The Fundamental Political Problem

 

It hasn’t slipped my notice, and it shouldn’t slip yours either, that by and large, the services in this country that have been consistently performing the worst in recent times have been the services politicians have been attempting to heavily manage. Think about it; the most financially strained, under-performing, crisis-laden services are the health services, social care, education, and the parts of the economy that politicians attempt to govern. Don’t get me wrong, our health workers, social workers, teachers, etc are doing an amazing job under hugely challenging conditions – this is not their fault – but the industries in which they serve, and in which they are understandably so unhappy, strained and unsettled, are the ones that are most incompetently managed and poorly planned by our political overseers.

Despite the clear warning signs of more deeply rooted issues with this model, remarkably, the majority of the population seem to think that these issues can only be resolved by having even more government involvement in the matters, or more public money thrown at the problems, or that things wouldn’t be quite so severe if only the other party was in charge. This kind of wishful pleading and sub-standard party political group-think has been going on for decades, and it is perpetuating a narrative that has the dual effect of misleading the public further and further, and increasing the damage to society as it does so. I will explain both.

The first thing you should always remember is that humans are primarily selfish – by which I mean that they are primed to put their own interests first, and those of their family and strong tie connections, and think and act in a relatively short-term manner. There’s nothing outrageous or shocking about that – humans have limited capacity (time, energy, resources), so it makes sense that they do this. Just as when you’re on a flight that comes into difficulty, the wisdom of “putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping others” is sensible advice (you need oxygen yourself to enable you to help others, even your own children) – similarly, if you are going to have a widely positive impact on others, you need to get your own house in order first.

The kind of pattern of behaviour I’m describing generally works well in the free market too, where pursuing your own family interests first, also creates wealth and value for others too, in a broad competitive and cooperative society. Jack the furniture maker, Jill the florist, Susie the accountant and Dave the greengrocer all make a living by selling their goods and services, but they are of benefit to their consumers too (these are called consumer and producer surpluses). The key to all the value being created here is that, in a world consisting of billions of complex trade-offs, all the agents of participation know their own wants, needs, skills and individual preferences better than anyone else, so are (usually) optimally equipped to make those decisions.

The problem is, this kind of model does not translate very well into the political sphere. Humans being primed to put their own interests first works a lot better in a market where the Smithian ‘invisible hand’ is at work, than in politics. It doesn’t work brilliantly in the market every time, and it doesn’t work badly in politics every time – but, by and large, human selfishness is a bigger problem in politics than it is in the market. Here’s why. Even if you are selfish, greedy and profit-seeking in the market, you can’t make a living unless you are competent enough to provide goods or services that others want and are willing to pay for. But selfish politicians don’t have the same incentives to be as careful with their money, their actions or their policies as the everyday individual, because politicians rarely feel the full effects of their actions, and almost never pay the price of their bad policies. The only way they pay the price is by being voted out at the next election, but that simply means that those self-interests are most energised in favour of short-term decision-making and narrow perspectives that usually benefit a small minority at the expense of everyone else.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for society to hold politicians accountable for acting in such selfish narrow interests, not just because humans generally are self-interested and lack the incentive to bring about changes, but because the whole political charade has been partially created by the volitional endorsement of its model by the electorate. In other words, there is a co-dependency by the governors and the governed that acts as a tacit advocation of the human selfishness problem on which the political sphere operates - and this consists of numerous self-centred, short-termist decisions that range from being annoying and marginally costly, to being absolutely dreadful for society.

For example, the main reasons that the health services, social care and education are in such a mess is because politicians aren’t able to make decisions that factor in the range of complexities required for the services to be optimal. As a consequence, they mismanage the finances, and they continually try to solve problems with short term perspectives, meaning that they never keep up with the changing landscape. It’s not entirely their fault; we’ve become a society that demands that politicians solve problems they are ill-equipped and unmotivated to solve properly, so everyone has to keep up the facade – which is why we get the aforementioned futile cycle of the majority thinking that these issues can only be resolved by having more government involved in the matters, or more public money thrown at the problems, or that things wouldn’t be quite so severe if only the other party was in charge. This has been failing for so long, it is mystifying to me why so few people have got wise to this debacle.

To make matters even worse, the selfish, short termism of politicians is even more damaging when it comes to the influence they have on the economy. Again, many people are struggling with the cost of living, yet they seem to be perpetually convinced that if only the failing model grew even bigger, or another party took over to govern it, things would be better. Let’s take the confusion about inflation, prices and public spending as a good example of a long-standing and snowballing catastrophe.

I have a couple of blogs in the Economics sidebar that go into inflation more deeply, but let’s talk about inflation in relation to price perspective. Consider tomatoes. The media has reported this week that there is a shortage of tomatoes. Suppose for simplicity, tomatoes generally cost £2 per kilo. When a supply shock occurs, with no change in demand, supermarkets raise their price to £2.50 a kilo. This is generally a good thing, because nothing has changed in the UK’s money supply, and with the increased price, those who value tomatoes at less than their new retail price won’t buy them. Unfortunately, most politicians and social media commentators have joined the general public in confusing inflation with price increases. Higher value tomatoes caused by a supply shock or a natural increase in demand is a price increase, not inflation; inflation is largely connected to an increase in the money supply. If there was no change in the supply of tomatoes, but the government decided to increase the money supply to pay for a subsidy so that every citizen in the UK could have a kilogram of tomatoes every week, then the price of tomatoes would go up because people now have more money to buy tomatoes. When the money supply is increased, each pound you own becomes less valuable, because there are more of them in circulation.

Returning to self-serving politicians, part of their short-termism is in vastly increasing the money supply to pay for things that will help them stay in power. But when politicians increase the money supply and the credit supply, purchasing power goes all out of whack with the market’s supply and demand signals, hurting most of the citizens in the country (this is also mostly why house prices have continued to rise faster than real wages). In other words, the government and the banks usually benefit from an inflated money and credit supply, but most other people feel the costs – they just don’t often realise why they are feeling the costs.

All this new money hasn’t created significantly more value or any more material resources, which means there is more of it competing for the same resources, which means that, combined with higher taxes to pay for it, things like food, fuel, energy, etc cost more for the consumer like you and me. It is literally the case that short-termist governments are increasing the money supply to favour their own self-interested priorities first, and in doing so, they are diminishing the wealth and purchasing power of almost everyone else. It is also literally the case that this has been going on for decades, and that the public blithely encourages their own wealth diminution with consistent regularity by continuing to vote for this kind of governance.

Furthermore, such a system of governance has continually been manipulated by special interest lobbyist groups, who bid for first dibs on the extra money or credit that has been generated. The politicians are often happy to support these projects regardless of whether they provide value, whether they allocate resources efficiently and whether they make the nation poorer overall, because a) they know there will be little resistance from a general public that doesn’t really notice how these activities are harming them, and b) they know they can make the very same public pay for it through increased taxation, and burden future generations with much of the debt. At the time of writing, this official national debt (what the state owes to private enterprise, including banks) is about £2,800,459,700,000 (it’s even more than that, really, if you factor in other unmentioned liabilities – but let’s keep it simple), and is growing at the rate of about £5,170 per second.

