In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Caliban retorts to Prospero:
You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t
Is I know how to curse. (Act 1, Scene 2: 437-438)
What is it about us that seems hell-bent on turning anything good into something bad? Words are wonderful, but they can be used to kill. Science progresses with techniques for curing and healing, but the same technology gets diverted into ways of killing ever more efficiently. Why? What is wrong with us?
Well, none of this is new if you are remotely familiar with any Christian theology… or basic human experience. But, in relation to current news stories, I make two rather simply observations: first re the Jimmy Savile horror story, and second re racism in football.
Various churches have had to pay heavily for allowing the systemic abuse of children and vulnerable people over decades. Quite right, too. Yet there has been a hint of a suspicion in some quarters that those doing the gloating about the nasty churches might one day need to defend themselves and their own institutions on similar terms. No schadenfreude here – just a fear that the problems experienced in the churches have less to do with the churches’ theology and more to do with common human propensities.
The BBC is now under scrutiny and certain newspapers scream at the BBC in judgement – seemingly oblivious to the moral questions hanging over their own treatment of vulnerable people. The BBC faces serious scrutiny and it clearly needs it. For Savile to have been able to exploit its culture for so many decades raises serious questions that must be (and will be) addressed.
But, those pointing the fingers now might need to be a little cautious in their judgements. They might be next. For the basic truth about all this stuff is that human beings have a tendency to turn goodness into badness, to exploit weakness and power, to put self-preservation before truth, and to pervert what began beautiful.
This applies to the banks, businesses that pay no taxes, media organs that treat people like commodities for the entertainment of others, clergy who abuse trust and abase the ‘good news’ they are supposed to represent. As we keep having to remind those who uncritically (and sometimes mindlessly) accuse religion for all the world’s ills, the worst abuses of human life in the twentieth century came from anti-religionists such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. These are human problems, not just problems to be nailed to people we don’t like.
In other words, this stuff goes right back to being human and not just part way to what humans say motivates them.
This is another reason why people like me get fed up with accusations that Christians are escapists, whilst humanists are people who ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. Christianity is rooted firmly in this world, in facing reality and taking direct responsibility for the whole shebang. The cross of calvary involves God and us looking the sad reality of the human condition in the eye and naming it for what it is. No romantic escapism; no fantasising that if we just tried harder everything would be OK; no wishful thinking about ‘myths of progress’ that seem somehow to end up lying in pools of other people’s blood dripping from the altar of someone else’s tribal ego.
Francis Spufford calls this “the human propensity to fuck things up” (HPtFtU). The Bible calls it ‘sin’. Take your pick, but the former spells out what the latter means after we have drained it of all the negative associations piled onto it as the shorthand that means all Christians are miserable self-haters. No, we are lovers whose experience cries out for some explanation, if not excuse. Read Spufford’s wonderful Unapologetic to see how he deals with this universal feature of human being. (And read Stephen Cherry for a reflection on the book.)
This is where the racism stuff comes in. I am writing this while Liverpool are giving away a two-goal lead against Everton – football being the game that houses racism (leaving match fixing to cricket, doping to cycling and competitive-dadness to Monopoly). Yes, we must do all we can to expose racism wherever it comes to light. Yes, we must legislate against behaviours and language that represent a curse within our society, blighting lives and scarring all of us with sheer nastiness. But, no, we shouldn’t be surprised that these things go on and will not be eradicated by all our best efforts.
As I once said to a neighbour in a General Synod debate on something or other: it is easy to win a vote – but winning the vote does not mean we have won the hearts and minds.
Unless HPtFtU is taken seriously – and the alternative is escapism, romanticism, fantasy, wishful thinking, etc – we will continue to bow at the altar of the sort of relativism that we see in our press: assuming that the best guide to moral goodness is merely that we know we are better than [insert chosen 'monsters']. (Which, of course, means that we might be well down the moral pecking order, but at least we are not as low as…)
Ferdinand (not Rio or Anton) bleats to Prospero in The Tempest:
I warrant you sir;
The white cold virgin snow upon my heart
Abates the ardour of my liver.
