Increasingly Belligerent

Yet more spending on nuclear weapons.

By a country which has waged at least five wars in the last 15 years, and which is gearing up for at least three more (Mali, Syria, Iran), one of which is arguably already being fought on the ground in Mali.

Unlike North Korea, which has scarcely fired a shot at anyone else in half a century.

Having a wicked government does not in itself make anywhere a military threat to us.

Retreat From Reality

Not to say, "The Perils of Adrenalin", "Patriotism: The Last Refuge", and even "The Politics of Appeasement".

Has Michael "Pub Quiz" Gove, although we'd all pay good money to see him in a public house with a pint of beer in his hand, ever read Andrew Roberts's Eminent Churchillians? Or any other history book from his own New Right?

None of that school, nor any of the remaining Old Right historians whose position is probably due a bit of a renaissance and may already be experiencing one, would ever use such terms as "Clive of India" or "gunboat diplomacy".

Would Gove be happy for English to be taught in anything like this way?

Consectatio Excellentiae

I woke up this morning and found myself living in a foreign country, England without the NHS. When do we get to re-join the United Kingdom? No one ever asked us if we wanted to leave it. All this, and Paolo Di Canio, too.

David Miliband was going to have to resign from Sunderland, anyway. He could hardly have done the job from New York. But one hopes that this appalling appointment will finally bring to a head the question of who owns this country's last great expressions of working-class culture, and last great focal points of local patriotism.

There should be mutual ownership of the clubs by the fans, as in Spain. And there should be municipal ownership of the grounds, as in, now that we come to mention it, Italy.

The Americans would never permit ownership of major sports teams by foreign nationals thousands of miles, who knew nothing about the local culture and who cared only about the money. They are right. Nor should we.

The Nonconformist Conscience

Not a term applicable either legally or culturally to the Church of Scotland, although it is not an Established Church in the way that the Church of England is. But even so. And still a shame, literally a shame, about the Salvation Army and workfare. It should have been a signatory to this. It isn't. For shame.

Blairites and Heir-to-Blairites, do you still not get it? It's you. You are the ones who are wrong. The Far Left, clearly unaware of the phrase "owing more to Methodism than to Marx", is whingeing and whining that these complaints ought to be coming from the Labour front bench. That argument is not without merit.

But the idea that they are not coming from there because of 20 years of reduced influence, to say the very least, on the part of the Communist Party and the Trotskyist groupuscules would be funny if it were not so sad. Who, of any importance, ever did listen to the Trotskyist groupuscules, or even to the Communist Party very much? In any case, that party wound itself up in 1991, having been taken over by the midwives of New Labour around Marxism Today.

Whereas across the political spectrum, including in the Communist Party in its heyday, people of importance did used to listen to the Catholic Church, to the Church of England and its sisters elsewhere in the United Kingdom, to the Church of Scotland, to the Methodist Church, to the United Reformed Church and its predecessors, to the Baptist Union, and for that matter to the Salvation Army.

With the exception, up to a point, of the last, if you are no longer listening to them, then they have not moved. You have. Forget "gone Marxist", blah, blah, blah. It's not them. It's you. And it is in fact your way of thinking, not theirs, that is Marxian both in its intellectual origins and in its defining paradigm.

On the Conservative benches, that shift largely took place during the 1980s, whereas on the Labour benches, it happened from 1994 onwards. But even in the Thatcher years there was no active persecution of the unemployed. She and her supporters saw mass unemployment as "a price worth paying" for other things, notably low inflation.

That view of the relationship between the two was as obviously wrong then as it is now, but it did mean that those "paying the price" were left alone. It was Labour that wanted to turn them into the happy, dancing factory operatives of the Fabian imagination. Huge numbers of them voted Conservative in 1992 in order to prevent Neil Kinnock from finding them jobs. Thus was that party able to win that General Election, expected by no one apart from Kinnock's wife.

Remember that, and remember that one quarter of Conservative voters in 2010 lived in social housing. Hundreds of thousands of them face eviction one month before the impending local elections, and possibly millions by the time that the 2015 General Election has come round. I have no dependants, but I could not live on £53 per week. Unlike Iain Duncan Smith, I do not have a father-in-law to let me live rent free on his estate in a house worth two million pounds. But even under that circumstance, come on, IDS. Try it. Try and live on £53 per week.

