Cheaty Cheaty Bung Bung

What do the following have in common:

• Formula 1
• Afghanistan elections
• Westminster MP's
• Derren Brown
• Several Premiership football clubs
• Harlequins
  

Yup, cheats (or alleged cheats) are everywhere. OK Derren Brown may not have cheated, but anyone tuning in to find out how he 'predicted' the lottery numbers on Friday would have been disappointed. He promised to explain how he'd done it, and didn't - or at least, nobody else who watched the program is any the wiser*. So maybe 'misdirection' is the latest word for being 'economical with the truth'. The main trick he pulled was to get people watching his programme, and that worked very well.

From an early age, we're wired to sniff out potential cheats. Cries of 'that's not fair!' echo around every school playground and childrens party. It often means 'you've got something I haven't, and I'm jealous', which is another reason why people cheat in the first place.

The way we use language to cover up our cheating is almost comical. Brown (Derren, that is) gets away with 'misdirection', and millions of illegal downloaders protest about being 'criminalised'. How does that work? If you're doing something that's against the law, and you know it's against the law, you're a criminal. Yet somehow it's the laws fault, and the downloader is entirely blameless. The same specious rubbish is used about speeding. Are benefit and tax cheats 'criminalised' too?

The good news is that we can still get up in arms about cheating. The moral compass still works. The bad news is that we're better at reading other people's compasses than our own. Whether it's MP's trying to bluff their way through expenses scandals, or a football manager protecting his diving centre forward, there are far too many supposed role models who live as though cheating was ok, and a perfectly acceptable means to an end.

Before we get too uptight about the Afghan elections, and what Our Boys are doing propping up a corrupt and backward regime, it's worth reminding ourselves that the UK is hardly a bastion of fair play. If we wink at, celebrate, or reward those who cut moral corners, then we lose moral authority. When there are protests that immigrant communities have failed to 'integrate', I sometimes wonder if they've been wise not to do so, given the values of their host nation.

My other concern is that we're leaning to experience moral outrage as a form of entertainment. It sells newspapers, as the Telegraph discovered to their shareholders delight and MP's distress. The online Daily Mail headline generator ('Will Yobs infect British farmers with AIDS?') is close enough to the truth. If we can package moral outrage as an 'event' - a march, a music festival (remember Live8) then that heightens involvement, but our politicians also know that within a few days we'll have got bored and moved onto the next thing. Sustained pressure, outside of committed activists and pressure groups, is more elusive.

The encouraging thing is that these stories are 'news'. If everyone in rugby cheated, Harlequins wouldn't stand out. Unfortunately cheating is suspected/expected in so many sports now (athletics, cycling, football....) that rugby was seen, until this year, as an island of fair play in a sea of corruption. Will that tide turn back, or is this just part of human nature which will keep repeating somewhere, in some form, for as long as there's an advantage to be gained?

this is a cross post from the Wardman Wire, where I occasionally write a column called 'Touching Base'.

*if you watch the vid, his method is a load of cobblers: 'averaging out' numbers from 24 people who write from their 'collective unconscious'. Notice that none of them see his workings, or his conclusions. I really hope his 'team' weren't taken in by this, nor anybody else. The online consensus seems to be that it was a camera trick, with a split screen, with the balls switched after the draw, and the split screen removed.

Is the Crunch a Catholic? The Seven Deadly Sins and the Credit Crunch

Though the Catholic church seems to have recently mislaid its moral compass, it was not always so. Long before they were linked to the churches own financial scandal, the Seven Deadly Sins were commended as a medieval precursor of PSHE. Since nothing else seems to be working, gimme some old time religion....

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

Envy is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Hang on, I thought these were drafted in the 4th century? It all sounds strangely familiar. All you need to do is add 'marketing' to link Envy to the other two, and you have consumer capitalism. You could draw other lines from Gluttony to the obesity problem, or global warming, and one from Greed to Thatcherism.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Mmm......now where were we? Oh yes. That makes 4 sins which are about having stuff we don't currently possess, which is the engine room of consumerism. When this instinct spills over into relationships you get affairs, rape, and a whole load of stuff which stems from seeing people no longer as people, but as means to satisfy our own desires. Meanwhile the tabloids print pictures of naked women opposite a story on a sex offender and never do the maths.

Pride is excessive belief in one's own abilities, that interferes with the individual's recognition of
the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

I don't know if phrases like "we have abolished boom and bust" would count, or a consistent habit of blaming our economic woes on the USA (whatever happened to the special relationship?). One of the many troubles with pride is that, because you never admit to any mistakes, you never learn from them. So much energy is put into maintaining a public facade of competence that we tie ourselves, and others, in knots.

And before we point the finger (oops, too late), it's not just politicians who do this. When did you last read a blog post where, after the comments, the author writes "sorry everyone, I'm obviously talking complete nonsense, you are right and I was wrong."

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

Seeing the protests around Europe in the last few days, I wonder if we could do with a bit more anger. We've probably got enough going around, but we misdirect it - the middle classes at Jonathan Ross, the young at each other. Anger is a great agent for change if it's directed at the right things, but much of ours is blind fury, a catharsis of our own feelings rather than moved by compassion and a sense of justice.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

At last! A sin recognised by the government. Unfortunately this is one we're going to have to get used to. The recession is good news for the slothful, as it's much easier to blend in with the rest of us. Not the best time to launch a welfare-to-work push, though I guess if it fails nobody will notice (see Pride).

The avoidance of spiritual work is perhaps the more serious. Who we are - as individuals and as a society - is to a large extent what we have decided to be, or what we have let ourselves become. We can be proud, greedy and angry, or we can be humble, generous and kind. We have a choice, daily, over which way to go. The path of least resistance leads to all of the above, the road less travelled goes to that old place of myth and legend, Virtue.

And here are the 7 virtues: Faith, Hope, Love/Charity, Courage, Restraint, Justice, and, um, Prudence. It would be interesting to sit down with this list and Obama's inauguration speech and tick them off, one by one, but that's another post. (Meanwhile if you'd rather just have a giggle, go here.) Plenty of money is currently being thrown around to fix our sputtering economies, but we also need to address the questionable morality which got us here. If the debt crunch is at root a moral problem, then how do we fix that?

this is a cross post from Touching Base, a weekly column hosted by the Wardman Wire.