The above is the kind of consideration you should be having when being forced to confront the daily realities of cost-of-living crises, rising prices, inflation, strained public services and a devalued pound sterling. Covid has only exacerbated the problems, of course – but this cycle of problematic and clumsy economic mismanagement has going on for a long time – and that is largely because of the way that the malaware of human self-interest and short-termism has become so infectious in our politics, and because the anti-viral software of the general public is so badly in need of an upgrade.

Reality Check: There Are Many More Ways To Make The World Worse Than Better

The best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Unfortunately, many people, especially young people, are being encouraged to do the opposite, making them preoccupied with large, unrealistic goals. Many of our young people are huge idealists, believing they can make the world significantly better with their political and social causes. When they grow older, most will come to realise that the world doesn't often improve in this way, as virtually all improvements, even the biggest ones, are small, gradual and incremental. We'll return to this shortly.

To make improvements, we need to think, and apply those thoughts to life - and to do so, we need a coherent mental process of sifting and selecting to build a corpus of views and beliefs we think are correct and beneficial to humanity. Although it's not visible to the naked eye, the brain is undertaking these computations with great frequency in quick execution time - sifting and selecting to expunge the mind of all incorrect data - a bit like how an anti-virus scan on your pc sifts and selects the data that's potentially corrupt (whether the mind embraces truth and facts is an altogether more complex matter that we don't have time to explore here).

For simplicity, let's divide the thought system into 3 categories: correct views, agnostic views and incorrect views:

1) I believe x is correct, and x does happen to be correct. (Correct)

2) I am unsure whether x is correct because I have kernels of ideas but don't know enough to be wholly confident. (Agnostic)

3) I believe x is correct, but x does not happen to be correct. (Incorrect)

Every view or belief you have falls broadly in one of those three categories. These also fall under a scale of varying complexity. Take the proposition of exertions of mutually attractive forces as examples. I would be a category 1 on the proposition that macroscopic objects in the universe exert a mutually attractive force proportionally to their masses, and that therefore force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. I would also be a category 1 on the proposition that with a telescope, the size of the smallest object it can see at any given distance is inversely proportional to the diameter of the telescope lens. These are scientific facts about which we should all be category 1.

But on the proposition that, given a large sample of data, the frequency of any element of that data is at a certain size inversely proportional to its rank in a table that measures frequency - well, I am more of a soft agnostic. That doesn't mean it does not hold for a multitude of cases, just that if examples came out of the epistemological woodwork to undermine the consistency of the rule, I would be all set to revise the strength of my conviction.

This is the sifting and selecting heuristic we use, as best as possible, to guard against being wrong. The fact that many people have faulty cognitive software in this process is not down to the hardware (not usually anyway) - it is usually down to bad learned behaviour. This is why falsehood and being wrong has a negative effect on a person's well-being - and why there is collateral damage on the mind's emotional well-being when it is in a state of cognitive dissonance.

I think we should always pay careful attention to laws of nature that are also rules that govern human beings. One such example is this: it is a lot easier to fail than to succeed. It is a lot easier to make a cacophony of discordant noise on a piano than it is to play a tune; it is a lot easier to drop an egg on the floor than it is to clean it up; it is a lot easier to write a rubbish play than it is to write a masterpiece. But why? The main reason is to do with numbers: there are astronomically more ways to do something badly than do something well; there are astronomically more ways to make a mess to be clean; and there are astronomically more ways to write a load of rubbish than there are to write high quality plays.

We shouldn't be surprised: this law runs through the heart of evolutionary biology. Think of genetic mutations - that is, the genetic material that is duplicated, transposed, deleted, and inserted. The measure of success of any mutation is related to the differential probability of reproductive success that it confers on the mutated offspring. New information comes from the random mutations that take place in the reproductive process of every single offspring. Every offspring gets the DNA from the parents, with a small number of mutations. If an organism gets to reproduce, it will pass on those differences along with the additional mutations that take place in the next generation. So the rule of survival is that mutation creates variation, and selection preserves helpful mutations. Those mutations, once preserved in this manner, propagate and their novel genes are distributed throughout the population. New mutations arise, selection favours or disfavours these mutations, and the complexity builds. Most evolutionary changes are the result of gene duplication and subsequent mutation.

Now here's the kicker: most mutational effects are either neutral or negative - relatively few are beneficial. Just as with the above examples we touched upon, the reason most mutational effects are not beneficial is because there are astronomically more ways to be non-beneficial than to be beneficial. It is this principle to which people who want to make a significant impact on the world should pay closest attention. Give a teenager a set of tools and a dismantled car engine, and he'll soon discover that there are many more ways that he can make a mess of assembling it than there are ways he can assemble it correctly. Compared to a global society and its economies, a car engine is very simple. Imagine, therefore, how many ways there are to make a society worse compared with the number of ways there are to make it better.

It's here that we return to the wisdom that the best way to change the world for the better is to set small but realistic goals. Let me offer an illustration. Imagine an island of 100 people trying to create a better society. The inhabitants who prioritise improving themselves, by seeking the truth, learning facts, embracing goodness, utilising their talents and skills and striving for personal progress are much more likely to make the island a better place than the inhabitants who disregard all that and go all out to change the island with an abstract collectivist agenda.

Another reason why there are so many more ways to get things wrong than right is because the world is highly complex, and because it is not easy to manage highly complex things efficiently from on high. This is because humans are adaptive systems that operate in a world that thrives on collective, bottom-up contributions, based on local knowledge and personal incentives tailored to individual goals. To understand why this is so, just consider what you had for lunch today. I had paella, which consisted of rice, chicken, prawns, chorizo, peas, peppers, saffron, and paprika. To gather all the ingredients of that paella, and get it onto my plate, required the interactions of millions of people - each with unique tastes, skills and knowledge - and innumerable local decisions that are based on the decisions of others, all of which dictate how much that paella costs to buy, and how much of it needs to be produced.

Extend that to every person in the world and the billions of local decisions and tens of billions of goods and services that are supplied, and you can see it is an object of staggering complexity that works better than anything else that has ever existed. The economy is the ultimate success in spontaneous order. The corollary of this is just as telling. Because value is created every time there is a single mutually beneficial transaction between buyer and seller, the aggregation of the value created in a global economy and the exponential progression that occurs the more markets become interconnected is built on those tens of billions of local transactions that occur every day on the planet.

I hope that paints a picture of why there are so many ways to make the world worse than better - and why, if you want to make the world better, far and away the best way to do it is to get your own house in order, and encourage everyone you know to do the same. Everyone doing their best to seek the truth, work hard, improve themselves, apply their skills, do good, and use resources efficiently is the best way to reduce the impact of the rule that there are so many ways to make the world worse than better. Conversely, people who have big visions but uncultivated minds are going to heighten the effect of the rule, and make a mess far more than they ever clean up one.

On The Quality, Cultivation & Sustenance of Friendship

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
E. M. Forster 

I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently, especially close friendship. Close friendship is one of the most wonderful of earthly qualities – alongside romantic love and familial bonds, it is the third part of the trinity of essential inter-relational human connections. A great friend acts like a mirror into our soul - through them our world becomes even more interesting and rewarding, and we can see more clearly inside ourselves and become better than we would have been without them. I'd say there are six key elements to a great friendship; you need mutual effort, you need trust, you need honesty, you need dependability, you need solicitude and you need truth.

