From a balanced reading of the Ten Commandments, we can only assume that God would prefer you to have gay sex than to covet your neighbor’s oxen. If you’d had a terrible day at work and had to do some sinning, just to unwind, the Commandments are clear about which sin is considered more unholy.
“God, I’ve had a terrible day at work; I’ve got to let off some steam. Either I’m going to have sex with Terry or I’m going to covet my neighbor’s oxen.”
“What?! No, you mustn’t do that; you better go hang out with Terry.”
“Thank you, Lord. I’m going to slide my erect penis right up Terry’s anus.”
“Fair enough, my son; I don’t really have a policy on that. I will ask, though, that you don’t look over next door’s fence at them grazing oxen, then imagine in your mind, ‘What would it be like if those oxen were my oxen?’ Don’t do that, will you?”
“I won’t. I’m going to empty myself into Terry, then put my mouth over his rect—”
“Okay! Do what you’ve gotta do! Just remember: Those are not your oxen!”
Anyone who claims to be operating on a model designed to fulfill the will of Jesus, or Allah, or Krishna, or anyone, who isn’t first and foremost dedicated to the union of all humankind and service of the needy is on a massive blag. Whether that’s hillbilly situationists like the WBC, self-serving neo-liberalists, or Taliban gangsters.
Any American politician who says they’re Christian must have as their uppermost priority the removal of the moneylenders from the temple, the undue, corrupt, and disgusting influence of the financial industry on public life. Any British politician, like Prime Minister David Cameron, who claims to be a Christian—which means “to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ”—has to, like Jesus, heal the sick, not, like a cunt, sell off the NHS.
“Which bit of Christianity do you believe in?”
“Ooh, I’d have to say the bit where you turn up at a church in a suit at Christmas or Easter and stand around looking a bit solemn.”
Yes, that’s clearly what he was driving at.
The only meaningful interpretation of any religious teaching is to honor the divine within ourselves and love the divine in one another.
To disavow the individualistic, materialistic evangelism of our age and serve that which transcends these lowly impulses.
Any version of any theology that manifests as dazzling costumes and palaces for the bloke at the front is bollocks.
Most religion is wrapped round the bellicose enforcement of a metaphor, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss the mystery. Science has donned the haughty robes of the pedagogues it displaced, but we can be grateful for the new lexicon and the contemporary understanding of ancient truths.
When I was an atheist it was because I rejected authority, and why not reject the supreme authority of God, particularly that boring fucker on Songs of Praise. I could reject him with the unsentimental dispatch of a clipped toenail. When I got clean from drugs and alcohol, I saw that the way I’d always seen the world was limited. It will always be limited. By yielding authority to a benign power, I found a key to transcend previous limitations. Modest limitations, like being unable to survive without the use of drugs and alcohol. Until the time when I got clean, I’d had little experience of loving, powerful authority. Authority had only been corrupt or inefficient in my experience.
My nan who I never much loved (I had a 50 percent success rate with nans—loved one, was cool about the other) and I were once ambulating down an Essex street. I believe it was Brentwood, now famed as the setting for the opera to idiocy that is The Only Way Is Essex.
My indifference to this nan need not have been her fault; she may simply have been an outer emblem of my inner discomfort. How did it feel in there to you when you were a child, in the aquarium of your head? I was lonely in mine as the world swam by in immaculately choreographed schools, like an inaccessible gang of Nemos. I was only really at ease with my mum and animals, and I treated them pretty badly.
If you feel how I felt, I have been taught a few techniques that might help you. Here’s one for a kick-off: You have to forgive everyone for everything. You can’t cling on to any blame that you may be using to make sense of the story of your life. Even me with my story of one nan that I love and another that I don’t—that story is being used to maintain a certain perspective of mine, a perspective that justifies the way I am, and by justifying the way I am I ensure that I stay the same. I’m no longer interested in staying the same; I’m interested in Revolution, that means I have to go back and change the story of my childhood.
You might think of yourself as some kind of umpire of veracity and righteousness: “You can’t change truth; you can’t forgive people who’ve done wrong.” What helped me to overcome those outmoded concepts was the understanding that there is no such thing as right or wrong, merely an interrelated system of beliefs. I was taught that my reality, including the whole concept of “a self,” is a construct and that I can alter it if it isn’t conducive to well-being.
This perhaps-undeservedly unloved nan and I were walking along, likely only flung together as my mum was away in hospital, and she was explaining to me her religious beliefs. I now know that these beliefs were typical Protestant doctrine and she was a relatively typical woman of her time and background. I recently researched my family tree, and quite quickly labels of class are smudged into nonsense. For a couple of generations back, it’s all very proletariat in every direction—Bethnal Green bottle-makers and jobs that belong in Dickens. But with the generational doubling that occurs, before too long it’s a muddle of all manner of colliding types: scullery maids and sculptors, officers and gentlemen; there’s no clear upstairs–downstairs, as our ancestors were all resolutely fucking each other on the landing. The filthy dead perverts.
