When is it time for politics?
Living in the greatest (immediate) global crisis in our lifetime is a bit overwhelming, an American friend commented on social media today. She asked how all her friends were coping.
I replied that I am coping well when left to my own devices. I mentioned that I have been identified as a "key" worker, and so go out to work despite being in the 'at risk' category with two chronic illnesses and a heart condition. I make no apologies to people who think people like me 'play politics' with serious issues we should all be united on (by which they mean unite behind the political leadership and be complicit in the politics behind these convergent crises – that’s the kind of ‘non-politics’ they espouse, the apoliticism of acquiescence in the status quo). I make no apologies either to those who think 'class' is 'obsolete’ or ‘outdated’ ‘us and them thinking.' I have had that accusation levelled at me time and again, and once more just a couple of days ago. The idea that there is a third way beyond issues of class and class struggle is as old as class itself, and its failures by now ought to have long ago rendered it obsolete. One person questions whether "the working class" exists. Well I do, and I'm no different from other working class people who have to work to pay bills etc, and now have to brave this damned virus despite personal health risks. Others are doing it. They have to. How nice it was to receive an official letter from my CEO confirming my status as an "essential" worker. I shall ask the company for a pay rise and a mask and gloves, being so "essential" (nothing doing).
I see the postal workers are organising for a strike over safety in the UK. I need to take note and take care.
The worst thing is coming across people who say this is no time for politics and that governments and leaders (by which they mean the UK and the US) are doing their best with a problem that no-one foresaw. The ignorance is so breath-taking as not to be ignorance at all. These people must have heard the criticisms over lack of preparation, mixed messages and such like, and they must know the history of cuts to the health service over the years. Although you do get the impression it never was, never is, and never will be time for politics for these people. They are not merely complacent and comfortable, they are complicit with the status quo by conscious political choice. This doesn't augur well for the future. If this isn't a political wake-up call, then I don't know what is. These are the self-same people who will tell us one day that ‘no-one’ saw climate change coming. By which they seek to cover their own particular culpability behind that of the general ‘all.’ This is crass stupidity, but I have no idea how to penetrate minds so deliberately dull. Such people seem congenitally incapable of enlightenment. You can give them all the information in the world, and the defence mechanisms of self-validating stupidity kick-in to dismiss criticisms as ‘politics.’ There has to be an awakening and a reckoning at the end of this, otherwise these crises continue and converge, becoming ever greater, until finally, and maybe sooner than we think, civilization is engulfed. To say that something has to be, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be. There had to be a reckoning and reordering after the financial crisis and economic collapse. There wasn’t. Instead there was a decade plus of austerity, hence weakened, divided societies and underfunded health systems vulnerable to this virus. How am I feeling? I am angry at the complacency and complicity of far too many people.
Other than that, I am good on my own, when left to my own devices. I am busy writing and editing. I am working well on my forthcoming book. I have 1742 pages and 570, 977 words on Dante to edit into a single readable, publishable book by the 700th anniversary of his death next year, 2021. And I have music in my ears all day – Elvis, Mahler, Francoise Hardy (at the moment, the delicious “La Question” album), Jacques Brel, Springsteen, Queen, lots of my old rock favourites).
I am adept in the art of little victories and little treats. I looked after my dad for more than ten years. He had a chronic lung complaint. He died at Christmas. The medics looked at his ailments and were amazed he had survived with his condition for so long. We did it by way of winning little victories and celebrating them every day, and rewarding ourselves with little treats, just savouring the little joys that came our way, things that may mean nothing to other people. We valued life, we enjoyed it. I still do this.
People are commenting on Boris Johnson, who has been taken into intensive care with coronavirus. Of course this is where politics can become tricky, but shouldn’t. Politics isn’t put on ice when it comes to life and death issues, and the age-old attempt to suppress politics at a time of crisis needs to be exposed for what it is – a political attempt to silence legitimate criticisms in order to insulate the status quo from attack. Too many people still fall for it. We have gone from a government practising ‘herd immunity’ with respect to coronavirus to the political exploitation of the herd instinct. I continue to wait for people to prove the cynics of elite theory wrong, but unfortunately too many revert to type.
Of course I empathise with Johnson. There is an attempt to intimidate critics and silence criticism of government and policy, though, that is highly political. That denotes an attempt to use natural sympathy to substitute for politics and cultivate and enforce unity and authority. Politics is disagreement and dissensus, it is to raise critical voices and advance alternate platforms. Heaven knows, given what we know with respect to government complacency and mishandling of this coronavirus, there is every need for criticism now. The UK government dragged its feet from the first, was slow to act, toyed with herd immunity, and then only at a late stage went into action.
