The problem with fairness

Everyone likes fairness. It’s a British value: fair play for everyone. From the childhood “It’s not fair” and into national politics, there is an assumption that things should be fair.

But there is a problem- and the response to the recent budget (and any budget for that matter) shows it up. The problem is that there are multiple different axis for “fairness” and we choose the one that gives us the greatest advantage.

For example, the budget was largely reported in terms of who won or lost in this budget. So people who didn’t get tax cuts (e.g. pensioners) could complain that it was unfair that workers received a tax cut via National insurance. Fairness here is by comparing who wins and loses with a particular change or set of changes.

But while this is how the budget is generally reported, it is not generally the most useful measure of fairness. Because it ignores the question- was the overall distribution of tax and benefits before the change fair. If the previous situation was fair, then changes that make some people winners and others losers are unfair. But what if the previous situation was unfair, and the changes help create a more fair distribution?

But this also is more complicated that it seems. People who argue for more fairness in income, meaning more equality of income, ignore the fact that those with many assets(e.g. owning their own home outright) may have lower costs than those who don’t own assets (e.g. renting a home). If we made it our goal to aim for asset fairness, we would tax low income asset rich pensioners more highly than we do young high earners with large debts and no assets. In practice, we probably care about some combination of both assets and income when we think about fairness. 

There is also the question of whether fairness is about equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? Is it a fairer society when someone who chooses to work part time in a low stress job gets the same income as someone working a 60 hour week in stressful job? Or is that unfair?

So fairness has many different dimensions. Here are just a few:

-Distribution of wins and losses of a change

-Overall distribution of benefits and costs

-Income fairness vs Asset fairness

– Outcome fairness vs Opportunity fairness

We human beings tend to be pretty good at finding the axis that helps us benefit. Fairness becomes a tool for our personal gain pretty easily. That doesn’t mean it is useless- justice is important, and things that are truly unfair should be put right. But next time you feel something is unfair, or you hear someone on the news complaining that something is unfair, it is worth pausing and asking whether we have weighed this along enough fairness dimensions. Are we truly concerned for justice, and especially justice for the poor and powerless? Or are we really using fairness as a weapon to get our own way?

What is wrong with us as a country?

We don’t realise how rich we are!

I tend to be quite careful about expressing political views online or in public. As a church pastor, my job is to help people unite around Jesus. There are a few obvious issues (matters of life and death, honesty in public life, freedom of religion and speech) which are broadly held by Christians across a spectrum of political parties. But weighing up correct tax or health policy would be unhelpful in my role.

So my aim in these reflections is not to push a particular party political line but to try and step back a bit and ask what is wrong with our culture, what might we be blind to. So here is the first attempt at this “stepping back”. We are going wrong as a country because we don’t realise how rich we are!

That might seem an odd thing to say after a cost of living crisis, when some people have struggled with household finance, and our public sector is struggling to meet needs. But stepping back and looking at a historical and world perspective, we in the UK today are incredibly wealthy. The poorest family in the UK has education and healthcare, and some sort of roof over their heads, and one way or another enough food not to starve. What we consider the bare minimum in the UK is what the middle classes of much of the world strive to achieve! Typical families live in houses which are warmer and more luxurious than medieval nobility. We have food abundance and variety that would exceed the even Royalty of the 18th century, and would have been incredible even to middle class families 70 years ago. For most of history, the vast majority of the population was at risk of starving to death during a bad famine! And that is to say nothing of the ravages of disease, the lack of education for the poor, and the constant threat from bandits or invading armies.  

So why is it a problem that we don’t realise how rich we are?

1) Ungrateful. From a Christian viewpoint, all the good things in this world are meant to lead us to thankfulness for the ultimate source of good things, God himself. From a psychological viewpoint, thankfulness for good things helps us to appreciate what we have instead of being envious and grumbling about what we don’t have. But because we think of ourselves as poor (perhaps compared to peers or the older generation or people in the public eye), we do not express gratitude for the wealth we live with. We think that what we have is less than we are entitled to, and so are miserable. If we understood how rich we are, most people in the UK would be cheerfully thankful!

