Christianity and brokenness

I often wonder why 'broken' is such an in-vogue noun in the Evangelical Church. Apparently, we are broken and the logic in this thinking would suggest that we need mending to whatever state we were in before we were broken. The understanding to be inferred here is that we have made such a mess of our lives and that our thinking is so limited that we have ended up in a state that can only be described as broken. Indeed, we are taught that we can only make a success of our lives if we allow God to determine every single hour of how and what we do. It is thus a grave error to be independent and free thinking individuals lest we fall victim to our own sinful limitations. 

However, this is not a phrase that I'm too enamoured with when used outside of context. Life for the majority of people is normal, ordinary and is not subject to a  painful reality. Having a job, a mortgage, children, a marriage, a social life is part and parcel of an ordinary every day existence for most Christians. Yes, we have all had our emotional hurts and have been battered by the storms of this life. Yes, life can be painful but a great deal of people can sail through life without drowning from the varying severities of trauma that afflicts the more unfortunate.

As part of my day job, I deal with people who are unfortunate enough to suffer from alcohol or drug addiction and sometimes both. Such behaviour can be construed as a mechanism of coping with previous and current traumas or symptoms arising from a natural susceptibility to mental illness.  The needle or the bottle represents a temporary numbing of toxic emotions that are awakened by pondering on a troublesome past and a very bleak future. 

Quite often, the cause of a destructive addiction is a painful trauma during the childhood years which can result in depression, anxiety, personality disorders and delusional thinking in adolescence and adulthood. For the many people who suffer from or have second hand experience with mental or physical health problems, brokenness is a very real day to day reality and thoroughly inhibiting and isolating the sufferer from engaging in an ordinary existence. Walking through a ward in a mental health hospital or visiting a palliative care unit  is an experience in what it truly means to be broken. 

University and the rise of youth unemployment

It is largely indisputable that post-war Britain, thanks largely to American post-war bail outs, enjoyed a level of economic peace, financial growth and socio-economic certainty that hitherto had not been the case during the previous two hundred and fifty or so years of free market capitalism. The NHS was created, jobs were available and thus the dream of working and saving money for a house, a family and a comfortable retirement. The country had prosperity and economic certainty aside from the fear of being blown to smithereens by the arms race. We certainly do not have this now and this is no more true than for my generation; the offspring of the baby boomers who in the words of Harold Macmillan 'never had it so good'. Aside from a few recessions, the rot well and truly set in with the credit-crunch and the longest lasting economic downturn since the Great Depression. However, it would be easy to blame the greed of the bankers and the incompetent spending of debt drunk politicians that resulted in this mess. To be honest, the rot set in way before this unhappy seismic shift from capital to debt to bankruptcy. 

My focus is not so much on the socio-economic circumstances that have affected every strata of the British public, rather I am more keen to look at the quickly diminishing hopes and dreams of those of my generation. The twenties and thirties who are racked with persistent job uncertainty or stuck in mind numbing spirit crushing jobs which fail to compensate for the investment of hard work in a sound university education.   Indeed, many of us are bucking the trend of our parents generation; sky high property prices, unreasonable rents, outrageous competition for even the most soul destroying jobs and long term entrenchment in kidulthood; the realm of adulthood whilst being forced to live with the parents owing to sky high rents and equally unaffordable mortgages. 

When I Graduated in 2004 I was fairly fortunate in that there were many opportunities laid out before me or so I thought. I was led to believe that sound academic credentials would open doors into corporate law, accountancy and other such high powered careers. Indeed, that was the case except no one told of us of the horrendous competition, the work placements and the euphemistic CV's that would be required to get us there. For the lucky few who managed to land internships, interviews and contracts in the realms of finance and law the good times roll with sixty hour weeks and the occasional all nighter to please the bosses and keep their jobs. It was the competition that flabbergasted me, on average I worked out that there were one hundred or so applicants going for every position, whether that be marketing, law or finance. Personally, I blame the Labour Party for this with their emphasis on education and the desire to get fifty percent of people into a University education. All rather patronising and bourgeois to think that the only suitable way forward in life was to gain a university education rather than opt for an apprenticeship in a trade and all the other non-university options out there. The flip side of all this wasteful emphasis on University was the cold reality of realising that several years of hard work amounted to a sum of nothing.

Temporary contracts in call centres, admin posts, other such jobs with salaries that didn't even hit the student loan repayment threshold was more than humbling. It was deeply frustrating and took a long time to get my head round it. Then again, a student loan is somewhat relative against monthly rent that can hit nearly eight hundred pounds for a one bedroom flat and near double in London. It would be fairly easy to afford all this if you never take a holiday, eat out, spend on clothes and so forth and eventually you'll be able to afford a deposit for house with mortgage payments running at seventy percent of net pay. Oh well.

