God, Genocide & Good Neighbourliness

                                          The Conquest of Jericho- Jean Fouquet

 You shall consume all the peoples which the Lord, your God, is giving over to you. You are not to look on them with pity, nor serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you.
Deuteronomy 7:16 

And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you, shall be as one of yourselves, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 19:33-34

Those who attack the God of the Abrahamic faiths as a genocidal maniac often quote the text from Deuteronomy but never the one from Leviticus. The reverse is true for those who conceive of Abraham's God as some kind of ethereal fluffy bunny. Yet both texts belong to the same religious tradition and are considered to form part of the divine revelation of God to man. It is especially difficult for the followers of Jesus to reconcile the smiting hip and thigh which forms such a great part of the Old Testament histories to the peaceful teachings and witness of the Son of Mary. So much so that from the earliest times various heresies have been proposed by figures like Marcion and Mani suggesting that there is an evil God who does bad things (most of the Old Testament) and a good God who does good things (most of the New Testament.) Whilst such heresies are seldom actively advocated nowadays they are, as it were, taught by default by those, mostly liberal, theologians who simply omit to defend the 'difficult' passages of the Old Testament.

Is there a single common thread which unites the command to destroy the Canaanites with the Law demanding that strangers be treated with love? The Lord has an abiding concern for His people  'You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine' (Leviticus 20:26) His concern is that the Israelites should be a people apart, different from the surrounding nations because devoted to the One True God. The purpose behind the occupation of Canaan is not primarily the destruction of its previous inhabitants or even the mere acquiring of territory. It is that the Israelites be not contaminated by the sin of idolatry. A sin which, as I discussed in my post Disappearing Into Darkness, is rather more serious than simply expressing a preference for a Pepsi god over a Coca Cola god. Of course one might quibble over the means used to attain this end, genocide, ethnic cleansing, a point to which I shall return later.

The concept of holiness is not exhausted by an adherence to monotheism it also includes imitation of the object of worship 'The Lord, the Lord, a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity' (Exodus 34:6) So, in their dealings with their neighbours the Chosen People must also behave in a like manner. The apparent contradiction between the command 'destroy' and the Law 'love' is resolved into a question of power. If the Israelites settled into a land with a substantial existing population with established religious and cultural practices then the temptation to adapt to their surroundings, or 'integrate' as we might say today, would be irresistible and their character as a separate monotheistic people would be lost. On the other hand if they became the dominant group with their culture solidly established, their faith secure, then they would have nothing to fear from ethnic and cultural minorities in their midst and certainly no imperative to expel or extirpate them.

What implications does this have for 21st Century Christians? Well, the idea of a People of God remains but not one which lives behind a physical boundary and is policed by a written Law. I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one (John 17:15) The Church takes its mission to the heart of the world and rests in the Spirit for protection against the world's temptations to idolatry and other sins. Which means that the weapons of conquest and dispossession are, under the New Covenant, wholly inadmissible and any Christian who claims to be doing God's will while carrying out such atrocities adds blasphemy to their other wickedness's. The call to imitation of Divinity remains and in Jesus, Divinity Incarnate, we have a clear role model always before us. The strangers in our midst, minority ethnic, religious and cultural communities, must be loved. How must they be loved?  As we love ourselves.

                                    Testament and Death of Moses- Luca Signorelli

It is certainly possible to love someone without actually liking them. Sometimes we don't like ourselves very much but even then we are seldom less than kind to our mind, body and spirit. So too with our neighbours. We can be self critical but seldom do we mock, stereotype or caricature ourselves. So too with our neighbours. When we are hungry we feed ourselves, when naked we clothe ourselves, when threatened we keep ourselves safe. So too with our neighbours. A person who is harsh with herself, who doesn't listen to herself, who blames herself without considering her own account of events first would be unbalanced and possibly ill. So too in our relationships with our neighbours. All of this, of course, applies to any neighbour but those who come from minority communities are most at risk of being dismissed by us as 'not really neighbours.' We see what we imagine to be the problems they cause or what we imagine to be the threat which they pose before we see the person. Or indeed we fail to see the person at all, only the problem. This is not a mistake we make with ourselves, we never forget our personhood, our identity as an individual beloved by God and for whom Jesus died. If we are to follow the Law of the Spirit then the 'illegal immigrant' disappears into the 'man like me,' the refugee into the 'woman like me,' the Muslim, the Jew, the Hindu into the 'child who loves their mother.' Certainly we should not pretend that there are no problems but in dealing with them we must start from the principle that all humans, each human, must receive from us no less than we give to ourselves.

