The Mystery, Wonder & Existence of Santa Claus

I know a couple who refused to introduce the concept of Santa Claus to their 2 young children. They believed this went against their much-valued scientific principles of only teaching their children facts. I think this is unfortunate. Even aside from the sense of fun, it’s good to do the Santa thing with your kids when they are very young – it introduces them to a sense of wonder, and it teaches them that sometimes their everyday experiences are connected to a meta-reality that won’t reveal all its mysteries and secrets at once.

The idea of Santa Claus helps kids learn about deeper curiosity, and about propositions bigger than themselves that they can’t quite understand. And in some small way, to young budding minds, it teaches them some of their first deep considerations about existence itself. As any who have seen the marvellous film Miracle on 34th Street will know, the ontology of Santa Claus is a rather complex set of considerations, especially on top of the propositions about existence contained in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant and Russell. 

As a young boy, I was told about Santa Claus, who supposedly visits every house on Christmas Eve, leaving presents and indulging in mince pies and alcoholic beverages left for him. Having observed the logistical challenge of visiting millions of homes in a short time, I questioned how Santa could accomplish this feat. Realising my parents were unprepared to answer, I decided to investigate by hiding in a cupboard. This prompted more anxiety, especially since the surprise gift they bought for me was also concealed there. Attempting to divert my curiosity, my dad warned that Santa would only come if I had been good, leading to an unwanted discussion about the nature of goodness. "Come on now, bedtime, son," he urged.

I’m not surprised my agitated father tried to rush me off to bed. The question 'what is good?' is just as profound now as it was then, but it’s easy to see today why, back then, my father had difficulty satisfying my curiosity. The truth is, goodness in its primary form resides in the person of God; all earthly goodness, wonderful in itself, is but a pale reflection of Divinity.

And this is what I think we see in the meaning of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, and we share in those celebrations with our family and friends by trying to bring goodness, happiness and love into their lives. I fancy that Christmas is so widely seen as the most special time of the year because it’s the time when we more Christ-like in our goodwill to others, and in our desire to bless those we love.

As an adult, thinking about Santa Claus, it makes me ponder the qualities children have that Jesus encourages for us in discipleship. G.K. Chesterton once made a good point about children and stories:

"We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door."

I think that's a salient observation that can be connected to the wisdom of Christ in Matthew 18 too ("unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"), and how the child still sees what the adult has learned to unsee. Like Blake's 'Doors of Perception', that have been cleansed in childhood, only to have been closed up through age, till all is seen through the "narrow chinks of the cavern". One of the great features of childhood innocence is the willingness to embrace real life as an exciting and enchanting story, without the embellishments demanded from youth and adulthood. The youth and adults are enthralled by the romance, thrillers and drama mixed into their stories, taking the extraneous as boring. But the young child finds nothing extraneous - it is all, in a sense, romance, thriller and drama, because it hasn't yet been uncharmed by the prosaic breath of fiction or stunted by the cold chill of reason.

I recall C.S. Lewis saying he found children's books the hardest to write. But he also made the great point that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a very good children's story - which I guess is why it takes great skill to write a good one. I think even the child would see through a writer’s attempt to tailor too specifically to children, and an adult certainly would. It’s like the wisdom about originality – you can never try to create an original work for originality’s sake, just like you can’t try to be happy for happiness’ sake.

Similarly, the great children’s works are good simulacra to children-adult conversations. An adult becomes creatively childlike when taking an interest in the child, and a child becomes more adult-like through talking seriously to an adult. That’s probably why children tend to advance more quickly when adults speak to them with unaffected adult communication. So, a children’s book is similarly good for adults in the way that a garden is beneficial when we are tending to it, as well as when we are enjoying it in relaxation. A garden that could only be enjoyed during relaxation would not be a garden that gives the full experience that gardens elicit.

Returning to the opening line of enquiry - my advice would be this; Don’t be afraid to allow your kids to enjoy the idea of Santa Claus. The chances are, it will open their mind to metaphysical horizons that will hopefully bear fruit later on, when they think about who Jesus is, and the gift of salvation He brings to us all.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 1: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them towards the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 1 – taken from Letter 18: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism:

“I think the only genuinely realistic hope of awakening the modern folk from their sleep is for them to fall in love with the truth that good ideas and interconnectedness are the most vital of combinations for progressive problem-solving. Because the reality is, ideas come together in an exchange, and they evolve and mutate far faster than any physical limitation that can retard them. The combinatorial search space of ideas is far vaster, broader and deeper than any other combinatorial system in the physical world (certainly in the Newtonian world). 

The global population is like one big problem-solving collective - it does not go about its business as though the world is going to stay the same; it works on the basis that problems, like climate ones, usually (though not always) work on steady arithmetical ratios, whereas the human ability to solve these problems usually works on geometrical ratios. That is why progression tends to work at an exponential rate - it's the exchange of ideas at an increasing pace, and the more people there are to exchange those ideas, the more readily we can combine to create this explosion of problem-solving relative to problems themselves. But that involves a kind of freedom that so many are keen to retard.

The reason that politicians are of such low intellectual calibre is because they are selected to represent an electorate of low intellectual calibre. For example, extreme left wing voters tend to be of a lower intellectual calibre than more central left wing voters, which is why extreme left wing politicians are more likely to be of an extraordinarily low intellectual calibre (think Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Cabinet as prime examples). But why is the electorate of such low intellectual calibre when it comes to understanding politics well enough to vote in better politicians? Oh, that’s easy too – it’s because being highly competent and well-informed comes at a cost – you have to put in a lot of time and effort to understand any subject well. With politics, the cost incurred for being politically astute confers only a tiny benefit in terms of election outcomes, because only a fraction of the benefit of good political policies goes to you. Just as you wouldn’t spend £500 of costs to gain £2 of benefit, similarly, you won’t see much personal benefit in becoming a well-informed member of the electorate. That’s not a reason not to become well-informed – there are many other benefits to it – but it’s a reason why the vast majority of people do not become politically well informed; the costs are just not worth it to them.

The above also extends into other more specific socio-political areas. For example, this has particularly detrimental societal effects when it comes to things like climate change. There has been a systematic attempt by politicians, the establishment and the media to have the population believe that we are in a climate crisis. They do this in three primary ways: by appealing to our desire for drama, by appealing to our desire to congratulate ourselves, and by appealing to our desire to belong in mutually affiliated tribal groups. The proposition that we will use our collective ingenuity to solve climate problems is not as dramatic or as interesting as the spectre of climate catastrophe. It is the latter that generates sales, subscriptions and clicks. So-called climate justice makes the adherents feel good about themselves, because they get to indulge in moral posturing and sententious mutual back-slapping. And climate alarmism brings people together for a common cause that satisfies their social need to be accepted and validated within a tribal group.

The upshot is, irrespective of whether these views are based on truth and facts or not - what people claim to believe, how they conduct themselves, and the actions they take are largely driven by narratives that give meaning and purpose to their life, motivations that help them feel good about themselves, and causes that make them feel part of a tribal group and give them a sense of belonging. Climate alarmism has replaced Christianity as the national religion, which is why, apart from a few exceptional cases, most climate alarmists are not Christians.

The other thing about extreme environmentalism – or climate lunacy in some cases - is that it is what large parts of economic socialism has morphed into; especially now that only the economically uninformed have any belief in socialism as a viable form of politics, and history has repeatedly shown its failings and its culpability in the cause of human suffering. Deep down I think virtually all socialists always knew how foolish socialism is – they advocated it like those in the Asch conformity tests, being swayed by the wrong answer even though they suspected it wasn’t right. Most extreme environmentalists are still socialists, of course - but extreme environmentalism enables red socialists to turn green, and espouse a cause that is still relatively contemporary in human history, and not as widely and historically discredited as socialism has been.

What extreme environmentalism lacks in terms of a balanced, intelligent set of considerations, it gains in the form of a sense of group identity and belonging, a perceived ethical cause, self-congratulation and a Gaia-type idol to act as a religious substitute. Without those four things, it is hard to fathom how anyone could adopt such foolish beliefs and behave in such a selfish, narrow-minded and intellectually bankrupt way – but those four substitutes for reason and critical thinking have always proved powerfully seductive for leftists, and that will likely remain the case whether the colour is red or green.”