2) Judgmental. Because we do not realise how much wealthier we are than most people through history, we tend to judge people in the past harshly. Because we do not realise how much poorer they were, we do not realise how much worse their options were, and how sacrificial making the right choice was. 19th century people refusing sugar because it was made by slave labour didn’t have a lot of affordable treats in their lives. They sacrificed in order to do what was right. I fear that much of our supposed virtue as a society is only sustained by our wealth. If we were as poor as most people have been, I fear we should find our virtue evaporating. In the meantime, an appreciation of our relative wealth should make us less judgmental of those facing difficult choices we don’t have to make.

3) Careless. Because we don’t consider ourselves unusually wealthy but rather impoverished, we don’t consider our society something to be carefully preserved. We are careless about wealth production and preservation, because we do not realise that the normal state of humanity is far poorer than our current situation. The free-market position is often careless of the cultural and social capital and infrastructure that enables a wealthy society, while the large-state position is often careless of the incentives and freedoms that enable innovation and competition to generate wealth. Realising that we are privileged to live in an unusually wealthy society would make us more careful stewards of the social and economic conditions that sustain wealth creation.

What do you think? Is not realising how rich we are part of our cultural problem in the UK at the moment?

Should leaders be “vulnerable”?

Leaders in many organisations, including churches, carry a wide range of responsibilities. And these often start to feel like burdens or pressures. I think this is common across institutions and fields. There are pressures. Leadership creates a challenge in how to express that. And Christian leadership, with Jesus’ call to integrity and truthfulness, faces this acutely.

On the one hand, if leaders don’t share any of that weakness or pressure, the rising burdens can crush them. It can also give their team an unrealistic expectation of what handling responsibility and pressure looks like. The mask of calm competence can end up crushing everyone under unrealistic burdens.

On the other hand, if a leader is constantly expressing their weakness and pressure, that can inhibit team members from coming with problems that need addressing. “The boss is under too much pressure to add this today.” At its worst, this can be used manipulatively by bosses to push all the pressure down onto those under them- constant “humble weakness” actually means failing to serve the team well. But even where there is no manipulation, good leaders should be safe for team members to come to with problems and concerns, and over expressing vulnerability and burden stops that happening.

So what should leaders do? I think some level of openness with team is good. That means mentioning the good weeks as well as the bad. It doesn’t mean constantly talking about the burden or pressure you are under. But when there is a tough patch, it is probably helpful for the team to be aware of that, while not feeling they should avoid raising problems as they come up. Jesus himself tells his disciples he needs some time away, and wants some of his friends with him as he prays facing his death.  

But the need to be people our teams can come to with their pressures and problems probably means leaders need one or two other friends outside the situation who they can be honest with when the pressures are great. Sometimes it is helpful to have a mentor from the profession, who can guide a leader through the uncertainty of different options. But other times it may be simply having people we are not responsible for that we can tell “I’m facing a lot of pressure at work, and please pray.”

And for Christian leaders, the answer probably includes praying more than we do. God is the one ultimately able to handle all the pressure and burdens we bring to him. He already upholds the entire cosmos! We can be totally honest with him. We can trust him to keep loving us and we can expect his wisdom to help us. Christian leaders may face particular tensions because of the need for integrity (about weakness) as well as being safe for people to come to with their problems. But we also have a unique resource- God himself is for us and listening to us and helping us.

New opportunities and dangers for the church

Over the last few years, there have been some cultural shifts that have been encouraging for Christians. There have been a number of high profile intellectuals or public figures who have moved from atheism to some form of Christian faith, including Paul Kingsnorth and Ayyan Ali.

