New Zealand politics and conspiracy theories

My second essay for the Conspiracy Theory paper I enrolled in this semester answered the question, "What is the evidence (if any) that conspiracy belief is increasing, and why might this be the case?" To answer this question I studied the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories in political discourse, with a particular focus on the 2005 election.

Although the paper is a philosophy paper, the second half of our course looked at the psychological reasons people become attracted to conspiracy theories. While my first essay looked at the question of whether we can evaluate a conspiracy theory to be true, this essay addresses the question of why such theories emerge in the first place - whether true or false.

In this essay I address a lot of theories that I, personally, have been open to and even committed to in the past, and which I am still partial to at present. Indeed, the idea that organised groups of people are discreetly acting for their own gain in the public domain, or for the purpose of one specific lobby, is not exactly foreign to at least the mindset of the generation I belong to. I can remember very clearly that careers advice at school suggested politics as a good forum in which to advocate for rights you believe in, rather than a forum to discuss and represent some sort of common good.

Indeed, some of the psychological theories presented in this article implicitly assume that groups of people are very consciously and publicly asserting themselves for a certain post-materialist, ideological agenda. The irony is they do so believing it is in the interests of the community as a whole, and thus think the term "conspiracy" is not appropriate. What is certain is that politics today is dominated by strategies very conscious of PR (public relations) and PC (political correctness). In embracing these strategies parties choose to keep some things as secret as possible knowing that public knowledge would be adverse to progress.

Nefarious and evil-minded conspiracies? Maybe not. But conspiracies nonetheless.




Secret agendas
The rise of the paranoid style in New Zealand politics
Allan Chesswas

30 October 2009


“Politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers…[demonstrating] how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority…a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing…a paranoid style, because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

- Richard Hofstadter, 1964


These could easily have been the words of a New Zealand political commentator following the 2005 election. The Labour party was allegedly at the mercy of a “formidable political machine,” a group of “front bums” aka “The Labour Party Wimmins Division,” responsible for an anti-men agenda at the heart of government policy. But that wasn’t all – Labour were also accused of a “radical homosexual agenda” which called even the sexual orientation of the prime minister and her husband into question (Wishart, 2005; 2006; 2007; 2008; Tamaki, 2005).

But, just in case anyone thought the National party was safe, just two weeks out from the election they, too, were accused of harbouring conspiracy. Leader Don Brash was not only fronting a far-right wing conspiracy of ACT and business roundtable members – he was also working closely with the fundamentalist sect The Exclusive Brethren (Hager, 2006). Both Ian Wishart, commenting on the left, and Nicky Hager, commenting on the right, proceeded to publish # 1 best sellers detailing these conspiracies.

But this was no strange flash-in-the-pan as far as conspiracy theories endemic to New Zealand are concerned. Both Wishart and Hager had been publishing bestselling conspiracy non-fiction since the mid-1990s, and Wishart had founded his Investigate magazine in 2000. It would be fair to say, though, that the general elections of September 2005 saw something of a climax for conspiracy theory in New Zealand. Wishart and Hager were certainly prominent already, but in the build up to the 2005 election their work and rhetoric became increasingly popular. What’s more, in the same month as the election pornography mogul Steve Crowe teamed up with the controversial Jonathan Eisen to launch Uncensored, New Zealand’s first conspiracy theory magazine.


A flourishing style

The growing popularity of conspiracy belief has been observed by academics in a wide range of fields, from media studies, cultural studies and anthropology, to history, philosophy and psychology (Arnold, 2008; Marcus, 1999; Knight, 2002; Pipes, 1997; Keeley, 1999; Basham, 2001; Goertzel, 1994; Leman & Cinnirella, 2007).

Arnold (2008), reflecting on much of the conspiracy theory literature, surveys the increased use and popularity of conspiracy theory themes in film in television since the post-war period. He argues that increased interest in themes of conspiracy theory resulted initially from the paranoid climate of the Cold War period, with a focus on the “Red Menace.” Conspiracy themes in film and television then entered a second phase, a more introspective and cynical phase, rsulting from the exposure of government cover-ups surrounding the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. Finally, a third phase began in the 1990s which is not only cynical, but reflects a strong sense of disaffection. Productions such as JFK, The X-Files, The Trueman Show and The Matrix portrayed “conspiracies of enormous scale and complexity suggest not only that some parts of society should not be trusted, but that engaging with them at all is almost pointless” (p170, 171).

While Arnold’s thesis seems compelling, it must be observed that the postwar period also saw the rapid growth of the use of television and film as a medium of popular thought. Before this time, access to such media was still a luxury. The comparative absence of conspiracy themes might have reflected the lack of a populist audience – conspiracy theory has long been identified as a populist phenomenon. While conspiracy themes were absent from film, television and newsmedia, they may well have been rife at the pub and in the pulpit. Arnold’s project takes advantage of written and recorded evidence that the oral examples of the bar and the church can never afford us.

It could also be argued that the absence of conspiracy theory in media was due to the dominance of conspiracy beliefs in actual life and politics, in the early years of film and television. From the paranoid concerns of alliance and axis powers which sparked the Great War, to the conspiracy theories inspired across Europe by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, to the actual conspiracies of Soviets and Nazis in the mass genocides of the age. For conspiracy theories to also then dominate film and television would surely have been something of an overkill.

However, Arnold’s observation, that themes in conspiracy theory have become increasingly cynical and disaffected in relation to the powers meant to represent their interests, adds immense value to his thesis. Psychological literature on the subject argues for an increased sense of disaffection as a leading motivation for people to adopt a conspiratorial view of the world, and employ the language of conspiracy theory.


Conspiracy belief in New Zealand

Right-wing conspiracies

An attempt to answer the question of whether or not conspiracy belief has increased at a global level, or in the West, or in the USA, seems a rather ambitious project, and the authors referred to should be commended. In this essay I will focus on the New Zealand context, particularly cultural and political discourses employed in the media in the last 20 years, with reference also to important publications and institutions referred to in the media. I will use this analysis to demonstrate an increase in conspiracy beliefs in New Zealand over this time. I will also explore how the psychological literature on the topic confirms that this is exactly what we should expect.

The lineage of 21st Century New Zealand political conspiracy theories can be traced back to the 1994 Winebox Inquiry, sparked by Winston Peters’ allegations of serious international fraud on the part of both business and government agencies. The details were published in Wishart’s 1995 book The Paradise Conspiracy.

The Winebox Inquiry of Peters and Wishart set the tone for right-wing conspiracy plots. In 1996 Nicky Hager published Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network, revealing New Zealand’s role in an international intelligence organization. This organization could, as David Lange observed in the forward, “command compliance from us while withholding from us the benefits of others" intelligence.” Hager went on to publish a number of books addressing similar right-wing conspiracies: Secrets and Lies (1999), Seeds of Distrust (2002) and The Hollow Men (2006).

Secrets and Lies served as an expose of political lobbying by state-owned-enterprise Timberlands, and was capitalized on by the Green Party, who made the termination of Timberlands party policy, as did Labour. Three years later, again at election time, Hager published Seeds of Mistrust, a conspiracy theory about a government cover-up of a case of GE contamination. News affairs presenter John Campbell quickly took up the case with Helen Clark, without her being prepared, and was the first to suffer Clark’s “little creep” invective (Clark also described Wishart as a creep four years later) (Orsman, 2002; Berry, 2006). The Greens again took advantage of Hager’s work, calling the government to account for what became known as “Corngate,” and refusing to support any party in coalition that would lift the moratorium on genetic engineering.

Pink Think

Theories of left-wing conspiracies on the other hand, though already in circulation, certainly did not have the same profile. Helen Clark’s successful challenge for Mike Moore’s Leadership of the Opposition, after the 1993 election, was “characterized as a “pointy-headed lesbian plot,” and a discursive chain of equivalence was constructed between the challengers in the Labour Party, homosexuality, feminism, socialism, intellectualism, and “political correctness”” (Ingraham, 2004). It was this 1993 “pointy-headed lesbian plot” theory that in time became the 2005 “radical homosexual agenda,” obsessed with “political correctness” and “social engineering.” So compelling was this theory that in 2005 it was at least alluded to by everyone from the leadership of the opposition to a member of Clark’s own cabinet. It became a dominant theme of Investigate magazine, and of Wishart’s bestselling Eve's Bite (2007) and Absolute Power (2008).

New Zealand’s Fifth Labour government came to power under Helen Clark in November 1999. Before the year was out the anti-socialist slogan Helengrad was already coined, and in the New Year Wishart founded his Investigate Magazine (Cresswell, 2008). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, often said to have upped-the-ante of conspiracy beliefs considerably across the globe, had the same effect on New Zealand. In the wake of the attacks Jenny Shipley was ousted by Bill English as Leader of the Opposition, criticized for failing to respond adequately in expressing united support for the US after the events (Mold, 2001). As issues of race and immigration came to the forefront of political debate, “political correctness” became a useful invective against a government unwilling to address the issues, when politicians felt they were being shut down. With the 2002 election approaching Winston Peters in particular picked up on this. He described the nation’s apology to Samoa for colonial injustices as “politically correct,” and described the country as “cowed into a cringing silence by the dictates of misguided politeness and political correctness” (Ward, 2002; Peters, 2002).

But it wasn’t until 2003, with the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act, that the charge of “social engineering” became a common invective against the Labour party. The term had a well-established history already, but it was United Future leader Peter Dunne who made particular mileage with the term. Dunne was leading a party which, like New Zealand First, had taken advantage of the MMP system, and drawn support from Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians disaffected by the two-party system. Embarrassed as coalition partner with the government’s legislation, Dunne accused Labour of “prioritising political correctness over political reality” (2003).

The success of Dunne and United Future came at the same time as the Maxim Institute emerged as a force in conservative political discourse. The Prostitution Reform Act had the effect of sending the conservative vote into overdrive. Political correctness became more than just a buzzword or a slogan. Political correctness “expert” Frank Ellis featured in Investigate in 2003, and the following year was a guest speaker at Maxim’s annual forum, titled Political correctness: End of an error. Well-known televangelist Brian Tamaki prophesied his church would put an end to the nation’s godlessness and rule New Zealand within 5 years, and quickly established the Destiny New Zealand party with Richard Lewis as leader. Tamaki accused the government of harbouring a “"sinister" gay agenda” driven by a “spirit of homosexuality” (Tunnah, 2003).

But concern about political correctness and social engineering wasn’t confined to the religious right. At the same time Boxing Bill English became the Leader of the Opposition, Kiwi blokedom went through something of a revival. West Coast brewer and long-time humourist Paddy Sweeney published Good Bastards Book One: The Larrikins Guide to Success in November 2001, and began the weekly Good Bastards News which often criticized political correctness as the bane of good sense and good humour.

At the same time Marc Ellis was demonstrating his own form of Larrikinism on Ric Salizzo’s Sports Café. Ellis became famous for his risqué adage “sweating like a rapist,” for founding “national nude day,” his appearance drunk on Sports Café, enticing streakers with financial incentives, and then offering greater rewards for women streakers (Rae, 2002; Taylor, 2008). And when he was accused of being sexist and politically correct he’d offer even more to a “black” “female” “midget”. This echoed Winston Peters’ proximate criticism of policy surrounding the immigration of homosexuals, quipping “We are going to have a blonde dwarf category shortly” (2002).

In October 2006 Ellis released his autobiography Crossing the Line, and in doing so criticized New Zealanders for embracing political correctness with “such bloody vigour.” As journalist Diana Wichtel observed, “If anything has him losing his sense of humour it’s the whole PC world gone mad…disappointingly conventional coming from the man who launched International Nude Day, once won top sporting honours for chasing a giant cheese downhill and has a penchant for moustaches” (2006). The following month Waikato University released Sports Comedy Shows and New Lad Culture in New Zealand: The Sportscafe Guide to Kiwi Masculinity, and claimed that Ellis was part of a global phenomenon of “new laddism,” in which shows like Sports Café were preserved as “"the last bastion where men are safe from the threat of women", as represented by female political leaders and feminism generally,” and that “the highlighting of discourses around toughness in Sportscafe embodies a reassertion, if not desperate clinging to, values that are culturally perceived to be under threat.”

It was into this climate that David Benson-Pope introduced the Civil Union Bill in June 2004 (Benson-Pope, 2004). Brian Tamaki quickly organized the famous Enough Is Enough rally and in August marched on parliament with thousands in tow (Armstrong, 2004). Earlier in the year Wishart had published an article which profiled gay Labour MP Tim Barnett, his personal policy agenda with regards to homosexual rights, and Helen Clark’s willingness to encourage government support to it. The Civil Union Act was successfully passed into legislation at the end of the year (Thomson & Berry, 2004). Inducing much the same effect as the Prostitution Reform Act, the stage was set for the 2005 election.

The Tamihere Interview

Early in 2005 Wishart struck again, publishing an interview with John Tamihere in the April edition of Investigate. Tamihere had recently resigned from cabinet after suffering what he called an “orchestrated campaign to bring him down.” The Wishart interview was his revenge.

Wishart & Tamihere began the interview reflecting on the tension between the “union” and “activist” factions in the Labour party, and the ascendancy of the latter under Clark.

Then Wishart asked this question;

“This goes back to the great conspiracy theory. Most people like you and I can’t get our heads around the idea that someone can sit in a darkened room and figure out where they want to be in fifteen years. Where do they get the time to do that?”

Tamihere responded with anecdote after anecdote detailing his take on the “‘machine’ on the ninth floor”:

“They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet. They don’t even think about that.”

“It’s formidable. It’s got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA all the way through. It’s actually even built a counterweight to the Roundtable – Businesses for Social Responsibility. Its intelligence-gathering capabilities are second to none.”

When asked to identify “the most powerful network in the Labour executive,” Tamihere observed:

“The Labour Party Wimmins Division. Whether it’s bagging cops that strangle protestors they should be beating the proverbial out of, or – it’s about an anti-men agenda…”

“Where else in the world do Amazons rule?... I don’t mind front-bums being promoted, but just because they are [women] shouldn’t be the issue. They’ve won that war.”

Tamihere’s observations echo the Waikato University thesis quoted earlier, of a surge in female political power so strong that mens’ very identity and idea of masculinity was under threat, let alone their political power. The media bore the brunt of Tamihere’s outburst along with the Labour Party, described as “utterly and totally useless, sycophantic.” Perhaps this was why media coverage was devoted more to scolding a politically incorrect and rebellious Tamihere than to the content of his confessions.

The appearance of two separate biographical articles profiling Ian Wishart two weeks later certainly suggested the interview had attracted much attention (Barton, 2005; Masters & Dixon, 2005). What was notable about these articles, though, was the labeling of Wishart as a conspiracy theorist. To be fair, Chris Barton did this quite self-consciously, observing “there are two popular ways to undermine the credibility of Ian Wishart's works - by branding him a conspiracy theorist or a member of the religious right.” Barton’s article was saturated with a latent understanding of the conspiracy theory dynamic. Even the title – Jumping at every shadow – suggested an understanding of the role of hyperactive agency detection in conspiracy theorizing.