Mutual effort: You both need to make the effort to sustain the friendship at a high level - you have to take an interest in each other, and that interest has to be two ways.

Trust: You must be able to trust each other; with your secrets and your lives if necessary.

Honesty: You should know each other deeply, openly and sincerely enough to be yourself, and not be unfairly judged.

Dependability: You need to be there for each other through thick and thin, be reliable, and be willing to take the weight of your friend when you are needed.

Solicitude: Like above, you should both care deeply about each other, where putting your friend’s needs first (when appropriate) doesn’t feel like a cost.

Truth: You need your combined realities to be anchored in truth, so you can be the truest version of yourselves with each other, otherwise the rest of the qualities remain filtered and suppressed.

It’s great to have lots of friends in a wide and diverse circle, but I don’t think we need dozens of very close friends – around five is sufficient. It’s difficult to feed and sustain any more than about five or six high quality, close affinity friendships. In fact, to nourish the most important and mutually beneficial friendships, you have to guard against expending too many emotional and intellectual resources on friendships that are only superficially of a good quality, or on friendships that have (often for good reason) undergone a natural declension over time. Three things can expose a friendship as being shallower than you envisaged:

1} When you wake up one day and it dawns on you that the friendship is largely being sustained by your efforts (to make contact, to take an interest, to initiate social contact, you’re the only listener in a one-way conversation, etc)

2} When something difficult happens in your life, and all your fair-weather friends disappear, or fail to do the right thing in standing up with you against suffering, an injustice or in opposition to poor treatment.

3} When certain friendships exist not in a high quality 121 capacity, but merely as part of a larger social circle. Sometimes you just realise about a person that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of friendship between you and x, and the number of other friends in the circle that contains you and x. 

It’s absolutely essential that close friendships must be two-way – you must give your all in caring about each other, and being there for each other. But you must be capable enough to not burden a friend with an over-abundance of issues – especially issues it behoves you to address more competently yourself. A highly unsymmetrical friendship is burdensome for the person carrying the bigger weight. You ought to find you're giving about as much as you're receiving. That’s why the relationship between a psychologist and patient is quite unlike friendship – it can never satisfy the deepest needs for both parties, because therein lies the lack of reciprocity.

A friend who chooses you for the sake of utility is dodgy - which can be a tricky assessment to make, because we all have utility in friendships. Therefore, I suggest a good way to measure a healthy level of utility is to determine to what extent your friend is interested in you, in the core essence of you. Those that are, you’ll know – you’ll really know. Those who are with you only for the superficial rewards can very easily be without you when the rewards dry up, or when they find bigger rewards elsewhere. High quality friends don’t do this, because from the start they are in it for more than rewards.

It's interesting too how, for most things we achieve in life, we require patient searching and probing – but in the best friendships, the strong depth of connection is largely unsought. We don’t have to artificially over-indulge our exploratory efforts in order for the greatest friendships to blossom - fantastic friends are like two jigsaw pieces that fit neatly into the same puzzle. That is one of the senses in which friendship and love with a beloved differ. And those differences can be subtle, and not as obvious as you think, because in friendship there is also love. If you created a Venn diagram, the intersecting circle that contains the qualities that pertain to both friends and beloveds would take up the majority of the diagram. Friendships don’t have the Eros type of love, but they have philia, pragma and agape.

Another big practical difference between friendship and relationship with a beloved is that relationships are built on continually seeing each other, whereas friendships can stay stronger for longer without regular contact. The qualities of friendship can be magnified in absence in a way that the qualities of love will not be. An absence of your beloved is going to frustrate and starve the organism of oxygen. Given that friendship is absent of Eros, it lacks some of the pleasure-seeking sensations that marriage does, and could be argued to have a virtue that even marital love doesn’t have. However, that thought can be subdued by the notion that within the intimate relationship with your beloved there should exist a depth of friendship unequalled in any other external friendship.

Another strange and unique thing about friendship is that it requires active involvement between both agents to sustain its very existence, in a way that most other relationships or connections do not. You can buy a precious gemstone from a jeweller you’ve never met; you can admire someone famous who is never likely to meet you and know that admiration; you may have a father who knows nothing of your existence; you may even have the deepest unrequited love for someone who has no awareness of such a powerful feeling. But friendship is different – one can’t have a friendship unless both parties are actively involved in building and sustaining the organism.

Finally, an amusing thought on which to end. If you're new to a city, and you're looking to make new friends, you have the following hurdle to negotiate. The best people to be good friends with are likely to be the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know. But the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people are likely to be the busiest, most popular and most in-demand people too. The best chance of breaking in is if you happen to be even smarter, wittier, kinder and more generous-hearted than the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know.

 

How We Might Move On From Racism

 

I like to spend time listening to people whose opinions differ from my own. During the financial crisis, I went to engage with the protesters who were camped outside banks; I've been to several Black History Month events; and I've even spent a weekend camping with environmentalists. All those experiences have been very useful in trying to understand how these groups think and what their motivations are. I've written a lot about socialism and environmentalism on this blog, but not much on racism, which is what I intend to do here.

The first thing to say about racism is that it is clearly a learned phenomenon. When young children are put together to play, they don't show any signs of racial discrimination. We are not born racist; it is implanted from other humans. What struck me from my conversations with people at the Black History Month events is how preoccupied they were with skin colour and racial wrongs from the past. I’m sure that is even truer of more hostile groups like Black Lives Matter – there is a propensity to see the world through the unhelpful, divisive and counter-progressive lens of group identity and ethno-tribal polarisation. Personally, I tend to live as much in the present as possible, I try to treat everyone as though they are loved and infinitely valuable, and I couldn’t care a jot about the things (like skin colour and ethnicity) that seem to cause so much prejudice. I care about you as a person, and am interested in you as a unique individual – not as a secondary group member to which you may happen to belong.

Now, I’m not saying the past doesn’t matter, and I’m not saying this country has no present day racism to contend with. But it seems clear to me that continually going on about past legacies, and remaining preoccupied with skin colour and so-called racial identity is only perpetuating a stratification that most people have moved on from (and most prejudice that appears racist probably isn’t racist anyway – see my blog here). This point is compounded by the fact that people who are preoccupied with what others have done to people like them in the past are generally preoccupied with what people have done to black people, as though that particular category of racism is the primary one in history. But the reality is, history is replete of all kinds of injustices committed by every kind of skin colour and ethnicity: white on black, black on white, black on black, Asian on black, white on Asian, and so on, dating back thousands of years.

We are living in a time when the anti-racists are behaving a lot like the historical racists, and the anti-fascists are behaving a lot like the historical fascists – and we need to move forward. As Marcus Aurelius said: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” Suppose a magic switch was flicked, and everyone woke up tomorrow morning with no awareness of past ethnic, racial and religious injustices. Black and white people, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and so on, would no longer see each other through the prism of past troubles, but simply as different people co-existing alongside one another. I’m not saying that cultural identity and heritage isn’t important. But if we stopped making so much of past racial prejudices and began to refrain from preoccupations with skin colour and group identity, we’d prime ourselves for a future of diminished racial tension.