Todays Little Choices

It's been quite a week for democracy and people power.

Barack Obama's first inaguration was the media event of the week, with everyone from 5Live to the Daily Mail queuing up to kiss the ring. Obama recognised in his speech that leading the USA also involves leading the world. Even though the rest of us have no say in it, the choice of President made by the USA will affect our politics, economy and society.

And how many in the US actually made that choice? Obama won with 52.9% of the popular vote, which with a high turnout translated into 1 in 3 of the total adult population. His early decisions - on Guantanamo and international funding for abortion - affect people who had no say in that election. It's a reminder that when we vote we vote on behalf of others, not just ourselves.

They get a President, We get a Presenter
Back in the Messiah-free UK Jonathan Ross has returned, after his 3 month suspension. Many have put the BBC's response down to a campaign against Ross which resulted in nearly 40,000 complaints being sent to the BBC. I wonder if any of those against that campaign were involved in this one, which helped torpedo government moves to keep MP's expenses secret. With hundreds of people using the internet to raise the issue with MP's, there was a sudden change in the Westminster wind, and a Tory-Labour deal came rapidly unstitched. Was this what Hazel Blears had in mind when she explored how the internet could enhance democracy?

Less succesful were the 300+ complaints against the Agnostibus - the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the slogan "There is Probably No God, now stop worrying and enjoy life" didn't breach the advertising code, being "an expression of the advertisers opinion" and that "the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation." Would they have got a different result with 40,000 protesters? Or do some things stay true no matter what public opinion thinks? The weird thing is the ASA have ruled that atheism, and the claim that belief in God causes you to worry and stop enjoying life, can't be substantiated. So who won?

Meanwhile, though total figures don't seem to be public yet, I imagine that Ulkrika Johnsson's vote on Celebrity Big Brother knocks all of the above (except Obama) into a very small cocked hat. It would be dispiriting to think too much about it, but far more of us will take the time to vote on a reality TV show (or complain if John Sargeant is booted off), than to lobby our MP over a matter of justice and truth. This leaves the democratic process in the hands of the few, not the many - it is only those who are committed who can locate and pull the levers of power.

A funny thing has happened to choice. 100 years ago, women were fighting for the right to vote, to choose their political leaders. In an age when few economic or social choices were available, the right to exercise power through the ballot box was a unique opportunity to influence things. Since then there has been a massive change, as the power to choose has extended from politics, to economics, family structure, personal identity, gender roles and religious preferences. Choice is now a fundamental right for 3 years olds - chatting to a teacher at our local pre-school yesterday, they have to offer every activity as a 'choice' to the children, despite having dozens of 'learning outcomes' to deliver.

McChoices
Weve got used to exercising many of these choices through consumption: what we buy, wear and do is part of our identity. At the same time, the Big Brother effect has created a parody of choice. Douglas Coupland once defined marketing as the art of feeding people's waste back to them in such a way that they don't realise it's not real food. The mobile phone and TV production companies one day woke up and realised that they could sell 'choice' back to us in a form which made them money.

And the more Gordon Brown tells us that the credit crunch is the result of global factors beyond his control, rather than our economy's quiet divorce from Prudence, the more text voting looks like a fun diversion and lobbying Parliament a waste of time. Even some prominent bloggers have taken to trying to stitch up public votes. Or was it campaigning?

So now to my choice: in my inbox is a newsletter from No2ID, warning of a key Commons vote next week on data protection, and an amusing circular email from a friend. Which one I choose to read might affect the country I end up living in. It should be a no-brainer, but......

this is a cross post from Touching Base, a regular column hosted by the Wardman Wire.

Stop Worrying? I Hadn't Even Started

Fear not, brave credit crunch commuters. As you sit in never-ending traffic queues at the rush hour, wondering if you'll have a job to go back to next week, a message of hope will pass you in the bus lane. That's right, stop worrying and enjoy life, because you'll probabably have no job.

No, sorry, I misread that, 'there probably is no God'. Well that's all your problems sorted then.

The agnostibus, or Atheist Bus Campaign to use the official title, was launched this week to great fanfare. £140,000, 800 buses and hundreds of ad spaces on the Tube are declaring the joyous news that there is probably no God. Responses have been many and varied, including Christian groups supporting the ads, arguimg that anything which gets people thinking about their beliefs is a good thing (I guess that's the 'no such thing as bad publicity' line). Meanwhile some atheists have lamented the 'probably', and there are worrying signs that the debate is being sidetracked by other matters.

Bus Stop

Complaints have already been made to the Advertising Standards Authority, predictably from Christian Voice but from more serious quarters too - see this submission by Clifford Longley, covered by Andrew Brown in the Guardian. Longley argues that the probability actually points towards the existence of God, and cites a number of prominent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, to back up his argument.

As yet, nobody has picked up on the other dubious claim in the advert, that faith causes you to worry and enjoy life less. For example, Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science that there are 6 major factors in human happiness which apply worldwide, one of which is belief in God. He writes about:

one of the most robust findings of happiness research: that people who believe in God are happier. At the individual level one cannot be sure whether belief causes happiness or happiness causes belief. But since the relation also exists at the national level, we can be sure that to some extent belief causes happiness” (p72)

It's a finding backed up by other research including this presented to the Royal Economic Society. In response to the latter, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, claimed "Happiness is an elusive concept, anyway - I find listening to classical music blissful and watching football repulsive.

"Other people feel exactly the opposite. In the end, it comes down to the individual and, to an extent, their genetic predispositions."

So according to the NSS your level of happiness, or enjoyment of life, is nothing much to do with whether you believe in God or not. This is

a) despite research suggesting otherwise (but when was the last time the NSS paid attention to anything which didn't support their agenda?)

and

b) a high-profile national advertising campaign saying exactly the opposite.

Whoops.

How Scary is Jesus?

