A Safe Schools discussion must start with the past.

I’m going to wade, a little, into the Safe Schools debate that in my last post I dipped my toe into. For those who don’t know the Safe Schools Coalition initiative, it can be divided into two things; a series of lesson plans and resources for high school teachers to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex student issues, and recommended high school policies to support those students (found amongst the resources).  To shrink the language of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex” I will be referring to this grouping as same-sex attracted and gender-diverse.

Although in my younger years some attempt was made to put all the letters of LGBTI under the reclaimed word “Queer” that never took off. For one thing the word Queer became attached to the image of a white wealthy gay male, an inevitability of any singular identity perhaps in a world of ads chasing pink dollars. Many Lesbians insisted on their own particular identity, rather than existing as Queer’s “other”. Queer politics also had agendas that were broader than the LGBTI movement – sex-positivity for example – and whereas Queer tended to embrace Drag, some feminists saw this type of performance as offensive as “black-face”.  Still Queer has an edgeyness that LGBTI lacks. Queer is a little more punk and post-normal. For this reason the term still finds favour today.

This old debate about the universality of Queer is an obscure element of history. If you lived through it and participated in it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows why Queer is not generally considered an acceptable umbrella term and why some people, despite this, still use it. I’m not showing off here. I never learnt this stuff. I was just involved in it. Ask me who won any of the Grand Finals through the 80’s and 90’s and I will have to guess because I wasn’t paying attention to that history.

This idea of niche and personal histories is crucial to understanding the debates and discussions around the Safe Schools initiative. Consider the example of the Tasty Raid in Melbourne in 1994. The proportion of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults in Australia who know of this event will be huge. In fact it will be much higher than people who know about why we do or don’t use the term Queer, a largely academic debate. The Tasty raid and the subsequent suing of the Victorian Police was a big deal, but the people who remember it don’t all remember it because they are better historians. Many just remember it because it was about their lives. They either were caught up in it or they learnt about at the time through their networks.

A more chilling example of separate history was reported in an article titled ‘Sydney’s Shame’  (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shame ). This story reported on systematic gay bashings leading to deliberate murders around Sydney beats, and a culture of police reluctance to investigate. We’re talking here about people found dead at the bottom of cliffs with clear evidence of being assaulted first and the death being ruled as an accident. We’re talking about “fag-bashing” viewed as an ordinary activity to do with your mates. Again this is not necessarily something same-sex attracted and gender diverse people study in specialist classes. It is simply what some have lived through and many more have been aware of as they walk home. Even when these things are reported in mainstream media they become part of the consciousness of some readers and not so much of others.

Incidentally this is what women’s experience of the epidemic of violence against women is like. They hold their keys differently. Take out their phone. Stay close to the lights and avoid the alleys. Notice who is walking behind them. Of course therefore they remember more than men the history of this violence, including incidents of violence, poor political or police responses and community reactions. They will appreciate how every single Mardi Gras through the 80’s and 90’s came with a warning to keep yourself safe as you left venues because the gay bashers always stepped up their activities around that time. They will understand how that warning is a part of some peoples history of events. By the way, maybe they still give out that warning, but living in Bendigo with my family I don’t follow Mardi Gras news much anymore; again separate histories.

The relevance of all this to how Safe Schools is being discussed, is simple. Virtually every argument in support of the Safe Schools program refers to the history of same-sex attracted or gender diverse people, often incorporating the personal history of the author. The Safe Schools programs are seen as correcting for the systematic oppression that has been the life of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. My last blog did something similar – it drew upon my past. The past is very much present when supporters speak of the Safe Schools program. For them an ugly homophobic past is sitting square in the middle of the discussion.

Meanwhile the criticisms of the Safe Schools program are massively ahistorical. They may criticize the program based on its merits, or they may criticize what they have heard is the program based on the merits of that, but they are definitely not evaluating the program in a historical context. How was school for these critics when they were young? Irrelevant. How were workplaces or the media or the law as these critics were emerging into adulthood? They were fine, why would that matter?

Occasionally the past is brought into the conversation from some Safe Schools critics, but it is a fantasy past. It is in fact such a fantastic past as to make their criticisms even more ahistorical for mentioning it. In these pasts everyone is neighbourly and chaste, homosexuality is barely mentioned which one supposes means that same-sex attracted people barely existed, and children respect their parents because God is in the schools where He (sic) belongs. You don’t find this sort of fantasy past promoted by serious critics of the program, but it is there amongst the petition signers and the online angry. In this past there are no gay bashings or homophobia at all. This is why I consider it to be even more a denial of history than simply not mentioning history at all.

The tendency of the more serious Safe Schools critics is to blunt any historical special interest case by generalizing the focus from homophobic bullying to all bullying.  In this way they mirror other ahistorical criticisms of other historical movements. On Q&A recently the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton responded to comments that same-sex attracted and gender-diverse kids are being bullied, with comments that all bullying is wrong for whatever reason. This is a copy of the white response to the hashtag Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.  While technically true there is no knowledge of history in either response. It is as if presented with the Sydney’s Shame article the ACL would say “Well, all police corruption is wrong and nobody is condoning any violence here.”

