Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 85
March 8, 2011
On the buses: fifty years ago today
Fifty years ago today, on Wednesday 8 March 1961, I joined the Johannesburg Transport Department as a learner bus conductor.
The Johannesburg Transport Department was a new name for what had previously been known as Johannesburg Municipal Tramways, which began in 1906 when the first electric trams were introduced, replacing the old horse-drawn trams which had been run by a private company. But the trams were being phased out, so they decided to change the name, but members of the running staff still referred to it as the JMT, and the letters JMT still appeared on the sides of some buses until they were repainted.
There were six of us in the class, which met in the training school at the trolley bus garage in Fordsburg, and it started off with the instructor, Mr Venter, showing us how to make out cash and journey waybills, and in the afternoon we learned how to punch tickets, only he would not let me do it left-handed. But eventually he relented when he say I could punch tickets much faster that way. We had bundles of loose tickets, which we held together with knicker elastic (broekrek), and a bell punch which punched a hole to indicate the stage where the passenger boarded. And the auditors could count all the punched bits to check against the number of tickets sold on the waybill.
The starting wage for a driver or conductor was 59c per hour, or R25.96 per week for a 44 hour week. It was a 6-day week of an average of 7 hours 20 minutes per day. Fares had been simplified with the introduction of decimal currency the previous month: 5c for 1 stage, 7.5c for 3-5 stages, and 10c for 6 stages and over. There were also higher fares for longer journeys, but they were undertaken only by one-man operated single-deckers going to Randburg. The simplification meant that old coins or new could be used for the bus fare, 6d or 5c. A cup of tea or coffee in a local cafe cost 5c, and an omelet and chips cost 35c.
Second series BUT passing an Alfa Romeo-Ansaldo at the Vanderbijl Square terminus
The next two days at conductor school we practised selling each other tickets and giving each other change. There was a platform with seats on to simulate a moving bus, and we practised on that. At lunch time every day we went to the gym up the road at the tram sheds for half an hour. We had books of fares and stages for all the routes in the city and we had to learn them off by heart, so there would be no undercharging or overcharging. We learnt how to fill in accident and incident reports.
We were also taught the culture of the Department. My fellow-trainees were all Afrikaans speaking, and since it was the time of apartheid, buses were segregated. Most were for whites only, but up to five "Asiatics or Coloureds" could be allowed to occupy the back seats upstairs, provided there were no whites sitting in them. But there were some routes for "Non-Europeans" only, and some for "Asiatics and Coloureds" only, to Bertrams and Crown mines. The instructor told us we were never to refer to black clients as "kaffirs". That was a strict no-no. In the JMT they referred to black clients as "kadallies", I assume after Clements Kadalie, a prominent black trade unionist of the 1920s.
Last tram ceremony in Johannesburg 18 March 1961
After a week we were given our own kit – a change bag, a ticket punch, a pair of nippers, bundles of tickets, and a practice note. We had to do two trips as learners, under an experienced conductor, on every route, and he would sign the practice note. For the first four days we were under conductors who had qualified as instructors, and after that we could be freelancers.
So on Wednesday 15th March 1961 I went to the Trojan depot in the south of the city, early in the morning, and took the fares on two trips to South Hills under the watchful eye of instructing conductor Tommy Crowne. Tommy Crowne had a spreadover shift, which meant that he worked in the morning and evening peaks, and had about four hours off in the middle of the day. On the third day, Friday 17th March, I took my practice note in the break and worked on the Malvern and Bez Valley trams, which was the last day of scheduled service. The next day they were to be replaced by oil buses, and there would be a special commemorative run to mark the end of the tram service. So I can truly say that I was the last tram conductor ever to join the JMT, and indeed the last tram conductor in South Africa, since all the other cities had closed their tram services long before.
