The invisibility of social privilege

"Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye."

- Matt 7.3-5 NRSV.

This is one place where Jesus doesn't want us to be focussed on others. I am to concentrate on my own faults. Correcting others can wait. The implication is that we are very good at fooling ourselves with regard to our own shortcomings. We all have blind spots, issues that we don't notice but which others find obvious. Jesus, with a twinkle in his eye, asks us to imagine having an entire log stuck in our eye and yet not seeing it. That is how blind we sometimes are.

So how can we know where these blind spots might be? Perhaps we should expect them to appear in places where my not noticing an issue ends up making my life easier. My kids are far better at pointing out where an injustice benefits their sibling than when it benefits them personally. And this is true for all of us. We tend to notice when things are unfair and we lose out. Yet we can more easily overlook unfair situations where we gain.

So if I am benefitting from an injustice that I am not good at seeing, how would I know about it? Perhaps I should listen to those who might be losing out as a result. This, then, could be a good principle to apply in many situations. If someone else is saying they are the victims of an injustice and saying that people like me benefit from that injustice, my first instinct should be to assume they could well be right. Of course, my actual first instinct is likely to be to deny it, since who wants to hear that my success is partially due to injustices from which I benefit? But if Jesus is right about my tendency to not see negative things about myself, then it is my responsibility to listen with particular care when someone says I am at fault. Or even when they say that I might not personally be at fault, but I am the kind of person who might be benefitting unwittingly from a larger fault in our culture or social system.

So, if you belong to a group of people who, on average, have advantages over others, it is right to pay extra attention to the claims of those who speak about how the system might be rigged in your favour.

It is possible that their complaint might simply be sour grapes from someone who hasn't succeeded due to their own shortcomings. But how can I possibly know that unless I am completely sure that any logs have been removed from my vision?

Guilty vs guilt: the path to liberty is honesty

Do you feel guilty about the effect your actions are having on the planet? Are you in fact guilty of having mistreated the community of creation to which we all belong?

There are two meanings to the term "guilt" and its cognates. The first is objective guilt, the state of having committed an offence. The second is the subjective feeling of regret, remorse and unease over the perception of having done wrong. The two do not necessarily go together. It is quite possible to feel guilty (subjective) without actually having committed any wrongdoing (objective). Conversely, it is also possible to commit an offence and so bear objective guilt without any corresponding subjective feeling of guilt, due to some combination of ignorance, insensitivity, acculturation and denial.

An interesting new poll reports that when 17,000 people across 17 countries were surveyed regarding both their subjective feelings of eco-guilt and their objective ecological impact, there was a strong negative correlation between the two. Those doing most to mess the place up feel least angst about it. Those most ridden by guilty feelings are objectively least to blame.

I have argued previously that a Christian response to feelings of eco-guilt can avoid legalism and self-righteousness through a proper focus on the liberating good news of Jesus (and I also discussed eco-guilt in these three posts). Yet while we do not need to be paralysed in self-accusation (or distracted by self-righteous condemnation of others), some brutal honesty about our contribution to planetary failure is essential. The Christian response to feelings of guilt is neither wallowing nor suppression, but sober judgement concerning the cause of the guilt: am I objectively guilty? And if so, then there is but a single Christian response: repentance.

And so let us face up to the fact that if the average lifestyle of a citizen of the developed world were to be shared with the rest of the world, we would need something like three planets. Our consumption of finite resources, our apathy towards the origin and destination of our goods, our acquiescence in the face of a political and economic system that behaves like a tumour cell, our wilful blindness to the cumulative consequences of our quotidian choices, our unwillingness to look beyond the next pay-check or election cycle, our insensitivity to the present and future suffering and destruction required for our luxuries: let us be honest with ourselves. Where we remain ignorant, let us discover what is the case, what is the true cost of our "cheap" consumption. Only the truth will set us free: the messy, complex and sometimes brutal truth about ourselves; the surprising, simple and energising truth about God's abundant graciousness towards us in Christ.

“What must I do to win salvation?” Dimitri asks Starov in The Brothers Karamazov, to which Starov answers: “Above all else, never lie to yourself.”

Ecological legalism and Christian freedom

Some questions: What is your carbon footprint? How does it compare to the global average? To the global required average? And what are you doing to reduce it?

