With the recent victory we had over Friends Life, it’s been a busy time talking about the campaign and thinking through more deeply what lessons can be learned from it. I’ve got a blog piece up over at the Huffington Post talking about the story behind the campaign, but I wanted to highlight one key thought from it:

We will never know if we would have won the case without the campaign, but the vital point is this: the enormous scale of support meant that Friends Life could not get away with a quiet loss. Having tried to weasel out of paying an ordinary family, the story of their humiliating defeat has been amplified to national news levels in a way that could never have happened without the work of Change.org.

This, I believe is a vital change in the landscape of campaigning. The twin prongs of the law and the media have now been given a third dimension: online petitions and social media. The addition of this third leg has the potential to give a new stability and democracy to activism. The law has always been where final decisions are arbitrated, and the national media where issues are investigated and probed by journalists. But with the dimension of social media and well-organised tools for online campaigning, ordinary people now have an effective way of bringing their stories of poor treatment by huge corporations into the picture.

The traditional media were superb throughout the campaign. We had huge support from journalists doing what they do best: balance, investigation, proper reporting. But it is always the law that has the real power to change things. What is brilliant about Change.org is how these two things – the law and the powerful mass media – are now given some democratic stability and balance by social media and campaigning tools like Change.

In other words, this is a good time for democracy, and a good time for campaigning. And it’s high time too – because right now it’s the law that’s under threat from government cuts and policies which will severely restrict people’s access to the law. They won it for us, and now the law needs us to support it. So please do consider signing a petition to persuade the government to change its mind.

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too.

I don’t want to talk much about the links with After Magic – other than to say if you’ve read the book, watch the film – and vice versa – as there really are some excellent resonances, (the film opens with the words, “we create our own demons”) and their shared ideas speak for themselves. However, I was left mulling over the ideas the film presents about our relationship to tools and technology, which I thought linked well with my recent post ‘Giving Up the Internet: ‘It’s Never About The Tools‘‘ and particularly the links between technology and identity.

In one scene in the film (I’ll try not to give away too much) Tony Stark has dragged his Iron Man suit into a dilapidated garage. A young boy comes in, sees the suit and hollers in amazement ‘Wow, it’s Iron Man!‘ To which Stark replies, ‘No, I’m Iron Man. Well, we both are. It’s complicated.‘

This is really the central question in the whole film: who is Iron Man? Is it the suit? The person inside the suit? The man who designed the suit? Or, if the suit turns out to be empty, or, worse still, being controlled by an imposter, is it even possible to say who Iron Man is at all?

What Tony Stark comes to realise is that, even when the iron shard is surgically removed from his rusting heart, he is Iron Man. Even when he is stripped of the suit and stands naked, all his fabulous technologies and protective cocooning devices ripped from him to leave him exposed…. even then, he is Iron Man.

It would be tempting to drift towards a Luddite position here, or say something about our innate humanity being about a place where we are device-and-technology-free. But the situation is more complex than that. We, humans, are tool-makers. It is our evolving tool use that has always made us what we are: social technology use is what made our brains grow and made us homo sapiens.

The film actually deals with this in a really clever way. Tony Stark’s revelation over the arc of the film is that he is Iron Man not because he wears the suit, nor because he controls the suit, but because he was the mechanic who put his craft into it. This is made explicit in the closing scenes of the film: Iron Man is the man who works with iron. He is the monger, the mechanic, the blacksmith, the welder, the carpenter…

This is brilliant (and links so well to Richard Sennett’s excellent book of practical philosophy, The Craftsman.) Put shortly: our humanity is not in our creations, but in our craft. This is why the artist will never be finished painting. They can never produce enough pieces to say ‘I’m done, this is me in my entirety, on canvas’ because their identity is not tied up in their creations, but in the relationship they have to their craft of creating them. Process, not product.

This is an important lesson. We project so much of our identities onto our devices, on the things that clothe us: phones, brands, pictures… But doing so leaves us empty. We know in ourselves that we are not these things. Deskilled by consumer-capitalist approaches to labour we find we that substituting consumption for craft is unsatisfactory: buying the latest iPhone or another pair of jeans gives some kind of temporary bump to our need for validation… but ends up unfulfilling… just as the artist’s feeling of satisfaction on completing a work is only fleeting.