That's me, Steve Hayes, with my conductor's outfit
On the 18th April, having filled my practice note, four of us did the final test. There was a written test and an oral test, in which we had to be able to give the stages on any route. And the following day we did a practical test. Having past, we were given cap badges and numbers, and were measured for uniforms. The cap badges had numbers in order of seniority, with drivers having odd numbers and conductors even numbers. So driver 1 was the most senior driver, and conductor 2 was the most senior conductor. I was 1456, which meant is was the 728th conductor, at the bottom of the pecking order. The pecking order was important, because every six months there was a reallocation of shifts, with those with the lowest numbers getting the first choice, and those who had just started, like me, were "casual" – each day we were told which shift we would be doing the next day, usually for someone who was sick or on holiday. And on our day off we still had to go in to see what shift we were allocated for the following day — the scheduling section were far to busy to answer such queries over the phone. Nowadays such things are probably handled by computers. Back then personal computers were unheard of. On one route the bus passed a computer bureau, and we could see row upon row of boxes the size of stationery cabinets, with large reels of tape that jerked backwards and forwards, and the whole roomful of them probably had less capacity than a pocket flash drive.
BUT Second Series, passing Gardens en route to Waverley
I worked on the JMT for the next two years, and when I turned 21 I trained as a driver as well, which took another month out of work with a practice not, driving every route, even if one knew them as a conductor. With the trolley buses one had to remember the location of insulators, and how to get to the right stand for the trip. After passing out i went back to my picked shift as a conductor, but being able to drive gave more opportunities for overtime.
In 1963 I resigned from the JMT and went to study at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, but as soon as I had written my last exam in November, I went back to Johannesburg, and drove buses during the long vac. I preferred driving, because when one's shift was over one could go home, whereas conductors still had to count their takings, enter up their cash waybills and pay in.
And when I went to study in the UK in 1966, I worked for 6 months as a driver with London Transport. One of the perks of the job was free travel on town and country buses and the Underground, so I used the opportunity to explore London and environs.
The biggest bus in the fleet, Sunbeam Series 4, could carry 112 passengers
March 7, 2011
Lent begins
Today is Clean Monday, the beginning of Great Lent. Well, actually it started last night, about halfway through the Vespers of Forgiveness.
A few years ago I went to Greece towards the end of Lent, and I thought it would be easy, in a country where most of the country is Orthodox, to find fasting food, but it proved remarkably difficult. We wanted to go to a restaurant with some friends, and the only place we could find was a very expensive specialist vegetarian restaurant halfway up the Acropolis above the Plaka, and it was clear that most of their clientele were New Age types, and the last thing on their minds was nistisimou — fasting food.
McLent at McDonalds, Athens 1998
Somewhat surprisingly the one place in Athens where fasting food was quite easy to get was McDonalds. They offered a "McLent" special — a veggie burger or six spring rolls with chips. Strictly speaking, oil is only permitted at weekends, and so the fried chips weren't really Lenten fare, but at least they showed willing, more so than most of the local Greek restaurants did. And soon after that I read about some Hindu guy in the USA sueing McDonalds for having beef fat in the cooking oil in which they fried their "vegetarian" chips.
We now have McDonalds in South Africa, but back then we didn't, though I've rarely visited a South African McDonalds — for one thing, I doubt that they offer Lenten fare here. The first time I ever went to a McDonalds was in Hong Kong — I'd read about them and wanted to sample their wares. It seemed little different from the Wimpy chain in South Africa. I also went to one in Moscow, to see how they differed from the Hong Kong branches, and was amused to see that they advertised "feelay o' feesh" (written in Russian letters).
McLent in Athens, 1998
Anyway, the Athens McDonalds got a lot of custom from us in Lent, but come Pascha, we went elsewhere, because everywhere other than McDonalds offered lamb done in half a hundred different ways.
Back in South Africa I've been to conferences and seminars on various subjects, and where they've served food they'e had special tables with kosher and halaal food, and occasionally one for vegetarians, but for all their cultural "sensitivity", none of them has ever offered nistisimou. I've wandered round them nibbling at the lettuce leaves and cherry tomatoes that have usually been put there for decorative effect — they were never meant to be eaten, but rather to make the vegetarian egg mayonnaise sandwiches look pretty.
I wonder of McDonalds in Moscow offers a McLent — does anybody know? Thank God for falafel.
March 5, 2011
Soulmates: Book review
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Emi and Polly Leto are identical twins, yet as they grow up they have great differences in character. When I began reading the book I kept being reminded of Her fearful symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, which I read a couple of years ago. It was also a kind of Bildungsroman about identical twins, and was also set in London, at least in part.