While Barton’s article was quite critical and patronising, Masters & Dixon’s was more optimistic. Former TV3 chief-of-staff and colleague Steve Bloxham was quoted as saying that while “maybe three out of four conspiracy theories remain conspiracy theories…[but] when you hit that fourth, it's a big story. I mean, Watergate was once a conspiracy - that's probably what I'm saying.” Bloxham’s observation echoes the pragmatic “studied agnosticism” of philosophers of conspiracy theory such as Pigden (1995), Basham (2001) and Coady (2003). But less optimistic was an observation of NBR editor and colleague Neville Gibson, when asked about the demise of his relationship with Wishart since the launch of Investigate. He pointed to Wishart's swing to a “fundamentalist line, particularly on issues such as the Creation,” and observed that “someone who undergoes such a shift in ideas usually turns their journalism to suit those ideas.”

Tammy Bruce and Brian Tamaki

It is clear, though, that many accepted the interview at face value. In May a Herald article explored the question “Have today's women got the jump on men?” and in June ex-NOW lesbian and famed author Tammy Bruce visited New Zealand to speak about “the fact that today's feminist leaders are more concerned with pursuing a socialist agenda than actually helping women” (Collins, 2005; Paterson, 2005).

In a review of Bruce’s The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong, Kiwi journalist Sandra Paterson quoted Bruce;

“I have seen first-hand how the agendas of feminism, black power, multiculturalism and gay advocacy have been consciously used to break down morals and values that the activists saw as obstructions to their achieving, first, cultural acceptance and, ultimately, cultural domination.”

Paterson observed;

“[Bruce] still considers herself a liberal - but wants to rescue that label from the people she calls the Left Elite: that is, the decision-makers in feminist, gay and civil rights movements as well as many of those in the judiciary, the entertainment industry, the media and American university faculties.”

“Bruce talks about how people are increasingly afraid to say what they really think, lest they offend someone or be branded homophobic, racist or sexist. Unless of course the topic of conversation is the religious and/or conservative, who she describes as the new, approved target.”

And while Tammy Bruce was touring the country, Brian Tamaki was busy with his Nation Under Siege tour, promoting his new party Destiny New Zealand and promising to rescue the nation from “a government gone evil,” “a radial homosexual agenda,” a “modern day witchcraft media,” and the general “retreat of religion in New Zealand” (Tamaki, 2005) This sudden flourishing of exteme rhetoric and conspiracy theory left National MP Wayne Mapp’s observations that same month, on The Problem of Political Correctness, seem mild by comparison (Mapp, 2005). Opposition Leader Don Brash also took the opportunity to present the National Party as representing “mainstream New Zealand” in contrast to Labour’s focus on the cares and concerns of minority sector groups at the expense of the interests of the majority (Berry, 2005). Indeed, Brash loved Mapp’s speech so much that before the year was out he’d appointed him the National Party Political Correctness Eradicator (Thomson, 2005).

The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

July and August came and went relatively calmly in contrast, at least until the last weekend of August. Sunday newspapers carried stories claiming Brash’s successful coup of the National Party leadership was due to Act and the Business Roundtable backing. The source of the story turned out to be Nicky Hager, who published it a year later as The Hollow Men.

However the Green Party, traditionally quick to latch onto Hager conspiracy theories, was quickly overtaken by another conspiracy. Responding to a widely publicized flyer critical of the Greens, The Green Delusion, the party quickly assumed National Party responsibility for what was considered a highly inaccurate and inflammatory piece of work (Fitzsimmons, 2005). The flyer proffered yet another hidden socialist agenda conspiracy theory, this time aimed at the Greens instead of Labour. When it was discovered to be the work of the Exclusive Brethren, of all people, collusion was quickly assumed. Although Brash denied knowledge that the Brethren were responsible for the $500,000 campaign, he later admitted to having met with the Brethren (Thomson, Young & Dye, 2005). Though not as sophisticated as the theories of Wishart and Hager, media and lobby groups went out of their way to exploit this connection in the same vein.

So, whether Wishart or Tamihere, Bruce or Tamaki, Hager or Fitzsimmons, New Zealanders entering the polling booths on September 17 must have been aware of at least one of these conspiracy theories. It is telling just how conspiratorial peoples’ beliefs had become, that only days before the election New Zealand’s first ever conspiracy theory magazine, Uncensored, was launched. It was also telling that the chief financier behind this was New Zealand’s biggest (only) pornography mogul. And within a week of the election a photograph was distributed among the right showing the prime minister’s husband Peter Davis kissing a well-known gay Aucklander, alluding to long-running conspiracy theories about Clark and Davis’ marriage as a PR front for two “heterosexuals” with an unusually strong interest in gay rights (Wishart, 2006).


The psychological literature

A number of themes identified by social and political commentators reporting these events reflect what much of what the psychological literature has to say on the subject of conspiracy belief (Billig, 1984; 2001; Kruglanski, 1987; Inglehart, 1987; Moscovici, 1987; Goertzel, 1994; Irwin, 1999). Taken together, these authors suggest conspiracy beliefs are typically caused by what Kruglanski describes as an attributional error – ascribing fault for undesirable states of affairs externally, usually to minority groups, in order to protect one’s own sense of self-esteem. A plan of action against the conspirators is thus promoted by the theorist, typically a political plan. A heroic course of action is imagined that exposes and brings down the conspiracy, again enhancing the theorist’s sense of self-esteem. These political projects most commonly appear at the extreme Right and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and the use of conspiracy theory serves as a rhetorical device to fuel political debate, particularly among those who Inglehart describes as “Postmaterialist.”

Quoting Zuckerman (1979), Kruglanski observes that attribution errors often result from anxiety to protect one’s self-esteem, where “success tends to be ascribed internally, and failure externally” (p222). He notes that conspiracy theories are often formed to satisfy “one’s wish to have a clear-cut unambiguous answer concerning a given topic.” This need for epistemic structure prompts the “freezing of the epistemic process upon an early conception rather than inducing an extensive probing and validation process in which this conception is critically examined against alternative possibilities” (p226). Kruglanski observes this need for structure “is likely to be heightened in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance. A conspiracy theory that forewarns the members of a group concerning an advanced plot aiming against them introduces just that kind of urgency, and therefore a need for a structure, in turn disposing the group to accept the theory.” Further, acting on a conspiracy theory and exposing the conspiracy promises not only to bring about a desirable state of affairs, but gives one an opportunity to exhibit resourcefulness and competence, contributing a great deal to one’s sense of self-esteem (p227).

Billig (1984) shows that conspiracy theories as rhetorical devices are powerful for their ability to compel a moralistic response against those accused of conspiracy. Drawing on the use of Zionist conspiracy theories within anti-Semitic discourses, he shows how these theories: a) identify the conspirators as symbols of evil, b) relieve the theorist of any sense of guilt for injustices against the conspirators, c) provide a rhetorical device that is difficult to disprove, and thus difficult to disqualify from debate, and d) extend the boundary markers of opinion. On the latter point, Billig (2001) demonstrates the way that conspiracy theories on extreme white supremist websites make the Klu-Klux-Klan’s website seem mild by comparison.

Moscovici (1987) illustrates the way that conspiracy theories are generally invectives against minority groups, observing “The very existence of a minority already constitutes a conspiracy…the conspiracy mentality is based on this fact, which none can deny or disprove” (p158). But not only is conspiracy theory directed at minority groups, it also typically finds its home within minority groups. Inglehart argues that conspiracy theories typically emerge when groups experience “repeated frustration in their attempts to attain important goals, for reasons that seem inexplicable unless one assumes that the rest of society is united in, or dominated by, some kind of conspiracy” (p231). Echoing Kruglanski, Inglehart (1987) observes “…an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion that one’s goals were not shared by the rest of one’s society would be to attribute one’s frustration to a political conspiracy” (p232). Thus, “the extreme Left would attribute their frustrations to a conspiracy by the forces of the Right, while the extreme Right postulated a conspiracy of the Left…[and therefore] both would perceive their society’s institutions as being controlled by secretive and unfriendly forces” (p233). Inglehart discusses the rise in “postmaterialist values” in society over the previous two decades, and notes that while traditionally the Right and Left both emphasized materialist goals – economic and physical security, the new Postmaterialist generation place greater emphasis on “self-expression.”

Inglehart observes;

“[Postmaterialists] emphasise fundamentally different goals from those that have long prevailed in industrial society, and that continue to be predominant in most of the established social institutions. As a result, Postmaterialists are relatively unlikely to be successful in having their goals adopted by key institutions, and consequently, relatively likely to distrust these institutions or even to perceive them as conspiratorial.”

Citing evidence from surveys carried out in a number of European countries, Ingleheart argues that;

“as a result of the historically unprecedented prosperity and the absence of war in Western countries prevailing since 1945, the postwar generation in these countries would place less emphasis on economic and physical security than older groups, who had experience the hunger and devastation of World War II, the Great Depression, and perhaps even World War I. Conversely, the younger birth cohorts would give higher priority to nonmaterial needs such as a sense of community and the quality of the environment.”

Goertzel (1994) demonstrated, in surveying 348 residents of southwestern New Jersey about belief in well-known conspiracy theories, that alienation and disaffection are strongly correlated conspiratorial belief. Goertzel observed that “minority status and anomia are clearly the strongest determinants of belief in conspiracies,” and that “…belief in conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system” (p737, 729).

Irwin’s (1999) Introduction to Parapsychology explores four theoretical psychological explanations for belief in the paranormal, and discusses paranormal belief in terms that demonstrate strong transferable value to the psychology of conspiracy belief. Like paranormal beliefs, conspiracy beliefs are often seen to be a “misinterpretation of normal events as paranormal,” and the result of “selective discounting of information not compatible with a paranormal interpretation” (p280). Irwin identifies four main schools of thought in the psychology of paranormal belief: 1) The Social Marginality Hypothesis, 2) The Worldview Hypothesis, 3) the Cognitive Deficits Hypothesis, and 4) the Psychodynamic Functions Hypothesis. The Social Marginality hypothesis concerns the themes of disaffection already discussed. The Worldview hypothesis has strong allusions to Irwin’s study of postmaterialist politics, arguing that paranormal beliefs are the result of a “broader worldview…characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large” (p285). The Cognitive Deficits hypothesis merely poses stupidity and educational deficits as determinative of paranormal belief, while the Psychodynamic Functions hypothesis argues paranormal beliefs merely serve psychological needs pertaining to “a personal philosophy of life,” “a sense of self-understanding,” or reflecting perhaps a substitute for a sense of social alienation, or alternatively the result of an acute sense of narcissism.


Cause for conspiracy theory

Winebox origins

Most of these theories help in some way to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy belief in New Zealand in the last 20 years, and are reflected in available social and political commentary on the subject. The comments of Business Roundtable Executive Director Roger Kerr and Chairman Douglas Myers on the Winebox Inquiry conspiracy theory are useful in this sense. It is important to note Kerr and Myers are not speaking from an academic platform, as leaders of a pro-business lobby injured by the inquiry. Nonetheless, their explanations for the willingness of Kiwis to embrace conspiratorial thinking have value regardless of whether or not the conspiracy actually occurred.

Kerr (1996) discusses the Winebox affair as one of a genre of “myths about the market…result[ing] from sloppy thinking,” namely “that business is often corrupt, that it manipulates politicians and that there is altogether too cosy a relationship between big business and politics.” He observed “our ranking in the Transparency International survey should be a cause for national pride, yet I would wager that not one New Zealander in a hundred is even aware of it. It has received hardly any publicity here, partly because it contradicts the conspiracy theories held by too many people in the media, in politics and even in academia.” He went on to say that “it is in [this] context…that the transactions in the winebox inquiry are best viewed,” and that reporting of the winebox inquiry has “blurred” the distinction between tax minimisation and tax evasion, inevitably playing into the hands of the conspiracy theory rhetoric of Peters and Wishart.

Myers (1997) developed this rhetoric of conspiracy theory as mythology further, referring to Labour party heavyweight Mike Moore’s description of the Winebox Inquiry as “a dark and ugly period in New Zealand's history, which changed our political, social and business landscape.” He observed “the fallout for business, the economy and our political institutions has been massive.” Myers went on to explain this episode as the result of the “wider political climate,” – a combination of “the economic upheavals of the 1980s, the anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past, the sharemarket crash of 1987 which brought in its wake heavy investor losses, the belief that businesses were not paying their fair share of tax when in fact their profits were severely depressed, some isolated cases of corporate fraud, and the electorate's disgust with broken political promises and its desire to seek revenge.”

Although Kerr referred to the idea that “under a market economy 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer'” as one of New Zealand’s myths, Myers’ thesis on the causes of New Zealand’s growing cynicism and affair with conspiracy theories highlighted the role of disaffection as a leading cause of conspiratorial thinking. The economic upheavals and sharemarket crash certainly resulted in economic loss and disaffection for a lot of New Zealanders. And it is safe to assume the “anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past” observed by Myers was owned by non-capitalist New Zealanders not advantaged by the reforms of the 1980s, and further alienated from power as a result.

MMP

Another spring to the watershed of New Zealand conspiracy theory was the impact of MMP voting on the dynamic and rhetoric of the political realm. As with the Winebox Inquiry, they key player in this was Winston Peters.

A populist in the vein of ex-prime minister and good Kiwi bloke Sir Rob Muldoon, Peters became an outspoken critic of National Party policy, though a cabinet member himself, as Minister of Finance Ruth Richardson continued the privatization of government assets and streamlining of the welfare state. Richardson’s budget of July 1991, for which her policies were famously labeled “Ruthanasia,” drew relentless opposition from Peters. He was eventually sacked from cabinet in October 1991, and the following year was discarded by the party as for the Tauranga candidacy. Incensed, Peters resigned from parliament and a local by-election for Tauranga ensued. Winning as an independent, Peters subsequently establishment the New Zealand First Party in July 1993. When a binding referendum on MMP was held at general elections in November later that year, its success was seen to be the result of a general sense of disaffection from the political process, and Peters had become a voice for the disaffected (James, 2007).

According to political commentator Colin James,

"Dismay at the two big parties' use of their single-party parliamentary majorities between 1984 and 1992 to effect reforms unmandated by election manifestos and at odds with their past behaviour was also the deciding factor in the referendum in 1993 which introduced proportional representation."

Thus when Peters arrived at parliament with a winebox full of documents in March 1994, he was about to capitalize on new opportunities provided by an MMP system, in which votes for minor parties like his could actually offer significant political power. And this is exactly what happened. According to James, New Zealand First drew on an electorate of “disaffected National party activists and supporters,” winning enough seats in the first proportional representation election in 1996 to deliver him the deputy prime ministership and the finance minister's portfolio.

But not only was Peters "drawing on the disaffected," he was also capitalizing on conspiracy theory as a means of interpreting the juxtaposition of his political frustrations against his conviction he was actually representing the interests of New Zealanders. He was, in the words of Inglehart, embracing an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion his goals were not shared by society, and attributing his frustration to a political conspiracy. Again, whether the Ruthanasia reforms were the result of a conspiracy against the will of the public or not, interpreting them in this way allowed Peters to hold onto his political convictions in spite of his frustrated political ambitions.