Yet, importantly, we also know that we are not Luddites. Whether using them or consuming them by proxy, tool-use is part of what it is to be human, and we should celebrate that rather than strive to rid ourselves of it.

What Iron Man 3 reveals is that our humanity is enhanced by our focusing on the process of our craft: it is neither in the purchasing of devices, nor even the display of own creations using them that our identity is enhanced; it is in the craft, the process, the imagination combined with problem solving and skilful manipulation that we find something deeper about who we are.

Park

They will come here
all of them in
different groups and
all of them do
what they shouldn’t
………………………….like
smoke on benches
let dogs run wild
climb up slides
and push.

This is the park where,
on common ground through
uncommon years
we take our turns
and rebel.

 

© KB 2013

 

Was in the local park the other day, kicking a ball with my kids… They are such interesting city spaces, places where boundaries are pushed, all the play equipment used for something other than that for which it was designed: running up the slide, pushing the swings over the bar. Kids of 14 or 15 lounging on the roundabout, taking drags. And yet there’s something beautiful in this. Richard Sennett would call it the natural craftsman: children testing out materials and equipment to see what things they can do, not just using them for what they should do. Just as the older ones do with their bodies. Just as we all later do with our thoughts. Parklife.

Brilliant weekend away over the Bank Holiday, with loads of surfing, go-karting and some great evening conversations with a bright and challenging bunch of friends.

One of the most interesting areas we talked about was around privacy in future technologies, and, when I outlined my major concerns about Google Glass-type devices I was quite surprised to be called a conservative on the issue.

This morning someone from the weekend sent me this article on the BBC about some users’ responses to using Glass, which makes very interesting reading. (For a more extensive look at the issues, this ‘35 Arguments Against Google Glass‘ is very well worth a read.)

One of the comments that jumped out from the BBC article was this:

It makes CCTV cameras look trivial. Here is a real-time, always-on, internet-connected data stream being fed in – not from a fixed position on a building, but from among our everyday lives. The person next to you isn’t just another commuter any more, they’re a Google agent…

Choice is key to trust in the digital economy and Glass doesn’t just challenge our assumptions about consent, it challenges whether we even have a choice any more. And that can’t be good for anyone.

I think this is the key word: choice. A good friend over the weekend said that she wasn’t really concerned about Glass etc., as ‘it’s just the future – it will just happen, and you just have to choose if you want to join in or not.’ I see that, but this is the problem with Glass and other aspects of the digital future, we may not have any choice. When someone looks at you on the train, the question will be ‘are they taking a creep-shot of me?‘ This cannot be good.

A connected issue came up this morning too: designer Wilf Whitty shared a release from Adobe, announcing their plans to move their design applications into a ‘creative cloud.’

We believe that Creative Cloud will have a larger impact on the creative world than anything else we’ve done over the past three decades. It is our single highest priority to enable deep integration between our tools and services. One of the implications of this is that many of the new features in our CC applications require access to Creative Cloud, as will many of the updates we are planning for the future.

As Wilf said in a reply to them: ‘I already work when and where I want (laptop), have a creative community (studio) and don’t need to subscribe to Creative Cloud.’

But the quote in the Adobe release above begs the question, will designers even have a choice in the future? And what privacy questions will the cloud-basing of all these applications and files raise?

There are an infinite number of possible futures out there, and it is entirely up to each one of us to make the best choices each of us have to navigate towards the best possible future. As with the announcement of the world’s first 3D-printed gun being fired today (and the coming free release by right-wing groups of blue-prints to build your own) it is clear that not everything that is possible is desirable – in other words, we have to make choices. But when the choices of others remove choices from our own hands, that becomes a matter not just of their freedom to act, but of their actions limiting other people’s freedom.

In Mutiny I outlined how pirates were pursuing a radical self-determination, and doing so by living ‘off the radar’ in TAZ-style communities. Our ability to choose to enter or absent ourselves from the new digital cartography is narrowing, and is going to require a) legislation, b) direct action and c) education. That all of these are currently struggling in the face of economic and big-business pressures (and direct action being severely bashed by legislation created by governments who love snooping anyway) leaves me feeling a little concerned about the future people are choosing for us.

