Compassion Failure? Yes, and it’s not just the Chinese.

At 5:30pm on October 13th, a two-year-old girl left her mother’s side for a moment. Her name was Wang Yue, though her parents called her Yueyue, which means ‘Little Joy’. Wandering into the street in Foshan, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guandong, she was struck by a van. The driver, realising what he had done, stopped, with the child lying between the front and rear wheels of the vehicle.

Then he drove on, and the rear wheels crushed her for a second time.

For the next seven minutes, Yueyue lay bleeding on the road. The first person to come across her, a young man in a pale shirt, stepped around her and continued on his way.

The next, a young man on a moped, swerved around her, looking over his shoulder at her before he decided that he, too, did not want to get involved.

The next was a young man passing by on the other side of the road. He walked past, not taking his eyes of her as he continued on his way.

Then came another van. He flashed his lights, before driving his right-hand tyres over her legs, breaking them. It is worth saying at this point that Yueyue was still alive.

Three motorcyclists then passed in swift succession. Two looked. None stopped.

A red motortrike swerved out of the way, followed by another man on a moped. He stopped, examined the little girl, and then carried on.

A young mother, child in hand, hurried past. A motorcyclist behind them slowed before he too swerved to hurry on.

A young man in a green shirt displayed some interest as he sauntered past, hands in pocket. So did the moped rider following him.

Finally an elderly woman, a street-scavenger and scrap-peddler called Xuen Chengmi, found Yueyue, picked up the toddler and called for help. She was too late. Yueyue was brain dead. On October 21st, despite receiving the best possible medical care at Guangzhou Military District General Hospital, her life support was switched off, and Little Joy died.

There has been a staggering outpouring of self-recrimination in China. Reasons have been sought for the apathy of the passers-by. A number of theories have been put forward. Some of these have been specific to Chinese culture. A commentary in the Chongquing Times suggested “Our current system is obviously in an embarrassing state: corruption continues to run wild and evil people enjoy privileges, scandals with charity organizations such as the Red Cross stop people from donating to help the needy. All this certainly shakes up the beliefs of kind-hearted people.” According to this argument, societal mechanisms which fail to support or facilitate charitable impulses are to blame.

Others have pointed to a legal disincentive for those wishing to behave as Good Samaritans. In Nanjing, in 2006, a man named Peng Yu helped an elderly lady who was injured in the street after a fall. She asked him to take her to hospital, whereupon she accused him of pushing her over. The case went to court, where the judge decided in the woman’s favour, saying “common sense” dictated that if the man wanted to help, he must have felt some sense of responsibility for her injury in the first place. As a result, three years later in the same city, an elderly man who fell off a bus was only offered assistance after he assured those who were in a position to help that he would take full and sole responsibility for his predicament. On September 2nd of this year, an 88-year-old man fell on his face in the middle of a crowded street in Hubai in central China. He lay there for 90 minutes before anyone did anything. When they rolled him over they discovered that he had choked to death on the blood from his nose.

There are further disincentives. Someone found guilty of causing death through vehicular manslaughter is required to pay 200,000 yen (about $2,000) in compensation. However, if the victim survives, the culpable party is responsible for paying all of their medical bills – a total that may be far higher. The first van driver has been quoted as saying

When I realised I had knocked her down, I thought I’d go down to see how she was. Then when I saw that she was already bleeding, I decided to just step on the gas pedal and escape seeing that nobody was around me.

The driver, who had allegedly just broken up with his girlfriend, was talking on a mobile phone when he hit her. He then sought to avoid personal responsibility, explaining

You saw that girl on the CCTV footage, she didn’t see where she was going, you know. I was on the phone when it happened, I didn’t mean it.

Even those who do attempt to help face societal problems and backlash. Remember Xuen Chengmi, the scavenger who carried Yueyue to the side of the road and summoned help? Initially, she was praised for her actions: she was given rewards by both the town and local governmental offices, while the manager of an IT company gave her a rather larger gift and offered to make her an ‘honorary employee’ so as to ensure a more stable source of income. However, there then began a backlash: even her neighbours, she says, are now saying she did what she did in order to gain wealth and fame. She has had to leave her home as a result. The Diplomat speculates that in a society as utilitarian as China’s, altruism is regarded with suspicion at best and as an outright perversion at worst: as a result, Chengmi’s altruistic actions are more comfortably viewed as utilitarian by those whose own daily motivations err on the side of self-interest rather than charity.

Here in the West, another psychological theory is doing the rounds in an effort to understand the motivations of the disinterested passers-by. The Bystander Effect was identified after a psychological study conducted in the aftermath of the 1964 New York murder of Catherine Genovese. She was attacked and stabbed, in an assault that lasted half an hour and was witnessed by 38 people. By the time the police were eventually called, she was dead. The full details of the resulting experiment are available here (a very interesting article, if you have the time), but the relevant discovery was this: people take societal cues far more readily than act individually. This is the effect that Douglas Adams used to humorous effect in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ – in order to have spaceships become invisible, he had them cloaked in an ‘SEP Field’, SEP standing for ‘Someone Else’s Problem’. It is entirely possible that some who saw the broken and bleeding Little Joy considered her, simply, to be Someone Else’s Problem.

I know a little of what this might feel like. Driving home after a church lunch a few months ago, I saw a man collapsed on his face at the side of the road, beneath some trees. And I did – and I report this with some shame – feel a momentary stab of “I’m sure someone else will deal with him”. (I did in fact turn my car around as soon as I could and pull over a couple of minutes later, by which time he was conscious and sitting in the back of a car that had been able to get to him before I could. And both he and the driver of the car thanked me for my concern).

The case of Yueyue is not unique, and it is not unique to China. On Christmas Day last year, a woman in Brighton told 1,048 Facebook friends that she had taken a fatal overdose. No one went to her flat or contacted the police until it was too late. Two weeks ago, Jamie Hubley, a gay 15-year-old high school student in Ottawa, killed himself after suffering years of homophobic bullying, and months of a crushing and increasing sense of isolation. His last blog post was a suicide note, and read simply ‘This hurts too much’. His death has prompted public soul-searching, attempts to understand how and why he was not helped in time. Last week, in Greater Niagara General Hospital, 82-year-old Doreen Wallace fell and broke her hip in the foyer. No one, including passing nurses, would intervene until an ambulance was called (remember, she was in the hospital!) She lay bleeding on the floor for half an hour before a passing doctor put her in a wheelchair.

There has been much judgement passed by the Western media on Chinese society. The comments on Youtube – where it is possible to view the footage of Yueyue’s striking and abandonment, although I am not going to provide the link – have ranged from legitimate horror to calls for genocide on the Chinese people. But this is not a Chinese problem (though it may be exacerbated by factors in Chinese culture, an example of which might be shaoguanxianshi, a mindset described as ‘don’t get involved if it’s not your business’). It is a human failing. A failure of humanity, in which all humanity is complicit. “Evil”, said Terry Pratchett, “begins when you start treating people as things.” Morality begins with compassion. “Love your neighbour as yourself” saves those such as Yueyue, and goes some way to saving yourself.