Dig beneath the surface of ecological issues and for many people, apart from fear, the second most significant factor driving our responses is guilt. So much of the discourse around ecological responsibility has the feel of a new legalism, a set of norms available to external quantification and verification that can at best provide useful guidance and at worst either crush motivation or provide an open door to self-righteous superiority (depending on the size of one's footprint). Indeed, the whole concept of an ecological or carbon footprint is ripe for interpersonal comparison and when linked to moral judgements of the necessity of reducing it, the full range of contemporary ecological psychoses becomes manifest: holier-than-thou accusation, desperate performance, pious self-denigration, tokenistic conformity, resentful rejection, weary indifference, paralysing despair.

If we are nonetheless to take our ecological concerns seriously (as the scriptures, reason and a passing familiarity with our present condition suggest), then do we have to live with such legalism? Of course not.

Basically, we need a way to talk about the good life to which Christ calls us that speaks in the tones of grace not law (apart from the law of love). This good life may well often look like taking up a cross and denying myself, but I walk it in hope and faith that the path of love is ultimately the path of life, even if I have to wait for God to raise the dead to see it.

We are set free by Christ to live as servants of God and neighbour. This is the only path to life, and at times it can feel narrow, and yet the content is actually quite flexible. Andrew Cameron speaks of the ethical life as being like a river - there is a strong current in one direction (love), but within that, there is water moving in all kinds of ways, at different speeds and so on. Yet there are still river banks. This is his attempt to speak of how the scriptures can be quite specific in their prohibitions ("do not lie"), but general in their exhortations ("love your neighbour").

The question for us as Christians seeking to follow Christ amidst a world of ecological degradation is therefore: what is the space of Christian ecological freedom? Where are there hard lines that we ought not cross? And, much more importantly, how do we talk about (and live) the strong current of love? Complicating matters is the fact that many aspects of our ecological crises are cumulative, involving too much of an otherwise good thing, rather than the commission of acts that are in themselves always wrong. In this way, I think that ecological irresponsibility has a somewhat similar structure to drunkenness, or gluttony. I may know that once I have had ten drinks, then I am in disobedience to the warnings of scripture against inebriation, but there is not necessarily a line we can draw in the sand and say that up to this many drinks is I am simply enjoying the fruit of the vine. Perhaps legal blood alcohol limits for driving might give us a ballpark estimate, and perhaps contraction and convergence models of carbon reductions (applied on a per capita basis for our nation) might give us a ballpark estimate for our the path of our personal carbon footprint goals, but the law of the land is always going to be both too precise and too blunt an instrument for forming the mind of Christ within us.

If our goal is defined too narrowly in terms of certain emissions levels or atmospheric concentrations or personal footprints, then the complex world of goods and the discernment required to navigate it can become oversimplified. Even amidst the grave perils we face, Christian obedience is a path of freedom and joy, of trusting the goodness of God under the weight of a cross, of dying to self and receiving new life being granted as a gift.

Some better questions: How does new life in Christ lead into delightedly sharing my neighbour's burdens? In what ways are my neighbours threatened by ecological degradation? Which parts of my life and the life of my community contribute to this path of destruction? How can I discover new patterns of thankfulness, contentment and engagement to express the abiding peace I have received from Christ and the deep concern for my neighbour this grants me?

News of the World 0; Guardian 1

Extraordinary. The world's most read (and most loathed?) English-language newspaper, in existence for 167 years, is to cease publication this Sunday after the rapidly developing events of the last couple of days. Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist tabloid News of the World has faced escalating revelations of wicked and illegal behaviour, including hacking the phones of up to four thousand people - royalty, politicians, celebrities, murder and terrorism victims and their families, soldiers killed in Afghanistan and those of their relatives - as well as interfering in police investigations, paying police for information, lying under oath and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rest of this list) hacking the phones of those involved in the investigations into their own misdeeds.*
*I would provide links to each of these, but it would take all day. There is extensive coverage here and just about everywhere.

Credit must go to the years of investigative work by Nick Davies at the Guardian, who kept following the story despite threats from NotW and scorn or lack of interest from many other mainstream media sources.

The fallout will continue for some time. There will be retrials, public inquiries, reform of how the media are (self-)regulated, questions about how one of the editors at the heart of the scandal ended up working for the Prime Minister, reviews in the role of police corruption and very serious questions (hopefully) about the BSkyB takeover that looked set to give Murdoch even more control over British media (and which ought to be rejected on media plurality grounds alone).
UK voters can sign a petition against the takeover and/or contact your MP.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of bad journalism, nor that Murdoch will be likely to change his ways, or lose his malign influence on the politics of too many continents. A publication like NotW doesn't get to where it was without an extensive public willing to pay good money to read gossip and slander. Those malformed desires will not disappear overnight. Other publications will quickly fill the void.