What about the Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani debacle?
I think Lady Hussey's line of questioning could have been better, of course - but the same can be said about Ngozi Fulani's response too, which looked to be opportunist, disingenuous and self-serving. Lady Hussey was stitched up by Fulani, and then subsequently thrown under a bus by the Royals, including her own Godson, Prince William - who, if the media account is accurate, responded ignobly in this. After her 60 years of loyal service, Lady Susan Hussey deserved far better than this - and I think this has reflected very badly on the Royals.

To be fair to Ngozi Fulani, I have sympathy with the fact that it must be difficult to have your nationality questioned when she was born in the UK. And I'm sure it's not always easy to live in a nation in which your skin colour is the minority one. But it would have been very easy for her to have responded to Lady Hussey with more grace and understanding, and not to have capitalised on a poor dialogue in such an egregious way. Not that we should be surprised - from past activity, it looks very much like Ngozi Fulani is a racial grifter, in the same way that Dianne Abbott, Affua Hirsch, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Kerry-Anne Mendoza are racial grifters. To see what I mean by racial grifters, here's a quote from a blog post of mine from 2021:

"It seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us)."

Ngozi Fulani and the aforementioned group are racial grifters in the same way that Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Loach are poverty grifters; and in the same way that Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot and the numerous wacky environmentalist hysterics (Extinction Rebellion, Just-Stop-Oil, etc) are climate grifters. They make their living and their reputation on the attempted prolongation of the thing to which they claim opposition, seizing every opportunity to cry foul and attribute malice or bigotry where none exists or is intended.

And this leads us full circle to the opening points. Unless social and cultural grifting is shown up for the pernicious creep that it is, we are doomed to keep repeating the taints of the past, from which the vast majority of folk in the UK have moved on.

A Deeper Look At The Recent Census On Religious Belief

According to the headline-grabbing census, there has been a 5.5 million drop in the number of Christians in the UK, equating to a 17% fall in the number of people who identify as Christian. Apparently, it is the first time in a census of England and Wales that fewer than half of the population have described themselves as Christian. Humanists and secularists have been buoyed by this census, celebrating the news that, on the surface, we seem to live in a post-Christian society. But surface-level thinking is often deceptive, because it doesn't delve down into the real depths of the water.

Once we dive in, we'll find several key points being missed. In the first place, census results are only as good as the questions being asked. Belief and faith are complex propositions attached not just superficially to what people say, but to how people act, the values they adhere to, and the obvious deeper spiritual longings that play out alongside those actions. In the second place, for the past 100 years there has been a clearer distinction emerging between the identity of a British person as a cultural Christian and as a practising Christian who accepts Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. This distinction has been more carefully eroded away in recent decades, I'd suggest, where the number of people who call themselves Christian may have decreased as a proportion of the population, but the ones that do call themselves Christian continue to profess an active faith in the Lord Jesus, where the real decline is probably more in the demise of 'cultural Christianity'.

In the third place, despite what people claim to believe in a census, we cannot live in a post-Christian country, because Christ IS the Truth. All claims of post-truth of any kind, Christian or otherwise, are false by matters of degree. That is, people always have and always will act as though Christianity is true - in their underlying values, in their regard for truth over falsehood, for good over evil, for love over hate, for right over wrong, for marriage over divorce, for kindness over meanness, for grace and forgiveness over hostile resentment, for peace over war, the list goes on. Even if they don't consciously ascribe those qualities to a Christian underpinning, the fact is, Christ is the origin and the source of all goodness in the world. 

In one sense, of course, we've never had a Christian country in the world, because no nation has ever faithfully reflected scripture to the level that it could justifiably call itself Christian. But despite that acknowledgement, when it comes to human morals, behaviour, values and decisions, we are always acting out the Christian truths or departing from them, whether we like it and know it, or not. The cause of everything that's wrong in human society finds its origin, somewhere down the line, in not adhering to the values Christ espouses; and the cause of everything that's right in human society finds its origin, somewhere down the line, in adhering to the values Christ espouses. It is profound, but it is true - Christ's truth, love, grace, wisdom, goodness and sovereignty are the metric we use for all our value systems, because their origin is in the Creator of the universe. Irrespective of what the census reveals, we can be a post-Christian country only in what we claim to believe, not in how we structure our life and our acted-out values, because they are Christian. A swimming fish can claim to be dry, but it cannot convince those fish who swim alongside it who know full well they live in the ocean.

Finally, to make the point even clearer, let's return to the nature of asking questions, and see what the census would look like with questions fit for the depth and gravitas of a Christian faith. Consider if everyone in the UK answered the following questions:

1) Do you value truth more than falsehood?

2) Can you imagine a standard of values higher than values you could attain?

3) Do you fail every day to live up to the standards of Jesus?

4) Are you imperfect, and in need of forgiveness for the wrongs you've committed in your life?

5) Is a society that values good over evil, love over hate, right over wrong, marriage over divorce, kindness over meanness, grace and forgiveness over hostile resentment, and peace over war better than one that does not?

6) Would a God who lived as a man on earth, suffered and died for our sins in an act of supreme love and grace, and rose from the dead to give us eternal salvation, be a God with whom it would be good and beneficial to have a relationship?

These are all questions to which the vast majority of the population, thinking clearly, would answer a resounding YES!

Christianity and its concomitant truths and values are always alive and well in the world, because we are all created to know Christ, and we impute onto our lives a framework narrative in which we act as though Christianity is true. We act as though Christianity is true when we do good and bad, because both times we are showing the truth of the gospel - its truths shine a Divine light when we do good, and its truth pervades and nudges with the absence of light when we plunge ourselves into darkness. 

It is a shame that so many people in the UK now claim to have no Christian belief. But the good news is, every unbeliever in the UK is only one visit to church away from discovering Christ in action, or one profound book away from uncovering the gospel, or one influential Christian friend away from having their perspective changed, or one honest prayer away from having their life transformed by Christ.

Understanding Inequality Better, In Three Easy Steps

 

Pretty much all commentary on inequality is misjudged, and it's largely for three reasons; one is to do with overlooking the inevitable dynamic, two is in misunderstanding what should be measured, and three is in overlooking the scale of measurement. Let's take them in turn.

The inevitable dynamic is basically that in a free country, where people have the opportunity to contribute according to their skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence, wealth will be distributed unevenly. When measuring capital, wealth distributions follow a near-inevitable power law, whereby the top 10% percent are going to have a large proportion of the wealth, and the bottom 50% are going to have significantly less, despite substantially outnumbering the top 10%. I have lots of individual blog posts in my 'Inequality' tab that explain why in more detail.

Regarding the misunderstanding of what should be measured, if you only measure capital, then you have a distorted picture of inequality, because you are disregarding all the things already in place that make us more equal. Once you factor in the many goods and services provided by the state - the health service, social services, the state pension and the many public services - they add up to a lot of value that narrows the wealth gap. Because equality, you see, isn't just about capital, it's mostly about consumption. We also have to factor in the knock-on effects of all this economic growth, like having access to the entire world's knowledge, having more leisure time due to technological enhancements, and all the other concomitant benefits associated with human innovation.