So, genocide, ethnic cleansing are these signs that the Old Testament God was evil?  There are a number of points seldom considered which I shall briefly flag up. Whether, taken together, they constitute a reasonable refutation of the charge is a matter of judgement.

• The Canaanites lived morally reprehensible lives 'it is not because of your justice or the integrity of your heart that you are going in to take possession of their land; but it is because of their wickedness that the Lord, your God, is dispossessing these nations before you.' (Deuteronomy 9:5) This included child sacrifice to their deity Moloch.
• While no doubt some Canaanites were innocent, including those children who hadn't been sacrificed, in ancient warfare separating the innocent from the guilty was not possible so either the guilty would never be punished or the few must suffer because of the acts of the many.
• Such actions require an unequivocal mandate. When the God who has gone before you as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, who has parted the Red Sea, who has rained down food from heaven upon you, who has brought water out of a rock and so on tells you to do something you should be sure to do it. Unless you have such a mandate these actions would be monstrous crimes. Something I hope to touch on in my next blog (Ancient) Israel & Ethnic Cleansing.
• The existence of divinity is proof of eternity. The life of the Canaanites was not limited from the period between conception in the womb to death in massacre or battle. They always are in the hands of God. If they suffered injustice in time it shall be compensated in eternity. This is not a general licence to kill people and let God sort them out afterwards but it can be considered as an operative factor in association with the previous point about a Divine mandate. Where such a mandate is known on irrefutable evidence to exist then the agent of that mandate arguably is not morally culpable so long as his motive is obedience not anger, greed or lust. 

The main point to grasp is that the Canaanite genocide is a problem of history and theology the need to love the stranger that dwelleth with you is an urgent necessity and a basic Christian duty. Go to it!

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ps Here is the picture I very nearly used to illustrate this post-

                                            The Brick Testament

Independence for Scotland?

                                       Tuscan School, The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew
For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.
Hebrews 13:14

For we ha'e faith
in Scotland's hidden poo'ers
The present's theirs
but a' the past and future's oors.
Hugh MacDiarmid 

This is a spiritual blog not a political one, forbye which most of the people who read it will never come within a thousand miles of Scotland. So what for am I writing a post anent the Scottish Independence referendum of September 2014? Firstly, because I'm Scottish about which more later. Secondly, because it seems like a good test case for considering the relationship between spirituality and patriotism or nationalism. After all if, for example, Christians hold that the 'one thing necessary'(Luke 10:42) is to 'seek first the Kingdom of God' (Matthew 6:33) then you would think that they would look with a lofty disdain on merely earthly kingdoms.

In the New Testament we frequently find suggestions that in our personal hierarchy of values we should put mundane considerations such as income, family or country low down on our list of priorities. For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul (Matthew 16:26) If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26) And within the historical context of the first century Holy Land the very actions of Jesus bear witness against the nationalism of many of his compatriots. Early in His mission we see Jesus therefore, when he knew that they would come to take him by force, and make him king, fled again into the mountain himself alone (John 6:15)

From the perspective of the Roman authorities the territory was full of Palestinian terrorist like Barabbas (Mark 15:7) who concealed themselves in the civilian population and used them as human shields while committing 'sedition and murder.' From the point of view of many Jews though groups like the Zealots were heroes who fought valiantly against a regional superpower. The fact that they had no chance of success did not matter much so long as they struck a blow on behalf of a people who had been beaten and dispossessed by a powerful foreign foe.There was an expectation that a figure anointed by God, Messiah or Christ means the anointed one, would be able to unify the Jews and turn the disparate groups of Jewish jihadis into a force capable of driving the occupying power into the sea. Many thought that Jesus would be such a figure. He, however, repudiated such nationalism. My kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) He told the Roman governor Pilate.