Then, of course, through the umbilical link, we all tumble backwards down the spiraling DNA staircase to one common ancestor in Africa and before that to some bunch of curious monkeys. Down and down we go unto the sea, unto the dust, the single cellular dust. What impulse drove one cell to become two? What yearning pulled the fish on to the land? What caused apes to walk upright? Some invisible magnetic pull. Is there a difference between attraction and intention? Where is evolution taking us?
The early Christians favored the fish as the symbol of their burgeoning cult, the cross perhaps still regarded as being too recent to be apt. The fish symbol that they deployed was appropriated in fact from a pre-existing pagan order that believed an oceanic goddess had given birth to humanity. Isn’t that just a different way of saying we came from the sea?
Water too, in emblems both inner and outer, in the world of dreams, in the world of myth, symbolizes the unconscious. “Dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams,” said ol’ Joe Campbell (I’m getting overly familiar now as I ransack his legacy).
The unconscious, the aspect of ourselves we by definition do not know, is difficult to describe. Carl Jung believed that we had a collective unconscious, that we were all sharing it like a bunch of unwitting communists.
Jung, the mystical Sundance Kid to Sigmund Freud’s staunch Butch Cassidy, observed that common motifs cropped up in people’s dreams and that there was a corollary to symbols and even structure that could be found in various folk tales and myths. So Jung offered up the idea that consciousness could exist outside the mind and that we all have access to it.
This is implicit too in Campbell’s work. In his global studies of the stories humans tell each other to make sense of the world, he found astonishing consistencies in the formula. Folk in Africa, Iceland, Nairobi, and Wisconsin are all telling each other similar stories. How the fuck is that happening if we’re a bunch of dislocated individuals living in a bunch of dislocated tribes?
A way of understanding it might be that the unconscious mind is up to all sorts of stuff all day long that I’m not taking responsibility for: blinking, peristalsis, digestion, fighting bacteria, fashioning perfect little stools that could be
sold at a village fete with a flag stuck in them saying, “Russell’s unconscious mind made this.”
Everybody’s anatomical unconscious is doing more or less the same thing, unless they are “deficient” or “mutated.” Someone said, “Thinking that you are in charge of your totality of being, with all its complex facilities, is like a stowaway on an ocean steamliner thinking he’s the captain of the ship.”
Conventional, mechanical, materialistic science will tell you that’s because there are proteins stored in the genes telling them to do that. This isn’t strictly true, though. If you took an arm and a leg and ground them into a powder (and I’m not suggesting you do; it’d likely land you in the clink) you would discover that there is no particular genetic data that determines that a leg must be a leg and an arm, an arm. There is some untraceable component that does that defining work. Some people think that there is a magnetic memory outside of the material that guides the direction of the manifestation.
Once you accept the concept of data being held beyond the physical, new worlds open up. In a way, if my unconscious “mind” and yours are doing the same job, more or less, of generating cells and movements and procedures, the imposition of anatomic individualization is redundant.
We’re all doing the same thing, dreaming the same dream, in the words of Belinda Carlisle, who also said, “Heaven is a place on earth,” by which she might’ve meant that the concept of a divine realm is not in the hereafter but present now as a realm of being, achieved when we look beyond our material parameters and individualistic desires. I’m going to listen to that track again—in fact, the whole album warrants further scrutiny in the light of these revelations.
Again, I’m not advocating the abandonment of science like a modern-day Ned Ludd (a concept he would’ve especially hated), smashing up the microscopes and telescopes and particle accelerators, merely that we accept that we have allowed it to stray beyond its rightful dominion. When you get Richard Dawkins yapping menopausally at some poor hamstrung old archbishop, while we dismantle our environment due to the materialistic, pessimistic principles that the atheistic tyranny of the day is tacitly sponsoring, it is time to look for a new story.
If all there is is only that which we can prove, then we live as disconnected, condemned animals. We need faith now more than ever, because our ideologies are obscuring the fact that we have more important things in common than in conflict.
My nan walks purposefully with me at her side. We are definitely not flânuers, she and I, who wandered with no specific intent, mostly through Parisian streets of a century ago, knowing that abundant wonder will be uncovered if you trust the day to be glorious. Of course they were bowling about in Paris, likely off their nuts on absinthe, not shuffling up Brentwood High Street in Clarks sandals with a fist full of dolly mixtures and a nan they don’t much like because the narrative of themselves they’ve constructed requires adversity.
“I believe in God,” says my nan, in a way that makes the idea of an omnipotent, unifying frequency of energy manifesting matter from pure consciousness sound like a chore. An unnecessary chore at that, like cleaning under the fridge.
I tell her, plucky little seven-year-old that I was, that I don’t. This pisses her off. Her faith in God is not robust enough to withstand the casual blasphemy of an agnostic tot. “Who do you think made the world, then?” I remember her demanding as fiercely as Jeremy Paxman would later insist I provide an instant global infrastructure for a post-revolutionary utopia.