Lastly, on top of overlooking the inevitable dynamic, and misunderstanding what should be measured, there is also the overlooking of the scale of measurement. Where you are in particular stages of life says a lot about your capital and assets, but it often creates a distorted view of a nation's inequality. Students are an obvious case in point - when graduating, they start life in debt, but most go on to earn substantial wages, retire with their own property, and across their life timescale go from negative wealth to reasonable wealth. This is also applies to many other workers, who start life on lower wages when they are young, and progress through their careers with higher wealth.

Insipid left-wing articles about inequality never factor in how to properly measure wealth and standards of living, they don't factor in the big picture where most people get better off with age, and they ignore the fact that in any economically free society, an uneven distribution of wealth is an inevitable outcome of a thriving society.

Given the foregoing, my three easy steps to thinking about inequality correctly are as follows:

Step 1 - Be precise in your language, and define ‘inequality’ properly. Are you talking about inequality of capital assets, consumption, or income? Do you mean inequality before the state has taken tax and passed on public sector benefits or after? And are you factoring in the many other social benefits that reduce inequality in other ways, due to increased standards of living?

Summary: Define before you complain.

Step 2 – Be clear on the economic and social dynamic that causes inequality. Skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence are the biggest causes of most kinds of inequality, and they are good things. Good things cause most inequality. Every time you buy a best-selling book, go to a music festival, shop on Amazon, do your shopping at Tesco, renew your Microsoft subscription, etc, you make the world a little more unequal. But you do these things because you are supporting other people’s prodigious skills, intelligence, industriousness and competence.

Summary: Understand how the world works before you complain.

Step 3 – Be aware of the big picture regarding where, why and when people’s individual life circumstances contribute to the distribution curves of the Gini coefficient, and how those contributions change over time.

Summary: Be mindful that (in)equality is dynamical, not static, before you complain.

Finally, some more insight to digest. Suppose Rich Roger has accumulated lots of capital through market transactions. He's done so by providing value to society. But it doesn't end there. Roger's accumulation of capital is going to be two other things; if he spends it, it creates a living for other people; and if he conserves his capital, then in spending less than he is saving he is leaving more goods and services available to everyone else (and at a slightly cheaper price).

Diversity is so often rightly celebrated in society - diversity of looks, talents, age, specialisations, interests, passions, culture, personalities, etc - and diversity in wealth, income and consumption are a fundamental part of, and result of, those other diversities we celebrate. I think we need to get out of the habit of using the loaded term 'income inequality' and simply call it 'diversity of assets', because that's what it really is, and society is all the better for it.

The Most Interesting Monsters Are The Ones In The Head

 

I love movies and TV drama, and I have a fairly broad and eclectic taste. But I’m usually much more interested in the psychology of inner demons than those created enemy artefacts found in sci-fi, disaster and adventure movies. Films where the heroes are battling against external monsters, aliens, dubious supernatural weidos or big dangerous animals are far less appealing to me than films that delve deeply into the characters’ minds and explore the deep challenges and rewards of being human. 

As Charles Darwin expressed so well, 'We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realised that they were inside us.' The monsters inside even the seemingly ordinary men and women usually strike me as far more scary and compelling and thrilling than just about any outside monster Hollywood has tried to create. Even the best films about external dangers, like Jaws, are really about the nature of being human.

Sunday Faith Series: Dawkins' Faulty Belief-O-Meter

In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins produced his popularly received seven point scale – a 1-7 valuation of the strength of belief or disbelief in God. Here it is:

1.Strong Theist: I am 100% sure that there is a God

2.De-facto Theist: I cannot know for certain but I strongly believe in God and I live my life on the assumption that he is there.

3.Weak Theist: I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.

4.Pure Agnostic: I don’t know about God’s existence or non-existence, so am undecided.

5.Weak Atheist: I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.

6.De-facto Atheist: I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life under the assumption that he is not there.

7.Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.

In stating where on the scale he sits, Dawkins says “I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7. I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” In other words, Dawkins is fairly unequivocally an atheist with not much room for change. 

Alas, despite its popularity, Dawkins' 1-7 scale is so philosophically naïve it is all-but meaningless as an exercise. The main thing wrong with it is that as an indicator of strength of belief the model is entirely empty, because the strength of belief is inextricably linked to the quality of mental acuity put into that belief. In other words, anyone can tell you where his strength of belief sits on a made up scale of 1-7, but it is only worth taking seriously if he has a competent understanding of the subject and a good philosophical brain with which to reason.

Suppose someone calls themselves a 6 on Dawkins' scale, and when you ask them why they don't believe in God, they tell you that it's because they once asked Him to reveal Himself by writing 'God' in the sky with stars, and because He didn't, then that is grounds to not believe in Him. Obviously a relatively smart mind would simply object that that's a terrible reason to not believe God exists - in which case, calling your self a 6 on the scale means absolutely nothing to anyone with half a brain.

Theology and philosophy and probability theory are broad and complex subjects, and unless you are competent at all three, any high rating you give yourself on the atheistic part of the Dawkins scale is like calling yourself an excellent literary writer just because you happen to know a lot of words in the dictionary. Dawkins' attempt to construct a scalar model of belief and treat it as a unique metric for philosophical returns is about as narrow-minded and parochial as it gets. What the Dawkins model does is treat people as though they all see religious belief in the same way and with the same ability, and it treats the ‘God’ concept as though it is homogenous in thought structure, when it’s about the least homogenous concept around.

And if it still isn't clear why, then to show the absurdity of making a faux homogenous model, let me alter the concept to something Dawkins will understand; let’s replace the word ‘God’ with ‘evolution’, and ask a bunch of people in the Bible-belt in America where they stand on the 1-7 scale. If the polls are anything to go by, no doubt many fundies in America will say they are a 6 to 7 when it comes to evolution. That is to say, they are as sceptical about the fact of evolution as Richard Dawkins is about God. What do you think Richard Dawkins would say to them when they told him that they were a 6 or 7 when it comes to evolution? He would make the same criticism of them that I have made of him. He’d say with full justification that their comprehension of evolution is so bereft that their gradation is rendered inadequate by such a defective and inept understanding of the object of study. 

When the signs are reversed, that is precisely what is wrong with Dawkins’ own gradation. And by the way, it does not matter that evolution is amenable to scientific study and God is not, because we are only talking about how well the subjects are understood, not the empirical tractability or the final conclusions. Dawkins states that he thinks God does not exist - but his strawman caricatures are so clumsy that most Christians do not believe in the god (small g) that Dawkins denies. This is the principal point of this message, one which makes a good rule of thumb for future reference with another Knight-ism I like to employ;

The God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas. 
JK
 

Climate Hysteria Overlooks The Key Part Of The Equation

I have been consistently critical of climate alarmism and the billions wasted on misjudged climate policies, but I think most critics of my views on this don't really understand the position of people like me. I believe they assume that, either; a) I'm trivialising the empirical forecasting of climate scientists, b) I don't under Navier-Stokes equations, or c) I'm dismissive of the dangers of climate change on the spurious pretext that the vast majority of people pushing the agenda are such incompetent thinkers.

