Living Wittily

Anne Frank, - The Prophetic Voice of a Teenage Diary

While in Amsterdam for those few days on my Van Gogh pilgrimage, I also visited the Anne Frank House. I had tried to book online before leaving to avoid the long queue, but it was booked a week in advance. However long queue or no long queue, I had already decided such a visit was a must.

So we arrived not long after opening at 9.00, and the queue was already long and slow moving. Now I'm not the most patient or contented queuer, but there are times when inconvenience, delay and anticipation are more significant than cramming every unforgiving minute with value for money tourism. We got talking to the couple behind us who had just flown over from Bitmingham, and who were also making a pilgrimage to this place of  humane and humanising memory of a young girl whose honest goodness and innocent intelligence defied and triumphed over the inhuman bureaucracy of the genocidal imagination.

Then once we got in, after an hour's waiting, we made our slow way through the house, with the sound of the Kerk bells from nearby, the same bells she heard sounding when in hiding. And the slowness of those in front of us allowed time to see, to think, to pay attention, and so to imagine. One of the greatest moral challenges of our age is the safeguarding of the moral imagination, the developed capacity to anticipate, and have symathy with, and realise in thought and vision the cost and consequences of the intractably human lust for power, power over others, exerted for ends other than humane. 

Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most astonishing achievements of World War II. Not just the transparent goodness and hopefulness of the entries; and more than the faithful recording of the experience of what it is like to be afraid, and hated by the powerful and ruthless; and more too than the exposing of political malignity observed and critiqued by a young woman wo was naive, but wise, and whose own future would be foreclosed by the lethal consistency of the racist mindset. The Diary is first hand evidence of human resilience, of spiritual awareness, of life loved as gift and mystery, and of that instinctive will to live and to live well, that occasionally illuminates the historical landscape, and gives us all hope and a much needed reminder of the glory of a human life whose music cannot be silenced.

Then near the end of the exhibit, time to look at the faces of those who hid in the hiding place, blqck and white photographs, and behind the face of Anne Frank, another queue, at the arrival station of Auschwitz, and then images of the Shoah and the Camp liberations. I was overwhelmed by then, having just stood in a slow moving queue to enter this house, and to pay respects to this story of one girl amongst 6 million of her people, and one girl amongst countless more people across continents, whose deaths are the fearful mathematics of state generated hatred linked to military ambition. 

It is one of the sanitising statistics worth pondering, that all day every day, this house is open, and the queues are constant. And if everyone who comes to this place comes respectful and goes away subdued by a wondering sadness but a renewed commitment to the nourishing of humane values, then there is hope for us. The Hebrew Bible has the prophetic observation, "a child shall lead them". And so she did, and does.

Roses and Castles and the Politics of Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just spent a few days in Northumberland.  The ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle is one of those impressive reminders of dangerous times, human power games and the labour and ingenuity that goes into territorial defence and territorial aggression. These were built to last, 700 years ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there was the beauty and alternative worldview of Alnwick Gardens. The rose garden was past its best and had been battered by rain, but there's a defiance in flowers quite different from the defiance of stone and rock against sea, wind and human determination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whether in the shared harmony and profusion of colour and scent, or the single glory of fragile transience shaped into such modest loveliness below, the contrast of rose and rock, garden and castle, vulnerability and power, is one of the distinctions too easily overlooked in the politics of human life. I don't mean we don't need castles in a world of fractured and changing loyalties. But the question of why we need them, is one of the moral perplexities we may be losing the will and capacity to go on interrogating. 

 

I didn't think many of those thoughts while on holiday - they began to assert themselves when looking at photos and deciding what to keep and discard.  It could be argued quite persuasively that the beauty of gardens requires time, and peace, work and investment, and the hopefulness that others won't come and build a castle on the garden site. To prevent such purposes you need strong castles to deter and defend.

But if all of life is about looking over our shoulder, identifying the dangerous 'other', then maybe we need the reassuring space and viewpoint of a garden. Worryingly, both garden and castle need walls, and the wall is both a necessary part of human civilisation, and an ambiguous symbol that tells of our need to keep danger out and what we love safe.

Roses and castles. Hmmm.