The only witness in favour of nationalism in the New Testament comes from St Paul who writes For I could wish that I myself were accursed and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kin according to the flesh. (Romans 9:3) But even here he acknowledges that 'not all who are of Israel are Israel' meaning that membership of a nation or tribe or clan is secondary to the main business of life which is spiritual. Encountering and responding to the transcendent reality is what matters and anything in the material world which substitutes itself for the deity, such as the Nation, is is to be rejected. What we do in this world, such as loving our neighbours as ourselves, should flow from the divine encounter. Nothing can be put into a separate category where spiritual values do not apply.

Does this mean that Christians in Scotland should ignore the referendum and that they have nothing to contribute to the debate? No, but it means that their contribution needs to come from a distinct angle. There is nothing peculiarly Christian to be said about a common currency or how much oil is left in the North Sea (although there is a Christian angle to the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Scottish soil.) But Christianity does have something to say about community.

There are many things in this world which are both imaginary and real at the same time. Or, more precisely, they are real because they exist in people's imaginations. Money is one such thing. With a coloured piece of paper it is possible to buy haggis and chips but not a bottle of single malt whisky. With a slightly different coloured piece of paper one can buy not only a single malt but also several haggis suppers and a deep fried Mars bar while receiving numerous metal disks in exchange for the paper as well. The intrinsic worth of both bits of paper is identical but the value we ascribe to them is a collective act of the imagination. A country or nation is a similar imaginative creation. If nobody believes that a country exists then it does not exist. If large numbers of people believe that a country exists then that alone will have the power to bring it into being if it is not already established. Nature does not create nations. Geography does not create nations. God does not, in the usual sense of the term, create nations. Contrary to what you might expect economic necessity does not create nations either although it plays a part in forming and sustaining them. And most particularly science does not create nations.
       
A country is an imagined community. It is not real in the sense that no single individual imagines the country to be just precisely, just exactly the way that country actually is. People attribute to the nation a collective sensibility, a shared set of values which it does not possess. They understand it to have a shared history which it has never lived, all historical accounts are highly selective and in any event the past is even more of an act of the imagination than the national community is. Very often a patriot thinks of her country as being mostly composed of people very like herself but no country is very like any one person. Commitment to nation or love of country is an act of faith in an imagined reality. 'Just like Christianity!' the atheists among you will say. However that might be Christianity and Nationalism have this in common they proceed from a notion of Incarnation. Ideas which taken in isolation are mere abstractions take on life when they are clad with flesh. Moreover, from the beginning Christianity was Church, a community. Without Church there is no Christianity. Without community there is no Nation. The Church community is in part a visible, structured thing with rituals and sacraments, it subsists in the Catholic Church, and in part an invisible, spiritual thing, a hermit on a mountain is as much part of the community as a woman at a Papal Mass attended by millions. So too the Nation, whether it has a State of its own or not, exists in both visible and invisible forms. A People without shared rituals and agreed common signs is no People at all.

What the members of a nation agree among themselves to imagine about themselves becomes an incarnated reality. Christians who are called to be the leaven that leavens the whole must play their part in contributing ideas and values to this shared act of imagination. The loyalty which they have may be first and foremost to the person of Jesus Christ but He is not an abstraction. He is a person and He translates His ideas and values into action in the world. In the national conversation Christians must seek to ensure that the collective imagination becomes tinged with the personality of Christ so that the nation as a whole through its agencies, such as the health service or the foreign office, and each member of that collectivity acts more or less consciously under the influence and inspiration of these values. This should not be confused with evangelism or a mingling of Church and State. It is no business of the State or Nation to demand of its members allegiance to a religious confession as a prior condition of membership of that country. Explicitly recruiting to the Church is a task for the Church alone. But it is the business of Christians to diffuse their values in society and it is not the business of State or Nation to prevent them and to insist that religion is a purely private affair.

Leaving that to one side. Do Christians have a duty to love their country even if they are excluded from the national conversation or if their views are not heeded? The philosopher Simone Weil said that "In the soul of a Christian, the presence of the pagan virtue of patriotism acts as a dissolvent"  What she had in mind was specifically the patriotism of Rome (and also of Nazi Germany which was then occupying her native France) It is a pagan virtue if it is directed towards the notion of the State as an agent of power, as an idol to be worshipped. To love your country in the sense of saying 'we are number one' is morally abhorrent in a Christian. It is to identify might with right and your notion of God with the policies of your country. There is no sense in which Christians can justify sin in the name of patriotism. And to the extent that a country is mired in sin a Christian who wilfully either distorts theology to justify evil or pretends that her countries policies are something other than they really are has departed from Christianity and become an idolator. There is a positive duty of resistance laid upon Christians which always and everywhere trumps patriotism. Where a nation embarks upon a path which Christianity condemns Christians are bound to refuse cooperation at the very least.