The individual shifts reflect something of a cultural shift. When I was growing up, there were three major cultural positions and they were all anti-Christianity. Scientific materialism, or the New Atheism, which thought faith was a backward and destructive delusion to be thrown off. Marxist materialism, which thought religion was “opium for the masses”, fooling people into accept injustice in this life with promise of an afterlife. And individual expressivism which argued for individual freedom and pleasure seeking and saw religion as oppressive.

But in recent times, the culture has shifted. Scientific materialism seems to have a certainty which is suspicious to post modern minds. Individual expressivism has seemingly led to harm to individuals and a loss of social bonds. Marxist critiques have morphed from a focus on economic class to other forms of privilege and group identities.

Some of the newer trends are positive about Christianity. This gives Churches a great opportunity- the new trends could be stepping stones to people becoming disciples of Jesus. But it also contains a new risk. We are so used to the culture being anti-Christianity that we are not used to dealing with people coming to church and being positive about church while not actually becoming disciples of Jesus.

Here are two trends I see, which create opportunities and challenges:

1) Christianity as foundation for civilization/cultural flourishing

Sometimes this is a recognition that religion provides a sort of communal unity that is necessary for civilisation. Other times, it is more explicitly the values and achievements of western civilization that are valued and Christianity is seen as a necessary foundation for the that civilisation.

The opportunity is that it is clear today that modern liberal and scientific atheism could only exist parasitic on values and institutions which it did not create and could not sustain. The optimistic trajectory of the 90s and early 2000s is long past and people can see things are broken in profound ways. This brokenness can no longer be plausibly blamed on the Christian past. Instead, Christianity is viewed as a potential solution. So people seriously consider Christianity or church going.

The danger is that a merely outward religion will lack the power to regenerate civilization or give eternal life to individuals. And that in our desire for these seekers to join us, we will fail to give the call for true discipleship- that if you would have Jesus you must love him more than father or mother or child… or civilisation. Augustine wrote “The City of God” in part because the Roman Empire had become Christian and then been shredded by barbarians. A true disciple of Jesus must follow Jesus not only when it helps build a civilisation, but even if civilisation falls.

2) Christianity as a mythic or concrete expression of a deeper wisdom

A number of “intellectual dark web” speakers like Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein (is Paul Vervaeke part of the dark webweb?) are arguing that there are deeper realities about how human beings function individually and as societies that religions handled and encoded. So the religions are not literally true. But successful religions have encoded a great deal of wisdom about how to live well as a human. And so it makes sense to attend the religious community local to you and take what is good, while always seeking the higher truth behind it. This approach to Christianity has parallels to the 2nd century gnostic movement, in which a secret teaching gave the literal stories of the Bible deeper meanings.

The opportunity is clearly that religion is now seen as a source of profound wisdom for life and understanding. But the danger is people saying words but meaning something quite different. In the end, the challenge is that Jesus is the only way (not one alternative alongside Buddha and Muhammad), and that he really is the crucified and risen King as a matter of history and not just myth.

Demons and spiritual forces

Some people are fascinated by the idea of spiritual forces at work, and others find the idea outlandish and weird. No doubt some people are too fascinated by the spiritual forces at work, or too quick to blame things on demons that are really human sinful choices. But people who grew up in Western culture are more likely to think that demons are pure fantasy.

Since the Bible clearly teaches that there are spiritual forces, both good and evil, at work in the world, if I want to uphold the Bible as a book giving truth about the world, I need to be able to explain demons to a Western atheist. Here’s one attempt at that.

Many of us will have experienced the way that a human community or institution starts to develop a distinct flavour. This school or football club has a different set of ways of doing things, and a different flavour, to this other school or football club. And this culture, shaped by people and events in the past, often persists through time as people join who don’t remember the events or people, and yet are shaped by and join this culture. Some people talk about the school spirit or club spirit to describe this unique culture which draws people in and shapes them as they join.