Tech writer Paul Miller’s contentious experiment to log-off from internet devices for a whole year is coming to an end in two weeks (HT Maggi Dawn for the story, which she flagged on facebook this morning), and in a very frank and illuminating article (sent in by post, no doubt – he has had no access to email, smartphone, web etc) he concludes ‘I was wrong.’

It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or “checked my email” or “liked” anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I’ve managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I’m internet free.

And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more “real,” now. More perfect.

But instead it’s 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I’m watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

I didn’t want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey.

Miller was given a lot of stick for even embarking on this experiment, and all credit to him for taking it on the chin and sticking with the project. But even more credit for being so open about the failings, as well as successes, of his time offline. In one sense, that’s good enough for me: achieving that level of reflection is a big plus.

His conclusion is pretty clear: the vices we talk about in relation to the internet are really vices inside of us that are given easy expression through the online tools we use. But going offline does not change us, just as removing an alcoholic from their drink doesn’t change the fact of their addiction.

Miller notes:

As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did.

By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.

There are important lessons for all of us here. New technologies may change the ease with which certain aspects of our lives surface – whether that be online gambling, porn, anxieties about friendships or the need for affirmation – but they are not the root of them. So spending less time online may change the way that these parts of us are amplified (and that in itself may be helpful) but they will not cure us of our addictions or salve our deep needs.

The problem is that, especially with social media, they are sold to us on a lie that they will: more connections, faster connections, better communication with friends, never alone, life lived at 30MB/s… And yet the truth is that, once we have unboxed our newest smartphone, or upgraded our connection, the same desires and vulnerabilities still linger, an abyss never satisfied no matter how many ‘likes’ or RTs…

Miller concludes:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

There’s something worthy about what he’s saying here, but also something dangerous. Yes, the internet makes many connections possible, and that’s a brilliant thing. But to say that ‘the internet is where people are’ is wrong, because ‘people’ are made up of each one of us – and that would mean that ‘the internet is where I am.’

It is not, or at least it should not be. I am where I am. I might use the internet, but I do not enter it, or become located in it.

It is this confusion between tools and identity that, I think, caused Miller to want to embark on his yearlong log-off. My concern would be that he has not found ‘himself’ amongst the continued noise of offline tools. When he says he didn’t want to meet this Paul, I’d say that’s because Paul – like so many techno-natives never got beyond the confusion of himself and his tools. And perhaps that’s what Jonny has been getting at with his posts on silence, because perhaps silence is the place where we properly down all our tools and see who’s there.

Here’s a link to a video piece about his time…

Went to see The Book of Mormon last night. I’ll be reviewing it on William Crawley’s BBC Radio show on Sunday morning, but thought I’d blog a few thoughts here too.

Firstly, it’s a great musical. I’m no great fan of musical theatre to be honest [in mathematical terms, it's non-additive music (fab) + theatre (fab) doesn't mean musical theatre = double fab] but, within its genre, The Book of Mormon is fine work. Brilliantly choreographed, some excellent numbers, fine singing performances and it zips along at full pace without the songs feeling too awkward.

It’s also, in parts, hilarious. Yes it is crude and ‘offensive’ – more on that later – but the comedy isn’t just about that, it’s also silly and sweet in places too, with some good physical theatre, all performed on a good set.

I don’t want to spoil the show for people, so don’t read this section if you’re going to see it and don’t want to know what happens. But any discussion of the buzz around it does need proper context… so hear goes.

Spoiler Start:

Broad-brush: think South Park performs a musical of Things Fall Apart. The story follows two young Mormon guys, sent to rural Uganda to do two years’ mission. They form an odd couple: the top-of-the-class Mormon jock, paired with the needy geek who thinks them being sent together is awesome.

Arriving in Uganda they find the mission has had precisely zero converts, and the village hosting them under threat from a local warlord, General Butt-F*cking-Naked, who is threatening to circumcise all the women/girls in the village.