Refusing to confer ultimacy on evil

Funny how sometimes several scattered moments of cognition can be drawn together by one of those rare migrating coincidences of thought, when against all odds, we are made attentive to something precious and important to capture,which otherwise would disappear in the fast flowing stream of consciousness which passes for thought in an overstimulated world.

It started when I read a novel last week by David Silva, The Rembrandt Affair. It's the story of a lost Rembrandt masterpiece, an SS Officer who combined an obscene courtesy to those he robbed with indifference to the plight of those same Jewish victims, a Jewish painting restorer who works for Israeli intelligence, and a little girl who, like Anne Frank was hidden by neighbours. A key moment in the story is when against all warnings, she crept out into the snow one moonlit night to play and dance. She was seen by the neighbours, reported, and the family were transported, except her, whose freedom was bought with the painting. Like so much of the literature of the Holocaust, there is the tragic irony of guilt clinging to the soul of the victims, who have done nothing wrong - other than exist.

Then I listened to Sheila Hancock's audio version of her autobiography Just Me. One chapter describes her visit to Hungary, and her discovery of the 600,000 Jewish people who were there before the War, and the tiny remnant who survived. Her sorrow and anger, her utter bewilderment at such organised human cruelty, combined with her rage that this could happen while she was betwen the ages of 8 and 13, in her lifetime, is one of the most telling pieces of soliloquy she has ever uttered, including Shakespeare.

I then watched the programme on Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, a pre-olympic docu-drama that filled out the stories of these two remarkable human beings. Both of their later lives overshadowed by war, and the cost and consequences of ideologies that reduce human beings as means to ends, rather than privilege every human being as ends in themselves.

By now, inside a few days, one of the 20th Century's most systematic forms of madness had insinuated itself back into that conscious reflective place in the mind, where prayer, ethical judgement, moral energy, critical thought and human wondering mix together in the search for meaning. As if the discovery of meaning could lessen the evil, reduce the guilt, redeem the suffering, restore hope or render the Shoah as something less than the mystery of iniquity it is. Because at the same time it arose in an historical nexus of events imagined, initiated and implemented by human beings, morally accountable, made in the image of God, and utterly capable of denying to others the humanity they claimed for themselves, thereby raising by their actions, in the tragic irony that accompanies moral suicide, a more potent question mark over their own humanity.

And then I came across this - and I realised again the spiritual genius of God's people, the miracle of human hopefulness and goodness, the capacity of that of God in us to look Hell in the face and refuse it ultimacy.

O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us.

Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to the suffering; our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this.

And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.  (Prayer of a condemned Jew in Belson)

I'm glad I was in my study on my own when I read this, and I am glad for two reasons. First, because together with the clues and intimations above, I was ready to hear words that in their truth and hope and love, slice through the dark tangle of hate and anger, sorrow and shame, despair and distress that grips the heart when we are confronted by intolerable but unalterable truth. Secondly because I cried, confronted by the distilled essence of goodness and mercy.

Adidas - The trainers that scored an own goal!

The post last week on those shackle trainers touted but then withdrawn by Adidas, can now be supplemented by a further very interesting perspective. A friend drew attention to the take of the Guradian correspondent on this consumerist own goal. And his perspective is perhaps the more subversive, powerful and telling. Go to the link below and read for yourself.

What the piece does is identify and expose the hubris and accompanying moral blindness of brand driven companies, so assured of their captive market that they miss the internal critique of one of their flagship designers. Was the designer genuinely making a sociao0ethical statement, or is this a clever piece of social hermeneutics?

So here again is the image of these trainers which purportedly carry the message no matter how hard you kick the ball they won't come off. Except the same trainers carry now the more powerful image of a company scoring an own goal in late extra time!

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/19/adidas-trainers-slave-fashion

What are Adidas thinking of?

These are called by those who have previewed and condemned them, Slave Trainers. There are times when it is necessary to build a case against cynical exploitation, moral bad taste, ethical vacuums; times when you have to argue that something is socially offensive, gratuitously thoughtless, and commercially unacceptable; times when argument is needed to persuade others that what offends is indeed offensive, and what is deemed clever is really the toxic combination of cruelty and stupidity.

