Thought it would be good to catch people up a little on what I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. As you’ll know if you’ve read here for any time, one of my areas of interest is around pirates and piracy. I posted a series entitled ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ some time ago which you can get to here (start at first post, obviously). That prompted quite a bit of discussion on various sites, which I rounded up into some links here.

Having taken the discussion about pirates a little further in the publication of Other (US version here) I felt as though I had probably done enough. However, things never quite work out that way, and a series of insights I’ve had recently a) through some psychotherapy and b) in conversations with Pete and others have led me to want to write a more comprehensive work on the place of pirates within our culture.

The basic thesis will be this: pirates emerge wherever cultures have become ‘blocked.’ This applies to the traditional idea of sea-faring pirates, who, as I’ve explored a little in Other, arose as a rebellion against the merchants and princes who enslaved them. They were victims of a blocked economic order, and their rebellion was an essential act of unblocking which eventually gave rise to a more equitable system.

Moreover, I’ll want to argue that this piratical act was part of the founding principle of America – called by some ‘the first pirate nation – and that this principle has been sadly lost. By exploring the phenomenal rise in media piracy I’ll examine how this has again occurred because of a blockage, and that tighter and tighter copyright laws and digital rights will do nothing to solve the problem. Indeed, if America is to regain something about the dream it seems to have lost, a return to piracy should be welcomed.

Finally though, my interest is in why pirates have remained so fascinating for children and parents alike. And, using some stuff from Star Wars and The Godfather, as well as some ‘dark inversions’ of parables, what the last part of the book will explore is the way that pirates gift us a way of unblocking the often difficult move from childhood to adulthood, and, by linking this to an atheistic view of the Christ event, we can see the pirate figure of Christ performing a radical act of theological unblocking too.

I currently don’t have a publisher for this as yet, but am talking to people about what I might do with it… which could end up a work of piracy in itself. But if you’re interested and would like to see it completed, then bombard me with encouragement and I’ll get off my ass to finish it. I mean, it’s only going to save the US from economic doldrums and the Western Church from certain death Can I get an ARRRRRR from you, you lubbers?!

Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ can be found here. Start at Pirates [1] and work on…

Secondly, some a round up of some of the other posts (from Pete Rollins, Richard Sudworth etc.) that that generated can be found here… Plus a little thought on the crucifix and the skull and crossed bones here.

Finally, here’s a longer article I wrote – a version of which appeared in Third Way magazine – In Defence of Pirates, which I hope will be helpful. All of this is thinking I’ve done which is condensed into the section on piracy in ‘Other’, which I hope people will go read and respond to too… I’m convinced that the pirate/heretic/cultural transfer and TAZ idea is one that is rich for our times:

This, then, is the lesson that pirates hold for us as people of faith. Was not the incarnation the penetration of our culture, a rupture that we experienced as heresy, a challenge to our economics and ethics that we resisted and fought back? Was not Jesus arrested and tortured and strung up for all to see like those 17th Century lovers of liberty, chained to gillets by the Thames? Did he not also demand that ‘no Man has the Power of the Liberty of another; and while those who profess a more enlightened Knowledge of the Deity […] prov’d that their Religion was no more than a Grimace’?

Financially, spiritually, culturally, theologically… the time for some good piracy is upon us. Avast, ye lubbers…

As a teacher – and an INTJ on Myers-Briggs – I can quite understand Sartre when he writes in a play that ‘Hell is other people.’ (I wouldn’t go as far as Zizek and say that ‘I hate my students – they are boring and stupid’, partly because they’re always trawling around the web looking for stuff I’ve written, and they’d string me up if I did!)

One of the reasons that Sartre’s maxim still resonates is that in the process of globalisation we are exposed to more and more ‘others.’ Whereas in the past the number of people we might meet in a whole lifetime might number a couple of hundred, we can now ‘encounter’ that many strangers in a day through a single strain of retweets.

With the exponentially increasing number of others, Sartre’s problem with other people becomes even more acute:

- Our exposure to many many more ‘others’ is enriching as they help us to understand and verify our selves through their myriad different manifestations, but…

- Our exposure to many many more ‘others’ leaves us flailing as we find ourselves more and more limited by the huge gulfs of understanding between ourselves and these others.