With the credit crunch in full swing the job market dried up and I remember one plucky young Graduate being interviewed by the BBC for the evening news. Unfortunately for him, he was an ex-Lehman Brothers employee, carrying a cardboard box with his belongings and only started his contract the day before. It said it all. Not quite sure what happened to him, hopefully he didn't end up back with Mum and Dad and signing on. The banks shed jobs as did all the major firms, the Civil Service froze recruitment and at some point in 2008 at least half of all new entrants into Architecture were redundant. It wasn't a great time for me to be studying a Graduate conversion course in Building Surveying after realising that my Upper Second in History made me as useful as an umbrella salesman in a desert.

It all went quite well until I was made redundant and got to the back of the queue with all the other construction Graduates. Thankfully, I'm now in a job that I enjoy although it took several years and I look behind me at all the million or so Not in Education, Employment or Training eighteen to twenty four year olds and feel desperately sorry for them as the opportunities in our overcrowded and stagnated economy are few and far between. Been there, done that and got the T-shirt and yet my experience was no where near as bleak. However, a glance across the English channel is even more disturbing.

Youth unemployment in Spain is running at fifty six percent and rising and the picture across the continent is also bleak with Italy's youth unemployment at forty two percent and France in a more fortunate position of twenty six percent which is still inexcusably high but no where near as outrageous as their Spanish and Italian neighbours and there is no real end in sight with continued 'deficit reductions' and 'efficiency savings' and weariness by major investors. The good news is that the British economy is beginning to pick up but I've yet to experience the evidence.

What is the actual answer to this? The masses becoming class concious as Karl Marx would want it, state control of the economy a la Soviet style or as Adam Smith would put it; the removal of the "dead hand" of the state? The attempt to create Marxism last century killed well over a hundred million people, the Soviet economies of Eastern Europe were a mess and took a long time to recover. The live and let live of the free marketeers appeared to be the only sensible solution until the bankers and our own insatiable demand for debt threw us of the economic cliff face and into a stagnant sea. Yes, there are town square demonstrations in Madrid by disgruntled youth but nothing as forthcoming as an all out revolution. Wherever crowd power leads therein will lie the answer albeit for a fleeting moment. As Desmond Tutu once put it, 'we learn from History that we do not learn from History'. It will be interesting to see where Europe is at in Twenty Years time.

The choice of no regrets

I've often recalled what it is like to work a nine to five job where one is incarcerated in an office all day long, manacled to a keyboard and a near constant focus on the computer screen. Whist I was pedalling my way into work at nine in the morning I was casting my eye around the  morning commute unfolding around me. I caught a glimpse of a man pushing through the door into the reception of a fairly standard office building. It occurred to me that he would most likely be in there, sitting at his desk for the next eight hours and his mind delving into the complexities of e-mails, spreadsheets, reports, ad infinitum. It suddenly struck me that spending eight or nine hours in the same building, on the same chair, with the same people and the same computer for eight hours a day for five days a week must be incredibly frustrating.

I once had a normal nine to five role; turn up, sit down, switch on computer and a life wasting wait for five pm to come round and yet there was life going on outside; fresh air, clouds racing across the sky, trees swaying in the wind, busy roads and busy motorways and yet all this is lacking in the conventional office. There is the gentle hum of the desktop fans, the flickering glare of a monitor, stale air, the faint hint of brewed coffee, photocopier fumes, phones ringing, gossip, false pleasantries and so forth. It was like a straight jacket as all that I wanted was beyond the double glazed façade of the office building and thus beyond reach for eight precious hours of life. 

Thankfully, I have now found my freedom through pure chance and am where I want to be and how I want to be and it has taken a very long time. On my way into work I breathe the fresh air, watch the clouds chasing across the sky and watch how the wind moves through the trees and so the life that I once yearned for is now with me. I cycle into work and vary my commute through the rural and pleasant surrounds of the local university, I look at the clouds chasing across the sky and refresh myself with the sensation of the wind in my face and it is the perfect way to start the day. I may take a detour or two as whether I am ten minutes early or twenty minutes late has absolutely no bearing on what I do or how I do it. Yes, I am office based but for only so much of my time. I have appointments to keep and places to be and all of them require the use of my bike and thus the refreshment of the wind, the excitement of not quite knowing what to expect on my journey and being on my own in my own little world whilst the world on four wheels speeds past me.