This lack of recognizing their particular history frustrates same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. Weren’t they just sharing their painful pasts moments ago? Were the ACL and their followers listening? This only gets worse when organisations like the ACL claim to be bullied, harassed and silenced today. It was not long ago that being gay was compared to smoking by the then public face and continuing chair of the board of the ACL. The concern the ACL have always shown has been very much like a concern about the uptake of smoking, to thwart any improvement in gay lives lest it encourage more people to take up being gay. Many consider them a source of homophobia.

But it’s not even a question of whether the ACL and its current head Lyle Shelton directly spread homophobia or not. The reality is that all the time Shelton was growing up and when he was a newspaper journalist and editor, when he was a city councilor and a state candidate and when he moved to the ACL, same-sex attracted and gender diverse people have been being bullied, bashed and murdered, fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes and turned away from services. Not a single element of this history was ever confronted by Shelton as a journalist, editor, politician or lobbyist. Shelton either never knew about this history or never cared. Most likely it simply passed him by like AFL did me. He didn’t have to decide not to take an interest in it – he simply wasn’t involved in it.

Does it seem unfair to you to judge him for this? Does it seem irrelevant to his evaluation of the Safe Schools program? Maybe so in both cases but this is what I suspect is a part of the feeling of the supporters of Safe Schools. For them Safe Schools exists within a history that entitles the voices of same-sex attracted and gender diverse people to speak and disqualifies the speech of people like Lyle Shelton and the ACL. This is a shared feeling, by the way, from supporters of the program who are as heterosexual and cis-gendered as Lyle Shelton. It’s not a Queer thing to privilege Queer voices in this discussion – it’s a historically aware thing. Many even feel it is a human thing – to allow themselves to be silenced by the testimony of the survivors of violence.

Having spoken of the frustration of the Safe School supporters, let’s consider the frustration of its critics. In their minds they are making what they feel are rational arguments. Some of their arguments are not rational at all and some of them are wildly misinformed but some of them raise legitimate areas for improvement. If the filter of personal history is driving how Safe Schools supporters feel about the program and its critics, then they can be easily hostile to any criticism being made, almost regardless of the program’s content.

The Safe Schools program has been developed with the input of numerous same-sex attracted and gender -diverse young people. It has been implemented successfully at a range of schools including a Catholic school, a tiny country school and many large state schools. This all speaks to how useful and positive a program it is, but it’s still just a program. There are bound to be ways it can improve and mistakes that have been made. It seems to me that by being engaged in historical battles Safe Schools supporters are in danger of viewing all criticisms of the initiative as attacks on LGBTI people.  That's not a healthy relationship to any program.

If this conversation about Safe Schools is to improve we are going to need people who can confront the history gap in our community. There are some examples of people who speak for conservative Christians who get the importance of history in this discussion and by that I don't mean a token nod to the problem of all bullying. Michael Jensen,  is someone I disagree with on Same-Sex marriage but he recently made a long Facebook post which indicated his understanding of LGBTI history. It has since been published by the Huffinton Post. What is important about this post was that it never tries to subsume homophobic bullying or racist bullying under the generic title of all bullying. Instead it recognized that homophobic bullying occupies a particular place in our history and delivers a particular harm that can only be imperfectly imagined by those who didn't experience it. That's humility.

John Sandeman provides another example. He is the editor of Eternity Magazine, a Christian non-denominational publication and one which has defended ACL and taken a conservative stance on LGBTI issues.  On the 25th of February this year he wrote an article for the Australian Bible Society website titled, ‘The SMH apologises to the Mardi Gras. What should Christians do?’ This was a genuine admission of the history of conservative Christians in denying basic freedoms to same-sex attracted people and in being involved in their systematic oppression.

Neither of these pieces of writing specifically mentioned the Safe Schools program although Jensen's piece comes close. Perhaps that enables their authors to be freer with their acceptance of the gains of the LGBTI movement for equality or perhaps even that it is to take their point too far. At least they start the conversation off on the right foot. We should all be able to acknowledge that Australian history is a brutally homophobic one and that this is not just more of the “general” bullying, violence or sinfulness of society. It is a specific problem with same-sex attraction and gender diversity that churches have fostered themselves.

From this point I think we should all be able to agree that some kind of program like the Safe Schools initiative is necessary and deserves the paltry eight million dollars that has gone into it. This will be a leap for some conservative Christians but I hope it is one they can make. As Stephanie Judd wrote for the ABC news site, addressing the ACL in particular:
“If you feel some Safe Schools content isn't age-appropriate, then isn't dialoguing with them for modifications to the program a better and more gracious approach than pitting yourself against them by calling for their wholesale defunding?”
Stephanie, whose byline indicates she attends an Anglican Church, goes on to say that  “In the absence of a a satisfactory alternative that addresses the problem that Safe Schools was created to fix, the ACL's statements are going to continue to be received as harsh and unconstructive.”

So long as the critics of the Safe Schools initiative come at Safe Schools with axes of outrage rather than ideas for improvement they will seem to have very little idea of lives outside their own. We can see this in their ahistorical approach to the issue. So long as they propose no alternative at all or a generalised alternative that hides the special historical case for justice of same-sex attracted and gender-diverse people, they will seem to have no idea there is even a problem to fix. On that basis they are not going to be listened to and despite what they might tell themselves it won’t be because they are being bullied now. On the other hand, a proper discussion might be had if the examples of John Sandeman and Michael Jensen, both conservatives, have a genuine influence on their peers.

They Always Keep the Minority in at Lunch.