Postmaterialist politics

While Peters illustrates the attributional error, perhaps more fairly labelled an attributional dynamic, discussed by Kruglanski and Inglehart, he was still operating within the ambit of materialist politics, as his concerns tended to focus on the efficient and effective delivery of economic and health services to New Zealanders. The use of conspiracy theory rhetoric in postmaterialist terms didn’t emerge until the coming to power of the Labour Party, firstly in the form of Hager’s Secrets and Lies, espousing a concern for the environment and taken up by “values” party The Greens. Right-wing postmaterialist conspiracy theories, on the other hand, took longer to come to the forefront of political discourse. However, nonmaterialist concerns certainly began to surface quickly, as illustrated by the increasing popularity of the un-PC Sports Café programme, and the growth in criticisms of political correctness spurred on by Investigate and the Maxim Institute. But it wasn’t until the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act and Civil Union Act, seen as significant postmaterialist milestones by both sides of the spectrum, that conspiracy theory rhetoric was adopted and embraced with exponential fervour.

The late development of conspiracy theories directed at the left-wing illustrates well Billig’s presentation of conspiracy theory as first-and-foremost a rhetorical device, and a boundary marker which makes less extreme views more acceptable. For example, in the build-up to the Prostitution Reform Act the recently established Maxim Institute began to receive media attention, but also came under attack and was accused of being “fundamentalist,” and backed by American money. But when Wishart published the Tamihere interview and was subsequently profiled by the Herald, his allegations of full-blown conspiracy made Maxim’s simple ideological critique appear much more palatable. Then when Tamaki launched his Nation Under Siege tour Wishart suddenly looked like a remarkably civil voice in one of the most heated postmaterialist debates this country has seen. In a similar way Hager’s theory of an ACT-business roundtable of the National Party began to look a whole lot more realistic when Fitzsimmons and Cullen began to accuse National of an intimate collusion with the Exclusive Brethren. The increasing intensity of conspiracy theory in the build-up to the election also illustrated they way that conspiracy theories are more likely in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance.

Finally, the willingness of the religious Right (Wishart, United Future, Maxim Institute, Brian Tamaki) and of the green Left (Nicky Hager, Green Party) to sympathise with conspiracy theory illustrates the correlation between worldview and conspiracy belief as discussed by Irwin. The Christian right and the New Age left both embrace worldviews “characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large.”


Conclusion

In conclusion, the psychological literature on conspiracy belief can offer a lot to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy theories in New Zealand in the last 20 years. But while disaffection has been the predominant explanation for this phenomenon, the introduction of MMP in 1996 clearly gave groups at the extremes and groups with postmaterialist concerns much more voice and traction in the political sphere. Certainly, though, as even Kerr and Myers discuss, New Zealanders are much further removed from power than they were 30 years ago, due to the privatization of state assets and rise in lobby and activist factions within both the National Party and the Labour Party.

Is this pattern of increased conspiracy beliefs set to continue? According to some commentators, recent times have seen a middling out of both the National Party and the Labour Party.

Colin James observes (2007);

"This saga of splits and lurches (Shipley was replaced by Bill English, a self-styled "modern conservative", in October 2001 and he in turn by radical-liberal Brash two years later) depicts a party dragging its ideological and operational anchors. Only with the formation of a John Key-Bill English leadership team in November 2006 could the party be said to be fully back on its historical course, presenting something akin to the mix of liberal and conservative tendencies which typified it during its domination of politics from 1949 to 1972 but which had been obscured for 30 years since Sir Robert took it down a populist cul de sac."

The increased sense of disaffection of the last two decades has definitely resulted also in increased political activism and engagement with the powers that be. The conspiracy theories discussed here more typically belong to Arnold’s “cynical” Watergate genre rather than being full-blown theories of “disaffection.” The popularity of adding the suffix –gate to major sagas (ie. Paintergate, Corngate, Doonegate) illustrates this well. Barry Smith’s New World Order/Illuminati theories were popular among the evangelical right in the 1980s and 1990s, but since his death in 2002 he has certainly lacked a successor. Perhaps this is a sign of New Zealand maturing as a nation, and avoiding the mass hysterical excesses of US populism. Such optimism finds little value in conspiracy theory rhetoric.


References

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Arnold, Gordon B., Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics. Westport, CT, Praeger, 2008.

Basham, Lee, ‘Living with the Conspiracy’ in The Philosophical Forum, 32 (2001) pp. 265-80.

Barrett, Justin, Why Would anyone Believe in God. Philadelphia, AltaMira, 2004.

Barton, Chris, ‘Jumping at every shadow - one man's battle against the odds’ in New Zealand Herald (16 April 2005).

Berry, Ruth, ‘No knowing who's in the mainstream’ in New Zealand Herald (28 June 2005).

Berry, Ruth, ‘Clark labels magazine editor a 'creep'’ in New Zealand Herald (24 March 2006).

Benson-Pope, David, Civil Union Bill simply about choice. Speech to floor at Parliament of New Zealand, 24 June 2004.

Billig, Michael, ‘Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left’ in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987, 115-136.

Billig, Michael, ‘Humour and hatred’ in Discourse & Society 12.3:267-289.

Coady, David, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories’ in International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 17 (2003) pp. 197-209.

Collins, Simon, ‘Have today's women got the jump on men?’ in New Zealand Herald (28 May 2005).

Cresswell, Peter, ‘Helengrad is here’ on NOT PC (15 January 2008).

Crowe, Steve, Steve Crow Launches Uncensored Magazine. Press release, 12 September 2005.

Dunne, Peter, ‘Government trying to change the way we think’ in New Zealand Herald (30 July 2003).

Ellis, Marc, & Matthew, Kirsten, Marc Ellis: Crossing the Line. Auckland, Hodder Moa, 2006.

Fitzsimmons, Jeanette, Greens challenge other parties to disown dirty tricks campaign. Party press release, 3 September 2005.

Goertzel, Ted, ‘Belief in Conspiracy Theories’ in Political Psychology, Vol 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp731-742

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Hager, Nicky, The Hollow Men. Wellington, Craig Potton, 2006.

Hofstadter, Richard, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ in Harper’s Magazine (November, 1964), pp77-86

Hurley, B., Dickie, M., Hardman, C., Lardelli, N., & Bruce, T, Sports Comedy Shows and New Lad Culture in New Zealand: The Sportscafe Guide to Kiwi Masculinity. Quality Assured Paper section of the Sociological Association of Aotearoa (New Zealand) conference. CD ROM. Hamilton, 2006.

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Ingraham, Chrys, Thinking Straight: The Power, Promise and Paradox of Heterosexuality. London, Routledge, 2004.

Irwin, Harvey, An Introduction to Parapsychology. London, Routledge, 2004.

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Keeley, Brian, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999) pp. 109-26.

Kerr, Roger, Business and Politics: Myth and Reality. Address to National Party Papakura Electorate, Papakura, 2 August 1996.

Knight, Peter, Conspiracy Nation. New York University, 2002.

Kruglanski, Arie, ‘Blame-Placing Schemata and Attributional Research’ in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy. Ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987. 219-229.

Leman, Patrick J., & Cinnirella, Marco, A Major Event Has a Major Cause. 2007.

Mapp, Wayne, The Problem with Political Correctness. Party press release, 22 June 2005.

Marcus, George E., Paranoia Within Reason. University of Chicago, 1999.

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Mold, Francesca, ‘Put up or shut up, says Shipley’ in New Zealand Herald (3 October 2001).

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Myers, Douglas, Reflections on the Winebox. Address to Business Leaders' Luncheon, Auckland, 21 November 1997.

Orsman, Bernard, ‘Clark told to take 'creep' Campbell on’ in New Zealand Herald (12 July 2002).

Paterson, Sandra, ‘A hard voice to ignore’ in New Zealand Herald (2 July 2005).

Peters, Winston, ‘Our right to speak out on immigration’ in New Zealand Herald (26 June 2002).

Peters, Winston, ‘Peters cries deception over defunct category’ in New Zealand Herald (21 November 2002).

Pigden, Charles, ‘Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25 (1995) pp. 3-34.

Pipes, Daniel, How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Sweeney, Paddy, Good Bastards Book One: The Larrikins Guide to Success. Bundall, QLD, Delafon, 2001.

Tamaki, Brian, Nation Under Siege. Auckland, Proton, 2005.

Thomson, Ainsley, & Berry, Ruth, ‘Passions run high before Civil Union debate ends’ in New Zealand Herald (10 December 2004).

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Thomson, Ainsley, ‘Brash appoints political correctness eradicator’ in New Zealand Herald (27 October 2005).

Tunnah, Helen, ‘Evangelist slams 'sinister' agenda’ in New Zealand Herald (9 August 2003).

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Wichtel, Diana, ‘A clown like ellis’ in New Zealand Herald (21 October 2006).


Wishart, Ian, The Paradise Conspiracy. Auckland, Howling at the Moon, 1995.
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Wishart, Ian, ‘The Civil Unions Bill’ in Investigate Magazine (April, 2004). Auckland, Howling at the Moon.

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Wishart, Ian, Absolute Power. Auckland, Howling at the Moon, 2008.

A racist decision

I continue to be intrigued by the recommendation from the National Geographic Board to change the spelling of Wanganui to Whanganui.

What is most intriguing is that the same iwi that changed the pronunciation of its river's name hundreds of years ago wants to spell it just like the rest of the country do.

What a lot of people don't realise is that the same iwi that want the spelling change will continue to insist on calling the city Wanganui. This effectively creates an in-crowd, in that you only have the right to pronounce Whanganui according to historical New Zealand custom if you belong to that local iwi. What will result will be Maori-Pakeha conflict over who has the right to use the historical pronunciation, with local iwi claiming the moral high ground.

It would seem that Michael Laws has every right to label this a racist decision.

That the spelling of place-names doesn't always reflect that name's linguistic heritage is evident in the name of the suburb in which I live, Kelburn. Kelburn was originally spelt with an e on the end, Kelburne, in honour of Viscount Kelburne, the son of a former Governor-General of New Zealand, David Boyle, Lord Glasgow. However the e was soon dropped, to avoid confusion with the suburb of Kilbirnie.

Whatever the reason the spelling of the place name changes, the volume of use that placename has had must surely be a important factor in these sorts of decisions. If a descendant of Lord Glasgow began to lobby for correcting the spelling of Kelburne, we would probably very quickly tell him to chill out.

Bursting the Climate Change Bubble

This is my second installment on conspiracy theories, following my last post about The Da Vinci Code. This article is an essay I produced for the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories paper I'm doing at Victoria University. We were asked to choose a conspiracy theory and evaluate it according to the literature. I have chosen to evaluate climate change conspiracy theory, given the significance of the issue particularly as New Zealand's own Emissions Trading Scheme begins to take shape under this government.

As in the essay, I want to disclaim that I do not intend to take a position on the science of climate change, either as an emissions reduction campaigner or as a skeptic. The purpose of this essay is merely to consider ulterior motivations and alternative outcomes, other than environmental sustainability, that may or may not benefit many in the emissions reduction lobby.




Bursting the Climate Change Bubble
Matt Taibbi’s Global Warming Conspiracy Theory


“With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists.” - Senator Jim Inhofe, 2003


Global warming denial, known today by its more politically-correct term climate change denial, is among the more serious of modern-day heresies. US Senator James Inhofe found this out after his 2003 speech as chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, The Science of Climate Change (Inhofe, 2003). Following his speech, in which he described global warming as a hoax, Inhofe was lambasted by the media and labelled a “global warming denier” (Mooney, 2005; Begley, 2007). As far as 21st century heresies go a climate change denier may not be as abominable as a holocaust denier, but according to a number of journalists it is certainly a slippery slope (Monbiot, 2006; Goodman, 2007; Connelly, 2007). A recent debate hosted at Victoria University, where Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson’s admission of skepticism caused outright indignation among the panel and the audience, illustrated this clearly.

The issues of global warming and climate change are seldom far from the news, and it seems that every member of the public is either a firm skeptic or a passionate believer. But as far as the official institutions of society are concerned, the verdict is clear and the verdict is a consensus. Global warming and climate change are human-induced trends that we can and must do something about (Oreskes, 2004; Guggenheim & Gore, 2006; Doren & Zimmerman, 2009).

The term consensus is used despite the dissenting of many scientists to either a human-induced theory of climate change in general, or at least an emissions-induced theory of climate change. Civil media and institutions are happy refer to a consensus on the basis of the assent of key scientific bodies such as the International Panel on Climate Change and a groundswell of national scientific & academic bodies. This has left those dissenting scientists apparently baffled, and where they see the official science to be faulty they often suspect foul play and conspiracy rather than just plain stupidity (Steigerwald & Ball, 2007).


Climate conspiracy theories

There are many climate change conspiracy theories in currency today. A Wikipedia entry on Global warming conspiracy theory provides a long list of quotes & articles that refer to such theories. Unfortunately, there are no references to works on global warming or climate change conspiracy theory in general, and none of the literature sourced for this essay has availed the author of any such works, nor have library or internet search engines. Blogger Frank Bi, of the International Journal of Inactivism, has compiled a “Genealogy of climate conspiracy theories,” which he created in May 2008 and has been regularly adding to since. As of June 2009, Frank Bi’s family tree includes a total of 38 different climate conspiracy theories, with many intricate linkages and interdependencies.

In July another distinctive and unique climate change conspiracy theory arrived on the scene, not yet accounted for in the work of Frank Bi. This is the theory by Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone, in his story The Great American Bubble Machine (2009b). His conspirators are the people of finance company Goldman Sachs, and his theory explains the increasing success and advancement of proposals for an Emissions Trading Scheme as the result of recent moves by Goldman Sachs to lobby to this end.

In this essay I will provide an analysis of Taibbi’s article, employing philosophical literature on the topic of conspiracy theory. I will show that not only do Taibbi’s allegations have merit, requiring at the very least what Basham calls a studied agnosticism, but I will consider what this may mean for the validity of other similar climate change conspiracy theories. I must state here that the purpose of this essay is not to discuss or take a position on whether the science of the emissions reduction lobby is compelling or not. Even if we are to accept the verdict of the scientific consensus, this does not mean there will not be conspiratorial activity seeking to advance the scientific consensus – conspirators who do so for self-interested and deceptive causes, rather than the common environmental cause.

Compared to many other conspiracy theories, those concerning climate change, and the effects of the alleged conspiracies and of the theories on public life, are very significant. With the future of the planet as we know it at stake on one hand, and a massive cost with its inevitable effects on the availability of food and human welfare on the other, the real effects of any proposed solution must be properly discerned. For an issue as important as this, exposing any ulterior interests of parties in conflict is essential, particularly as the complexity of the science requires a great degree of human trust.


The Bubble Machine

In The Great American Bubble Machine, Matt Taibbi discusses the extensive role and influence that Goldman Sachs has had in major economic “bubbles” of recent history. He first discusses their role in the 1929 Wall Street crash, quoting John Kenneth Galbraith to identify their innovative but treacherous pyramid-scheme approach to finance as a leading cause of the crash. He then picks up the story much later in the century, with the appointment of Goldman Sachs’ chairman Robert Rubin as Treasury secretary to Bill Clinton in 1995.