But that's not it at all. I do take the empirical forecasting seriously, I do understand Navier-Stokes equations, and fallacious ad hominem reasoning is not my game.

So, I'm not an adversary up to this point, because I'm also fully seized of the high likelihood that there are significant climate issues to solve. The data models suggest there will be an increase in floods and droughts, sea level rises, a changing ecosystem, and the need to adapt to some regional disruptions as the earth's temperature increases.

But after this point of small concordance, our harmony ends - because if you are a climate alarmist, activist, or just generally behind the financially exorbitant environmentalist policies, then I'm afraid you are missing too much of the bigger picture. Even if we ignore the fact that simulated atmospheric and ocean conditions based on computational fluid dynamics increases in margins of error the further forward we try to project (and we shouldn't ignore that, but let's be generous and do it anyway), computational fluid dynamics is not the tool for assessing economic change, technological change and climate change combined, over time. If you only focus on the latter one of the three, it's an anaemic, sub-standard equation.

For that reason, the proffered formula for spending so many billions on future climate change mitigation now is so unbalanced, it's astounding it persists unquestioningly. The formula for taking such drastic action now would have to be this: analysis of a reasonable margin of error taking into account the possibilities of chaotic anomalies in the Navier-Stokes models, and a projected model of the curve of human progress during the same timeframe, alongside which, a red queen-type of projection justifying why the arms race is won by the climate-over-human-ingenuity forecast not human-ingenuity-over-climate forecast.

And that has never been propounded, not once, ever, by anyone, as far as I can tell. It's the second part of the equation - the projected model of the curve of human progress during the same timeframe - that always gets missed. Both have potential chaotic perturbations, but the climate alarmism model speculates with billions of pounds of sunk costs without any regard for the progression curve of humans within that frame period. In layman's terms, the choices made are roughly; spend billions now and regulate the oil industry out of the market and have no regard for future progression, or spend the money today on a more prudent allocation of resources, and expect that, because of several good reasons (we'll be smarter, richer, more technologically astute in the coming years, and because we already adhere to the law of parsimony), we'll have far far far less trouble solving these problems than the misguided people of today think.

Sunday Faith Series: Are We Alone In The Universe? 5 Questions On Alien Life

 

The two best known examples of a systematic attempt to evaluate the probabilities of finding alien life in the universe are the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation. They were set up a few decades ago, but were proffered to calibrate probabilities based only on modelling our galaxy (no further). Given the less sophisticated technology, they were largely speculative equations - assessing the rate of star formation, the number of stars with planets, and the number that are likely habitable. The trouble is, given that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and around 100 billion galaxies, both the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation proved inadequate to the cause of assessing the fraction of planets with life, and the odds of life becoming intelligent, and even more so the odds that intelligent life becomes communicative.

A few years ago, the Breakthrough Listen project was launched, heightening our search for other life in the universe by searching planets that orbit the million stars closest to Earth and the hundred nearest galaxies. This was the biggest and most sophisticated search we've ever had, and has, for me, elicited 5 questions:

1) What are we likely to find out there?
Here's a hunch - we won't find anything. The universe existed for around 10 billion years before the earth began to form some 4.6 billion years ago, therefore if there is intelligent life on other planets much of it is likely to be a lot more advanced than we are as many of the planets we search will be older. While this comment makes a lot of assumptions about a similar evolutionary story (see below), if you imagine how much more advanced we'll be in just 500 years, consider how much more advanced a civilisation could be that had extra thousands or even millions of years to evolve.

2) Are we better of not finding each other?
If such life does exist, it would perhaps be advanced enough to have been able to find us by now. Perhaps they are watching us; perhaps they are so ultra-sophisticated that they have no need to communicate with us, rather like how we earthlings have no need to communicate with ant colonies. Or perhaps if they stumble upon us they might see us as enough of a potential threat to challenge their supremacy in time. In which case they might wipe us out, rather like how heads of empires used to have their armies wipe out groups of peasant radicals that saw themselves as revolutionaries and future over-throwers of the ruling elite.

Alternatively, perhaps alien life out there is less evolved than we are. In which case, mutatis mutandis, judging by the way that we earthlings have treated those who are less-capable and less-powerful than us, if there were such creatures in the universe that are less developed than us, it might be better for them if we never find them.

3) What might aliens look like?
This is an intriguing question. Presumably any other life in the universe would share the commonality of having evolved from carbon-based origins (silicon is unlikely). That is to say, given that science shows that regeneration occurs most optimally at moderate temperatures, and with an increased amount of chemical variability, carbon based life is much more probable than any other kind of base. One presumes creatures on other planets would have had a primordial soup of some kind - therefore one wonders if natural selection on their planet would produce anything like us. Given the fecundity of qualities like wings, eyesight, vocal expressions, a central nervous system, memory and the intelligence to find food and outcompete rival species - all of which are so fecund that they've evolve multiple times independently on our planet, one wonders whether evolution on other planets would select for those same qualities. If we did find life on other planets, It wouldn't be surprising to me to see them possessing many (if not all) of the above qualities.

4) What if we miss life by arriving at the wrong time?
I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone ask this question - but it is worth considering, particularly after the news that Kepler, NASA space telescope, has discovered a planet in the Milky Way similar to Earth. NASA said the Earth-like planet, named Kepler 452b, orbits a star similar to Earth's sun over the course of 385 days, and is located 1,400 light-years away from Earth.

The reason I mention our timing is that even if we do find a planet habitable for life, we have to catch it at the right period of its cosmological evolution. Kepler 452b is 6 billion years old, making it roughly 1.5 billion years older than earth - and it is getting rather hot apparently - just as our own planet will be in several billion years’ time. Given what I said above about how biological evolution selects for fecund qualities and traits that increase the odds of genetic propagation, that 6 billion year period may well have engendered a reasonably high level of intelligent life, only to be gradually discontinued as Kepler 452b gets hotter and hotter, meaning that by the time we discovered it all trace of intelligent life has gone the same way as the evaporated oceans.

5) What are the ramifications for Christians?
Finally, a question I pondered a few years ago is whether or not the discovery of alien life on other planets might affect our religious faith. The first point of note is that in my experience atheists are bound to find a way to elicit the wrong accusations on this one. That is to say, when broaching the question of whether we are alone in the universe or whether there is life elsewhere, one ought to be mindful, first off, of the way that either answer (‘yes’ and ‘no’) is used by the atheists (rather dishonestly and disingenuously, as it happens) against Christianity. They say that if we are the only life in the whole universe then that must prove that our being here is merely the result of the sheerest fluke. If, however, there are other planets which contain life of some kind that must prove that we are not the special creation that the Bible claims we are. Both contentions are, of course, equally spurious - but it is easy to see how atheists like to have it all their own way. 

So what if we did find sophisticated life on another planet, then, complete with language, intelligence and complex multivariate societies like we have on earth - how would that affect our faith? I think it's a very good question. Suppose they had evolved no concept of God, and had had no incarnation, death on the cross, and resurrection in their history at all - how might you respond to that as a Christian? Could it simply mean that they are another branch of God's creation that do not require the same kind of salvation we do, or perhaps (highly questionably) no act of salvation at all? Or might the absence of God on their planet lead us to wonder if our own religions are simply human inventions? Or, alternatively, might we stick to our faith and accept that there are things we don't understand, and accept perhaps God has not yet chosen to reveal Himself to that planet? After all, sophisticated God-fearing aliens that arrived on our planet 20,000 years ago might think the same about earth.