When the General shoots a villager in cold blood, Jock-Mormon decides to flee to Orlando, and tells his geeky partner what he really thinks of him. One girl in the village is prepared to give Mormonism a go though, thinking it will get her out of Uganda and to the utopia of Salt Lake City.

The show really turns on this: geeky Mormon begins explaining his faith to her, but, in desperation to succeed in converting someone, starts adding in all sorts of embellishments to the story, drawing in elements of Star Wars, The Hobbit – and explaining how founder Joseph Smith was cured of AIDS by ‘f*cking a frog.’

The villagers, poor and desperate, believe all of this and end up being baptised – which saves the mission from embarrassment during a visit from the head Mormon who’s come to inspect them.

Geeky Mormon’s cover is blown though when the villagers put on a theatrical/dance interpretation of what they have learned about Mormonism, which leaves everyone aghast. In the mean time, Jock-Mormon has been assaulted by the General, and is ready to give up his faith. But, seeing the villager’s version, he understands that, no matter how nonsensical, it made them happy anyway, so they should just run with it.

In a mirror of the Joseph Smith story, he and Geeky Mormon thus start a new faith, based on the inspired writings of Geeky Mormon, and thus the show turns full circle.

[Spoiler End]

So, apart from technically as a musical, critically, is the show any good?

Part of the trouble of going to a ‘hot ticket’ show like this is that the audience can be very self-congratulatory. They got a ticket to the toughest-to-get-tickets-for show in town… and are going to over-enjoy it beyond what it might necessarily deserve. The reception was rapturous – but clearly the audience wanted (needed?) it to be rapturous. So, in one sense, the ovations needed to be taken with a pinch of salt.

In truth, I think it’s actually far weaker than it would like to think it is, especially for a UK audience. This is important. If you are going to see it, you are going to see an American show that deals with a very American religion that’s actually very peripheral in the UK (though how different this would have been if Mitt Romney had been elected.) Nothing wrong with that – but it does mean that the targets it sets up to attack, and the context to those targets, are not necessarily transferable. Religion in America is orders of magnitude more embedded in society than it is now in the UK, and the fun poked at Mormonism doesn’t feel that risqué at all.

In fact, I kept waiting to be offended. Yes the language is strong, and yes it can be obscene in some ways, but on a surface level it’s really not that shocking – and the apparent ‘offence’ can function to bolster that which is being attacked. Indeed, the circle of the narrative here is really very orthodox: it’s good old downfall and restoration. Yes, Mormonism comes in for a good mocking, but that it is shown as part of a very human cycle of attempting to understand the world and creating stories with which to do so means that it is, in many ways, given a nod and a wink, even if it is all a bit barking. Indeed, seeing the show and watching the video below, the odd thing is is that Mormons actually come off pretty well… and the creators just don’t really want to expose them as dangerous or mad – quite the opposite, ‘wow, they’re so nice, and they have a successful thing going!’

The good friend and theatre director I went with turned to me at one point and whispered ‘what would be really radical would be if the General just turned round and shot them all now.’ And she was right. Though the piece has been purported to be an attack on Mormonism and religion in general, it actually shies away from engaging with religion and critiques of it in any serious way. There are opportunities to do so. One brilliant song sees the villagers outline their response to famine, drought, AIDS, child rape and sexual violence with a traditional chant that the Mormons think must be about ‘in God’s strength we soldier on,’ but actually ends up translating as ‘f*ck you God.’ And yet this move to anger at God, or questioning God’s existence in the midst of this suffering, is never explored.

That’s fine – it’s a fun musical, so it might have been a wrong move to try – but that does mean that any claim to be a serious engagement with religion or theology has to be dismissed. As one critic has pointed out: ‘the show concludes with the glibly predictable moral that it is better to believe in something, no matter how absurd, than to believe in nothing at all.’ Hence it doesn’t pursue the possible avenues that open about the nature of truth and the place of myth and story in the development of cultures. It’s just not an intelligent or challenging production in that way, which was disappointing.

However, as I’ve said, it is definitively an American piece – and in the context of American society, may still provide high challenge to the still highly religious climate there. More worryingly though, we did leave feeling rather uncomfortable about the politics and drives behind the piece.