By four in the afternoon, I am usually finished and I pedal my way back home through the fresh air, the trees swaying in the wind and the bird song of the late afternoon. It's a good life and a life that I did not choose but chose me instead. I don't earn a great wage and yet I could if I had chosen the route of a lawyer, an accountant, a software engineer and the many other hundreds of jobs that involve the gentle hum of the desktop fans, the flickering glare of a monitor, stale air and the faint hint of brewed coffee. If I had chosen this route, I may even have had my own house by now, a pension, a nice car and decent holidays. I do not have any of these, but one thing I do possess is my freedom and that doesn't come cheap and nor does the rest.

Quid Pro Quo

In a recent article in The Times, Daniel Finkelstein has suggested that the basis of human co-operation rests on reciprocation, you do something for me and I'll do something for you. Quid Pro Quo in effect. Such a position may lean more towards a classical liberal and conservative understanding of human nature that tends to see human beings as creatures concerned more with self interest than the pursuit of altruism. His view of human nature underpins his interpretation as to what may be agitating a group of people to the extent that they are prepared to camp outside St Paul's in late autumn to protest about greed.

His suggestion is that the protests are not really driven by a popular anger at bankers getting rich at the behest of others. What is at the root of this tented expression of confused agitation is a perception that the bankers have taken out what they haven't put in. It is this sense of unfairness that runs as a common thread through the occupy wall street movement and many of their fellow fly sheet comrades in London, Paris, Seoul and Los Angeles. It has been assumed for sometime that the economic crisis of 2008 -2010 and the current global financial problems can be laid at the feet of the bankers and many commentators and journalists are holding them to account. However, is this wholly fair?

The common idiom of 'it takes two to tango' would suggest otherwise. It was a lack of liquidity that drove the financial system into the credit crunch and the brink of armageddon in 2008. The liquidity that was pumped into the markets following 9/11 soon found it's home in many diverse financial instruments ranging from the so called ninja mortgages (no income no asset, no problemo), the 120% mortgages of northern wreck, highly leveraged public companies and disastorous mergers and acquisitions such as RBS take over of ABN AMRO just before the bubble burst. These loans were sliced, spliced and sold across the global credit markets as securitised investments with the blessing of the credit rating agencies. As with any loan, there are two counterparties and both are responsible for honouring the covenants.

British household debt, including mortgages and unsecured loans, is well over a trillion and it is not the fault of the bankers that ordinary Britons are up to their eyeballs in debt. The banks supplied the loans, the debtors purchased them, America sneezed and the world caught the economic lurgy. As a result, loan covenants were dishonoured, losses were incurred across the financial spectrum and liquidity dried up. In the first half of this year, 696 homes were repossessed each year and Lloyds TSB has £38 billion worth of exposure to homeowners in negative equity. It is a similar story in America, hundreds of thousands of homes were created in the boom years on the back of loans that people were not able to pay off, hence there have been over 1 million seizures of domestic property in 2010 and a crisis in liquidity that has not been known since the days of President Herbert Hoover. The losses that the banks sustained from the sub-prime crisis stemmed from a failure of responsibility amongst those people who took on loans that they knew they could not honour and a failure of a banking system that should have honoured competent diligence and had far tougher regulation hoisted upon it.

Yet as the boom times rolled, no one questioned the mantra of so-called light tough regulation, easy money and an end to boom and bust. As long as the party continued and the world got punch drunk on easy credit and high yielding investments then who cared? The years of easy credit, tax cuts by the Bush administration and it's foreign wars and stupendous state spending by European governments reflected one thing and one thing only; your quid for my nothing. It is not just the bankers who were responsible for the global financial turmoil of 2008 - 2010, we all were.

Obama and Karimov, an unlikely alliance?

In recent months the Obama administration has agreed an aid package worth $120 million with the Government of Uzbekistan on top of a fee of $60 million for use of an air base in the south of the country. In the years since the end of the Soviet Union, President Islam Karimov has ruled Uzbekistan with corruption and fear that have resulted in significant human rights abuses.

Martha Brill Olcott commented in the Washington Post in 2005 that, "Poverty, corruption, repressive security agencies, price controls and steep taxes have created a disgruntlement that has nothing to do with religion". On 14th May 2005, thousands of protestors gathered in the main square of Andijan in the Ferghana valley to protest against rising prices and a government decision to turn the main mosque into an art gallery. The response by the Uzbek security forces, who had been recieving training from the US military was clinically brutal, 850 people were shot dead. One shopkeeper who was present that day described women and children falling like grass when cut with a scythe. Those who tried to flee across the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border were shot by security forces. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan accused the President of having ordered the deaths of two political oppopents by boiling them alive.