“Builders,” I said, thinking on my feet. This flummoxed her and put her in a bad mood for the rest of the walk. If she’d hit back with “What about construction at a planetary or galactic level?” she’d’ve had me on the ropes. At that age I wouldn’t’ve been able to riposte with “an advanced species of extraterrestrials who we have been mistakenly ascribing divine attributes to due to our own technological limitations” or “a spontaneous cosmic combustion that contained at its genesis the code for all subsequent astronomical, chemical, and biological evolution.” I probably would’ve just cried.
Anyway, I’m supposed to be explaining the power of forgiveness, not gloating about a conflict in the early eighties in which I fared well against an old lady.
Since getting clean from drugs and alcohol I have been taught that I played a part in the manufacture of all the negative beliefs and experiences from my past and I certainly play a part in their maintenance. I now look at my nan in another way.
As a human being just like me, trying to cope with her own flaws and challenges. Fearful of what would become of her sick daughter, confused by the grandchild born of a match that she was averse to. Alone and approaching the end of her life, with regret and lacking a functioning system of guidance and comfort. Trying her best. Taking on the responsibility of an unusual little boy with glib, atheistic tendencies, she still behaved dutifully. Perhaps this very conversation sparked in me the spirit of metaphysical inquiry that has led to the faith in God I now have.
7
A Few Rotten Apples
WHILST I WRITE THIS, BRITAIN, THE CONCEPT OF A COUNTRY I live in, as the result of a European election has advanced this odd political outfit called Ukip.
It’s six months since I did the interview with Jeremy Paxman that inspired this book, and British media today is awash with halfhearted condemnations of my observation that voting is pointless and my admission that I have never voted.
My assertion that other people oughtn’t vote either was born of the same instinctive rejection of the mantle of appointed social prefect that prevents me from telling teenagers to “Just Say No” to drugs. I cannot confine my patronage to the circuitry of their minuscule wisdom.
“People died so you’d have the right to vote.” No, they did not; they died for freedom. In the case where freedom was explicitly attached to the symbol of democratic rights, like female suffrage, I don’t imagine they’d’ve been so willing if they’d known how tokenistic voting was to become.
Note too these martyrs did not achieve their ends by participating in a hollow, predefined ritual, the infertile dry hump of gestural democracy; they did it by direct action.
Emily Davison, the hero of women’s suffrage, hurled herself in front of the king’s horses; she defied the tyranny that oppressed her and broke the boundaries that contained her. I imagine too that this woman would have had the rebellious perspicacity to understand that the system she was opposing would adjust to incorporate the female vote and deftly render it irrelevant. This woman, who left her job as a teacher to dedicate her life to activism, was imprisoned nine times. She used methods as severe and diverse as arson and hunger-striking to protest and at the time of her death would have been regarded as a terrorist.
Today her legacy has been so thoroughly douched that an anodyne brass plaque can be placed in the halls of Westminster, a trite, bland tribute to her heroism. Emily Davison would not be urging the disempowered people of today to vote; she’d be urging them to riot. Has the once-gleaming sword of democracy, this weapon of power for the masses, been so blunted that it is now seen merely as a quilted draft excluder upon which extremists might stumble? To stop Ukip getting more seats in Thurrock council or in Brussels, this is democracy’s endgame? It’s like using Excalibur to put a new plug on a toaster.
It hadn’t occurred to me, coming from where I’m from, that people considered parliamentary politics as anything other than a distraction. I only mentioned not voting in my New Statesman article that led to the Paxman furor because I was informed it was noteworthy.
For me, it’s standard. I don’t feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary. I might also note that I think it unlikely that people aren’t voting
because I told them not to; it is more likely that they’re not voting because they are subject to the same conditions that led me not to vote. The realization that it’s totally bloody pointless.
That the crime of occupying an Apple Store and redistributing its contents is nothing, nothing, compared to the larceny* that took place to get those goods on the shelves. That torching a Nike Town is no crime at all compared to the incessant immolation of the rights of the workers that made the goods within, the burning of the codes that means those that profit from the store do not give back to the society in which they flourish.
I don’t feel inclined to rally youth to put an “X” on a box on a little ballot ticket but on the doors of those who will be spared when the plague descends. For we are at a turning point; the exploitation has now reached a pitch where the disenfranchised and exploited can look to a culpable minority with vengeful eyes. This minority, though, cannot be defined by the color of their skin but by the color of their god. Green. These worshippers of Mammon have with their ascendance into privilege marked themselves out from among us. To tell the multitudinous dispossessed to take the rage of the terraces and the streets, mendaciously aimed by Wapping propaganda and Rothermere smears at society’s most vulnerable and poorest, and take aim at this most deserving target.
The system that exploits us cannot function without us—without our labor, without our compliance, without our consent. If we want a society in which people with insufficient resources are given what they are owed, where are we to look for recompense? To other people who also have nothing? The weak? The dispossessed? People who have arrived here more recently than we have? Or ought we be looking to organizations that have abundance? Excess. Wealth. There is no great mystery to unravel; the solution is quite simple. We must spontaneously cooperate; we must immediately overcome our superficial differences of accent and lexicon and come together to organize society effectively.
Revolution Page 7