Memory is connected to prophecy. We use our memories to tell the future and inform the present. What we remember, and how, is full of salience for the decisions we make and the causes we support. Stuff that we don’t think is relevant to our current situation we forget, and then a memory can come back loudly when it needs to speak its prophetic voice to us.

Our prophecies may be wrong. Memories are selective and unreliable. Politics is partly an exercise in competing prophecies. The world that Trump followers fear is different to the world Bernie Sanders followers fear. Those who want to stop the boats are predicting outcomes that are different to those who want to let the babies stay. But these prophecies are powerful to each of us.

For some time I have been haunted by a particular memory with a particular message about our time. Is it true? I think it speaks a certain truth.

When I was in high school, about year eight or nine, each student was required to give a short speech. One student in my class gave a speech which told us that all gay people should be shot. I kid you not. The speech was allowed to finish and the class, the whole rest of the class it seems to me in my memory, clapped.

As a high schooler I was already a leftie. The talk, my teacher’s lack of reaction, the class’s applause for the speaker, all incensed me.  Any protest I made was not received. Instead someone made a snide comment about me for dissenting.

Well, that meant it was on. For the rest of the class I winked and even blew kisses at the guy who had commented about me. He gradually grew angrier and angrier. He was smaller than me and that was probably why I focused on him. Finally he got up to hit me. I stayed calm but the teacher was no idiot and knew I’d been provoking the situation.

After class the teacher made me stay behind. I was in trouble and it was me who would be kept in at lunch. There was some sympathy from the teacher but there was also no doubt that she wouldn’t be taking any kind of recrimination against the student who gave the talk or the one who wanted to hit me. I was the one who needed to be brought into line.

The lesson is that rules are not designed, not in school at least, to be right or fair or to protect a loving view of the world from a hateful one. Rules are designed to minimize conflict. My teacher didn’t have to step in when a student said gay people should be shot because any gay people in the class were too in the closet for this to create immediate conflict. And when I made a conflict out of it, the teacher had a choice to try and affect the views of the whole class or to affect my behaviour. They chose the rational if perhaps cowardly choice to change the single student.

Today there are some religious people who believe that we live in an age of intolerance. We do, but as my memory reminds me it is an age without beginning and only an imaginary end. The intolerance these religious people claim is simply the force that I faced in high school – the desire of institutions to minimize conflict – a force they generally support when it is in their favour. As the world changes, the new minority, in many places, is the student in class who has a problem with homosexuality, who needs to make anti-gay jokes and who wants to make a point of a boy's effeminacy or a girl's machismo. The school fundamentally doesn’t care for who is right. The school will police that minority because they are easier to police than changing the rest of the school.

Now this may be unflattering to describe things this way but it shouldn’t be shocking to us. Consider a hypothetical program called “All kinds of families” In this program the notion of blended families, single-parent families, adoptive families, and families with divorced or separated parents are discussed. Does anyone think this program is interested in young Billy’s Roman Catholic views that divorce and remarriage is wrong? Is young Billy’s definition of family, with its problematising of assisted reproduction going to get a hearing? Of course not.

And here’s what the teachers are thinking. These teachers want to introduce this program for Sarah who has been sad ever since her parents divorced. These teachers note that every single piece of curriculum material from the picture books to the movies they show has two happily married people with their kids all born in wedlock. These teachers may have grasped this material with a real gratitude for it’s reflection of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, these teachers think “Billy can shut up.”

Now when “All kinds of families” was (hypothetically) introduced maybe someone wanted to include same-sex couple’s families. Maybe someone else wanted to include polyamorous partnerships and their families. Most likely if this hypothetical program was produced over a decade ago neither of those families would be included. Again this would not be because of what is right or wrong. This would be because of what stands inside or outside the majority acceptable culture. Excluding same-sex couples and their kids from the program's definition of 'all kinds of family' would minimize conflict up to recent times. Including them now might cause conflict in some places but not so much in others. That is the force that always controls school decisions. Polyamourous families are still out; Way too much conflict there.

To see how things have changed for same-sex families though we can look to Play School. The voice of those opposed to including a same-sex couple with kids on a show about diverse family types is firmly in the minority. What did the ABC think of the Australian Christian Lobby’s outrage about the issue? I reckon they thought “The ACL can shut up.”

In Victorian schools we now have the “Safe Schools” initiative. Some people are shocked that it will normalize homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. In doing so they fear it will de-normalise their own ideas of sexuality in which non-heterosexuality is unnatural or just plain wrong. This, they claim, will simply shift who is ostracized from those who are gay to those opposed to gay rights. I suppose the answer to that is yes, it probably will. Can it do anything else?

Some people think it is possible for multiple competing ideas of what is sin and what should be celebrated to survive together in society. If we look at something like divorce and remarriage though I think we see that it isn’t particularly possible at all. Yes, conservative Catholics can choose not to recognize remarriages as legitimate. However nobody wants to hear it – at least not at school or in a workplace or on a publicly funded tv show for kids. Yes, the view is alive and well but is it tolerated? Outside of a personal view of how to live one’s own life it is barely tolerated at all.

This is the approach we can expect to take hold around gay marriage in the near future. That you will be required to recognize gay marriages is a reasonable prediction just as politeness requires you now to recognize remarried couples as married. Will you be permitted to add “I don’t agree with homosexuality” at the end of a toast in the staff room when two male co-workers tie the knot? You probably aren’t now. The reason is that conflict minimization is the priority in most workplaces as it is in schools.