Professor Weil, however, joined the Free French resistance out of the love which she bore for France. Patriotism can have many faces. She wrote “One can love France, for the glory which would seem to insure for her a prolonged existence in space and time; or one can love her as something which being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account. These are two distinct ways of loving" Recognising that a nation is a product of imagination, that at some point it comes into existence and at some point it will cease to be. Recognising too that it is no more and often less than the best of the best people who make it up Christians have a duty to strengthen the good, console the weak and defend the right. Their place in the nation is not as apologist nor as traitor but as bulwark. The great gift a nation can offer is stability. Through its institutions and shared values it can, for a time, allow for the maintenance of what most of its members agree to be good. Families can be safe, children can be taught, one generation can share its imagination with another. Christianity places the family at the centre of its project. Country and Church have a shared stake in stability which does not exclude, for example, one country seceding from another as may happen in Scotland. The argument here being that the shared values which Scots imagine that they have will be lost if the Union with an England possessed of antagonistic values persists.  

                                                        William Hepburn 1940-2011

Which brings me to my Scottishness. Since I live in partibus infidelium, also known as Exeter, and may, after all never return to my native land it is possible that the only practical impact upon me personally of a 'Yes' vote would be my having to acquire a different passport. Yet, if a nation is an incarnated set of ideas (or dreams) a person from that nation is a bearer of those ideas. Accept them or reject them ones life is never entirely free from an interior dialogue with them. It is usually through the family that those values are first transmitted. My late father William Hepburn, God rest his soul, was a Scottish Nationalist for around 50 years of his life. Had he lived few things in that life would have given him more happiness than to answer the question "do you want an independent Scotland?" with a resounding Yes! I can almost hear him saying "if not this time then next time" I never shared his nationalism, I don't share it now. I am sad beyond words that he cannot crown his act of imagination with a triumphal vote but my imagination is not his.

But he did teach me one thing of inestimable value about this debate. He became a Nationalist in the 1960's before oil was discovered in the North Sea. His conviction did not rest upon an argument from material well being. He believed that whether or not Scots were financially better off as a result of independence was not the most important consideration. The current debate among politicians has mostly been about money. The 'No' campaign offers no vision for a better tomorrow, it simply warns against a worse one where voters may be several hundred pounds a year out of pocket. The 'Yes' campaign counter by saying 'no they won't be.' If, however, Scotland does vote for independence it will likely not be about either of these propositions. Scots will be saying that, yes, they know there is a financial risk but, so long as the weak and vulnerable are protected that is not the real point of the thing. They will be voting for a future where the shared values that they imagine that they have will take an assured place as of right in the governance of their country. And they will be rejecting the values which they do not wish to have imposed upon them by distant elites.

Whether they know it or not many Scots who vote 'Yes' will be striking a blow against materialism. Because of the crass nature of the 'No' campaign few Scots will vote for it for other than material reasons. Christian Scots can make hard headed calculations as well as the next voter and there is nothing wrong with voting for the well being of your family and yourself provided it is not at another's expense. But when you vote for money and money alone it is a sign that your horizons are too low. I do not, as I said, share my father's Nationalism but I do share his thrawnness. It is one of the things that we tell ourselves about ourselves that we are a thrawn people. And it is a piece of imagination that to some extent has become a reality. If the 'No' camp thinks so little of Scots that it offers money in place of enduring values then many Scots will say the hell with  them I'm voting 'Yes' whatever the risks may be. Scotland is better than its politicians and it places more emphasis upon things that endure longer than a politician's promises. Independence for Scotland? I say Yes.

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A Christian Country?

David Cameron the Prime Minister of the UK, it must be noted, is first and foremost a politician. This means that his words generally mean more than, or less than they appear to mean but practically never mean what they appear to mean. So when he says-

"I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith "

It is worth asking the question 'what meaning or meanings does this conceal?' 