Screwtape Sets A Frost

The diabolical timetable is somewhat different from the terrestrial one, and the devil Ragwort, who has responsibility for the entirety of the Scottish Sector, has just submitted his annual report. No doubt Hell, like any other bureaucracy, has official channels through which reports filter and responses are made; but, like any other bureaucracy, it seems that the real work is done outside that mandated structure. What you have before you, it would appear, is Screwtape’s unofficial response to Ragwort’s report. Screwtape has spent many years in the role of diabolical mandarin, and as a result his advice to his juniors is well worth heeding. For us, who are both spectators to, and the prize in, the Great Game, his commentary is scarcely less essential: when the stakes are this high, it is always worth paying attention to the state of play…

 

My dear Ragwort,

 

Allow me to come straight to the point. Your report has done the rounds, and although of course there has as yet been no official decision made on the nature of your Superiors’ response to it, I can tell you unofficially that that response will be highly favourable. You have done an excellent job in the last year, and you should be well pleased with your efforts thus far. I stress this because, of course, your task is not completed. Nor is it even close to being so. But you have made an excellent start.

The first section of your report, concerning the progress of Atheism in Scotland, speaks for itself, and does not require much by the way of commentary. The situation is satisfactory and is continuing in that manner. One development I did enjoy seeing was the success of the philological department’s most recent subterfuge. Replacing the term ‘atheism’ with ‘rational secularism’ or even ‘teapot agnosticism’ is a very real victory on two fronts, appealing to two different mindsets. ‘Rational secularism’ seems so much less bald, so much less stark, so much more sophisticated than the nakedness of mere atheism. It is the perfect term to be deployed by those who believe they have outgrown, out-matured the crudities of religious belief. ‘Rational secularism’ – it covers a multitude of sins.

The other prong of this attack resides with ‘teapot agnosticism’. “No one believes in the presence of a teapot orbiting Jupiter,” the argument goes, “but we can’t prove the non-existence of the teapot. Therefore we are agnostic about the teapot. So too with God. We can’t prove His non-existence, but no one seriously believes He is there. He is on the same level as the orbital crockery.” It is a magnificent argument for several reasons. First of all, it appeals to the sense of ‘fair play’ so many of these creatures purport to respect. By identifying itself as a form of agnosticism, the patients who hold to it can convince themselves that all they require is a really solid argument to change their minds. This is true in so few cases that we may as well ignore the risk entirely. People who are agnostic refer to themselves as agnostic, without the prosthetic addition of tableware. Secondly, by putting God on the level of a teapot orbiting Jupiter, there is a very real – if unacknowledged – identification of the Lord of the universe as being absurd. It may seem inconsequential, but this is a very real assault on the majesty of God. It is an excellent stratagem: it is hard to believe in God if He is ridiculous. The diminution of God by this argument is probably as potent a weapon against Him as the argument itself: the old ‘if You’re there, show Yourself’ demand we have been encouraging (provided the question is never asked with genuine desire to see) for thousands of years.

All this is good news. Heartening, even, and it will probably lead to a letter of commendation in your file. But it is to the second part of your report that I wish to recall your attention.

This second section deals exclusively with the nature of the Christian church in Scotland. The successes you have achieved (and let me say now that this year has, by and large, been one of success) can, essentially, be summed up in a single word: Balkanisation. Like a good hard frost on the rock upon which the church is built, the cracks between various groups are widening, and soon true fractures will appear.

One could almost sympathise with the little vermin. They have been so comprehensively thrown into tumult that human nature, aided and abetted by our ever-labouring agents, has taken an ascendant role in their dealings with one another and they have turned for comfort and guidance not to the Enemy, even though that is what He so earnestly desires, but to those among their peers whom they can already count on to agree with them.

There has been no cross-pollination of ideas. There has been precious little genuine discussion. Instead (oh, how sweet!) there has been much talk of ‘battle-lines being drawn’, and ‘the thin end of the wedge’ and so on and so forth. That man Yeats surely spoke very good sense when he observed that those unwilling to engage with argument prefer faction-fighting to the labour of unfamiliar thought. Better still, these battle lines are drawn between each other, rather than between the Church and Us. Make no mistake, Ragwort: the Christian Church is still a lion rampant, its teeth still sharp and its claws still fearsome. But thanks to our efforts it is now mostly engaged in chasing its own tail.

You must persist in encouraging this happy state of affairs. Never forget the blessed transmutation of the meaning of the word ‘parochialism’. It used to mean ‘pertaining to the parish’. When it did so it was a word to be feared: can you imagine the danger of a parish church actually involved in the life of its community, seen as a focal point for that community, open to all, exclusive to none, alive, active and healthy? You do well to recoil in horror from the thought. It offends every principle we hold dear. But thanks to many years of hard work, of clever strategising from devils whose names you rightly revere (my own superior, Grotwrangle, was involved), we now use ‘parochialism’ to mean ‘an excessively narrow-minded perspective on the world’. If there must be such entities as ‘parish churches’, our job is to ensure that the parish in question extends no further than the walls of the church building itself. By denying the very existence of ‘common ground’ it becomes infinitely easier to manufacture conflicts in which these churches can clash – and even in the case of genuine disagreements, the concealment of the common ground renders rapprochement all but impossible.

This, then, is your assignment for the next year. It is upon you that the burden rests. If we can’t directly blind the Christians whom we are trying to despoil to the truth that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself, we may yet be able to blind them to the fact that they have any neighbours at all. I noticed some considerable success scored recently against many Christians whom you persuaded to forget that their duty of Agape extends even to – indeed, especially to – those who horrify them. The trick is to make the Christians ever more comfortable, so that ever more about ‘the outside world’ offends them. If they cannot bear to face it they will not do so, and will instead live within the protection of the church family – a family we must pervert into defending itself against any and all threats, real or imagined, until it lies rabid and alone. You will find that the success of this project offers a very particular and invigorating delight, and the victims of your triumph will amuse the palates of those of us who here await them.

 

In the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

 

My Favourite Sketches

Hi all

No real rhyme or reason to this: these are just my personal 20 favourite comedy sketches that have appeared on tv down through the years, the ones which never fail to make me smile. Enjoy!

#20: Rowan Atkinson, ‘The School Master’

Rowan Atkinson is one of very few people who, like Peter Cook or Eric Morecambe, is just funny in the way that other people such as myself are just tall: it is an indivisible part of their nature. Atkinson is, however, almost unique in the way that he sees the comic potential not in the use of words but in the words themselves. This sketch is hysterically funny, not despite but because half of it consists of Atkinson simply reading out a list of names. There is literally no other comic who could achieve this. It’s brilliant.