This normalizing pressure is also the same reason that in many school environments today teachers still don’t mention homosexuality, and texts and films are all 100% heterosexual. In fact often there are no books in a high school library let alone a primary school one which include gay characters.  As a teacher I have stopped my students from using “gay” as an insult but in this regard I am atypical. This is not a reflection of what these teachers or schools believe is right or wrong. It is just the priority of minimizing conflict.

Conflict is a real concern at the moment because views have been polarised by the pending plebiscite on gay marriage.  We would expect the same polarization to be present if a plebiscite on anything else could materially affect that issue. We find this polarization present even in the religious communities which claim to be oppressed by a new intolerance from outside. If your church disapproves of gay marriage you might even be told you are not a Christian if you support it.  Meanwhile in a church supportive of gay marriage it will be hard to imagine someone opposed to it being welcomed on plebiscite night. This will probably die down once marriage reform is through.

All this might seem terribly depressing. We want to believe that changes in society are the result of enlightenment and reasoning not some force of normalization with a priority of minimizing conflict. Changes in popular opinion might well be the result of good argument. Changes in the hearts and minds of people can also occur through relationships and connections. But policies are not people. Policies change to suit public opinion, after the fact, and in doing so they are always intolerant. They will always keep the minority in at lunch. It’s time we stopped acting like this was something new.

I have my beliefs about what are rights and what are privileges and would rather step on privileges to secure every child's rights. As a human who has know the sting of feeling abnormal for same-sex attraction I hunger for a time when that sting is not delivered. As a man who has found my gender roles stupidly limiting and uncomfortable I enjoy seeing young people play with or reject gender entirely. I am generally favorable towards the Safer Schools materials as a result. But I am not going to be surprised if in some classrooms some of the conservative fears of the program come true and kids who disagree with the materials feel constrained in speaking out.

I think the best thing we can do is to be transparent about the forces we operate under. I think we can invite debate about school policies while being clear that there is actual learning to be done and every student no matter their sexuality or their views on sexuality has the right to the best environment for that learning to happen. As a teacher I try to stop any lynch mob even if they are rounding up someone who I believe has been a complete dick. But at the end of the day something is probably going to be normalised and something else is not.

Beware cheap love.

Christians are called to love others. One of the clearer teachings of their Saviour is the command to love their enemies. In Christian circles therefore it can be a rebuke in a political discussion that a person is not sufficiently loving the targets of their criticism.

Still Christians on the left or right are hardly silenced by this insistence on loving their enemies. The rejoinder against the call to be more loving is that having a critical perspective is in fact being loving. I have heard this defence used to argue that a person loves transgender kids precisely by being loudly critical of their gender identity. They love them so much they want to speak the truth to them although if there are no trans teens around a debate on facebook about them will do.

Likewise stop a left wing Christian from bemoaning men’s rights activists for a second and yes they might claim to love them. They may claim to merely hate their policies, similar to hating their sin. They still love the sinner.

Let's be honest. There isn’t a lot of material loving likely to be happening between people who strongly disagree. How could there be given that they tend to avoid each other? Seldom does any relationship other than the one of criticism actually exist between a right wing Christian and a transgender teen or between a left wing Christian and an active defender of the patriarchy. Generally speaking the love between these groups is hypothetical at best; I would cross the road to help them if they were injured, and if by some remote chance I was passing by.

Often this love is just a romantic notion. Loving is defined as wanting the best for someone else and doesn’t require anymore than the willingness to imagine them happy. The image of their happiness can rely on any number of presumptions about what is best for the other person. It is still loving to steal the children from a person of another faith because you think your faith is the best for them. It is still loving to conceal safer sex information from teens because celibacy is in your opinion best for them. This kind of love can become just another privilege to stand on – a daddy knows best kind of love.

What people may mean by this kind of love is that they don’t hate the other person. Some people do genuinely hate the objects of their political criticism. They delight in any misfortune that befalls them. The person who holds to wanting the best for those they are criticizing, claiming to love them by that definition, is different to this. They are not driven by hate. They may however be driven by fear or self-interest or anxiety. There is a lot of space between hate and genuine love.

Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them, maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.

I think its commendable and worth noting when hate is not a part of a person’s motivation. This can be demonstrated by reigning in the mockery of peers – maybe suggesting that some criticisms are off-limits and opposing violence most definitely. I think its important to recognize the distinction between a hateful attack and a critique. But I hope we stop calling this not-hate love.

I think the commandment to love our enemies has very little to do with abstract feelings maintained at a distance. I think loving someone also can’t come after we have decided our policy on them. Love involves the respect that requires us to rethink our opinions after listening. Love is so specific that our response to one person may not fit the play book, even while our response to another is exactly as foreseen. Love involves speaking critically rarely and listening mostly. We may merely not hate our enemies and not actually love them because it’s hard to do more than this. We shouldn’t cheapen love to the point that it’s easy.

Likewise we should stop with the rebuke that provokes the cheap love reaction. We should call out speech that is spiteful, gleefully mean and deceptive. However we should stop expecting people to love the objects of their criticism and holding it against them if they don’t.  Sticking up for some population online and in general does not really love them either. It is just a different type of grandstanding and soapboxing. As someone who generally supports trans teens in their transitioning in general maybe love would call me to oppose someone’s transition in the particular.