For the first few chapters I kept thinking that I could always give up and abandon the book if it got too boring, but somehow it never did, and the story got more interesting as it progressed, and I think it is considerably better than Her fearful symmetry.
Emi, who was always closer to her mother when they were growing up, decides, as her mother did at one point, to drop out of her life, and disappears completely in order to reinvent herself. But she fails to tell Polly or any of her friends where she has gone, leaving them wondering what has happened to her.
I suppose that is one of the things I find interesting and appealing about the story. We are interested in family history, and one comes across a surprising number of people who seem to disappear without a trace, without telling members of their family where they are going. Nowadays electronic social networks make it relatively easy to find old friends that you haven't seen for years, but only if they want to be found. It is difficult to find someone who really wants to hide, though in the end they often do surface somewhere. I last saw my own father when I was 12 years old, and only found out that he had died 14 years after his death. As the book points out, thousands of people go missing every year, and while some turn up within a week or two, many are never found by their friends and families, and the police aren't very interested unless there is good reason to suspect foul play.
March 2, 2011
Christian sexual morality and the law
The English High Court case of R (EUNICE JOHNS and OWEN JOHNS) versus DERBY CITY COUNCIL and EQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION has raised a number of contentious issues. Eunice and Owen Johns brought a case against the Derby City Council, which they claimed was infringing on their religious freedom because it said that their views on sexual morality might disqualify them from being foster parents
Solicitors Journal – Foster carers' views on sexuality are relevant, High Court rules:
The views of prospective foster carers on sexuality are relevant and should be considered by councils to the extent that they affect the treatment of children, the High Court has ruled.
Lord Justice Munby was giving judgment in a case brought by Eunice and Owen Johns, who claimed that Derby City Council refused to let them foster children because of their christian beliefs.
The couple argued that their beliefs were not a legitimate fostering concern, that they were being discriminated against under article 9 of the ECHR and that the council's decision to exclude them was unreasonable under the Wednesbury principle.
Quite a lot has been written about the case, often in terms that confuse the issues. For example this piece, The judges' atheist inquisition in The Spectator:
The secular inquisition against Christians was ratcheted up another notch yesterday in a grotesque judgment in the High Court by two judges, who have upheld the ban against a couple from fostering children simply because they hold traditional Christian views about homosexuality.
What helps to obscure the real issues is that many people discuss such cases by referring to tendentious articles like this one, rather than basing them on the actual judgement, and so each misreporting gets further misreported.
If we look at the actual judgement itself, rather than twisted and exaggerated reports of it, we find that the core of the question is this:
27. Shortly before the hearing, and in order to focus the points at issue, we asked the parties to formulate the terms of the declarations that they sought. The claimants and the defendant did so.
The claimants sought the following declarations (as refined following the hearing):
(a) Persons who adhere to a traditional code of sexual ethics, according to which any sexual union outside marriage (understood as a lifelong relationship of fidelity between a man and a woman) is morally undesirable, should not be considered unsuitable to be foster carers for this reason alone. This is a correct application of the National Minimum Standards 7 'Valuing Diversity'.
(b) Persons who attend Church services at a mainstream denomination are, in principle, suitable to be foster carers.
(c) It is unlawful for a Foster Service to ask potential foster carers their views on homosexuality absent the needs of a specific child.
(d) It is unlawful for a public authority to describe religious adherents who adhere to a code of moral sexual ethics namely; that any sexual union outside marriage between a man and a woman in a lifetime relationship of fidelity is morally undesirable, as 'homophobic'."
28. The declaration sought by the defendant (as refined during the hearing) is:
"A fostering service provider may be acting lawfully if it decides not approve a prospective foster carer who evinces antipathy, objection to, or disapproval of, homosexuality and same-sex relationships and an inability to respect, value and demonstrate positive attitudes towards homosexuality and same-sex relationships."
29. The intervener considers that declaratory relief in the circumstances of this case is problematic. Ms Monaghan submitted that both the claimants' and the defendant's formulations were too wide. She submitted that in a context where no decision had yet been made, and where there may be a range of factual contexts for reaching a particular decision about an application to become an approved foster carer, it is difficult to formulate a form of declaratory relief which would in fact be of assistance to the parties and to other public authorities and applicants who wished to become foster carers. We deal with this later in this judgment.