Getting Religion & Science Wrong

I saw this comment about religion from economist David Friedman the other day, and I thought it worth commenting on, as it often typifies people's misconception of religion.

"Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain, for instance, why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why. The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth."

I think there's so much wrong with this set of statements, it needs several correctives. Regarding religion (by which we should mean Christianity here, as it's the only true religion), I think David Friedman has both definitions slightly misjudged; I don't think religion is primarily to help us make sense of physical reality, nor to tell us what we 'ought' to be doing in the sense of morality. Of course, religion can inform us about both, through the right lens of interpretation, but that is not religion's primary purpose.

Religion's primary purpose is to help us to know God and enter into and sustain a relationship with Him. Science is the primary tool to help us make sense of physical reality, and morality is an evolved phenomenon that helps us construct value judgements in line with what our conscience tells us about right and wrong. God uses those things, and many more things too, to point us towards the higher standards found in Him, and to the adventure we can undertake in order to find the full meaning and purpose of the creation story.

This is why David Friedman's conclusion, that "The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth." is wrong in a twofold sense. In the first place, science was never a strong rival to religion, because both were always asking different questions; and therefore, in the second place, it did not come up with stronger evidence for its truth.

The main problems regarding religion and science are to do with people's misconceptions of the purpose of both. As a Christian, I can tell you that if you perceive a conflict or contradiction between Christianity and science, then you're either getting one of them or both of them wrong in terms of your individual interpretation. There are big costs on the integrity of your worldview when this happens. If you retain your Christianity but compromise science, you end up believing absurd things about physical reality that belong in the realm of counterfactual religious fundamentalism. If you retain your science and give up or reject Christianity, then you become mired in the quagmire of narrow scientism. And if you refuse both Christianity and science, you'll very likely end up in one hell of a mess, where instead you'll probably let in and embrace all kinds of low-grade substitutes, like extreme politics, environmentalism, and countless other idols, superstitions and forms of egocentric, narcissistic expressions.

Banks Could Only Dream Of Being Like Casinos

 

I happened upon this article in The Banker, which expressed concerns that the government’s attempt to enable more competitive banking to boost London’s growth might lead us towards the dangers of ‘casino capitalism’.

The casino metaphor is flawed, because it misunderstands both how banks work and how casinos work (see my blog tab ‘Banking/Financial Risk’ on the side bar for more on this subject). Both deal with probabilities, but in different ways. Probability theory tells us that in n number of incidences, we expect certain values as a result. The more incidences of n, the closer we expect to get to our predicted value. So, for example, in coin tossing, the greater the number of trials, the closer we expect the heads-tails ratio to be 50-50. 

Casinos operate in this way – they cannot predict the precise outcome of every gambling event, but they predict stability in the long term, which means a high probability of turning a profit. Your big win at the casino one Saturday night will be cancelled out by the broader probability landscape, where net losses for the totality of customers secure the solvency of the casino.

To see why banks are not like casinos, we have to understand the distinction between risk and uncertainty. A risk involves an incident where we are not sure of the outcome, but we know the probability. Uncertainly means we don’t even know the probability. Gambling £100 on a coin toss is risky, because there is a 50% chance you could win and a 50% chance you could lose. Whether your mortgage will increase after your next fixed-term ends, and if so, by how much, is a matter of uncertainty. 

Casinos operate under a risk model where the known probabilities guarantee a stable income; banks operate under a model that is a small mix of probability and a larger mix of uncertainty. Government guarantees aside, it would be much harder for a casino to go bust than a bank. If the banking sector had operated like casinos in the past 15 years, an awful lot more would need to have gone wrong to have brought about a similar crash to the ones the banking sector endured.

The reference to banks being in danger of ‘casino capitalism’ was a quite unfortunate and misjudged comparison. If banks had the same long term model as casinos, their risk portfolio would be a lot healthier. But then they wouldn’t be banks in the way we know them – just as oranges would no longer be oranges if they were yellow, bent and grew on banana trees.

On Kant's Synthetic A Priori

 

I haven’t done a philosophy post for a while, so let’s rectify that with a blog about Kant’s synthetic a priori. To start us off, here’s a useful reminder of my summary of epistemology in 400 words.

Make any statement about reality and it will be incomplete in some way. If it is a statement that you can prove with logic or mathematics then it falls short of describing anything conclusive about any reality outside of mathematics or logic; if it is a statement about physical reality then it falls short of anything that can be conclusively proven to apply in all cases (in the black swan sense); if it is a statement of fact then it cannot be established by logic or by reason prior to initial experience; if it is a logical proposition then its subject/predicate content must be verified outside of the proposition; if it is an allusion to an inner concept then it is not knowledge (justified true belief) of the perceivable world; if it is an allusion to an inner perception of outside reality then it escapes your certainty; and if it is a statement about a metaphysical interpretation then in its proprietary form it is entirely subjective.

Everything is derived from experience (this is the basis of Hume’s fork – everything is classified as either Relations of ideas and Matters of fact), but in distinct ways: a priori is knowable without having to consult experience, except initially to understand the terms (“all bachelors are male”); a posteriori is only knowable by consulting experience (“London has a higher population than Birmingham”); analytic statements (A is A) are true by virtue of the meaning of the terms, synthetic statements (A is B) are true by virtue of meanings in relation to facts; physical statements are in relation to the material world (“the chair has four legs”), metaphysical statements are subjective ideas formed as a result of relation to the objective world (“Love and grace triumphs justice and revenge”); and necessity and contingency are related to whether or not a statement is conditioned by how the world happens to be.

Relations of ideas and Matters of fact describe everything, including all the notions like a priori and a posteriori, necessity and contingency, the physical and the metaphysical and the analytic and synthetic distinctions – they are part of our matters of fact derived through experience, and our relations of ideas that result from that experience.

Every possible distinct description of experience is covered above, because everything is either a fact (an impression) derived from experience, or a relation of ideas based on those impressions from experience.

Regarding Kant, the general historical method is that we identify all the possible mental configurations with the class of analytical and synthetic truths, and ascertain our success in tailoring models to reality. Because there is a quite seamless blend regarding the way experience requires an up and running interpretation component and how perception naturally integrates with the outside rules of nature, analytical truths and synthetic truths are really just different interpretations of the same empirical structure built from experience.

To that end, I’ve never really understood why Kant made such a mountain out of the synthetic a priori so-called problem in philosophy. I think if he’d have been steeped in 300 years of empiricist science and philosophy, as we are today, he wouldn’t have exhausted so much of his time over it.

Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction was posited to identify two types of knowledge related to our experiences of the world. In the Kantian terms, analytic statements are statements in which the concept of the predicate is included in the concept of the subject - so for example 'All triangles have three sides' or 'All bachelors are unmarried' are analytic statements because the predicate is found in the subject (i.e. a triangle, by definition, must have three sides, and a bachelor must be unmarried). Synthetic statements do not have the predicate found in the subject - so for example 'All life on earth is carbon based' cannot be shown to be true by the subject and predicate alone, it must be constituted as knowledge by external evaluation and repeated experience of the world.

The easiest way to put this to bed is to say that we cannot have any knowledge without attaining that knowledge through experience of the world. Although there is a secondary distinction regarding experience of the world that remains useful; a mind needs to experience reality to acquire all our knowledge and familiarity with patterns in that reality, so the issue of whether something can be worked out without needing to consult external facts or ideas was a pertinent philosophical question. This is where Kant’s famous example of 7 + 5 = 12 was considered as a synthetic a priori judgement. It is a priori in that we do not need to consult the world and experience 7 things and 5 things grouped together to know that they are 12 things, but it is synthetic in that there is nothing in the concept of 7 or in the concept of 5 that implies twelve; it is only when the two are combined (synthesised) that we can get twelve.

Understanding this an as empirical landscape deadens the mystery Kant was trying to illuminate. In subjecting our mind to Kant’s arithmetic, we would have these ideas formed without experience of the world, but equally at a secondary level we need not consult external facts to know that 7 + 5 = 12, so this is why the analytic-synthetic model works on those two levels.