Sometimes this shaping power has negative effects, and it is these that are particularly unsettling. Human institutions and cultures end up shaping behaviours in way no one originally intended or wanted. But the institution or culture shapes people so that they feel they have no choice but to go along with the rules and expectations that no one individually wanted. Atheist Scott Alexander writes eloquently on this in Meditations On Moloch (slatestarcodexabridged.com)

So far, what has been described are either emergent properties of complex human interactions, or of human interaction with their environment. Though some theologians have argued that the “powers and principalities” of the Bible are simply these emergent properties, I am not persuaded. But for those who fear using language of demons or spiritual forces influencing the world is simply crazy talk, there is a helpful analogy . The emergent properties spoken of here do not remove personal responsibility for our own choices, nor do they necessarily mean that we discard other forms of analysis of the situation. But there is value in considering a situation at the level of these emergent properties. Speaking of a “spiritual influence” does not mean we have to switch off our brain to economic, social and other tools of analysis, but gives us another facet to consider. 

If the “spirit” of a community is a factor we can consider in understanding it and the individuals interacting with it, then we might understand the true spiritual forces interacting with this “spirit”. The “powers and principalities” are the true spiritual realm interacting with the emergent properties of human cultures and institutions.

I won’t spend much time arguing for them here. If there is a supreme spiritual being (God) then it is certainly not impossible for there to be lesser spiritual beings (angels, demons etc). Most cultures have believed in them. And if we observe collective phenomena that make no sense, we might wonder if spiritual forces are at work. For me, the most striking example of this is pervasive irrational antisemitism.

If there is a spiritual realm that intersects with the emergent properties of human institutions and cultures, there are some big implications.

1) We cannot fully explain human society and human history by merely human level analysis. We cannot come up with a Seldon Psychohistory* because there is a component to human society which we cannot study scientifically. There are spiritual forces which influence society.

2) There are spiritual forces corrupting humanity and promoting evil, which at points will lead to irrational and destructive hatred. No society is immune from this. We cannot fight this purely on the human level, and are often outmatched.

3) There are spiritual forces of good, which may turn around situations which seem hopeless. We are not on our own in the fight against evil. The spiritual forces of good may give fresh heart and will to overcome evil. Perhaps we might think of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as an example of this. Tolkien understood this dynamic, and so in Lord of the Rings Gandalf is an angel putting heart into men to fight evil.

4) Prayer is really important. It is not merely a ritual to calm ourselves down. It is not merely a way of talking to each other. When we pray “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one”, we are engaged in warfare to align ourselves with the spiritual good not the spiritual evil. When we pray “Your kingdom come”, we are praying for the spiritual good to spread and win in the world around us.

*See Asimov’s Foundation series

Why McGilchrist is wrong on the reformation

(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)

For McGilchrist, the reformation is the first step towards unbalanced left hemisphere dominance, a step towards the enlightenment. It’s easy to see why he should think this. The focus on the word of God above the visual arts in church looks like a loss of right hemisphere insights. Compare the simple austere white washed walls of puritan churches with the intricate beauty of the cathedrals of the late medieval period, and you can easily think something important has been lost. Another post may look at the helpful warning and corrective McGilchrist’s insights might give to evangelicals.

But fundamentally, McGilchrist is wrong. Not only because protestant churches included such musicians as Bach and artists as Rembrandt. But because his critique of the reformation is significantly influenced by his own understanding of God.

McGilchrist thinks of God as the totally other, and as being bound to the world as something like the soul of the world (panentheism). Whatever else the divine may be, it is different in kind from everyday objects of experience, even if it may be seen as manifesting in those objects. It is not clear, known and familiar in the same sense that, say, a table is. It is intrinsically “Other,” not limited by the conceptions or words we bring to bear on it. Indeed, in some traditions it is precisely that which cannot be grasped by our thinking faculty or expressed in language, and that which can be so grasped or expressed is by definition not the divine. Compare the “tao that can be named is not the eternal tao” of Lao Tzu, the “si comprehendis, non est Deus” [“if you have understood, it is not God (that you have understood)”] of St Augustine, and, in more general terms, the apophatic tradition or via negativa in Christian and other theologies.  