The very same message applies to all sides; Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them (a positive opinion even), maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.

Seasons Grievings

I am not worried about terrorism. This is not because I am somehow more Zen than the rest of the world and never worry about what I cannot change. Nor do I generally apply some objective evidence-based assessment of what I am most at risk of dying from. While terrorism wouldn’t make a short list of significant threats to my person, I fear many things which are statistically improbable; Aneurysms, for example. Why did anyone ever think I needed to learn about aneurysms, the cause of anxiety since before I was an adolescent?

Even more than a bubble of air in my brain, I am particularly concerned about another threat, one so overwhelmingly present in my recent experiences as to crowd out any raised alert over acts of terror. For the last six months I have worked in St. Arnaud. I have prepared classes between two teachers who are also farmers. I have driven an hour and twenty minutes each way, each day, past the pastures that produce some of my food. Most poignantly I have driven over dry river beds and besides diminishing dams. All the while I have taught Geography students about food security. I am scared by what I have seen and learnt about.

Climate change is real. We have finally come to admit this at a political level at the recent Paris summit. Some people are still in denial. But denying or not people are investing on the basis of the sorts of changes global warming will bring. The U.S. city of Miami is allocating millions to hold back the rising sea while refusing to name what is causing it. Farmers in Australia are not all willing to accept man-made climate change as real but they are changing their crops, or even moving their farms, in the expectation that recent trends in weather patterns will continue.

Alongside climate change we are seeing global population growth, desertification of farm lands, competition for cropland from the production of bio-fuels, over fishing and the sort of food waste that can’t be sustained but seems culturally unstoppable. There are answers to these problems in smarter farming, greater sharing and reduced consumption. But our current efforts in these areas will be negated by the best case scenario of a 1.5 degree global temperature rise.

My head is playing a powerfully linear narrative. This year is dangerously different to last year. Next year will be crucially not the same as the year before. My children’s lives will not be like mine. The natural world will treat them differently, which is not the same as saying they will have different social mores or use technology differently from my generation. It is a magnitude beyond that. Nature, the benchmark of permanence by which technological and social change can be compared will be different.

Christmas is embedded in a circular narrative. Each year a baby is born as much as they were born once in history as well. Songs are sung and a pantomime is enacted in our lives to transport us to that singular moment in time, restored to relevance each year. This is the Christian church calendar that despite declining church attendance still shapes our secular world. The pattern is also the pattern of seasons. Come Easter when the crops would have been harvested across Europe, this child is cut down, their life taken, so that new life can emerge from that death. We are sustained. Our communities are sustained. Our world is sustained by the pattern of acknowledging God’s plan in our world. Prosaically, cynically even, our economy is sustained by the Christmas consumer demand.

The constancy of this cycle is a significant part of the message around Christmas every year. We are supposed to return to the original Christmas, to look at the manger frozen in perfect stasis. Even odder nostalgias are celebrated so that Dickensian garbed figurines adorn cards and wrapping paper, . There will be a million sermons which seek not to add a drop to the recipe, but instead suggest that the nativity message of the angel to the shepherds is still the food fit for us on Christmas "morn". Both the tacky and the profound share the message that old is good on this day. Who says morn not morning except at Christmas?

Of course the Christian calendar is not something unchanging. Its marking dates are relatively recent in the grand scheme of human history. We stand in its 2015th year. Extending before it is a Jewish calendar now in it’s 5776th year. This calendar corresponds its months to lunar cycles so doesn’t match exactly the civil calendar. Still the event closest to Christmas in date is Chanukah, which commemorates an event only two years before what Christmas remembers. Purim, in March (and the Jewish month of Adar), is perhaps closer in tone to Christmas, with plays and feasting and the exchange of gifts. It recalls an event set in the Ancient Persian Empire. This is Ancient applied too easily though. There are calendars older than this and in my ignorance I wouldn’t even know how to apply linear time to those of Aboriginal peoples.

Christmas represents, whether adopted voluntarily or imposed by the state, a disruption in the sacramental life that preceded it. Traditionalism in regard to Christmas is therefore a defense of the relatively modern and thus counter-traditionalism. To acknowledge this is to remember that Christian history is ultimately not cyclical but linear. What is happening is not supposed to continue indefinitely. Christian history heads towards the sharp cliff of the end times. Every sale will be a closing sale one day.

Normally I resent the intrusion of end times preaching at Christmas. I think it reveals our human discomfort with an image of God that is helpless at birth. In the adoration of the returned and avenging soldier Christ, Jesus gets weaponised in a way infant Jesus can’t sensibly be. But this year while I won’t look for any heavenly intervention to save us I find I am also not satisfied with the practice of Christmas as attention to the past. The same is not sufficient. The manger is burning. We need a new song to sing. Not even the seasons are the same.

This Christmas is not going to be the last but it is the last one we should practice in ignorance of what is happening to this planet. I'm not sure what this means in practical terms. Buy less plastic crap obviously. On a spiritual level ritual is meant to speak to our fears and hopes and I find mine feeling ignored by the observance of Christmas this year. Faithfulness to tradition feels like blitheness towards what is changing. NOT EVEN THE SEASONS ARE THE SAME.