To my mind, such as it is, Mr Cameron has, no doubt intentionally, hopelessly confused three different strands of thought only one of which is unquestionably true. The fundamental ambiguity rests in his use of the word 'we.' To whom does it refer? The individual believer? The State? UK society at large?

What is true is that each Christian as an individual is called upon to bear witness to their faith. This is primarily expressed by the way they live their lives. The fruits of the transformative power of Christ should be manifest in the way that Christians are pure love to each person whom they encounter. 

The first confusion lies in the use of the word 'evangelical.' By virtue of their vocation to the faith a believer is to be evangelical which is not the same thing as 'an evangelical.' Evangelicalism is a particular form of Christianity, it believes certain things and acts in certain ways which other parts of the Christian family have difficulty in accepting as authentic manifestations of the Holy Spirit. It is, however, a current of opinion which has sometimes been more or less easily co-opted by the political Right and I suspect that Mr Cameron used the word intending to defend it in the first sense but also to send a signal to Evangelicals that he is on their side if not in their tribe.

The second confusion and that liable to cause most offence is in the possible application of the 'we' to the State. The State has no business to be Evangelically Christian. Not because, or not just because, we are a multicultural, multi faith, diverse country. But because State functionaries are appointed on their ability to perform their statutory tasks and it would be absurd to apply a religious belief test in addition to a competence test in giving people these appointments. It would be still more absurd to expect non-believers to fulfil a Christianly evangelical role if they themselves are not believers. The best that the Christian Church or the ecclesial communities of the Reformation can expect from the State is a recognition of the special role they have played and continue to play in UK and European society.

David Cameron remains a politician. The debate he has stirred up really does nothing to help the Christian faith or to impress upon the minds of those who hear him the Good News about Jesus Christ. But it probably does help the Conservative Party bring on board Evangelicals and those for whom the words 'Christian values' is a shorthand way of saying 'everything was better in the 1950's'. And that is all he cares about. 

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We must respect our opponents' humanity

It occurs to me that I never got around to posting my Guardian article published in the wake of the Arizona shootings last year. This is that

Comments by and about Sarah Palin over the Arizona shootings have underlined the importance of civility in the public sphere. Photograph: Randy Snyder/Getty Images

The question: Does civility matter?

The opening lines of the Buddhist classic the Dhammapada are "Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox." Thought precedes words, words precede deeds. Does Sarah Palin precede the terribleshootings in Arizona?

Arguably anyone who answers that question by saying "yes" could be accused of creating a climate which legitimises the assassination of Palin herself. Incivility is a vicious spiral. It is a continuation of war by other means. The point of attack speech is not to convince but to defeat by humiliation or other means. It proceeds from the conviction that our rightness, the rightness of our cause is more important than the mere persons of those who disagree with us. If our opponents are not people but "wing-nuts" or "lifestyle gays" then it doesn't really matter what we say. If they are cut they do not bleed.

It seems to me that for a Christian the starting point should be Christ. Not so much "what would Jesus do?" as "why did Jesus suffer?". I have never met a person that Jesus did not die for, I have never spoken about a person that Jesus did not love. When I am thinking about my best friend's best friend then I think differently than if I am thinking about some warmongering hockey-mom that wants to nuke Iran. And that should be reflected in how I write, how I speak, how I act.

Back in 1984 the IRA exploded a bomb in Brighton that very nearly killed Margaret Thatcher. Over the course of the next few days I lost count of the number of people I heard saying, on the street, in buses, at supermarket checkouts, how much they regretted that the IRA had failed to achieve its aim. These were not Republican sympathisers, these were people who hated Thatcher and without willing the means, terrorism, willed the end, assassination. And that at a time when dialogue had not been coarsened and brutalised in the way that appears to have happened since the culture wars began in the US. Which brings us back to thoughts preceding words preceding deeds. Unexpressed hatred is no less dangerous than its expressed variety, arguably it is more so. The supreme incivility does not consist of calling someone less than human. It consists in believing that someone is less than human.

In debate and discussion I usually (actually always) start from the assumption that I am right and that those who disagree with me are wrong. It seems pointless to argue from a point of view otherwise. What I do not begin with is the assumption that my correctness makes me a superior form of creature to those whom happenstance has placed in the camp of error. Being right is not the same as being better. And if I am not better than my interlocutor, why act as if I was? Civil discourse does not proceed from respecting your opponents' beliefs, which in the case of atheists are ludicrous tosh, but in respecting your opponents' humanity. Once you do that, your finger never tightens on the trigger.