Taibbi reports that Goldman Sachs created a superficial Internet Bubble by abandoning the finance industry standards of quality control;

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s.”

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future." (Taibbi, 2009b, p3)

Taibbi lists a wide range of perfidious market tactics employed by Goldman Sachs during the internet bubble, whereby they essentially made money out of thin air. He discusses similar tactics used by Goldman Sachs in the “Housing Craze,” the recent oil price hike, and the more recent US economic bailout. Finally, Taibbi looks to the future to what he considers to be Goldman Sachs’ next move – investment in the proposed US Emissions Trading Scheme.

Taibbi describes the Emissions Trading Scheme as follows;

"The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice." (Taibbi, 2009b, p7)

As with the internet bubble, so Goldman Sachs is again ideally positioned for the global warming bubble, with their favoured Democrats in power under Obama’s administration. Treasury chief of staff, Mark Patterson, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief, Gary Gensler, are both former Goldman Sachs staff. Goldman Sachs has invested heavily in renewable energy, and also in schemes such as the Chicago Climate Exchange & Blue Source LLC. They even have their fingers in Al Gore’s pie, Generation Investment Management, where three former Goldman Sachs asset managers (David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris) are employed as staff.

According to Taibbi;

"Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy." (Taibbi, 2009b, p7)

In a video associated with the article, Taibbi illustrates the way in which Goldman Sachs uses their wealth and their ability to organize to influence politics. He relays an anecdote of a congressman he spoke with who circulated a letter about Goldman Sachs in Congress complaining about something they were doing. Within an hour he had Richard Gebhard, the former Presidential candidate on the phone, acting as a Goldman Sachs lobbyist, requesting that he take back everything he wrote in the letter. Taibbi reports that “if you cross Goldman Sachs you’re never going to get a campaign contribution again, not only from them but from anyone else in the Democratic party. The bank has an enormous amount of influence and people don’t have any way of getting in the way of that.” He says, “I’ve never had so many people say “hey you can’t use my name when you do this story because I’m afraid of retribution.” So I’ve talked to a lot of people in that business who were legitimately afraid to talk which was kind of interesting, almost like an organized crime piece” (Taibbi, 2009a).

Goldman Sachs is not only ready for an Emissions Trading Scheme – according to Taibbi, they are more than capable of ensuring that it is implemented.


Evaluating the bubble theory

At a surface level, Taibbi’s thesis might not strike the reader as deserving the label conspiracy theory. Marc Wilson, in his study of conspiracy theory belief in Karori, New Zealand, discusses the way that theories about big business manipulating economics and politics for their own gain are more often than not seen as common-sense. People prefer not to apply to such ideas the label of conspiracy theory (Wilson, 2009). As the philosophical literature shows, the term is connotative of being unfounded, overly paranoid, and lacking in credibility (Keeley, 1999; Clarke, 2002).

However, this modern aversion to the word conspiracy when explaining social phenomenon is of no help in an academic analysis of conspiracy theories. Keeley’s attempt to form an unawarranted class of conspiracy theories, by appealing to the level of skepticism required in our attitude to public institutions, is well-countered by Basham and Coady, who argue that unless we have some way of gauging accurately the level of conspiratorial activity in society, we will inevitably have to resort to a sort of studied agnosticism (Basham, 2001; Coady, 2003). This studied agnosticism can at the very least make use of Lakatos’ dichotomy between progressive research programmes and degenerative research programmes, as proposed by Clarke (2002). According to Clarke, a true conspiracy theory should resemble a progressive research programme, where the information gathered helps us to make accurate predictions about future events, while a false theory is more likely to have little predictive power.

Taibbi’s conspiracy theory certainly offers a lot in this regard. While it is only in its infancy, and has not had much opportunity to be tested, it nonetheless offers predictions about future events that if correct will do much to lend credibility to its thesis – that Goldman Sachs are superficially stimulating the economy for their extravagant gain at the expense of the man on the street. Taibbi gives a lot of evidence for their role in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the internet bubble, the “Housing Craze,” the oil price hike, and the economic bailout. He also refers to testimonies of public servants which reveal definite, successful and high-powered conspiratorial behaviour on the part of Goldman Sachs. It is on this basis that Taibbi identifies a similarly superficial market which makes money out of (disputably) nothing (the Emissions Trading Scheme), identifies the depth of Goldman Sachs interest in this market, and predicts they will similarly use the scheme for their own ends rather than the environmental purposes for which it would be established.

One could conclude at this point that there is sufficient evidence to be agnostic regarding this theory, and sufficient predictive scope for the theory to be tested as a progressive research programme. But before this analysis is made it is worth revisiting what we mean when we talk about conspiracy theories, and what the complexities of this particular theory might mean for that understanding. The recent interest of Goldman Sachs in global warming and the ETS and their lobbying to that end could explain some of the increased momentum gained by the mitigation movement. However, the breadth of the emission reduction lobby is so vast that there is surely no way this theory can resolve the climate skeptic’s dilemma on its own.


The plural nature of conspiracies

The philosophical literature provides a number of definitions of “conspiracy theory.” Popper (1945), Pigden (1995), Keeley (1999), Basham (2001), Clarke (2002) and Coady (2003) all understand conspiracy to mean, as Pigden puts it, “a secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by covert action.” A Conspiracy theory is similarly considered to be, in the words of Keeley, “a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms of the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of persons – the conspirators – acting in secret.” Basham prefers “intentional deception and manipulation” to “acting in secret.” Like Pigden, who observes something of a presumption that conspiracies are morally suspect, Basham adds that “these deceptions and manipulations are usually thought to express nefarious, even insanely evil, purposes.” In a later definition (2006), Basham adds to the list of conspirators’ sins “the intentional denial of information.”

David Coady provides perhaps the most comprehensive definition (2003);

“A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of an historical event, in which conspiracy (ie agents acting secretly in concert) has a significant causal role. Furthermore, the conspiracy postulated by the proposed explanation must be a conspiracy to bring about the historical event which it purports to explain. Finally, the proposed explanation must be in conflict with an “official” explanation of the same historic event.”

A consideration of Taibbi’s global warming bubble conspiracy theory confirms the importance of Coady’s definition to a comprehensive treatment of conspiracy theory. Pigden, Keeley and Clarke are very particular in identifying the agents in a conspiracy. Pigen refers to “a group,” and Keeley “a relatively small group,” while Clarke simply employs Pigden & Keeley’s definitions without change. Basham, on the other hand focuses less on the conspirators and more on their effect on others – “the intentional deception and manipulation of those involved in, affected by, or witnessing those events.” Coady more ambiguously describes the conspirators as “agents acting secretly in concert.” He does not specify “a group” in the singular, but rather “agents” in the plural. Acting in concert, no doubt, but whether all are in concert together or there are a number of autonomous but interdependent rings remains ambiguous.

This is important, because much of the literature refers to conspiracy theories which claim the exclusive hegemony of one particular group (i.e. US government, Freemasons, Jewish bankers, Elvis Presley & family). Taibbi’s theory, however, does not necessarily claim the same degree of hegemony for Goldman Sachs. Taibbi traces their advocacy of the global warming/Emissions Trading Scheme thesis only to 2005, and more specifically to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. But most readers will remember learning about the greenhouse effect in science class decades ago. Goldman Sachs’ promotion of the emissions reduction lobby cannot explain the origins of climate change and emissions reduction science. It is merely the more recent adoption of this lobby by US policy makers, and a growing movement towards an Emissions Trading Scheme, that Taibbi is seeking to explain.


Behind the bubble

Fossil fuel finance

The philosophical literature often gives the impression of envisaging conspiracy theories as one reductionistic genealogy of human intentionality. But conspiracy theory need not be a reductionistic science. This is evident from Frank Bi’s family tree of climate conspiracies, and more specifically in theory #16 of his family tree, which Frank Bi has titled Global warming was invented by financiers, corporations, and cartels backed by military.

Taibbi was not the first to suggest big business were using global warming science for their own ends. In February 2007 controversial spectroscopy professor Denis Rencourt, more recently fired from staff at the University of Ottawa Physics department, wrote a scathing attack on climate change science called Global Warming: Truth or Dare?. Later quoted by Senator Jim Inhofe to the Senate floor, Rancourt’s article included a detailed conspiracy theory on the origins of the global warming lobby. Rancourt claimed that the global warming thesis has been encouraged to emerge as a scientific consensus by the major corporate and financial interests of the Western world, on the basis that “environmental scientists and government agencies get funding to study and monitor problems that do not threaten corporate and financial interests.” He alleges that these financiers, corporations, and cartels have recognised the value of the global warming/emissions reduction thesis as a smokescreen, distracting the public from their own unsustainable business practices with regards to the exploitation of oil and other resources of the third world.

Rancourt argues that;

“…promoting the global warming myth trains people to accept unverified, remote, and abstract dangers in the place of true problems that they can discover for themselves by becoming directly engaged in their workplace and by doing their own research and observations. It trains people to think lifestyle choices (in relation to CO2 emission) rather than to think activism in the sense of exerting an influence to change societal structures. The first involves finding a comfort zone consistent with one’s values whereas the latter involves accepting confrontation and risk in order to challenge power structures. The first is needed for welfare, as are community, friendship, etc., while the second is needed to create sanity and justice in an insane world.

In that sense, the global warming myth is a powerful tool of co-optation that has even eroded one of the most fertile grounds of political activism: the environmental movement.

I find that those who defend the global warming myth most strenuously are also those who cling most to the notion that the best way to solve these problems is to somehow (“through awareness and education”) get everyone (or the majority) to minimize their footprints and consume responsibly. They usually also argue that corporate bosses and bank managers are people too and that we just need to reach out to them. They are allergic even to the notion of organized confrontation.”

Rancourt provides something of a groupthink model to explain the collusion of a scientific consensus in the global warming project, similar to that suggested by Luboš Motl (2008). In all he provides a model of climate change conspiracy explaining the ulterior motives not only of financiers, corporations, and cartels (veneer to distract public from real environmental/economic concerns & solutions), but also of scientists (funding) and of environmentalists (ideological goals).

United Nations

Rancourt doesn’t explain the role and motivation of another very powerful force in the global warming/emissions reduction lobby, that of the United Nations. However, an explanation of the role of the UN is proposed by 3 theories listed on Frank Bi’s genealogy (see Appendices 1, 2);
#29 Gorbachev tried to enforce rigid greenist agenda; greenism’s a pretext to undermine industrial base, spread communism (Vernon, 2008);
#31 Global warming’s an elite plot to forge a “one world government”; IPCC part of this (Morgan, 2008); and
#38 Jacques Chirac, Maurice Strong et al intend IPCC to be nucleus of world government (Monckton, 2009).

A documentary released on DVD in July 2007, Global Warming Or Global Governance?, explores in detail the well-established global governance ideology of the United Nations, and the way that the global warming/emissions reduction lobby is able to be used as a lever to further the “global governance” agenda.

Since as early as 1995, with Elaine Dewar’s publication of Cloak of Green, the personal connections of UN pioneer on international environmental governance, Maurice Strong, have come under increased scrutiny (Lamb, 1997; Bailey, 1997; Thompson, 1999; Ward, 2005; McLeod, 2007). Of particular interest is his long-standing friendship with the Rockefeller dynasty, America’s first family as far as the international oil-driven economy is concerned.

Also of interest is Strong’s membership of the Club of Rome, whose 1992 The First Global Revolution said;

“It would seem that humans need a common motivation...either a real one or else one invented for the purpose....In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

The Rockefeller presence would probably undermine Vernon’s allegations of a UN communist agenda. However, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the Rockefeller interest in the UN environmental administration and the IPCC is driven by some of the motivations discussed by Rancourt, as well as the ideological commitments expressed by the Club of Rome.

However, in contrast to Taibbi’s bubble theory about the conspiratorial Goldman Sachs, these theories of the UN having motives other than the presentation of plain science seem less palatable to 21st century academic and intellectuals. It is one thing to suspect the motives and ambitions of big business. But to suppose the hallowed UN might be infiltrated by individuals and groups with their own ideological agendas, and to suppose they might even be eating from the hand of the likes of the Rockefellers, seems to upset our sensibilities. Yet, if the evidence for such conspiratorial behaviour on the part of the likes of Strong and the Rockefellers is as good as that of Goldman Sachs, and as capable of predicting future events, we would surely be obliged to have an equally agnostic attitude to such a theory.


Conclusion

The philosophical literature acknowledges many difficulties in analyzing the validity of conspiracy theories. As Keeley (2007) observes, although conspiracy theories have an air of mythology, they are very different. Unlike the Loch Ness monster, the existence of which a simple exploration of Loch Ness would disprove, conspiratorial powers are potentially aware of our investigation, possessing the cognitive resources and motivation to outsmart us in that investigation. The best tool we have for evaluating the validity of a theory is Lakatos’ dichotomy between progressive research programmes and degenerative research programmes. As Keeley suggests, “The best we can do is track the evaluation of given theories over time and come to some consensus as to when belief in the theory entails more skepticism than we can stomach.” In the meantime we hold to what Basham describes as a studied agnosticism.

Taibbi’s global warming bubble conspiracy theory is one such theory to which we should respond with, at the very least, a studied agnosticism. But at the same time we should recognise the limited breadth of his claims, and roles of other actors and groups with their own distinct motivations who share a role in promoting the global warming/emissions reduction lobby. The global warming bubble is far too complex for one group to be able to exercise some sort of exclusive hegemony over its direction. An analysis of Taibbi’s theory must take into account other theories of the same phenomenon and consider them as potentially interdependent theories rather than competing theories.

Could such a model of the true nature of conspiracy in the global warming bubble be plausible? The plausibility of complex and ambitious models is certainly pivotal in the emissions reduction lobby. Climate change conspiracy theories seem to be similarly important to the skeptic lobby. Is the model of conspiratorial activity provided in this essay – a story of big business, global governance ideologues and mass-scale groupthink – as warranted as the modeling of emissions and climate change promoted by the UN? Like climate change itself, perhaps all we can be assured of is that time will tell.



References

Bailey, Ronald, ‘Who is Maurice Strong?’ National Review (1997).

Beck, Glenn, & Monckton, Christopher, Glenn talks with Lord Monckton (2008).

Basham, Lee, ‘Living with the Conspiracy,’ The Philosophical Forum, 32 (2001) pp. 265-80.

Basham, Lee, ‘Afterthoughts on Conspiracy Theory: Resilience and Ubiquity,’ Conspiracy Theories: The Philosphical Debate, Ashgate (2006) pp. 133-37.

Begley, Sharon, ‘The Truth About Denial,’ Newsweek (2007).

Bi, Frank, ‘Towards a genealogy of climate conspiracy theories,’ International Journal of Inactivism, 1:37—44 (2008). URL: http://frankbi.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/towards-a-genealogy-of-climate-conspiracy-theories/

Clarke, Steve, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorising,’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 32 (2002) pp. 131-50

Climate change: It’s alright ma, I’m only fryin’, Ramsay House, Victoria University (2009). Chaired by Jonathan Boston. URL: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/chaplains/whatson/do-something.html#cc

Coady, David, ‘Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories,’ International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 17 (2003) pp. 197-209.