Today is the day when the Conservative Party committed suicide.

Without Parallel

Just as the derivation of the word "Easter" from the name of a pagan goddess is peculiar to English, hardly the first language in which the Paschal Mystery was ever celebrated, so the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is entirely without parallel in mere mythology.

The example usually cited is the early Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris. Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth, who then sinks his coffin in the Nile. Isis, wife of Osiris and most powerful of goddesses, discovers her husband's body and returns it to Egypt. Seth, however, regains the body, cuts it into fourteen pieces, and scatters it abroad. Isis counters by recovering the pieces. How does this resemble the Resurrection Narratives in the slightest? Some much later commentators refer to this as an anastasis, but the fact that they were writing in Greek rather illustrates how far removed they were.

In all the mystery cults, no early texts refer to any resurrection of Attis, nor of Adonis, nor, as we have seen, of Osiris. Indeed, according to Plutarch, it was the pious desire of devotees to be buried in the same ground where the body of Osiris was held still to be lying. Of Mithra, popular among Roman soldiers and often invoked at this point, it is not in dispute that stories of death and resurrection were devised specifically in order to counter the appeal of Christianity.

There is no suggestion that any pagan deity was ever held to have risen from the dead never to die again, nor to have appeared in the flesh several times thereafter (and soon thereafter, at that), nor to have been recounted doing so by eyewitnesses, nor even to have lived and died, never mind risen from the dead, at a specific, and quite recent, point in investigable history.

You might deny or dispute this in investigable historical terms, although good luck, because you'll need it - the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth can be very hotly denied on the Internet by people who have that particular bee in their bonnets, but it is subject to no scholarly dispute whatever. But the present point is that, uniquely, any such investigable claim is made at all.

It is also contended that Attis is supposed to have come back to life four days after his death. There is one account - though only one, not four - of Osiris being reanimated two or three days after his death. And it is even suggested that Adonis may have been "resurrected" three days after his death. In the case of all three, there is no evidence for any such belief earlier than the second century AD. It is quite clear which way the borrowing went.

There is, furthermore, no evidence whatever that the mystery religions had any influence in Palestine in the first century. And there is all the difference that there could possibly be between the mythological experience of these nebulous figures and the Crucifixion "under Pontius Pilate".

Hellenism and the Roman Empire did not view the Christian message as merely another legend of a cultic hero, just as neither the philosophical Greeks nor the pragmatic Romans dismissed it as either harmless or ridiculous. Just look at how they did react to it.

As Rousseau said, men who could invent such a story would be greater and more astonishing than its central figure.

The Political Economy of Our Lord

What a difference a couple of days make. But Matthew Franklin Cooper is worth reading on any day:

It may seem ill-fitting to speak of the economics of Jesus Christ on the day on which we remember his death. After all, that death was the means by which death itself was defeated, and the powers of the earth (though they did not know what they were doing) ultimately failed to wield death, their ultimate power, against the Son of Man who will one day sit in judgement of us all. To speak of something as this-worldly as economics in the awe-inspiring, numinous light of Jesus’ death and holy resurrection may seem somewhat… petty.

But we have to remember that the combined powers of the Sanhedrin, the Roman Empire and their Herodian puppet-king executed Jesus because they feared him for his message, and that message carried political and economic implications as well as spiritual ones. Indeed, because many in the Sanhedrin (such as the Sadducees) simply did not believe in Jesus’ message of eternal life, the political and economic dimensions were of greater concern to them.

If we are to believe in the way of Our Lord, the true manner in which he lived his own life and by which we are to order our own, of course we are called to heed his spiritual message. But if we take seriously the message of Jesus, that thought, word and deed are of equal importance, that theory and practice are to be united rather than separate, we ignore the political and economic inferences of his message at the world’s peril and our own. We risk becoming like the Essenes or the Gnostics rather than like the early Christians.

It is only analogically and in literary terms that we can hope to understand the meaning of Jesus’ self-sacrifice. (As one of my references, of course, I take Ched Myers’ excellent literary-historical reading of the Gospel of St Mark, Binding the Strong Man.) If we crudely try to impose the economic and political categories of (post-)modernity on Jesus and his world, it stands to reason that we will get a warped view of the end result.