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Orange Dreams

I submitted this to the Guardian perhaps over optimistically

Reading Andrew Browns recent piece on Creationism at the Giants Causeway on the weekend before the big Orange Order 12th of July parades brings about an interesting juxtaposition of ideas. Andrew writes of the Young Earth Creationists-

 the world will not take much notice of my preferences, or yours. If we are to change it, we need reasons and explanations, not just wants. And we can't get the reasons and explanations that we need without reaching outside science, and outside the market. To the extent that creationists, too, are trying to do that, we should sympathise.

Which reminded me of these words of Patrick Pearse The Orangeman is ridiculous in so far as he believes incredible things; he is estimable in so far as he is willing and able to fight in defence of what he believes. It is foolish of an Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home Rule; but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest degree common sense but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his threatened liberty. 
http://publish.ucc.ie/celt/docs/E900007-005?fragment=6&numdiv=View

Whilst Brown and Pearse are an unlikely pairing, one a dewy eyed romantic with mystical leanings the other an Irish Republican, they both point to an almost universal reality. People have a need to explain the world to themselves and to explain themselves to themselves. Many of the religious, philosophical or political belief systems which we have do not consist of people making things up, the "imaginary friend syndrome", they consist of people encountering facts which contain for them some kind of emotional content. The facts may be true facts but the importance they have for the one who attaches themselves to them in a partisan fashion is that they convey a personal emotional "hit". They are facts which make us feel that we understand more than we did before we encountered them.

I think that it is more or less inevitable that most of us seek out such emotional truths or at any rate encounter them. And our immediate and passionate attachment to them is also practically inevitable. What follows on from that, however, is much more dependant upon personalities or the contingent circumstances in which we dwell. The Young Earth Creationist and the Orangeman stick doggedly to their facts and will forever combatively assert them against all other facts for which they feel no positive emotion. The parade they make of their attachment through the public streets, and especially the "enemy" streets, is a statement that the explanation that they have found is the end of the search for meaning, take it or leave it.

More commonly I think is the experience of finding fulfilling facts but not thereafter entering into a solemn pact and covenant to ignore all subsequently encountered unfulfilling facts. Not least because all our fulfilment is only ever partial at best. We still hunger and thirst for more and better explanations and this need fuels our continuing search. We resist the notion that there are no such universal explanations, and those who believe such a notion are themselves simply attached to an emotionally satisfying truth. Another unlikely pairing, Marx and Augustine, perhaps have between them described this as well as anyone ever has.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

 You move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm

The important question each of us needs to answer is not so much "are the facts that I believe true?" but "are the facts that I ignore unimportant?" No universal explanation can ultimately satisfy us if, deep down, we know we are suppressing inconvenient truths in order to attach ourselves to pleasing ones.

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Not Burning Books

I heard a report about the riots in London last night. The journalist said that every single shop in a street had been broken into and looted; except Waterstones. This means that hundreds of young people were desperate to grab the things of the flesh as represented by clothes, shoes, jewellery, bits of technology, money, but were completely indifferent to the world of ideas and the imagination as represented by books. If we had a generation of teenagers that wanted to loot books and then cart them home to read then that would be a sign of hope. But we seem to have a generation or, to be more precise, a small group within a generation that is about taking and having and using and then throwing away. Children who do not have dreams about green fields and broad horizons but have urges for sports gear and blackberries are already lost, a lost generation and role models for another lost generation-in-waiting. What poverty of imagination and mind throws aside the opportunity to pick up free books in favour of breaking and burning and destroying things of metal and brick and extracting things of plastic and lycra? What goes on in those heads and in those hearts? Those who fail to long for beauty can only bring about ugliness.

Young people are responsible for their own actions but they are not responsible for the world in which they find themselves or the messages they have been given by those who are older and have had the power to create or to stifle imaginations. Whatever Fire Brigade methods are needed to deal with today's problems today we, as a society, have a responsibility to form the young people of that lost-generation-in-waiting. If we cannot stop them rioting in ten years time at least let us form in them the desire to steal books and not bling.