But not this time - these are so crassly conceived that they are self-evidently all the things stated above, produced in a moral vacuum, imagined by minds lacking any sense of history, humanity or humility. They are a disgrace.

Of course it may be a publicity stunt. But doesn't sound like it - you can see here and decide.

A Plea for Foolishness as a More Durable Wisdom?

This was published 50 years ago - tell me if it is now obsolete, dated, passe? I have broken up what is otherwise a sustained and relentless paragraph in critique of a fundamental assumption of contemporary Western existence. You may have to read it more than once - that may be because it seeks to expose what we would rather not see.

The whole modern world is one great campaign against risk and uncertainty; as a money dominated world, it is a world of life insurance. 'The modern world as a whole is a world which thinks only about its own old age. It is a monstrous old people's home, an institution for pensioners.

In economics, politics, and constitutional law, as in ethics, psychology and metaphysics, we should, if only we had better eyes, be able to see one thing and one thing only: how much this terrible need for peace and quiet is invariably a principle of enslavement. It is always freedom that has to pay the bill. It is always money that is the master. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.

That is the real psychology of the contemporary idea of progress: man would like to live his life in the future, to live in advance of the event, so making his present into his past. Taking thought for the morrow, saving for the morrow, actually means throwing away its freedom, castrating its potency and fertility, which are the supreme blessings for human beings.

Every financial transaction is an expense of spirit; the only genuine miser, storing up his treasures, is the lover. This is the most profound teaching of the the Gospel. And we are so much under the domination of money, the Antichrist, that even when we do not openly name it, we constantly take its name for granted. In this commercial world, everything is commercial, even metaphysics, and theology; they too fall into line and cease to have any true presence in their own right. Christianity, like everything else, is detemporalised and thereby deprived of its 'salt'.

Avarice in the form of anxiety about tomorrow is the lord of all the world. The drying up of the heart makes itself felt both temporally and spiritually. The person who rejects the fluiditiy of the living heart, preferring the rigidity of money and conceptual thought, has already chosen the other kind of fluidity, the liquefaction of the corpse.

The question is simply what in any given world is a commercial commodity and what is not. It is by this standard that every world will be judged.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III A Theological Aesthetics. Studies in theological Style: Lay Styles, (San Francisco: Crossroads) 1986, pages 478-9

Now I guess you could say those are the words of a grumpy old theologian, and that may be so. And it does seem a wholesale condemnation of economic activity for its own sake. But is he wrong? Does he exaggerate to the point where he can be ignored?

Jesus said you cannot serve God and money - so how do we follow faithfully after Jesus in a money dominated culture? What would be the signs that our allegiances are at times tested to the point of capitulation? In the work of the Kingdom of God, how important are financial questions of profit and loss, assurance and risk, generosity and prudence - and should the Church learn again the counter intuitive practices of giving away, free gift, reckless compassion, unlocked resources - and those as acts of freedom and declarations of independence from a cash dominant culture. 

Or is that the idealism of the fool, the naivete of the enthusdiast, the behaviour of one devoid of any practical, viable and responsible strategy? But maybe the strategy is precisely this, the sacramental use of money and possessions to subvert the secular sacraments of compulsive consumption within the free market by deliberate decisions and intentional actions that demonstrate a Christian use of money.

If there is such a thing?

 

We shall not live by bread alone, but we shall not live without it either

 

Nicholas Berdyaev:

 

There are two symbols,

bread and money;

and there are two mysteries,

the eucharistic mystery of bread,

and the Satanic mystery of money.

We are faced with the great task;

to overthrow the rule of money,

and to establish in its place

the rule of bread.

The Questionable Validity of "You have to be cruel to be kind".

Having finished the Dickens biography I'm now well into the biography of Steve Jobs. Both men whose gifts, hard work, drivenness and early insecurity were harnessed by acute intelligence and a flair for entrepreneurial opportunism. Comparisons are hard to make though - the contrasting contexts of Victorian England and 21st Century Silicon Valley; the very different media through which they worked, one a novelist who pushed the genre in radically new directions, the other a technical geek for whom technology held the secrets of an accelerating can-do attitude.