Says it all, really.
(And, Christianity doesn’t stop at realism or diagnosing the problem of the human condition; it offers a response that takes the human condition seriously. Start with Easter…)
October 28, 2012 at 7:32 pm
Christians are no better or worse than the rest of society at genuinely understanding all the implications of HPtFtU or the right response to it. Dogmatism, threats of a punishing God who only forgives if you consider to be sin whatever the speaker considers to be sin, a lack of empathy… can be just as damaging as too much relativism.
In theory we have the right answer, in pratice, we’re far too often the problem and secular compassion gets a lot further in taking the full reality of an individual’s HPtFtU on board and trying to help find a non dogmatic solution to it.
Ask anyone at the margins of your church how they feel about Christian moral certainties that firmly put some people right down the bottom, or anyone who is used to being told that their atheism or different faith puts them outside the bounds of salvation.
HPtFtU applies to all humans, not just the liberal, wishy washy, relativistic press and other lefties.
October 28, 2012 at 8:06 pm
Those who look for profit from privatisation of the BBC and their supporters have some of the pointiest fingers.
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Much less attention to Savile’s eleven annual invites to Mrs Thatchers’ New Years Eve Parties, Mrs Currie’s appointment of him to sort Broadmoor out, and his friendship with the Tory Councillor who was I/c Broadmoor and handed over the keys and a bedroom there.
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These people didn’t respect the BBC and couldn’t have expected the Corporation to pass Savile for such a role, but their imprimatur of a self declared anti tax millionaire must have added to his authority in the face of inquiries for example.
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News that a Tory Deputy Chairman Sir Peter Morrison was a well known and self admitted pederast is appalling.
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Why have not the Tories who have insisted on predatory inquiries into the failures of the BBC not sought to investigate their party’s
and its senior figures’ roles?
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It would have been far better had there been an independent inquiry into the manifold failures of all sorts of people and institutions – including the police and media – rather than the current confusion. The Police must seek those who must be prosecuted of course, but manifold other inquiries wil not carry public conviction. Ed Miliband was prescient to suggest something of this sort: Cameron was anti BBC minded, looking for a diversionary scapegoat to reduce attention to his recent failures not to adopt it.
October 28, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Erika, I don’t see that what I wrote denies what you are saying.
October 28, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Nick, in that case I misunderstood you and I apologise.
October 28, 2012 at 9:44 pm
What was life like prior to the evil eye of film and TV and books and theatre and every other form of communication-
Our historical Kings and Queens and religious leaders had base instincts that damaged and caused wars with unforgiveable consequences.
Is moral goodness something that has to be relearned?
So much is undone and broken now, why haven’t we all evolved and learned to be more loving and giving ?
October 28, 2012 at 10:22 pm
The JImmy Savile horror was by no means exclusively a ‘BBC problem’ but hell, these days a scapegoat is obligatoire! There were youth club abuses, teacher / pupil abuses, unfortunately that kind of thing was not unusual at the time. Clearly it doesn’t make it right, but it does make me laugh (or sick, I’m not sure which) all this sky high shock horror reaction, when back in 1977, everybody ignored it.
October 31, 2012 at 9:35 pm
I much prefer the term HPtFtU to ‘sin’ since if, as a Christian, I am a ‘self-hater’ then how am I supposed to love others as myself? I used to struggle with this question before I came to realise that God’s love and grace are truly unconditional.
As for Jimmy – he will be judged by one greater than us leaving us to concentrate on learning from the lesson that Stanley Milgram highlighted with his famous experiment on obedience to authority figures…….
November 6, 2012 at 11:53 am
Seems to me there is a deep longing for truth and righteousness out there… Britain is almost engulfed in a kind of moral ‘spring cleaning’ and no institution is exempt from this tide.
I wish I could be confident that at the end of this we will be a better society, but I fear that we will simply be more suspicaious and litigious.