The reflex reaction to this exposure to more and more others can be, as I’ve explored here before, utopian: we try to create perfect places, wherefrom all difference and dirt has been excluded. We try to create heaven by expelling all of those who make our lives hell.

This naturally leads to violence, and we can see this in the paralleled rise in right-wing nationalism as countries become more ‘globalised.’ Sartre’s maxim could thus be used as the driving force for all right-wing groups.

As I have written here before, the popularity of right-wing nationalism has to rely on there being a ‘dangerous grain of truth’ in what they say. If it was total nonsense, they would gain no support. In terms of our analysis of Sartre, we could say that what these groups do is to grossly distend the limiting aspects of our relationship to the other: by interacting with ‘them’ we are diminishing ourselves somehow.

By collapsing the paradox that Sartre sets up, they ignore the hugely beneficial aspects of engagement with strangers: helping us to better understand who we are.

It’s in getting this balance right that I believe we find a way out of this problem of hell being other people – and in doing so I believe we can begin to see that heaven, whatever that might be, is actually other people too. I’ll try to get to that in the next post.

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people.

I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever had was teaching: ‘I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.’

He is being facetious, but the problem of dealing with other people is central to all of his writing: violence, psychotherapy, communism – all of these key themes are issues of how we relate to ‘the other’, and that’s obviously the thrust of my book ‘Other‘ too.

Sartre’s view was that we need ‘the other’ in order to verify our own existence. He also believed that our self consciousness had a masochistic desire to be limited – that we were afraid of the ‘abyss of person’ at our core – and that the reflective consciousness of the other provides this limitation. This is what Sartre means by ‘hell is other people’: we need other people in order to verify our existence, but the act of doing this is limiting to us. Thus we are trapped in some kind of hell: unable to fulfil our potential because of the limits of others, but unable to be at all without them.

We can read Zizek’s quip in this light: without an audience his thinking is neutered as he can’t disseminate it; with the audience he can’t fulfil his thinking as most of them are not at his level.

One might might reflect on Jesus’ mindset in light of this. Did being a perfect person leave him frustrated and angry at having to deal with ‘mere mortals’? Perhaps Jesus’ time in hell was no more than having to live with a bunch of irritable, unreliable, stubborn and ignorant disciples.

As a teacher myself I can strongly empathise with this view. My profession is inherently about communicating with people less knowledgable than you are, and this can become irritating. It requires a great deal of patience.

But clearly I wouldn’t be carrying on doing it if I thought that ‘other people’ meant hell… So what route out of Sartre’s dark world can we find? Is it possible to be fulfilled while dealing with ‘the other’ too? I’ll try to cover that in the next post…

'Rumspringa' by Paul Richard James

Emerging/Retreating [1]

I’m quite surprised at the traffic caused by the last post – been the most read thing I’ve posted for a while, and that seems to suggest that the theme has resonated, though not all in agreement. I had a good chat to Jonny on the phone yesterday, who said he initially thought the post was a wind-up, and then that, if serious, it was ‘romantic tosh!’

Well, it wasn’t a wind up. Jonny’s point was that he increasingly feels that those who remain outside of institutions tend not to have the resources to change anything, and that they tend not to last either. He may have a point. My point was not meant to be a value judgement – more an observation that the trajectory of movement away then return was one that appeared to signify a ‘retreat.’

Moreover, I’m convinced that the attraction of ordination to those in leadership of emerging groups does have something to do with finding security. I’m less concerned with people simply heading back to church; more concerned about people entering the ordination process, which I find troubling – as Jonny has found out reading through ‘Other’ where I examine the birth-narrative of the priesthood. You’ll have to buy it to find out why!

At least two themes in the book are pertinent here. The cycles through which communities and organisations go through have been really interesting me, and I will talk about those later. But firstly, I think it’s really important to look at the process of maturation – how we grow up as people of faith and the different ways in which our faith is expressed as we mature.

In the book I look at this through the prism of Jesus’ temptations, and the connections with puberty and preparations for parenthood:

[One] perspective on the journey of maturation is that of the ‘two halves of life’, separated by some kind of public ritual which displays our movement from the first to the second half. This same basic journey is undertaken in virtually every culture on earth. Young men from the Maasai undergo circumcision as part of their initiation into adulthood, Bar Mitzvahs perform a similar function for Jews, and Australian Aboriginal boys spent months preparing for their full entry into society, with sacrifices and lessons on tribal law all part of the process. For some Christian groups baptism serves this purpose, and for some parts of groups like the Amish, this may be preceded by a period of ‘rumspringa’, where adolescents actually leave the community for a period to experience ‘English’ life – with all its sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll – before returning and taking up full membership of the church.