I was struck by the recurrence of one word, describing a character disposition, and used by both biographers, to describe their subject. It's a word I'd hope was never applied to myself, or anyone I cared much about. Yet it seems to be a required term to describe how each of these great men went about their business, their relationships and influenced some of the key moral choices in their lives. And it has left me wondering if it is an essential component of the entrepreneurial and ambitious drive of those utterly committed to sustained innovation, product marketing and the can do no matter what mentality. They are both described as cruel.

I underlined the word in both books, and have reflected on the examples given, and the personal contexts that provoked the use of such a specific term of moral deficit. I've no intention of singling out either Dickens or Jobs  - I'm more interested in the use of the word, the aptness of the word, and the cultural context that enables such a word to be used. And I am asking a deeper question about our culture in which we are increasingly careful of our terminology lest we discriminate against, abuse or diminish the dignity of other human beings - I'm absolutely on the side of moral correctness in the way we use words, and address other people. 

But it does seem that we have come to tolerate cruelty in other forms - as ruthlessness replaces kindness, rudeness laughs at courtesy, resentment smirks at respect, slick cleverness pretends to be intelligence, being outrageous is better viewing than being compassionate, and selfishness replaces consideration of the other as a virtue. Is there something in a materialist, consumer driven, celebrity obsessed, virtual reality, globalised, ICT saturated, social networking culture that requires of us distance and disinterest, self-focus and self-promotion, and a redefined morality of self-survival at the expense of others?

Has our commitment to economic prosperity as the index of standards of living become so absolute that human existence and quality of life are reduced to economic indicators of growth and recession?

And in all the anxieties and uncertainties that now invades and pervades daily life, what are the safeguards in our systems and structures that prevent political decision making, commercial choices, industrial strategies from building in as a non-negotiable assumption, that you have to be cruel to be kind?

The word cruel now requires moral examination. From exploitation on reality shows to abuse of vulnerable people; from decisions made by corporations and governments about people's futures to thoise acts, words and attitudes that wound, intimidate and corrode people's sense of worth; from premeditated rejection and hurting of the other to those countless careless incidents that drain self confidence and make the world less safe for the vulnerable. By the way, the other word used of both Jobs and Dickens, is kind. The contradictions of our humanity - the capacity for cruelty and kindness, are not limited to these two people. They are integral to what we mean by moral growth, ethical maturity or sanctification.

The painting is one of the most powerful representations of human cruelty, human grief and compassion, and divine love. Rogier Van der Weyden's Triptych of The Deposition is a study in destructive cruelty and redemptive love, etched on each face, and enacted in the body language of bewildered sorrow.

How shall we defeat the enemy? (1)

 

How Shall We Defeat The Enemy?

How shall we defeat The Enemy?

We shall defeat The Enemy by making alliances.

Who shall we make alliances with?

With people in whose interests it is, to be enemies with The Enemy.

How shall we win an alliance with these people?

We shall win an alliance with these people by giving them money and arms.

And after that?

They will help us defeat The Enemy.

Has The Enemy got money and arms?

Yes.

How did The Enemy get money and arms?

He was once someone in whose interests it was, to be enemies with our enemy.

Which enemy was this?

Someone in whose interest it had once been, to be enemies with an enemy.

Michael Rosen, 2001

The Otherworldly World of Cabinet Ministers, Or Why Chris Huhne Has No Idea!

The Energy Minister, Chris Huhne thinks the consumer is significantly to blame for high energy prices. 

85% of consumers can't be bothered to shop around for a better deal, he says.

The average family could save up to £300 a year just by changing supplier.

In other words, let the market set the price, and the most savvy people will benefit.

So what about people who don't have online access;

many of the more elderly and vulnerable people in our communities;

low income families where even if they got a better deal, energy is still so expensive the choice is between heat and food;

Oh - and what about the fact that the big 6 have all put prices up more than 10% and they control 99% of the market.

I suggest Chris Huhne shops around and gets enrolled in one of the following courses:

"Get Real - Towards a Basic Understanding of Social Realities"

OR

"Laissez Faire - the History of a Bad Idea for the Poor."

OR

"Making the Right Choice - Principles for Getting the Balance Right Between Heat and Food"

OR

"Let Justice Flow - and Alternative View of Energy Flow."