I do not think Kant’s ideas or definitions were strong enough to capture fully the relationship between definitions and their relations regarding predication, but it wouldn’t have been so problematic to him if he was writing under a stronger empiricist framework. Our dealing with reality and our ideas about causal relations are very much grounded in both perception, experience and ideation, so they are not mutually contradictory - they are complementary, and can give a fairly accurate signpost towards sound epistemology.

A priori knowledge is claimed to be knowledge which is known not through experience. But it’s better to think of all knowledge as being acquired by experience, and analytic propositions as describing a way of knowing but not extending knowledge already acquired. The primary distinction is about how they are determined; we always discern the analytic judgment by extension to what is contained in the proposition, but it's the structure we are determining, not what it contains. That’s why structurally 'All triangles have three sides' works the same way as 'All bachelors are unmarried' even though the subjects are different. Kant’s issue with synthetic, a priori knowledge seems to me to be a twofold combination of him not fully developing why it was supposed to be a problem and, as a consequence, not reaching the conclusion that it isn’t a problem.

On Cancel Culture

Here are a few thoughts on cancel culture. By ‘cancel culture’ I mean the hostile and belligerent desire to see some people silenced, have their work censored or removed, lose their jobs, and in some cases, have their whole character publicly assassinated.  A lot of people, especially young people, seem to have bought into the notion of cancel culture. Personally, I’ve never wanted to cancel anyone, even those who I think are utterly wrong. If I have no desire to cancel people, I assume many other people share that lack of desire. 

Cancel culture of this kind is fairly new. It’s a minority exercise, and it’s almost exclusively undertaken by people with a predictable personality profile; that is, entitled, not very bright, imbalanced, reactive, tempestuous, left-leaning and attracted to identity politics. The fact that people who have bought into the notion of cancel culture fit a fairly predictable profile of individuals tells us a lot about what we are looking for as common properties - of which I think there are five primary ones:

The first property is dishonesty. That is, it’s obvious that in the vast majority of cases when proclamations of moral outrage are uttered, it’s as plain as day that the person under accusation is not actually being sexist or racist or >something<phobic – they are, at worst, being clumsy and slightly provocative, and, at best, merely spouting an opinion that the cancel culture folk wish to aggressively disavow. By and large, then, to be complicit in cancel culture, you have to be willing to accuse people of things of which you don’t really believe they are guilty.

The second property is spite. People have a lot of spite inside them, especially people who are still insecure about who they are, how smart they are, and what they will amount to later. Cancelling others gives them an opportunity to behave spitefully in a controlled way, and it has the added bonus of making them feel self-righteous while doing so.

The third property is attention-seeking. Claiming to be hurt, damaged or traumatised by other people’s words and opinions is a classic attention-seeking method. It helps them be listened to, not on the merit of what they have to contribute, but on the feelings they claim to have. Coveting offense and victim-status gets you attention, and even support and encouragement from like-minded people.

The fourth property is belonging. Find like-minded people and fight these causes together, and it soon taps into the tribalistic desire to be part of an established group, with all the tribal perks offered within the group, and all the benefits of taking the fight outside of the group to engender a sense of purpose and solidarity. 

The fifth property is power. The above four properties give people perceived power, and this power may even be used to intimidate professionals, politicians, media outlets and some of the general public.

I’m not decrying every case, and I believe there are likely instances in which brave voices need to speak up for their cause. But they are in a tiny minority, and generally speaking, most individuals complicit in cancel culture are, I would say, acting dishonestly, with perverse incentives and ignoble motives.

Why I Think We Can Do Away With The Term 'Gender'

 

In a recent blog post, and a subsequent video, I’ve been suggesting that gender is a problematic term that has been so distorted and abused definitionally that we could probably do without it. Some folks have found this one hard to swallow – you can almost hear them saying: Even though you’ve been so right on everything else, James, I think this one is a step too far.

But I don’t think it is a step too far – I’ve been debating it for a few weeks now, on the back of responses to my post about sex and coin-tossing, and nobody has been able to convince me so far that I’ve got this wrong. And I’m quite open to being convinced, because my life will probably be a lot easier if I can accept gender as a valid term. But, so far, I cannot. No one was brave enough to debate it with me on camera (the invitation still stands), so I had fun convincing Chat GPT instead.

For a fuller elaboration of my position, you should read (or re-read) my original article Sex And The Gender Agenda. Here I will lay out my position on gender even more comprehensively, and tackle the objections proffered too. I don’t think we need the term gender, and it’s for two principal reasons: 

1)     Sex is a perfectly adequate category for defining males, females, and those in the tiny minority who fall into a category that can be defined as intersex.

2)     Everything else that you can put forward as justification for the term gender is better defined under a broader category of maleness and femaleness. 

That is to say, sex is a comprehensive enough term to define males, females and intersex people, and every subset definition that people claim falls under the umbrella term gender is, I think, already adequately defined on its intrinsic terms, where gender adds no further utility to the equation. In the last few decades, we have learned a lot about how complex individuals are – and numerous revisions of the broadness of the term ‘gender’ have been put forward as ways to foster greater understanding, inclusivity and tolerance. But I submit that what we’ve actually learned is that there is a lot more to being male and female than we ever realised, and that what needs establishing are broader categories that encapsulate the deeper complexities of being male and female.

Consequently, I am compelled to conclude that gender has failed in both the ontological and the epistemological category - that is, there isn't a clear way to define what gender is (ontology), and there isn't a way we can know gender (epistemology) in any objective sense. If we can neither define gender satisfactorily or know what it is for an individual, then the term has no real utility, and promotion of it can only lead to both abuse of the term and confusion. Once you add to that the fact that identity is a melting pot of complex feelings, thoughts and sensations, and the fact that the things we tendentiously assert as being properties that make up the package of gender (masculinity, femininity, sexuality, etc) are perfectly sufficient as descriptors in themselves, it is difficult to make any case for the utility of the word 'gender'

If people identify as something that has no basis in reality - such as if a 50 year old woman claimed to be 40 or a young boy claimed to be superman, we would rightly say they are living under a delusion or a fantasy. It is, of course, slightly harder to identify the delusion of gender than the delusion of being a younger age or having superhero status, but it's still illusory if it isn't based on reality.

Struggles with identity and development are real things - but once we categorise masculinity, femininity, sexuality, hormonal development, etc as traits that can be identified and considered without the need to introduce a vague term like gender, we do not then need to cite those things as being independent criteria to which we can appeal to in order to confirm an individual's claims about their gender.

As an analogy, suppose I describe my garden as having a lawn, some flowers, a shed, 3 trees and a decking area - and you come along and say that gardens should also be underpinned by the descriptive term 'Fairydust'. That is, as well as my telling you about my garden's shed, flowers, etc, you say I have to also define what type of fairydust it is. And I ask what you mean by fairydust, and you say its category of fairydust depends on whether it has a lawn, a patio, trees, a greenhouse, bushes, sheds, etc - I'd be fully justified in saying that the fairydust category adds nothing that is already covered in the descriptive properties of the garden.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be both epistemologically impractical and societally catastrophic in this case.

On top of gender's lack of ontological and epistemological merit, the introduction of the word causes unnecessary additional confusion into the world that wouldn't otherwise be there. People struggling with their sexuality, or with their sense of self-identity, or with anxiety, or with their body shape may say they are experiencing gender dysphoria or that they are born in the wrong body, when what they are really experiencing are things within the realm of being male and female. There are, of course, other motives to ascribing gender to individual attributes - a desire to be accepted, a desire to be different or break conformity, a desire to take the pressure off particular life situations, an incentive to obtain success in other environments (like sports competitions), the need to seek attention, and so on. But so far, those debating with me have remained largely uninterested in these considerations.

Let me now tackle some objections that repeatedly came my way during the debates:

Objection 1: Denying the validity of the term gender discriminates against or trivialises the people struggling with gender dysphoria.

It’s difficult to believe that people would put that forward as an objection – they miss the obvious error in their thinking. I'm denying the need for the word for gender at all, so you can't cite gender dysphoria as a problem, when what we are questioning is the term gender itself. A fundamental tenet of my position is that I don’t believe there can be a mismatch between someone’s biological sex and what they claim as their gender identity, because the latter lacks any empirical clarity or objectivity. So citing gender dysphoria (the very definition of the aforementioned) as a counter-argument still leaves all your work ahead of you, because you haven’t provided a valid definition of gender, much less a superior argument that defeats my two primary propositions.