The people asking us to sympathize with Boris Johnson are the ones playing politics on this. You don’t ask for sympathy. Sympathy, being natural, is offered voluntarily and spontaneously, not solicited by way of public pressure and command. What is being demanded here is political silence and unity in culpability.
Sympathy is hard to find when it comes to the sociopaths who have been governing us for so long. I have friends who have no sympathy whatsoever for a man who shows none for others. He plays at being a ‘man of the people,’ all that bluff, jolly bonhomie in pantomime performance for the masses. He’s a hero for all those worried by experts, those whose revolt against the elites is limited to those elites who actually know something and can do things, running into the arms of the most worthless elites for reassurance and protection.
One friend writes: ‘If Johnson is taken from us, it is the way he would have wanted, setting the example of sacrifice for herd immunity.’
That’s cruel, but raises a couple of pertinent issues with respect to human sacrifice and herds that those demanding sympathy miss. I read someone asking whether Johnson is one of the vocal crowd of conservatives who think that things should go on as normal so as not to damage ‘the economy,’ that slippery euphemism for capitalism. People and planet have been sacrificed to capital for a long time now, and will carry on being sacrificed. What is remarkable to note is the extent to which capitalist imperatives have become so internalised as to make these sacrifices voluntary. The Johnson government toyed with herd immunity, and ‘herd’ might well be the right word. Johnson told us to 'take it on the chin' when our loved ones die as a result of his 'herd immunity' policy. My view is that when illness strikes in this way, it invites people to see finally our common condition and seek a politics of the common good. That's not the reaction from many of those making a public show of sympathy, and demanding likewise from others, to the effect of political self-censorship. This is illegitmate. In fact, when one considers the culpability of the Johnson government in spreading this virus, with fatal consequences for many, it is obscene. And it is very much evidence of 'playing politics.'
Already, the pulling together of community below is finding its counterpart in an unthinking, uncritical herding behind leaders and government at the top, despite the complicity of these rulers in making this crisis worse. It seems that the only people who ever wake up are those who are already awake. Some people really are a herd and flock together in search of a safety in numbers, only to be offered up for sacrifice. How many crises have been wasted now? My dad used to say that people will rise only when things get really bad. I kept telling him that that was a dangerous myth. Things will continue to get bad, and people will just get worse, trying to put reality – politics and others – to sleep rather than waking up and reclaiming politics from the death-grip of idolators.
The people who insist on empathy for Boris Johnson as part of a politically motivated attempt to silence critics and suppress opposition need to read the extraordinary post from Harry Paterson, a man who has just lost his brother to COVID-19. I append it at the bottom.
The people who seek to silence politics with claims as inane as leaders and governments are ‘doing their best’ with an ‘unknown’ virus need to be pushed hard on this. Students at fourteen are not allowed to get away with claims as vague and as general as this, so it is legitimate to demand that grown adults, citizens of the realm, be more clear in the statements they make here, and provide details in support of the claims they make. Stated thus, this is not an argument, it is mere assertion, the sub-text of which is to delegitimize the views of those who persist in raising more detailed questions and issues, discomforting power in the process.
We can actually detail errors and culpability in dealing with this crisis. The virus is not exactly unknown, either. I am now reading an article which purports to show that President Trump reportedly knew that pandemic was likely in January. The crisis has not been visited on us overnight from out of the blue. Claims that suggest otherwise, to marginalise and suppress criticisms, are decidedly political, a politics that is all the more invidious and insidious in being put out under the banner of ‘no time for politics.’
The first cases of COVID-19 go back a long way, giving time enough for proper preparation. That preparation was not done. And the idea that governments didn’t know what was coming is manifestly false. The UK government had an initial policy of ‘herd immunity.’ It knew a crisis was coming, and made all the wrong decisions, errors which will prove fatal for numbers of people.
As for this not being the time for politics, that has to be one of the most dangerous notions in history. Politics is disagreement, dissensus, the raising of contrary voices and alternate platforms. Unless we presume our leaders and governments have finally become the unerring fonts of all-knowledge and wisdom, it will always be time for politics. The alternative is a common herding behind the one Ring to rule us all.
