“As the Church of England keeps telling us how much it shares the aims of the St Paul’s protestors, I notice an advertisement in the Financial Times. The Church Commissioners need a chief operating officer. He will be paid a `six figure salary’, says the advertisement, to manage their `£5 billion multi-asset portfolio’. There is no mention of anything Christian, or even anything ethical. The language is all management-speak. The ideal candidate will have a `proven track record of driving continuous and consistent operational performance’. The job’s responsibilities include `to build and maintain internal controls and process and to lead a no-surprises culture’. Although it is pretty hard to reconcile a `no-surprises culture’ with the mystery of the Incarnation, one must admit that it might have come in useful in dealing these various `occupations’. As well as St Paul’s, there is no one else outside Bristol, Exeter and Sheffield Cathedrals. You have only to study the websites of the various Occupy groups across the country to see that they, too, stick to a no-surprises culture. Events include Palestine Solidarity Campaign rallies, performances by Billy Bragg, strikers’ benefit gigs, meetings of the Anti-Cuts Alliance. They are not forerunners of a Second Coming: they are the usual suspects. There is nothing unchristian about rounding them up (caringly, of course).”
Charles Moore, page 11 of Spectator, 19 November. (This is behind the magazine’s pay-wall. Be grateful to your humble Samizdata scribe for re-typing these words from the dead-tree version).
I like the point about Billy Bragg. He’s in danger of becoming a “national treasure”.
I couldn’t help chuckling at “Although it is pretty hard to reconcile a `no-surprises culture’ with the mystery of the Incarnation”. As for the rest, colour me unsurprised.
All utopians, regardless of whether their heaven is on earth or in the spirit world, long for stasis—an unchanging realm of perfection without the need for change, or surprises.
At the most fundamental level, then, utopia is a non-human form of existence, i.e., an existence without flaws, defects, progress, or evolution in any sense of the concept.
If you ever wonder why the human race has struggled so desperately for so long, one need only consider how influential the prophets of “other-worldly-ness” have been all through our history.
Whether the alleged goal is some mystical paradise in the future, or in another dimension populated only by spirits, the reason the trip there is so painful and bloody, and why the train never, ever seems to arrive at that final station, the flaw in utopia is not in the details, but in its very nature.
An inhuman goal requires humans become “something else” to get there. Oddly enough, often that means dead.
This sort of thing has done the most enormous damage to the message contained within Christianity. There’s nothing more calculated to damage a point of view or way of life than it’s freakish, dogmatic and intransigent advocates who show little spine when attacked and who embrace all the tenets of that against which they’re railing. It’s incredibly difficult to show that there is enormous good in Christianity when Williams and cronies, the Pope and P2 etc. are doing their darndest to turn people off.
This post is right and it shouldn’t be right, if you see what I mean.
I await their appointment of Fred Goodwin, with interest ;-).
The Church of England has not limited its ravings to telling people about monetary policy and the financial industry (ironically the “loose money” policies that Rowen Williams and co favour produce the very concentration of wealth and high financial industry incomes that Rowen Williams and co are against) they also lecture the universe on fiscal policy.
Supposedly 50% income tax is not high enough, and a financial transaction tax (a “Tobin Tax”) would produce lots of revenue (it would not drive business away – oh of course not).
And on government spending?
Rowen Williams (and his pal the Archbishop of York – and a dozen or so other moron bishops) have decided that 500 Pounds a week (plus free health care and free education for the kiddies and …..) is “not enough”.
Welfare payments must have no limit at all.
Rowen Williams – you stupid, stupid, man. I have never earned 500 Pounds a week in my entire life (or even half that) and I never will.
And you are telling me that 500 Pounds a week (paid by threats of violence – i.e. TAXATION) is “not enough”.
Please explain why I should not hold your head down in the nearest font and not let go till the bubbles stop comming up? After all if it is O.K. for you to use violence to collect unlimited taxation (for unlimited government spending) – why shoulc I not use violence back? Straight at you Mr Williams.
Unlike Veryretired I do not think that this has anything to do with religion (by the way, as Tolkien showed in his short story “Leaf by Neagal” an after life does not have to be “unchanging”) in that I doubt that this gaggle of Bishops would recognise anything religious, even if they fell over it.
These Bishops are basically Guardian readers – who went into the Church of England because it was the most comfortable job they could get.
“Men of God” – I doubt it.
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