Thus you will see everywhere online lazy exegesis and quote-mining to prove a ‘cookie-cutter Jesus’ – it’s common to see ‘Jesus was a socialist!’, ‘Jesus was a capitalist!’, ‘Jesus was an anarchist!’, ‘Jesus was a liberal!’, ‘Jesus was a conservative!’, with each interpretation using its favourite out-of-context Scriptural quotes (with the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Talents being subject to the greatest degree of such abuse) to prove its point. The Gospels are not allowed to speak for themselves, but are used as tools to promote modern-day political agendas which have very little to do with the Kingdom of Heaven Our Lord proclaimed has come near.

Some of these abuses are easy enough to debunk with counter quote-mines. The people who believe that the Parable of the Talents indicates that Jesus was a neoliberal who approved of usury are obviously, studiously missing the point of the parable, whose broad context is the Parable of the Bridesmaids, the Parable of the Wicked Servants and the foretold Judgement of the Nations.

Jesus was very clearly not encouraging literal investment or literal usury (by literal slaves, for that matter), but criticising those in positions of trust and authority who did not do their duty: people who claimed to tend to the law, but failed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and heal the sick. Others are not so easy to parse. Instead, it is wiser to review the political and religious context in which Jesus lived and preached, and attempt to reason by analogy from those, rather than working backwards from a modern political ideology which we attempt to impose back onto Scripture.

During Jesus’ time, the Hasmonean kingdom had been replaced with a Roman client kingdom, the Herodian state. Religious authority was invested in the Second Temple and its legal scholars. Various political-religious parties had variously formed around (or in opposition to) these nuclei of political, economic and cultural power. What follows are ‘rough sketches’ of their beliefs, along with some parallels to modern-day groups which might be drawn from them:

• The Seduqim (Sadducees) – Scriptural literalists who accepted only the Torah and a selection of written works as authoritative, and who preached ontological and metaphysical voluntarism along with a denial of the afterlife. They were one of the parties who dominated the Second Temple establishment of the time, and can be analogically likened to Scriptural literalists in our own time – conservative evangelicals and fundamentalist Protestants, who are likewise narrowly voluntaristic and dogmatic, and who (though they proclaim a literal afterlife) are notably worldly in their concerns, with their afterlife often taking the form of a physical ‘rapture’.
• The Perushim (Pharisees) – followers of the oral traditions which would become Midrash, the Perushim were the forebears of modern Judaism, who placed a high priority on ritual purity and cleanliness. Also one of the parties which dominated the Second Temple establishment, they did believe in an afterlife and also in a form of predestination – but they placed an emphasis on individual moral self-sufficiency. Though not ‘bourgeois’ in the narrow use associated with Marx, they were certainly quite ‘bourgeois’ in Berdyaev’s sense of the word: focussed narrowly on material concerns and individual piety through the Law. Being so focussed on individual health, property and purity, they had insufficient concern left over for the widow, the orphan, the homeless, the sick and the indebted. Modern liberals, libertarians and followers of moralistic therapeutic deism take note!
• The Isiyim (Essenes) – ascetics with an intentional-community lifestyle who withdrew from society and preached an immanent end to the world. In common with some religious communist communities, they shared all their property in common and treated each other as equals, but believed that the rest of the world was damned. In modern times, they can be compared with the various schismatic and sectarian millennial movements which have chosen self-isolation to the neglect of the community: in the United States, the Radical Reformers (particularly the Amish and the Hutterites) are perhaps the best-known examples.
• The Kana’im (Zealots) – people who preached an immanent (and violent!) end to the Roman occupation of Judaea, often associated with assassins (Sicarii) and ‘social banditry’. Often they came from, and preached liberation to, the lower rungs of society – and were often the targets of crucifixion by the Romans. It is understandable to find in their preferred methods and ideology some distinct parallels with Marxism, liberation theology and other forms of revolutionary socialism… and it should be noted that at his crucifixion, Jesus was placed alongside two such ‘criminals’ (as over-against the Roman Empire and the Second Temple establishment), indicating empathy as well as solidarity.
• The Herodian clique – people who collaborated with the Roman puppet regime, most notably including ‘tax collectors’ (who may have been aligned with Rome for purely pragmatic reasons) along with more ideological collaborators who had Roman sympathies or religious affiliation. The ideology of power is certainly not a new one; nor is apologetics for the Kingdom of Caesar. One can certainly find echoes of it in modern liberal interventionism and neoconservatism.
• The Baptisers – led by St John the Baptist, this small group taught non-violent rejection of Roman rule and ‘repentance of sins’, which amounted to a radical renunciation of involvement in debt structures and purity codes. Our Lord was explicitly a member of this group, until he began taking followers of his own.