So why are the adverts claiming that faith causes you to worry and stop enjoying life? Ariane Sherine, who thought up the campaign, argues: a new advertising campaign for Alpha Courses is running on London buses. If you attend an Alpha Course, you will again be told that failing to believe in Jesus will condemn you to hell. There's no doubt that advertising can be effective, and religious advertising works particularly well on those who are vulnerable, frightening them into believing. Religious organisations' jobs are made easier because there's no publicly visible counter-view to refute their threats of eternal damnation.

Anyone who's done the Alpha Course will wonder if they missed something - yes the course is designed to present the Christian faith and persuade people to try it out, but at no stage are people told 'believe this or go to hell'. And the adverts themselves are far from frightening: 'if God did exist, what would you ask?' runs the tagline, featuring very generalised questions like 'What am I doing here?' There's even a story doing the rounds of someone sitting in a very dull church who saw that poster, asked himself what he was doing there, and got up and left.

Any religion worth its salt will deal with questions of eternal destiny. Criticising religions for having an alternative scenario to spending the next life with God is like criticising water for being liquid. I very much doubt that Richard Dawkins would take kindly to spending eternity with the God he's spent his whole life trying to disprove. So if he's going to hate 'heaven', there has to be an alternative.

To be fair there are some crass religious adverts, such as those peculiar Authorised Version quotes which occasionally pop up at railway stations. But most religious advertising is aimed at raising money for charity (e.g. Christian Aid), and if anyone has been left quaking in fear by the Alpha ads then please leave a comment below.

Seatbelts Please

The 'stop worrying' tagline, conceived in those heady summer days of 2008 before the credit crunch, now looks woefully out of step with reality. There's even a photo at the official website which looks like two of the agnostibuses crashing into one another. This is going to be an interesting ride.

This is a cross-post from Touching Base, a column at the Wardman Wire.

Trescothick 'Coming Back to Me'

Review of Marcus Trescothicks excellent and painfully honest autobiography just posted at the Wardman Wire, so go there for the full monty, but here's a snippet:

Thoughts
Firstly, I remove every cricketing hat I’ve ever worn to Trescothick for being so honest. One of the great fears of people with mental illness is what others will think of them if they let on, and having the tabloid press following your every move can’t make things any easier. The book adds to the increasing number of public figures who’ve gone public about mental illness (though Trescothick is careful to remind us that depression is actually a physical illness - perhaps we should call it a chemical illness, since that’s the root basis of it). John Prescott (bulimia) Stephen Fry (bipolar) David Beckham (OCD) - there is a celebrity patron saint for most forms of chemical illness now, and hopefully this signals a cultural shift in the way we deal with these things.

Secondly: it’s clear that Trescothick was broken on the wheel of international cricket. Money has come to dominate the game, as it has in football, and cricket schedules have changed what’s involved in playing for a national side. Most of the 2005 Ashes-winning side have broken down physically (Simon Jones, Ashley Giles, Andrew Flintoff, Michael Vaughan, Steve Harmison), mentally (Trescothick, possibly Harmison again for his touring blues), or suffered a dip in form which was cured primarily by a break from the whole business (Andrew Strauss). You have to ask of others (Bell, Cook) whether they’d score more runs if they played fewer games, and don’t forget to add Ryan Sidebottom, our top bowler of 2008, to the injury list.....

....English players will continue to crack because they no longer get a proper rest. Even if we win the Ashes this summer against an increasingly shaky Australia, enjoy it whilst it lasts, because half of that winning side will be out of action by summer 2010. We’ve known since God created the Sabbath that rest is vital to a sustainable and fruitful life, but both cricket and culture now run as close to empty as they can just in case He got it wrong.

It would be tempting to pass Trescothicks book off as an honest, brave account of something deeply personal, and nothing more. But Trescothick notes that when he told manager Duncan Fletcher the truth for the first time “Duncan even went so far as to raise other instances of players disappearing from the game for reasons that weren’t apparent at the time but which now appeared to him to make perfect sense” (p290). He probably wouldn’t claim this for himself, but the powers that be need to hear this as a warning voice from the professional cricketing community.

And those of us who consume our cricket via Sky need to ask if we’re just the innocent viewing public, or something more. If the likes of Sky couldn’t make money out of televised cricket, they wouldn’t push so hard for more fixtures, or dangle such large sums of money over the various national cricketing bodies. Just as every Google search leaves a carbon footprint, everyone who pays commercially for their televised sport contributes to the culture our sportsmen and women have to play in. If that culture breaks them, who is to blame?

The True Meaning of Christmas

Amid all the tinsel, baubles, half-eaten turkeys and re-runs of the Muppet Christmas Carol, lets get back to the true meaning of Christmas for a moment. And it’s this:

Game Over.

In the New Testament, there are 2 accounts of the birth of Jesus. Luke’s version tells us that Augustus Caesar rules the world, and proves it by ordering a census which sends poor Jewish families like Joseph & Mary trekking 100 miles on foot to sign a register. No wonder censuses caused riots and uprisings. This isn’t background information, it’s a potent reminder of the harsh reality of the ancient world, and the superpower which ruled it.

Into this Luke drops the fact that Joseph is a direct descendent of David, the great Israelite king. They go to David’s town (Bethlehem), and the miracle baby is born. In the Bible a miracle baby usually means God is about to do something amazing (Isaac, Moses, Samuel). Then the angels (= ‘messengers’) announce that this baby is the Christ, or Messiah. In other words, this is the king God was going to send, who would rule not only God’s people, but the whole world, in God’s way. Stand aside Caesar, there is a new dynasty.

Matthew’s gospel is even more blatant. The first few paragraphs spell out Jesus’ direct descent from king David, right back to Abraham. There is no question that this is the rightful king. It’s therefore quite a surprise to find that Herod is in fact king of Israel. By the time Herod is mentioned (at the start of chapter 2), it’s clear that he’s a usurper, and his job is to stand aside. It’s only the visit of the wise men, come to worship and honour the new king, which puts Herod on red alert.

Of course Herod doesn’t stand aside, and neither does Caesar. Human government - whether the local tyrant (Herod) or the impersonal international system (Caesar) doesn’t take kindly to being challenged. Look at the feverish efforts of the West to maintain military supremacy, and the mind-boggling levels of resources poured into keeping the economic system on its feet in recent months. This system is not about to say ‘ok, game over, somebody else have a go’.