I’ve spent some time in East Africa – not loads, but I’ve visited on three or four occasions and my brother has lived there for 20 years or more. I couldn’t help wondering if any of the writers had been there, or what percentage of the audience had either. Towards the beginning of the show (see pic above) it pokes fun at the ‘Lion King’ view of Africa (note the wrong-continent tiger), but then proceeds to paint an equally myopic view: all backward impressionable poor people with AIDS, in need of help from Westerners. Yes, it’s meant to be funny and caricatured, but actually it doesn’t quite feel like that has been done from a wise point of view, and nowhere is this caricatured challenged, which leaves one wondering whether or not an audience who have likely never seen any different saw it that way or not.

As I keep on reminding my students, Africa is a continent of scores of different countries and cultures, with huge socio-economic and political differences. To just talk about ‘Africa’ is just never good enough, and it felt that the black actors in the play might not really be doing people a great service in performing these gauche stereotypes without challenging people to think different.

All that said, it’s a great evening out, and a lot of fun. Just don’t believe the hype about any brilliant critique of belief or religion as myth, as you’re just not going to get that here. (You’ll just have to read After Magic for that instead )

//

Here’s the writers talking about it:

Tad Delay has written a great couple of punchy paragraphs thinking about Boston, radicalised youth and the problem of religion within empires.

What town in America goes a single year without producing young men who – amidst the college-aged angst of life directions, relationships, or career fears – turn to religious fundamentalism and/or militant violence? We applaud them for it as long as the religion matches ours and the violence can be packaged and exported.

Religion is a function of economy. Economy is how we divide up resources. Empire is what happens when one group holds all the cards. Empire creates two poles of extremism, one at home and another abroad. We love the drama. As Heidegger said, only a god could save us.

These are precisely the themes I tried to get at in After Magic. I’ve little doubt that in the subsequent trial and coverage the words will be spoken that ‘god told them to do it,’ and that this was a logical conclusion of following an Islamic faith. And, on the other side, people will say God Bless America…which means what precisely?

What is clear that, while they remain tragic and horrific, these events will continue to occur with some frequency. I’d agree with Tad and say they were pretty much the inevitable side-effect of global consumer capitalism and the military-industrial nation state. Groups will feel alienated, they will turn to violence as violence is what has been modelled by their leaders / pioneers…

Religious fundamentalism / militant violence / fervent nationalism: they are all large-or-infinite demands, and what I’ve tried to argue in After Magic is that these large demands tend to dehumanise us. Whether it be an obsession with career or an obsessive devotion to a company or brand, when we begin to be affected by the gravity of large demanding systems we become less human. The problem with religion that I try to interrogate in After Magic is that the demand can become infinite… and thus if god declared that America was a sinful nation not living according to Allah, then what are a few deaths in pursuit of doing god’s will?

Tad goes on to say that:

Christianity is the idea that says this: if god were to come down from the heavens and try to fix the world, we would kill god.

I’ve been mulling on this, and on the ‘death of God’ theology that was discussed so widely at the recent Subverting the Norm conference I went to. The real test for any system of thought is not how it deals with the ordinary and mundane (though this is important) but also how it can deal with a ‘Boston-style’ event.

What I feel After Magic does is make some head-way towards a theology that can do this – and it does it by considering the death-resurrection events in terms of removing this infinite demand, and the subsequent development of communities who live out a very different ‘prestige.’

All religions develop over the centuries, and all religions go through periods of asceticism, empire building, followed by periods of mysticism and inner transformation. What I think it unique about a radical Christianity and what makes it the most psychologically mature religion is that it is the only one that has learned to embrace its own death. (There are brilliant kernels of this in Buddhism too – which is why one sees great monks like Thomas Merton synthesising the two towards the end of his life.)

Perhaps we shouldn’t be talking so much about a Death-of-God theology as a God-Of-Death theology: radical theology brings people to grief for the death of infinite demands, draws them on in emancipatory hope to self-determination and self-organisation and a ‘prestige’ that brings the life of god back among us without the dehumanising demand. It’s in this place that both the fundamentalism of the Islamic terrorist and the terrifying funda-capitalism of American society are resolved.