I would ask the people whose first instinct is to downplay politics every time there is a crisis when they have ever been involved in politics. These crises are the product of bad decisions and choices made in the past. Where were these people when these bad turns were made? I remember Johnson and his colleagues voting down a payrise for nurses, for instance. That’s so recent as not even count as recent history. Some people seem so forgetful here as to suggest they didn’t know in the first place. In other words, it is never time for politics for these people. They are politically inattentive in their normal state. They fit the ancient definition of idiots, from the Greek ‘idiotes,’ referring to those interested only in their private affairs. They are content and complacent, ignore politics, deny politics as an agency of the collective good, feed at the trough, and are complicit in remediable social and environmental ills. And when payment is demanded of society as a whole for this politics of idiocy, they herd behind the political architects of the disaster.
It was time for politics when society was put under an austerian straightjacket as a result of neoliberal deregulation. It was time for politics when health and welfare was cut to pay for the greed and stupidity of the rich. Instead, there was political acquiescence from this self-same crowd. The problem is that not enough people pay political attention. For that self-same reason, it won’t be the time for politics when this crisis is over. These are the people who will be relieved to go back to normal and make public shows of themselves partying, sightseeing, and going to the pub with drinks in hand. They are too blinkered to see the extent to which normality is the problem, continuing to generate increasingly severe – and converging – crises from deep within.
Johnson was recently bragging about shaking hands with coronavirus patients. I’m pretty bluff myself, but even I was getting worried about social contact weeks ago. At the local ACL is even stopped using the mugs at the tea break. I went without. Johnson is a character, all right. He’s the kind of spoonfed toff who thinks they can bluff their way through life, leaving others to face the consequences. He’s not alone in that arrogance, it characterises the contemporary political class in many nations. Sociopaths presiding over public larceny. But people who have never grown up politically like his bluff reassurance. It tells them that all those problems that those clever experts and elites worry us with are really groundless. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, be happy.
My sympathies go out to Boris Johnson. If socialism means anything, then it means love for your fellow man and woman. Of course, I am big on the religious root of this meaningful socialism. Adopting a class analysis and engaging in class politics does not mean you lack and cannot express sympathy for members of the other classes. It tends to be forgotten that the whole point of class struggle from below is to put an end to class relations which divide humanity within and against itself, allowing some to predate on and exploit others. The aim of socialist class politics is the classless society that those who are against class politics claim also to support. The problem is that if you practice a classless politics in a class society you remain entrenched in a class society which divides people against themselves. To attain a classless society requires a class politics that aims to put an end to class relations. Johnson is a Conservative and a wealthy capitalist. Those identities identify him as a political opponent. He is also a human being, a person, a husband, a son, a father, and a father to be. Those identities are things all humans share in common. There is no delight in sickness and misfortune, only shared concern and empathy.
My sympathies also go out to Labour MP Tony Lloyd who has been taken into Intensive care with Covid-19. Tony Lloyd against:
the Iraq War;
detaining terror suspects for 90 days without trial;
student tuition fees;
renewal of Trident.
You should read Harry Paterson's post below describing the loss he has just suffered and try to be happy:
"There will, of course, be those idiots, those hypocrites, those bootlickers, who will condemn me for 'politicising' both my own loss & Boris Johnson's condition. They can't grasp that politicians making political decisions and political choices impact people's lives. And sometimes ends them.”
These people are idiots, in the sense I defined above. They want nothing from politics other than it costs them little and leaves them alone to enjoy their private concerns. This is an anti-public raised in the image of the liberal market’s ‘free to choose.’
If you're going to practise ‘herd immunity’ lite with a virus whose sole job is to go direct to the lungs and turn them to mush, then it follows as night follows day that tens of thousands of people are going to die and not just a few thousand (Germany), hundreds (S.Korea) or tens (Japan). None of this was ‘unknown.’ How difficult do you think it is to copy a successful country?? Statements like all leaders and governments would struggle with a crisis like this say precisely nothing more than the obvious – a problem is a problem. Of course you struggle with a crisis! I sometimes wonder why I bothered to work so hard to pass exams at school. At sixteen you could be expected to be picked up for windy generalisation, trite observation, tautology, and circular reasoning. But there’s the problem – some people never grew up intellectually and politically. They remain as ignorant as swans, only not as pretty.
Some leaders and governments are struggling a whole lot more than others. The UK and the US had advanced warning and so had a lot of time to learn from the experience of other countries. The time was wasted. Worse, I can remember American voices barely concealing their glee at the trials of Italy. Instead of heeding the warning with respect to COVID-19, they were concerned most of all to warn of the inadequacies of socialized healthcare and the dangers of socialism. Politics, in other words; it’s always with us, and it has consequences, good and bad. Political inattentiveness is a menace to the social and public good. And citizens who are idiots bring democracy down from within. Such people are easily cowed and herded by rulers presiding over a death-dealing system.