In Scripture, it becomes clear that the approach of Our Lord in the social realm is opposed in a number of ways to several of these movements. Obviously there are strong and direct denunciations of the Second Temple establishment in Scripture – the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. These take direct issue with a number of the basic tenets of their political and economic approaches, of course – the Pharisees he charges with tithing mint and dill and cumin but neglecting the weightier matters of the law, like justice and mercy, so concerned are they with individual piety. He told his followers to do as they do in terms of following the law, but also cautioned that it wasn’t enough.

Our Lord also took issue with the Sadducees’ propertarian treatment of women in marriage, turning their own loaded question about the afterlife back upon them. Jesus was neither a classical liberal convinced of the self-sufficiency of individual moral judgement and practical reason, nor was he a fundamentalist concerned with legalistic and literalistic interpretations of Scripture.

Likewise with Our Lord’s approach in the realm of economics. If he is to be analogically likened to the socialists, he is emphatically not of the parliamentary sort or the authoritarian sort. The libertarian criticisms of Jesus-as-state-socialist are actually valid; the kingdom of God is not like the kingdom of Caesar (which is not, of course, to say that the kingdom of Caesar has no place – he cautioned those indebted to Caesar to repay to him what they owed him, and repay to God what they owe to God).

But it has to be noted likewise that neither is he a fan of the marketplace, as is shown in the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes. The disciples ask Jesus if he should send the multitudes away to buy food at the market – and Jesus told them that wasn’t necessary. He told them that sharing what they had with the multitudes would be enough; and to their surprise, it was. The communal, mutualist economics of Our Lord are shown to be diametrically opposed to the self-interested logic of markets. (I think I hardly need make mention of that scuffle Jesus had with the Temple moneychangers?)

But, unlike the Isiyim, Jesus did not advocate seclusion from or disengagement from, let alone damnation of, the world. He told his disciples to be leaven: the ingredient in the bread, though transient and of a different nature from the bread, which transfigures it from within. And he told his disciples to live by example.

The kingdom of God would not come about through political violence – whether of the imperial-interventionist or of the revolutionary kind. Nor will it come about by taking the Pharisaical, atomistic individual attitude of ‘it’s not my problem’ endemic to bourgeois liberals and libertarians, or by withdrawing completely from and refusing to participate in society as the Amish do. It starts with solidarity, and with hearts and hands in the heavy labour of engaging the world where they are.

The mystery of the Resurrection which this week we commemorate stands at the centre of what we are as the Body of Christ. Our Lord dies to be risen again, and dies so that the world might again know life. He dies and is risen to remind us that we are not sufficient to ourselves, but need each other as we needed him.

These are not mere empty pieties, recited half in sleep on a Sunday morning; they are directives. They make claims not just upon our beliefs but upon our words and deeds as well. This is something the Church must remember.

Melanie Philips Stole My Muslim Transsexual Baby, Forcing Me To Eat My Cat, Which Gave Me Cancer

Neatly avoiding the libel laws in that title, Alex Andreou writes:

I have never had any dealings with Melanie Phillips, never had a baby and never eaten cat (to the best of my knowledge – although, these days who can say with certainty?). I just thought it appropriate to emblazon a sensational title across the top of this piece, which has nothing whatsoever to do with its content or the truth. My thinking was, in the words of Kelvin MacKenzie, "If it sounds right, lob it in."

This is, apparently, the way in which a "raucous press" must be allowed to behave, otherwise Britain will turn into Iran or North Korea or both at the same time. Essentially, "raucous" boils down to the idea that the public should put up with papers behaving badly, because there are significant benefits. This is the plain argument behind all the elegant rhetoric. And it’s not a bad one, but it must be accompanied by an explanation of the benefits, tangible, rather than theoretic.