This is a place of psycho-spiritual maturity, but it is not academic or over-complicated. What it will draw on though, which is why I’m such a big fan of the direction of Tad’s work, is a full integration of psychoanalytic ideas into religious and political thought.

Some questions that might be asked in light of this could be:

Does the US have a particular issue with fundamentalist Christianity / school shootings / weaponry because it has a constitution that fetishizes the pioneer spirit and locks people into immaturity?

Is it possible to frame these acts of terror as corporate acts of ‘self harm’? Those who self-injure do so to fulfil a number of functions – including coping with anxiety, stress, emotional numbness, low self-esteem or perfectionism. Self-harm is often associated with a history of trauma and abuse… (From Wikipedia) Is terrorism / school shootings a ‘lashing out’ against itself of a corpus who sees the horror of consumer culture and planetary alienation and just wants to feel…something?

What is clear is that orthodox theological and political thought has failed to deliver as regions have radicalised and communities continue to be hurt. It’s a small offering I know, but After Magic does try to think big and find a new way forward – and my hope is that others who know more will be able to build on it.

A good friend Jonny spent a week or so in silence in the hills of Wales recently, and has been blogging really beautifully about the experience. The term I don’t like that’s often used for these periods is ‘retreat’ – it’s too military for me, and carries with it a sense of moving backwards. Though (likely for want of a better word) Jonny uses it too, what I like about what Jonny has done is that he seems to have very much seen it as about moving forwards, rather than escaping backwards.

I’ve been thinking over his experiences, and thinking too about the issue of the ‘examined life.’ I posted some thoughts on this last summer, asking if the examined life was actually worth living as the move into examination seems to inevitably lead to rough terrain. Socrates famously said that ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die,’ and there is a definite sense that to begin to live an ‘examined life’ brings one face to face with death: death of the self, death of selfishness, death of ideas and concepts that we’d unconsciously held on to. This process will almost certainly bring pain – and that’s part of the project that Pete Rollins has been uncovering: the emancipatory move from certainty and unexamined living will not be a move into an easier life. But once one has seen that there is a road to travel, and that your chains are your own to unlock, who can stay put?

Holding this in mind, one of David Eagleman’s short stories from Sum (which I cannot recommend highly enough) has kept coming back to me:

Descent of Species

In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?

But perhaps you’ve just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there’s only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That’s permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.

Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

The vector of the examined life is singular: you cannot return to ignorance once you have begun. And I think this helps us with the myth of ‘simplicity’ and the sometimes utopian ideals that people can project onto times of ‘retreat’ – which Jonny has skilfully avoided.

Life is clear: there can be no retreat. You cannot return to some simpler, equine life. To do so with any integrity would mean lobotomising your experiences up to that point, unlearning everything you had taken on board and erasing memories of where you had been before. It would be a spiritual and intellectual regression, from which there could be no great joy.

The challenge of Descent of Species is the same challenge Jonny hints at in his posts after his period of silence: not how to capture some elysian life, some bucolic existence away from humanity, but how to engage in the discipline of simplicity and silence in the midst of the inevitable forward vector of life.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes said:

‘I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.’

In other words, our task in pursuing truth is never to regress backwards towards a false ignorance, covering eyes and ears and pretending that the complexities and depths of life do not exist. Our task is to face those complexities with a life ordered by periods of reflection and silence, and to have the courage and discipline to walk calmly into those challenges, unflustered and without lashing out in violence.

And if people turn backs
or appear a little harsh
and cruel
then remember, iron lady
this caring less
this selfishness
was you.

So let the pomp begin
and let the men in fine coats
begin their parades
and let the police secure their lines
and flash their notes

But may this funeral march
also mark the death
of your -ism’s cruel enmity
from society’s ashes
rise Assisi’s kindness
in community.

Been following with interest the US Supreme Court deliberations on the right to gay marriage – a debate that has been going on in various other parts of the world too. What’s interesting is the vociferous nature of the opposition from religious groups on the right. I mean, they really hate this. Which is odd… because if ‘god is love’ then where the hell does all the hate come from?