No Sympathy for the (concept of the) Devil

There is some hooha at the moment in the U.S. over a television show, Lucifer, for depicting the Devil in a sympathetic light. But who is the real Devil supposed to be? The word Devil is the Greek version of the Hebrew word Satan. The word Satan simply means adversary – so anyone can be a satan to a cause they oppose.  Lucifer is a name attributed to Satan because, meaning light-bringer, it was a nickname for the morning star. As thus it appears in the Book of Isaiah describing a mighty figure cast from the heavens.

In the third century BCE this reference was taken to refer not only to the Babylonian king it directly meant but also to a unique historical figure. This historical figure was understood to be the same as the serpent in the garden of Eve and also the adversary of Revelations who contends with the returned Jesus for the fate of the world. This is the Devil, a single male entity, who has been our adversary since creation.

Nowadays when we think of Satan or the Devil or Lucifer whether we believe in them or not it is this one immortal being that we tend to think of. They are not omnipotent like God but have some supernatural power. That power can range from the unfathomable, “god of this world”, able to establish Kingdoms and secure victory in battle, (or secure fame and recording contracts) to something much more limited – only able to possess individuals, or even merely a whisperer of dark suggestions. The Lucifer character from the latest t.v. show fits into this archetype.

But this isn’t the only way that the Devil has been understood. Their role has changed significantly over time, expanding or diminishing depending very much on broader world views. To describe the devil may even be to describe God’s animus to use Jung’s term – the repressed shadow to God’s righteousness.  It has long been my view that asking what God would be like, as the perfect object of worship, has usefulness to non-believers as much as theists, as a thought exercise. I don’t argue against the existence of God so much as I want to know what kind of God a person cares to follow. I am far less inclined to extend this merit to the concept of the Devil though. 

The Devil has always served as a crude political tool. The Devil gained horns and goat legs when Christianity wanted to demonise Pan worship in its first few centuries. During the Crusades both Muslims and Christians justified atrocities on the basis that their opponents served Satan. The Crusade against the Cathars, a Christian Gnostic sect, declared them Satanists too. The Reformation called the Pope, the Anti-Christ, in league with the devil and the Catholic church made the same claim about protestants. Whatever theological purpose the Devil serves seems secondary to immediate politics.

On the more local level the Devil has served humanity no better.  Both the medieval and puritan slaughter of women for witchcraft, often to obtain land from widows, found the Devil everywhere. The idea that women are especially subject to the devils seductions lingers in their oppression in churches today. Also in an alarmingly increasing trend the devil as an explanation can be seen in cases of child abuse and neglect. Brutal and at times deadly practices are being justified as the exorcism practices of the perpetrators.

I had intended this blog post to be a humorous tour of the different ideas of the Christian devil. I thought to visit not only perceptions in the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Job, and the New Testament but also ideas in popular culture. There are some ideas of the devil, as the ruler of Hell, which I find subtly funny; as if they were a middle manager assigned to the torture department of a large bureaucracy, burdened by expectations from head office. But to be honest I don’t have the heart for it.

More seriously I had wanted to challenge myself as well to find the ways in which a concept of the devil might be useful. I’ve only been able to think of two. Firstly working in addictions for many years I know it can be beneficial for some people to externalize compulsions – to disown them by attributing them to a medical condition. Maybe the devil’s influence can do this for a range of unwanted behaviours, even social problems like war and the destruction of environments.

Secondly the devil serves as a spiritual source of evil. Without this kind of a transcendent cause we might be more inclined to source evil in our animal instincts instead. Does this do justice to either evil or animals? I don’t think so; the holocaust is a uniquely human sort of endeavour. So maybe the devil has a usefulness in this regard, in recognizing evil as something that divides us from the rest of nature rather than is drawn from it.

In the end though I couldn’t see how a further investigation of the devil would reach my goal to find humour or practical benefit without glossing over far too much harm. God’s name can be found on the lips of those who speak up for refugees, against racism, and for the homeless. God is also declared by those who seek their own power over others. The Devil on the other hand, with very rare exceptions (which I might explore further another time) is declared present and powerful with the result of horrible suffering. The idea just doesn’t seem redeemable enough so I’m cutting the exercise short. Maybe the show Lucifer will be different precisely because its devil is less than pure evil and more like the rest of us.

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Still interested despite my thoughts? The following clips are worth a watch;

History of the Belief in the Devil
History of the Devil

"Did I offend you? Good." : The Perversity of Inverse Wishful Thinking.

Recently my evangelical Christian brother, and often theological sparring partner, asked a stimulating question; Is substitutionary atonement the most offensive idea in Christianity?

Substitutionary atonement is pretty much the theologically nerdy way of describing the idea that Jesus died for our sins. In substitutionary atonement Jesus death serves as a human sacrifice on our behalf.  It is understood by its adherents as a necessary adoption of the punishment incurred by our sinfulness in order for us to be at one (or atoned) with God. Within the theology of substitutionary atonement you can understand our sinfulness as the commission of bad acts by each of us individually or a corporate human responsibility for Adam and Eve’s garden folly or even an inherited corrupted nature that we can do nothing about. 

What intrigued me about my brothers question however was that he didn’t find substitutionary atonement offensive. He didn’t mean to ask his question in a way that was critical of Christianity or this idea in particular. He likes the idea of substitutionary atonement. In fact he meant to pin to subsititutionary atonement the mark of “offensiveness” as a badge of honour. That is interesting. What assumptions are behind this idea that offensiveness is somehow a virtue?