Objection 2: Isn’t your position denying their humanity and their right to identify however they choose?

The problems with gender that this objection tries to capture are typified by this quote from Cade Hildreth, who calls himself a non-binary LGBTQ+ entrepreneur. He says: “Gender can’t be binary, because it is a personal identity and is socially constructed. One’s gender identity could be woman, man, transgender, nonbinary, or an infinite number of other possibilities.”

Last I looked, there are over 40 listed genders in the UK on standard lists, and it has probably grown by now. How can anyone make sense of the different combinations? I've heard people refer to themselves as they/them, he/they, she/they, he/she, two-spirit - it's not possible to validate these claims. Unless you just say that anyone is anything they claim to be - in which case, it no longer bears enough resemblance to empirical reality to be meaningful. So, basically, gender is your personal identity and there are an infinite number of potential genders. This kind of thinking reflects what is happening more widely among our youth today, where a reservoir of social contagion has washed over our young, and they think that they can choose their gender to reflect their personal feelings about their unique identity. The desired ability for every individual to choose their unique gender makes the term gender utterly meaningless, as there are potentially as many different genders as there are human beings.

Objection 3: Unfortunately for you, humans don’t fit into the neat binary boxes you are trying to force them into.

Well, firstly, I’m not trying to force anyone anywhere, I’m simply questioning the validity of an empirically dubious word that no one so far has been able to define adequately. Secondly, I am not suggesting that identity falls easily into neat boxes – but that does not mean that the categories male and female are too small to encapsulate the properties that others are trying to claim under the umbrella gender. There are many traits that overlap between the sexes, which means females can show up as extreme in more masculine categories, and males can show up as extreme in more feminine categories. In other words, in some traits, females can appear more male than males, and males can appear more female than females. But I believe it is folly to mechanically confuse masculine and feminine outliers with gender dysphoria. The vast majority of people who have atypical personality profiles are still within the natural distribution of male and female identities – they are not ‘born in the wrong body’. In most cases, what is perceived as “gender identity” is part of their personality profile from within a binary sex category, usually related to masculinity and femininity, but confused with one’s sex.

Objection 4: You are disregarding all the cases where someone you know (or know of) has claimed to be so much happier and more fulfilled after they changed course and identified as someone of the opposite sex.

This doesn’t convince in the slightest. I think we all know that such a testimony is absolutely not a reliable metric for truth propositions, and nigh-on impossible to accurately measure, due to all the complex variables. For example, as Christians we all know of many people who claim to have fallen away from belief in God, and no longer want to have a relationship with Christ. In their dozens, they tell us that since they left Christianity, they are happier, more fulfilled and less pressured - but those of us who know the Lord Jesus know that this perceived change for the better is a huge misjudgement. How we say we feel about something is often transitory, incomplete, and not necessarily a reliable measure of what's true and factual.

Objection 5: What about transgender people? – they are being discriminated against in your argument.

Same as with gender dysphoria, if you can’t satisfactorily define gender, then you can’t satisfactorily define transgender either. You can’t keep referring to transgender people without really defining what you mean by gender, how you define a transgender person, and how you explain your metric for defining a transgender person amid the clams people are able to make about themselves in terms of their complex identity. Would you define me as a transgender person if I declared myself a woman in order to enter female weight lifting competitions? If so, why? If not, why not? What are your metrics? If you can't answer these questions, then you can just say so. If you don't know why these questions are important, then you can also say so, and I'll try to elaborate. But if you fail to see the importance of these questions, and either ignore them, pretend they are not necessary, or change the subject, then you're not engaging at the level required to be having this discussion in the way you are trying to.

Objection 6: Denying people the ability to identify as whatever gender they choose is an abuse of their individual liberties.

I'm certainly not trying to gainsay people's individual feelings or internal senses of experiences - I just don't know of a rigorous scientific definition that encapsulates what gender actually means. People can identify as made-up genders if they wish – but it doesn’t mean I have to think it’s a good idea that they do so.

But this works both ways too; there are plenty of people who have had their individual liberties compromised by this wave of gender-based ideology – and none of the people debating this with me are acknowledging any of the costs. For example, in the UK, there have been quite a few high profile cases where men have claimed to identify as a women and won medals in the female categories of sporting events - even in weightlifting and boxing on two rather infamous cases. They have an unfair advantage, and that undermines the sport because it's grossly unfair to the women competitors. There have also been high profile disasters with men in women's prisons, and lots of disgruntled women fighting back against men (identifying as women) being freely encouraged to use female toilets if they wish. My position on this is clear; I do not think anyone born a male should be able to do these things.

And perhaps the greater costs of all are borne by children (and their parents) who are being infected with these disturbing mind pathogens about sex and gender that are invoking confusion and distorted perspectives on reality. What begins as perceived lack of congruity between a person’s biological sex and their gender presentation usually gets washed out in maturity, where one becomes clear about one’s sex and identity. But until then, there is widespread confusion about the distribution of sex-related personality and behavioural distinctions, and this is creating a crisis of irresponsible teaching. Young children shouldn’t be telling us they have been born in the wrong body - but when this happens they should be carefully nurtured towards more facts and greater wisdom, and given time to grow and develop. The trend towards alarmism, pandering to their whims, and worse, irreversible and harmful medical and surgical interventions are a damaging development that needs urgently addressing. 

I think society has become too craven and too ridiculous when it comes to all these daft pronouns on offer: a multitude of superfluous pronouns like co, ey, xie, ze etc that don’t have any scientific basis, and only serve to create attention-seeking demands and misguided attempts to deal with psychological/emotional issues that are best addressed in more empirically evidential ways.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be epistemologically impractical, because there is no exogenous, objective definition we can agree on to define gender.

Conclusion
It wasn't difficult to get Chat GPT to agree with me that a society tends to function better when terms are defined more clearly and factually, and when there are fewer ambiguous terms embedded into our discourse, especially in highly emotive areas where reason and facts are often not prioritised - it's just a shame that the social scientists who debated with me couldn't yield to the same kind of rigorous persuasion.

This issue is clearly an issue of high sensitivity, and there are going to be significant costs with whichever position one takes. For me, it's perhaps wise to think of this in terms of type 1 and type 2 category errors. A type 1 error, as you may know, is the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis that is true. An example would be, when a jury delivers a guilty verdict in the trial of an innocent defendant. A type 1 error is generally an error that infers an effect or correlation or causality that doesn't actually exist (a false positive). A type 2 error is the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. An example would be when a jury delivers an innocent verdict in the trial of a guilty defendant. A type 2 error is generally an error that fails to infer an effect or correlation or causality that does actually exist (a false negative).

What we are all doing, for ourselves and on the basis of what we believe, is considering what type of error we are most willing to risk. Because there's a risk that by not calling someone, say, they/them at their request you're making an error that's unfair to that individual (and by extension to the wider society), but there's also a risk that by calling someone they/them at their request you're making an error that's also unfair to that individual (in the longer term, and by extension to the wider society). I've tried to weigh up both sets of circumstances, and tried to undertake my own individual risk calculi, in accordance with what I believe, in conjunction with the arguments I can make and the arguments I hear others make, and that's how I've arrived at the position I have. Those accusing me of being cruel and dehumanising are not even pretending to engage with the depth and severity of the situation.

The upshot of all this is that humans are complex, in terms of having different experiential variables; they have differing levels of masculinity, varying places on the sexuality spectrum, different phenotypical structures, different levels of comfort with their bodies, different affiliations with both sexes, different temperaments, different levels of anxiety, varying emotional connections with others, different tastes, different responses to physical touch, diverse ranges of neurological development, multiple ways of expressing themselves in terms of looks, style and fashion, and a highly complex and dynamic sense of self and personal identity in a multitude of places and stages in life. We know so much about psychological factors related to identity, to hormones, to masculinity and femininity, to sexuality, etc - and what that does, I believe, is show us that being male and being female encapsulates a whole range of subset traits, feelings and identities to do with the above. That doesn't mean that we stop becoming male or female, it means we expand our conceptions of maleness and femaleness.