It’s very extreme I know, but the Westboro Baptist church website is actually called GodHatesFags.com – with sub-sites ‘GodHatesIslam’ and ‘GodHatesTheWorld’ – all with an extraordinary side-bar that clocks exactly how many people God has cast into hell since you opened the page. (I couldn’t find their coffee morning rota, but sure it’s somewhere deep in the navigation)

God. Perfection. Hatred. Hell.

After Magic speaks directly into this (and can be got for 40% off for a few days now!) , arguing that the demonisation of ‘the other’ is an inevitable result of a theology that insists on super-nature. It has been the same through history: fundamentalist religions have required some group to be the focus of their hatred, be it Jews, blacks, gays, women, liberals, communists…

In Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy we see this same process at work. Gotham has some problems, but it opts to solve them not by taking a good look at its community structures or systemic inequality, but with a powerful short-cut: Batman. The use of a super-power to sort out the city is such a win: it’s cheap (Batman doesn’t need paying) and easy (Batman does all the hard work.)

But what Gotham is blind to is that the move to access this ‘higher’ super-nature is always balanced out by the emergence of the darker, ‘lower’ powers too. In short: you cannot have Batman without Bane. The tension that this creates requires some explanation. People want to know why. And thus the process of demonisation begins.

In Macbeth we Shakespeare very subtly set out this archetype in his use of the witches through the play. Macbeth was written for King James I – yes, he of the King James Bible, who was also responsible for the Daemonologie of 1597 – that begins with these terrifying lines:

The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the Witches or enchaunters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in post, this following treatise of mine (…) to resolve the doubting (…) both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practised, and that the instrument thereof merits most severely to be punished.

James was an avid witch-hunter himself, but who were these women, and why were people so afraid of them? In the book I explore how the rise of witch-hunting was connected with the rise of Puritan religion. This absolutely holier-than-thou theology brought with it a connected huge rise in fear of the devil – and this required personification. Who shall we say is responsible for all this evil? Women. The unmarried, poor women:

‘People could attribute catastrophes to natural causes as well, but an expected blow – a violent storm; a mysterious, wasting sickness; an inexplicable case of impotence – set them grumbling menacingly at the poor, ugly, defenceless old woman in the hovel at the end of the lane.’

Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World, How Shakespeare became Shakespeare.

With the emphasis on unattainable holiness always comes a demonisation of those we consider responsible for tainting our perfect world. To put it shortly: those who elevate gods, raise devils.

From After Magic:

James had plenty who fawned around him, but his Bard was never so dim. In the witches of Macbeth James was confronted with that which appeared to condone his beliefs, yet in the subtle subversion that was as much as he could afford, Shakespeare also made his points: he who hands his fate to super-nature will be taken through madness and brought down by it and, more painfully, those who are most vulnerable, those on the edges of society, the poor, the outsider, will be demonised along the way, gruesomely violated and often murdered.

Tragically, we still see this today. Fundamentalist religion still requires demons to be created in order to protect itself from having to come to terms with its own internal fears. Those who are gay, those who are Muslim, those who are immigrants, those who are disabled, those who doubt, those who are women, those who are black – through history each of these groups has become a demonised other. They have had super-villain status projected onto them, and special powers have been attributed to them. They steal our jobs. They destroy marriage. They are the devil’s own spawn. They are whores. They are über-criminal. Yet each of these attributions comes, like James, only from the failure of religion to see beyond its fears, fears that are created by the move that diminishes its humanity through a caving in to the apparently infinite demand of super-nature.

Beyond Macbeth and into The Tempest Shakespeare showed how this humanity can yet be restored when his protagonists have the courage to lay down these undeniably ‘potent arts’ and see what comes ‘after magic.’ And yet, as we shall now see, this move of renunciation is the same one made at the very inception of the Christianity that James and others had so sourly twisted.

As the Supreme court in the US debates gay marriage, and ‘Christians’ protest vehemently at the way fags are bringing God’s punishment on the nation, we urgently need to see clearly what’s going on in their protests. It’s my hope that in After Magic there are some moves towards hope and resolution in this – beginning with the release of the ‘infinite demand’ that creates the atmosphere within with demonization flourishes.

(Oh, and by the way, apparently God condemned about 2500 people to hell while you read this. SHEEESH.)