But this is the true meaning of Christmas. Game over: God wants to have a go. A go at ruling with justice, and without cruelty. A new system which, born among the poor, rules for them rather than against them. The birth of Jesus, and the way the gospels portray it, is intensely political. No wonder many early Christians were martyred and persecuted - the powers of the time grasped very clearly what the Christian faith was claiming: there is a new leader, and we are going to follow him, not you.

Sadly the church has messed up in two ways. Firstly, when we’ve had power and influence we’ve not used it well. Crusades. Enough said. Secondly, we’ve allowed the Christmas story to turn in modern times into a twee bit of escapism, and lost the revolutionary political edge which it originally carried.

So have yourself a subversive, political Christmas. It’s what Jesus would want.

This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire on Christmas Day. And in case you think 'hang on, he's said this before', yes it's an abbreviated version of some of the 'Three Kings' sermon from earlier this week.

Welfare Reform: Injustice Alert

I've posted a critique of the Governments welfare reform proposals, announced during the week, at the Wardman Wire. You can read the full article there, but here's some of it.


Lone Parents and Families.
The proposals for lone parents are that they will be on conditional benefits by the time their children are 7+, and whilst their children are 3-7 they’ll be taking steps back to work. The legislation “will enable advisers to require lone parents with a youngest child aged 3 or over to undertake work-related activity, a skills health check and training…” (para 6.68, my emphasis). If they don't comply, benefits can be stopped.

Why is this? Because the paper has “an emphasis on tackling the underlying causes of poverty rather than just treating the symptoms” (para 7.9), and if lone parents are working, their children are less likely to be in poverty.

But that’s not the only cause of child poverty. The governments own figures (see tables in chapter 4) show that children are twice as likely to be in either absolute or relative poverty if they are in lone parent households, compared to households with 2 parents. One underlying cause of poverty is family structure, yet this is an issue the government consistently refuses to address. The best thing you can do for your kids is wait until you’ve got a faithful partner to have them with. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a start.

There are two other injustices here:

1. Parenthood is work. Even with a 7 year old, you are on call 24/7, and if you put together the work involved in looking after them, creating a good home environment, and doing all the mundane things which need going when you’ve got kids, then that is a full time job. Yet the implicit message here is that it’s not, we would rather you stick your kids in ‘wraparound childcare’ (which may well be substandard in the first place) so that you can do paid work.

Good, attentive parenting can do more for your kids than a few hours on the checkout at ASDA, or whatever other McJob you’re forced to accept by your personal job trainer. What stuns me is that parents of 3-6 year olds will get coaching and training offered in work skills, but nothing whatsoever in parenting skills. Once again, there is no value or support given to their primary occupation. An investment in the parenting and relational skills of parents of under-7’s will do a lot more for their children’s wellbeing than forcing them to return to work once their child hits 7.

2. It singles out the poor. There may be a small army of lone parents desperate to get back to work, and they’ll get more support to do that through these proposals. But there is also a small army of non-working parents who will escape government coercion. These are the partners of working people who don’t qualify for benefit, so the government can’t wave a big stick at them to get them back into the labour market. Actually it can, it’s called Child Tax Credit, but there is nothing here about stopping CTC (or Child Benefit) for middle class mums. Why pick on lone parents? Because they are easier to coerce through the benefits system, and, if you’re cynical, it might just be about the votes too.

Let me be clear: I don’t think that any full-time parent of children under 16 should be coerced into the labour market, and it is unjust and unfair that only the poorest and most vulnerable parents are going to be coerced in this way.

Work and Mental Health
The White Paper notes, almost in passing, that “Mental health conditions are now the single biggest cause of absence from work and of claims for incapacity benefits” (para 5.83). Yet in a 210 page document there are only 6 paragraphs on mental health, which basically say “we’re not sure we know enough about this.”

Despite that, those with mental health problems will also come under the regime of ‘job consultants’ to help them back into work. How on earth the government plans to train up thousands of Job Centre employees to do this isn’t explored. There is a bewildering range of mental illnesses, and understanding everything from anxiety disorders to seasonal depression, OCD and anorexia will require a big input of training.

My worry is that the training just won’t happen, so decisions about benefits will be taken by people who simply don’t know what they’re talking about. The very process of seeing your benefits at risk will heighten stress and anxiety for some, and what safeguards are there? “We would not put in place sanctions against anyone without first contacting them, their carer or their health professional” (para 5.85). Well that's reassuring. Not. It's a commitment to inform, nothing more. How is placing the mentally ill under more pressure going to help them?

Again, this is symptoms and not cause. There are a nest of cultural, economic and social reasons for the epidemic of mental illness, but there is nothing here that proposes to tackle any of them.

Judge's Seat or Mercy Seat?

Five people in a balloon, you can only save 3, they are:
- A journalist who can't dance
- A member of the BNP
- A talent show judge
- A person with a diagnosed mental illness
- A disgraced former chat show presenter.

There's been an awful lot of judging this past week, not all of it to the same standard, some of it to double standards. For example:

1. Talent shows. John Sergeants departure from Strictly Come Dancing may have hogged the headlines, but the X Factor judges were just as keen to see the back of one of their contestants. Not because he couldn't sing, but because the last time an older man won the competition he didn't sell many records. Cowell and Walsh were just as harsh on Daniel Evans as the SCD judges have been on Sargeant. Were they judging talent, or potential sales - well, who am I to judge....

2. Angus Deayton taking Jonathan Ross's place as the host of the Comedy Awards. The BBC enquiry found the R&B calls 'deplorable', and no doubt Ross will do his time and be back, just as Deayton has done. Second chances are good, and it remains to be seen whether we see a contrite and changed JR in the new year, or whether Manuelgate becomes just another source of comic material.

3. BNP members. From the little I know of The List, I'm not sure I'll ever look at railway enthusiasts the same way again... Some sackings, threats and public denials, have followed the membership leak, yet membership of the BNP is not a crime. Certain occupations are barred to membership, and rightly so, but we don't as yet have thought crime in this country, and we never should. Yet the label makes it easy to judge people, which ironically is a language the BNP are quite familiar with.