If you look at male and female personalities in totality, their similarities far outweigh their differences, but there are plenty of differences too, and these play out in their respective relationships, attitudes, careers and priorities (to name but four). Personality differences are significant, but they are not the same as sex differences - hence sex and gender should not be used interchangeably - and the fact that they so often are is not helping the debate, especially for our children.

All of these are profound things to explore and assess, and our best efforts to do so reveal lots of subset elements about the nature of being human. But I maintain that adding the extraneous term 'gender' to all this adds no value to the considerations, and instead imputes needless ambiguity and confusion. What is needed, I submit, is the admission of a broader understanding of the categories of male and female, and the realisation that the traits being claimed to have one foot in one camp and one in the other are really just claims that misunderstand the true breadth and depth of the two fundamental categories.

We can look back at every age that preceded us and identify things they were doing that were absurd, wacky, ignorant and extreme - and I believe it's prudent for every contemporary age to do the same, including us. What are we of today doing that our descendants will look back on with complete horror and incredulity? I am fairy confident that this wanton abuse of the reality of biological sex and the liberal assault on language with the ‘gender’ constructions will be seen as one of them.

In closing, I've spent a fair amount of time discussing gender with scientists in various fields, and despite my open invitation and diligent considerations of their points, no one has been able to justify the efficacy of the word 'gender' to me in terms of its ontology and epistemology, so I remain unconvinced of its merits.  

Who Is Looking Out For The Strong & Wise People?

People who are consistently strong and wise are valuable to others in so many ways; they offer support, they give sound guidance, they come up with solutions, and they are a real force for good in the world. Because their strength of character and wisdom is a real blessing to many, they are naturally popular too, and in high demand.

Which leads to my somewhat rhetorical question: Who is looking out for the strong and wise people? Are they getting the support they may need?

Here are some things to consider about these forces for good. They are likely to be the smartest and strongest people in most interactions (be they individual or group interactions), they are going to be an absolute rock for some people, and highly sought after by many others, and they will provide a lot more strength and wisdom than they receive. All this is to be expected – those who have the most to offer usually carry more and deliver more than those who have less – in fact, there is probably a weighty responsibility for them to be that force for good.

But these forces for good in the world are playing a kind of guardian role too - and the chances are, they are so accustomed to being the strong, wise one, that they may not have many people (if any) they feel they can turn to, to meet their own emotional, practical, psychological and spiritual needs. They are so used to being a tower of strength and a vehicle of good counsel, that they may often (if not always) feel unable or unwilling to ask for help, to show weakness, to express vulnerability, or to confide in someone to solicit guidance. They are so used to giving, that they have forgotten how to receive; they are so used to being strong for others, that the ability to be vulnerable for themselves has elapsed; and they do so much for the needs of others that their own needs have been neglected to the point of being largely unconsidered. I don’t just mean unconsidered by others – I mean it’s likely that they can become so familiar with a reality in which their needs remain consistently derelict that they neglect to adequately process their own internal needs, vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses, because there isn’t any sufficient outlet for their external attendance.

I believe we can make the world an even better place by ensuring we look out for the strong, wise forces for good in our world; check in on them, offer to be a listening ear, and be mindful that in being such a light in so many people’s lives, their own needs might often fall behind - perhaps even to the point they feel quite emotionally isolated and barren, where their own requirements and well-being are left perennially unchecked. Even the strongest and wisest people need people too.

 

Why The Falling Birth Rates?

 

Birth rates are falling - almost no country in the world has a higher birth rate than it did 50 years ago. The world population hit the first billion in roughly 1804 - then it took another 123 years, to 1927, to reach the second billion. Then the world hit three billion by 1959, then four billion by1974, then five billion by 1987, then six billion by 1999, and it reached 7 billion in 2011.

Birth rates are falling, in part because of birth control, in part because of increased prosperity, and in part because of female emancipation. But there are three less obvious reasons too.

The first is decreasing infant mortality. Yes, that's right - it is counterintuitive, but the lower the levels of infant mortality, the fewer children are born on average. This is because if a woman thinks there is a good chance that her children will die young, she will have more of them, whereas if she feels there is a good chance her children will survive, she will have fewer of them.

The second is economic freedom. The freer the society is, the more liberty for the individuals, and the less they are a slave to their reproductive cycles.

And the third is more people are gravitating towards cities, and cities with intense competition for housing can work against larger families. World cities already contain over 3.5 billion people (nearly half the world's population), and that figure is predicted to rise to 5 billion by 2025. What's also interesting is that despite half the world's population living in cities, they only take up 3% of the planet's land area.

On Women Being Attracted To Bad Boys

It is frequently believed that bad boys are attractive to a significant proportion of women, especially younger women. Andrew Tate's current popularity (and men like him) seems to give exhibition to this idea. But I don't think the theory is quite right. Women aren't generally attracted to bad boys - bad boys tend to make poor, unreliable and ultimately unsatisfying partners. It's more the case that women are attracted to certain traits, like confidence, extraversion and machismo, that are found in excess in many bad boys, but are misleading signposts in the quest to find a high quality beloved.

I will tell you what I think it's like with an analogy. When I was a child, we had some family friends who had a house in fairly bad repair, but with a fantastic swimming pool and an awesome games room in their outside garage. As children, we loved to go there for the pool and the games, but being so young, we were largely oblivious to the state of the rest of the house. Over time, the house declined into an even worse state, and eventually, by the time we were teenagers, even the swimming pool was neglected to a point where it became a grotty eyesore.

Similarly, bad boys have characteristics, like the swimming pool and games room, that in the short term superficially attract women who are more likely to be swayed and charmed by things like confidence, extraversion and machismo - but because the rest of the house is in such bad disrepair, the long-term prospects are full of hazards and disappointments. 

The swimming pool and games room made the house visits more appealing, but the quality of the house, and how it is attended to, like the bad boy, can only be measured properly when everything is taken into account - where it is then found to be lacking.

Church Set-Up & Varying Human Beliefs

 

When on the church set up team, one of our jobs is to put down the mats for the kids to play on. As you can see from the picture I took above, there are four colours, and for aesthetic effect we endeavour to place the mats so that no two adjacent mats are the same colour. There is actually a mathematical precedent for this - it's called the four colour theorem, and it states that no more than four colours are required to colour the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour.

The four colour theorem has been proven, although the heuristic for the proof is fairly long-winded. This is in contrast to something like the Twin Primes Conjecture (there are infinitely many primes p for which p+2 is also prime), where it has not yet been proven, but yet the heuristic makes the explanation fairly tractable. Then there's Gödel incompleteness theorem (G(F)), which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be fully captured without leaving a state of incompleteness.

These varying mathematical propositions gave me pause to think about commentary I frequently make on human behaviour, on smart and dumb thinking, and on how certain beliefs are embraced wantonly, even when they are obvious nonsense. This ties in with the other reliable rule of thumb too, that the amount of effort needed to refute incorrect thinking is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to come up with it. There is a complex relationship between the beliefs themselves, the reasons people believe them, and the motivations they have for not questioning them very rigorously (or often not at all).

I think there are three important things to bring to attention about the formation of beliefs. The first is that most of your beliefs are likely to be partially wrong or faulty - the chance that you've thought everything through with precise rigour and without cognitive error is infinitesimally low. The second is that the number of possible wrong interpretations of reality we can produce is immeasurably large, whereas the number of possible right interpretations of reality we can produce is vanishingly small in comparison. And the third is that you have very strong emotional, psychological, cultural and tribal incentives for your beliefs - and the chances that you've managed to address them comprehensively and honestly, without any biases distorting the picture for you, is practically zero.

Consequently, the formation of rational and correct beliefs and viewpoints involve a big ask; they involve precise, careful and attentive reasoning and truthseeking; they involve understanding how complex the search space is; they involve the ability to sift through a lot of data and select the right beliefs from an astronomically larger number of incorrect beliefs; and they involve the willingness to discern and confront our own intellectual biases and emotional prejudices and filter them out as best we can to leave us in support of the bare truth and plain facts. That is a gigantic ask.

And, assuming a willingness to seek the truth honestly, we find that, like the mathematical examples above; in some cases it is hard to sense precisely why something is wrong, but not that hard to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective; and in some cases it's easier to sense why something is wrong but harder to determine the steps needed to arrive at the corrective. This is because human error is riddled with complex fault narratives, ranging from intellectual ineptitude, scarcity of knowledge, emotional biases, tribal pressures, paths of least resistance, indolence, weak support networks, and other competing trade offs that compromise the success of the task.