We can see an archetype here: it is precisely in the time around puberty, when we gain the biological ability to reproduce and become parents, that all cultures and faiths seem to demand a period of ‘excursion’, a time away from the host community, often in physically demanding conditions, to prepare themselves for the task of parenthood. As we have seen, this is the plot of countless movies and books, from Austen to Dickens: a young girl looking for her prince (or vice versa) must undergo a journey of sorts, a rupture, a move away from the family home, facing all sorts of trials before returning triumphantly and enjoying a wonderful wedding.

The gospel makes interesting reading through this prism: Jesus is born in miraculous circumstances and then, at a particular time in his life, leaves home, undertakes a journey with a band of followers, is frustrated, suffers, leaves the reader under the impression that he has died, but then comes back victorious to await his ‘bride’.

The question that I think is pertinent here: to what extent can the ‘emerging’ phenomena be paralleled by this ‘rumspringa’? In other words, is it an excursion away from the institutions of faith – a temporary act of heresy that is then put away – or a more fundamental departure? In other words, can the Emerging Church ever be a mature ‘second half of life’ expression?

The point of the departures outlined above is that they appear to serve as preparations / ‘odysseys’ for parenthood. In almost all cultures they occur around the time of emerging fertility. So perhaps the emerging/retreat dynamic could be seen as a sort of necessary ‘rumspringa’  - a ‘dirty excursion’ before they return to the host community when they reach the time of ‘reproduction’ – in a spiritual rather than biological sense. To connect with Jonny’s point above – it’s only on the return to the institution that people can really give birth to something significant.

While I think there is something in this parallel, I don’t think the archetype outlined above necessarily fits well with the emerging situation. Why? Because the institution we are talking about is seriously dysfunctional – and one only need read the comments in the previous post to hear that clearly. So this is not about the prodigal son going away and coming back to his good home. Here are prodigals with genuine issues about a dysfunctional family life, and what should be done in response to that.

In many ways these excursions outlined above can actually serve to reinforce the dysfunctional institutions that send them, rather than reinvigorate them. The Amish are a good example of this: sudden exposure to ‘English life’ sends those who can’t cope running back to the fold even more committed than ever to not breaking out from it, and often more committed to return to the familar – if even dysfunctional – practices that they are used to.

So when people are returning to the institution, as I think they are when it comes to new forms of ordination, I think the key question is the form of maturation that this signifies. One could see it in a positive way – that people have their rumspringa and then return to the nest to become spiritual parents. Or one could see it less positively – people return to the nest because the fear of actually giving birth to genuine newness is so profound.

Sorry, that’s a long post…

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ] | Violence of Heaven [ 3 ]

According to Revelation – the apocalypic birth narrative of our future utopia – “when heaven is established, it will be a bloody business.” I have been trying to argue that any attempt to establish utopia – whether that be heaven or the perfect revolutionary proletarian republic – is a violent business, and we should therefore look for other models.

The violence of utopia comes from its desire to purge impurity – either when that impurity threatens it from within, or when a utopian group goes out to expand its boundaries. The removal of violence requires us to change our dirt boundaries, just as Jesus did. As I write in the new book:

Dworkin outlines what a middle position might look like by examining Jay Winter’s idea of ‘minor utopias’. Winter’s book Dreams of Peace and Freedom describes these places as ones that ‘sketch out a world very different from the one we live in, but from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated’.

It is in the light of this description that I think we can gain a new perspective [on] Jesus’ miracles in his very short ministry. In each of these examples we can see that they carry hints of ‘a world very different from the one we live in’, while not attempting to be permanent statements or manifestations of that new world order, and certainly not attempting to eliminate all social conflict or oppression. Jesus fed 5,000 people, but only for one afternoon.

If he were to continue this as a daily event, would it have to be restricted to those who were there for the original miracle? If so, who would check? What would happen to those who made a living from making bread or catching fish if Jesus continued to undercut their sales by this miraculous multiplication? Would he still have to be there today, feeding a population of six billion and more with free food? What sort of people would that make us into, and what sort of God would it be that we were worshipping?

