Month: March 2023

I did run this morning — at -3° with no precipitation, it was extremely cold but the cold didn’t seep through my hoodie and gloves as it does when it’s raining or sleeting. Two miles, very patient pace since I was coming back after two days off. The BBC suggests that tomorrow will be much warmer, which would be very welcome.

I’m bunking off from running, still, as the weather stolidly refuses to improve and my throat is still wobbly (it’s embarrassing talking about the death of Jesus in John’s Gospel with a voice that alternates between James Earl Jones and Mickey Mouse). Right now the BBC projects tolerable weather for Sunday, so I’ll tentatively plan to resume running then.
I neglected to mention yesterday that I had gone to the lecture by Paul Gilroy, ‘Race-thinking and the Half-life of Atlantic Slavery,’ and it was a remarkable conspectus of the many dimensions of the toxic persistent legacies of racial ideologies. I tried to take notes, but just couldn’t keep up; I hope they put it online some day. I hadn’t heard anyone invoke Castoriadis and Dusssell in a long, long time.
Today is Friday of Eighth; I’m still a little behind in my marking, but as of today I can’t get further behind, and all the marking I do will have the effect of zeroing out my essay debt.

Two days in a row with no running, cos it’s still bone-achingly cold out, with some sleet apparently, and I seem to have lost my voice (so that running in cold, wet weather seems an unlikely recipe for rapid recovery). Several tutes today, marking (etc.), and Margaret gives a lecture tonight, so we’re not yet on a ‘spend a relaxing evening at home’ schedule. That waits for tomorrow, Friday of Eighth.

There’s no snow lying on the pavements (on James Street), but rooftops, walls, leaves, parked autos, and fences are dusted. I decided last night not to run this morning, so I permitted myself an extra hour’s sleep. This definitely seems like a good thing. I look forward to some sweet rest between terms.
This afternoon, there’s a lecture by the great Paul Gilroy on ‘Race-thinking and the Half-life of Atlantic Slavery,’ after which I’ll hasten home to dress for the Edward King Dinner at St Stephen’s House (to which I’m invited as the spouse of Visiting Tutor Margaret Adam). If I were the sort of person to resolve awkwardness by drinking, I would likely be deep in my cups tonight, but instead I expect I’ll just smile a lot and say, ‘No, I don’t have anything lined up after this year.’

Once again, 1°, (very) light sleet, two miles. I set an overambitious pace and didn’t meet it, but I expected as much; I did get home just three minutes later than my notional target.

Two miles, 1°, ‘light sleet’ according to the BBC Weather, and a very full timetable today. I did make my pacemark, but I had set it at what I thought was a nvery generous pace, when in fact I was sprinting to catch it at the end (and did catch it with time to spare, but still).

I mistrust Johann Hari, and I’m cautious about pop-lit denunciations of social media (Hmmm, social media caught Hari out as a plagiarist, fabulist, and Wikipedia vandal, and now Hari is down on social media… hmmm), but I have only respect for Chris Corrigan who devotes some thoughtful observations to his recent reading of Hari’s social media book.

The publication of the Matt Hancock WhatsApp transcripts from the Tory leadership conversations has engendered an appropriate response of mockery, indignation, and incredulity (I myself thought that certain excerpts had to be from a parody site, they were so outrageously, gleefully hard-hearted). I’m not sure, however, that they have provoked an increase in cynicism, and I wanted to take a moment to speculate about why that might be.

As a starter, I should confess that I come from the naïve, earnest generation who thought that we really could make the world a better place if we voted, smiled on our brother, voted for civil rights, marched for peace, and loved one another right now. We were suspicious of IBM and Ma Bell, of oil companies and mass media (cf. ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’), though we watched the Watergate Hearings and the Trial of the Chicago Eight Seven avidly. Many of us doubted that there was a way forward apart from some kind of revolution, but damned if we weren’t going to try.

As the Reagan/Thatcher era kicked into gear and brought with it swingeing deregulation, harsh cuts to social care and welfare benefits, anti-union government action, and various other favours to capital, our ’60s earnestness looked increasingly callow, and though some kept the faith in nonviolent resistance and ‘turn out the vote’ activism, many more slid into degrees of capitulation to the corporate regime; we succumbed to what Peter Sloterdijk called ‘enlightened false consciousness’, recognising the corruption attendant on participating in an economy that drove restlessly toward benefitting the wealthy and immiserating the middle class, eating away at the low end of modest prosperity, bit by bit. Enlightened false consciousness shouldn’t work — if we recognise corruption and our implication in policies against our own interest, we ought to resist and fight back — but enough of us were bought off by the promise that the face-eating leopards were going to eat other people’s faces first, and they wouldn’t get to us for a long time. Let’s call that ‘cynicism’ (not to be confused witih Sloterdijk’s ‘kynikal’ pushback).

Scroll forward past the Bush-Clinton-Blair-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Brown-Obama-Obama years to the elections of David Cameron and Donald Trump. By this point, enlightened false consciousness has become so deeply embedded in the discourses of public life that the news media treated frankly outrageous lies as ‘one side’ that had to be heard alongside ‘the other side’ (because ‘reality’ skews toward the left, and the journals — never as stalwartly liberal as liberals hoped, and far from as liberal as the right wing gleefully accused them of being). At this point, ‘cynicism’ no long functions as an accusation; it’s a survival tactic that itself works less and less well, as opiates require increasing frequency and greater dosage to provide blessed relief from the bleakness of staring into the abyss of contemporary policy ‘debates’. Scroll up to a global respiratory pandemic to which the simplest, cheapest, most effective policy entailed minimising transmission (in extreme conditions by lockdowns, in less mind-bogglingly dire circumstances by wearing a paper mask over mouth and nose). Within my lifetime, a serious political regime might have invoked the ‘moral equivalent of war’ and asked the citizenry to put up with minor discomfort as part of a society-wide effort to suppress the pandemic to the extent that its transmission and mutations were not rampant, but sporadic and perhaps seasonal. But under the conditions of enlightened false consciousness, the governments of the USA and UK (and other Western nations) trimmed their sails to the wind of the oligopolistic media’s profit-driven outrage machines.