This means the mind is fighting to reconcile a number of foggy inner conflicts; sensing a belief is wrong but lacking the incentive to find out why; finding it convenient to hold a dubious viewpoint because it lessens burdens elsewhere; making assumptions based on outsourcing your thinking to people whose views subliminally serve your own interests well; compromising the truth in an attempt to attain status within an assortative mating pool within sexual selection; assenting to a black and white mode of thinking because it helps you manage negative emotions - the list goes on.

Given all the above, here is some guidance you may find useful. If you hold a view and you suspect deep down that it may be wrong, ask yourself a candid question. Do I really care about being right on this matter? In other words, am I prepared to pay the costs of trying to understand why I'm wrong, what the correct alternative is, and the costs of changing my mind (there may be social, familial, cultural and professional costs of a public change of mind). The vast majority of people who are wrong on a particular issue don't really care about being right. If they were prepared to pay the costs to be right, they usually would have done so by now.

If the answer to the question "Do I really care about being right on this matter?"  is yes - and you'd better pray it is yes - try analysing why you believe this wrong view; think about how you arrived at this belief; think about the incentives of those who also claim to believe this wrong view; think about what experts and others who disagree with you believe about this matter; think about how much you understand the counter arguments to your belief; think about whether this belief makes you feel good about yourself or uncomfortable; think about what would convince you your view is wrong; think about what your best arguments for the opposing side would be if you had to argue for their case in a court-type of scenario.

If you care about being right on a particular matter, and you subject yourself to the above questions and are prepared to go where the indications lead you, there's a decent chance that you will arrive at the right viewpoint. Two words of warning, though. First, if you sense you're not willing to subject all your views to this level of scrutiny, you are probably not taking things seriously enough. Second, if you hold a wrong view and you have no inkling that it's wrong, you need to locate the means by which you might possibly recognise the view as wrong. This can be difficult because the fog that clouds vision can often feel like the vision if you don't sense the clear horizon in the distance. Being wrong but not knowing it, doesn't feel much different to being right; being closed-minded doesn't always feel like close-mindedness; and cognitive errors don't always feel like defects, especially when they are enslaved by passion for a cause.

Anarcho-Capitalism & Benevolent Libertarianism

On a recent video episode of mine, I talked with the brilliant anarcho-capitalist economist Dr. David Friedman about his views on economics and the state. David Friedman believes that everything that the state provides can be provided by the market, but he acknowledges that such a transition would take some time to materialise, as we gradually wean ourselves off state services and onto market-based provision. I’m fairy sure he and I agree on virtually everything to do with the benefits of capitalism and the inefficiencies associated with state provision, but I’m not as confident as Dr. Friedman that his ultimate no-state model is realistic – I think it is more complex than most anarcho-capitalists think.

In my eponymously titled book Benevolent Libertarianism, I tried to come up with an original term that perhaps most accurately summarises my economic and political ethos – and it’s one that gets to the heart of the complexity better, in my view, than the anarcho-capitalist model. Below is a rough post-it-note summary of my views on this matter.

Good economic principles are based on the successes of the free market - trade, innovation, supply, demand, prices, labour, productivity and consumerism - but also in using that framework to take it to an even higher level of personal responsibility and benevolence towards others. That, I think, is the biggest challenge in the modern globalised market, where the world is interconnected and economically unbound by national, cultural or ethnic boundaries; it is to conflate the qualities of the free market with the virtues of loving one's neighbour as oneself, on top of charity, prodigious generosity, and helping the poor become self-sufficient and with a greater standard of living. My economics book attempts to factor in all the social elements, and people's other incentives too.

Humans face a tension between choices which serve ourselves and family, and choices which serve the social group, and sometimes the zero-sum decisions create competing forces between self and community. Humans are motivated by social relationship factors even more than they are material wealth – once material wealth goes above a certain threshold of utilitarian functions (food, drink, safety, shelter, warmth, health etc), then material acquisition becomes bound up with the complex social world of status and impression on others. Even status has a significant social value for many. That is one of the blind spots of the raw capitalists – they miss the chaotic perturbations of feedback capitalism, especially the division and tension in the social aspirations around identity and belonging.

Humans emerged from the complex biological world of adaptive systems, which rely on both central and decentralised methods of adaptation. This requires complex informational signals that cannot always be effectively distributed bottom-up, because the Smithian ‘invisible hand’ method of local incentives and trial & error processing is too computationally protracted to deal with large-scale problems that require some coordinated top-down intelligence. If Benevolent Libertarianism is to have any influence, it must concede that the decentralised market patterns are sometimes inadequate to the task of factoring in all the complex social motivations that feed into status, group identity and community cohesion.

Although I’m not at all party political, it’s obvious from observing party politicians that the great chasm between the left and right is that the right believe society does best by innovation and self-determination, and the left believe in the ideals of community and wealth distribution. It’s clear to me that one’s group affiliation is the key driver in who one prefers, and the policies and economics come second. In reality, a successful society is a complex blend of community ideals and market competition, but both sides are naturally suspicious of the other, and are unlikely to ever change, because capitalists don’t touch base enough with people's social motivations, and the socialists live in an idealised delusion about how the world actually works.

A centralised democratic government, if it has one useful function, would be one that bridges the gap between the two polarities – offering the best of innovation and self-determination, and what the left believes in the ideals of community and wealth distribution – but it usually fails, because almost all voters are in one camp or the other, with few being able to balance the two.

The challenge, therefore, is to find a way to incorporate the qualities of a kind of socialist-individualist-libertarian triumvirate at the personal level with the qualities of the free market and its concomitant mechanism for price theory to efficiently balance supply and demand. Otherwise, we won't make any significant inroads into the deep-seated prejudices, indelibly stamped cognitive limitations and exiguity of epistemic resources available to the individual mind.

Humans are not adroit processing machines like computers, they are adaptive systems that are fed from the minds of other humans, and this communication is replete with incentives and blind spots around status, self-preservation, security, social connection, tribal biases, and individual persona and identity. This means that humans can subject their data to an honest enquiry to the best of their ability and still end up reasoning poorly and getting their facts wrong.

Groupthink and community in-group biases can be advantageous for the individual agent because it short cuts some of the cognitive processing functions and spreads them more thinly across the group. Just as this can be advantageous in learning how to cook, hunt, codify ethics and tell stories, it can also mean that some of the views we have are not subjected to enough individual scrutiny and remain unchallenged, as we become a little more dehumanised by being embroiled in the mistakes and cultural taints of the wider community. We are creatures who incur both costs and benefits of distributing computational power too readily among other minds and both costs and benefits of distributing computational power not readily enough.

Markets contain non-linear feedback systems, which are likely to yield chaotic market instability that brings about stress and insecurity for humanity. The first part of this problem is that humans are only cognisant enough to operate within a set of values that place the individual self, the family, and other strong ties at a primacy, which makes it harder to factor in the global effects of their decision-making.

My big personal problem with the state, as it has evolved in the past few hundred years, is that I find it profoundly difficult being governed by people who are so incompetent at the things they manage, and by people who are so self-serving, partisan and narrow minded that they do not deserve the power they have, and operate within a system that makes it nearly impossible for it to be radically undermined or peacefully overthrown. This is a big philosophical and moral problem. But the other side of the philosophical and moral problem is that most people in most nations do not want to live in a world without the state. The state would not exist with such prominence if the majority of individuals had not empowered its proliferation in size and scope – but if the state’s existence is a central part of our socio-personal psychological make up, then the increased freedoms enjoyed from its eradication would likely encroach on the freedoms of those who value it and deem it necessary. Of course, we could contend that if only people just became a lot smarter and understood how fraught the state model is, they would join the libertarians in desiring its diminution, but the “If only things were x, then y” propositions are usually not very robust arguments.