4. On labels, well done to Horizon for an excellent two-parter on mental illness. 'How Mad Are You?' followed 10 volunteers, 5 of whom had mental disorders, and showed just how 'normal' they looked. A team of psychiatrists, despite the aid of video footage and some specially designed tests, only guessed 2 of them right. The programmes showed both that there's a spectrum of mental health, and that recovery from mental illness is possible.

The BBC's Headroom has made a real effort to educate and de-stigmatise mental illness. Whilst depression and 'stress' are increasingly ok (and almost vital if you're a celebrity), there are other conditions which are less well known, with which many people suffer in silence for fear of what others will think. I was struck by the courage of Dan, who spoke openly about his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (nearly 2m sufferers in the UK), in the hope that it would encourage others and help to break the taboo around it. It's a horrible illness to have, and one which many are afraid to admit to, David Beckham being a notable exception. (On a similar theme, Bishop Alan has recently posted on eating disorders, worth a look)


With so many TV shows based around judges - either in the studio or the massed ranks texting in their votes - we seem to be training ourselves daily to pass judgement on people we've never met. Someone I know has suffered a torrent of online abuse this week for a public statement of his Christian faith. And because we know judging is so common, we also become experts at concealing stuff that might get judged by others.

Wouldn't we be a better society if we could be open about our deepest beliefs, fears and weaknesses without being jumped on? Fear and criticism can create a ghetto mentality, where no critics are admitted, which in turn makes entrenched beliefs less and less open to reason. Witch hunts don't find witches, they just create devils out of those who pursue them.

Jesus, who himself was voted off by both the judges and the public, once said 'judge not, so that you yourself are not judged'. Of course he's right, societies and individuals are both healthier for getting out of the judgement seat and sitting in the mercy seat instead. Now, who's going to tell Simon Cowell?

This is a cross-post from the Wardman Wire.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Great word. What does it mean again?

There's a battle of the long words at the Wardman Wire, where I've posted on Antidisestablishmentarianism in reply to an earlier post about disestablishmentarianism. Have a look and see if we've justified this overuse of the available consonants in the universe.

I just feel better for seeing it down in print. It's worth the debate just for the writing and hearing of the words themselves. At the pub quiz the other night the quizmaster was struggling with a few pronunciations (Seve Ballesteros came out as 'Steve', and we won't mention the Crimean War), so, in true Christian spirit, we called ourselves the Antidisestablishmentarians and hoped we'd get in the top 3 so he'd have to read our names out. We came 2nd. He did quite well, actually.

Behind the Collar: Funerals

Taking a funeral is one of the hardest things I do. Having two in one day on Tuesday all but wiped me out for the rest of the week.

It starts with a phone call from the undertakers - we have some very good ones in Yeovil, and it's no reflection on them that my heart sinks every time they ring up. Taking someone's funeral is an immense privilege, but I'd be lying if I said it was my favourite part of being a vicar. A few details down the phone, then you ring the family to arrange to meet up. Having to ring someone you've never met, out of the blue, to express condolence and to fix a meeting normally means I put the call off for a day. I'd be hopeless in telesales, ringing people up isn't something I find very easy, never mind judging exactly what to say.

The Visit
Then we meet, and most of the time is spent scribbling down notes - often folk launch into their summary of the deceased persons life before you've even sat down, and it's vital to capture all of those words. I always breathe a sigh of relief if someone from the family offers to give the tribute, because if they don't then it's my job to stand up and tell the life story - usually a story of a person I've never known or met. Normally in the funeral service I'm very up front with the fact that I didn't know the person, and that I'm not going to pretend that I knew them.

At one funeral, of the youngest of 6 brothers, each of the other 5 had written down their own words for the vicar to say, and my job was to edit all 5 accounts together and deliver the tribute. They bought me a pint afterwards, so it must have gone okay. I try to use the words that mourners themselves use, rather than try to read between the lines - this isn't a time for guessing games.

At the funeral visit you're trying to gauge mood as well: emotions can range all over the place. Family splits come to the surface, and the occasional skeleton emerges from the closet. If everyone knows that the dead person was an absolute scumbag, who beat his children and swore at his neighbours, then you've got to acknowledge that somehow, without starting the funeral service with "we're here to remember John, who, as you all know, was an absolute scumbag...."

There's a whole mix of emotions: grief, relief, numbness, anger, exhilaration, guilt, you name it. And for the bereaved, questions. Did we do enough for them? Were we there at the moment of death? Is it ok to feel relieved that they're not suffering any more? Is it ok to feel relieved that we don't have to look after them 24/7 any more? And for the vicar, how do you reassure people truthfully when you don't really know the circumstances?

The Service
The funeral service is normally booked into a 30 minute slot at the crematorium. That actually means 20 minutes for the service itself. One of the first ones I took had so many mourners that we were still filling the building 10 minutes after the start time. Crem staff can get a bit twitchy, one former employee came into a service a few years ago and told them to get a move on as they were running late: that's why he's a former employee! Especially after it was picked up by a national newspaper....

There's normally both laughter and tears at a 'good' funeral - both are ways of releasing grief, and the incredible pressure and weight that can build up. Funny stories are great. It's a fine line - you want to celebrate the good things in someone's life, as well as recognise the deep grief and loss that people are feeling. Being remorselessly downbeat isn't helpful, being chirpy isn't helpful either.

There are some standard Bible readings for funerals, but where possible I try to find something new, which linked to the persons life: for a man who had worked on trawlers at Grimsby, we had an encounter between Jesus and Peter the fisherman. If folk have asked for a vicar, and a Christian funeral, then I want to set everything in the context of the Christian faith. Old, familiar words (Psalm 23, the Lords Prayer) often help, but also how you say them. Sometimes it feels like you're having faith and hope on behalf of other people who haven't got them, but need someone to have more faith than they do.

Over the years I've become more challenging - trying to pick out the things in the deceased's life that folk can be inspired by, trying to give some sense of hope or direction for the future. For many people a funeral reminds them of their own mortality, how long they might have left (especially at an untimely death), and how they're going to be remembered.