#19: Peter Cook, ‘Biased Judge’

Peter Cook was, according to Stephen Fry, almost supernaturally funny. Quite apart from his near-perfect partnership with Dudley Moore (an example of which we shall see later) he was quite capable of producing startlingly memorable monologues, as this example demonstrates. Cook was the original owner of the magazine ‘Private Eye’, and he had very little time for Establishment figures – especially those who abused their positions, as this diatribe demonstrates. It was written with reference to the Thorpe Trial, and was written and first performed the evening of the day on which the real Judge made his not-entirely-fair-minded recommendations to the jury…

No embedding available, sorry, but here is the link: http://youtu.be/Kyos-M48B8U

#18: Monty Python, ‘The Fish Slapping Dance’

Monty Python was and remains the prime example of very very smart people being very very funny by being very very silly.The Fish Slapping Dance demonstrates precisely this. The sublime moment, for me, is John Cleese’s momentary examination of the alignment of his fish: it is this apparent checking to make sure everything is ‘just so’ that elevates the sketch from mildly amusing to side-splittingly funny.

#17: Armstrong & Miller, ‘Blue Peter – An Apology’

Cheekily, this video is a compilation of three sketches, but since they feature the same characters in the same situation, I think it’s permissable. I love these three sketches. They are perfectly constructed. Everything about them – the set, the clothing, the accents, the hairstyles, the poses adopted by the three characters (there’s something about the determined innocence of ‘Tina’s’ expression that absolutely cracks me up), and finally the syntax and lexicon, are so painfully accurate that it is entirely possible to believe that these are real apologies from a parallel universe…

#16: Mitchell & Webb, ‘I’m a Brain Surgeon’

We’ve all been there. We’ve all met someone ghastly at a party and wished that someone would, in some way, deal with them. This sketch is all those who have made that wish.

#15: Rowan Atkinson, ‘Welcome to Hell’

I may be over-analysing this, but there is something almost classical in the way this sketch is constructed. It clearly owes a debt to Dante Alighieri, with Atkinson’s devil, ‘Toby’, putting the French in with the Germans and the looters, pillagers and thieves being joined by the lawyers. That kind of contemporary analysis defines El Infierno, and by drawing its strength from the same kind of observations Atkinson’s sketch is damnably funny as a result.

#14: Not the Nine O’Clock News, ‘Constable Savage’

There are times (and we shall see this again with my selections for #13, #10 and #8) where sketches perform a function of social commentary and, indeed, indictment. The racism displayed by police forces in Britain at the time, and the attempts to weed it out, form the basis of this routine. A lot of it depends on Atkinson’s pitch-perfect delivery, but Griff Rhys Jones’s too-thick-to-even-know-he’s-thick ‘Constable Savage’ is a fantastic creation, and serves as the perfect foil to Atkinson’s verbal pyrotechnics.

#13: Mitchell & Webb, ‘Homeopathic A&E’

For anyone wondering why homeopathic remedies are regarded with skepticism bordering on contempt by those who, you know, think, this sketch provides all the answers. It also seems to be a favourite amongst the doctors I know.

#12: Rowan Atkinson, ‘Fatal Beatings’

There ought to be no way this sketch should work. Write it down in black and white and it seems just too dark and too sad ever to be funny: “This is a comedy sketch about informing a parent that their child is dead”. And yet…the sketch works because we all have a preprogrammed set of responses to make to a statement like that, and these are the responses that Rowan Atkinson’s character completely ignores. The sketch is funny (and it really is funny) because Atkinson is such a monster, and the parent’s (Angus Deayton) reaction is not so much grief as total bewilderment at Atkinson’s headmaster’s prioritising…

#11: Carol Burnett, ‘Went With The Wind!’

The first of the two big ‘set-piece’ sketches to appear on here, this is an epic parody of an epic film. Carol Burnett is just hilarious, and she would need to be to pull this off: hers is the central performance, and everyone else supports it. A little trivia: the ‘dress in the window’ appearance earned the most sustained laugh in the show’s – and indeed the station’s – history.

#10: Mitchell & Webb, ‘Are We The Baddies?’

Like ‘Fatal Beatings’, this is a sketch which takes a deeply unfunny subject  – namely, the question of complicity in the Holocaust – and somehow manages to make the existential musings of two SS officers deeply funny. It’s a very difficult sketch to analyse, but it’s wellworth watching – especially for the ending, which suggests a moral awakening of sorts.

#9: Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, ‘One Leg Too Few’

The late great Peter Cook was fortunate enough to find a partner equal to his comic genius in Dudley Moore. While Cook specialised in lugubrious establishment figures (it’s not hard to see why John Cleese so idolised him), Moore could provide the kind of ebulliant cheekiness that could be guaranteed to create sparks between the two. In this sketch, Moore’s manic energy is exactly the right counterpart to Cook’s elegantly awkward and delicate circumlocutions.

#8: Saturday Night Live, ‘Word Association’

Richard Pryor delivers an almost Zen performance (look out for his transition from finger-tapping amiability to lip-trembling apocalyptic rage) in this 1975 sketch, which dealt with racism through the policy of head-on confrontation. It is – and I choose my words advisedly – shockingly funny, and deserves to be better known this side of the Atlantic.

#7: The Two Ronnies, ‘Crossed Lines’

The Two Ronnies were the absolute masters of verbal tricks and tics, but their best sketches depended on near-perfect miscommunication. Their dazzling verbal gymnastics depended on the flexibility of language itself, and for that reason I – an English student – adore them.

#6: Morecambe & Wise, ‘Andrew Preview’

Andre Previn had no time to rehearse with Morecambe and Wise, and he learned the script on the way to the studio. Eric Morecambe’s “Pow! He’s in, I like him, I like him!” was the only ad-libbed line in the whole thing, and was an expression of relief as he realised Previn’s comedic timing was every bit as excellent as his musical timing. Do please enjoy the infamous Morecambe rendition of ‘Grieg’s Piano Concerto By Grieg’.

#5: John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Tailor, Marty Feldman; ‘Four Yorkshiremen’

The original and best version of one-upmanship, as seen on “At Last the 1948 Show”. Eventually not only do modesty and common sense go out the window, but so too do the very laws of time and space themselves.

#4: The Two Ronnies, ‘Mastermind’

This is one of the most fiendishly complicated sketches ever written. But it doesn’t look like it is. I discovered this the hard way, since I tried to write a new version of it for a newspaper article. The gags, oddly, aren’t the hard part. The hard part is the structure, and in particular the progression. In other words, it’s very difficult to move from a ‘what’ question to a ‘who’ question to a ‘why’ question and still have everything make sense, never mind be funny. For me, this was the Two Ronnies’ crowning moment in sketch comedy – more so than ‘Fork Handles’, which, while it may be funnier the first time you see it, doesn’t stand up to repeated viewings. This does.

#3: Monty Python, ‘Dead Parrot’

Do I really need to say anything about this epitome of absurdist humour?

#2: Morecambe & Wise, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

A play what Ernie wrote. Not only was this probably the best of Morecambe and Wise’s longer dramatic sketches, it was also a revelation for Glenda Jackson, who prior to this had not been considered a comic actress. After appearing in this she was asked to playVicky Allesio in the romantic comedy ‘A Touch of Class’…for which she won an oscar (her second). After receiving the award she received a telegram from Morecambe and Wise, saying “Stick with us, kid, and you’ll win a third!”