One problem seems to have been that the counsel for the claimants indulged similar hype to that of the columnist in The Spectator, which led the judges to say
All we can do is to state, with all the power at our command, that the views that Mr Diamond seeks to impute to others have no part in the thinking of either the defendant or the court. We are simply not here concerned with the grant or denial of State 'benefits' to the claimants. No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not 'fit and proper' persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.
I'm not a lawyer, and so I may have missed something important, but it seems to me that what the court decided was that it was within the competence of the Derby City Council to enquire into the attitudes of potential foster carers towards sex and sexuality. It made no ruling on the competence of the claimants to be foster parents and the Derby City Council had apparently made no decision on that either.
The court found it a difficult matter to deal with because there was very little evidence, and only a lot of assertions and counter assertions.
Nevertheless the case does raise a number of issues, which perhaps need to be faced and worked through, rather than sidestepped. For example, the judges say
We sit as secular judges serving a multi-cultural community of many faiths. We are sworn (we quote the judicial oath) to "do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will." But the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form. The aphorism that 'Christianity is part of the common law of England' is mere rhetoric; at least since the decision of the House of Lords in Bowman v Secular Society Limited
[1917]AC 406 it has been impossible to contend that it is law.
In spite of this, however, in England the state recognises marriages that take place in Christian churches, and perhaps, in the light of this observation by the judges, it ought not to do so, and the church, for its part, should not register marriages on behalf of the state.It seems that neither church nor state, nor the judges themselves, have faced up to that contradiction.
In the case, neither the claimant nor the defendant questions the laws, rules and regulations that were applicable, and if they had, it would have made the court's job even more difficult. Instead they focused on the way in which the laws, rules and regulations were interpreted and applied by the Derby City Council.
For the defendants, "The ability to promote diversity is the main issue."
That doesn't appear to have been challenged by the claimants, but "diversity" is a rather vague and nebulous concept, and it seems that it is being held up as something intrinsically good. But those researching things like HIV find that the constantly mutating virus is a problem in finding a cure for Aids, and diversity in this case seems to be a drawback. If diversity is good per se, then the elimination of the smallpox virus must be seen as a sin against bio-diversity.
The judges sought to distinguish between moral attitudes that were held on religious grounds, and those held on other grounds, and pointed out that there are limits to religious freedom.
Though this is not an example they gave, and does not arise out of this particular case, the matter of human sacrifice is an example of a possible conflict between the values of religion and the values of society. In most societies where murder is regarded as immoral, a religion that practised human sacrifice would not be allowed to do so in a society that values human life. The right to religious freedom is trumped by the right to life.
But the values of society change, not only with regard to sexual morality, but in other areas as well. Some societies, for example, now permit euthanasia. In such a society, could not human sacrifice become lawful on the basis of "willing slayer, willing victim"?
And would it then become the duty of potential foster parents to evince a positive attitude towards human sacrifice, even if they themselves believed it to be wrong, in the interests of promoting diversity?
March 1, 2011
Book review: A history of the English-speaking peoples
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 by Andrew Roberts
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is a strange book. It purports to be a continuation of Winston Churchill's work of the same title, which ended at the end of the 19th century. I haven't read Churchill's work, so I can't compare it with that, but the point of view of the author seems to be set at the end of the 19th century; I can only describe it as "neojingoism". It's the kind of outlook I could imagine my grandfather having, if he'd been alive today, and not experienced any of the intervening period since the beginning of the First World War. Perhaps one could also call it neo-Edwardian. It reminds me of the song, I think by Flanders and Swan:
The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.
And that is the viewpoint that permeates the whole book.
In spite of this quaint anachronistic approach, however, the book is quite well written, and for the most part, not boring, and at times entertaining. At least, since the author makes his own point of view obvious, one is forewarned about some of the biases. There are quite frequent asides for sermonettes on the virtues of capitalism or the English-speaking peoples, or pointing out the vices of lesser breeds who don't share the virtues of the English.