Coffman, Michael, Global Warming? or Global Governance? (2007).

Connelly, Joel, ‘Deniers of global warming harm us,’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer (2007).

Dewar, Elaine, Cloak of Green: The Links between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business. Halifax, Lorimer (1995).

Doran, Peter T., & Zimmerman, Maggie Kendall, ‘Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,’ EOS 90 (3): 22–23 (2009).

Goodman, Ellen, ‘No change in political climate,’ The Boston Globe (2007).

Guggenheim, Davis, & Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

Inhofe, James, The Science of Climate Change (2003).

Keeley, Brian, ‘Of Conspiracy Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999) pp. 109-26.
Keeley, Brian, ‘God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory,’ Episteme, (2007) pp. 135-149.

King, Alexander, & Schneider, Bertrand, The First Global Revolution. New York City, Pantheon (1993).

Lamb, Henry, ‘Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future!’ eco-logic (1997).

Lomborg, Bjorn, ‘The Climate-Industrial Complex,’ The Wall Street Journal (2009).

McLeod, Judi, ‘Revved up Global Warming, collapse of auto industry equal 'The Hijacking of America'’ Canada Free Press (2007).

Monbiot, George, ‘The threat is from those who accept climate change, not those who deny it,’ The Guardian (2006).

Monckton, Christopher, 35 Inconvenient Truths: The errors in Al Gore’s movie (2007).

Monckton, Christopher, Climate Conspiracy (2009).

Mooney, Chris, ‘Warmed Over,’ The American Prospect (2005).

Morgan, Peter J., ‘‘Global warming’ is non-science,’ The Flat White Magazine (2008).

Motl, Luboš, ‘Leonard Susskind, global warming, and groupthink,’ The Reference Frame (2008).

Oreskes, Naomi, ‘Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,’ Science 306 (5702): 1686 (2004).

Pigden, Charles, ‘Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25 (1995) pp. 3-34.

Popper, Karl, ‘The Autonomy of Sociology,’ Chapter 14 of The Open Society and its Enemies II, London: Routledge (1945) pp. 89-99.

Rancourt, Denis, ‘Global Warming: Truth or Dare?,’ Activist Teacher (2007).

Steigerwald, Bill, & Ball, Timothy, ‘A Skeptic’s Take on Global Warming,’ Human Events (2007).

Taibbi, Matt, ‘Inside The Great American Bubble Machine,’ Rolling Stone (2009a).

Taibbi, Matt, ‘The Great American Bubble Machine,’ Rolling Stone (2009b).

Thompson, Scott, ‘Maurice Strong Discusses His Pal Al Gore's Dark Age `Cloak of Green',’ Executive Intelligence Review (1999).

Vernon, Wes, ‘The Marxist roots of the global warming scare,’ Renew America (2008).

Ward, Olivia, ‘A man of two worlds,’ Toronto Star (2005).

Wikipedia, 2009, Global warming conspiracy theory. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theory

Wilson, Marc, Conspiracy Theories Lecture Notes (2009).



Appendix 1

Towards a genealogy of climate conspiracy theories (Frank Bi, 2009-06-06)
http://frankbi.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/towards-a-genealogy-of-climate-conspiracy-theories/

List of Theories

1.Greenists are commie sympathizers (Davidson, 1962)

2.Mainstream scientists are Soviet stooges (Jastrow, 1986)

3.Global warming’s a plot by British royalty and commies to undermine US (Maduro, 1989)

4.Greenism’s a Soviet plot (Ellison, 1990)

5.Greenism aims to control private production – full Stalinism now unpopular (Singer, 1991)

6.Greenists self-perpetuate, rig scientists’ funding (Lindzen, 1992)

7.Global warming’s a plot to bring back New International Economic Order, and to let greenists wine and dine (Singer, 1992)

8.Climatologists predict warming to gain attention – and funding (Lindzen, 1995)

9.Chapter 8 hoo-ha was masterminded by IPCC (Ellsaesser, 1995)

10.IPCC officials and Santer doctored IPCC report for political purposes (Singer, 1996)

11.Thatcher preached warming to get world fame, weaken coal unions, power nukes; Hadley Centre created to make international campaign credible; scientists equivocate on warming to secure funding (Courtney, 1999)

12.The Right wanted to weaken coal unions, develop nuclear power; Hadley Centre created at Thatcher’s “instigation” (Stott, 2001)

13.Climatologists on both sides artificially sustain debate to get funding (Pielke, 2003)

14.Hadley Centre created to find data to justify closing coal mines; after that, had to find another issue to deal with; scientists compete for scarce funds (Hissink, 2005)

15.Climatologists coerce skeptics, sustain alarmism to get funding (Lindzen, 2006)

16.Global warming was invented by financiers, corporations, and cartels backed by military (Rancourt, 2007)

17.Media look for extreme views, ignore silent majority of skeptical scientists (Spencer, 2007)

18.A govt. official wants something like the Montreal Protocol; climatologists have “confirmation bias” due to their politics (Spencer, 2007)

19.Nuclear industry use global warming theory as excuse to build new nuclear plants, recover from Chernobyl, hide fact that earth core’s getting hotter (Cockburn, 2007)

20.Pollution by global warming was purposely increased to create a crisis, giving pretext to impose UN World Government (Mickey, 2008)

21.Greenism’s a movement that hates humans, trade, technology, nuclear energy, fossil fuels (Fox, 2008)

22.Media reporters are leftist crusaders, fake popular support, and catastrophe sells; politicians want to look strong, scare public (Harris, 2008)

23.James Hansen has vague “political and financial links” with Al Gore (Monckton, 2008)

24.Greenism’s a new doctrine to replace Marxism (Lawson, 2008)

25.Greenism’s an attempt to find a substitute for evolution theory, replace it with worship of Nature, a jealous god (Gray, 2008)

26.Climatologists predict warming to increase taxes & get funding (Bast, 2008)

27.Greenism’s an excuse for US Congress to give pork-barrel deals to corn ethanol lobby and “alternative energy impresarios” (Jenkins, 2008)

28.Climatologists are members of a secret cabal, the Illuminati (Schmidt, 2008)

29.Gorbachev tried to enforce rigid greenist agenda; greenism’s a pretext to undermine industrial base, spread communism (Vernon, 2008)

30.Global warming’s a form of global groupthink caused by Gore being almost elected in 2000 (Motl, 2008)

31.Global warming’s an elite plot to forge a “one world government”; IPCC part of this (Morgan, 2008)

32.Professional societies infiltrated by “politically correct” greens, control prizes and awards; universities want never-ending projects; governments, corporations exploit global warming for own purposes (Lindzen, 2008)

33.Jon Jenkins had his adjunct professorship revoked due to a climate skeptic essay of his (Marohasy, 2009)

34.Svante Arrhenius was eugenist, foresaw greenhouse effect work being used to justify eugenics, “took over” Malthus’s population principle formulation to describe greenhouse effect (Curtin, 2009)

35.Climate regulation’s part of Obama’s “stated plan to kill 9/10 of Western economy (Monckton, 2009)

36.Climate regulation’s part of Obama’s secret agenda of “wealth redistribution” to “people who are already essentially net tax consumers (Bressler, 2009)

37.Global warming’s a real problem, but “climate-industrial complex” wants to enact solutions that benefit only themselves (Lomborg, 2009)

38.Jacques Chirac, Maurice Strong et al intend IPCC to be nucleus of world government (Monckton, 2009)




Appendix 2

Towards a genealogy of climate conspiracy theories (Frank Bi, 2009-06-06)
http://frankbi.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/agw-conspiracy-20090606.png

Table

Defending the story, vs. The Da Vinci Code

This semester I am studying Conspiracy Theories, a philosophy paper at Victoria University which looks at how we can know anything about the validity of conspiracy theories. As an example of a popular conspiracy theory we looked at the claims of the Da Vinci Code, of a massive conspiracy on the part of the Catholic church to cover up the true history of Jesus of Nazareth.

On Friday 21 August I was involved in a very casual and fun debate. The lecturer asked one student to volunteer to represent the official story of the Catholic Church, and another to represent the claims of the Da Vinci Code, in a 1-part each debate. I volunteered to present the official story.

I can still remember vividly my first confrontation with the claims of The Da Vinci Code, before I’d even heard of the book, when a colleague in the halls of residence at Massey University confronted me about my Christian beliefs. She told me Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a sexual relationship and ran off to France and had babies. She put it much more graphically than that, and I was completely shocked at the dishonour of this heresy. I was so shocked that I totally dropped the discussion there and then and walked off. I couldn’t believe a person would promote such a ridiculous idea without any proof, or any sensitivity to its abhorrence to the believer!

When I finally learned about the book I purchased it and read it. I found it a good read, but didn't find its claims of conspiracy compelling. I saw the movie when it was released, but unlike the book I found it boring, unimaginative and ridiculous, leaving the heretical claims of the story bare and naked, and leaving me feeling just as sick as I had in that conversation years earlier. On attending the screening of the movie, in New Plymouth, I was given a small booklet which explores the claims of the movie, written by a popular author in Christian apologetics – Campus Crusade for Christ man Josh McDowell.

When I read The Da Vinci Code, one thing that seemed apparent about the book was what I'll call its inverse truthiness. What I mean is that it left me wondering if the opposite of the claims of the Da Vinci Code might be true. That is to say that the Catholic church are the good guys and have, in the main, preserved the truth about Jesus. Those who The Da Vinci Code potrays as the good guys on the other hand – the Cathars, the Knights Templars, the Freemasons and other high-placed occultists – have forever been conspiring against God and the church by trying to discredit the Christian gospel. Indeed, the shadowy existence of freemasonry and its associated networks has been the subject of conspiracy theories for over 200 years, increasingly so in the last 40 years – and not without effect on membership numbers. I couldn't help but wonder if the Masonic Lodge were looking for a way to rekindle their ever-dwindling membership. They discovered Brown and sponsored him to make some of their oddball ideas more palatable to the general public, and to make their role in history and in the world appear more moral and appealing.

So when my lecturer asked for a volunteer to present the official story in class I knew that it had to be me! Here was a great opportunity to present the gospel I love so much in the face of a heresy with which I'd developed some familiarity. I dug up the booklet I'd been given at the movie, retrieved a statement by the Anglican bishops which had come out at the time, called on the historical Jesus material I had studied last semester, and got to work.

This was the result.


Defending the story

“In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown has created the ultimate conspiracy novel. In the world of subversive plots the stakes can go no higher – hiding aliens in Roswell or the identity if JFK's assassin are but pranks compared to the idea of a conspiring Church hiding the true identity of Jesus Christ and misleading billions of the faithful.”

These are the opening few lines from Josh McDowell's Companion Guide to the Movie. McDowell is a popular Christian apologetics author who has worked for decades in Christian student ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ. Like McDowell, many Christians have written responses to The Da Vinci Code. New Zealand's own Anglican bishops issued a press statement when the movie was released, which actually referred to Tony Robinson's The Real Da Vinci Code which we have watched as part of this course. And of course Opus Dei issued their own press statement late in 2006 defending the true nature of their organization.


The Gospel

So what are the core beliefs these Christians are defending, which The Da Vinci Code threatens to undermine?

1.The Christian account of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was brutally crucified by Roman forces, and subsequently buried in a tomb. Two days later he miraculously rose from the dead. He then spent some time visiting and teaching his disciples in Judea, before, as the Christian texts put it, “ascending into heaven” before the disciples’ very eyes.

2.This account is derived primarily today from the gospels of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In earlier times the story was passed on by the oral traditions of Christian communities.

3.Vast attention has been given to the academic historiography of Jesus Christ, particularly over the last century, in which Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus was seminal. Chris Marshall, in Victoria University’s own paper on the historical Jesus, describes this historically skeptical academic tradition as having recently entered a “third quest.” Third quest scholars are increasingly open to accounts of the miraculous and supernatural as being historically viable, especially where objections seem more grounded in personal philosophical commitments rather than historicity.

4.Evidence or Christ’s resurrection & ascension include:
*Empty tomb
*Antiquity & simplicity of narratives
*Discovery of female witnesses – unlikely to be fabricated as the testimony of a woman was not as valued as that of a man at the time
*Authorities did not dispute empty tomb
*No evidence of secondary burial (ie Ossuary)
*No evidence of tomb veneration
*Resurrection appearances over period of 6 weeks, to up to 500 people at a time
*Unprecedented nature of resurrection - Walked through walls & ate fish
*Transformation of disciples/aftermath - Interpretation of Jesus' death and resurrection as the transactive means of God's power to forgive sin & give new & eternal life


The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code explains Jesus’ empty tomb and the emergence of early Christianity by arguing that:

1.Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus' child when he died on the cross, and left Judea and went to France, where they died and were buried.
2.The early church viewed Jesus as a mortal prophet
3.The gospel accounts of Jesus, with its stories of resurrection and ascension, were later fabrications employed inevitably by Constantine to be used as an official religion to control his empire.


Christian response

How do Christians respond to these allegations?

“Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone to Mary Magdalene.” – McDowell

The arguments of the Da Vinci Code are not grounded in available historical documents – indeed, as a conspiracy theory they cannot be. The book refers to the gnostic gospels, opposed by early Christians and supposedly passed on through groups like the Priory of Sion and held at Rossyln Chapel. Yet, as Robinson shows in his documentary, we are unable to access those documents.

Contrary to what The Da Vinci Code asserts of Constantine, the divinity of Christ is confessed to in a wide range of divergent Christian traditions – dating to the 1st Century AD even in India and Ethiopia. It would seem a wild stretch of the imagination that these traditions would all be involved in a conspiracy to fabricate the life of a 1st century Palestinian Jew.


Closing thoughts

The argument of Jesus’ marriage & progeny is intended to a) support the idea that his royal Davidic bloodline may still be intact with its divine claim to the throne of God's kingdom, and b) challenge Catholic views of sexuality and gender so that chastity is not seen as a high calling, and the feminine is properly recognised as integral to the godhead. Yet The Da Vinci Code fails to deliver in this regard.

Lets take this idea that there is one sacred bloodline, a san greal, which claims descent from Jesus. The Da Vinci Code refers to the Merovingian dynasty as the early carrier of the holy bloodline, and links this dynasty to the Plantard & St Clare family via Merovingian king Dagobert II. However it is often claimed by genealogists that everybody in Europe is descended from French king Charlemagne – and Charlemagne himself is believed to have claimed descent to the Merovingians. Charlemagne aside, I can trace my own ancestry back to the Plantards and Merovingians via the Duff, Huntingdon & Boulogne families, and the Counts of Louvaine & Brabant. As Steve Olson put it in Why We're All Jesus' Children, “If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet.”