#1: Abbott & Costello, ‘Who’s on First’

Widely – and deservedly – considered the best sketch of all time, this masterclass in timing, delivery, writing and physicality is my favourite sketch. It is, again, perhaps not so widely known on this side of the Atlantic, but it remains unsurpassed. Have fun!

Investigating Squalor

I’ve never visited a prostitute, but I’ve had coffee with one or two and I’ve listened to their stories. They are desperately sad, and I have never been able to make the imaginative leap to understand the people who make use of the services that prostitutes offer. How could you be that exploitative and selfish? How could you cope with the sense of inescapable moral degradation you must – if you are self-aware at all – experience afterwards? How could you meet your own eye in the mirror? I don’t understand it. Although I now believe I may have the first inklings of awareness, because I have found an equivalent experience.

If you want to feel the same moral squalor, crawling self-loathing, squirming hypocrisy, and even the tawdriness of exchanging money for goods and services unacceptable in civilised society, the answer is very simple: buy a copy of The Daily Mail.

It’s all very straightforward. If you want to experience the visceral thrill of doing something you know to be absolutely indefensible, you are hard-pressed to beat reading The Daily Mail. There’s the delicious transgressive shame of either purchasing it at a newsagent (and the attempt not to meet the vendor’s eye); or you can look it up online having first ensured that you have put Firefox on to the ‘private browsing’ setting that will not subsequently damn you with your reprehensible browsing history.

There are so many things to feel bad about when you read The Daily Mail. The reporters, for instance. If at any point you become bored with the asinine posturing of Christopher Tookey, a man who understands ‘film critic’ to mean ‘moral guardian’ and who fails in both capacities, you can refresh yourself in the deep and ever-flowing wells of poison that fuel Jan Moir, restaurant critic and homophobe extraordinaire. If the attraction of professional bile palls, there is always – at least in the online version – amateur commentary available beneath the articles. Tookey’s columns offer particularly good mileage on this. There is, in fact, a clash-of-the-titans -style debate between the aforementioned Tookey & Moir on the subject of the film ‘Bridesmaids’ that offers exactly this. Maldwyn, of Carmarthen (and can I just say how much I love the name ‘Maldwyn’?) says

The last time I attended a cinema was to see Raiders Of The Lost Ark and do you know something, it had a story. No exploding cars, no depositing of stomach contents and other fluids…

I am a huge fan of the Indiana Jones films, and particularly Raiders Of The Lost Ark. And so I say to you with some confidence that that film features two exploding lorries and an exploding aeroplane (not to mention several vehicles run off the road in an excellent chase sequence), and that while there are no visible stomach contents there are certainly other fluids on display as Belloq’s head explodes and the heads of Major Toht and Colonel Dietrich melt like wax (which isn’t surprising, since that is exactly how that special effect was accomplished).You can depend on The Daily Mail and its readers to steer you clear of all efforts towards accuracy. (Incidentally, do we know when the paper’s self-imposed mission to categorise everything in the universe as either carcinogenic or cancer-preventing is ever likely to finish? It’s just that this is one case – among many, the Mail not having a good track record on medical stories – where accuracy would seem to be somewhat important.)

In addition to specialising in a very particular mission of disinformation, The Daily Mail also has a mission of manipulation. Consider the phrasing of these online poll questions:

“Can parenting lessons reverse Britain’s ‘moral decline’?”

“Does the creation of jobs justify wrecking the countryside?”

And my favourite:

“After its success during the riots, are you in favour of CCTV?”

What I love about these are the presumptions they bring to the framing of the question. In order for you to engage with the first question, for example, you have to accept that there has been a ‘moral decline’ in the first place – a position with which I strenuously disagree. The second uses the nuanced and non-inflammatory word ‘wrecking’; and as for the third…well, what can you say? You would be hard pressed to dig up a more loaded question anywhere online.

Then there’s the hypocrisy in which The Daily Mail so readily indulges. Are young children becoming more sexualised? Why don’t you look at all these pictures we’ve provided ‘in order for you to decide’? Is Britain ‘dumbing down’? Probably – but we’re still going to talk at tedious length about reality television.

Of course, none of these criticisms address the big and obvious problems with the paper: its parochialism, its rampant xenophobia, the Middle England sensibilities that enable it to include, as yet another online poll, the question “Are you in favour of independence for England?” But in a sense these don’t matter. They’re the window dressing designed to lure you in, to seduce you with the offer of giving you a place where the baser prejudices of your nature can be allowed to roam free.

Just so long as you’re not a gay muslim out to lower house prices, obviously.

Son of Perdition is no son of mine

From time to time I deliberately subject myself to books that I suspect are not going to be stimulating literary treats. It was in this frame of mind that I bought Son of Perdition, a novel by Wendy Alec (writing as W Alec), the co-founder of GOD TV (which I didn’t know when I bought it).

My first piece of advice to Ms Alec – or, at least, the team responsible for her cover art and bindings – is, if you’re going to write a novel that is part of a series, somewhere you should show which part of the series the book constitutes. Nowhere on the front or rear covers, spine, or opening pages does it inform you that this is the third in a proposed series of seven novels. In consequence, I was well into it before I began to suspect there was a whole lot of backstory I was missing.

Anyway, the plot: Lucifer kicks off the Apocalypse by begetting a child in a weird kind of virgin birth, whereby he clones his own genetic material. The boy, Adrian De Vere, is one of three brothers (as is Lucifer, whose brothers are Michael & Gabriel), and the two triads of brothers give their name to the series: Chronicles of Brothers. Adrian is now President of the EU, and in the aftermath of the Third World War he is the most powerful man in the world. His ascent to that position has been assured by the Illuminati (yes, them again), guided through Satanic ritual and running the world through a combination of global financial control, military black ops and total media dominance.

No conspiracy theory is left untouched, with 9/11, the credit crunch and economic meltdown all attributable to this shadowy council of 13. Meanwhile, in the First Heaven the angelic forces are marshalling to wage war and fight Armageddon, while in Hell Lucifer’s host is growing stronger and some now are beginning to walk the earth…

All of which is a set-up for a great supernatural thriller, which Ms Alec does not provide. Partly this is a question of technique. Ms Alec has never met an adjective she didn’t like (like? She’s practically co-habiting with them), which has led to such fine examples of the literary art as:

His face, although strangely scarred, was regal. The wide brow and straight patrician nose framed imperious sapphire eyes that held a mesmerising beauty.

His thick raven hair was silvering at the edges. On a normal day, he wore it pulled back fastidiously into a braid bound by a simple black band….

But today was not a normal day and this evening De Molay’s gleaming tresses fell loose to the shoulders of an exquisitely tailored Domenico Vacca suit that accentuated the well-honed body beneath it.

And so on and so forth for 393 interminable pages. One wonders if this is now the style encouraged after the success of such literary luminaries as Dan Brown. Dan Brown, incidentally, comes under fire in a neat little sideswipe on page 160:

“According to last decade’s pop culture, [the Illuminati] were a renaissance-era society of great thinkers who were expelled from Rome and hunted down mercilessly by the Vatican”

“Poppycock! Fiction writers.” The professor pursed his lips in annoyance. “A flagrant flight of the imagination.”

