Living Wittily

State of Play, and Wolf Hall - two studies in the ruthlessness of the self

Over New Year we watched the six episodes of the TV version of State of Play - way much better than the Hollywood version. Whatever we think causes the moral malaise and public cynicism surrounding current politics and journalism, this drama tackles some of the underlying causes of that dangerous disillusion with the capacity of public figures to be trusted. It also explores the fankled mess of divided loyalty, blackmail, betrayal, the ruthlessness of the ambitious self, the ease with which relationships are peddled in the marketplace where power is brokered; and it does so against the background of corporate business, government, energy policy and those unprincipled decisions that shatter lives.

All in all, a satisfying confirmation that all have sinned, and that the insatiable appetite for power and self preservation drives human beings to deeds and dispositions that do indeed fall far short of the glory of God. And yet the series portrays human behaviour and its consequences as tragic, the broken lives and inflicted anguish as not in the end what was intended, but rather the consequences of actions which if they could have been foreseen.....

But of course foresight isn't in our gift as human beings; we can't foresee all the consequences of our compromises, betrayals, lies, power games. Not so. Foresight isn't a crystal ball we don't have access to; it is that creative process of moral imagination, awareness that actions have consequences for those near and distant to us. And foresight, in the ethical sense is to be responsible and responsive to that inner voice we call conscience, because when conscience is persistently shouted down by the claims of the strident self-determined ego, it is gradually silenced. But John Stuart Mill wasn't far wrong when he spoke of the conscience as that web of moral feeling which when violated is later encountered as remorse. And remorse is brilliantly portrayed by David Morrissey in this drama.  

Running parallel with my viewing of State of Play, my reading of Hilary mantel's Wolf Hall. Take most of the above review of human cruelty and cynicism, and the description of the State and the individual in ruthless pursuit of power, and the parallels become fascinatingly close. Especially when it is very clear that power is not grasped and wielded for its own sake, but for the sake of the person who pursues it and cultivates it. Yet both State of Play and Wolf Hall have characters who act within a recognised code of honour; the journalist in pursuit of the story, protecting sources, upholding the public right to know; Thomas Cromwel's rise as advisor to Henry VIII, making and breaking lives as he orchestrates the court intrigue and lethal alliances of Tudor politics. In Wolf Hall the question of morally generated foresight and the slow reorientation of conscience to the service of the self is also explored in the relationships and conflicts between political expediency and moral consequence. Mantel's novel is a partial rehabilitation of Cromwell, a sympathetic portrayal of the English Machiavelli whose volume The Prince is Cromwell's textbook on political survival and required ruthlessness.

All in all, a few days of enjoyment - laced with reflections on how power, tragedy, human ambition and failure, love and betrayal, cruelty and compassion, manifest themselves differently in different historical periods. But it is the same tragedy, the same broken glory of the human being, lacking moral foresight yet culpably ignoring their best lights, human life unredeemed but not unredeemable. Because against the bleak sense of the inevitability of the tragic, and the contemporary loss of faith in the goodness of life, the Christian story is of God entering into the full tragic consequences of human sin. And not as Machiavellian Prince bent on violent re-ordering and manipulative exploitation of the world, but as Prince of Peace. As self-giving love the Prince of Peace contradicts the will to power, and in his death all that makes for implacable death is crucified; and as the life and love and light of God, hope is resurrected as He is risen with healing, embodying the promise of a new kind of humanity, signal of a renewed creation, the beginning of the reconciling of all things.

A more hopeful attention to the future...

World Beyond

He stands by a window.

A flock of starlings

settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree.

Then, like black buds unfolding,

they open their wings;

black notes in music.

He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure:

that something almost extinct,

some small gesture towards the future,

is ready to welcome the spring;

in some spare, desperate way

he is looking forward to Easter,

the end of Lenten fasting,

the end of penitence.

There is a world beyond this black world.

There is a world of the possible...

He sees it; then he doesn't.

The moment is fleeting.

But insight cannot be taken back.

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

......      ......      ......

Actually not a poem. A beautifully written paragraph (which I've restructured) from Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's novel about Thomas Cromwell and the intrigues, betrayals and political shenanigans of the Tudor Court. It describes the inner change of worldview and self-determination in Thomas Cromwell, as he moves finally from grief at the death of his family from plague, to a much more hopeful attention to his own future. His star is on the ascendant and he begins to sense it without yet fully understanding it. He has discovered the world of the possible.

