Dear all. The new home for thoughts and news from myself, David Benjamin Blower, and related collectives etc. can now be found at davidbenjaminblower.wordpress.com
Over there you’ll find news of a new record coming out very soon, gigs, up coming books, big questions and small actions. Come over, follow, connect, commune.
Grace and Peace.
DBB
Andrew Marr interviewed the Defense Secretary Michael Fallon on Sunday. Marr asked him what the outcome would be if they lose the vote to bomb Syria. Fallon’s reply is astounding:
“Well that would be hugely damaging – obviously – to Britain’s reputation across the world. It’s our allies who want us to come and help: France has asked us very directly to send the RAF to help alongside their aircraft. It would obviously damage our reputation internationally, and I honestly believe it would leave us less safe than we are at the moment.”
The fact that he said it at all is remarkable. The fact that this is the first thing that came out of his mouth when asked why we need to bomb Syria, is horrifying. Are more bombs to be dropped on Middle Eastern cities because British politicians are embarrassed to say “no” to French ones? Are innocent men, women and children to be blown apart on the alter of Britain’s reputation?
It is indicative of the imperial ideology among us that talk like this isn’t hash-tagged to death and slammed across newspaper pages. As though it were utterly normal to take bloody military action to defend one’s reputation, rather than being something Mafia bosses might do.
It is crumbs of comfort that the quote above includes, at least, an afterthought about national security. Marr challenges him on this, saying that some wonder if more ill-considered Western bombs in the Middle East will only create more terrorism, to which Fallon replies:
“Well its too late now, we’re already a target [ . . .] We’re attacking ISIL already in northern Iraq.”
I’ll be playing songs, conversing, and maybe taking requests at Six Eight Kafé in the city next friday (20th Nov).
£5 on the door or £4 online.
Proceeds go to Kings Heath Collects, who are getting stuff out to refugees spending winter in Greece.
“Salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveller.”
-Henri Nouwen
I thank God that so many are saying we need to help the refugees, even as many others are singing the right wing media’s tune and saying no we don’t need to help the refugees. What I want to say is that I think we need the refugees. We need them to help us. The Britain I know and love is in a very deep hole, and if anyone in the world today can save us from our situation, it is the refugees.
The Desire to Remain Unchanged is Delusional and Destructive
Those who are resisting calls to welcome refugees into our country are motivated primarily by the desire to be unchanged by the state of war that is destroying parts of the Middle East and North Africa. They are afraid that we will be poorer, more crowded and less “British.” Indeed the government see it as their job to prevent our being changed.
But the hope to remain unchanged is delusional and destructive.
It’s delusional because it’s based on the denial of the obvious. Everything is changing whether we like it or not. The old order of things is passing. Ask Peter Hitchens (who is quite frank about the futility of his own winging). We are entering a time when the world will be increasingly mixed up and indeed a time when we can no longer maintain our imperialistic power relations with Middle Eastern countries. The sad irony is that, for most of us, life in our own country has been a routine exercise in daily alienation, structural injustice and cultural oppression, and yet so many of us are defending this miserable order of things, as though it stood for us. It doesn’t.
The hope to remain unchanged is also destructive, because, even if we succeed, by some bitter and twisted effort, in keeping all this suffering out – if we really manage to remain untouched by this terrible war – we will nevertheless be utterly changed in the process. We will deteriorate into a socially and morally disfigured society: a boat meaningless privilege sailing through an ocean of corpses. Our hard won security from the terrible other will be ashes in our mouth and we will continue on our present trajectory towards a soulless and lobotomised mirage of stability.
In any case, we have no right to remain unchanged by this crisis. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our addiction to certain resources from the Middle East, and our habit of selling arms to Middle-Eastern regimes, make us utterly complicit in the situation. We will be changed by it: the only question is, how? Will we sink deeper into the alienation of empire? Or will we come to terms with our predicament and find some unexpected opportunity to be transformed and rehumanised by this crisis of human suffering that we’re locked into?
From What Predicament Must We Be Saved?
Our predicament is one of greed, imperialism, racism and alienation.
Greed, because our level of consumption is unsustainable. If everyone lived as we do, I’m told we would need four worlds. Our wealth necessitates other people’s poverty.
Imperialism, because our foreign policy, arms trade and our oil addiction have created catastrophic political instability for Middle Eastern peoples.
Racism, because the media powers we uphold over ourselves have normalised a degree of racism since it suits them to find poor foreign scapegoats for the inequality that they themselves help to perpetuate against us.
And alienation, because life on the ground has become an alienating routine of work, sleep and numbing consumerism which has all but destroyed our community life. British life has been in a sort of glitter-sprinkled, numbing pathos for decades now.
