“If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still have one apple. But if you have an idea, and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw.

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Thomas Jefferson.

“The Iliad and The Odyssey can be spread throughout the world without anyone being deprived of them as a consequence.” Lewis Hyde

I’ve been thinking about these ideas (known in economics as non-excludable and non-rival goods) in relation to a novel I’m writing.

One of the things that’s struck me is that the shared project of human progress has moved away from these non-rival principles and become ‘excludable.’ The principles of profit mean that ideas that might be placed in the commons for the benefit of all are high-fenced, so only those who can pay get a look in, and those who consider themselves the ‘creator’ get infinite compensation for their stroke of genius. Feels a long way from Jefferson’s original American vision…

Interesting piece in The Independent about the battle over the right to remain anonymous online – especially as waged in World of Warcraft recently. That’s not a world I have ever ventured into, but many many have, and, as Rhodri Marsden sets out:

Female players were particularly concerned, very aware that revealing their gender could invite unwanted attention from the kind of men who spend long hours sitting indoors seeking the Reins Of The Bronze Drake within the Caverns of Time. Some respondents during the ensuing 2,000-page discussion on this topic dared to suggest that privacy wasn’t really an issue, but they were forced to eat their words when a Blizzard employee, after revealing his real name in defence of the system, suddenly found his phone number, address, details of his parents, siblings and spouse, and even pictures of his childhood home posted online by Warcrafters trying to make a point.

He goes on to quote comic artist John Gabriel’s ‘Greater Internet F****** Theory‘, which runs that Normal Person + Web Anonymity + Audience = …. well, let’s say ‘idiot’, to keep it for a family audience.

This highlights again the paradox of online presences: we have the potential to be more ‘ourselves’ because we don’t have the pressure of others watching us, but we are also able to be incredibly stupid and cruel for the same reason.

Interestingly, this paradox is nothing new. The screened off confessional has always been a place both where people can unload and be honest about what they have done, but also open up some of their darker desires, and we can see this duality in the way it has functioned as a place in cinema and literature.

Indeed, one could argue that the robes of the priest, which are meant to anonymise them, also bring the twin dangers of increased honesty and increased indiscretion, and that Gabriel’s theory works for any ‘masked performers’ whether ministers, comics, puppeteers or musicians.

Once again, we have to evolve to live with it. Rather than turning off the web, or demanding everyone is unmasked, we need to learn new social skills of how to deal with anonymous commenters, online flaming and general idiocy.

What I like about them, as Barry says, is that the new lens with which these images have been shot forces us to reappraise scenes from the gospels that have become over-familiar and domesticated. The story of the woman washing Jesus’ feet is shocking in many ways, and some of the problems with the gift exchanges associated with the story I touch upon in ‘Other‘:

Gift exchanges can very often be about displays of power, and Jesus understood this perfectly. In Luke 7 he is dining with a group of Pharisees who become embarrassed when a ‘sinful woman’ comes into the room and washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, an expensive jar of perfume and her hair. The story is slightly problematic in that we read that the ‘Pharisee who had invited [Jesus] saw this and said to himself . . .’ and of course we have no way of knowing how Jesus heard what he’d said under his own breath. Even so, the dramatic intention is clear: ‘I came into your house,’ Jesus says to him, ‘You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet . . .’

What is important to note from this story, and others like it in the Gospels, is that Jesus understands that all gifts, even the absence of gifts in contexts where it would have been customary to expect them, carry cargo. That the Pharisee had not offered the customary foot wash or kissed greeting to Jesus when he entered his house is a powerful statement of his disregard for Jesus. Equally, the woman’s flamboyant offering is a powerful statement of her high regard for him. Both gifts say something about the perceived power-relations between the giver and receiver. The Pharisee wanted to be seen to be entertaining Jesus, so invited him to share food – yet his neglecting to offer the simple things of hospitality on Jesus’ arrival betrays his real motive. His gift of a meal to Jesus was loaded with cargo: I am wealthier than you and more important than you; I can afford to give food to a poor itinerant preacher, but I won’t pretend to really care about you.

The woman, on the other hand, clearly felt hugely indebted to Jesus, perhaps for his respectful treatment of her. Her tears are a gift welling up from within. Her hair, which in her line of work would have been integral to her need to be alluring, is sacrificed as a towel to dry a foot, and perfume which she could perhaps barely afford is poured out liberally. These gifts came loaded too, but their cargo speaks of poverty of spirit, rather than pride. Her sacrifice is genuine, for the passage tells us it comes from her love for another; the Pharisee’s ‘sacrifice’ is rejected, like Cain’s offering, because its voice sings only about himself.

Given that both gifts came with other cargo it is perhaps worth considering if, outside of the immediate context, Jesus would have been critical of both the Pharisee and the woman. We read at the beginning of Matthew 6:

Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the syna- gogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Neither the Pharisee nor the woman did their giving in secret that night. One gave in the right spirit, yes, but both were very public displays of generosity. Is Jesus contradicting himself by not chastising the woman for following his teaching? If it would have been ungracious to point out the lack of secrecy in her giving, was it not also insensitive to embarrass the Pharisee in his own home?