In Afghanistan the US mission is to destroy the Taliban, should they blow themselves up on the streets of the US, introduce democracy, human rights, gender equality and financial stability. Yet only a couple of thousand miles away the Obama administration is financially supporting a vile and corrupt dictatorship that his little or no respect for the values that the US is attempting to intorduce to the people of Afghanistan. What then is the reason d' etre behind this contradiction in US foreign policy in Central Asia?

It would appear that even though the Cold War is over the old adage of, 'He may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch' is bankrupting the morals to US foreign policy in this arena. One only has to remember American support for the likes of Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam in the early sixties, a rather brief flirtation with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during their war againt Vietnam and the rise of General Pinochet of Chile. Indeed Karimov is a son of a bitch, but given the convenience of an airfield in close proximity to the Afghan theatre of war he is very much Obama's son of a bitch. Yet again, the US is more than happy to overlook the discretions, however serious, of an ally that is proving convenient to the current policy mission of the state department.

The intolerance of intolerance

Great Britain and indeed much of Western Europe has found itself in a paradoxical paradigm that manifests itself in an intolerance of intolerance. As Christopher Caldwell presciently argued in the April edition of the magazine Prospect, 'The values that were supposed to liberate Europeans had left them paralysed'. Indeed, the politicians and special interest groups of Europe, in their pursuit of secularism are walking all over the graves of John Locke and Hegel.

Following centuries of European bloodshed from the Napoleonic wars through to the second world war and the colonial counter insurgency campaigns of the post-war period, Europe has sought a departure from the ideological germs of its past. The concepts behind this departure were designed to be antithetical to the nationalism, militarism, chauvanism, racism and racialism that tore Europe apart in the late nineteen thirties and throughout the Second World War. As such, European political institutions sought to construct post-modern ideals of indivdualism, relatavism, democracy and human rights. Arguably, such concepts were there to act as a buffer against any emergent extremist ideologies that could once again throw the continent back into its bad old ways.

However, such ideologies did arise but their potency were tempered by the healthy macro-economic framework of the post-war years and a desire amongst the majority of Europeans and their political classes to move on and forget. So where then would this antidote for the elimination of extremism find its medicinal role in Europe? Following the demise of the European empires prior to and after the second world war, the western European states, notably Great Britain, France and Denmark experienced a reverse migration. Many nationalities of the former colonial states sought economic relief and sanctuary from the turmoils decolonisation by emigrating to Great Britain, France and Denmark. It was in these waves of migrations from the former imperial domains that the antidote to racism and fascism finally found its purpose, the intolerance of discriminatory attitudes towards the new immigrant citizens of Europe.

In 1949 the far left Movement against Racism and Friendship (MRAP) among the peoples was founded in France as a reaction against the anti-semetism of the Vichy regime in France and Nazi Germany yet over the decades its remit has slowly changed. With Nazi war criminals now in their frail years and scattered to the four corners of the earth, the fight against European anti-semitism was beginning to loose its allure to the left. By 2002, it was clear that the anti-racism movement in France had found its new cause; racism. Oriana Fallaci, a prominent and respected Italian journalist wrote The Rage and The Pride as a polemical examination of her perception of a conflict between Islam and western liberal democracy. Oriana Fallaci found herself on the wrong end of an MRAP lawsuit filed on the basis that her book constituted incitement to racial hatred. In the same year, a Swiss judge issued an arrest warrant for her trial in Switzerland for her alleged violation of article 261 of the Swiss Criminal code. Both cases demonstrate that a post-enlightenment critique of religion, specifically Islam in these instances, is regressing in the face of the intolerance of any alleged intolerance.

In Great Britain, Islam is on the rise whilst Christianity is experiencing the inverse due to the rise of secularism and the degree to which it is promoted at the behest of Christianity. During the Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip in early 2009, young Arab men were allowed to chant 'death to Israel' outside the Israeli embassy in London. In February 2009, on the streets of Luton, muslims belonging to a banned terrorist group were allowed to shout abuse at soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. Seemingly, the religion of the 'minority' must be upheld free from persecution, even if that may be at the behest of the freedom of speech, morality and the sensitivities of the majority. Indeed, this is quite apparent when examining the inept handling by Merseyside Police of a conversation between a muslim woman and the two owners of the hotel in which she was staying. One of the hoteliers, during a conversation about their respective faiths suggested to the muslim woman that Mohammed was a warlord. However, the muslim woman has appeared to have taken umbridge against such an opinion and has thus lodged a complaint with Merseyside police force. The Christian Institute who are providing support to the Christian hoteliers commented that, "If we are really saying that someone can't express their opinions without having their collar felt by the police I think we are in a very worrying situation for freedom of speech".