Vagueness and generality in politics is not merely dangerous, it can be fatal.
Crisis and reality awakens people to politics in a way that normality doesn’t. That gives hope for a reckoning to come in the aftermath. Unfortunately, it seems that many people not only don't learn by crisis, they are congenitally incapable of it. All this parroting of the "nobody" saw this crisis coming line and we have to support our leaders because they are doing their best and similar vague drivel indicates the extent to which people who have been discomforted still don’t have what it takes to address politics and simply want reassurance. They want problems to go away, and they want critical voices highlighting those problems to be silenced or silence themselves. It’s a dry run for the authoritarian politics of climate collapse. It’s time for politics now. Where are you?
Always, I note, these comments come with the clause that critics at this time are 'playing politics' with a serious issue. I wonder when these people ever think it ever time for politics. I wonder if they had a political view on Johnson and his colleagues voting down a payrise for nurses not so long ago. It never seems to be time for politics for these people.
But that notion of ‘playing politics’ is revealing. Behind that charge is an awareness of politics as an illegitimate zero-sum game played between winners and losers. Such a politics is fraudulent and deceitful by its nature, its aim being to dish opponents and monopolize the board. But the charge of ‘playing politics’ implies that there is a real and genuine politics apart from the game. I’m not sure critics of playing politics quite see the distinction. Those who are all too quick to say that it isn’t time for politics seem to equate all politics with playing. They miss the critical distinction that enables us to reclaim politics in its true sense – creative human self-actualising in determining the terms on which human beings as social beings govern their common affairs.
I fear those of us calling for a "massive reckoning" in the aftermath of this may be wasting our breath. We are dealing with people who passively accepted the austerian straightjacket imposed on them after "free" market economics tipped the economy over the cliff. The victims pay the price and the authors are rewarded – and too many remain politically quiescent. Those practising zero-sum politics at the top calculate the odds on this. They think precious little of the active, critical capacities of the citizen body in the main. And people who give us this vague ‘support the leader’ fake solidarity bear the cynics out. In political theory classes we used to debate the relative merits and demerits of elite theory and democratic theory. People don't have the nous to make democracy work, say the elitists; instead, all you have in politics is a circulation of elites, with democracy reduced to what Schumpeter called competitive elitism - the plebs turn up to give their assent to their pre-selected elite rulers. It's a screen that generates sufficient contentment on the part of those who don't have a political - or critical - bone in their body. This pandemic and the reaction to it on the part of right-wing governments and broad sections of the demos sets a template for the reaction (present and future) to climate change. They go from claiming it doesn't exist or is a ruse to raise taxes and expand government and is unnecessarily alarmist. Then they'll claim "nobody" saw it coming and are doing their best to deal with an uncertain problem. At no point will any of them take responsibility, either for spreading disinformation and downplaying/denying a threat that will lead to catastrophe, collapse, and death, or for remain passive and not having time for politics when the warnings were being issued.
Is it that difficult to see a crisis affecting other countries coming and copy best practice? This lame apology that every leader and government would be confronted by a difficult problem is crass and infantile. I recall political theorist Benjamin Barber’s description of ‘infantilism’ in his book Consumed, warning of a generation raised on emotional appeals and immediate gratification being incapable of forming the active, informed citizen body a vital public life requires. Statements that crises confront leaders with problems are so trite and crass as to reveal another underlying motivation at work – the political motivation to suppress politics in favour of an unchallenged status quo. Such statements of the obvious say nothing to conceal an awful lot. Some leaders and governments are struggling a whole lot better than others, and some a whole lot worse. It is quite legitimate to point this out, and expose the reasons for differential experience.
I see this pandemic and the reaction to it on the part of governments and certain sections of the governed as a template for how people and their institutional agencies will react to climate change in the future. And have been reacting. From the first, addressing the crisis in the climate system has been frustrated by institutional and psychological inertia. I’ve broken my brain in trying to crack this problem in my writing. It can only be broken by practice and communities of practice. At first, the crisis was denied, considered a ruse to raise taxes and expand government, and was ‘alarmist.’ Then there was the denial with respect to solutions, avoiding ambitious governmental action in favour of some magical techno-fix. Then there was a search for causes other than human activity, solar activity, volcanic activity etc. At no point did anyone take responsibility for the disinformation they spread and the delay that resulted, leading ultimately to climate chaos and civilizational collapse. Death-dealing lies – and there is a soft ‘public’ out there that is more that content to be complicit in them. They voluntarily sacrifice themselves to the altar of capital, and happily sacrifice others.