This is historical fiction of exceptional standard - recreating the early modern world, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and the reverberations across Christendom of Henry the VIII's obsession with producing a male heir. Reading this one slowly. 

Oak trees, Suffragettes, and not taking political equality for granted.

At University of Glasgow Library and parked my car near Kelvingrove Park.

Frustrated and couldn't find what I wanted.

Sauntered back to the car which had collected some large fading oak leaves from the big tree under which I'd parked it.

Noticed a wee plaque at the base of the tree and went over to read it.

Planted on 20 April 1918 by the Women Suffragette Movements in honour of their being granted the vote.

Not sure why but I decided one of those oak leaves, from this 100 year old oak tree, should find its way into one of my books for a while.

100 years is a long time, even for a tree. It is though, a magnificent tree.

But it's astonishingly recent in the history of discrimination - just 100 years ago women were largely excluded from political decision-making. 

The photo below is of women protesting outside Duke Street prison in Glasgow. The City had a Women's Socialist and Political Union (WSPU), just one of the organisations far too easily forgotten, but made up of women of courage, conviction and passionate commitment to social justice and political equality. My oak leaf honours them!

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution - Martin Luther King's dream.

Today is an historic day. The inauguration of Barack Obama will mark another step towards the fulfilment of the most famously articulated dream of the 20th Century. On the obvious public, contemporary, global media level, the day belongs to Barack Obama - but in terms of history, human significance, Christian witness and political theology, the day belongs to the Baptist pastor whose dream, nearly fifty years ago, inspired others to dream.

So on this inauguration day, instead of quoting from Obama's autobiography, quoted below are important words with which he is required to engage if he is to be anywhere near true to the vision of Martin Luther King. The extract comes late on from a remarkable sermon in which MLK tackled politically embedded racism, world poverty and the tragic stupidity of the Vietnam war. I've inserted italics at a sentence which is not only quintessential MLK - it states the grounds of a Christian political ethic as a stance of Christian witness. The sermon is called

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most vicious way.

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.

***<<<>>>***

In a world where hope comes hard, expectations of this Presidency are understandbly but unreasonably high. But lovers of peace and makers of peace, dreamers of hope and makers of hope, those who hunger and thirst for that righteousness of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, will today pray God that the newly inaugurated President will live up to his own rootedness in those ideals and values determined to use rather than abuse power.

The problem is, "If we're not careful....."

Massacre in Mumbai.
Kidnap of Karen Matthews.
Murder of Baby P.
IED's in Iraq and Afghanistan (Improvised Explosive Device).
Murder of Vicky Hamilton
Violent riots in Greece
Debates on assisted, now televised, suicide
Cholera in Zimbabwe.

Some of the week's news. It's hard not to develop defence mechanisms. There's only so much information the mind can process, only so much weight of moral evil mind and conscience can evaluate. There's only so much suffering and human anguish the heart can feel with and feel for, before we begin to care less, and if we're not careful, finally couldn't care less.

Eventually then, if we're not careful, we become accustomed to familiar reports of bloody violence, abuse of children, politically driven brutalisation of peoples, the orchestrated moves of deregulated power. The moral danger of saturation news coverage, with detailed and graphic reporting, authoritative comment and skilled techniques of image, word and story, is that it eventually sets the emotional, mental and moral tone of our worldview. If we're not careful. And we will interpet the world politically, economically, ecologically, sociologically, demographically, militarily, - from multi-perspectives, except the theological. If we're not careful.

 Advent keeps us careful. Advent is Magnificat, an alternative worldview, theology at loggerheads with power politics. Advent is Jesus, a name not to conjure with, but to speak as God's embodied promise of peace. Advent is Emmanuel, God with us, truth to keep in the heart and ponder. Advent is, to live in the light of the coming of God as Advent people. Advent is a worldview illuminated by hope.  

Blogging, the sense of loneliness, and the current cultural mood.

"Since the underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another, as the sense of loneliness increases, more and more books are written by more and more people, most of them with little or no talent. Forests are cut down, rivers of ink absorbed, but the lust to write is still unsatisfied....If it were only a question of writing it wouldn't matter; but it is an index of our health. It's not only books, but our lives, that are going to pot."