Which brings us to the Hancock messages. At this point, cynicism is punctured, a flat tire, a placebo that used to give us a bit of pain relief but which we’ve discovered to be just another sham, another bluff. We’ve been played, and our cynicism has been turned against us by practitioners of metacynicism, the deliberate effort to live down to the lowest possible expectations of elected representatives in order to render the whole system of electoral politics moot. If all politicians are fundamentally, ipso facto, grifters, then all a pol needs to win votes is to be a more agreeable con artist than the alternatives, the ‘other sides.’ So the public face of metacycnicism splashes false equivalencies, whataboutism, both-sides journalism, and so on, while behind the scenes the jovial mountebanks LOL (literally) at the marks. Global climate catastrophe? Global pandemic of a viral infection that kills, disables, and then comes back for second and third helpings? Bogus panic about trans- ‘recruitment’/‘grooming’ that bears no relation to realities that overflow with generations of Britons revelling in pantos and broadcast cross-dressing? Government by the puppets of billionaires who rig the economy to favour them?

Better vote for the funniest puppet, so that as we cough and reel in our lifeboats, we can navigate the flooded streets of our low-lying cities with the comforting thought that at least our side is in power, and the other side would have made things much worse.

I’m disabled by earnestness. I can’t imagine what meta-metacynicism will look like, and I’m too serious to think it a relief that I may not live long enough to see its toxic fruit. I lie sleepless at night, grieving the world my grandchildren will never have the chance to see, where we actually had more than a sliver of hope that a better world was possible — assuming, of course, that the world is still habitable by the time they see what a mess the metacynics have made of it.

Rowan Williams’s lovely interview with Nick Cave;

Beth Felker Jones’s takedown of the infamous Gospel Coalition ‘semen as divine gift’ post (a compelling illustration that, although Beth and I hold to very different basic theologies [she evangelical Protestant, I catholic Anglican] and probably very different assessments of human sexuality [though we haven’t talked that over], we can agree when somebody has written a Very, Very Bad Article);

James McGrath blogging about John’s ‘I Am’ sayings, and Jaco’s response thereunto. This is a topic I return to every year when tutoring the Gospels paper, and I remain persuaded that there is less here than meets the imagination of most of my colleagues — but I keep reading, cos that’s how they could win me over if they come up with better arguments.

Two degrees, a very slow pace, but two miles naetheless, in the books as it were. Morning Mass at Cowley St John, Evensong tonight at Oriel (University Sermon by our own Mark Wynn), home, then a whole solid week of work. Whee!

3° temps, two miles, one chilly runner. I didn’t set a pace goal, so I didn’t have a goal to meet. I just ran, and came home.

‘If you lose your faith, babe, you can have mine
And if you’re lost I’m right behind
Cos we walk the same line…’

Another morning, another two miles, in (heat wave!) 3°. Feeling especially susceptible today, set off by reading a column Margaret sent me: Simcha Fisher on almsgiving, who concludes the short essay by observing ‘There is no such thing as a wasted act of love…’. That just opened up a large old can of feelings — grace has a way of affecting me. Now I want to write a book about Wasted Theology: Excess, Utility, and Love, working with ideas I’ve written about here before concerning the direly pernicious effects of the idol of efficiency, the presumption that everything worthwhile is useful, and the counterexample of a love that yields, squanders, dawdles. As I think I’ve said here before, You can’t steal anything from Jesus…

Then hearing a few of my favourites come past on iTunes Shuffle (someday I want to adopt a digital music player that sorts according to a pseudorandom pattern weighted by how much I love a particular selection, how often I want to hear it, how much I ought to hear it (break out of lazy listening habits, you old coot!), and so on. Nothing from iTunes seems close (though its old star-weighted system was at least a gesture), nor am I aware of another player that permits complex shuffle patterns) — as I was saying, hearing a few favourites it occurred to me that I’d like to write something on ‘playlist theology,’ as it were, a personal spirituality of the music I love and how it weaves a pattern of truth-telling about the world from strands of imprecise but insightfully spot-on songs (yesterday I heard ‘How A Resurrection Really Feels’ for the first time in a while, and I thought I’d donate an important body part to have written that vivid first verse…).

This burst of writing-motivation may be just my subconscious trying to console me for the fact that I can’t seem to get a job: too academic for ecclesiastical work, not academic enough for the academy, too old for almost everyplace, just not right for parishes I’ve known, and various other rationales I’ve been offered by search committees that want to draw the sting of rejection (as if that were going to work; honestly, someone with autism is the very last person you should try to buffalo into accepting soothing words about why you’re rejecting them — rejection sensitive dysphoria is a real thing, and our relentless candour cuts through anodyne self-justification). Maybe forced retirement is how this will play out, in which case, hey, lots of time for writing, if not much pension to live on.

But it comes back down to my heartfelt connection to so many very dear people, and my unhesitating certainty that I have more work to do, and my trust that when my faith falters, I’m enveloped by a throng of souls who’ll offer me theirs. We walk the same line.

It’s true that I moan about running in the morning in near-zero° temps, but the cold weather is convenient for inspiring the dogs to come back in from the garden.