All of which makes for rollicking good – if somewhat hypocritical – fun for devotees of metafictional references. But the game of spot the literary heritage does not stop there. There are echoes of J.R.R. Tolkien in her insistence on naming every possible geographical feature and every conceivable rank or title. Sometimes these arrive in a veritable avalanche. And, like an avalanche, one feels that the relentless deluge could easily overwhelm whole villages in a matter of seconds. Take, for example, this masterful presentation of extraneous and irrelevant detail:

Charsoc the Dark, Chief High Priest of the Fallen, bowed deeply. Charsoc’s fall from the First Heaven had been second only to his nefarious Master’s. Formerly one of Yehovah’s eight High Elders of the First Heaven and second only in rank to Jether the Just, Charsoc had sunk effortlessly to become the most depraved of Lucifer’s Necromancer kings. He was Governor of the dreaded Warlock Kings of the West and the Dark Cabal Grand Wizards.

One wonders if the caps lock on her computer had developed an intermittent fault.

There are, I was once told, three types of writing. There is writing that is visible because it is bad. There is writing that is invisible – writing that conveys the story without interfering with it. Then there is writing that is visible because it is good – such as is utilised by China Mieville, who can (if I open ‘Perdido Street Station’ at random) produce such examples as

A few grey blocks rose from the streets like weeds in a cesspool, their concrete seeping and rotten. Many were unfinished, with splayed iron supports fanning out from the ghosts of roofs, rusting, bleeding with the rain and the damp, staining the skin of the buildings.

Ms. Alec’s writing, sadly, falls into the first category. It actively interferes with the narrative. It is like a clock whose ticking, once you become aware of it, proves impossible to ignore.

All this, of course, is mere superficial criticism. There are much deeper and more interesting things to discuss. There is, for example, a vein of American conservative Christianity running through the work like a faultline, and, like a faultline, it is where things tend to break down. There are the old prejudices fashionably repackaged: the devil incarnate is a Jesuit (the old idea that the Roman Catholic Church is somehow facilitative of Satan’s endgame); perfidious Europe is to be the source of the World Government (because the most popular of the books in this vein, the books by Jenkins and LaHaye and Alec and Lindsey, all see the downfall of America as being critical. That’s right – no American could be the Antichrist…); and good ol’ American conservatives are particularly singled out for elimination since they offer too serious a threat for the antichrist to countenance:

“Then, gentlemen, our coup d’etat – the United States sovereignty will be permanently eliminated.” Piers Aspinall, chief of British Intelligence Services, removed his spectacles and breathed on the lenses.

“In the first phase of the North American Union we launch the Amero currency and introduce mandatory gun control.”

He leaned back leisurely in his chair.

“We divide the world into ten superblocs. Then stage a false-flag incident – nuclear or bioterror, weaponised Avian flu, smallpox – ushering in martial law and mandatory vaccination.” He removed a perfectly pressed, linen handkerchief and polished the lenses. “We eradicate resisters. Patriots. Constitutionalists…Christians.”

This particular passage occurs just six pages into the novel, and it’s nice to see the political ducks that for the more rabidly Conservative  constitute ‘demonstrations of evil intent’ lined up so neatly in a row: destruction of the American dollar, mandatory gun control, mandatory vaccinations, the death of ‘Patriots’ and ‘Constitutionalists’. It’s all so au fait it could make you weep. She’s got Avian flu! On the previous page she namechecks the 2008 market crash, the Patriot Act, bin Laden’s apparent kidney problems, the Iraq war and even the precise contents of Nawaf al-Hazmi‘s car. This is a novel designed to appeal to the more frighteningly ‘Christian’ members of the Tea Party. You know the ones: they’re the people who put the ‘mentalist’ into ‘Fundamentalist’.

And, of course, no cliché is left unexploited. Where would Americans be without British villains? (Incidentally, the goodwill Ms. Alec generates with me, a devoted reader of thrillers, through the correct use of the term ‘false-flag’, is immediately dissipated through her referral to British Intelligence Services. Either she is referring generally to the British intelligence services – note the absence of capital letters, since this is not a proper name – or she means either the British Secret Intelligence Service [popularly if inaccurately known as 'MI6'] or the British Security Service ['MI5'].) Even the chapter titles have the inescapable ring of the familiar to them: ‘Raiders of the Ark’, ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, ‘Dark Clouds on the Horizon’ (an interesting chapter, since you may not have been aware of the vital role the shipping forecast has to play in the end times), ‘The Cold Light of Day’, ‘Bolt from the Blue’, ‘Skeletons in the Closet’…

You know, just once I would like to see someone get a bit inventive with this kind of thing. Why not a Malaysian antichrist? A Japanese? A Cambodian? A Paraguayan? An Australian? It’s all so Western (and particularly American) -centric. To call this stuff formulaic is to insult the infinite and majestic variation of formulae. And then there’s the dialogue. Milton‘s demons had a looser and more modern turn of phrase than Ms. Alec’s, who appears – throughout, and with every character of every race – to have mistaken ‘pomposity’ for ‘majesty’. Even I, on the side of the angels, felt an urgent desire to give the Archangel Michael a good swift kick in the pants. It is also the case that everyone’s dialogue is festooned with adverbial modifiers. People seldom simply say things: they say them with ‘foreboding’ or ‘mutter darkly’ or ‘grimly’ or ‘cheekily’ or ‘sadly’ or any other of the gamut of emotions that, had the author been more competent, we would already have known from the context. Even when we do know from the context those adverbs are there to keep you on the straight and narrow.

The bits where she lets her imagination run riot are, I grant you, more entertaining: I quite like the idea of comets lighting the frozen skies of Hell, or Lucifer breeding an army of underworld creatures for the forthcoming War. (I’m sure I’ve come across that idea before, the idea of hybridising ‘evil races’ for footsoldiers. Oh yes, how silly of me: the Uruk-Hai. Tolkien’s influence, as I have said before, looms large.) But it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to save a manuscript staggering under the weight of its inadequacies.

Jim Macdonald, who reviewed the book, described Ms Alec as ‘obviously a master of the fantasy genre‘.Mr Macdonald, poor, lost soul that he is, has clearly only been exposed to the worst that the fantasy genre could offer. Ms Alec is not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett or Michael Moorcock or HP Lovecraft or Stephen King or…well, you get the idea. There is a banquet of fantasia on offer at the moment, in comparison to which Ms Alec’s contribution seems an ill-made cupcake sat on by an elephant – flat, uninspiring and leaving a nasty taste in the mouth. To other would-be authors, I recommend it as an educational tool and an encouragement. It is deeply, deeply educational in the ‘how not to do it’ sense. And it is very encouraging because it’s dreadful and it still got published. There is indeed hope for us all.

