioning institutions, this gets inside of people and actually affects their basic motivations, even when they're in a situation when no one is watching, 

This lends some credence to the possibility that institutions (indeed corporisations) are providentially part of God's pedagogy of the human race. Though of course we need also to recognise the fallenness that shows up in a pedagogy of sin as well as of good-neighbourliness.

Rice growing and cultural differences

In a PhD thesis, it is being proposed that the co-operativeness demanded by rice growing has generated a distinct cultural psychology to that found among wheat-growing societies.

Talhelm and his co-authors at universities in China and Michigan propose that the methods of cooperative rice farming -- common to southern China for generations -- make the culture in that region interdependent, while people in the wheat-growing north are more individualistic, a reflection of the independent form of farming practiced there over hundreds of years.

"The data suggests that legacies of farming are continuing to affect people in the modern world," Talhelm said. "It has resulted in two distinct cultural psychologies that mirror the differences between East Asia and the West." 'Rice theory' explains north-south China cultural differences -- ScienceDaily:

To me this seems very plausible and could take its place alongside the effects of the tech-complex of move-able-type printing on rag-paper as generating quite important cultural mindscapes.



What I'm left looking for with this, is how this particular difference is handed down when societies move beyond such a large demographic investment in the agricultural bases. In other words, what mechanisms are there that continue to propagate the different mindsets in populations where rice-growing or wheat-growing are not big practical factors in people's lives?



Is it that the mindset is further embedded in other institutions which take over the propagation of attituteds? If so, what institutions might they be?

The New Covenant by Robert Emery

 For a number of years I've experimented from time to time with narrative sermons. For me, usually, this has involved telling a Bible incident as a more extended story. Usually I've found this easier to tell as a first-person narrative and I've tended to either take the part of a central character (eg Simeon in Luke's birth and infancy story) or to pick or make up a bystanding character. What this has enabled me to do is to use what I have learnt about the circumstances, culture, habits, mores and economics of the time to add depth and colour to the telling. It also enables me to teach about such things obliquely as part of driving the story forward.



So I was intrigued by Robert Emery's book when it was offered for review. At this point I've not read it all; just the first part, but already I can see that Mr Emery has done essentially the same sort of thing that I have done in my narrative sermons. It's been good for me to see how this technique reads when it's not been me that has created the story, and I've enjoyed it. I have found that social and cultural details that have figured as part of the story have 'come alive' more than if they are simply stated in a more textbook fashion. It also gives a chance to reflect on the biblical characters and what were the personal drivers and perspectives and struggles they might have had. It has to be said that as a means of conveying such information, it has a lot to commend it and it is preferable in terms of memorability and engagement to simple textbook tellings.



of course their are downsides in the form of potential pitfalls. The reader (or in my case listener) is at the mercy of the knowledge of the narrator and the ability to make imaginative connections and to understand the implications of cultural artefacts, ways of living etc in terms of the effects on human actors. So the possibility of slipping in anachronisms is very real and sometimes a crucual issue.



The other main potential downside is maintaining the balance between story, character and background. And in the temple tour narrative I think Emery only just manages not to get totally lost in the background at the expense of story and character. This pitfall is that the first-person narrative can simply become a lecture where the character speaking becomes a mere proxy for the author and so the character can end up giving what is effectively a textbook lecture on something (eg the architecture and furnishings and rituals of the temple) without it actually being part of the story or helping us to gain sympathy or insight into the characters. As I say, I think Emery just about manages to stay on the right side of the line in these respects, but the fact that I noticed the danger was a bit distracting. What I don't know is whether i noticed because this approach is familiar to me or whether it was because for most readers, the amount of detail being conveyed by the characters in 'conversation' was quite heavy.



It is hard to properly weave lots of such detail into narrative form in an engaging way, and consistently over a whole story arc. I'm looking forward to learning more from Emery's book both about the way of life of the times as he has discovered it and also about the relaying of insight into the times, people and events through this approach to narrative.



The New Covenant, a book by Robert Emery  #SpeakeasyNewCovenant

Although I'm not in the USA, I'm happy to meet with the guidelines for such reviews required in the USA: I received a copy of this book from Speakeasy for review. I'm not required to write a positive review.

More than a conjuring trick with bones

In the film The Princess Bride,  confronted with a dead Westley (the hero) and told that he is dead, Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) says in a delicious NY accent "Look who knows so much about dead ...  it so happens your friend is only *mostly* dead. And mostly dead is a little bit *alive*" and then goes on to administer a restorative which resuscitates Westley so he can go on to finish the plot. I mention it because a lot of us think about resurrection as if it is a kind of resuscitation. A zombie Jesus only mostly dead somehow revived but fundamentally still restricted to the normal laws of time and space, decay and entropy.