These are four manifestations of the basic competitive hostility that has underpinned and withered British life. The first two are active, and the latter two are passive. While many communities fight the good fight and there are glimmers of hope everywhere, so much grassroots British life has been held mercilessly down in this basic world view of competitive hostility – the war of every man against every man – and it has has come close to defining our way of being as a people.
How Can the Refugees Save Us?
Firstly, it is absolutely necessary that we become poorer, and the refugees will help the west to redistribute wealth. Perhaps you’re having a panic attack now, but the fact is, there is not enough for everyone if we live as we currently do. Notice that relatively poor nations are taking in refugees by the million. It is rich nations like ours, and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait who have bolted the door, turned out the lights and are all hid under the kitchen table pretending no one’s home. Yes, “it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” I hasten to add that I don’t think the poor among us should be made any poorer, but that ordinary western life needs to move towards greater simplicity, greater interdependence in communities and less waste. Ultimately I believe this will enrich the poor among us and provide an escape route from the financial and social poverty that come with our alienating myth of consumer individualism.
Second, the refugees confront us with the fruits of our imperialism, and if we are willing to face up to their stories we may finally accept the challenge of finding an alternative route into the future – one that isn’t dependent on oil and or on the economic boost we gain from the arms trade.
Third, they give us an opportunity to overcome the racism that now dominates so much of our politics and media, simply by being the human other in our midst. I believe that we will not lose a sense of who we are in the presence of the other. Rather, we will gain a deeper sense of who we are, as we gain a deeper appreciation of the other.
And lastly (and most of all) the refugees will help to reconfigure British social life and politics through the grass roots community cooperation that is now necessary to respond to this crisis. Community cooperation is necessary now because a) the powers are not invested in the future, but in the present (the era in which they hold power) – they will not do what must be done. And b) because community cooperation is precisely what has been chased out of British life by numbing consumerist order of the last decades – and it is precisely this that has left us bereft of any sense of who we are. Functional and compassionate communities will be the most important political spaces in the future. If we don’t rise to this, we will remain locked in a stagnant and dying imperial past.
Why The Government Can’t Save Us
The government are almost completely unable to help us. Rather, we must help them by changing the assumptions under which they operate. The government have been a driving force of the greed, imperialism and social alienation that now characterise Western life, and racism is a tolerated side-effect. More than that, the government’s fear of the big newspapers (The Sun and The Mail) means that they are an obstacle to the refugees that we so sorely need to help. But lastly, even the refugees that the Government does let in will do us no good if the government oversees their life in this country.
We have to recognise now, that nobody’s humanity or dignity will be preserved if refugees are to be minced through government bureaucracy into dire council houses where they will live on a pittance, secluded and alienated and suffering continual racism and prejudice, only to be finally deported at the age of 18 if they are unfortunate enough to be orphans. The housing, social integration and provision of resources for refugees must be handled by welcoming grass-roots communities who are invested in their humanity and are willing to be changed by them. These grass roots communities, who will most likely be faith communities, must then include the wider community so that we, as a people, can be changed by encountering the other, can be grieved by their stories, can be heartened by their newfound stability and the part we are able to play in it. We could be transformed from a people of television and entitlement to a people of life, culture and hospitality once again: a people who’s core values are not dictated from the heart of capitalist economics but from a compassionate connection to the other.
What Should We Do?
If any of us have any enthusiasm about the opportunity to begin transforming British life from the grass roots upwards, then I encourage you to get involved with Citizens UK, to lobby your local councils to accept refugees, to consider how you could make yourself available to spend time with refugees and help them to settle and integrate and be welcomed, and to explore fund-raising activities that will involve the wider community.
This is not merely a crisis. This is the beginning of the world to come. And so I think it will be fruitful to respond to this in a steady, considered and committed way – to re-position ourselves gradually. If our own country is to be a good and beautiful place in the future, much depends on our response to the weary traveller. The current powers will make nothing but the most begrudging response, and so hope now depends on ordinary people in ordinary communities.
Our opening quote from Henri Nouwen, doubtless refers to Jesus’ story about the judgment (Matthew 25:31-46) where he tells one group of people “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” And they say “When?” and he says “Whenever you did it for the least of these.” Then he talks to the other group of people, and it doesn’t go so well.
As I’m sure is already clear, I don’t consider this to be religious mysticism so much as a concrete political reality that stands before us: “salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveller.”
Here lies yesterday’s sermon on Revelation chapters 13 and 22. I have a feeling that Revelation 13 is probably the most blogged about chapter of the Bible in the digital universe.