Your moment of zen for today:

LMS Jubilee 'Australia' snakes under the road bridge on 'Tynedale'

Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan & Derelict

An exercise in scrapbooking.

* * * * *

James Devon, in my physics class, wondering aloud why, if lightning hits the surface of the planet many times per second, every second, no one has yet found a way to harness all that energy. Robin McLoughlin, our physics teacher, not answering the question: “Keep having ideas. When I was your age I was full of them. And then they started to dry up, and I grew up. Keep having ideas.”

* * * * *

Stephen Macartney performing in class, retuning the guitar to do so. I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. There are new notes.

* * * * *

A cassette tape wearing thin, Dark Side of the Moon cycling through tenuous repetitions into faded oblivion (the music, somehow, remains). Yetis under London. Webs across the Underground. Later there will be strange dreams that never end.

* * * * *

Cicero: “A praetorian guard of pansies.” I wonder who put alliteration to this end.

* * * * *

“Don’t take the car out tonight Gavin.” “Why not?” “It’s green.” This world is not appropriate.

* * * * *

I move the rook and win. My father smiles. I do not.

* * * * *

He thinks no one is looking and he fills his breast pocket with chunks of watermelon. The juice immediately stains his shirt. The galley staff affect not to notice. He leaves a few minutes later. There is not enough watermelon for everyone. We had no more to give.

* * * * *

A gift of prawns from the Faroe Islands celebrate their birthday. There is cake.

* * * * *

The threads come together. The end of the novel finally comes into focus. In a few more hours it will be done and I will, in some sense, have lost a friend.

* * * * *

The country is stone and water and dark, silent forest. I do not know where the birds have gone. Or the butterflies.

* * * * *

Fully up to date - an L1 on a mixed goods.

Voicing my dissatisfaction

This is one of those posts that I sometimes feel like writing but seldom do, partly because they seem unfeasibly self-obsessed, and partly because I have no idea what the conclusion will look like and I don’t often enjoy sailing out into uncharted musings. So this isn’t the long-promised final post about Creationism (about which I have, frankly, only just remembered); nor is it a post that is currently under construction with a Texan guest blogger on the pros and cons of private gun ownership: this is a post on the idea of finding one’s voice.

Which is, in itself, a fairly highbrow way of saying ‘figuring out who you want to sound like’. Actually, that’s only the first stage. The real trick is managing to sound like yourself. This, I think, I have more-or-less achieved, insofar as I am happy that if you hear me speaking in conversation and read this blog you would be able to see both as the product of the same linguistic stylings. My problem is, I sometimes wish I didn’t sound like me.

I know that on the list of world problems it’s at the bottom. To be honest, it’s near the bottom of the list of things that I personally ought to be concerned about in my own life too. Nevertheless, it niggles sometimes, like a nagging suspicion that perhaps you left the house with the tap still dripping – no big deal, but annoying all the same.

This is a question of style. (Yes, all former students of English, we’re going to try and pin down that notorious mythical beast). My style, I acknowledge, is fairly formal, sometimes quite arch, and with a tendency toward the mandarin (and the facetious). There’s a reason why I find the Screwtape Letters easy to imitate stylistically (though the theology requires a lot more thought!). There’s a reason why the Heckler articles in the Gaudie were readily identifiable as being written by me, and why the editor felt the need to issue a blanket ban on anyone else using the term ‘Dear Readers’. You can, I think, tell it’s me when I’m writing to you.

However, there are other people whose writing style appeals to me much more readily than my own. Neil Gaiman is a prime example of this. I love his blog. Perhaps I am not being fair to myself when I complain that my blogging is not of the same standard as that of a world-famous bestselling author. But this isn’t about quality, or not exactly: this is about (I now coin the word) addressmanship. The ability to relax and informally imply that you and the person to whom you are writing are actually having a private conversation that’s every bit as relaxed and happy as conversations between friends ought to be.

My favourite Twitterer, and for the same reason, is Nathan Fillion. He’s funny and warm and talks to you exactly like that good friend of yours who drops you a text to let you know they’ve found something cool that you will enjoy.

This kind of thing crops up in some fairly unexpected places. A while ago, a Google search on something entirely unrelated to anything salacious left me on the Tumblr blog of, as it subequently turned out, a porn actress. And in it she was funny and nice and when there then came a picture of her with no clothes on the disconnect was all the more pronounced, because you were forcibly reminded that this was a nice person, not merely a nice body, and I for one felt desperately uncomfortable. (This kind of thing is referred to on one of my favourite websites, TVtropes, as ‘Mood Whiplash‘.)

There are newspaper columnists whose columns I like for the same reason. Victoria Coren (Giles Coren’s sister and Alan Coren’s daughter) is a highly educated and witty individual whose columns – particularly the one in which she described her experience meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury – can, on occasion, make me laugh out loud and grab the person nearest to me and read out the funniest bits for their edification too.

This kind of personable blogging/tweeting has echoes closer to home too. Tom’s blog is an endless source of cheerful distraction; Jo’s blog (though more sporadic even than mine) makes me happy too.

I don’t want to make this into a moan or a whine or a whinge or a rant. (This is partly why I have been eager to accentuate the positive in the examples I’ve cited, and why other blogs/columns I enjoy a great deal – such as Charlie Brooker’s – aren’t mentioned above, as they rant far better than I do). I just wonder why it is the case that I’m not very good at being as cheerfully informal as the people I speak of above. If you have any ideas or suggestions, answers please on a postcard, or in the comments below.

G

Your moment of Zen for today:

A small, formal figure

Reason and Sticky Buns

There are times, Dear Reader, when I am heartily sick of, and fed up with, the behaviour of Christians. And the reason I get so annoyed and dispirited by it is that the people who are behaving badly have no excuse, and ought to know better.

There are a couple of situations of this type on my personal radar at the minute. I know one pastor who is being maligned in the press (both secular and ecclesiastical) for no good reason, on the basis of either inadequate understanding or inadequate theology. I know a church where incredibly destructive and misinformed gossip is placing huge strain on the eldership for no very good reason that I can see. And I am angry about this, because both those elders and that minister are my friends, and what is being done to them is spectacularly unfair.

I love Doctor Who. But I disagree with the Doctor’s oft-repeated mantra (at least since Christopher Ecclestone) that “people are brilliant!” People aren’t brilliant. People can be brilliant, but it’s not their ground state. I think Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity a far more clear-sighted and unromanticised view of the nature of humanity. I think Yeats was right when he talked about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I was told recently, on the basis of my Screwtape Letters, that I have ‘a real insight into the nature of the human heart’. That’s a nice compliment to receive, and I am grateful for it, but there are times I wonder if ‘you have a real insight into the nature of cesspools’ isn’t equally applicable.

And all that’s fine. I am entirely comfortable with thinking of humanity at its worst because I know I share in it. I am no better. I can, on occasion, be every bit as small-minded, petty, vindictive and unpleasant as anybody else – like, for instance, you, Dear Reader. But what really grieves me about the situation facing this minister and these elders is that it would be relatively simple to resolve these situations if everybody was prepared to sit down and talk about it. As the minister’s opponents have discovered, it is easy to sit at a computer and make comments that one would baulk at in a face-to-face encounter. As the gossipers have discovered, the last thing you want is to meet with the people who could make clear the situation. To do so wrecks the deliciousness of being in the group ‘that knows what the real problem is’.