One factor that is certainly not helping in the struggle of Chrisitanity to hold in Great Britain is the rise of secularism. Secularism is not an ideology that is advanced by a specific legal system in Great Britain, rather its advance is pursued by anyone and anybody and is imbued with a serious dislike of anything that may run against the grain of intolerance towards 'equality'. There are now a multitude of laws in the UK, both codified and uncodified, that cover gender and racial equality and any attempt to wander to closely to these laws often results in very stern treatment. In the case of the two Christian hoteliers referred to above, Section 5 of the Public Order Act (causing, harrassment, alarm or distress) has been invoked by a police authority in dealing with an innocuous private conversation between two individuals. Several years ago in the UK, two evangelical christians were interviewed by police for nearly an hour and a half after the police were informed that the literature being distributed by the two christians demonstrated a potentially homophobic attitude. The Bible, much like the Koran, can be construed as homophobic when homosexuality is discussed. In Sweden, a Lutheran preacher was jailed for a month after declaring that homosexuality was not morally equivalent to heterosexuality. Subsequently, the rise and protection of the secular notions of morality are pursued with little regard for the freedom of speech and at the behest of the ancien religion of Europe.

In its bid to define a purpose for its post-war ideals of human rights, individualism and equality, Europe is slowly and willingly corroding freedom of speech and gagging itself for fear of upsetting those minority groups it so desperately tries to protect with its misplaced post-war revolution. What can be seen in these cases is the gradual establishment of a zeitgeist through the politico-judicial systems of the European liberal democracies that aims to regulate the boundaries of criticism that can be levelled against the so called 'minority religions' of Europe's new societies. John Locke who constructed the intellectual foundations upon which the Western world supposedly sits upon said this of the law, " The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom". It would appear then that the post war revolution of rallying against militarism, chauvanism and fascism has zealously disobeyed those sage old words of John Locke and long may we all regret it.

'Voters are just jealous'

In an interview with the World at One on 21st May Anthony Steen the MP for Totnes was unexpectedly candid about his conscience that failed to inhibit him from claiming £87,279 over the course of four years for his property in Devon. During the interview the MP described his behaviour as impeccable and believed that the interest in his expenses claim was jealousy. He even went so as as to say that the situation reminded him of an episode of Coronation Street, furthermore he asked what right did the public have to interfere in his private life. His answer to this was "none".

His home in Devon could hardly be described as modest or representative of the living arrangements of his constituents. It has a value of £1.5m and encompasses five hundred trees within the grounds, a separate cottage, gravelled driveway and a swimming pool. It is not the house of a man who is of modest means and is described by the MP as a 'very, very large house'. His claims for the property included tree surgery, maintenance of the cottage, an overhaul of the sewage system and an annual foresters inspection of the five hundred trees on his land.

On a de jure basis it can be construed that Anthony Steen did behave impeccably, after all his claims were processed by the fees office under the second homes allowance with only a couple of officials raising their eyebrows at some of his claims. For the financial year of 2004/05 one official did write to the MP to inform him that his claims for land management were considered excessive within the spirit of 'wholly, necessarily and exclusively on parliamentary duties'. However, his claims continued to be processed for another four years. If the argument is to be based purely on his uninhibited claims £87,000 for the upkeep of his 'very, very large house' and grounds then yes he did behave impeccably as he kept within the rules of the second homes allowance.

It is on his de facto behaviour where he is viewed in a less than favourable light. How can an overhaul to the sewage system and the continued maintenance of the grounds to what is his family home be aligned with the proviso of claiming for costs that are incurred 'wholly, necessarily and exclusively on parliamentary duties'? The truth of the matter is that tree surveys and a £1,318 wrought iron fireplace are in no way related to, or can possibly assist, in the discharging of an individuals duties as a Member of Parliament. Morally, Anthony Steen has acted in bad faith by charging the taxpayer just under the full annual value permissible under the second homes allowance for the upkeep of what in reality his family home.

Describing the anger against him as jealousy completely misunderstands the point of the matter. He is a man of wealth who has immorally used taxpayers money for the upkeep of his family home. Mr Steen may have a right to privacy, but in using public funds so extravagently on his large house in the country he nullified any right to privacy. The taxpayer has every right to know how their money is spent, particularly when such money is used for personal and not public interest.