We can see that Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5000 only works if we are prepared to take it as a temporary event. The attempt to solidify it into a utopia where no one need eat again necessarily descends into violence and absurdity. We have to accept that hunger will return, and thus accept a world ‘from which not all social conflict or all oppression has been eliminated.’

The question this leaves us with is this: does the elimination of violence from heaven actually requires heaven to be a place where impurity and impermanence is accepted?

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ] |  Violence of Heaven [ 2 ]

In the previous post I ended with some thoughts about the options that utopian communities have when they have established a new purified space: they can either defend their space to stop dirt getting in, or move out from that space to try to purify the dirty badlands that lie outside. The first instinct is that of the Puritans or monastics, the second that of the Crusaders. One could argue that the defensive violence of the first instinct is less dangerous than the proactive violence of the second – and writers like Anthony Dworkin have noted that:

‘the real harm came in the 20th Century, when utopians abandoned the idea of withdrawing from the world and instead attempted to remake it’.

The premise of the utopian instinct appears to be that of the dream of returning to Eden: if we can just achieve that totally purified state – no matter what violence or separation we have to subject people to in order to reach it – then nothing will ever infect it again. Hence we come to the title of the series: the violent imagery surrounding the establishment of ‘heaven.’ As we read in Revelation 19:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:

KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great.”

Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army. But the beast was captured, and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. The rest of them were killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

When heaven is established, it will be a bloody business. What are we to make of this violent imagery? Even if we are not to take it literally, I think its ethos has infected our theological thinking, and left us with a legacy of violent metaphors of separation when we come to think of heaven – the establishment of the Divine Utopia.

I think this is profoundly different from the mood we get when Jesus talks about the Kingdom. And it’s to the very different mode of thinking about purified spaces that we’ll turn to next.

Violence of Heaven [ 1 ]

I opened the first post with the story of Christiania – a ‘micro-nation’ in the centre of Copenhagen that has been going since the early 1970s. Seen as a ‘social experiment’ by the generally left-leaning governments of Denmark, it is now under increasing threat from more right-wing administrations, as set out in Porter Fox’s excellent article ‘The Normalisation of Free Town.’

In Tuckman’s stages of group development, a team goes through stages of ‘Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.’ The forming element is generally straightforward – people gather around a passion or desire and propose what they would like to do with their energies. In one sense, this happens pretty ‘naturally’ and may require little input. Following on from that, the storming element is essentially the easiest: the walls are torn down, the people march because of shared passion against something. Storming is generally about revolution – putting group energy into turning something round.

All utopias by definition get to this point. They form, they storm… but what happens next once they have turned over what they set out to oppose governs whether they will be a success or failure. Certainly, there is usually a lot of left-over energy and camaraderie from the ‘storming’ – and Christianians were no slackers, undertaking large infrastructural works and creating innovative social structures too.

I want to propose that for Christiania and any other utopia – even if the revolution is peaceful, the ‘norming’ element brings with it an element of ongoing violence. Why? Because once a pure space has been stormed and won – in this case the opening up of a disused military barracks – and once the initial fervour of creating a new space within which to exist has run out, what is left is the ‘norming’ of how to then simply live within this new space. People need to know what the new rules are, even if that means there are apparently no rules spoken.

In the case of Christiania, the battles began pretty quickly over who should have control over who lived where. Despite this being a place where there was meant to be no property ownership, people wanted to be able to put their own friends into vacant houses when they came up, and this led to fights and evictions.

These internal struggles are one aspect, but the most violent move has to come from defending the new space which has been stormed, and the pitch battles around the perimeter of Christiania that have been fought recently (see photo above) are a prime example of this.

Another example could include the storming of the Waco complex, and Christiania is no different to any other utopian movement that seeks to create a permanent new, purified space. Once these sorts of utopian spaces have been formed and stormed, they have two options to sustain their purity: defend their boundaries and stop dirt getting in, or continue to expand their boundaries and purify the space surrounding them. It’s to these two options we’ll turn in the next post.

As promised yesterday, a post about a brilliant piece by Porter Fox in this month’s Believer about the micro-nation ‘Christiania.’