Roberts rightly deplores the use of hyperbole in describing atrocities committed by English-speaking peoples. I must say I agree with him about the too-easy flinging about of terms like "Holocaust" and "genocide" for events that are nothing of the kind, and that the over-use of such terms diminishes the seriousness of the events that such terms were coined to describe. But Roberts spoils his argument by his own exculpatory descriptions, when he says (on page 312f), "However bad the late-Victorians might have been it is a gross error of judgment to compare anything they might have inadvertently done to the deliberate Holocaust against European Jewry in the 1940s." It's the "might… inadvertently" that gives the game away. The message is clear: they couldn't have done it, because they were English, of course, and even if they did do it, they did it in a fit of absence of mind.
Roberts describes in considerable detail the horrific injuries caused by the poison gas Saddam Hussein used against Kurdish insurgents, but glosses over the injuries caused by the atomic bombs dropped by the English-speaking people on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (justified, of course, since they were English-speaking). And not a word about the response of the English-speaking peoples to insurgents in Fallujah.
Towards the end of the book (p. 636) he posts a disclaimer: "It is emphatically not that the English-speaking people are inherently better or superior people that accounts for their success, therefore, but that they have perfected better systems of government, ones that have tended to increase representation and accountability, while minimising jobbery, nepotism and corruption." Unfortunately, however, in the other 647 pages he seems to be trying to create the impression that it is precisely because of their innate superiority that the English-speaking peoples have done what they have done.
One of the other curious things about the book is that when dealing with Commonwealth participation in the two world wars, South Africa has been almost entirely written out of the story. There is mention of Australia, and New Zealand, and the place Gallipoli in WW I holds for them. There is mention of Canada and Vimy Ridge. There is mention of the West Indies and Eire. But not a word about South African troops, of Delville Wood or the sinking of the Mendi. This omission is so consistent that it sticks out like a sore thumb.
All history is selective, and historians select and emphasise the points that seem most important to them, and give less emphasis to other points. But this is not merely a matter of less emphasis; it seems to be a conscious and deliberate exclusion, and one wonders why.
The book is hardly a history, in the sense of a coherent narrative. There are occasional illuminating stories about particular historical incidents, but little to connect these with others. Huge chunks of history are skipped over, and anyone reading this to get a view of an era is likely to get a very distorted picture.
Throughout the book the author seems to be wanting to have his cake and eat it. He argues that realpolitik is more important than occupying the moral high ground, but then says that realpolitik IS the high moral ground, if its practitioners are English-speaking, of course. So, for example, he says of the detente policies in the Cold War in the 1970s:
Detente had anyhow meant very different things in the East and the West. The West saw it as a way of lowering tension, 'in the hope that it might disengage from the dreadful and even apocalyptic tests of strength it was inflicting on the rest of the world'. By contrast, in 1976 Leonid Brezhnev stated, 'Detente does not in any way rescind, nor can it rescind or alter, the laws of class struggle. We do not conceal the fact that we see in detente a path towards the creation of more favourable conditions for the peaceful construction of socialism and communism.'
But where is the contrast? It is clear that both sides saw it as a breathing space that might create the possibility of getting what they wanted relatively peacefully without Mutually Assured Destruction. Brezhnev's words could be paraphrased to precisely express the attitude of the West: 'Detente does not in any way rescind, nor can it rescind or alter, the laws of the free market. We do not conceal the fact that we see in detente a path towards the creation of more favourable conditions for the peaceful construction of capitalism and the market.'
And in the 1980s it was the West, under Reagan and Thatcher, that resumed the arms race — something that Roberts clearly approves of, since they were English-speaking and Brezhnev was not.
Towards the end, the "history" label wears very thin indeed. It is an undisguised political rant. The author says very little about what happened, and a great deal about why it was right that it should have happened the way it did (if the English-speaking people were responsible). The contradictions multiply. It is a good and noble thing to speak the truth to power, unless that power happens to be American, Then it becomes anti-Americanism, which is, in the author's view, a Bad Thing.
So reading the book gives me the queer anachronistic feeling that a contemporary of my grandfather (who served on the British side in the Anglo-Boer War in an irregular unit called Loxton's Horse) had fallen asleep on 31 December 1900 and, like Rip van Winkle, woken up a century later with his Victorian-Edwardian jingoism intact, and decided to write about the previous century from that point of view.