The thing that I think anarcho-capitalists neglect to understand most is that, being complex adaptive systems, humans are continually caught between the lines of an ex ante (before the event) assessment of the world and a post facto (after the event) projection of how things will play out - and bottom up systems do not always contain the foresight and central intelligence to simultaneously plan for varying eventualities and at the same time adapt fast enough as the situations evolve. For example, things like welfare provision, disease research and virus prevention seem to require a delicate balance between centralised and decentralised information structures, and it is hard to imagine how pure market initiatives could administer the foresight and central intelligence to allocate resources efficiently and with adequate execution time to keep the institutions up to speed with changing environments.

Centralised intelligence also keeps in check the chaotic perturbations that emerge from feedback loops and non-linear instabilities, and create hazards and distortions. It’s true that politicians are hopelessly incompetent at managing these situations, but it’s also the case that leaving all this to market mechanisms would be an inadequate solution for the top-down complexity of the task. Markets with too much freedom underwhelm the necessary big picture thinking, and governments with too much power overwhelm big picture thinking – and therefore, the optimum balance is likely to occur with a much freer market than we have now, with a much smaller state than we have now.

I’m not even sure it’s realistically possible to get rid of the state. Given the inevitable power law distribution of wealth, and the natural hierarchies that emerge from differentiated power and competence and status mongering, I suspect that even a concerted attempt to produce the hypothetically ideal anarcho-capitalist society would soon find itself succumbing to the formation of a structure where acquisition of authority and rule was at the heart of the society, because it will probably always be the case that there are a majority of humans who wish to delegate responsibility to those who promise to govern them according to their wishes and principles. In most cases, central planning will never have the knowledge, incentives or resources to act on our behalf better than we can ourselves from a bottom-up standpoint; but on the other hand, in some cases, bottom up decision making also lacks the knowledge, incentives or resources to centrally plan and distribute resources with the foresight and big picture thinking required to support the free market. The upshot of all this is that a healthy combination of market and state is highly likely to be an inevitable coaction on the journey of human progress.

 

Theological Reflections From A Greek Pilgrimage

 

My wife Zosia and I have just spent nearly two weeks travelling over 1200 miles around Greece. We set out to have an exhilarating, spiritual, theological and philosophical adventure - following in St. Paul's theological footsteps in some places (Corinth, Thessaloniki, Philippi, Veria, Kavala), following in Greece's rich historical and cultural footsteps in other places (Meteora, Drama, Pella, Mount Olympus, Preveza), and fulfilling both criteria in our visit to Athens.

We invited God in at every step to feed into our journey, fill us with more of Himself, and enhance our wisdom with every passing mile. He most certainly obliged - in fact, it's highly unlikely that one can embark on such a spiritual adventure with hunger, good intentions and an open heart, and not come away fed, blessed and fulfilled. That which we give to God in dedication, He gives back to us to an immeasurably greater degree.

Below is a reflection of some of the things I captured along the way, in this quest for nourishment on our pilgrimage. A small confession - as a writer, I did, of course, take my note book and pen, enchanted by the prospect of jotting things down profound wisdom like an ancient scribe - but the reality is, what was captured below was done so on the voice recorder and camera on my mobile phone. The ancient and the contemporary crossed paths, blended through the long passing of time.

Adventures of the kind we had, teach us about the new things contained in the adventure, but they also teach us new things about the life we've temporarily left behind - rather like how eating another nation's cuisine heightens our appreciation for our own national cuisine at the same time, or how reading literature teaches us important things about reading philosophy too (and vice-versa). Rudyard Kipling once said “What do they know of England, who only England know?”, and what he meant was, not only do you not know much of other countries if you only know England - you don't know so much of England either without knowing other countries with which to make comparisons. Travelling helps us understand the destinations better, but it also helps us understand our homeland better - and that can be extended into our psychological, philosophical and spiritual endowments too.

In some ways, the Greeks are so much more laid back about rules - it's a more liberating place than Britain, and hasn't yet been infected by the many cultural viruses that have plagued the UK. But it's less liberating in some senses too; for example, it has a very religious attitude to church buildings - you can't walk in to a church without the right coverings, especially if you're female. Greek orthodoxy and some of the Catholic tradition is mired in religiosity, and it heightened my appreciation for freer expressions of the faith found in countries like ours, where dogma has not ossified the faith in as many places.

In a monastery in Meteora, I read a sign that proudly stated that every year on Holy Saturday, for two millennia, the Holy Light is miraculously lit by lightning inside the Holy Sepulchre, and only of course in the presence of the Greek orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, to symbolise the resurrection of Christ. I do not believe a word of it. I think God neither endorses this nor deigns Himself to perform miracles during conditions under which such poorly motivated mechanical proclamations are at play. It reeks of false attestations made because the spiritual well of grace theology has dried up. Britain may not be half as religious as Greece, but for now the Christianity it does have seems for the most part to be suffused with grace as the pivot around which the power of the gospel revolves.

Walking around some places in Greece, taking pictures with modern mobile technology that the ancients couldn't possibly have conceived, gave me a sense that there are ways in which not much had changed in cultural pockets of Greece for hundreds of years. We are tendentious creatures; we often prefer to stick to the comfort zones. But it ought to be mentioned – even the great dramatists like Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus all at first seem ponderous to the boy who has only read Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Anderson, and even, perhaps, Oscar Wilde. And the comparison works at an extra level of significance too, because the Greek tragedies, set in a backdrop of cultural, political and military power, and colonialism, and cultural identity bring forth their slowness in being only a substitute for something better (as shown by the cultural worshipping of Dionysus – who had the exotic womanliness akin to the motherliness of bonding sacrificial love). In dramatisations of the tragedies on stage, the actors wore masks, and the masks transformed the actors in a similar way to how the masks of works transform our true identities as creatures liberated under grace. 

There is a reason why Christ talked of bringing not peace but a sword, and why He said conflicts were inevitable, and why He reiterated that He has come to divide families. I do not think it is simply because He knew that many would reject His gospel of grace, or that we would be forever falling out over how best to go about our business. I think it is because He knew that although life is lived forwards, it is only reviewed backwards with retrospect - and it is with such retrospection we are able to see that God never wanted homogeneity. Our very uniqueness in mental composition and in cultural influence is precisely what makes the reaching of our full potential so full of wonder, as we journey through the stages of growth. 

Herodotus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus only seem ponderous to the populist, not because easy fixes on Oscar Wilde are a bad thing (in many ways one could make a decent case that Oscar Wilde is better than all four), but because at our worst we can be so busy with our own masks on that we remain inattentive to where those tragedies lead us to when we are incarcerated in a cultural stasis, worshipping gods and images that were no more exalted than their best thinkers, and in many cases, worse.

I captured this photo as we were driving through Macedonia, because it brought to mind a line from C.S Lewis from his Surprised By Joy: "To prefer my own happiness to my neighbour's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was really the largest."

For sheer natural gravitas, I think Mount Olympus was the most stunning place we visited - so named because, being the tallest mountain, it's the place where the Greeks thought the 12 Olympian gods lived. Made up gods don't live anywhere, of course, whereas the one true God lives everywhere (Psalm 139: 7-12) - and that is the power and spirit we took to the mountain. As we made our way up to the highest points accessible by car, I reflected on my past writing about how our ideas about multiple gods evolved into ideas about one God. The multiple gods the Greeks (and Romans, Scandinavians, etc) created over time represented the best and worst of our ideas about higher order values, and we began to refine them as we subjected them to a natural selection kind of filter, which inevitably led to the dying out of these invented gods.

As well as the rise of Christianity, the principal thing, I think, is that the gods of the Greeks were so obviously gods made in man’s image. Greek gods were in every way simulations of what the imagination can sense about the self if we are left to our own devices. Like us, they were on the most human of levels – their gods were often uncharitable, insensitive, base, incorrigibly proud, far too animalistic to be considered Divine, and nowhere near beautiful or numinous or ineffable enough to be worthy of our awe and worship. This gives them poor evolvability, because when subjected to selection pressure, humans will usually outgrow their deference to made up creatures and recognise these qualities in other humans instead. Many thousands of other gods and religions (although sadly, not all) went the same way for the same kind of reasons – the concepts associated with the ideas lost out to competing ideas, be they religious or non-religious.

The most rewarding part of Olympus was the secret waterfall we discovered. It was also the hardest place to reach, requiring a concerted effort on foot to get there. This, of course, is true of nearly all of the most rewarding pursuits in life - the things that are most worth discovering are the things that take the most effort to acquire.