I then go on to explore some of the difficulties associated with any sort of gift-exchange – and particularly the power-relations that inevitably come carried with them as ‘cargo.’  What philosophers such as Derrida have found is that the perfect ‘contentless’ gift is impossible to give. What our response to that fact is from there – should we just give up on giving? – is something that Jesus’ words and life-gift continue to challenge us with.

I’m currently enjoying one of Zizek’s new books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – an allusion to Marx’s introduction to his Eighteenth Brumaire in which he wrote:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

This, then, is Zizek’s dissection of the global financial crisis, undertaken with his usual array of linguistic and philosophical scalpels.

Reaction to the banking crisis, as Zizek outlines, was often typified by the Pope’s injunction to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. Zizek sees a big problem in this: by ‘fighting against the culture of excessive greed’ we are inscribing greed and over-consumption as personal sin and private psychological propensity:

“The self-propelling circulation of Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it controls our activity.”

Extending this view, Zizek then critiques the idea that ‘the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize him, to listen to his story.’ In other words, the adage that ‘an enemy is someone whose story you have not yet heard’ is wrong. Supporting this, he asks us:

“Is one then also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy only because his story had not been heard? Do the details of his personal life redeem the horrors that resulted from his reign?”

I think there is an problem with his argument here – a failure to understand that the empathetic relationship within the idea of friendship has to work both ways. Of course, one could not consider Hitler a ‘friend’ if he continued to act in the ways that he did. But in true friendship we changed, and perhaps if we had befriended him as a younger man, we might have been able to draw him away from the path that he eventually took. To assume otherwise is to isolate him, to fetishize him, to deny him any ability to change. Now, it may be that he was truly psychopathic and therefore totally unable to do so, in which case no friendship would even be possible.

Zizek then brings in another example, of an Israeli soldier who, on finding out that the Palestinian family whose house he was overseeing demolition of had a child with the same name as him, took his wallet out and showed them photos – but still went ahead with his duties. Again, Zizek is critical of the ‘befriending an enemy’ position, but again the point is that the power-relationship between soldier and oppressed family meant that no friendship was possible, and thus no symbiotic empathetic flow either.

So is my enemy simply someone whose story I have not yet heard? Perhaps, but only if that enemy, that ‘other’ is someone with whom friendship is actually possible – someone who has the psychological capacity for reciprocal relationship, and someone with whom there is some level of power equality.

What this might mean theologically is something that I might look at in another post…

Whenever a gift is given, an invisible cargo is exchanged with it, loaded with semi-conscious messages about power-relations between giver and receiver. Offering an expensive gift to someone can be a power-play: I am rich enough to give you this. Even letting someone out into traffic can carry the same message: I am more gracious than you, more relaxed and important, and thus I am able to let you out – it’s a small thing I can do for a little person like you.

In the parable in Luke 7 we saw in the last post, we saw this being played out: a Pharisee is giving Jesus the gift of a meal. But the cargo that is delivered with that gift is more important than the food: I am the sort of person who would invite Jesus for dinner.

And so as we come to the end of this Advent series – which I hope you’ve enjoyed – we come to what I think is the essential miracle of the incarnation: the miracle of restraint. At the moment of reception of this most wondrous gift, there is virtual silence. No fanfare. Angels may have sung in the fields – something I doubt to be honest – but at the breaking in of God into human form there is nothing to shock or bedazzle.

The incarnation is the gift that carries no cargo. It has been emptied of all power. It is thus both offensive in its simplicity and infuriating in its humility. It is as if the church would prefer God to have done something powerful and strong – that’ll show them! – but God refuses. Why? Because that would twist the power-relationship, and leave us less than free to make our response to it.

In How (Not) To Speak of God Pete Rollins describes Derrida’s view of the perfect gift thus:

(1) the receiver does not know they have been given a gift
(2) nothing is actually given
(3) the giver does not know they have given anything.

In light of this, the incarnation event is this perfect gift. As we wake on Christmas morning, billions of us, we are unconsciously entering this generous space, for we do not know that we have been given anything, nothing has actually been given, and in the unformed mind of that helpless new life, the giver had no idea that they had just given something quite wonderful.

Have a great Christmas.

There is only one thing on the children’s minds: presents. There has probably been only one thing on many of our minds these last few weeks: what to buy for who? How much is appropriate to spend? What did they give me last year? How will they think of me if I give them this?

It is in these thoughts that we subconsciously appreciate that there is no such thing as the ‘contentless gift.’ As Derrida and others have explored, every gift that is given carries with it some cargo. In The Complex Christ / Signs of Emergence I wrote about the importance of the gift economy over market exchange, for it is in these unbalanced gifts – a meal offered, a work of art produced – that relationships are deepened. In the market, all is balanced by payments. In the gift, an empty place is created, into which reciprocal gifts might at some point be offered.