Personally, my faith is built on so much by way of experience, evidence, cognitive consideration and emotional conviction that I don't think the discovery of a completely God-less civilisation on another planet would shake my faith very much. Of course, the first reaction might be for us to wonder if their being bereft of the good news constitutes an urgent need for us to go share it with them (as per Matthew 28:19-20). But that in itself brings another interesting hypothetical question: is telling the good news to a planet full of people currently unapprised of Jesus actually good news for them or is it bad news? For one presumes that if they had no knowledge of God, they could have no knowledge of sin and their need for salvation. Are they better off remaining ignorant so they are not indicted for their lack of accepting Jesus as their saviour? Would telling them be a bit like taking a deadly pandemic to their planet and then trying to provide them with the cure? Or would not telling them be like leaving them to a pandemic they already have and refusing to take them a cure?

The problem St Paul tells us in Romans 3:11 is that on earth “there is no one who understands, and no one who seeks God”, so imagine how much more this would be the case on a planet that had never even evolved the concept of God. Or might it be the case that just as God has clearly revealed Himself in the natural world (Romans 1:20) and has set eternity in the hearts of all people (Ecclesiastes 3:11), that there is no such thing in the universe as being wholly unapprised of God?

This blog post has been much more about questions than answers. I am of the view that sometimes questions are more interesting than answers - so hopefully they are questions that got you pondering with interest.

Counterintuitive Economics: Why People Are Often Confused About High Prices

 

High costs are not necessarily good or bad; it depends entirely on how things are being measured. The cost is what the consumer sacrifices when they decide on a transaction. If I want solar powered garden lights, I pay the cost; if I want my roof fixed, I pay the cost. Now, suppose there are three types of light I like - spike lights, bollard lights and meteor shower lights. Suppose my preferential order is meteor shower lights, spike lights and then bollard lights. If I buy meteor shower lights, I sacrifice the opportunity to enjoy spike lights and bollard lights - and that forgone experience, plus the retail price of the meteor shower lights, is the cost I incur for my favourite lights. If I love spike lights nearly as much as meteor shower lights, then my cost of choosing meteor shower lights is higher than if I don't really like spike lights then bollard lights at all.

Now, which position of the two do you think is most beneficial to you? Evidently, it's the first option - the one in which you like spike lights nearly as much as meteor shower lights. Even though the first option is a higher cost, it's more preferable than option 2, where you are indifferent to the other 2 options. The take home economic wisdom here is that the better your range of choices, the higher your cost in choosing your favourite, but the higher quality the thing usually (but not always) is.

This can be applied to many other walks of life - employment offers, marriage offers, dating, holiday offers, and so on. Let's take online dating. Suppose you have two scenarios. In the first scenario, you have the choice of dating Fantastic Fay and Amazing Amy. Let's suppose overall quality (looks, intelligence, personality, kindness, trustworthiness, wit, occupation, etc), can be measured out of 100, and say Fay is 95 out of 100 and Amy is 92. The cost of choosing Fay over Amy is 92. In the second scenario, you have the choice of dating only Fantastic Fay or Reasonable Ruby, who scores 63 to Fay's 95. Assuming that you'd rather date Ruby than be single, choosing to date Fay costs you 63. In other words, the cost of choosing Fay over Ruby in scenario 2 (where Amy doesn't exist) is 29 points cheaper than choosing Fay over Amy in scenario 1 (where Ruby doesn't exist).

Clearly, if you date Fay in both scenarios, you're as intrinsically well off in each scenario, but you're not as extrinsically well off in each scenario, because your next best option is better in scenario 1 than in the scenario 2. That is to say, the cost of being in scenario 1 is higher than scenario 2, but it's still better to be in the higher cost scenario. To see why, suppose Fay takes a job abroad, and your relationship ends abruptly just as it begins. You're gutted, but now you look at your next option. In scenario 1, it's Amy at 92 points, whereas in scenario 2, it's Ruby at 63. You are better off in the higher cost scenario (scenario 1), even though here, 'higher cost' is synonymous with 'a more preferable scenario'.

All this we've covered constitutes one of those counter-intuitive things about economics - things that are true yet few people believe because on the surface they appear false. After all, how can the option we don't choose cost anything? That's not how we ordinarily measure cost. When we go shopping in the supermarket and buy £100 worth of goods, we don't think up a bill in our heads of all the items we neglected to buy, and what that opportunity cost amounted to. But to understand opportunity costs in relation to consume and producer surpluses means understanding that as the options get better and more plentiful, so do the costs.

I deliberately saved this one until last, but here's a scenario that should make all the above even more plainly obvious. If you're told you can go to a car showroom and pick a free car of your choice as you have the winning ticket, it would be easy and not feel very costly to go and pick out the Lamborghini if it was alongside rusty old bangers. You would hardly give what you left behind a second's thought. But if you had to select a car from a range of superb, luxury cars of all different kinds, you'd take a lot longer to choose one, and you'd spend more time thinking about the ones you left behind. That's an understanding you should bring to the considerations around high prices. 

Sunday Faith Series: An Interesting Observation About Adam & Eve

Humans are culturally primed to take responsibility for their own misdemeanours. If Celia in Liverpool is caught speeding, we wouldn't expect Carol in Newcastle to get sent the speeding fine. If Jack in Bristol assaults someone in a nightclub, it would be unfair if the judge gave Tom in Manchester a prison sentence. The story of Adam and Eve, then, even when one takes it as a myth intended to convey powerful truths about humankind (as I believe we are meant to take it), is an interesting illustration of what it means to be humans under sin.

Taken literally, it would be a silly story; one man sins, and because of that original sin the imputation falls on everyone who lives. That's even more unfair than my illustration of Carol in Newcastle getting the speeding fine for Celia's offence. It's more like Carol in Newcastle getting the speeding fine for someone who was caught speeding before she was even born.

How are we supposed to take the Adam and Eve story then? I have a rule about reading scripture - I think it all has to be read through the lens of the grace of Christ on the cross. Every book and every chapter is bound to be read anaemically unless understood in relation to God's awesome grace - even the difficult parts. With that in mind, here's a suggested way to view the Adam and Eve story. We know from our present day lens of understanding psychology, biology and neuroscience just how inevitable it is that people will make a mess of things in life. Our heredity, or psychological damage, our emotional weaknesses and the other numerous human shortfalls are now understood to be key components in how we screw up. Or to put it another way, the world is full of things that are bound to make us fall.

In contrast, the scene set for Adam & Eve is a paradisiacal backdrop, where we're told none of these earthly afflictions would have been a danger to them. They had no insecurities, no other people to damage them or bring out the worst in them. But yet even in paradise, susceptible to none of these faults, they were disobedient - they chose 'self' over choosing God - the primary sin that leads to all other sinning.

