Creative Resistance

Finally got my acts together to see Avatar (3D) yesterday evening, two months after release. My Green friends Drs Richard Lawson, Derek Wall, and Rupert Read (and those over at Two Doctors blog in Scotland) all liked it, along with many of us studying the Accra Confession at the Saint Columba’s Manse Discussion Group.

L’Osservatore Romano did not like Avatar, some suspected due to alleged pantheism. But the philosophy therein was not really pantheism, but can be more accurately described as panentheism (as my friend Dr George Zachariah of the Mar Thoma Church taught): finding God in everything; finding the image of the divine in everyone. I would have to struggle if I had to deny this as Christian.

[...] Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries [...]

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The scene was indicative, where the scientist Dr Grace Augustine presented her results about the synaptic nature of the biosphere on the planet Pandora, and the businessman Parker Selfridge dismissed her thus: ‘what have you been smoking!’ Science is only accepted when it conveniently serves the imperial–rationalist exploitation: at all other times it is dismissed. As Dr Lawson pointed out (and echoed by the Reverend Dick Wolff), this has been going on in the climate-change debate: ‘If you are a committed free market fundamentalist, you will never accept the climate change facts, as they are incompatible with your ideology.’

I will be going to the Conference of the Green Party of England and Wales this Saturday; expecting Green hugs.

Ash Wednesday sermon at the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford, based on two earlier blog posts: ‘What keeps me awake at night’ and ‘Brecht’s Galileo, or, Against Macho Science’.

Luke 15:11–32 (Prodigal Son).

May I speak in the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. Amen.

A few years ago, I went to the National Theatre in London, to see Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, in a version by David Hare. With 20th-century hindsight, the German playwright Brecht retold the life-story of the 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei. Today, on this Ash Wednesday, I want to talk about the nature and motivation of scientific pursuit: this play happens to provide some hooks for my thinking. So, at the risk of substituting a theatre review in the place of a sermon, here I go.

If you recall, Galileo championed the theory of Copernicus that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church forced him to recant this view. The famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’ Is this modern science a good thing in the round? Was the Church right to slow Galileo down after all? Galileo’s 17th-century contemporaries did not have the benefit of hindsight and retrospection: They were riding the wave of the Renaissance, pregnant with the prospect of rationalism’s triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries. Read the rest of this entry »

At one o’clock Monday morning, I counted the votes to select a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in the Oxford East constituency, to replace Peter Tatchell who had to stand down due to health reasons. Announcement to follow in due course, soon.

From one o’clock to three in the afternoon, I attended the Green group of councillors to discuss budget proposals for Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, and election strategies.

From seven to about nine o’clock in the evening, I was glad to be at the launch of the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review. There I talked with three journalists (among other radical right-on comrades), from Aamulehti of Tampere, Corriere della Sera of Italy, and Samoa’s Environment Weekly. Very nice people they were.

Here is the table of contents for the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review (Issue 1, February 2010):

• Samual Burt: Equality and Republican Ideals
• Peter Tatchell: Voter Reform and the Left
• Stuart White: An End to Labourism
• Cailean Gallagher: Call to Scottish Labour
• Matthew Kennedy: The Putney Debates
• Jeremy Cliffe: A Fourth Way for Labour?
• Brian Melican: Germany’s Fragmented Left
• Christopher Jackson: The Return of Keynes
• George Irvin: Time for a Tobin Tax
• Kaihsu Tai: The Science of Copenhagen
• Sophie Lewis: COP15 – Activist’s Perspective
• Matthew Kennedy: Žižek review
• Roberta Klimt: Bennett review
• Noel Hatch: Today’s Lost Generation

Pace Radford, it was typeset in Palatino, to good effect dare I so say. All references to non-L——r party affiliation were cautiously scrubbed, for which I am (to be frank) a bit miffed. Despite that, it was an excellent effort by the editorial team in setting off this worthy initiative.

Near midnight, I refined my letter to the Oxford Times about public ownership of assets, after email-shots to follow up all the interesting discussions I had for the last 24 hours of politicking.

It is amazing that I am not getting paid to do any of this, but certainly it has been more fun than staring at molecules on the computer. Citizenship is a full-time job, and the work of a citizen is never done….

God our Creator, we thank you for the elemental nitrogen, which forms the silent majority in the air we breathe. We thank you for the bacteria that fixate nitrogen from the air, activating the element for metabolism in the biosphere.

With John Seymour, companion of Saint Fritz Schumacher, we remember the nitrogen cycle: We recall how humanity has split this one wonderful system into the two problems of pollution and the need of artificial fertilization.

We grieve for the wasted material containing fixated nitrogen, polluting the rivers and seas rather than fertilizing the land. We commit to you our anxieties about the Haber–Bosch process, which fixates nitrogen to make fertilizers by burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

God the Holy Spirit, give us wisdom and courage to repair and complete the nitrogen cycle.

Now we join the Society of Ordained Scientists in this collect: Almighty God, Creator and Redeemer of all that is, source and foundation of time and space, matter and energy, life and consciousness: Grant us in this Society and all who study the mysteries of your creation, grace to be true witnesses to your glory and faithful stewards of your gifts.

We pray all this through Jesus Christ, who is Alpha and Omega – who completes the cycle and reconciles all things to himself. Amen.

This week in England, we were asked to ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’, and this Sunday – Remembrance Sunday – to remember the soldiers. It is well that we remember these; but I wonder whether it would have served us even better to remember that there had been three Anglo-Afghan Wars, before getting ourselves into a fourth one. The Encyclopædia Britannica has them thus: ‘The first war demonstrated the ease of overrunning Afghanistan and the difficulty of holding it. The second war proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the British.’ So remember the poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as those in Flanders, when you see the poppies this autumn.