It's like a parody of a parody. There are several books that parody the simplistic history of school history trextbooks. There was an English one called 1066 and all that and a South African one called Blame it on van Riebeeck. The latter noted that in the 19th century in the Eastern Cape there were nine Kaffir Wars, and that these wars all had Causes and Results. And it tabulated the wars with their causes and results:
1st Kaffir War – Cause: the Kaffirs
2nd Kaffir War – Cause: the Kaffirs
and so on for all nine.
And yes, there were school history books in the 1940s and 1950s that took that approach.
But Roberts is writing a book for adults, yet adopts the same kind of simplistic approach. In any war that the English-speaking peoples were involved in, there are no nuances, there is no ambiguity, there are Causes — the non-English-speaking people (the Boers, the Germans etc), and there are Results: the English-speaking people won, and saved the world for democracy, capitalism, and realpolitik.
Archbishop supports multiculturalism
Archbishop Damaskinos of Johannesburg and Pretoria made it clear that he supports a multicultural vision of the church.
Speaking at the patronal festival (panygiri) of the church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton last Sunday, the Archbishop said that he felt very much at home in the parish. In his previous diocese, in Ghana, the same Russian music had been used, because one of the first priests there had trained at the St Vladimir's Seminary in New York, and had taught people the same music.
Archbishop Damaskinos receives the Gifts at the Great Entrance
St Nicholas community was founded in 1987 with the aim of promoting a multicultural vision of Orthodoxy in South Africa at a time when the other parishes were mostly ethnic enclaves: Greek, Serbian or Russian. St Nicholas uses mainly English in the services.
It was Archbishop Damaskinos's first visit to the parish since his enthronement in December 2010.
Archbishop Damaskinos presides at the Slava after the Divine Liturgy for the parish family
In the past there has been opposition from some people in the Archdiocese to the idea of a multicultural church. As one woman once summed it up, "The Orthodox Church is not missionary because its purpose is to preserve Greek culture."
Archbishop Damaskinos made it clear that he did not share this view.
The most important thing is that we are Orthodox Christians, not that we speak a particular language, he said. Language is important for communicating, but it is not what the Christian faith is all about.
The community had chosen St Nicholas of Japan as their patron saint precisely because he had a multicultural vision of the church. He was a Russian who went as a missionary to Japan, but he planted a Japanese Orthodox Church rather than a Russian one. He began his ministry by learning as much as he could about the Japanese language and culture, and was the ambassador of Christ, not of a national culture.
February 23, 2011
Married nuns?
[image error] clipped from www.washingtonpost.com
In a rare move that needed the pope's approval, a Lutheran convert was ordained Tuesday as a Catholic priest in Germany and is being allowed to remain married to his wife – who has already become a nun.
Harm Klueting, 61, was ordained by Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner in a private ceremony at the city's seminary, the Cologne archdiocese said.
Pope Benedict XVI gave Klueting a special permission to remain married to his wife Edeltraut Klueting, who became a Catholic Carmelite nun in 2004.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's chief spokesman, said the exception is rare but there have been similar cases.
"It doesn't happen every day," he said.
[image error]
In the recovery of the Orthodox Church from Enver Hoxha's enforced atheism in Albania, one of the few Orthodox priests who had survived the purges was made a bishop. He was married, and so his wife and he both took monastic vows and separated into different monasteries.
About 45 years ago a married Dutch Reformed minister became a Cathlic in the Netherlands. In an interesting bit of ecumenical reasoning he was ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church without first being made a deacon. His ordination in the Dutch Reformed Church was held to count for that. But thereafter he continued to live with his wife and children. He was a secular priest and neither he nor his wife became monastics.
That I can understand.
But a married Carmelite nun?
The mind boggles.
February 17, 2011
Lausanne, postmodernism and the emerging church
According to this blog post the Third Lausanne Congress, held at Cape Town in October 2010, issued a "call to action" against "postmodernism" and "the emerging church".
Now I wasn't at the Cape Town Congress, though I did take part in some of the online conversations leading up to the congress. Unfortunately the web site for these conversations seems to be broken, otherwise I would have asked these questions there. I would like to hear from some people who were actually at the Congress, to hear from them whether it was their understanding that the Congress issued a "call to action" against "postmodernism" (and whether they believe that postmodernism is called "the emergin g church movement"). I find it hard to believe that the Congress actually said or intended what the linked blog post claimed it did.