Blessings.
DBB
I was struck recently by Charlott Baring’s very short and successful campaign against Protein World’s Are-You-Beach-Body-Ready? adverts. As a response to the online petition, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) were called out of their offices to conduct an “investigation.” I had in my imagination a pair of men in suits with clipboards and coffees-to-go standing there in a London Underground tunnel regarding the giant picture, and circling numbers from 1 to 10, trying to empirically document how offended they felt.
This sort of automated bureaucratic response seemed ridiculous, because the people had already decided to be rid of those adverts, and made a public spectacle of it. It used to be, in times gone by, that when we didn’t like an advert, we would quietly not buy the product. Now ordinary people get out their scissors, and glue and spray paint and make their views known. For a long time public space has been ruled by the voices of those with the money to project their message into it, and ordinary people felt constrained to silence by an unspoken sense of subservience to those powers. Something’s tipped, I think. Now we talk back. And we don’t need the ASA’s permission or agreement to do so. Public space is beginning to be won back as a place for the public’s voice.
If the ASA’s involvement felt like an absurdly unnecessary gesture, the news of an “investigation” also felt like a desperate attempt to claw power back upwards. The people could not be seen to have spoken, uninvited, into the discourse of public space. Imagine the chaos if people felt able to talk back to every piece of coercive consumerist propaganda. It felt like the ASA were trying to stamp the authority of the advertising industry back onto a situation that had already left their control. The emerging truth is – I hope – that we are no longer satisfied to have our lives regulated by the powers. We are feeling freer every day to speak for ourselves, and take back public space.
In an open letter to workmen and labourers entitled Charitas (1871) John Ruskin quite boldly asks his readers to make three promises. The first is this:
“Mind your own business with your absolute heart and soul; but see that it is a good business first. That it is corn and sweet pease you are producing, – not gun powder and arsenic. And be sure of this, literally: – You must really rather die than make any destroying mechanism or compound… In your powder and petroleum manufactory, we work no more… There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon, – so without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war machinery, and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad and fight like harlots – God have mercy on them – you who hand them carving knives off the table for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what mercy is there for you?”
There are so many problems with this statement – not because it is wrong but because it is right. The problems involved in extracting ourselves from the industries of empire and violence are overwhelming.
I recall late on last year, the job of administration for the NHS was to be privatised and outsourced to an arms dealing company. The bid was abandoned after a petition, praise God. But it raises the question: how can we abstain from such things when everything is increasingly being mixed up together? Will we refuse to pay our taxes one day? What has it come to when it is proposed that the NHS be administered by the arms trade? That juxtaposition is a joke.
We could also ask the question from the other side of a war, ie. what resources are wars fought to secure? If its true, as Adam Curtis’ documentary Bitter Lake sees it, that our endless adventures in Iraq are ultimately about our commitments to Saudi Arabia (that is, our addiction to their oil), then it becomes a question of not only of the “arsenic and gunpowder…” we produce, but also what we consume. If we add to this the new information that our reliance on fossil fuels has itself turned into a war on the sublime cosmic sphere that God’s put us on, we are confronted with a question…
Addressing our fondness for petrol is something like the book on the shelf that we know is there, but put off reading. At what point do we decide that this choice is upon us? One part of what Ched Myers calls radical discipleship involves protest, activism and petitioning the powers – and this is growing, praise God. But if this is all we do then we confirm our total reliance on the powers to change the world for us. Are they going to be the sole agents of Good News? Another side is the rearrangement of ordinary life in spite of the powers. I believe that ordinary life can and must be rearranged radically, and that the Spirit of change empowers ordinary people to change the world in ways the powers cannot.
Ched Myers describes the moment Jesus told some fishermen and a tax collector to quit their jobs and join His movement like this:
“The first step in dismantling the dominant social order is to overturn the “world” of the disciple: in the Kingdom, the personal and the political are one. These concrete imperatives are precisely what the rich are unable or unwilling to respond to…” (from Binding the Strongman)
And now let the disclaimers begin. Just as Zacheus the tax collector kept his job, and St Paul continued making tents, and Nicodemus stuck to politics, and there is no sign that the Roman centurion quit even his job as the teeth of imperialistic power – ordinary life is not to be rearranged arbitrarily, nor is it always possible to make very necessary changes all at once. Likewise, a plumber needs a van, families sometimes need cars, and I don’t want to go to hospital with a broken leg on a bicycle (anymore than I want to be checked in by arms dealers on the reception desk). When we think of our petrol addiction, and the wars fought to supply it, we’re not talking about something like quitting smoking (a personal change), rather we are challenging the very things that ordinary life is arranged around. We will have to change the world outside ourselves in some way, to rearranging it around something better than the motor car.