I am sometimes accused – with a fair degree of accuracy, I must acknowledge – of being overly intellectual, of not engaging with anything on an emotional level. And, mea culpa, I acknowledge this to be true. I do over-emphasise rationality. I do have a tendency to lock emotions away in a box. But in situations like these, I think that approach a strength rather than a weakness. I am, I admit, angry on an emotional level – these things are happening to people I care about. But I am nevertheless clear-thinking enough to see why they’re happening – and even to see how they can be made to stop.

But here’s the thing. It is not my place to resolve any of these situations. I am not a member of the church where the eldership is being worked against. I am not a minister to leap into inter-ministerial disputes, nor am I a journalist to take other journalists to task for sloppy reporting, inadequate reasoning and poisonous personal attacks. (And I’m not going to mention Rosemary Goring by name, so you won’t know to whom I refer). But dear God all the people involved in these situations, of whatever stripe, faction or persuasion, are meant to be Christians, so why they can’t begin to live up to the name is beyond me. Is it too much fun being unpleasant? Is it too entertaining? Or is it that it’s too hard to behave as we are commanded?

Love God. Love thy neighbour. These are Christ’s two commandments, and if they were taken on board things would improve almost instantaneously. There would have to be acknowledgement, first off, that things have been badly handled. This is what’s called humility, and God knows it’s a painful business. But it is essential, and remarkably effective at leading to productive meetings, productive relationships and productive churches.

All this is Theology 101. I am not a proper theologian by any means (my brother occupies that niche in my family), but this is firstly plain old common sense and secondly such a basic biblical principle that one wonders how it could have been overlooked in the first place.

Following humility, there would be discourse. Tempers would be left outside with the coats, while inside rationality and sticky buns would hold full sway. (Incidentally, can I recommend “Rationality and Sticky Buns” as the format for all church meetings about everything, ever? Seriously, how is that not a winning recipe?)

And following the discourse? I think Abraham Lincoln put it best, in his second inaugural address:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…

That, I submit, is to be our aspiration. But it can’t happen until the high horses are dismounted, the mutterings are quelled, and straightforward conversation in humility occurs. This may not seem like much of a conclusion – it’s certainly no bombshell – but I can’t see a flaw in it. However, until it happens, I suspect I will remain angry, and sad, and wishing that people would be as good as Doctor Who believes they are.

Here is today’s moment of Zen:

Oh look. A rational, sensible approach to putting out fires.

Making the internet just that little bit worse

Good afternoon, dear readers!

I swither between thinking the internet a very good thing and a very bad thing, and my reason for adopting either position is in fact the same in both cases: anyone can say anything. And while you might think this is a neat little segue into a discussion of Ryan Giggs, in fact it isn’t. It’s a segue into Yahoo Answers.

On Yahoo Answers you can ask, or answer, any question. I have started doing this in the last week or so, and it ought to come as no surprise to those who know me that I’ve been looking mostly at the ‘Poetry’ section. There I’ve been able to help with the technical and formal questions (what is trochaic tetrameter? How are sonnets constructed?), which I find very rewarding. Something, however, that makes me grit my teeth and move on are (for example) the 14-year-old Emo kids romanticising suicide.

The best poetry advice I was ever given was offered to me by Donald Cairnduff, the head of English at my school, who, when I was starting to write poetry myself, offered 4 words of criticism that proved massively useful and ought to be dispensed to teenagers as a matter of national policy. The 4 words were “Angst is never interesting.“

Other 4-word credos that might prove equally useful to the Yahoo Answers crowd of poetic teens are You aren’t Sylvia Plath and Pay attention to rhythm. If we expand beyond 4 words, we can include You aren’t as disillusioned as you think you are, You don’t know as much as you think you do about this, and Punctuation is really, really important.

However, I said I was going to make the internet just a little bit worse, and I intend to do that by subjecting you all to one of my poems. It was published in October in Causeway/Cabhsair, published by the University of Aberdeen. It’s a sonnet (if you want to get really technical, it’s a Shakespearean sonnet according to rhyme but with modern metrical flexibility – so there) called ‘Sunnyside’, which was the name of the farm my grandfather grew up on in Comber, Northern Ireland.

Sunnyside

The carthorses are clop-shuffling in the yard
In their trap and tackle, trace and trim,
All muddied at the feathers from the field ploughed
And furrowed, turned by God Save The King.
Behind them, hunched over with potatoes
For the sowing, by seventy years
Of memories to come, my grandfather follows
The horses in their buckle, brass and gear;
Enacting his own plantation of Ulster
In uneasy years between bigger wars
Than that which sets grown men to mutter -
In the church halls and on the threshing floors -
Of the Free State and the simple truth
That troubles come of troubled youth.

The Baby, the Bathwater and the Methodist Minister

One of the hardest things about this particular blog post was coming up with the title (something of a recent theme with me: I got badly stuck the other day when I realised the title of the current chapter I’m working on in The Wings of the Dawn didn’t match the contents of that chapter, and that I had to change to something else. Inspiration deserted me for a while, but now ‘TUMBLEDOWN’ has become ‘Unrespited’. Hurrah!). In this instance, though, it wasn’t too few options that was the problem but rather too many. ‘How To Lose More Than You Think’ was an option; so too was ‘Nothing To Fear’ and ‘The Not-So-Bitter End’.

What, you enquire politely, on earth am I talking about?

As it turns out, this is one occasion on which a more robust approach to language is fully justified. You would have been far better to ask what the hell I am talking about…

There is a Methodist (ex) minister called Chad Holtz, who last month was fired from his position in a United Methodist church in North Carolina. He wrote this blog post, What I Lost Losing Hell, in which he announced his renunciation of the traditional doctrine of Hell as a place of punishment or even as a place at all. His congregation (who had apparently had difficulties beforehand: Holtz refers to this post as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’) then dismissed him from the pastorship.

First of all, let me say that Holtz’s position seems to have been honestly come by. It was apparently the result of long years of doubt concerning the nature of Hell, followed by an epiphanic realisation after reading Rob Bell’s now-notorious book ‘Love Wins‘. Holtz lays out four primary ‘losses’ that occured following his abandonment of orthodoxy. He lost his ‘Belief in Belief’; he lost ‘Fear as a motivator’; he lost ‘the right to hate his enemy’; and he lost ‘the holy huddle’.

I want to take this blog and do two things with it. First, I want to respond to Holtz’s four losses; secondly, I want to explore the implications of ‘losing Hell’ – something Holtz does not do. And, again, I want to remind you that I have great respect for Mr Holtz. No one can doubt his sincerity (someone prepared to lose their job over their theological position clearly means it). But I do consider him to be sincerely wrong.