W H Auden is a difficult poet. He is at times hard to read, and I wouldn't personally like to plough through his entire Collected Poems. But in his prose writings there are sharp-edged observations about what's going on, and about the state of cultural health. The above was written in 1932, (quoted in Charles Osborne's biography of Auden) - and long before the current blogging outbreak of literary loneliness! I have a feeling this least indulgent of poets would have fulminated against this "everybody thinks their opinion is worth hearing" social game we call blogging. So is blogging popular now, as Auden thought mass publications were in 1932, because of "our sense of increasing loneliness", and evidence "that our lives are going to pot"?

As a writer Auden seems to be wanting some form of quality control in the dangerous and exciting marketplace of ideas, not only over the ideas themselves, but over the literary artistry (or lack thereof) with which they are communicated. And any of us familiar with the blogosphere know only too well that everything from mediocrity and tedium, and from malice and terrorism, to narissistic trivia and embarrassingly detailed confession, can now be aired on a blog. Yes, but. Some of the most creative, funny, informative, artistically inventive, theologically humane and intellectually satisfying conversation and discussion can also be found in responsible blogs. What impresses me about Auden in the above quote, though, is his willingness to attempt diagnosis, to seek explanation, to understand what in his day was a phenomenal rise in the publication of ideas and self-expressed concerns. And that as a poet he felt it his duty to ask the human question underlying social changes and phenomena - as he did in 1945 when he defined the zeitgeist as The Age of Anxiety.

Makes me wonder who are the contemporary poets who are ruminating, probing, engaged in diagnostic reflection and articulating the current cultural mood.

..........................................

And because I can't resist. I've just been reading Crossing the Snowline, the latest collection of poems by Pauline Stainer.

Immense grief and family sadness explain her silence for over five years. This volume of poetry breaks that silence. More about this later.

But here's a poem about Emmaus, a story that I am living with just now.

River Landscape to Emmaus

Three men walking,

dippers working the water,

the river

writing its monograph

on mosses

 

Later,

the two disciples

watch him break bread,

lightfingered,

backlit.

 

Not nonchalant exactly –

for love is nothing

if not improvised,

wounds troubling the light

the art of extremity

 

When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?

When an ex Secretary General of the United Nations and an ex President of the United States are refused visas by Zimbabwe, the world is expected to be impressed by more petty power games of a corrupt regime.

But for the people whose suffering is intentionally orchestrated in the power-hungering and power-mungering across international borders, this is no game.

I turn to a poem by a Victorian Catholic, one of the finest peace poems in our language, I think. Hope and disappointment, longing and endurance, impatience and trustful waiting, the rebuke from the heart of the oppressed tempered by a hopefulness driven underground seeking means of survival, and finding it - believing that eventually, one day, peace will come.

The tyrant who causes other people's fear to hide his own insecurity, can't forever silence voices, crush human spirits, exclude hope. The Spirit of God needs no visa, is subject to no exclusion orders, and when He comes 'He comes with work to do'. 

And so I pray, "When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite

To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
                      He comes to brood and sit.

       Gerard Manley Hopkins

Faith in Politics: The Australian Prime Minister and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sean has drawn attention to an article Mike Bird drew attention to, which was published in the Australian periodical, The Monthly a year or two ago. This kind of hat-tipping dissemination of good stuff is one of the most useful functions of blogs. Thanks to both of you.

The piece in question is by the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and explores the relevance of Bonhoeffer's political theology as a resource for reflection on today's political issues of the 21st Century. There's something unusual but reassuring about a political leader whose intellectual and political life are resourced by such well informed theological reflection. That Bonhoeffer's life and thought is given such prominence in the political theology of a modern political leader is so unusual it is almost a work based experiment in practical and contextual theology.

Some important critiques and correctives of the current politicisation of religious commitments as vote-catching strategy, while insisting that religious values should inform, shape and resource political life - and in the case of Christian values, do so by speaking truth to power, siding with the vulnerable and marginalised, and refusing to be silenced on matters of social justice and human freedoms. Rudd makes it clear that Bonhoeffer's life and thought provide important, creative, and perhaps for political elites, disruptive guiding principles which have been lived out, and given both theological articulation and embodied witness in Bonhoeffer's story.

Called "Faith in Politics", you can find it here.