Since God is other, for McGilchrist true engagement with the divine is intrinsically a right hemisphere perception. God is by definition too other to be defined with human words (ie left hemisphere perception).

You’d expect the divine being to create something that was other than itself in order to have a relationship with it. And if God is, as is held in almost all spiritual traditions, love, the love needs to have an other. God has to create in order to have something to love, and he is like the soul of the world, needing the world to know it and himself. This is a form of panentheism.

McGilchrist is aware of the apophatic tradition in Christian theology, and some streams of the Christian mystical tradition, which would fit well with his own understanding of God. He also sees that such traditions come close to some eastern traditions, which similarly are congruent with his own views.

But McGilchrist’s view of God is not the mainstream of Christian thought. Christian theologians have generally treated God’s free creation of the world ex nihilo as a foundational truth. God is so sufficient in his own triune life that he has no need to create to have relationship, to know or love. Instead, out of the fullness of his life as three divine persons, he creates freely, not to gain anything but to share the life and love he himself enjoys.

And God is not merely the totally other, beyond our language. In the Bible, God is not hiding unknown beyond our language. Instead, God who created all things by his word, comes into our world to make himself known. God translates himself into our world as an object we can perceive, and God interprets himself for us in human words. Jesus is “the Word become flesh” (John 1:14). If you have seen Jesus, you have seen God (John 14:6-9). The words Jesus speaks are God’s words (John 14:10).

The problem with McGilchrist’s position is that God becomes just an especially big version of “the other” which the right hemisphere is better at engaging. But God is super-other, so other that he cannot be engaged by either hemisphere directly. Instead, God can only be known when he translates himself to be an other like other human beings, knowable by his actions and words which we can see and hear. And in order for that knowledge to be preserved rightly, we need words recording the event of God becoming human. We need a reliable record, which gives us facts we can rely on as we engage with God. If God the totally other has chosen to engage with us through action in this world which he ensures is recorded, then true humility and true engagement with God requires us to focus on that writing in our desire to know and relate to God.

McGilchrist’s critique of the reformation as a left hemisphere mistake relies on him viewing God as “other” beyond language, but apprehended primarily through non-verbal right hemisphere activity such as art, music and ritual. The reformation response is surely that since God the totally other has made himself known in Jesus and in the writings that God inspired to bear witness to Jesus, it is absolutely right the focus of church services should not be paintings or processions but the reading and proclamation of the words- which needs both hemispheres to truly engage with it.

Discipleship: weird cultishness or inevitable reality

One feature of Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, that strikes some outsiders as odd is the emphasis on discipleship. The idea that one would be shaped by a community in a set of beliefs and practices and ways of approaching life can seem deeply sinister. Isn’t this what cults do?

But we think this way because we are blind to how universal discipleship is. Being discipled is an inevitable reality. The only questions are “By What?” and “Have we chosen?”

Discipleship is learning how to think and live by watching examples, by explicit instruction, and by feedback on our own words and actions. And so we are all discipled. We are discipled by our parents. We are discipled by the news we watch or read, and the media we watch. We are discipled by educational institutions. We are discipled by our peers. We are discipled by our professions. Lawyers have similar ways of thinking not only because those type of people choose that profession, but because the process of being trained to handle legal matters shapes the person. And that is true of most types of jobs. There is then an additional shaping element from the specific company or organisation you work for, which will have its own shaping culture.

The question is not if we will be discipled but by whom. Jesus calls human beings to become his disciples. He calls people to look at his life, listen to his teaching, and trust in his death and resurrection as the central reality of the cosmos. He calls people to deliberate lifelong learning and training in his path by reading the Scriptures, prayer, worship, communal love and living, and active good works. To be a Christian is to opt to be shaped by Jesus, through his word and people.

And that is far better than being shaped by an educational institution, or the values of media producers, or even our parents. Jesus wants us to choose to follow him not be brain washed into it. And since he is the only man who was truly good and the only man who is truly God, he is the best person to be shaped by. Thinking and living following his teaching and example is true wisdom. So don’t be afraid of Christian discipleship. Instead, ask who or what is influencing you, and whether that is truly good for you, and if your current disciplers are the ones you really choose today.