Nonetheless, perhaps this whole episode is a chance for us to stop momentarily and consider what really counts as news, and whom we trust to tell us about it.

Let us also remember that the self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude offered by the gutter tabloid press at the failings and foibles of the famous is all too easily replaced with self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude at the humiliation of that very press's flagship. So let us not rejoice at a black eye for Murdoch, but mourn for our own myopic moral vision that all too often secretly wishes to be kept in the dark.

"And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed."

- John 3.19-20 (NRSV).

Lent: Give up and die

"Ash Wednesday, then, should be seen as standing guard over Lent, reminding us at its start of the core truth of Christianity: we must give up. We must give up not this or that habit or food or particular sin, but the entire project of self-justification, of making God’s love contingent on our own achievements. And the liturgy of this day goes right to the ultimate reality we struggle against, which is death itself. We are reminded, both by the words we say and the burned palms imposed on our foreheads, that we will die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Give up! Give up, for you will not escape death. The entire logic of the theology of glory, of all our Pelagian impulses, of all human attempts at mastery and control, are searched out and stripped away on Ash Wednesday. We are seen for what we are – frail mortals. All power, all money, all self-control, all striving, all efforts at reform cannot permanently forestall our death. Our return to dust is the looming fact of our existence that, in our resistance to it, provides a template of sorts for all the more petty efforts we make to gain control of our lives. [...]

"Ash Wednesday is a day for the hopeless and suffering, who are affirmed in their hopelessness and suffering rather than commanded to take up the task of self-improvement. When we give up hope, hope in our own abilities and efforts and doing, then the reality of God’s grace truly can become manifest. It is the occasion for an affirmation of who we are, not, ultimately, a plea to transcend our mortal condition. We can live in our bodies, in this world, seeing ourselves more compassionately and thereby are moved to perform works of love, without conditions or demands, for our fellow-sufferers. The first day of Lent is an occasion not for a form of world-denial, but loving acceptance of flawed reality, of imperfection. It is a rebuke to all separatism, escapism, and self-hatred. And of course, as it points us to the Christ-event, Lent ends, as it beings, with an affirmation of our creaturely existence: as Christ rose from the dead, so will our bodies, to live in a New Jerusalem – not an ethereal 'heaven'."

- from Possibly Insane Thoughts on Ash Wednesday
(Written on the Occasion of a Sleepless Night)

This is a beautiful, moving, personal and very insightful piece on the importance of Ash Wednesday in the tradition of Lent, and on the importance of the body and its death in the fullness of life. It is worth reading in full. My own journey out of a dualistic desire for escape from bodily life was also something of a via negativa through the prophet Nietzsche.
H/T Jason.

Would Jesus vote green? VII

Anger
When we learn about how bad things now are, a third common response is anger. How can people be so stupid, so selfish, so short-sighted, so greedy? Up to a quarter of all the sea creatures caught in global fisheries are discarded - thrown back in to the sea dead or dying - because they are not the fishermen's intended target -fish, whales, dolphins, porpoises, fur seals, albatrosses and turtles. Hearing things like this makes me angry.

Like grief, there is something right about this response. Like grief, we get angry when something we love is under attack. Anger can be a protective response. If parents didn’t get angry when someone was deliberately hurting their children, you’d have to wonder if they really cared. Anger shows we care and want things to be different.

God too is saddened and angered by the abuse and destruction of his creation. This is not a random, capricious rage that unexpectedly explodes, but his deliberate, passionate opposition to all that damages and tears down his creation, all that poisons and contaminates his good world, all that fractures harmony, all that blasphemes his life-giving Spirit.

So it is right and proper to get angry. This is not the way things ought to be. There is a deep problem with the world.

But the danger with anger is that we can blind ourselves to the role that we ourselves play. It is possible to get angry at others, at what the greedy corporations are doing, at what the spineless governments are not doing, at what my neighbour thinks, and in so doing to conveniently avoid what I am doing, not doing, what my attitudes are. This is the danger of self-righteousness.

Things are not the way they ought to be. There is a deep problem with the world. But the line between good and evil does not run between the rich and the poor, or between the left and the right, or between the corporations and the people. It does not run between us and them. The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart – including yours and mine. The problem is not simply out there; it is also in here.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII.