A podcast of this piece can be heard by following this link

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to show various ways by which, and why, I think both our own liberal, democratic European and North American culture in general — and its liberal religious, Judaeo-Christian traditions such as the Unitarian one to which I belong — can confidently reconnect with its two major religious and philosophical fountainheads, namely, the human Jesus and Socrates. The need to do this is particularly pressing at the moment because it is clear the wise, reasonable, loving and just ways of proceeding that — at our culture’s best anyway — have both been drawn from, and watered by, these two fountainheads, are now under many, many political, religious, economic, financial, ecological and epidemiological pressures. I should add that the felt intensity of this pressure has been exacerbated by our own neglect in nurturing, protecting and promoting these fountainheads in both the private and civic domains of our culture’s collective life. 

However, I am acutely aware that the temptation in such pressing moments is to try to make any kind of “return to tradition” as thick, or maximal, as possible, in the mistaken belief that such an approach will provide us with the most effective defensive wall.

But, one of the things our culture as a whole values extremely highly is openness to new evidences and insights and the freedom to employ our faculty of critical reason on these same evidences and insights so as to be able to change our minds/opinions when we need to. 

Consequently, one significant problem is that all thick and maximal returns clearly opens up the possibility that we’ll simply end up returning to too many of the old philosophical and religious dogmas and creeds that, within Christianity and Platonism, became wrongly and problematically attached to the names, ideas and ideals of the human Jesus and Socrates. 

In short, which ever way you cut it, it is almost always the case that projects claiming to “return to tradition” — even when they are intended to protect liberal, democratic and rational ideals — are likely to imperil that same freedom and openness and, in the end, only serve to steer our culture in an increasingly illiberal, anti-democratic and anti-rational direction. 

So, to be clear, from where I am standing, any return to tradition which helps restore in a substantive, creedal or doctrinal way, the Christian religion and Platonic philosophy would, ultimately, be a disaster for us. Whatever is required must assuredly remain heretical to its open-minded and open-hearted core.

So, if the project is not about restoring Christianity or Platonism then what is it I am hoping to achieve when I suggest European and North American liberals should, with the utmost seriousness and urgency, consider making a confident return to the human Jesus and Socrates as providing them with their best models of how best to be in the world? 

Well, an important thing to note is to remind you that the project I’ve been outlining over twenty five years of professional ministry, and now, in this first series of podcasts, is an extremely minimalistic one. 

In the first instance, it is important to realise that this minimalist project does not rely, in any fashion, upon belief in God. It doesn’t doctrinally rule out the possibility of traditional belief in God — that would be to close down a still unproven, if rather unlikely, possibility way too soon — but it most assuredly seeks to make it clear that belief in God is neither central, nor necessary, to the project.     

In the second instance when I talk about returning to the traditions of the human Jesus and Socrates it is vitally important to remember it is a return only to two very minimal presentations of them as models worthy of imitation. 

With regard to the human Jesus it is to learn from him a way of being in the world which is concerned to dissolve all of religion’s former supernatural God-talk, superstitious and apocalyptic ideas into a simple, if infinitely challenging, existential, ethical demand to show justice and love to our neighbours, enemies and all creation, right here, and right now. 

With regard to Socrates it is to learn from him a way of being in the world which helps people, through the disciplined employment of the Socratic method, freely to exercise their faculty of critical reason in seeking out new clues and empirical evidence about how the world is (and isn’t) and our current place in it.

That’s it. No more, nor any less.

Naturally, individual people and local communities, to more or less greater degrees, will always make their own images of Jesus and Socrates thicker than these minimal ones. But it is vital to the success of the collective project that these thicker images should never be imposed on everyone, everywhere as being either central, or necessary.

OK. But now I need to offer you an accessible and memorable picture of how these two minimalist strands might be understood to be woven together so as to provide a defence of secular, liberal, democratic European and North American culture and which does this in a fashion that preserves for us an appropriate, sturdy, structured way of remaining open to difference and new evidences and insights.

To do this I want to turn to a short, powerful poem by the contemporary poet, essayist, and translator, Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953).

“The Supple Deer” by Jane Hirshfield

The quiet opening 

between fence strands 

perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,

four feet off the ground, 

the deer poured through it.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns 

into a stream, an arc of water.

I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer—

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

[This poem can be found in her wonder collection, Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011). I highly recommend it.]

Hirshfield begins by presenting, in a very minimal, almost calligraphic, brush-stroke way, the two characters who will play out before us an exquisite, miniature drama. The first is the wire fence, the second, a supple deer — a stag.

    The quiet opening 

    between fence strands 

    perhaps eighteen inches.

    Antlers to hind hooves,

    four feet off the ground 

These characters meet in the event when the deer suddenly pours through the wire fence leaving not even a scrap of hair as evidence this had occurred:

    the deer poured through it.

    No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

Now, if you have ever been privileged to see this happen you will know it occurs so fast and fluidly that, like Hirshfield, there is no time fully to comprehend how such a large and substantial creature like a stag

    turns into a stream, an arc of water. 

Like Hirshfield, in that mobile, moving moment of heightened wonder, we, too, may feel envy.

On my first reading of the poem this comment somewhat jarred because envy is strongly felt to be a problematic emotion. So why on earth, in this extraordinary moment, does Hirshfield seem to sully things by using the word “envy”? And why, too, does she modify it with the adjective “accurate”?

I think she does this to remind us of a vital human reality, that although we don’t often like to admit it, envy always exists and plays a significant role in our lives in at least two distinct ways, namely, as inaccurate (false) envy and accurate (true) envy. 

In this specific case, an inaccurate envy for me would be to envy the deer’s own particular kind of speed, grace and suppleness. Although, as a fifty-five year old, through a mix of cycling, walking and Tai Chi, I try my best to keep up my own appropriate human kind of speed, grace and suppleness, it would clearly be inaccurate to envy the kind of speed, grace and suppleness the deer is capable of expressing because I am not, and never will be, a deer. 

An “accurate envy” on the other hand would be for me to become envious of something which I am not yet like but which I both can — and perhaps should — become more like. 

So, if I cannot become like the deer, then what can, should I, become like?  

Hirschfield answers this by employing what journalists or film-makers called a delayed drop, when she suddenly, and wholly unexpectedly, tells us her envy is “Not of the deer” — something which the poem’s title might have led us to believe was the case — but, my oh my, her envy is of the wire fence’s. In particular the wire fence’s ability 

    To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

This epiphanal moment reveals the poem is only secondarily focussed on the deer and that its suppleness and largess is primarily functioning as an aid to seeing something else, something which is usually unseen, in the poetic image this is the wire fence. And as a poetic image the wire fence stands for the many often unthought about structures which everywhere shape, define and delineate all aspects of our world and which helps make us this and not that kind of thing, creature, or culture.

OK, now I can return to a consideration of the project with which I began this piece.

I would gently, but strongly suggest that the fence we should be appropriately and accurately envying is one our culture has, and may yet still make, out of the interwoven, strong, minimalist strands of the human Jesus and Socrates I presented to you earlier. 

By appropriately and accurately envying them, and then trying to imitate their basic actions and methods in a disciplined fashion, we find there is released in us what the contemporary philosopher, James C. Edwards, has called the two “sacramental energies . . . that used to be bound up in the stories of the gods”. They are: “energies for limitation in the face of hubris and for transformation in the face of complacency” (James C. Edwards: “The Plain Sense of Things – The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism”, Penn State University Press, 1997 p. ix).

Naturally, Jesus and Socrates individually offer us examples of both energies at work. But, particularly with regard to energies for limitation in the face of hubris, we find Socrates’ dialectical method reveals, again and again, that the energy which helps drive a person towards developing an appropriately humble and truly wise manner of living is found in the moment they discover they know they know nothing, or at least when they come truly to know — to borrow the felicitous turn of phrase by the poet A. R. Ammons which appears in the introduction to this podcast — they know that there is no finality of vision, that we have perceived nothing completely and that, therefore, and thankfully, tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. 

And, particularly with regard to energies for transformation in the face of complacency, we find Jesus’ example reveals, again and again, how this energy is accessed only insofar as we learn to respond to the radical, infinite, ethical demand to show love and justice to our neighbour, our enemies and all creation right here and right now, and regardless of what our often complacent selves and culture would often have us do — namely simply to walk by on the other side of the road.

When we willingly give ourselves up to the accurate envy of Jesus and Socrates’ what we also learn is that together they have, and may yet still create for us a shared, wire-fence like, structure which helps meaningfully to shape and define how the world is and our place in it but which, at the same time, remains highly porous and open to the constant flux and flow of the world and so always capable of having “such largeness” and sacramental energies constantly pass through it to challenge our hubris and change us in the face of complacency. 

As I have noted elsewhere, and often, different cultures will, quite naturally, be able to weave their own porous fences out of different materials which they deem appropriate to their own histories and all my foregoing words simply serve to remind me — and I hope you — that own culture is clearly not the only one on the block and nor could it, and nor should it, be. 

However, having said that, I do wish strongly to claim that thanks to its very thinness and nearly-not-there-ness the minimalist form of liberal, democratic European and North American culture that I wish to promote and defend, still has great worth and, despite it’s many failings and real crimes through history, it continues to carry undischarged within it many things worth preserving and bringing to the common table and conversation of humankind. 

But, in the end — and in the spirit of Jesus and Socrates — I can do no more than simply invite you to consider this claim further and to invite you into a conversation about it.

—o0o—

LIVE EVENING ZOOM CONVERSATION

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With this thought in mind let me move closer to my very modest positive thought by recounting to you the basic storyline of a film made in 1965 which utterly captivated me as a child growing up in the 1970s called, “The Flight of the Phoenix”. Based on a novel written by Elleston Trevor, the film was directed by Robert Aldrich and starred James Stewart as Frank Towns, the captain of a twin engined Fairchild C-82 cargo plane.

After naming the aircraft a few more tense moments follow as they try to start the engine — they only have seven starter cartridges and the first four of them fail. Fortunately, the engines do start and the plane succeeds in taking-off by sliding down a steep sand-dune to help pick up speed. With the surviving crew tied to its wings, the Phoenix succeeds in flying to a near-by oasis where they experience both the ecstasy that comes with having survived something catastrophic and also, especially for Towns and Dorfmann, the consummating joys of reconciliation.

Now why do I tell you this story in the context of our current pandemic? Well, because it seems to me to be a parable that tells us exactly the kind of activity we need to be engaging in in connection with our various crashed, or soon to crash aircraft, and whether those aircraft are businesses or religious and philosophical communities such as our own. Many of these attempts will fail but some will succeed and, towards the end of this short talk, I will concentrate simply on what it is that I think needs to be done in this, specifically Unitarian, free-thinking, liberal religious community. However, as I do this, I trust that, in a very general way, it may stand as an example that can be applied more widely.

But let’s firstly look at three key things I think we can learn from the film. 

The first thing to note is that the Phoenix is built only by using the material and resources that are actually to hand in the wreckage lying about on the desert floor. That’s it. Nothing that isn’t already present and available to the crew can be drawn upon or used, no matter how much they would like any of those ideal things.  

The second thing to note is that the Phoenix is designed and built out of only the most important, absolutely necessary and still serviceable bits of the wreckage, and it is built only with the intention of carrying what the crew decide is the most minimal and most important payload of all, namely, themselves with all their own stories, dreams and values.

The third thing to note is that the Phoenix is not designed in their moment of crisis to be, in-and-of-itself, some permanent, beautiful, shiny, super-efficient, world-beating or new and innovative creation; it is a thing knowingly built using old, existing technology and knowledge simply to make a wholly pragmatic, short, emergency flight from out of the hell in which the crew currently find themselves so as to have a chance of finding another, temporary, but survivable abode at an oasis. It is only if and when they get there that, following a time properly to recover, regroup and rethink, they might then turn their thoughts engaging in some grander, innovative, longer-term project. 

Now, to begin to move in a modestly positive fashion towards a time of constructive conversation, let me run through these same three points but by explicitly connecting them to what it is I think our Unitarian community needs to do in this crisis.

The first thing to realise is that our own Phoenix can only be built using the materials and resources that are actually to hand and lying about us on the desert floor. This means that we need to look carefully around at all the scattered bits of our congregation’s former form-of-life to see what is actually to hand and still serviceable. We need to be aware that the shattering of our old aircraft may have brought to light certain formerly hidden materials and resources that we had either forgotten about or didn’t even fully appreciate were part of our old construction. A vitally important point to remember here is that we cannot proceed by relying on materials and resources that appear on any kind of ideal wish-list. Some lucky something or other may turn up whilst we are attempting to build our Phoenix but we cannot afford to make any plans that are completely dependent upon the turning up of that lucky something or other.    

The second thing to note is that our Phoenix can only be designed and built out of the most important, absolutely necessary and serviceable bits of our wreckage and only so as to be able to carry on a short flight what we decide is the most minimal and most important payload of all, namely, our own liberal, free-thinking religious traditions’ best and still serviceable motive powers,  dreams and values. For our own tradition they are those religious and philosophical practices which centre upon the two central figures I spoke about with you two weeks ago, namely, the wholly human Jesus and the Ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates.

To remind you:

With regard to the human Jesus it is to build with and carry out of the desert a way of being in the world which is concerned to dissolve all of religion’s former supernatural, superstitious and apocalyptic ideas into a simple, if always challenging, existential, ethical demand for justice and love for all creation, right here, and right now. (Just to reinforce something very important here — please note that following the human Jesus need have absolutely nothing to belief in God as Julian Baggini’s new book, “The Godless Gospel”, makes eloquently and very attractively clear.)

With regard to Socrates it is to build with and carry out of the desert a way of being in the world that helps people freely exercise their faculty of critical reason in seeking out new clues and empirical evidence about how the world is (and isn’t) and our current place in it.

In short, the human Jesus and Socrates are our tradition’s only available and still serviceable motive forces and pair of wings and, along with ourselves, they are also our most valuable cargo. Other kinds of crashed aircraft (whether businesses or religious communities) will, of course, have other kinds of available motive forces, pair of wings and valuable cargo. But it is their task, and not ours, to build a Phoenix out of those things. Our task is simply to build something serviceable out of the examples of the human Jesus and Socrates to help get ourselves out of the desert and to some kind of oasis for the work to come.

The third thing to note is that in this immediate moment of crisis our Phoenix need not be in-and-of-itself some kind of shiny, new, permanent, beautiful, super-efficient, world-beating or new and innovative creation. All that is required of us is to use our existing religious and philosophical knowledge to build some ad hoc form-of-life out of the materials and resources actually to hand. The question of what we might think about building later on is for later, if and when we have succeeded in flying to, and landing at, an oasis, and have had time to recover, regroup and rethink.

So, to conclude, although the form-of-life that is our freethinking, liberal religious community is highly likely to look significantly different in a post COVID-19 world to the way it looked like only six months ago, our job right at this moment is NOT to build that new thing. That’s a job for when, and if, we make it to the oasis. The job, right now, is simply to build our Phoenix, get it into the air with ourselves, the human Jesus and Socrates on board, and attempt to set a decent and ethical course that has some reasonable chance of bringing us to some kind of oasis. As to what may follow, only time and luck will tell. 

But right now, at least as far as I am concerned, we know what it is we must do: build and fly our Phoenix.

—o0o—

LIVE EVENING ZOOM CONVERSATION

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Matthew 13:31-32 (in David Bentley Hart’s translation)

[Jesus] set another parable before them saying: “The Kingdom of the heavens is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field, which is indeed the smallest of all seeds, but when it grows it is larger than garden herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31–32 in John Dominic Crossan’s presentation in ‘The Essential Jesus’ (Castle Books 1998, p. 51)

The Kingdom of God is mustard

 a seed small enough

  to get lost among others

 a plant large enough

  to shelter birds in its shade.

  —o0o—

In our own age, when it comes to the parable of the mustard seed, we find it very hard avoid the traditional interpretation that has become attached to it. We’re tempted to say straightaway that it’s obvious, it’s a simple lesson we can read off the face of nature about growth — namely, that things which will eventually become large and expansive begin with something very small and compact.

Of course, it is sometimes true that small things do become large and, in the case of mustard seeds, they do, indeed, become large plants and, whilst calling them tree-like is a stretch for even the most imaginative of us, they do grow to a height of three or four feet. Jesus must surely have had this in mind when he told his parable. But was that all he had in mind?

To answer this question let’s first do a little bit of what the contemporary Slovenian philosopher and all-round bête-noir, Slavoj Žižek, calls ‘short-circuiting.’ Žižek notes that:

‘ . . . one of the most effective critical procedures [is] to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deluze’s sense: not of “lesser quality”, but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower”, less dignified topic). If the “minor” reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions’ (‘The Monstrosity of Christ’, Slavoj Žižek and John Millbank, MIT, 2009, pp. vii-viii).

Žižek thinks that sometimes this process doesn’t simply bring to light something new in the text or tradition, but it can also serve to make us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’ (ibid. p. viii).

A fine example of the art of short-circuiting in connection with the parable of the mustard seed is offered to us by John Dominic Crossan whose translation of the parable you have already heard. The first ‘minor’ author Crossan uses as a lens through which to look at Jesus’ parable is the Roman author, naturalist, natural philosopher, naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD). Crossan reminds us that Pliny wrote:

‘Mustard ... with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once’ (Natural History: 19.170-171).

The second ‘minor’ author, or rather authors, Crossan uses as a lens though which to look, are those who, redacted the Mishnah in early third-century CE, a text which later on came to form part of the Talmud. In the Mishnah the authors tell us that, because of its tendency to run wild, the planting of mustard seed in a garden was forbidden in Jewish Palestine (Mishnah Kilayim 3:2). There is a very high degree of probability that Jesus would have been aware of this teaching and, given this, Crossan feels, along with the historian of first-century Palestine, Douglas Oakman, that: ‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the rule of God to a weed.’ Crossan, continuing to look through these lenses concludes that the point of Jesus’ parable:

‘. . . is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities. Something you would want only in small and carefully controlled doses — if you could control it’ (John Dominic Crossan, ‘Jesus — A Revolutionary Biography’, Harper San Francisco 1994, pp. 64-66).

Well, well, well. As Žižek noted thought can make us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’. 

It’s something we can most easily see through the lens of an old gag I am, perhaps, overly fond of telling, namely, that although Jesus promised us the kingdom of God (or the kingdom of the heavens), what we actually got was the Christian Church. Given this perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether Jesus might have planted the wrong seed by mistake? He may have thought he was planting a seed that would  grow into a flourishing, peaceable kingdom but what actually grew was an institution with very dangerous takeover qualities indeed, and one which quickly got wildly out of hand. The Christian Church became an institution which, as it grew ever larger and became the religion of empire, began to bring with it terrible consequences as it provided branches in which too many people who desired imperial, kingly or purely personal power and oversight could settle and who were filled with an insatiable appetite for swooping down upon the common land and the common people to inflict upon them two millennia of violence, corruption, crusades, inquisitions and much more besides.

This is neither a pleasant historical memory nor thought and it may seem the best we can say in Jesus’ favour was that the Christian Church was simply not the fruit of the seed he sowed two millennia ago and that the tiny mustard seed of the kingdom of the heavens Jesus actually planted was stillborn and never able properly to germinate and flourish as he had hoped it would. Perhaps, perhaps not. 

But what happens if we bring Crossan’s short-circuited meaning of Jesus’ parable into our own age and ask whether it speaks to any thing around us today? 

Well, it seems to me not unreasonable to suggest that Greta Thunberg and her many fellow young climate activists may stand as a classic examples of mustard seeds growing in just the fashion understood by Jesus in first-century Jewish Palestine. In August 2018 outside the Swedish Parliament Thunberg began, completely alone, a ‘School strike for climate’. An action in which only two years later, and even now during lockdown, she is regularly being joined by huge numbers of students across the globe.

Again and again over the last couple of years it has struck me that the School Strike for Climate movement may well make for a better candidate for being a genuine fruit of Jesus’ mustard seed than the historic Christian Church ever was.

To see what I mean and to conclude this piece, let me walk through Crossan’s conclusion again with this thought in mind.

It’s not just that our children start out as proverbially small and grow into creatures only a couple of feet higher than mustard plants, it is that they, too, tend take over where we stick-in-the-mud, stubborn and frankly short-sighted adults often don’t want them, they tend to get out of our control and their hearts and minds, like the branches of the mustard plant, tend to attract new and swift-winged, scientifically informed ideas within areas of our lives which we adults have populated with often problematic, destructive, out-dated and outmoded ideas and practices. Of course, we adults don’t desire this kind of thing to happen because it brings with it a serious challenge to our old ways of being-in-the-world, not least of all to our selfish and excessive consumption and waste, meat-eating, fossil fuel, car and aeroplane use which are clearly destroying the basic ecosystem upon which all life on this planet depends.

It seems to me that our children’s involvement in these School Strikes for Climate is very similar to what Jesus said the mustard seed growing into the kingdom would be like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities — dangerous, of course, but only to our old ways of being which we all know we must urgently change.

During the week an acquaintance of mine reminded me of a passage found in Bernard Williams’ (1929–2003) last book “Truth and Truthfulness” in the chapter entitled “Truthfulness, Liberalism, Critique” (Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 216). Williams writes:

‘Moreover, the Internet shows signs of creating for the first time what Marshall McLuhan prophesied as a consequence of television, a global village, something that has the disadvantages both of globalization and of a village. Certainly it does offer some reliable sources of information for those who want it and know what they are looking for, but equally it supports that mainstay of all villages, gossip. It constructs proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign. The chances that many of these messages will be true are low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone to pick out the true ones is even lower. In this respect, post-modern technology may have returned us dialectically to a transmuted version of the pre-modern world, and the chances of acquiring true beliefs by these means, except for those who already have knowledge to guide them, will be much like those in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the global nature of these conversations makes the situation worse than in a village, where at least you might encounter and perhaps be forced to listen to some people who had different opinions and obsessions. As critics concerned for the future of democratic discussion have pointed out, the Internet makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find each other and talk only among themselves.’

Williams’ words struck me powerfully when I first read them some eighteen years ago but they particularly struck home this week because, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, all of us have been forced to make much more use of the internet than we had before. Shopping, work, meeting people, getting our news, finding out about this or that, all is now being done more and more online.  

In terms of our local community here in Cambridge the most obvious example of this is seen in the closing of our buildings, the cessation of our face-to-face meetings and the beginning of our meeting on Zoom. In order to continue to let people know what we are currently up to, our activities are now almost exclusively advertised online via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and our own website.

This, in turn, throws everything we publish, say, do and think into a global “machine” run according to the workings of algorithms designed, for the most part, by people who care for little else than “pure” profit and economic, financial and political influence, power and control. They have written algorithms which log all our searches/likes/dislikes and then begin to manipulate the kinds of things we will get to see the next time we go online to do anything whatsoever. 

If, like me, you’ve been keeping an eye on this over the past few years the preceding information will come as no surprise to you. However, more recently, this kind of manipulation of data has got far, far worse and we’ve begun to see very disturbing examples of how these algorithms are now regularly being used to influence elections and referenda in entirely inappropriate (and actually often illegal) ways, especially through the propagation of what has now become known as fake-news, alternative-facts and deep-fakes. Once the algorithms have logged your current passions/preferences/prejudices then you will be actively targeted to receive content that simply feeds and enflames your current passions/preferences/prejudices, whatever they are, and it won’t matter a fig whether the content you receive is true or false. 

Things are now getting so bad that even employees of a notoriously secretive company like Facebook are becoming more willing to break ranks and speak out about the dangers inherent in this way of proceeding. Indeed, I hope that all of you will have read some of the stories which have broken in the last couple of years, for example, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. But one story broke this week which strongly resonated both with Williams’ words and which, I think, speaks directly to what I see as a significant difficulty currently facing a community such as our own which was born out of the dissenting, free-thinking, liberal religious, Enlightenment tradition which privileged truth, truthfulness and the use of cool, critical reason in matters pertaining to religion/philosophy/politics over mere inherited hot prejudice and putative, unsubstantiated divine revelation/s.

The investigative tech-journalist Casey Newton published a piece this week which includes an interview with a Facebook engineer who has worked on Facebook groups, i.e. pages meant for users with common interests where they can share information/knowledge/beliefs on that subject. Any person or organisation can create a group about any topic, cause or event and, not surprisingly, many liberal religious communities have started such groups, some open to public view, others not.  

Casey was told by one engineer that they found the group recommendation algorithm to be the single scariest feature of the platform — the darkest manifestation, they said, of data winning arguments. Here’s what the engineer said:

‘“They try to give you a mix of things you’re part of and not part of, but the aspect of the algorithm that recommends groups that are similar to the one that you’re part of are really dangerous,” the engineer said. “That’s where the bubble generation begins. A user enters one group, and Facebook essentially pigeonholes them into a lifestyle that they can never really get out of.”’

Now, usually, when a writer like me from an avowedly liberal tradition begins to write about these subjects their concerns are mostly focused on the kinds of lifestyles being encouraged by groups that are obviously antithetical to liberals and their usual concerns. Not surprisingly I do have such concerns because it is now possible to see — both in the media and out on our actual streets — how right-wing, anti-democratic, anti-vax, COVID-denying, authoritarian, nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and, yes, fascistic groups, are currently being emboldened everywhere to make their presence known. But, as Jesus memorably and wisely reminds me, before I make any attempt to remove the speck in my neighbour’s (or enemy’s) eye, I must firstly do my level best to remove the many logs that are undoubtedly lodged in my own eyes (Matthew 7:5). And, during lockdown, boy have I found logs by the decimated forest load. 

Over the past six months, not surprisingly, I have tried my best to begin properly to think through some of many huge implications of what is going on and how, in liberal religious circles, we might best negotiate the pandemic and its aftermath. As part of this process I began to visit some of the many conversations going on in various public, liberal religious, Facebook groups in the hope that I might find there some useful pointers. Alas, what I all too often discovered were exactly the same problems as those found in right-wing groups and which were predicted by Williams eighteen years ago. I found groups that were full of mere gossip and (internal and external) virtue-signalling and which were, as Williams feared, clearly ‘constructing proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign.’ I saw very little concern (or ability?) displayed by members of these groups gently, but firmly, to structure the conversation through the disciplined use of cool reason and evidenced-based arguments and, as I read though various posts, it was as clear to me as it was to Williams, that the chances that many of the messages already posted (or soon to be posted) will be true were low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone to pick out the true ones was even lower. Unsubstantiated and over-heated opinion and superstitious, uncritical belief could be found bursting out all over the place and nowhere was there any proper, sustained, evidenced-based, reasoned calling out of this. On the few occasions I saw such an attempt made (alas, often clumsily made by a person clearly at the end of their tether) all too often there merely followed a collective feeding-frenzy claiming that the person being critical had shown themselves to be disgustingly illiberal by their willingness to point that idea X or Y was, actually, little more than mere superstition and arrant nonsense.

When our online (putatively) liberal religious fora cease any longer to be places where prejudice and superstition can be effectively (if always gently and sensitively) challenged through the use of cool reason and evidence, where are we, or where on earth are we heading? This is especially pressing when we cannot easily or safely meet face to face. 

In the eighteenth-century our communities became widely known as “rational dissenters” and, whilst it is true we could at times wildly overdo the rational element (after all there are obviously limits to reason as there are limits to everything else), the use of reason and empirical evidence was a sine qua non of our religious/philosophical practice. It was one of our own, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826),  who in 1787 memorably wrote to his young nephew, Peter Carr, about religion, saying:

‘Your reason is now mature enough to receive this object. In the first place divest yourself of all bias in favour of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. [. . .] In fine, I repeat that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject any thing because any other person, or description of persons have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.’

Today, not only do I not see any reason not to continue to affirm Jefferson’s basic approach (albeit with certain modern nuances/revisions), I see countless reasons why we MUST continue to affirm it. Consequently, I hope that here in Cambridge we will continue confidently to embody this practice and never allow people wishing to join our community the impression that here they have the unconditional right to believe whatever they like but, instead, to insisted that people who wish to join us fully understand and accept that, here, they only fully have the right to believe what they do on the basis of the careful use of reason and a proper, collective, peer-reviewed, critical examination of what the available evidence actually allows us meaningfully to believe about the world. 

This three-centuries-old approach means that our local community has always preferred to err on the side of displaying a healthy scepticism towards all maximal religious beliefs and to keep its own religious practice as minimalistic and practically orientated as possible. In practice for us this has meant agreeing (but never slavishly or uncritically) to follow the ethical example of human Jesus and, to set aside as being central to our community, belief in almost everything else metaphysical, up to and including belief in a deity. Naturally, individual members of this community will have all kinds of their own privately held, maximal, unevidenced beliefs about all kinds of things but, together, we need to make it clear that those same unevidenced maximal beliefs can never take a central place in our community’s collective practice/identity. Always the primary arbiter amongst us must be the cool application of reason and evidence, the only oracle that has ever been (and is likely ever to be) available to us.   

As I explored with you a couple of weeks ago in my piece entitled ‘A passionately cool political/theological meditation on Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”’ this means that, as your minister, I continue to take with the upmost seriousness an insight borrowed from the twentieth-century English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), and encourage us only to use those poetic, philosophical, religious and political tools/strategies which tend, not towards inflaming passion by giving it new objects to feed upon but, instead, those which inject into the activities of already too passionate men and women an ingredient of moderation; those which offer ways which deliberately restrain, deflate, pacify and reconcile and which do not stoke the fires of desire, but damp them down.

In our current, transmuted version of the pre-modern world which is clearly getting way too over-heated (physically and ideologically) and increasingly being driven by unsubstantiated prejudice and superstition, our job as heirs of the rational dissenters is, surely, and quite literally, to cool it.

For these and other reasons, Jonathan’s friendship and work was very much in my mind this week and on a number occasions I stopped with a cup of tea in my hand to look at the photo of him on my mantelpiece which I took in his house a couple of years before his death as we ate fish and chips together, polished off a nice bottle of wine (a glass of which you can see in the photo at the top of this post) and talked philosophy and religion on into the afternoon. In the last two years of his life this became a regular bi-weekly event to which I always looked forward and thoroughly enjoyed. 

Jonathan was born in 1924 in West Derby, Liverpool and in 1945 he gained his BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Corpus Christi College/University of Oxford (MA, 1952). He was lecturer in philosophy at Durham University between 1947-1959, senior lecturer in philosophy at Edinburgh University between 1959-1964 and, finally, Professor of philosophy at Nottingham University between 1964-1988. During 1968 he was a visiting professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Chicago. His best known books are, Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (George Allen and Unwin, 1971), two books on Hume’s moral philosophy published by the Oxford University Press in 1976 and 1980 and, lastly, God, Freedom and Immortality (Ashgate, 1999).

Jonathan was hugely important to me in my role as a minister of religion because he helped me work carefully through the implications of being, like him, what he called “that embarrassing, but not, I think, uncommon thing, an atheist who has what appears to be [an] experience of the deity whom he believes not to exist” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 681).

Like Jonathan, I have continued to value hugely many aspects of my inherited liberal Christian tradition even as my belief in the existence of God has completely dissolved. Like him I continue to think that,

“Living a spiritual life may be regarded as paying attention to such intimations of the divine as one has in this world, without our having thought to any other world. Paying such attention might not suit everybody. I suspect doing so is more a matter of prudence than of morality. To love God, if I am right in thinking that it is possible to love a nonexistent God, cannot benefit him, for he does not, strictly speak, exist, but to love him may be of benefit to oneself” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 671).

In these difficult and discombobulating times — as I continue to explore the many, what seem to me, still undischarged energies to found in our religious tradition, even after the death of God — my paying attention to such intimations of the divine as I have in this world, without my having thought to any other world continues to help me negotiate (or at least begin to grapple with) the many significant and challenging “downs” I am currently experiencing as I view the current socio-political-ecological situation both in the UK and the wider world. I realise, of course, as did Jonathan, that “paying such attention” might not suit everybody but it might, just, suit one or two of you. Consequently, on the anniversary of his death and close to his birthday, I’d like to take the opportunity to reintroduce you to some of his thinking which can be found in the address I wrote for the congregation back in 2014 immediately following his death. You can find this at the following link:

In Memoriam: Jonathan Harrison (1924-2014) — On the religious benefits of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds and of having one’s cake and eating it

Jonathan thought — and I still, more or less, agree with him in this — that many of Christianity’s significant disadvantages might yet be overcome and he was prepared to state clearly that “the Christian ethic,” at least subject to the many criticisms he made of it, remains “a good one, though nothing in this world is perfect. It offers solace, comfort and help and the possibility of spiritual quietness, rest and solace which many sorely need and from which,” Jonathan suspected, “most would benefit” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 662).

But, as Jonathan also said, Christianity was not the only religion to provide such benefits and, although he hoped otherwise, he thought it was “unfortunate that these benefits are usually . . . bought, in their Christian form, at the price of accepting superstition and bad metaphysics” (God, Freedom and Immortality, p. 662).

But whatever you think about all of the above, sometime on Tuesday evening, Jonathan’s birthday, why not raise a toast to one of Britain’s unsung philosophers and a much valued member of this unusual congregation. 

Requiescat in pace, Jonathan Harrison (1924-2014)