In closing, I would like to ask – if Jesus did marry, would this actually detract at all from the claims made about Jesus in terms of the good news of his gospel, and his worship as God? Those who propose that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene generally assert that the Catholic Church portray him as virginal because this somehow adds to his divinity. Yet there is nothing in the biblical or early church understanding of Christology which would crash and burn if it turned out Jesus had been married. It is highly unlikely that a man intent on ascending to heaven not long after his resurrection would have chosen or been led by God to marry (of course, Da Vinci Code type conspiracy theorists allege that Jesus did not in fact ascend to Heaven, but instead moved to France). But it was probably this sense of the immanence of God's kingdom and its urgency, and the metaphor of Jesus as groom to his brode the church, that led him to make the statement that celibacy is a higher calling. He in no way denounced sexuality as somehow inferior. The challenge of The Da Vinci Code to Christology is not so much the implication he was married, but that he did not ascend to heaven. And as for the allegations of misogyny, the idea that Mary Magdalene's role was covered up in order to protect the patrinomy of Roman Catholic leadership seems clearly at odds with the rise to prominence of the veneration of Jesus mother Mary , in significant contrast to most other Christian traditions.

Stranded seals & politically incorrect parenting

Upon listening to a DOC officer on Radio New Zealand today, urging the general public to leave seals alone no matter how tired and disorientated they looked, I couldn't help but think about Nigel Latta and his Politically Incorrect Parenting Show.

Here are these well-meaning New Zealanders who, upon seeing a seal all on its own, think they're doing the right thing by wrapping the thing up and returning it home, even in their car boot across Cook Strait on a ferry.

Yet, the advice of DOC reported in today's Dominion Post is telling;

DOC staff were contacted the next day by Pet Vets in Silverstream after a member of the public brought a seal in from Picton, "apparently on the ferry". A vet nurse at the clinic said the young seal was skinny and emaciated, and its well-meaning captors thought it had been abandoned by its mother.

DOC biodiversity manager Peter Simpson said it was "definitely not" sensible to take a seal in the back of a car across Cook Strait.

"When you see a seal out on its own it's because its mother's kicked it out, told it to get a job."


Peter Simpson is not the only person in this country addressing the problem of New Zealand's hyperactive obsession with parenting. As I listened to this man being interviewed on the radio I couldn't help but notice he's dealing with the exact same problem as Nigel Latta of the Politically Incorrect Parenting Show.

The Herald's review of Latta states;

Latta's main thrust is to advocate a return to good old-fashioned common sense and a policy of non-interference: sit back, take a deep breath and don't feel guilty about shovelling the offspring up off the couch and outside to play. Stop taking it so seriously and have fun.


It is interesting to think about the seals in light of the smacking debate which has reared its head once more, and is likely to again thanks to John Key's refusal to tackle it at this opportune time.

While Nigel Latta has stated that he does not advocate hitting your kids, he also said that if he did, he would be struck off his professional body, the New Zealand Psychological Society. What is common to both DOC's seals and Latta's kids is a belief in the ability of the spirit of the creature to understand the rough crash of the wave, or the painful clap of the hand, and thereby learn its place in the world. A world which is more revered, not less, because it reminds the pup he is not at its centre.

The seals don't need rescuing. Neither do the majority of children who are smacked as part of good parental correction.

Christening existentialism

In my second essay for the philosophy paper I took last semester I tackled John-Paul Sartre's existentialism. I found that there was actually a lot of merit in Sartre's ideas, but took issue with Sartre's insistence on a fundamental connection between atheismand existentialism. The essay is, I think, somewhat incomplete. I haven't actually read Sartre's Being and Nothingness. As this essay follows my first essay on Plato, there could be a third essay which simply clarifies what a Christian existentialism would look like, and how it would still address Sartre's very valid concerns about human freedom, responsibility and dignity.

I have two versions of this essay. The version published below is the shorter version. A longer version actually summarises in detail the content of Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism, which I am responding to. If the reader would like a more in-depth understanding of Sartre, that essay can be uploaded from Geocities.




Existentialism is a Humanism… is an Atheism?

“Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.”


Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) earned his fame as the first person to popularise the term existentialist in the wider world of philosophy, in Existentialism is a Humanism (1945). Sartre published his magnum opus Being and Nothingness in 1943, the same year that Gabriel Marcel coined the term Existentialist (Cooper, 1999). As a member of Marcel’s circle of philosophers, and a regular contributor with Albert Camus to the Combat magazine, Sartre was among those coming under increased critique for this new brand of philosophy. Sartre set out to appease the critics by delivering a lecture that has been described as one of the most pivotal philosophical works of the 20th Century (Shaw, 2009). The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Existentialism is a Humanism has been described as a “quasi manifesto for the Existentialist movement,” by “arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century” (Zalta, 2002).

Yet Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, and the nature of its public reception, seems to have given away with one hand what it most certainly gained with the other. Sartre’s work was recognised as the first clearly and explicitly articulated argument for a priority of existence over essence in any conception of human nature. Existentialism is a Humanism defended with great success this concept of human nature in terms of its implications for human morality, and in doing so introduced a groundbreaking metaphysic: the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom. However, despite these great gains, Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism served also as a platform for defining Existentialism in purely atheistic terms, thereby sending post-war Existentialism down a narrow path resulting in its marginalization and ambiguity, from which it has never recovered. It is my belief that something of value was introduced to the discipline of philosophy in Existentialism is a Humanism, in terms of Sartre’s core metaphysic of responsibility in existential freedom. This essay is an attempt to recover this aspect of Sartre’s Existentialism, but to do so in a way that is more inclusive, and not constrained by an atheistic dogmatism.


Why Sartre?

One might ask, if Existentialism is a Humanism is such an incomplete and aberrant work, why not simply throw it in the scrap heap and start again? Sartre’s work is important because it is the first work to step back and take a broad view of Existentialist philosophy (Spade, 1996). Furthermore, Sartre supposes in his work to represent a broad range of existentialist thinkers – including, controversially, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Marcel, and also a group he describes as the “French Existentialists” among whom it can probably be safely assumed he located the noted Camus, and of course Sartre’s lover Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre, 1968, p289). When Sartre delivered his famous lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris on 29 October 1945, he left an impression on an impressionable post-war world of an authoritative Existentialism that was rigorous in doctrine and on the cutting edge of European thought.

Sartre’s Existentialism made a profound mark on popular thought at the time, yet within five years Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and Camus had all repudiated any association with Sartre and his Existentialism. Jasper later described the movement as a “phantom” created by the public (Jaspers, 1957, p75). Even Sartre himself is recorded as saying this lecture was the only publication he ever regretted seeing in print (Zalta, 2002). Indeed, later interpreters have sought to broaden the definition of Existentialism much more widely than is set out on Existentialism is a Humanism, acknowledging a diversity which in some way refers to thinkers influenced by some mixture of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Husserl & Heidegger (Zalta, 2008). Yet Existentialism is a Humanism continues to be the major introduction to Existentialism for the general public (Zalta, 2004), and Sartre’s central argument – that Existentialism is a Humanism – remains justified by his thesis.


Is Existentialism an Atheism?

If one were to read Sartre’s conclusion alone, they would think the purpose of Sartre’s lecture was entirely to establish why Existentialism is consistent with atheism. Yet the body of the lecture is overwhelmingly devoted to countering the “reproaches” of Existentialism’s critics, none of which require an atheistic response in order to be repudiated. And so, while Sartre achieves philosophical coherence to resolve the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom, he at the same time isolates a wide range of potential Existentialist cohorts with his narrow atheism. And so one of the critiques he seeks to dispel – that he “gives away with one hand he pretends to gain with the other” – is at least half correct. My lament is that he has given away not that which he pretended to gain, but which was certainly gained – a useful metaphysic for the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom – in exchange for an atheist club of Neitzschians seeking sympathy from a burgeoning Humanist movement.

Existentialism today receives little respect from established academic philosophy. Analytic schools see figures such as Heidegger as “a joke figure,” while regarding Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Sartre as “mere psychologists” (Shaw, 2009). If Sartre had been slower to speak, and the post-war media less quick to listen to him, a more developed acquaintance with his Existentialist peers might have seen a very different, more inclusive and less dogmatic Existentialism introduced to the 20th Century Western academy. Thankfully philosophy is never entrenched in any particular epoch, and the existentialist endeavour continues today – admittedly without the impressionable climate that was to Sartre’s advantage in 1945. One may hope that a more tempered existentialism might find currency in a post-modern and post-secular age. Whether or not that hope has any foundation will depend to some degree on whether existence precedes essence in its entirety, or whether existence has merely some ontological priority in the mystery that is human nature. It is because Sartre’s metaphysic of human freedom infers existential priority not in entirety, but rather to some degree, that I assert Existentialism is a Humanism provides an ontological breakthrough, not for atheist Existentialism, but for Existentialism in general. More than that, it provides at best a platform for the development of a Theistic Existentialism, and at worst plenteous room for Theism in Existentialism.


Existentialism is a Humanism

Existentialism is a Humanism is framed largely as a response to its critics, as discussed by Sartre in the first few paragraphs. He lists the various criticisms of Existentialism as: a) “An invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair”; b) an underlining of “all that is ignominious; c) an ignorance of “the solidarity of mankind”; and d) a denial of “the reality and seriousness of human affairs.” This amounts to a critique of Existentialism as a) Quietistic; b) Pessimistic; c) Individualistic; and d) Relativistic. Sartre argues that, on the contrary, “Existentialism is a doctrine that renders human life possible.” He argues the excessive protests of his critics make him suspect “that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but much more likely, our optimism” (1968, p287-289). In order to prove his point, Sartre spends the first part of his lecture outlining the central doctrines of Existentialism as it pertains to notions of responsibility, human nature, anguish, abandonment and despair. With this established, he then systematically shows that Existentialism is indeed a Humanism, as an active and optimistic doctrine that entails capacity both for solidarity and for judgment in human affairs.

One of Sartre’s chief concerns in all of his work is coming to an understanding of human freedom. This comes through clearly in Existentialism is a Humanism, but with it comes an overwhelming concern for human responsibility. Sartre states “For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom” (p295). Further, while doing away with the idea of a universal human nature, Sartre nonetheless establishes a universality of what he calls “the human condition” – “all the limitations which á priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe” (p303). And so, Sartre can argue, that “Since we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver” (p307). And so, while some accuse Existentialism of promoting a sort of relativistic permissiveness, Sartre can show that his concern is quite the opposite. For if man’s essence is truly an undetermined freedom, transcending not only biology but even some idea of a spiritual concupiscence, then he cannot excuse himself, body or soul, from responsibility for his deeds. Sartre’s Existentialism is thus successfully presented as morally superior to the determinism of much philosophy – both scientistic and theistic – of his time.


Existentialism & Hope

My contention is that, while Sartre’s atheistic Exstentialism claims to maximize human freedom, it is most certainly at the expense of hope. Sartre argues that an Existentialist can retain an optimism about future events only where we rely upon “that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible” (p298). However, Sartre admits that in any consideration of “men whom I do not know,” “I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is no human nature which I can take as foundational” (p299). The implications of this for the potential of trust and mutuality between human beings where familiarity is lacking are obvious. According to Sartre, the only assurance we can have that a stranger will act towards our good is if they have arrived at some existential consciousness of good faith. And if religious, cultural or political dogma and ritual qualify for Sartre as “bad faith,” then this leaves the existentialist with few friends in the world – hence the accusations of pessimism and hopelessness.

In Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Warriors and Adventurers Shaped Globalization (2007), Nayan Chanda, professor at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation, discusses the way in which cultural barriers were overcome by relationships of trust and mutuality in the development of a world economic system. And, as any student of history might suggest, religion played a vital role in this process. It cannot be overstated how, for many individual missionaries, a conviction that within all human beings lay some potential for trust and benevolence was vital to their willingness to serve in their missionary endeavour. And, time and again, with persistence, those missionaries saw that their hope was indeed well-founded. If a missionary were to adopt Sartre’s attitude – that “I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society” on the basis of Sartre’s atheist existentialism, there would indeed be little hope for the poor, the sick and the marginalized among those people groups unknown to the existentialist.

Or, perhaps more poignantly, one may consider the effect of Sartre’s non-essentialism upon situational ethics, where the violent intentions of a stranger are thought to be anticipated in advance. For example, any member of a recognizable ethnic group with whom my people are at war appears in my village – given that this man’s actions are outside of the range of my will, or any sum of probabilities that could render passive intervention feasible, and given that I cannot base my confidence upon his goodness for want of any such thing as human essence, as an atheist existentialist I may take it upon myself to shoot to maim or kill the man in the interests of minimizing risk. A theist view of existentialism, however, makes room for something of essence, despite the logic of giving some priority to existence, and might instead ask that I love my enemy (Bible, Matt 5:43-48). It might suggest that if he’s hungry I give him something to eat, if he’s thirsty give him something to drink (Prov 25:21; Roms 12:20).

Of course, Sartre’s Existentialism does have the potential to provide room for such an ethic. For Sartre, all human beings are capable of understanding freedom as constitutive of the human being. Sartre states that “when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values” (p307). Thus an atheistic Existentialist can hope that by his example of not conforming to the expected essence of his identity as enemy, the intruding foreigner might too be startled into confronting his own self-imposed existential limitations. However, a paradigm that explicitly embraces a notion of human essence that affirms inherent capacity for goodness, benevolence, pro-sociality, love – while at the same time explaining aberrations from this ideal – would be more conducive to trust and mutuality between the unfamiliar and the alien.


Nonreductionistic existentialism

On one hand Sartre has rescued man’s existence, his being, from a dependence on essence. He has liberated the human subject from Protestant, Catholic and Islamic fatalism, and at the same time from Newtonian determinism. Yet Sartre has merely reversed the hegemony, and made essence subservient to existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Archie J Bahm argues that the Existentialism associated Sartre has merely committed the same reductionist fallacy for which they so despised Platonic essentialism. Bahm discusses existence and essence as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions. He argues instead that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152).

In Being and Nothingness Sartre defines the being of humanness as grounded in nothingness. As conscious, self-reflective entities we are both être-en-soi (being-in-itself) and être-pour-soi (being-for-itself). My being-in-itself is what I am before I begin to think about what I am, while my being-for-itself is my consciousness – that part of myself which thinks about what I am. Furthermore, as Earnshaw observes, “there is a gap between the entity thought about, the ‘in-itself,’ and the entity which is conscious of itself as existing, or conscious of itself as a consciousness – the ‘for itself’…Being has a fundamental desire to close the gap, to make its reflecting on its being the same thing as the reflected-on, to make the two one-and-the-same, to make them ‘coincident’” (2007, p81).

Interestingly, Earnshaw goes on “Yet the only creature that could possibly have such a self-coincidence is God (or a god), since a creature that self-created would have no gap between the in-itself and the for-itself; it would be its own origin, it would be, in Sartre’s terms, an ‘in-itself-for-itself’” (p82). But it is precisely this gap between the in-itself and the for-itself that gives rise to our awareness of our true freedom as human beings. “By describing how the for-itself becomes aware of its self as without any kind of grounding, Sartre is able to emphasise how ‘nothingness’ ‘haunts’ being, how the self is ‘free’, but that this ‘freedom’ s accompanied by ‘anguish’, since who I am is part-constituted by who I project I will be, which itself is indeterminate and indeterminable” (p83).