But there is this other dimension to the gift economy, which makes it open to abuse in a way that the market is not. It is precisely because gifts carry with them a strong relational potential that they carry power. And as we come to Christmas it is vital that we are sensible to the power-imbalances that our gift-giving may carry with it.

In Luke 7 we read of Jesus being given dinner by a Pharisee. The meal is interrupted by a woman who comes in and washes Jesus’ feet with perfume. Jesus chastises those who rebuked the woman, and then proceeds to tell the Pharisee off for his own ungenerous thoughts – he hadn’t even followed normal hospitable practice when Jesus came in.

This story is problematic, for neither the Pharisee nor the woman had done as Jesus would have taught and kept their giving secret. Both had been ostentatious in their own way, both giving gifts with obvious cargoes. Yet it is only the Pharisee who is berated, perhaps because his gift was more deliberately an attempt to curry favour with a rising force in Judaism.

What is at stake in these gifts is the very spirit of giving. If we are giving only to receive something in return – favour, respect, forgiveness, power – then our gift is really no gift at all. I want to explore this in more depth in the last post in this series in a day or two, but for now it is sufficient to say: we should be conscious of what we are giving at this time of crazed parcel exchange, and conscious of what spirits may be at work in our giving and receiving.

Their recent episode on sustainable energy was very interesting, but fell into the trap that numbers can often set. The key interview was with Professor David Mackay, who has spent a long time doing very detailed calculations on what energy we could realistically harvest from which sources, and what sort of things we are actually using our energy on.

Asked whether it was worth switching off our mobile phone chargers when not in use, as we are often reminded to do, he scoffed that it was almost entirely pointless and we really shouldn’t bother – the energy used was about the same as driving a car 60m, and measured nothing compared to so many other things.

I think this misses the point, and raises one very important principle that a simplistic rational look at the numbers fails to see: turning off your charger won’t save the planet, but it’s a discipline that reminds us, like a mantra, to think about the bigger decisions we are making with our energy use.

This is the principle of ‘living symbolically’ that I talk about in the forthcoming book: taking actions that are not necessarily effective in themselves, but act as symbols pointing us or others to greater actions that may have a much larger impact.

There’s been quite a lot of environmental pessimism around at the moment – we’re buggered anyway, so why bother changing my lifestyle? – so I feel that it’s more important than ever to take actions, even if they are symbolic, in the hope that collectively these will show those in power that there is real political will to make things happen.

Head over to generous.org.uk to sign up for some actions yourself.

Etiquette has it that one doesn’t at the end of movements, only at the end of whole pieces. When asked what the history of this convention was, one composer noted that it ‘had arisen during the 1920s, when music began to move from the church to the concert hall, and the piety of the church came with it.’ When to stand, when to sit, where the hell we are in the prayer book – church-going does nothing if not refine your sense of when the right time to do something is.’

What’s lovely about this is that we’re seeing a reversal: the concert hall has become the church: 30 or 40 years after churches became worried about trendy new people coming in and spoiling the altar cloth, it’s the grand classical halls that are now worried about ruffians ignorant of convention. What’s been their response? To offer an ‘alternative service’ – check out the ‘Night Shift’ concerts given by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Whatever our position, this asks the question of all of us: what is our reaction to those who receive in a different way to us? Music, worship, art and gifts. Is our mode of reception preventing others from sharing?

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See also from the archives: ‘On Music‘

But you shouldn’t keep flogging a dead horse. There have to be periodic moments of silence / jubilee / death / hidden-ness if the moments of speech / action / life are to have any meaning.

So I’m going to stop this blog, and spend some time working on a follow-up book.

The idea, as it stands in various sketches in my note books, is for an extended meditation on the idea of ‘the other,’ leaning left on the poetry/theology continuum, and hopefully drawing on the stories of some fantastic people I’ve met.

I’ve been pondering Jesus’ summary of the Law to ‘love God, and love your neighbour as yourself,’ and re-phrasing it as ‘love the other, love The Other.’ The other within the Self, the other within our communities, The Other that is immanent and beyond all… It strikes me as the core of everything we are about as people of faith. Indeed, since the birth of consciousness, it’s at the core of everything we are about as people.

And yet, with the continuing rise in anti-social behaviour, teenage stabbings in London, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, theological schism, global terror threats and clinical depression, it seems that in our fluid, multicultural, melting-pot, border-less, easyJet world, we are further from accepting the other than ever before.

Yet, despite all this. I think there are signs of hope. And we need to be those signs of hope. Personally, communally, locally, corporeally, we need to be communities that have this love for God and other at our core.

No, I haven’t got a publishing deal, or even spoken to anyone about one. I’m not sure how much that matters, to be honest. I’m just going to spend some time thinking and writing. And if you have any thoughts you’d like to throw in on the theme, any good books to read, do get in touch, come for a beer, leave a comment, or whatever.

Doubtless I’ll be around online again at some point… No idea when. But you’ll find out

Fare well, for now. And thanks. It’s been fun.