This inverse use of offensiveness is not unique to either my brother or his theology although it is evangelical Christianity where I have encountered this useage most commonly. When I googled “the offensiveness of the cross” and “offensiveness of the gospel” (both autocomplete entries on my google account) I received results that were only pro-cross and pro-gospel. Offensiveness was always a good thing; a measure of the truth of the message. Nobody after all likes to hear the truth.

This way of thinking has a danger. Even if nobody likes to hear the truth this doesn’t mean that the truth is whatever nobody likes to hear. The truth may be that I am not a great writer. I don’t want to hear that. I also however don’t want to hear that my head is a bum - which it is not. If we take offensiveness as a virtue too far we enter the ridiculous; “Methinks he doth protest too much” makes any opposition to our position evidence for it.

I have personally encountered Christian evangelists who take this stance. Their argument for their faith largely consists of highlighting how unlikeable the prospect of having to submit ones life to judgement by God is. It assails our pride. It is offensive. Therefore by implication all opposition to this idea is basically self-serving while believing in this idea, because it is not self-serving must be because it is true. Scary logic.

But these evangelists are sometimes mirrored by their opponents.  Who hasn’t heard the characterization of belief in God as a crutch to lean on. The implication is that an atheist universe is just too hard to bear for the religious. Again by implication all opposition to this atheism is basically self-serving whereas atheism, because it is not self-serving, means it is true.  The burden of atheism is cast as its virtue – it is correct precisely because it is unpalatable.

I call these arguments the inverse wishful thinking arguments. Arguments from wishful thinking argue for what is on the basis of what would be nice. Inverse wishful arguments reverse this illogic but are no better. They are however extreme and maybe even strawman versions of the sort of thing my brother was doing with his question. I don’t mean to insinuate that he was suggesting the offensiveness of substitutionary atonement was a proof of it, merely some kind of “badge of honour” unrelated to its correctness.

But I wondered as I read my brothers question, “Shouldn’t what we find offensiveness be a default guide to the wrongness of an idea? Not an exclusive or perfect guide but a nudge in the other direction? A negative quality, rather than a positive? In the absence of anything else to go on shouldn’t offensiveness tip us away from an option rather than make it attractive?”.

That assumption of mine seemed so culturally at odds with my brother’s question. And when I googled those phrases, “the offensiveness of the cross” or the gospel, I asked myself, “How is it that offensiveness is celebrated in every one of these evangelical Christian blogs and articles? Shouldn’t it be atheists making this claim?”

I guess I am saying that while arguments from wishful thinking are not really arguments at all they still seem better non-arguments than their inverse. It seems less perverse to fall into the trap of wishful thinking than the trap of making offensiveness into something good. Further if we are talking about God and God’s plan then maybe this permits us some entertainment that the ideal is a map for reality. If God is perfection then what would be nice maybe ought to be closer to what is true than what offends us as yucky or dumb. Even if not, doesn’t it seem sensible to err in that direction?

We seem to be generally attracted to making life hard for ourselves. Not only offensiveness  but also difficulty is swallowed dutifully as if it was a foul tasting medicine. One option over another can be discredited by alleging it is “the easy way out” or the “soft option”.  Yet surely, excluding all other factors, the easiest route is the best one to take. We don't exit rooms by the windows.

Psychologically inverse wishful thinking comes across as self-hating. Supposedly this is the me generation. This is the age of entitlement, just ending, according to some. I’m not so sure that’s true or at least we keep our self-flagellation tools close at hand. Otherwise why would inoffensive sound like an insult? Why do we extol the hard road? Yes, I see it as silly but I do it too.

Perhaps it's that the desire for the difficult and unpleasant is perennially justified. We do regularly let ourselves and others down. We feel bad about it. Thus a world that would be mean and disappointing to us would balance things somewhat. Which I guess makes inverse wishful thinking just normal wishful thinking after all. 

The right side of history part 3 : Equality

It's been another long gap between posts. I have been caught up this time in a campaign to save my town's science education facility, The Discovery Centre, from closure. The petition which explains the issue is here. You can make a personal contribution to helping Discovery stay afloat at https://www.chuffed.org/project/save-discovery 

It's been a bit deflating in the process to encounter the sorts of politicians who would leap in front of a banner to Save the Discovery Centre, declare the closure a terrible loss and simultaneously sustain a complete avoidance of any commitment to maintain funding. It's been very disheartening to hear our rates and taxes described as “handouts” and “propping up” as if a children's science museum should be user-pays or rely on the noblesse-oblige of the wealthy. Still, the short of it is that the centre is dearly loved by so many that in the long term council and state are almost certain to support it. There really is no sense in closing Discovery for a pittance of investment then complaining about a lack of engagement in science.

But let's leave the frustrations of local politics behind and talk philosophy instead. Concluding this trilogy of blog posts on The Right Side of History is long overdue and for a while now I've known what I want to say, if not how to say it. Before I try, you may want to refresh your memory with the first two posts, “A Trope about Discernment” and “Progress”.

While discussing this topic with a friend of mine and speaking from my own doubts I asked her whether maybe there was no relation between different “good things” of history. Maybe, I mused, “women getting the vote and ending slavery and saving the orangutan from extinction and so on aren't connected enough to put them all on in the same right side of history.”