One thing is clear in all of this talk about nothingness – that the Sartrean ground of being in nothingness remains riddled with ambiguity and mystery in any attempt to comprehend it. That our ultimate being, as humans, is constituted by free choices made in a gap of nothingness is strangely reminiscent of quantum physicists explaining that the ultimate force in physics is an unseen muddiness that works according to uncertain laws of probabilities rather than he certainties of mechanical causation (Meyers, 2008). And just as journalists have succumbed to the temptation of labeling the undetectable Higgs boson as “the God particle,” so too is it tempting to consider human interaction with this psychic realm of nothingness as a transcendence into some other world, in a typically “God-of-the-gaps” fashion (Morgan, 2009).


Theism is an Existentialism is a Humanism

But the question must be asked – how could a mechanism of intentionality be constituted of nothingness? And if the ultimate being of humanness is located within such an untouchable realm, despite our being bound to material bodies, then why would an Existentialist be so quick to jump on an atheist bandwagon? With Bahm, a theist might argue for a nonreductionist Existentialism, whereby the mystery of our ultimate being in nothingness and our freedom as non-determined agents, together with Sartre’s ethical ontology of intersubjectivity and of freedom as the foundation of all values, is understood as a type of essence constituent both of man and of the God in whose image he is made. An essence that is ontologically self-coincident. But an essence which, as Sartre admits, cannot achieve that self-coincidence as long as its freedom is preserved in the realm of nothingness, or perhaps more accurately the realm of infinity – the realm of the divine.


References

Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. In The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN

Chanda, Nayan, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Warriors and Adventurers Shaped Globalization. New Haven, Yale, 2007.

Cooper, D. E., Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Basil, Blackwell, 1999.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov. 1880.

Earnshaw, Steven, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Continuum, 2007.

Jaspers, Karl, Philosophical Autobiography. In Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX), Tudor, Stockport 1957)

Kreeft, Peter, The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre. InThe National Catholic Register, January - February 1988.

Meyers, Eric, Big Bang. Washington, D.C., National Geographic, 2009.

Morgan, James, Race for 'God particle' heats up. In BBC News, updated 17 Februaey 2009. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7893689.stm

New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 1989)

Olson, A.M., Jaspers, Heidegger, And “The Phantom of Existentialism”. In Human Studies, 7:387 – 395, Dondrecht, Martinus Nilhoff, 1984.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, La Nausée. 1938.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism. In Kaufmann, Walter, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York, Meridian, 1968.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness. London, Routledge, 1969.

Shaw, Jay, Theories of Existence Lecture Notes. Wellington, Victoria University, 2009.

Spade, Paul Vincent, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: Course Materials. Indiana University, 1996.

Zalta, Edward N., Jean-Paul Sartre. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 22 April 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

Zalta, Edward N., Simone de BEauvoir. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 17 August 2004. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

Zalta, Edward N., Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 17 November 2004. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/

Zalta, Edward N., Karl Jaspers. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 5 June 2006. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/

Zalta, Edward N., Existentialism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 26 November 2008. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

Plato and the existentialists

I enjoyed the feedback I got on my essay Was Jesus a Pacifist. That essay, with Jesus the Pharisee, I produced as part of my Victoria University paper on the historical Jesus.

The other paper I did in Semester 2 was a third-level philosophy paper called Theories of Existence. This was a great chance to get stuck into a subject I've long wanted to study and finally connect up names with ideas and get my head around the field. We studied big names like Plato and Aristotle, and Anselm and Kant, and also the logicians Frege and Russell, and existentialist thinkers Kierkegaard, Heidegger & Sartre.

It was clear from the start that there would be a big emphasis on existentialism, and I was bracing myself to launch some sort of attack on what I'd understood to have been one of the most destructive philosophical movements of the 20th century. Instead I found my heart and mind strangely warmed by existentialist thought. And that was after being wrapt with Plato for months. Thanks to an obscure philosopher by thge name of Archie J Bahm who featured in our readings, I found a way to take the best from everything I learned from Plato to Sartre, in a way that very much fit my own moderating epistemological commitments in other fields.

And so the two essays I wrote for the paper ended up both using Bahm. Firstly with regards to Plato and his idea of The Good which long shaped western philosophy. And secondly with regards to Sartre, whose existentialism I hope to have rescued from the atheism Sartre has locked it into for the last half century. Both essays address the issue of the long-held dichotomy between existence and essence - what comes first, the existence of a thing, or its essence? It can seem on the surface a trivial or even meaningless question - but it is similar to the "what came first - chicken or egg" - question. Sartre preferred to prioritise existence, because essence implies a designer and thus a God, and Sartre wanted an atheist philosophy. My first essay on Plato follows below, and I will publish my essay on Sartre in the next few days.


Nonreductionistic Platonism

What is the nature of existence? Is this a sensible question to ask? Can existence have a nature, or an essence? And if so, is an essence a thing that existence has, a property that makes up what existence is? If this is so, then essences must be prior to existence, which means that essences must be able to transcend existence.

Yet, if essences transcend and are prior to existence, then before existence comes into being those essences must belong somewhere else, outside of existence. Now, if essences belong in some realm other than existence, then in what way can those essences be present in that realm if their presence is not some form of existence? Thus, surely, existence must be prior to essence. An essence can only cause a thing to exist if it at first exists itself. At least, this is the conclusion of modern existentialism.

Archie J Bahm, a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico for the better part of the 20th century, sought tackle this seeming antithesis between essence and existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966) he addresses the problem as identified by existentialist philosophy. He critiques both Existentialism and Platonism as taking extreme positions due to their inherent and unchecked compulsive reductionism. Rather than obsessing over which is prior to the other, essence or existence, Bahm proposes a middle way, which he calls organicism, or nonreductionistic existentialism. In this essay I will review Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism, and discuss whether or not a middle way is possible in the tussle for priority between existence and essence.

Archie John Bahm (1907 – 1906) spent most of his career as a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico. The same year he was appointed (1948), Bahm also founded the New Mexico Philosophy Society. He was involved with the American Humanist movement from early in its inception, as author of A Religious Affirmation, twice published in the Humanist Association journal (1933, 1953), and later as signatory to the 1973 Humanist Manifesto. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Bahm provides a new way of looking at essence and existence, and the wide gamut of other classical philosophical dichotomies, by critiquing the reductionist nature of western philosophy and suggesting a more organic approach. He provides a paradigm which can make sense of these dichotomies by accepting the existence of each opposing category as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions.

Bahm shows how this new approach resolves classical philosophical problems in four easily understandable ways:

1.He shows that the “falsity of the assertion that ‘essence precedes existence’ does not imply the truth of the assertion that existence precedes essence.’” Precedence need not be absolute – essence may precede existence insofar as existence requires essence to exist, but not so far as to exclude existence from the necessary metaphysic within which it must exist – and vice versa.

2.He highlights the way in which the obsession with existence as “will” (volition, power, freedom), and their chief concern with human freedom, has clouded the ability of existentialist thinkers to willingly consider the complementarity of freedom and determinism.

3.Quoting Gerge Herbert Mead, he shows that as human beings we consider ourselves both as subject (free) and object (determined), that to be social requires us to do the latter, and that as social beings humanness must be considered both in terms of our experience both as subjects and objects.

4.Finally, while existentialists claim that we create meaning as a result of experiencing meaningless (ie death, nonexistence of God), Bahm makes the point that we cannot know what meaninglessness is without first knowing what meaning is. “One can only die if he has first been alive.”

Bahm then goes on to provide four principles to avoid extreme reductionism and sustain a more organic approach to knowledge.

1.We must realise that “whenever a genuine issue arises regarding the nature of man or the universe, there is truth to both sides; for otherwise the issue would not have arisen in the first place.”

2.Reductionism tends to arise when we are too quick to take sides on opposing poles of a dichotomy, and thereby defensively oppose any truth claim which might support the opposite side.

3.Antireductionistic measures require reconsideration of “the nature of opposition which…may be seen to be characterized by polarity rather than contradiction,” and that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature.”

4.Variability and diversity, and the general manifestation of dichotomic properties, as an indication of the reality of polarity and presence of both opposites in the world. “Persons function sometimes more as subjects and sometimes more as objects.” My existential hunger may cause me to want an essential item of food, or the essential item of food may cause in me an existential hunger.


Bahm’s rejection of extremes and binary thinking has a ring of familiarity to it forty-three years on. His “middle way” of nonreductionistic existentialism would find itself quite comfortably at home among similar moderating paradigms in sociology (structuration theory) politics (third way), economics (Keynesian resurgency) and theology (radical orthodoxy). As far as philosophy goes, Bahm’s ideas could sit quite nicely within the scope of critical realism.

However, in dealing with the idea of existence, has he really successfully dispelled the Platonic notion of essences having an origin beyond existence? In order to address this I would like to look at Plato’s notion of The Good in relation to the ontological problem of existence, and consider its merits with reference to Bahm’s four principles of organicism.


Plato’s Theory of Ideas

In A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920) Walter Terence Stace summarises the ontology of Plato. Stace begins by discussing the way Plato develops the Socratic notion of concepts into a Theory of Ideas, as is illustrated in Meno. Plato poses that the nature of truth is when the concept I hold in my mind corresponds as a copy to something that exists outside my mind. In this way Plato argues that ideas must form the basis for both the substance of the world and our perception of the world as we experience it. Stace summarises (p187), “…the Ideas are substances. They are absolute and ultimate realities. Their whole being is in themselves. They depend on nothing, but all things depend on them. They are the first principles of the universe.” Furthermore as the ultimate substance of reality, the world of ideas is the location of “the essences of all things” (p189).

Stace then discusses Plato’s ontology of this world of ideas in relation to existence, or being, the term Plato uses. Here Stace draws on Sophist and Parmenides (p195 – 197). Against the Eleatics, Plato argued that the One is both a unity and a plurality, for we cannot conceive of the One without also conceiving its predicate, which immediately implies a duality. Similarly, “every many is ipso facto a unity, since we think of the many in one idea, and, if we did not, we should not even know that it is a many.” In the same way, being cannot totally exclude non-being. “The being of anything is the not-being of its opposite. The being of light is the not-being of darkness. All being, therefore, has not-being in it.”

Thus, for Plato, the One – that is, the ultimate reality – is both a unity and a plurality, and is both being and not-being. Plato’s Theory of Ideas is very clearly an ontology of plurality, as there are many ideas. Yet it is also an ontology of unity. For Plato, ideas are ordered in a hierarchy. “Just as the one Idea presides over many individual things of which it is the common element, so one Idea presides over many lower Ideas, and is the common element in them.” In Plato’s system, there is one highest Idea which is supreme over all other ideas, and that is the Idea of the Good (p198).

It is this idea of The Good as the highest ontological principle that caused later thinkers, influenced by Plato, to suggest that essence must precede existence. The first to make this argument explicit was the great Persian and Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980 – 1037). Ibn Sina, similarly to Plato, concluded that because essences can be present in either in things or (intentionally) in the intellect, their substance is not tied to the reality of things (the position of the Aristotelian tradition). However Ibn Sina creates a new category for essences which are in intellect and not in things – esse essentiae, a notion of pure possibility with a certain kind of existence, though inferior to actual existence (esse existentiae). Christendom’s answer to Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), also employed Ibn Sina’s idea that essence must precede existence. Yet, as Plato posed The Good as the highest ontological principle, and source of all ideas and by implication all essence, so Aquinas has God taking the place of The Good as the First Cause.


Platonism as ultimately non-reductionistic

In expounding his nonreductionistic existentialism, Bahm observes that Platonists overlook or deny the idea that existence and essence could be mutually independent, and hence mutually prior to each other. Bahm claims that a nonreductionistic and realistic approach to the existence-essence problem would better accommodate and understand “the nature of opposition” where the existence-essence dichotomy would be understood as “polarity rather than contradiction,” which “depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152). Affirming Bahm’s principle of polarity, I would argue that Platonism, in the work of the philosopher himself, and also in the father of the existence-essence dichotomy and his Western interpreter, are not purely reductionistic in their treatment of the problem. All of these thinkers certainly argue that essence precedes material existence, yet there remains a causative link between the material world and the world of ideas (Plato), possibilities (Ibn Sina) and God (Aquinas). Thus these ultimate worlds are no less real than the material world, and thus no less having existence or being.

Nowhere does Plato state the origin of The Good, or those ideas that proceed from The Good. It would seem that The Good was to Plato, because of its ultimacy, something eternal in nature, and thus without beginning. The same can obviously be said of Ibn Sina & Aquinas’ idea of God. The essence of The Good for Plato, or of God for Ibn Sina & Aquinas, could not precede the existence of The Good or of God. And so neither Plato, Ibn Sina nor Aquinas can be said to be purely reductionistic in this matter, nor should they be interpreted to be so. Bahm has reacted to what he calls extreme Platonism and extreme existentialism in his work, and as a solution has produced what he calls a nonreductionistic existentialism. Why he leaned to the existentialist camp with his label is unclear, as this interpretation of Plato, Ibn Sina and Aquinas shows that a nonreductionistic Platonism, at least in terms of first principles of ontology, is just as feasible.


Conclusion

Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism as a middle way in existence-essence tussle is certainly of merit. Yet it would appear there has always been plenty of room in the Platonic tradition for a mutuality between the ontological forces of existence and essence. The extent to which an extreme and reductionist Platonism has been propounded by Existentialists as a platform for their own reductionist enterprise would make for an interesting study.


References

Aquinas, Thomas, On Being and Essence

Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN

El-Bizri, Nader, Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. In Medieval Islamic Civilization (London, Routledge, 2005).

Goodman, Lenn Evan, Avicenna (Cornell University Press, 2005).

Plato, Meno.

Plato, Parmenides.

Plato, Sophist.

Plato, The Republic.

Stace, Walter Terence, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, Macmillan, & Co., 1969).

Zalta, Edward N., Existence. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 24 May 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/

Jesus the moderate pacifist

Just over a week ago I published my first essay for my Victoria University essay on Jesus, Jesus the Pharisee. Unfortunately I had no success in attempting to have it regraded, but I still regard it as a useful piece of work for understanding the connection between Jesus and the Pharisees, and the theological parameters he committed himself to within that tradition.

The second essay I wrote for the essay was an answer to the question, Was Jesus a Pacifist? I have reproduced the essay below.



Was Jesus a Pacifist?

Come now and join the feast, from the greatest to the very least,
come now & join the feast, right here in the belly of the beast.

Cops & soldiers you can come too - lay down your guns & c'mon thru.

- Psalters, Dumpster Divers


Deep in the interior of the Wanganui hinterland a young lad by the name of Walter, known to his mates as Sandy, was working hard clearing scrub and breaking the land in for production. He’d been pulled out of school and sent to the family farm at just 15, when his Dad got “crook.” Ever since he’d been working hard to see the family business go ahead, fighting gorse, scrub and thistles every day.

And now, two years on, his thoughts and ambitions were being interrupted by another battle. World War II had begun, and many of his older friends were signing up to defend the free nations of the West against the advancing German army. Sandy was still well short of 21, the required age for overseas service, but many of his peers were declaring their age falsely and joining the troops overseas. His own fitness and his occupation meant he appeared much older than he actually was. Perhaps that was why, when he opened the mailbox one day, he was devastated to find a letter accusing him of cowardice with white feathers and an empty 303 bullet alongside.