 

As we visited the ancient ruins of Corinth and Philippi, and sensed St. Paul's influence there, I also felt myself moved with the regard for the struggles the early Christians endured for our sake in influencing the dissemination of the word. It is good to reflect on such matters, and clothe ourselves in humility and gratitude as we do so. We can also celebrate the fact that although the church throughout its early years endured severe persecution at the hands of both the Jews and the Romans, it flourished and grew rapidly. When we look at the Christians persecuted after the resurrection; under such conditions there were few earthly benefits for them for their unfeigned allegiance to Christ, only the cause of grace that they believed in. They were locked up, beaten and tortured, but still did not renounce their faith in Jesus as God, because they were stalwarts – real warriors for Christ and people who deserve our respect, our admiration, and our remembrance. They believed in the profound message of grace that would put right the wrongs of Roman oppression (a notion which quite a few Romans actually embraced).

Greece is steeped in Roman influence, of course, especially in terms of the influence Rome had on Christendom. If you are familiar with Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can see parallels between the historical decline and the socio-cultural declension of the grace theology that should bootstrap the faith. Gibbon’s thesis is that the Roman Empire succumbed to external and internal sanguinary conflicts (including the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards) and its own gradual diminution because of loss of civic virtue among its citizens. The fall of the Empire, just like the fall of humankind, is not God’s primary dispensation – fallenness seems to be part of nature’s quintessence, as the true riches of God’s plans are played out in the poorness of a broken world. It seems to take a world of fallenness to see a world full of grace, which is what St. Paul writes about so comprehensively in his epistle to the Romans.

The other work that strikes a symbolic chord here is also Roman; it is Dante’s brilliant exposition of his own journey in Divine Comedy, journeying through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven towards our Triune God. Just as in the Psalms of lament (such as Psalm 12 where the Psalmist is bemoaning ungodliness, or Psalm 74 where the Psalmist is bemoaning a malcontent towards God Himself), God remains our the last refuge, because every part of our love and our virtue steers us towards Him – His feet and arms carry where ours are in despair, and dejection cannot even lift us off of our knees. And if He will lead us back into a standing position, fortified and consolidated in our readiness to progress, then He will put us right back on course with beatific visions, just as Christ did. The real secret wisdom in Dante choosing Beatrice (Beatific) to guide him through Heaven seems to me to be this; in being his ideal woman she must have most closely resembled the bride that he wanted to be. As a bride of Christ, she was the embodiment of the bride that he wanted to capture in himself (Revelation 18:23).

If Dante’s inferno was about our seeing sin for what it really is, then heaven must be our seeing what supreme grace really is. The in between “Mountain of Purgatory” is a brilliant allegorical depiction of the psychology of getting to know the first hints of grace theology by confronting the darkest that is in us. If the freely given cross of Christ is the answer to nature’s need of love and grace, and its encouragement to play a part in our own administering of the best love and grace we can, then our being brides of Christ is the security that underwrites that mission. In the words of Dante, the desires and the will are…

Being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
By the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

At the end of Divine Comedy, when Dante meets St. Peter and St. John, we get to understand something so inherently absent in Greek orthodoxy; we cannot easily express our deepest intuitions about grace because we are only sampling its true fullness. Legalism and stuffy religiosity is myopic to the fact that grace is the most liberating thing of all (John 8:31-32 - "the truth will set you free") - and consequently, the real power of grace can only be fully understood in relation to a perfect God who revealed grace in the mystery of Christ's simultaneous divinity and humanity – only by trying to grasp that with the help of the Holy Spirit can we become aligned with God's supreme grace.

This is a significant part of the influence driving my desire for following in Paul's footsteps in Greece and Rome (I aspire to go to Ephesus too in the future). Where Dante seems to find the greater refuge in meeting St. Peter and St. John, my own gravitation was always more forcefully pulled towards St. Paul – for I think he is the greatest Christian explicator who has ever lived. His epistles take the Divine level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own encounter with the Holy Spirit), and the human level of Jesus (through St. Paul’s own humility, weakness and suffering) to convey the most advanced and enlightened grace theology ever written. 

Contained within St. Paul’s epistles, we find not just the greatest explicator of grace that we have ever seen, we find a mind hugely tormented and assailed by the world outside of him – a mind of devotion that was able to disconnect him from the faults and weaknesses of others in order that he could counsel them best and serve their needs by using his own strength in Christ as a bridge to grace. One of the best examples of this is his approach in Areopagus - a place that we had the pleasure of visiting - where Greek philosophy had a huge hold on the people there – a place of strong intellectual vigour and a legacy of philosophical wisdom. St. Paul begins by bringing together the virtues of mankind by praising them for being worshipfully inclined, but he then proffers the suggestion that what draws a man towards worship must be greater than anything humans can construct:

"Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."

Although human virtue is the first step of a good conceptual footing – its goodness is relative to the God behind this grace theology – and the mind of St. Paul probably understood that better than anyone. His greatest thinking led him to see that no earthly richness could compare to knowing Christ, as he rightly considered everything else a loss when compared with knowing Christ. He powerfully declared that that neither earth nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord – and this is the ultimate grace theology – the best the world has ever known. 

Given the foregoing, standing on Areopagus hill was one of my personal highlights on the trip.

I imagined Paul preaching there to the masses steeped in Greek philosophy - and having read the works of Aristotle and Plato in the past - I can well imagine their reaction was not exactly very positive. Nevertheless, St. Paul was at pains to point out that grace extends to everyone – there are no philosophical hoops to jump through because recognition of grace is recognition of Christ’s expression, both human and Divine - and that is what Divine inclusion is. Perhaps at a subliminal level the Pagan (and the atheist in general) has to 'hope' in the absence of faith, and the Christian 'trusts' in the absence of unbelieving 'hope'. Maybe that's why Zeus left "hope" at the bottom of Pandora's Box - seeing it as shaving off trust and leaving hope that one's future is in one's control and not the gods. St. Paul was delighted to put his life in Christ’s control, and that is where we know true blessedness will be achieved. 

It also serves a good reminder that theology is a formal subject to us moderns, but it wasn't so much to Paul - it was a mission, a state of necessary being, in order for the gospel to be propagated - just like, to the physicist, componential study of light reveals transportations of energy through electromagnetic radiation; but to the 1st century man lost in the forest at night, the flame on his candle is seen only as the source of the way out. 

Areopagus hill has another important place in my heart, as it was also the influence of Areopagitica, the great work by John Milton - and possibly the best book ever on free speech and freedom of expression. Milton lays down the edict about the necessity of having a free press, the liberty to not be silenced or censored, and the wisdom that people who try to impede the freedom of expression in others harm themselves too, because they rob themselves of the ability to hear and think.

By the time we had visited Athens, I acquired another strong sense of how God was speaking to us on this pilgrimage. We felt so close to Him throughout the adventure, and we sensed a profound level of favour in everything we did - in all the little details of our journey, from public transport arriving just when we needed it to be, to favourable weather, to room upgrades, to all the right people being there just when we needed them. I believe God wanted to remind us how much favour there is in drawing near to Him. Favour of this kind doesn't mean everything will always go exactly as we think we want it to go, but it does mean that everything will always go exactly as we need it to go in order for God to ultimately bless us and teach us what we need to learn.

I'm sure that this pilgrimage has opened doors for God to speak to us in new ways, and a short piece like this is quite inadequate to the task of capturing the full essence of what God has said to us, and plans to do further within us. For quite often, we find that the most powerful ways that God connects with us are beyond the scope of our own articulation. And we all know too that the surest way to undermine something satisfying is to try to break it down into constituent analyses. Introspection aimed at joy and pleasure only leaves us with the by-product, not the thing in itself - like the ripples in the river after the current hits the rock.

We planned and researched this trip ourselves, and as such, we spanned the entire country with a sense of freedom and liberation, entirely open to what God wanted to do in us and through us on this pilgrimage. I sense that on top of what I've conveyed above, further seeds have been planted that will bear more fruit in the future. For anyone inclined to embark on a similar journey of this kind, I cannot recommend it enough. Apart from maybe a trip to the Holy Land of Israel, a spiritual pilgrimage in Greece in the footsteps of St. Paul is perhaps the most rewarding excursion a Christian can make.