Well, it's not like that with Jesus on Holy Saturday /Easter Eve: he's dead, really dead. Dead as the proverbial doornail. Not mostly dead; truly dead. Brain activity: zero. He's gone, passed away, flower food, he is an ex-messiah. More: his soul doesn't go marching on, there's no ghost hanging around fretting about his life's work being unfinished and agonising over his friends' and relatives' grief.

He's as dead as, well,

we are dead when we die. That's it. The end. Finished. Kaput. The long sleep: no awareness because there's nothing to be aware: we're gone; no longer exist, so no wake up call. Oblivion.

And Jesus has to be as dead as that else there's no help for us.

If Jesus does not truly die, then our dying remains the last word.

Jesus has to enter into our death: where there is nothing beyond. Just absence, nonexistence, uncontinuance.

Well, not quite. For, as it is getting popular to say that someone who has died lives on in our memory; that as long as we remember them, they live in us. In some ways that's the democratised version of especially skilled or favoured people wishing to live on in their accomplishments. "I want to achieve immortality through my art". Well, I agree with Woody Allen "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

The problem with 'living on' in someone's remembrance is that 'I' don't really live on. Again as Woody Allen put it "Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of people, and I said I would prefer to live on in my apartment."

Living on in someone's memory seems not to involve me enjoying the world, relationships or, well, life. Some other 'I' gets to do that while borrowing some of what they know of me to interpret their experience*.

So, while living on in remembrance may console the bereaved, it doesn't help us to live on in our apartments**.

And in any case, those who remember themselves die and with them whatever is left of us in their memory.

But there is one who remembers eternally. In fact, to say 'remembers eternally' may not be so different to saying 'knows always', or even foreknew. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God "not of the dead but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" . And that's the point. The remembrance/knowing by the Everliving, the Creator, is who we are. God ever-livingly and ever-lovingly re-members us. Our knowing and remembering each other is a shadow of that fullest knowing-remembrance. While something truly does live on in human remembrances, we truly live on in God's knowing-remembrance for that remembrance is the Source of all living and in loving us, the source and ground and upholding of our being 'us'. In God's remembrance/knowing and creativity 'we' truly are us. God is our continuity of existence.

So, when Jesus enters into our kind of death, becomes one with our finality, the only hope beyond that is that God is the God of the living, not the dead; that God really does know-remember him. The Resurrection is no 'conjuring trick with bones', it is not a resuscitation. God re-members Jesus***. it is a paradigm of New Creation: the New takes up and transfigures the former; creation is caught up into re-creation. Jesus is remembered into Life: the seed of the new creation is planted in the soil of the old order of sin and death. in the words of the liturgy: Jesus 'reveals the resurrection'.

Death is not, after all, the last word. The Last Word is the last word, just as he was the First.

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

This post is a re-working of my Easter sermon into a written form and with some further reflection.It's a preliminary set of thoughts heading towards the *** note below. There is a need also to think further about the primacy of Jesus' resurrection.

*I realise that there's a lot more to explore about what 'I' might be. But I don't think elaborating on that discussion doesn't seem to me to take away from my basic pint here. And while I remain indebted to Douglas Hofstadter's exploration, even his 'expansion' of human consciousness doesn't address this fundamental loss of I-ness.

**Putting me in mind of "in my Father's house there are many apartments, and i go to prepare a place for you."

***The relationship of Father and Spirit with the Son is remembered by them. The Resurrection grows out of Trinitarian perichoresis. I would like to explore this further it due course.

'Big Society –just continuing God's work' Is cameron right?

Speaking last night at his Easter reception in Downing Street, the Prime Minister reportedly said he was simply doing God’s work when he launched the “Big Society” initiative of volunteering and civic responsibility.

“Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago,” Mr Cameron said. “I just want to see more of it.”David Cameron: 'Jesus invented the Big Society – I'm just continuing God's work' - UK Politics - UK - The Independent: 

When I read this I felt that Cameron was both right and wrong: I warmed to his sense that we should be involved in the Mission Dei as defined by Jesus -the idea that God is up to something and that our task is to learn to be a part of it.



What the quote reminds me, though, is how easy it is to get something of our understanding of what God might be up to wrong enough to bring it into disrepute. in this case we need to think a bit about it to see where the difficulty lies.