Christiania began when a group of Danes broke down fences to a long-abandoned military base in the centre of Copenhagen and started to use some of the space as a playground for their children. Covering some 85 acres, Free Town – as it is known to Christianians – soon turned into a government-tolerated ‘social experiment’, where property could not be owned, and no cars or guns were allowed. Being a) Danish and b) of hippy roots, drugs were for a long time freely available on ‘Pusher Street’; hard drugs were not tolerated though, and Christianian’s own methods for rehab proved hugely successful.

Christiania is a real-life experiment in utopia, and what makes it fascinating is that it is now around 40 years old. So how has it faired? Fox’s article is entitled ‘The Normalization of Free Town’ and it is this process of ‘norming’ that I think is fascinating – and also has some very interesting parallels for all utopian visions – heaven included.

What I want to argue over a couple of posts – and do in ‘Other‘ is that if utopian ideal is pushed towards permanence, it inherently leads to violence – and this is precisely what has happened as Christiania has come under pressure from a more right-wing government in Denmark.

As Fox notes in the introduction to his article:

It was with some surprise that Danes turned on their television sets on May 14, 2007, to see fires burning in their capital’s streets and gangs of police officers beating their countrymen with billy clubs. The worst of the fighting flared up along Prinsessegade Road in the Christianshavn neighborhood. A column of black transport vans filed into the street as residents hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks, and fireworks at police. Officers retaliated with batons and tear gas, and by that afternoon, the seventeenth-century streets had disappeared under a thick cloud of smoke.

The site was an ironic flashpoint for violence. Prinsessegade Road marks the northern border of a pacifist commune that has existed in Christianshavn since 1971. That year, a group of squatters overtook an abandoned army base east of Prinsessegade, barricaded the roads, outlawed cars and guns, and created a self-ruling micro-nation in the heart of Copenhagen. They called the eighty-five-acre district Christiania Free Town, drew up a constitution, printed their own currency, banished property ownership, legalized marijuana, and essentially seceded from Denmark. The traditionally liberal Danish government allowed the settlement at first, dubbing Christiania a “social experiment.” Then it spent the next three decades trying to reclaim the area. Thirty-nine years and a dozen eviction notices later, the nine hundred residents of Free Town represent one of the longest-lasting social experiments in modern history.

How did a pacifist community come to this? And, from our own tradition, how did Christianity come to represent the face of some of the worst violence in Western history? I’ll be trying to explore some of that in the next couple of posts, drawing in some more excerpts from ‘Other’ along the way.

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve tried to set out a critique of the choice agenda that main parties are promoting, and also the ‘rights’ / devolved power agenda that is a central tenet of the Conservative Party manifesto.

The key question that was rightly asked yesterday was ‘is there a desire in the population for all these devolved powers?’ On top of working more hours than ever before as well as looking after children, do people want to be running their own schools, sitting on the boards of hospitals and police forces, and working out if they should be sacking their MPs? I’ll get to this problem of perceived apathy in a later post, but first I want to return to the issue of choice.

In the first post, I posited two problems with ‘choice’. Firstly, our democratic choice is actually fairly limited, and this is a systemic problem that those in power don’t have much will to change. Secondly, choice in public services must mean surplus capacity, which would imply waste – something that all parties are keen to show they can eradicate.

However, there are deeper problems with choosing that Žižek notes in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce:

The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of desire, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire.

In other words, not only are we not informed enough about what we are choosing, we are also not entirely sure what we want in the first place. In the voting context: not only do very few people really read party political manifestos in any depth and know the ins-and-outs of the differences in policy, but we are not even sure which of these policies would be best for ourselves and/or our nation anyway.

Beyond even this though, the problem of so much choice actually reflects back on us a deeper anxiety. Not only are we not sure what the choices mean, nor what we actually want – we are also not sure who we are. Using a typically banal example, Žižek gets to the heart of the issue:

Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose – what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pillows? Double or twin beds?) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are?”

This then I think leads us to a much more radical conclusion about our task in these next few weeks before the General Election: not only do we need to probe our representatives for what they are actually offering to do, we also need to reflect carefully on what we really want – personally and as a nation. But even beyond that lies the deeper question that this period of campaigning should prompt us to spend time reflecting on: who are we, and what sort of people do we want to be?

The terrorizing choice is thus not between Conservative or Labour. The choice is between the kind of self that I want to become, the kind of nation we want to be. Whoever can provide the environment within which this self-development can occur is the one who deserves our vote.