As Lily Swann writes: Capitalism kills. This bioweapon is aimed squarely at those people that Hitler wanted killed off, because they were a "burden on society". The old, infirm, developmentally disabled, and, of course, the poor. This will surely be effective in helping Them to cut down on the payments that Social Security is making, that They want for Themselves. Any penny paid to anyone but Them is violently resented by these ...people. These corporate "entities".
I’ve heard similar not only from hard right capitalists but from environmentalists of various stripes.
On a related note, doctors in one-third of US emergency rooms don't actually work for the hospital, but for a private equity firm! These firms do not have a goal of affordable care. They could care less about people, so long as they make money. People who are no longer productive in service to accumulative imperatives are merely ‘useless eaters’ and are disposable as pure cost.
The horrible truth is that we are up against people who too comfortable, too complacent, too lazy and too downright stupid to read let alone understand what is written. These people sleep walk from crisis to crisis and herd behind 'herd immunity' leaders when things get really bad. They praise the architects of constant and convergent crises for doing a good job, and accuse critics like you and I of 'playing politics.'
The same people who didn't do politics before this crisis - where were they when the blocking of the payrise to nurses was being cheered? - won't be doing politics after it either. Just as they put a block on people raising legitimate objections now.
There is the clash at the heart of liberal democracy. Liberalism holds that each is free to choose their own good as they see fit, with no standard evaluating those claims, other than the check of others (power); aggregate those choices in a democracy and you don't get a genuine public, you can get an aggregate of stupidity engineered from above and manipulated en bloc to other ends.
The wilful ignorance of some people physically sickens me. They are complacent and complicit. Here's to the people who do actually know there is a prize and are keeping their eyes on it. If this isn't a reality check offering an invitation into politics, then God alone will help us on climate change. The alarms and warnings have been long and loud, where the _____ are some people!?
My hope is that people of all political persuasions will come, at last, to see that humanity is united by much more than it is divided by, and that divisions in the main are socially engineered and politically maintained, and can be removed. That was my point with respect to those conservative commentators who used the crisis in Italy and France to warn about the failures of socialized healthcare. There was no empathy, only hardball politics. That degrades us all. Hence my discomfort with expressing anything but sympathy for Boris Johnson. At the same time, the keenness of others in using their concern for Johnson to put an end to politics needs to be checked, and vigorously:
Here is Harry Paterson’s post. It's emotional. Loss can lead people to state at extremes. In the main, though, the tone is measured:
“Boris Johnson.
A man who has lived his entire life recklessly, selfishly, irresponsibly; without any regard for the consequences. Because he's never needed to. His enormous privilege has protected him from any repercussions.
He is a proven pathological liar, swaggering through the years with no empathy or concern for anyone but himself. Indeed, recently bragging about shaking hands with Corona virus patients. As if it was just another laugh; a jape; just another moment in a life less lived.
There is a grim irony to him finally, in this manner, being confronted by the consequences of his behaviour. Even he can't lie & bluster his way out of this mess.
One can only hope that the Prime Minister, as he languishes in intensive care, courtesy of the NHS that he and his party have done so much to destroy, deeply regrets the cheering & jeering doled out to nurses by he and his colleagues; when they voted down a payrise for nurses. If he's lucky he'll now be finding out exactly how valuable these people are.
My brother, sadly, wasn't lucky.
Jas, 54, died of Covid-19 in Nottingham's Queens Medical Centre a week last Saturday night. Unlike the Prime Minister there was no ventilator for Jas.
I then stood on an empty street, shouting to be heard over the wind, no privacy, no dignity, to tell an old man on a doorstep his child had died. The most indescribably awful duty I've ever had to carry out.
There will, of course, be those idiots, those hypocrites, those bootlickers, who will condemn me for 'politicising' both my own loss & Boris Johnson's condition. They can't grasp that politicians making political decisions and political choices impact people's lives. And sometimes ends them. As Jas found out.
Do I wish Johnson dead? No. Do I wish dead his selfish and greedy supporters and voters? Those who were perfectly happy to ignore the systematic destruction of the NHS while they were all right Jack? Again, no.
My sympathy, however, remains with the terrified & heartbroken victims of this crisis. The appalling & callous mishandling of which is unavoidably the responsibility of Boris Johnson.