What are people going to say about you at your funeral? Alfred Nobel was one of the few who got to find out. He was surprised, to say the least, to read his own obituary in the paper one day. Even more shocking was the content: it described him as a 'merchant of death', who, by his invention of dynamite, had 'become rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.' Nobel decided this wasn't the legacy he wanted to leave, and changed his will to endow the Nobel Peace prizes.

And then...
The service is a threshold, a final farewell, a marker post in the grief journey, and if you botch it then you can really mess people up. I'm all for children being in the service if they want to come - kids who are kept away when they wanted to be there will often feel a strong sense of unfinished business. And it's over in no time, people are filing out, shaking hands, looking at the messages on the flowers, wondering quite what to say to each other. And for the vicar it's back to the little office to take off your robes, pack everything away, and head off to the next thing. My journey home on Tuesday morning took me via the parent and toddler group - from one end of life to the other in 5 minutes.

This is a cross-post from Touching Base, a weekly column hosted by the Wardman Wire. And thanks to the Britblog Roundup for linking here.

Bipolar Banking? Analysing the Money Markets

I'm not sure I agree with the Pope.

"We see it now in the collapse of the great banks that money disappears, it's nothing," he remarked earlier this week. I'm sure he'd have been just as chilled if St. Peters Rome (completed with the money raised by selling time off purgatory to medieval peasants), had collapsed. The moral he drew was that God is more dependable than money.

But this isn't a crisis of money, it's a crisis of faith. 5 live's phone-in yesterday morning included Kriss Akabusi, who reminded us what we already knew, that the word 'confidence' comes from the Latin for 'with faith'. (You didn't? Me neither)

Market Mentality
Look at the language people are using: 'the main emotions are panic and fear' (Times) 'uncertainty and fear' (George Bush) 'panic, fear, frenzy' (Telegraph), 'brutal...riot...chaos' (Wall Street Journal: bit more macho). What's striking is that most of it is psychological language. The crisis is not quite 'all in the mind', but it's close. The talk is about rebuilding confidence - without confidence the market won't stabilise, but until the market stabilises people won't have confidence. Oops.

If you had to compare the graph of any banking share over the last 12 months to a mental state, it would be manic depression. The manic phase: overpricing, fuelled by reckless borrowing, has turned almost overnight to a spiral down. Take HBOS: somewhere between £12 and £1.20 is (shareholders hope), the true value of the company. But it doesn't change that quickly over 18 months.

DONT PANIC!
One thing I admire about Alastair Campbell is his openness about his depression, of which there is more in a documentary tomorrow. Our financial markets are cracking up too. Unfortunately, being in a room full of 1000 other panicking people doesn't make it easy to stop panicking. Just as modern life is toxic to mental stability, so is the stock market.

I remember those neat little charts from economics 'O' level (GCSE for you young 'uns), which made market behaviour look oh so scientific. The worshippers of the free market maintain that the market system itself is fine, but after the last few weeks, that belief seems increasingly psychotic (= loss of contact with reality). Whilst the real economy grinds slowly into recession, share prices cry 'look at me' as they jump from a cliff. The Gadarine swine, who hurled their demon-possessed porcine bodies into a lake from a cliff-top, are the closest biblical metaphor.

Medicating the Market
So who will cast the demons out of the pigs? The challenge is at least as much a mental one as an economic one: what will trip the psychology of the markets into an upswing, or, at the very least, boring old stability? What is the seroxat for stock markets? We have the talking cures (one a day from George Bush), and a sizeable one-off financial pill, but every depressant knows that medication works -when it works at all - only when you take it regularly over the long term.

What is the long term medicine? Gordon Brown, speaking on Monday, outlined a moral solution:
"My values, the values of the country, celebrate hard work, effort, enterprise and responsible risk taking - qualities that markets need to ensure that the rewards that flow are seen to be fair....And that is why we back the work ethic; we support effort and enterprise and responsible risk-taking. These are the morals markets need."

So the problem, according to Brown, is irresponsibility, lack of trust etc., and the solution is a more robust moral code for the markets.

Just in case we hadn't got it, he said the same thing again on GMTV on Thursday: "I am angry at irresponsible behaviour. Our economy is built around people who work hard, who show effort, who take responsible decisions, and whether there is excessive and irresponsible risk-taking, that has got to be punished."

That's all well and good: markets without a moral foundation don't work. If there is no trust, integrity, honesty etc. then there is no basis for open trade and commerce. But is that enough? Will it stop the kind of speculation and herd psychology which drives markets over a cliff? And if not, what's the alternative?

This is the way the world ends, not with a whim, but with a banker.
(ht) We don't know if global 21st century capitalism can survive without epidemic levels of borrowing, because we've never tried it that way before. But we do know if we don't try a different way, there won't be a globe full stop. Like it or not, global recession is the only sure-fire way to reduce our carbon footprint.

It's too soon to tell whether we'll look back on autumn 2008 as the beginning of the madness, or its end: the final dash to a watery grave of an unbalanced and unsustainable system. How's the patient, nurse?

(cross-posted from Touching Base, a weekly column at the Wardman Wire)

Haggis RIP?

Matt Wardman has this deeply disturbing story. Well, ok, not that disturbing.

Keep an eye on the Wardman Wire from about noon today, for my analysis of the 3 conference speeches of Clegg, Brown and Cameron. Here's a sneak preview: (I've done Clegg in green rather than orange because orange wouldn't show up very well on this background!)

Length
38 Minutes, 4085 words (107.5 wpm)
58 Minutes, 6703 words (115.6 wpm)
64 Minutes, 7083 words (110.7 wpm)

Which might just mean that Brown speaks more quickly, or that Cameron got more applause, or that Cameron deliberately slowed down to do the 'gravitas' thing. Clegg had more jokes and payoff lines, which may explain his slower delivery.

Height: Best Lines
"This is a Zombie government, a cross between Shaun of the Dead and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue"
"Cameron's only aim was to make the Conservatives inoffensive. Problem is, once you strip out the offensive parts of the Conservative party, there isn't much left."