There are two areas to check out, I think. One is characterising Jesus' teaching -or some significant aspect of it- as equivalent to 'The Big Society'. So, we are asked to identify the Conservatives' slogan with Jesus teaching in some way. Now this is being done without specifics. So first we have a vaguely defined political slogan which seems to be about people helping each other and supporting one another and we are being invited to link that up with, presumably, Jesus' teaching about loving one another. So far so good and in some ways fair enough. However, I would want us to notice that the very vagueness of the two ideas being brought together should be treated with caution. The Big Society sounds fine in headline terms but what dose it mean in context and in practice. On the other hand, Jesus' teaching also contains encouragements to forgive enemies, do good to the 'unworthy' and leave families (I know that needs nuancing but it should be there if only to undomesticate Jesus' teaching in this context) -which I don't see represented very strongly in Conservative visions of society -quite the reverse.

The second thing is more concerning, though. and it relates to the way that 'Big Society' or Jesus' message is framed within a 'bigger' narrative. In this case, it is a return to framing that has worked for Conservatives for quite a while: to claim Christian credentials on the basis of agreeing with the idea that individuals should be nice to one another; a privatised morality where the state is not allowed to encroach or extrapolate. In this version of gospel, I may give a homeless person money, a bed, a meal -whatever, but I should not look at the social and economic forces that might have brought about a situation where someone might find themselves in such a position. And I should not expect to address those forces through law, tax or education (for these are the forces that create Wealth).

Let's just remember, by way of context, that iIn Jesus' time, there was no prospect of government responding to need  such as that: the Roman state was set up to mine  wealth from the provinces and to reduce populations to slave or serf-like conditions so as to provide labour for the the better off and the only hope for the destitute was private charity.

I would argue, in a relatively democratic society where we recognise that there can be such a thing as systematic generation of inequalities (Roman society didn't quite manage to make that recognition), that the proper way to take forward Jesus' concern for the marginalised is to address the systematic causes and effects of unjust inequalities by collective action and use of collective resources. Besides, the record of 'wealth-extraction' systems such as the Roman State and neoliberal capitalism is lousy in respect of addressing compassionate priorities which are meant to be to the fore in 'Big Society' visions.

Remember, we ended up with things like public sewage systems, public roads etc because private enterprise can't do them properly (and in the only models where it can, private companies are fulfilling governmental contracts and can't apparently make a profit without state safeguards and injections of subsidy).

Philanthropy was tried and found wanting -take a look at Victorian Britain. It was found that to address need at the level required took more than charity, it took collective action by government committed to common-good. The Big Society should not be an alibi for trying to leave the common good up to the diminishing capabilities of the good-hearted. The truly Big Society would be bigger than private-enterprise part-time philanthropy; it would be big enough to start to address the scale of need and the systemic nature of it (which is actually also going to be the 'cheapest' way to do it in the end).

So the problem with DC's Big Society is that it is actually a way to avoid Jesus' priorities: remembering the poor, reintegrating the marginal, healing the sick in mind or body. This is because it is actually giving an alibi to making the lives of many vulnerable people miserable because they fall outside the capacity private-enterprise charity to pick up what the collective was just about able to do. Hoping that somehow an army of volunteers can be found among the overworked and a flood of money from the overmortgaged seems a recipe for disaster. Literally -because the costs of leaving the needs unaddressed or being addressed patronisingly by non-professionals are likely to be revolutionary or worse. To model our response on the best that could be managed within in the limits of an oligarchistic (even kleptocratic) empire when we have democratic government and a fuller understanding of things, is frankly a sleight of hand to preserve privilege.

This is a moment to remember that trickle-down economics has never really worked.

And, we are talking about the Jesus who said 'Woe to you who are rich now ...' and 'Blessed are the poor ...' aren't we?

The truly big society should help us to do things together that we can't do (so well) isolatedly and to do so in a way that helps promote a fair contribution from those most able to give it. It should be able to allow us to recognise that all, by virtue of being God's image and loved by God, have an equal right to develop their capacities, talents and abilities and to use them to support themselves and contribute to the common good which nourished and continues to support them. It should recognise that sometimes we must act to redistribute opportunity to prevent its oligopolisation by the privileged and that very often the carrier of opportunity is wealth.

So, yes, the big society is carrying forward God's work, but so is seeking to address the systemic evils which keep the poor poor and degrade the environment. Using the former to evade the latter is undermining God's work, I think, by making a narrower good a substitute for a wider good.