It would be nice to think that lessons will be learned; that, when this is over, an enormous reorganisation of the nation's priorities will be undertaken. By both the politicians and the electorate. That, finally, people concern themselves with the value of others & much less the cost of things.
If Johnson, in any way, might be that catalyst then he will have done one noble thing in his life.
My breath, however, remains unheld.”
I don't want to end there, though, because it leaves us hopeless. Admittedly, politics is a notoriously treacherous terrain for hope. But I affirm a politics of hope alongside a politics of love. There is a Greater Love which enfolds, nourishes, and sustains us all, regardless of our political divisions, and this is the transcendent source and end that yields an undying, unending hope. I've punched hard with the text above for a reason. There are too many people out there who are failing to understand the nature of this crisis and what it means with respect to the kind of society we are living in. Their biggest grievance is the loss of normality. They fail completely to see what this crisis is revealing about normality. Normality is rotten and has left society weak and vulnerable. There should be no return to normality, since normality was and remains the problem. The people who want to go back to the way things were are the ones who are in danger of throwing away the lessons that are right underneath their noses. They need to start learning the lesson, and quick. We should not underestimate the genocidal implications of this pandemic and its disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. This is first and foremost a question of politics and those who seek to silence politics are involved in duplicity and death. This needs to be said openly and forthrightly, offering a firm counterblast against the people who are saying this isn't the time for politics. Political decisions and choices impact on the lives of people, not least in the context of the inequalities that lies at the heart of the social fabric. As my friend Steve Jobbitt told me here, "Exactly! In the absence of a critical counter-politics, people will die." This attempt to silence contrary political voices is happening in the UK in the context of the Prime Minister Boris Johnson being in hospital. The fact remains that he and his government are culpable in the spread of this virus, and the attempt to impose unity and consensus behind the leader is the plainest attempt to conceal that responsibility. To those who say it isn't time for politics, I ask if they will find their political voice to demand changes in the aftermath. I hear nothing from them on this. I do hear their yearning to return to normal. The truth is, they don't like this kind of politics and want to silence it. It is more important than ever to develop a critical counter-politics and not be bullied into silence.
But I don't want to end on that note. The world is more than politics and political struggle. The hope for a better world that drives that struggle comes from outside of politics, and is the transcendent hope that is beyond time and place. So I should like to end with Lindsay Alderton's prayer for Boris Johnson, a prayer offered in the hope that a better world, a better understanding, may emerge from this crisis:
"Breaking this pause to put a prayer out there for Boris Johnson. A prayer that he lives and that through this sickness he is humbled, and that something fragile and frightened, beyond all the tyranny and bluff, gets unfrozen, unstuck, brought back in from the cold. May Johnson be sincerely humbled by this illness and emerge into the world as a force of compassion for the weak, the struggling and the afraid.
The school that Johnson went to - Ashdown Prep - was renowned for its violence towards children. It sits as one node within a larger web of institutionalised cruelty inflicted by elite schools on children, directly leading to a culture of ‘privileged abandonment’, of a league of leaders who enforce tyrannical power to prevent a core vulnerability - shamed and perceived as weakness - from ever being exposed again. How this looks at a structural level is the obliteration of anything that mirrors back that vulnerability - the weak and the poor - and a need to control everything uncontrollable, including the Earth and the delicate systems of ecology we are utterly interwoven within. And if there’s anything that this virus is here to teach us it is that we are privy to forces larger and more intelligent than ourselves, and to reset the arrogance whereby humans perceived ourselves as masters of nature in the first place.
I never imagined I’d find myself praying for Boris Johnson, but these are strange and bewildering times. May he emerge out of this experience irrevocably changed by proximity to death. May he be forged by the fire of sickness and seek to use his power wisely to dismantle systems of harm. May he be humbled by the grace of breath that permitted him life in the first place. May he emerge as a force of good in a rapidly transitioning world. A world that cannot and will not return to a normal that was never normal to begin with. A world that has awoken and caught a glimpse of a saner way of living and will never go back to sleep."
The words make complete sense. It makes complete sense to me to pray for Boris Johnson. I don't find it remotely anomalous or awkward or incongruous. It is central to the Christian ethic and its practice. It is not done out of duty, either, as some mechanical observance that we tick off on a profit and loss account. It is genuine and sincere, and based on the notion that redemption is always possible. Hope resides eternally in those redemptive possibilities. Cut off from those, and all we have is the scarcely believable prospect that people may learn by hard experience, which comes across less as expectation than as some kind of meagre satisfaction in revenge. And that is no satisfaction at all.