"This is no time for a novice"
"One morning I woke up and realised my sight was going in my good eye. I... lay in the darkness for days on end. At that point my future was books on tape. But thanks to the NHS my sight was saved by care my parents could never have afforded."

"Tony Blair used to justify endless short-term initiatives by saying 'we live in a 24 hour media world.' But this is a country, not a television station."
"Four ways to make a complaint, but not one way for my constituents wife to die with dignity."

Depth: Core Ideas
Future, protecting the planet, liberalism - trusting people and providing 'people-shaped' government, tax cuts for lower incomes, civil liberties
Fairness, stable government in uncertain times, hard work, duty, more fairness - applied to law & order, education, economics, global poverty, NHS, immigration, welfare etc.
Responsibility - in society, politics and finance; mending the broken society, change, character and judgment, family, sound money & low taxes, sorting out broken politics.

and so on, also covering weight (specific policy announcements) width (policy areas covered), durability (lasting impact) and the Hallelujah factor.

Lessons from watching telly

After a summer break (thanks to Simon Sarmiento for filling in), weekly 'Touching Base' columns at the Wardman Wire have restarted. This weekends was 'Everything I Need to Know About Life, I Learnt from Watching Sport on Telly', here's the potted version.

1. Know what you have to do, and why
2. Work on your connections
3. It's ok to be human
4. There's more to life than football
5. Eventually, the game ends.

The link explains all.

Touching Base

In case regular readers - I think there are 2 of you - are wondering what's happend to the 'Touching Base' thingy I used to do at the weekend, Simon Sarmiento of Thinking Anglicans has taken this over for August, and is doing some very interesting posts reflecting on the Lambeth Conference. Thanks Simon. Now, where's my beer and sun lotion....

Touching Base: Quantum Blogging

the latest Touching Base will appear at Wardman Wire later today, but you saw it here first....

Science and God, despite Richard Dawkins attempts to break them up, haven’t stopped dating. Most flirtatious of the lot is physics. At the level of the cosmos, there is an emerging consensus that the universe appears ‘fine tuned’ for life. Had the Big Bang been stronger or weaker by roughly 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% then there would be no habitable universe. And that’s just the Big Bang, never mind all the other factors.

At the micro level, quantum physics keeps throwing up weird and wonderful results. One of the best known, and culturally significant, is the ‘observer effect’ - that the presence of an observer changes the results of what you’re looking at.

Seeing Through Others Eyes
Most of us rely on other eyes and ears for the events we can’t see and hear. TV, press, blogs, online news sources, or just asking around our mates. And those eyes and ears can change the way we see those events. Two examples:

- This weeks crime stats which revealed that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest ever level, and that recorded crime has dropped by nearly half since 1995. At the same time, 2/3 of us think crime is rising. Why? To be completely unscientific for a moment, we listen to the Today Programme over breakfast, and roughly ever other day I find myself talking loudly over a news item so that our small kids don’t hear about the latest ‘brutal stabbing’ or discovery of body parts on Jersey. Crime is news, and knife crime is big news at the moment, so it gets reported.

Crime seems to pay on TV too - during the last 7 days, you could catch the following on primetime TV: Foyles War; Midsomer Murders; Police Camera, Action!; Send in the Dogs (on police dogs); The Bill (twice); and A Touch of Frost. All about crime - real or fictional - and this is the output of just one channel, ITV1.

Good News is No News
The constant stream of news about crime sends a daily message that the once-a-year crime stats can’t compete with. After all, ‘man decides not to burgle house’ isn’t news. And because lack of crime isn’t news, it can’t be symbolic either. The Dewsbury abduction case earlier this year came to stand for more than just one messed up family, and was seized on by many as a symptom of a broken and lawless society. A running story, kept going by on-site journalists and off-site commentators (myself included). I struggle to think of an equivalent story of goodness and lawfulness which got the same coverage.

The Canterbury Coconut-Shy
The second example is the Lambeth Conference, the 10-yearly gathering of Anglican bishops from around the world. Bloggers and journalists are queueing up to report the latest scandals, splits and attacks on Rowan Williams. Frustratingly for most of them, the conference seems to be going well, and there is a decided lack of news. Jim Naughton comments:

To succeed fully, the bishops of the Lambeth Conference must avoid committing news. Any truly newsworthy development initiated by the bishops now gathered at Canterbury would represent a premature attempt to close questions not yet ready for resolution. Left to their own devices, the bishops might just be able to pull this off, but the bishops will not be left to their own devices. There will be a vast horde of media at the conference, and they will have to justify their presence by coming up with stories

Here is the observer effect in action. The journalists require ’stories’, and bloggers like me need something to blog about. If there are no stories, what happens? The machine keeps going - when was the last time the 10.00 news was cancelled or shortened for lack of items? And there is a ready supply of stones for the smooth Lambeth pond, supplied by those who weren’t invited but still came, and those who were invited but didn’t. The overall impression is of a church at war with itself, which contains some truth, but is just as much about a commenting community that would rather report the war than the peace.

One Argument Please, Short and Quotable.
Dissident groups are a godsend for the wordsmiths. Monty Python had a great sketch about a man seeking an argument, all he’d need to do today is log on. But because the argumentative make good news, they are given publicity way beyond their status. The National Secular Society has a very small membership, but because they guarantee an argument with anyone religious, they get quoted (example).

What Are We Doing?
The observer effect can go both ways. As a vocation, journalism is about unearthing and telling the truth, and the best journalism brings truth to light in the service of others. Matt Wardmans’s Zimbabwe series is a case in point. But there is a line crossed where reporting stops serving the truth and starts serving the story. The UK economy is a case in point - there’s no doubt that things are getting worse, with rising inflation and jobless, falling house prices etc. But could we talk ourselves into recession? A big story arc which reads ‘downturn’ seeks out stories which fit the big story, even if that’s not the whole story. So even as retail spending surges, and millions jet off on holiday, we keep on talking about how bad things are going to get. The ‘downturn’ story requires feeding to keep it alive, but the very act of feeding it creates a climate where a downturn is more likely.