Why left-hemisphere perception is helpful

McGilchrist’s book ‘The Master and his Emissary’ makes the case that the left hemisphere of the brain cortex has become dominant in ways that stop us attending to context, whole realities, metaphor etc, and in the process we have become mere users of the world regardless of environmental or social negative effects.

He would argue that what we need are both hemispheres working together, but the rhetorical effect over many hundred pages is that the left hemisphere is the bad guy, and the right hemisphere is the good guy. He acknowledges that between tool using and language production, the left hemisphere is vital, and our wealth today flows from left hemisphere strengths.

I want to suggest another way the left hemisphere is helpful. By working with simplified re-presentations, with models, rather than the complexity of the ever changing world, the left hemisphere has a greater certainty about its perceptions and about what actions will bring about what effects.

There are dangers to over-simplified models and lack of sensitivity to changing context. But over-sensitivity to uncertainty of understanding and the ever changing context leads to decision-paralysis. If we can’t know anything for certain, if we are always second guessing our decisions, then we end up doing less. I think I see this most clearly in leadership. Those who emerge as leaders are not always the most intelligent in the sense of most aware of uncertainties, complexities, and changing situations. Rather, they are people who can achieve sufficient psychological certainty (through left brain simplified models?) to clarify a best way forward and communicate that with clarity and persistence through the ups and downs. There is something about the simplifying effect of the left hemisphere, combined with the galvanising effect of greater certainty, that is vital for those who want to change things.

The problem of monofocus

(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)

McGilchrist suggests that the two hemispheres of our brain tend to perceive the world differently. The left hemisphere tends to have a narrow beam, a tight focus on a specific area. The right hemisphere tends to have a broad awareness of everything that is going on. McGilchrist applies this insight to cultural analysis, suggesting that modern society has a left hemisphere imbalance.

I think he’s right, and that we see that in the problem I call monofocus. Instead of thinking about the everything/everyone in a system, we focus on one particular thing/person in the system. How and why we select that thing/person is not always clear. But we then demand that we optimise the outcome for this particular thing/person, regardless of how it impacts others. Later on the focus may swing to another thing/person, and a new call goes out for optimising the outcome for this thing/person. And no one seems to notice that the problems this second thing/person has were in part caused by our attempting to optimise outcomes for the first thing/person. And no one seems to ask how our new optimisation attempt will impact thing person one or three.

For example, when my wife was teaching, an Ed Psych report came back saying a particular child needed to be able to blow a whistle loudly in class whenever they felt like it. I’m not qualified to say whether that was the most helpful intervention for the individual child. I can say that the outcome for the class of the child being able to blow a loud whistle whenever they felt like it would be extremely negative for peaceful environment and learning outcomes. The report had a monofocus on the individual child, and no awareness of the needs of the whole class.

Or take the covid response. Over the year before Covid-19 hit, there were high profile public campaigns about the problems of loneliness for mental health and about single use plastics for the environment. But when Covid-19 hit, these previous concerns were simply ignored. The narrow beam of focus had moved to a new problem, and so optimising for defeating Covid made the risks of loneliness (lockdown) and single use plastics (masks and tests) irrelevant. In general, I suggest our response to Covid showed a monofocus, rather than a broader weighing up of costs and benefits.

What is the alternative? Ideally, if both hemisphere’s are in balance, we would consider each individual in the group, and how the group as a whole is functioning. We’d consider each issue with awareness of all the other issues. We might not optimise the outcome for every individual thing/person, but we would hopefully have overall better outcomes when considering the range of people and issues, and a more stable approach rather than swinging our whole approach with each shift in focus. The narrow focus would still be needed to spot problems and suggest improvements, but within an awareness of trade-offs.

What do you think? Is monofocus a helpful way of thinking about our society? And how could we rebalance our thinking?