If this is so then the question I am asking – how to borrow from past moments in which people chose the right side of historical conflicts, some guide to discerning the right side to be on in our own times – falls down. My friends answer was revealing. She said “There probably is some meta-ethic narrative that ties together all the different historical right decisions but I doubt we can know what it is.”*

Firstly I really like “meta-ethic narrative” . It's proably clearer than my own preferred terms of “spirit” or “progress” which each come with their alienating cultural baggage. Narrative just means 'story' like history is our story, and meta-ethic is a nice way of describing an idea of right and wrong that ties together disparate decision making moments. Hence meta-ethic narrative describes the right side of history fairly well.

Secondly its very important to remember the element of unknowability involved in this question. Whatever we are talking about in terms of a right side to history to be on is something glimpsed, only at best partially available to us. In Christian theology this idea of unknowing is sometimes referred to as a condition of “the Fall.” The Fall is the inbetween time that supposedly humanity lives in now, with harmony with God's will behind us in our story and in the future, but absent now. While I disagree with this history I think “the Fall” is well utilised by theologians like William Stringfellow to describe the problematic nature of our attempts to fathom the right side of history. For Stringfellow all things including religion operate inside the Fall and are therefore prone to corruption.

Stringfellow's discussions on the meaning of the Fall describe the type of unknowing that I am talking about. I am very carefully not saying that uncertainty is a quality of those on the right side of history so that we can point to the people who are terribly certain and say they are clearly going wrong. This is I think a mistake we want to rush to make. We are desperate to fill our ignorance in with something. This inspires the fundamentalist drive to elevate texts but it can even make an idol of uncertainty itself. Yet uncertainty, or certainty, can both be qualities of people on the right or wrong sides of history. We are therefore uncertain even if uncertainty is the correct position to hold in any given situation!

We need to be especially mindful of this when examining heroes of history. Heroes of history for example are all likely to be courageous, persistent and imaginative. This is because we identify heroes from the circumstances of them being opposed by great force and yet succeeding. That usually takes courage, imagination and persistence. However it would be wrong to conclude these characteristics put a person on the right side of history. If we broaden our scope we can see those characteristics producing some of history's worst villains as well. Essentially courage, persistence and imagination produce people able to change history for good or ill. We can't make them into idols which would always put us aright.

I view the role of religion in a similar way. Religious beliefs are generally speaking “convictions”, whereas the scientific model of knowing treats beliefs as assumptions. (as discussed in this very old post). Convictions are harder to change than assumptions and therefore we will often see religion serving as a factor in helping historical heroes resist broad social forces, especially when conflict is sharply defined. No surprises though that this can also produce some horrible outcomes too. Not all circumstances involve progress by conflict with broad social forces and sometimes self-questioning is to be found in the necessary toolset of someone on the right side of history rather than conviction. To repeat Stringfellow, everything is under the Fall. Even religious conviction can be corrupted.

So where does this leave this project? Humbled for one thing. Simple answers like suggesting we all need to meditate or think more logically to improve our chance of being on the right side of history wont fly. An idea like “read your bible” is about as historically reliable as “join the workers party” for ensuring a life without historical regret.

However I refuse to believe that the clarity with which I can identify the right side of history in the past is meaningless. I also take comfort from a particular Christian teaching which has always made sense to me; ethics is not rocket science.

Before you scramble for your bible to find out where Jesus mentioned rockets almost two thousand years before we launched one I'm referring to Matthew 7: 9-12“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”Look, even we who are evil are not so messed up as to not get the basics of right and wrong and give our kids stones for bread (or as the gospel of Luke adds, "a scorpion instead of an egg").

Many people I asked answered this question of how to know the right side of history by relying on the sort of common sense that is found in the bible quote above. My partner's mother said “It always seems that people go wrong when they make themselves more important than other people.”*
As she pointed out arguments like the need for British Sugar to maintain the use of slaves are really just convoluted ways to put the speaker's wants above another's basic needs. We often find that the people on the right side of history, in this case William Wilberforce, didn't do this. He and those with him simply valued the wellbeing of others as much as their own.

For me this notion of equality between self and others needs is at least one essential kernel of the meta-ethic narrative. I used to wear a badge which said “You are among equals”. I enjoyed the way it infuriated the right people and flattered the right people depending on what misconception they laboured under. And for myself, if the badge humbled me or gave me airs it was precisely when whichever dose was required.

Certainly not every kairos question is neatly answered by this notion of equality. But upon reflection a surprising number are. If we look squarely at an issue like Australia's policies towards refugees we can see that every complex argument for harsher border protection simply obscures that Australians are trying to preserve a privileged way of life at the cost of refugee's very lives. While some Australians might be poorer or less safe than a refugee seeking entry most aren't by a huge magnitude. So long as that inequality exists then the right side of history is to be found in refusing to consider it a valid state of affairs. People's conclusions from this recognition may differ but not so wildly that we would ever tolerate covering up systematic child abuse in off-shore detention. 

Equality also gives us a direction for history and a way to recognise where wrong turns were made. Flattening movements like Christianity with its anti-clericalism or Communism with its supposed abolishment of class move away from this right side of history when they throw up new hierarchies and inequalities. There is no guarantee of success implied in this definition of progress. We can't even imagine necessarily from our present what perfect equality might look like. We can however tell when inequality gets worse and when we have chosen the bread for us and the stones for those seeking our help.



*Not exact quotes.