1.) ‘I lost my belief in belief’ – which, as Holtz paints it, means ‘I lost my belief in my own agency. I lost my belief that anything I can do ultimately affects my eternal standing with God. He is in control; therefore, what I do does not matter.’

There are – it seems to me – very fundamental questions raised here about the nature of man’s relationship with God, and I believe Mr Holtz’s position answers those questions incorrectly. He answers them in the same way that Robert Wringhim, the protagonist of James Hogg’s ‘Confessions of a Justified Sinner‘, asserts his position in relation to Divine judgement: God has made his mind up on the matter, and nothing we do can change that position (since God Himself is unchanging). This – as with every other point Holtz makes – discounts what Christ had to say on the subject. (Note to atheists, postmodernists, comparative moralists and other strange creatures: all my responses will be based primarily on what Jesus had to say, rather than, say, Paul, or John the Divine – both of whom are, apparently, easier to discount as authoritative commentators). The point is reiterated more famously in the verse following this one, but since I’m keeping to what Jesus actually said, John 3:15 records Christ as saying “everyone who believes may have eternal life in [the Son of God]“. The act of believing in the Son of God is of pivotal importance. And it is an individual decision.

Where Holtz comes unstuck is, I think, in his interpretation of predestination.

The best metaphor for the answer to the tricky question of predestination vs free will that I can think of lies in the somewhat abtruse realm of particle physics. Everyone knows that light travels as a wave. Most people know that when it hits something, it does so as a particle called a photon. Now, is light a wave or a particle? Answer: both, depending on the circumstance (or, to put it another way, depending on how you look at it). Is it predestination or free will? Both, depending on how you look at it. Add to that the fact that God, in a very real and literal way, exists outside of space and time, and you realise that language itself was never really designed to have to cope with these sorts of concepts and theologians are doing their best. But to reiterate: choices matter. What I choose to do or not do matters. It’s important. It has consequences. Waving one’s hands in the air and saying God will deal with it all is not something espoused or recommended in Scripture. As the saying goes: “Pray like prayer’s the only thing that works and work like work’s the only thing that works.” So when Mr Holtz says that he has lost his ‘belief in belief’, he is also making the much more serious and far-reaching claim that he has lost his belief that it is possible to know God. That it is possible to draw near to Him just because we want to. Remember, God has promised to make himself accessible to all: Holtz’s position stands against this.

2.) ‘I lost the ability to use fear as a motivator’. Holtz splits this into two subcategories: He could no longer frighten himself into behaving better (apparently even when already a Christian); and he could no longer frighten others into accepting Christ.

On this first point I admit to confusion. Two things confuse me. Firstly, if he was a Christian, why was he worried about Hell at all? Christ on the cross had taken that option off the table. Secondly, as a Christian, why did he depend upon fear and not love as a motivation for his charitable actions? Neither of these concerns make any sense to me: perhaps someone in the comments section below could point me in the right direction?

His second point, about frightening others, is much more sensible. I dislike greatly those speakers who preach nothing but hellfire and brimstone. That was not Christ’s emphasis, nor should be theirs. Tell instead about our Father in Heaven, slow to chide and swift to bless, so loving that he encourages us to enjoy Him forever.

However…

Don’t lose Hell completely. You mustn’t. Otherwise Salvation looks like a pretty ropy concept: what is there, exactly, that we should be ‘saved’ from? Christ talked about Hell (something all-too-frequently overlooked by the ‘Jesus was just a good moral teacher’ brigade is that all the really terrifying stuff in the New Testament is described by Him, not Paul or John). Christ was big on saving people: He talked about it all the time. Only infrequently did He mention Hell. That, I submit, is the proper pattern for these discussions.

3.) ‘I lost the right to hate my enemy’. Holtz describes the sense of smug satisfaction that he enjoyed knowing that the enemies of God and of him (apparently a single category) would suffer eternal torment. First of all, let me again applaud his honesty. For far too many Christian speakers a ‘problem’ or ‘moral failing’ is something that happens to other people. But let’s be quite clear that this attitude is a moral failing. I do not judge Mr Holtz: I merely record the attitude he held for what it is. But what strikes me as peculier is his terminology: by what possible theology does he defend his use of the word ‘right’? He had no more right to hate His enemies than I have a right to live underwater and breathe through gills. I may be pleased at the expedited removal from this world of Osama bin Laden, insofar as I believe he has earned that punishment and he can no longer seek to hurt others, but I do not have the right to dance in the streets at the news, and nor do I have the right to gloat at the prospect of his eternal judgement. Even at my worst (and I am well aware that I can have a spectacular worst) I don’t think I could find comfort in the prospect of eternal suffering for someone whom I hate. What Mr Holtz is describing here seems to me to be a remarkable failure of empathy, more than anything else. And empathy is important, not just for Christians (although “When Jesus saw her [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him [Lazarus]?’ he asked. ‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him.’”) but for good human beings. The abject failure of it here is a real problem. Even more so since ‘losing Hell’ doesn’t actually fix it. Losing Hell speaks to nothing of the attitude, merely the image that the attitude fixated upon. Losing the image just creates the opportunity for a new image to take its place.

4.) “I lost my place in a tribe”. The infamous holy huddle. Of all the things I detest in church congregations and organisations, clique-dom is probably the greatest. It is defined through exclusion, exits for isolation, sits in judgement and corrodes its way through the greater Body of which it is a part. It is nothing but poisonous, and it stands in such stark antipathy towards the Christian message that we discussed earlier (“whoever believes in me…”).

But that’s not what Mr Holtz is describing. He is describing something else entirely, although I’m not sure he knows why it is different (I will explain the difference in more depth below). People who believe what Christ explicitly tells them are not a ‘clique’. They are not a ‘huddle’. They are not a ‘coterie’. They are Christians. They are members of the body of Christ. When Mr Holtz feels rejected by that body he should not be surprised: he is like an organ from an incompatible donor. The differences are too great, and too severe, to make him capable of functioning usefully within it. This is why his church in North Carolina had no choice but to remove him from office.

So those are my responses to Holtz’s four points. Earlier I mentioned that the other thing I wanted to was explain why Hell is important, and why it is not just bathwater but the baby too. Here we go:

1. If there is no punishment of wrongdoing there is no justice to be found in God.
2. If there is no justice in God there is no way to determine if worshipping Him is right or wrong. You cannot tell good from bad when there is no judgement.
3. If there is no Hell then Christ was a liar when He talked about it.
4. If there is no Hell then no one need be saved, since there is nothing to be saved from (see above). There is no Good News. There is no News at all.
5. If there is no Hell then Christ need not have been sacrificed.
6. If Christ need not have been sacrificed then God His father is callous, cruel and uncaring.
7. If there is no Hell then sin must be allowed to enter into the presence of God: God is not holy. God is not sacred. God is not God.

These are some of the reasons why I believe Chad Holtz to have been sincerely wrong, and some of the implications his position holds for him. I wish him luck, and pray he examines his situation clearly, but I cannot agree with him.

And now, your moment of Zen:

A 9F 2-10-0 heavy freight locomotives emerges from the tunnel