…And Who For?
The temptation for bloggers and journalists is to feed stories and chase traffic, rather than chase truth and rest between meals. We can become self-serving. To come back to a regular Touching Base theme, we need a quantum of Sabbath, a routine which takes us out of the waterfall of words every so often, to evaluate what we’re doing, and ask who it really serves.

Time Out

Did a Touching Base piece on Saturday at the Wardman Wire on the need for time out, but forgot to link it. In a way it's a non-religious version of what I blogged here.

Here's a snippet:
Our local leisure complex has a section called ‘The Retreat’, which offers a typical consumerist solution. By parting with large amounts of cash, you can get a facial, a massage, or something unspeakable with candle wax and whalesong. An hour in another world. It’s not long enough, but it’s all we’ve got time for. The provocative Slow Leadership recommends time out, but recognises that for many of us half an hour a day is stretching it.

Blogging only makes things worse. On a web that never sleeps, it takes a matter of minutes for a new story to circle the globe. Report it tomorrow and you’re already too late. Its said that todays newspaper is tomorrows chip paper, blog posts start to whiff of deep fat whilst you’re off having your lunch.

and it's been picked up on this blog roundup, which is nice. It's quite a challenge to write something spiritual for a non-Christian audience every week, but it's a good challenge. How can we communicate the gospel and Christian wisdom without resorting to Kingdom catch-phrases? Discuss............

Those Hard Working Families

My latest Touching Base column is now online at the Wardman Wire. It deals with those creatures of political myth, the 'hard working family', and why the term doesn't do families any favours. Here's a snippet:

the ‘hard working families’ rhetoric is always used in economic debates. Outside this, families seem to barely exist, except when they’re trying to get their children into a local school. But what both of these are about is money: the better the child does at school, the more they’ll earn and the more tax they’ll pay, and Labour has been very keen to gear schools to the modern economy. At one level, that’s great, but at another you do have to wonder whether it’s being driven by childrens well-being (at an all-time low), or by £££££ signs.

Likewise the hard working family (lets call it the HWF) is first and foremost an economic unit. It’s not about love, companionship, raising children, building community, or any of that stuff, it’s about the money.

We had a government leaflet through our door a few months ago, which basically said ‘why stay at home looking after your kids when you could be out working - look at all the different people who are queueing up to take the little darlings off your hands!’ The overall message of the thing was ‘work = good, parenting your own children = bad’.

for the rest go here.

Moral, But No Compass: Reflections

I've posted some thoughts on the recent report 'Moral, But No Compass', on the role of the Church of England in delivering state welfare services, over at the Wardman Wire. For the full article, go there, but here's a bit of it:

A First Reaction
My initial response to the first news headlines on Moral but No Compass was ‘oh no, my church is whining at the government‘, but the report is actually very good, and deserves to be read and mulled over by both Church and State.

Welfare Delivery by the Church?
The reason for the report is the increasing encouragement from central government for the Church to be involved in welfare delivery. In seeking to understand the policy environment, the Von Hugel Foundation discovered that policymakers had no information on the Church of England, and a very limited understanding (and lumping together) of ‘faith groups.’ Alan Wilson, Ruth Gledhill, and Thinking Anglicans (also here) have already done a good job of responding to the main points and summarising comment from elsewhere.

a) Does Government understand the Church? Does it want a Glove Puppet?
The report speaks of national and local government failing to understand what motivates the Church. I remember a Q&A session with the Director of Education in one northern local authority: when asked how the Church could partner with them, his answer was effectively ‘you can promote the council’s education policy‘, and he couldn’t think of anything else. There was no recognition of the Church’s centuries of experience in education, its work with children and families, and the contribution it was already making in local schools.

Speaking to a councillor at the same authority one day, I realised a couple of minutes into the chat that it wasn’t really a conversation, he was simply asking loaded questions to get a ‘vicar supports council policy’ answer out of me. This was all in a Labour stronghold, and the principle attitudes towards the church seemed to be mistrust or co-option, rather than partnership and engagement. It must be said that here in Yeovil, a LibDem council, attitudes are more positive, though the labyrinth of agencies, partnerships, funding streams etc. means you have have a certain amount of time and energy to find your way through it. Equally, there are likely to be examples of positive and negartive examples in local authorities across the country.

It’s interesting that a recent government consultation on ‘violent extremism’ floats the idea that Further Education chaplaincies can play a role in tackling extremism on campus. It’s not easy to see whether this is seen as partnership, or chaplaincies becoming an informal agent of the state in low-level counter-terrorism!

go here for the rest: on whether the report lets the church off lightly, and the interface between prophecy and practice

(cartoon from ASBO Jesus)

New 'Touching Base' - is there such a thing as too much choice?

Beggars and Choosers:

In a consumer, choice-driven society, the question of British identity will never be settled. Consumer choice is all about the now, but the present without the past is a place without memory, a social form of dementia as the memories which created and sustained meaning are lost.

I enjoy the freedom to choose, but choice can never fully define who we are, or be the trump card in debates about morality, science, and economics. The Christian vision of identity - people created in love in the image of God - includes free will, balanced by reason, creativity, love, community, and a sense of place within creation. (Interesting that one of the upsides to recession is that we’re told we’ll all get more creative, as we’ll no longer be able to buy a solution to everything.)

In a couple of weeks I’ll be doing my first wedding of the summer. For the happy couples, the most amazing thing is not that they have chosen, but that they have been chosen. It’s in that context that love and identity can grow to their full extent.

more at the Wardman Wire from early this afternoon.

Recession? Bring it on

I've a new Touching Base column at the Wardman Wire on some of the casualties I'd like to see should the threatened recession materialise. For example:

Mortgage Weddings
whilst the plain old church still costs less than £400, there’s a hotel somewhere which will cost you 20 times that, and do individually wrapped gifts for all the guests (huh? I thought we gave them presents?). When the average wedding costs £25,000, more than double the figure 10 years ago, there’s clearly a few leeches which need to be pulled off those bright-eyed engaged couples. How we laughed when the desperate Apprentices failed to sell any wedding cakes to win Alan Sugars approval. But where they fail there is a queue of photographers, wedding organisers, stag venues, dressmakers, hire firms, and ‘wedding accessory’ marketers waiting to latch on and suck blood.

for the rest, go here.