Perhaps the primary message the story is conveying is that if paradisiacal Adam and Eve can slip up under their conditions, it shows just how hopeless our attempts are at avoiding sin. If even the two safest people ended up sinning, it is quite unsurprising that relatively unsafe people like us were always going to sin. But with that comes the realisation of how the grace lens is brought to bear on our affliction. We are all so naturally screwed by ourselves that the only possibility antidote for us is the same antidote for paradisiacal Adam and Eve - the love and grace of God, given to us through the death and resurrection of Christ as a free gift that we had no chance of earning.

On The Curious Nature Of Incuriosity

I’ve known quite a few people over the years who are largely incurious about pretty much all of the most interesting things available to humans to ponder deeply. They live a fairly contented life, where family, work, friendships, running a household and some leisure time take up virtually all of their time and mental energy. But deep and profound questions and considerations about God, reality, existence, the universe, life, philosophy, morality, consciousness, free will, etc are met with, at best, a brief but transient spark of curiosity, and, at worst, blithe disinterest.

I’ve always found this strange, on at least two counts:

1) Those deep and profound considerations are really the elixir of life’s purpose, joys and wonders, not mere adjuncts to the story

2) It’s near-certain that, with the right balance, your family life, work life, friendships, home life and leisure time are greatly enhanced, not compromised, by an interest in the deep and profound considerations of the world

Consequently, then, if being curious seems to be much more beneficial than being incurious, why do so many people prefer incuriosity over curiosity? One obvious possibility is that being curious requires a lot of effort that being incurious does not, so most people choose not to bother. Another possibility is that curiosity takes you on a journey that engenders more internal mental anguish than simply leaving well alone. Yet another possibility is that curiosity leads to more knowledge and more opinions, and therefore the likelihood of more epistemological conflict with others.

All three of those possibilities seem mutually plausible – they tap in to the human tendency to act according to the law of parsimony (the law of least effort). In order to think competently about something, you need to have learned lots of facts, and also how to reason well, and when faced with that, parsimony can probably seem quite seductive.

But incuriosity is to our detriment. I’ve often pondered whether people can be taught or encouraged to be more curious. I’m pretty sure that once people begin to learn and discover more, their curiosity compounds like interest. I should imagine it’s unlikely that you can comfortably know lots and not want to know lots more. Consequently, perhaps the most influential curiosity is the nascent curiosity – helping create the spark from which all fires can burn. Or perhaps, we have to get excited about thinking big before we can even start thinking small. It may be, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, that if we want people to build ships, we don’t get them gathering wood, collecting tools, and assigning tasks – we, instead, teach them to “yearn for the vast, endless sea.”.

 

Sunday Faith Series: Christianity - Genius or Madness?

There are two common binary considerations associated with Christianity - one is: Is it true or false? - and the other is: Is it good or evil? I prefer to frame it a different way by asking; Is it genius or madness? If it is madness, it is probably false and evil too, whereas if it is genius, it is probably good and true. Hang on, I hear you object - why can't it be a work of genius in its moral proclamations, but not in the least bit true when it comes to its claims of Jesus' divinity?

It's a fair question. Telling us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to be charitable, compassionate, kind and morally excellent is hardly wisdom that could not have been thought up by an excellent human. But as C.S Lewis reminds us in his 'Lord, liar or lunatic' trilemma, Jesus made claims to have co-equality with God, so as long as we accept that the scriptures are an accurate portrayal* then Christ couldn't have been thoroughly excellent if He either a) told so many lies about being God, or b) was under so many false misapprehensions.

Christianity is based on the proposition that Christ is God in human flesh - not a mere man. Therefore, to consider Christianity as true or false, or good or evil, means to consider it in terms of genius or madness. If God loves us, and can see that by ourselves we are all pretty wretched, ego-stroking, status-mongering, selfish creatures, then there may be a certain genius to the creation story - one that even the world's greatest human genius probably wouldn't have the imagination or audacity to think up.

Consider the story. Thanks to His penchant for autonomy and volition, God creates a world full of humans, and gives us the freedom to be ourselves. In being human, we learn, we grow, we slip, we fall, we have joy and gladness and pain and hardship - the whole rich tapestry of experience. Yet constrained by the limitations of being human, God knows that the only way we can reach the destiny for which we were created is to have help - rather like a teacher helps a pupil, or a parent helps their child. God's cosmic story is that He would be born into this world in a backwater village in ancient Palestine, live as we live, suffer immense pain and torture, die under the most horrific circumstances and then demonstrate through the resurrection that bodily death is not the end.

It sounds a strange way to bring justice to the creation story - and I remember it certainly sounded positively bizarre before I became a Christian. But a God who helps us to salvation and to renewal by nailing all our sins to the cross, and inviting us into His kingdom with love and grace, may just be demonstrating the work of a Divine genius - the work of such genius, in fact, that no group of people would be crazy enough to make it all up and proclaim it as the pivot around which the rest of existence revolves.

Surely an ordinary man or a woman, even if they were a genius, wouldn't have thought of such a peculiar thing - it makes for strange consideration at a human level. Why couldn't God have just forgiven us without needing to come down to earth and suffer as a man? Perhaps He could have chosen that method - but the idea of a God who loves us enough to put Himself in our shoes, live all the earthly hardships that we live, and suffer grief, pain, humiliation loss and death for us might just be so something so ingenious that ordinary humans would never entertain it.

You may object that that kind of reasoning could justify all sorts of nonsensical ideas about God. We could just as easily envisage a God who became a five dimensional object, or a God who juggled 100 balls with one hand for a year - the imaginative possibilities are endless.  But hold on, the alternatives may be endless, but they do not have the same gravitas as the real accounts of Christianity. It takes something quite remarkable to change the whole course of human history in the way that Christianity did, and to inspire such a multitude of creative excellence - theology, apologetics, literature, poetry, art, music, architecture, and so on. And let us also not forget the numerous martyrs that died for their faith by standing up to oppressive authorities and refusing to renounce their beliefs. This Christian faith is no ordinary thing. I have no inclination towards false dichotomies or faulty trilemmas - but it seems to me that such an extraordinary thing is either the work of a Divine genius or else it is utter madness.

I won't deny that the idea of an infinitely good God seeing everything we do and knowing our thoughts and our intentions better than we do sounds very much like madness. I also won't deny that the idea of Heaven being a gift earned for us by Jesus on the cross also sounds a bit like madness too. The first one sounds a bit like madness because it involves God as some kind of surveillance camera in the sky from whose attention we can never escape. And the second one sounds a bit like madness because it means that our bad deeds are not quantifiable in terms of desert - so a genocidal dictator and a nice lady volunteering in a charity shop can both be with Jesus in paradise by accepting God's free gift.

But once we conflate the two 'mad' ideas, we see them both in a more enriching way, as two complementary sides to the same golden coin. So much so that even our day-to-day sins - like uncharity, a bad temper and selfishness are up for continual re-examination when we have a relationship with God. But on the other hand, our continual efforts to improve and be better people are part of the grace-centred relationship with God too. So while God sees everything we do, and knows our thoughts and our intentions inside out, He views us not as reproachable sinners but as forgiven sinners. He sees us as sharing in the victory that Christ's free gift won for us on the cross. 

* Not everyone accepts this claim, of course - but given that faith in God involves faith in the accurate propagation of His word, it's a bit of a moot objection.