Evangelical Christianity has been under severe and sustained attack from those who wish to compromise and synthesize Christianity with Postmodernism (called the Emerging Church movement) instead of fighting back against it. Some of our largest Evangelical institutions including for example Zondervan Publishers, many denominations and seminaries have been compromising. These compromisers threaten to destroy the very definition of Biblical evangelical Christianity.
Some other claims made by the blog post are:
the [Lausanne] statement is explicit. Unlike many other public statements, it does not beat about the bush. Postmodernism is identified as false, illogical, misleading, a negative influence a threat to Evangelical Christianity and religious freedom
combating Postmodernism in the church in the Western World will greatly assist the forward progress of world evangelism (the principal goal of the Lausanne Congress) and the persecuted church
they put the call to action to defend the truth against Postmodernism first in the practical part of the document their 'call to action', recognising the central importance of the fight against Postmodernism to the defence and advance of Christianity in the Western World
I belive that the linked blog post, where these statements appear, is itself "false, illogical, misleading, a negative influence a threat to Evangelical Christianity and religious freedom". And to say that Postmodernism is called "the emerging church" is ridiculous. Postmodernism is a rather broad movement in art, architecture, literature, philosophy and several other fields, generally in reaction to, or moving beyond modernism, so to say that Postmodernism is called "the emerging church" is just silly.
The emerging church movement, as I understand it, is also a pretty broad thing, covering quite a wide range of Christian theology and practice, with a broad general aim of proclaiming the gospel in postmodern society (which I would have thought would be consonant with the aims of the Lausanne movement). I really can't see the Lausanne movement consciously tying itself to Modernism, and saying that Modernism is good while Postmodernism is bad, and restricting Evangelical Christians to the proclamation of the Gospel only in Modern societies.
It also seems to me that most of those who identified with the emerging church movement a few years ago have moved on, and now call themselves missional or something else.
I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm an Orthodox Christian, and as far as I know there were no Orthodox Christians at the 2010 congress. As a missiologist I'm interested in what movements like Lausanne and the emerging church are saying and doing about mission and evangelism. From my own observations, there is considerable overlap between the Lausanne movement and the emerging church movement, though there are also areas where they don't overlap. The blog post I've quoted, however, presents them as being at loggerheads with each other, which I think gives a false and misleading picture.
Voodoo histories: conspiracy theories and theorists
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It is said that there are two main theories of history: the conspiracy theory and the cock-up theory. In this book the author examines some of the conspiracy theories of the last century or so, and comprehensively debunks them.
But debunking and refuting conspiracy theories is not the main purpose of the book. It rather shows that whether or not there are conspiracies, beliefs in conspiracy theories often do more to shape history than the conspiracies the theorists believe in. An example is the Priory of Sion, which, according to the conspiracy theorists, is a centuries-old secret society at the centre of a conspiracy to restore the Merovingian dynasty and thus to change European and possibly world history. In fact it is a hoax, but those who were taken in by the hoax made their fortunes out of it, and influenced the beliefs of millions while doing so.
Let me say at the outset that I tend to believe put more weight on the cock-up theory of history. Not that I don't believe that there are conspiracies; there are lots of them. But most real conspirators also make cock ups, like Guy Fawkes.
And there is no shortage of conspiracy theoriesand theorists. You probably had dinner with one in the last week or two. You may even be one. Some of the blogs I read sometimes propagate conspiracy theories, including some of the ones mentioned in this book: see here, and here, and here. Maybe there are even some in this blog.
David Aaronovitch covers most of the better-known conspiracy theories of the 20th and early 21st centuries: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Stalin's show trials of the 1930s, the theory that US President Franklin Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour, the McCarthy witch-hunts, and the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy (with side trips on the deaths of Marilyn Monrow and Princess Diana).
Then there is the death of an elderly British rose grower, which a crusading MP tried to link to the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War.
And the Priory of Sion gets the full treatment too — how three British journalists fell for a hoax, hook, line and sinker, and wrote their book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail on the basis of it, and then sued Dan Brown for stealing their plot in The da Vinci code. Their suit failed, because they found themselves in an awkward dilemma. If their books were history, as they claimed, then there was nothing to prevent a novel writer from basing a novel on it.
There is the 9/11 conspiracy theory, which maintains that the US government conspired to murder its own citizens (rather like the Pearl Harbour theory), by bringing down the World Trade Center in New York in a controlled demolition. One version of the theory even maintained that the aircraft that flew into the buildings were elaborate optical illusions created by holography. It is at that point that one surely needs to apply Ockham's razor, if not long before. Perhaps this illustrates something that G.K. Chesterton once said: that truth is always stranger than fiction because fiction is a product of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Unlike most of the other events that the book describes that gave rise to conspiracy theories, I watched much of this one live on TV. And what had me gobsmacked, while watching the twin towers burn before they collapsed, was not the scale of the conspiracy, but the scale of the cock-up. Of course at that stage nothing was known about the conspiracy, though it later transpired that a conspiracy there undoubtedly was. A group of men did conspire to hijack four aircraft and to fly them into buildings.
But what struck me watching the buildings burn, with hundreds of people in them, was that the United States Air Force, arguably the most powerful and well-equipped in the world, apparently made no effort at all to rescue anyone from the buildings. Yet our much smaller South African Air Force had successfully managed to rescue people from burning buildings and a sinking ship. At the time it really did seem like a monumental cock-up.
In some of the earlier instances David Aaronovitch shows that the real conspirators were actually the authors and disseminators of the conspiracy theories themselves. In the case of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion the real conspiracy was not that described in the document, but those who forged and distributed the document, including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Henry Ford (both of whom later apologised).
In the case of the Stalin show trials the real conspirators were not those wccused, convicted and subsequently executed for masterminding a Trotskyist plot, but the Stalinist government and prosecution who made the bogus accusations.
Later in the book, however, this connection becomes less apparent — the comparison between the bogus conspiracies cooked up by the conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies. And thinking about this, I begin to wonder why. The author deals with the conspiracy theories about the the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, but says nothing of the conspiracy of the Argentine Generals that led to the war itself — and their regime was just as unpleasant as that of Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak. And just over the Andes there was the conspiracy that toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende, and installed the unpleasant dictator Colonel Pinochet in his place.
While devoting much space to the bogus conspiracy theories about the Bush Administration attacking its own citizens in the twin towers, the author says little about the WMD conspiracy that was the Bush Administration's excuse for the invasion of Iraq. Wasn't that a conspiracy? Of course the author might say that that was a real conspiracy (though to all accounts it seems that he favoured the invasion of Iraq) while the other was a bogus conspiracy. But wouldn't comparison be useful?
In specularing on why people actually believe conspiracy theories, and sometimes go to great lengths to promote and propagate them, the author mentions several theories, including one about paranoia. He notes that most of the people who believe and propagate these theories are middle-class educated people. Paranoia is defined as a mental disorder charactersed by persistent delusions, and often hallucinations. Sometimes these delusions may be of persecution. But, as someone once said, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you. There used to be psychological tests that had statements that you had to give yes or no answers to, and some of them contained statements like "My telephone is tapped." And if you answered "Yes" to it, it was scored as a symptom of paranoia, even if your telephone was tapped, as in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s it might well be.
I started this book thinking that I was a firm adherent of the cock-up theory of history. Now I'm not so sure. I'm no less convinced that there are lots of bogus conspiracy theories out there, including all the ones he mentioned. But what about the real ones?
February 14, 2011
How they did it
The protests in Egypt and Tunisia that toppled dictators began with the youth, and this is how they did it; hat-tip to Father Milovan. who notes the link to the Serbian youth group that helped to topple the dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000.
A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History:
As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: "Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas."
The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.
They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.
Twenty-one years ago, in the annus mirabilis of 1989-90, when dictatorships fell all over Europe, and in South Africa too it was bulletin boards (BBSs) and fax machines that played a role. The Fidonet echo conference ASIAN_LINK was a channel for the youth movement in China to communicate with the outside world, though the Tianamnen Square massacre put an end to that. But in Russia the tanks withdrew, with women shouting to the soldiers "you are our children".
Well, it just goes to show that the youth can use the Internet for something more significant than celebs and brand name clothing.