The change is impossible without re-forming grass roots geographical community and will inevitably involve reforming life around some kind of geographic village well – a life shared with others in a walkable, or bike-able, locale, and shareable resources. We can’t make the change until we emerge from the identity of individualism and consumerism.
Grass roots community resists empire. Empire dismantles grass roots community. Amongst numerous new technologies of the last century our reliance on the motor car (for all it has given us) has helped to dismantle grass roots community. I am not suggesting that none of us should have them – it actually helps a lot if some of us do. But I am, unapologetically saying that we will not be able to emerge from empire as long as our lives, as individuals and families, are arranged around the motor car rather than around our local community.
It is an odd paradox, in keeping with Myers’ observations above, that it is far more difficult for the rich to rearrange ordinary life in this way than the poor.
The less we, as a people, are reliant on such mediums for life, the richer life will be and the less Western bombs will be dropped on oil rich countries.
For the record, Ruskin’s second and third requests are these: to “seek to revenge no injury…” and lastly to “learn to obey good laws… and subdue base and disloyal ones… ruling over those in the power of the Lord of Light and Peace, whose Dominion is an everlasting Dominion, and His Kingdom from generation to generation.”
It’s difficult to know how to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.
For one thing, I haven’t seen it and I intend not to: partly out of solidarity with the women who’ve raised their voices about its issues around domestic violence; and partly out of my own resistance to having my libido co-opted into Hollywood’s money making machine.
The problem is with critiquing what we haven’t seen. It seems a bit Mary Whitehouse-ish to be criticising a film because we don’t like the idea of it.
Perhaps, though, we can talk about what we have seen, which is the beast that curls this marvelous stuff out on us from on high – which seems to be hidden in plain sight. One of the characteristics of our time is the way the powerful farm the life of the people for profit, and the way our sexuality is expected to be offered up for exploitation*. What goes around masquarading sexual freedom and liberation here is nothing much besides the enslavement of our sexuality to consumer capitalism. Our sexuality is not being liberated from the private to the public in some great Freudian relief of pressure. Our sexuality is being lifted from the realm of personal relationships and shuffled into the private pockets of rich and powerful white men.
I think I am right in saying that the film is about a rich powerful white man who gets to do whatever he likes to a woman by getting her to sign a contract. This is supposed to appeal to the dark side of my libido, and to that part of a woman that secretly desires powerlessness and subjection. Indeed, we as a society know quite well what its like to be subject to whims of rich powerful white men who know how to use a contract. And the beast knows that we love it! “Lose control!” says the poster.
So no, I don’t think we should.
The other problem with writing about this film/book/“phenomenon” is the hype. How do we talk about it without adding fuel to the fire? I think, in fact, the film will be charity shop fodder in no time, as the book already is. The lasting battle is against the powers who will still hold the keys to the city’s high places and “public” arenas after this fad blows over, and are still able command access to the sexuality of everyday men, women and children, and absorb all into the politics of profit and penetration.
________________________________________________________________________
*Foucault calls this biopower. See History Of Sexuality Vol1
I think Mary’s lovely Magnificat sounds more like a politicised protest song than anything else…
He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
The prophets are the women breast feeding their babies in public.
If Walter Brueggeman is right that the biblical prophets criticised the present situation and energised people towards an alternative future, and did so by offering symbols from the past, public breast feeders do it all.
They criticise an order that has made breasts a symbol of women as the playthings of men, and the iconography of power, profit and control. The fact that the criticism rings true is obvious by the cries coming down from businesses, politicians, and celebrities telling them to stop it. Meanwhile the protest against the people who drag women’s bodies through the public sphere as visual amusement comes up from everyday people. (That fox, the prime minister is happy to say public breast feeding is natural, but he won’t raise a whimper against Rupert Murdoch’s peculiar right to publish breasts as a misogynist spectacle in a daily newspaper, because he knows that Murdoch carries the keys to the next election).
The prophets – the public breast feeders – energise us towards an alternative vision: a humanising order against a dehumanising one. A relational order against an alienating one. An order that glorifies grass roots life against the cult of the idealised image. It’s something that the businesses who rule consumer capitalism can make no use or sense of, and that makes the consumerist reconstruction of masculine libido evaporate. Its the image of Kingdom against empire.
Of course people aren’t feeding their babies to make a statement (apart from the protesters outside Claridge’s). British life has made a prophetic statement out of ordinary human life, by being a place driven to strangeness by systems of power and profit.
Kingdom Vs. Empire 