There is an unacknowledged tension at the centre of the debate. The free press is already unfree – there, I said it. Ninety per cent of national titles are owned by a very small group of billionaires, the majority of them based abroad. The international Press Freedom Index, compiled largely from the responses of people in or related to the industry, ranked the UK at 29 this year. The top country according to the index is Finland, which has a system of self regulation, fully underpinned by statute, very similar to what is being proposed.

There is a business aspect to what we do. We work for commercial organisations with commercial considerations. The environment is so highly competitive that it can push journalists to excess. It is a great myth to suggest that the public interest is the primary preoccupation of these companies. It may be in the mix – for some more than others – but dominant is the imperative to sell copies and generate website traffic. The public interest and the commercial interest can, and often do, clash. Inside our heads, we might be Superman, vigilante hero from Krypton. To the world, we’re just Clark Kent, salaried employee of the Daily Planet.

If we want people to collectively and individually support a request for special dispensation, we must demonstrate what they might get in return. Otherwise, it is just a carte blanche to vandalise people’s lives for some romanticised past or speculative future good. If we wish to put ourselves forward as defenders of constitutional freedom and democracy, then we have to take that role seriously. Having hissy fits about state involvement in our own regulation, while applauding Theresa May for trying to impose her will on the Qatada case, is hypocrisy. A constitutional role is not a Groucho Marx nose on a bit of elastic, to be worn only when it suits one.

Then, there is the total denial of the cavalier "lob it in" attitude which brought the inhabitants of the Fourth Estate to the cusp of their first ASBO. Such a lack of contrition and reflection is an insurmountable obstacle to rehabilitation. It reinforces the argument that we cannot regulate ourselves. Cheap, personal attacks on celebrities who support statutory regulation are symptoms of our very malaise. Louise Mensch’s "two Churchillian fingers" to Hacked Off, is an insult to the ordinary people who found themselves at the centre of a press feeding frenzy. How can anyone trust an industry to put its own house in order when it suggests, increasingly, that it did nothing wrong?

Many point to the MPs' expenses scandal as the brightest recent example of the press holding the powerful to account. But let us also remember that the story was exposed and pursued largely by papers, which did not engage in the sort of conduct which was the subject of the Leveson inquiry. As a matter of fact, Rebekah Brooks turned down the story when it was brought to her. Perhaps minor celebrity A had been telescopically photographed putting Appendix X into minor celebrity B that day, so space was scarce. The truth is that if anybody illegally hacks the phones of a few hundred powerful people, they will occasionally come up with stories which are in the public interest. It does not follow that this was their motive.

"Anything bad that happened is already unlawful", is a popular argument. But what about the death of Lucy Meadows and the way she was treated by the media? Is that not a perfect example of conduct which may not have been unlawful, but could have been covered by a strong code of ethics? "It’s covered by existing regulation", a colleague suggested (apparently articles 3, 4 and 6 of the PCC code), "the issue, as ever, is one of enforcement, not a lack of rules".

To whom is this plea for better enforcement directed? It can’t be to the police, whom the press had been bribing into breaking the law. It can’t be to the state, which the press resolutely rejects as an overseer. It can’t be to the PCC (or a variation thereof) which has shown itself to be completely ineffective. It can’t be to individuals within the press itself – if there were a general understanding that this kind of reporting is wrong, it wouldn’t have happened. So, who is left to oversee us? We have corrupted, manipulated and undermined all other instruments of regulation, only to bleat about the enforced remaining alternatives.

Membership of the PCC is proof that newspapers accept the principle that they must operate within restraints which go beyond what is merely unlawful. The rejection of a robust way of enforcing such a code shows that they are only happy to do so in circumstances where enforcement is weak and toothless. In other words, we will agree to comply, provided we can get away with not complying. I have a lot of sympathy for constitutional arguments against state involvement. But when the continuum between an unfettered press and self regulation has been tried and has failed, what is left?

We have made it very clear what we don’t like, but not what alternative we propose. This is the question to which I have not yet seen a cogent answer. All I have seen is a cleverly reformulated plea: to continue to be allowed to behave appallingly, to trample the likes of Lucy Meadows, to invade people’s private lives with catastrophic results – all in exchange for some fictional benefit: the vague notion that, while we are looking for cheap smut, we may stumble across something of actual value to the nation.