Perhaps it was the fact Sandy was an ardent Presbyterian that didn’t count in his favour. For at that very time a certain Reverend Alan Brash was preaching pacifism at Wanganui’s central Prebyterian Church of St Andrews. Brash was part of a significant pacifist movement in the Presbyterian Church and New Zealand. He had himself been inspired by minister & founding chairman of the local League of Nations Union of New Zealand, James Gibb. Brash’s Wanganui appointment coincided with the emergence of the Christian Pacifist Society of New Zealand, founded by returned serviceman and Presbyterian-come-Methodist preacher Ormond Burton. For these men, to be Christian meant to be pacifist, and to be pacifist meant a total commitment to the abolition of war. And all of these men grounded their pacifist convictions in the words of scripture.

The manifesto of the League of Nations Union of New Zealand, which defined pacifism for Gibb and his generation, read (Barber, L.H., 1973, p12);

“To demand an immediate curtailment of armaments with a view to their ultimate abolition, to insist that our rulers shall refrain from making secret treaties or alliances with other nations…and to labour for the coming of an era of universal peace.”

J. D. Weaver, in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, defines pacifism as simply “a refusal to participate in war (2001, p879). Peter Brock similarly defines pacifism as “an unconditional renunciation of war” (1972, p3). This definition is in contrast to a definition which renounces force and coercion in all forms, and makes a distinction the issue of war and that of policing. In this essay I will explore what connection may exist between pacifism and Jesus’ teachings of non-violence. It will not explore the implications of those same teachings on the use of force and violence in the interest of policing criminal activity.


Contemporary Christian pacifism

The quote at the beginning of this essay is extracted from a song written by the Psalters. The Psalters are a popular bluegrass band belonging to Potter Street Records and affiliated to the Potter Street Community, a growing ministry to the poor and homeless of Philadelphia under the leadership of Shane Claiborne. Claiborne was featured in a 2005 Christianity Today article titled The New Monasticism, which described his community and the wider new monastic movement as “the latest wave of evangelicals who see in community life an answer to society's materialism and the church's complacency toward it.” And, as the song suggests, one of the marks of this movement is a very active pacifism (Claiborne, 2006, p95, p123). In The Irresistible Revolution, Claiborne gives credence to other notable Christian pacifists such as Tony Campolo (p269), John Howard Yoder and Walter Wink (p221), and Jim Wallis (p11).

Whether Presbyterian pacifists of the early 20th century or the neo-evangelicals and new monastics of the early 21st century, one thing Christian pacifists share in common is a conviction to be faithful disciples to the gospel teachings of Jesus, particularly those of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-8). It is this passage which contains that clear injunction; “"You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven"” (Matt 5:43-45).

For Christians such as Brash, Gibb, Burton, Campolo, Yoder, Wink & Wallis, as Claiborne expounds in The Irresistible Revolution (p179); “love your enemies means you shouldn’t kill them.” But typically these thinkers, preachers and writers ground their ethic of pacifism not merely in a few verses from the Gospel of Matthew, but in the themes of the entire life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder provides a thorough and detailed analysis of Jesus’ life and teachings, and also deals with the problem of the sanctioned violence of the Old Testament scriptures, very persuasively arguing that an ethic of pacifism is central to the ethic of Jesus, and thus necessarily of Christians.


Pacifism & Just War Theory

But despite arguments such as Yoder’s it would seem that, throughout history, the majority of those who profess to be Christian have in fact not assumed an ethic of pacifism. It has been argued that the early church was predominantly pacifist on the basis of writings of church fathers such as Tertullian, Origen & Hippolytus. However Helgeland (1985) shows that the pacifism of these writers was by no means consistent across their careers, and argues that it is impossible to determine a consensus or majority view either way for the early church.

With the advent of the Constantinian church came the emergence of the just war theory, first promoted in its Christian form by Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430). In his Magnus Opus, City of God, Augustine writes (Book I, Ch 21); “…the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged wars on the authority of God, or those who have imposed the death-penalty on criminals when representing the authority f the State in accordance with the laws of the State, the justest and most reasonable source of power.” In his apology Against Faustus, Augustine writes with regards to the (Sermon on the Mount) injunction to turn the other cheek; “What is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition. The sacred seat of virtue is the heart.” With his argument he contrasts the forcefulness of a father’s physical discipline against the softness of a molester’s caress to show it is the intention, not force, that matters most in the matter of violence.

Christian philosopher Boethius (c480 – c525) later expounds something of the rationale for a high view of punishment, even that of death (c524, p84);

“…wicked men are happier when they pay the penalty for their wickedness than when they receive no penalty at the hands of justice. I am not going to urge what may occur to any one, namely, that depraved habits are corrected by penalties, and drawn towards the right by fear of punishment, and that an example is hereby given to others to avoid all that deserves blame. But I think that the wicked who are not punished are in another way the more unhappy, without regard to the corrective quality of punishment, nor its value as an example …the wicked when punished have something good added to their lot, to wit, their punishment, which is good by reason of its quality of justice; and they also, when unpunished, have something of further evil, their very impunity, which you have allowed to be an evil, by reason of its injustice.”

These views of war and punishment retained extensive currency in the Christian world from the time of Augustine to the Reformation, and were barely challenged. Pacifism did not appear again as a mark of any particular Christian movement until the emergence of the Waldenses in southern France in the late 12th century, and then among Hussite Taborites of Bohemia in the 15th century. Both of these groups sooner or later abandoned pacifism, but a Hussite by the name of Peter Chelcicky broke with the wider Hussite movement on the issue in 1420. However by the end of the 15th century his followers no longer demanded a pacifist ethos. It was another 30 years before pacifism reemerged as central to the ethics of the Anabaptists, who have remained proud guardians of that ethic ever since. It is in this tradition that John Howard Yoder, perhaps the most influential 20th century pacifist author, stands.


Interpreting the New Testament

So, was Jesus a pacifist? If we are to take the New Testament scriptures as authoritative and canonical with regards to the historical figure of Jesus, as do the authors above, then we are left with a difficult task if we wish to come down on one side or other of the debate.

John Piper (2006), a widely influential Reformed pastor, points to the hyperbolic nature of the Sermon on the Mount in general, and like Augustine explains Jesus’ intentions as “to illustrate what our primary disposition and attitude should be.” He also notes that in the sermon Jesus is addressing individuals. He contrasts this with passages from the Epistles in which governments are described as having a God-ordained vocation as “the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:3-4; 1 Peter 2:13, 14). Indeed these passages, attributed to the oft-disputing great pioneers of the church, Paul and Peter, pose a problem for those who subscribe to an all-encompassing pacifism. Can a person be both a Christian and the Emperor of Rome warding off the attacks of the barbarians, or Christian and the prime minister of Britain putting down the armies of Hitler? If a Christian is called to love his enemy and turn the other cheek, how can he at the same time bear the sword as an “agent of God’s wrath?” We can see, then, the complications of attempting to describe Jesus as a pacifist in the ideological sense of the word.

In his commentary on The Gospel according to Matthew (1985), R.T. France notes;

“…there is no warrant for applying these principles to social ethics, still less to politics. A willingness to forgo one’s personal rights, and to allow oneself to be insulted and imposed upon, is not incompatible with a firm stand for matters of principle and for the rights of others. Indeed the principle of just retribution is not so much abrogated here as bypassed, in favour of an attitude that refuses to insist on one’s rights no matter how legitimate. Jesus is not reforming the legal code, but demands an attitude that sits loose to personal rights. Verse 39b-42 are illustrations of that attitude, not rules to be legalistically applied.”

The close resemblance of the themes of Romans 12 to those of the Sermon on the Mount, in a context immediately prior to defending the state’s bearing of the sword, is a good illustration of this compatibility. France, with Augustine, Boethius and Piper, seem to quite compellingly make sense of the Sermon on the Mount in a way that is consistent with Peter and Paul’s view of state-sanctioned violence for the purpose of justice.


Interpreting discipleship

In Volume IV Part II of Church Dogmatics (1958), Karl Barth discusses the renunciation of force as one of five themes central to the Christian call to discipleship, along with the renunciation of possessions, worldly honour, family ties and religious systems of law and piety. He states, “According to the sense of the New Testament we cannot be pacifists in principle, only in practice. But we have to consider very closely whether, if we are called to discipleship, we can avoid being practical pacifists, or fail to be so” (p550). Barth observes that in all Christian call to discipleship, the demands made on the disciple come “in a highly particular way in his own particular time and situation…It is not the case that he is loosed from…the legalism of the world…only to be bound to the legalism of another generality.” Instead, Barth notes that “what the Gospel sayings about the following of His disciples really preserve are certain prominent lines along which the concrete commanding of Jesus…always moved in relation to individuals…[while not requiring] the same thing of everyone, or even of the same man in every time and situation…” (p547).

This understanding of Jesus’ discipleship ethic paints a picture of a Jesus who is very much a realist. This is a Jesus who prefers non-violence and leads with this ethic in his kingdom, and expects the same of those who follow him. Yet this is a Jesus who refrains from making pacifism a binding rule on followers, in the same way he does not expect a compulsive total rejection of possessions, honour, family or liturgical practice.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a friend of Barth’s, was a significant anti-war figure in Hitler’s Germany, and would have been considered by most a pacifist. Yet the same man joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, and himself died trying. In the purest sense of the definition of pacifism advocated by the likes of Brash, Gibb, Weaver & Brock, Bonhoeffer’s resolution to assassinate Hitler most certainly disqualified him from the label. Yet this was the same man whose The Cost of Discipleship is considered a classic on the subject, revered by pacifist and non-pacifist alike.


Conclusion

Can we, then, answer the question, was Jesus a pacifist? I think we can safely conclude that if we can call Bonhoeffer a pacifist, despite his resolve to kill Hitler, then we can say the same of Jesus. But anyone attempting to delineate Jesus’ pacifism to the purest sense of the word will have their work cut out for them. They will need to address the way that his style of teaching & discipleship seem to have made sufficient room for theories of just war and violent state-sanctioned punishment. They must consider the cases where the earliest Christians happily welcomed Roman soldiers into their fellowship (Luke 3:7-14, 7:1-10; Acts 10). Cornelius is given significant attention in the Book of Acts as the first Gentile convert to Christianity, and is described as a “God-fearing man.” Jesus himself says of the Roman Centurion of Luke 7 “not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Further, a war-accommodating God seems to fit more easily with a God whose nature is described as unchanging, and who is recorded as having sanctioned wars and violent punishment throughout Israel’s history. And while Jesus demonstrated and taught an ethic of nonviolence in the inauguration of his Kingdom, he retained a language of violence to describe his return and associated judgment. He refers to hell seven times in the Gospel of Matthew alone. Even the early church fathers argued Jesus’ second coming and judgment are to be interpreted symbolically rather than literally. But the fact remains that his language indicates punishment, and pain. And if spiritual pain rather than physical then surely the severity is magnified. As Jesus indicates in Matthew 10:28, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

To come back to the issue we began this essay with, that of compulsory military service. It may not be possible to argue that Jesus was an ideological pacifist, and that Christian disciples should not fight in wars. But is the converse true? Is it right to demand a militarism of Christ and his followers, as was evident in James Gibb’s preaching during World War I, before his conversion to pacifism? To apply the logic of Karl Barth’s interpretation of discipleship, it is clear that Jesus will ask for an all-encompassing pacifism for many of his followers. I would conclude that a government that denies the right of a Christian to conscientious objection is certainly a government which becomes by its very nature anti-Christian. And so the likes of Gibb, Brash and Burton could be confidently said to be representing Christ at least in practice, if not in principle.


References

Augustine, Contra Faustum, XXII

Augustine, City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (London, Penguin, 2003)

Barber, L.H., The Very Rev. James Gibb: Patriot into Pacifist (Lecture notes, 1973)

Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, IV, II (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1958)

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by W.V. Cooper (New York, Cosimo, 2007)

Brock, Peter, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1972)

Brock, Peter, Pacifism to 1914: An Overview (Toronto, Privately printed, 1994)

Claiborne, Shane, The Irresistible Revolution (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2006)

France, R.T., The Gospel according to Matthew: an introduction and commentary (Downers Grove, Intervarsity Press, 1985)

Grant, David. 'Burton, Ormond Edward 1893 - 1974'. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007 URL: http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/

Helgeland, John, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience. Philadelphia, Fortress, 1985

Hunt, Dorothy, “Interview With the Very Reverend Dr Alan Brash”. NZine, 2 July 1999, Christchurch, New Zealand. URL: http://www.nzine.co.nz/features/brash1.html

Moll, “The New Monasticism.” Christianity Today, September 2005, Carol Stream, IL.

New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 1989)

Piper, John, Did Jesus Teach Pacifism?, updated 23 January 2006. URL: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Articles/ByDate/2006/1450_Did_Jesus_teach_pacifism/

Psalters, Dumpster Diver’s Song.

Ross, Jean, Memoirs.

Weaver, J.D., “Pacifism”. In Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2001).

Yoder, John Howard, The Politics of Jesus. (Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1972)

Philosophy of Life

Just days after I blogged about the meaning of life, the Philosophy updates bulletin reports that philosophers Scott Campbell and Paul Bruno are:

"creating an edited volume on the philosophy of life and are seeking original, unpublished articles, of approximately 5,000-7,500 words, addressing the following question: What new approaches are being made to the study of life-philosophy?"

Echoing my post, the bulletin observes;

"Too often, life-philosophy is taken to be a mode of self-help or motivation and not a genuine philosophical movement. Although it is not recognized as such, serious and provocative work is being done on life-philosophy in phenomenology, existentialism, ancient philosophy (spiritual exercises), the philosophy of biology, deconstruction, American philosophy, and elsewhere."

It sounds great, and I'll look forward to its publication.

Censoring referendums

Well, it's only taken them 8 months, but our new National-led government have already been infected with political madness. The unlikely combination of John Key and Sue Bradford are talking about introducing a highly ambiguous legislative amendment to give parliament the power to veto what they consider to be ambiguous referendums. On the basis that this referendum to argue that smacking per se should not be a criminal offence will costs $9 million. And that's too much money.

Actually, the funny thing is somehow Federated Farmers have also caught the bug and have spoken against the referendum. Again, because of the $9 million pricetag.

Which is fair enough, on one hand.

But the answer isn't to therefore clamp down on the few referenda we actually ever get to have. It's to ask the question, why does a referendum cost $9 million, in the days of internet and number-crunching computer programmes. I note it is a ballot by mail, with no doubt a bunch of plebians waiting at the beehive to run their fingers through the votes.

Ahy not simply have a computer programme on a hard-drive somewhere, which is online to Kiwis across the country who can simply vote from home, or from their nearest library. 1 computer programme, a couple of technicians creating IDs and passwords, a couple more posting those log-in details to everyone in the country. The computer programme would crunch the numbers - hey presto. I don't see why such an exercise should cost any more than $100 000 - $200 000 - and I'm sure we'd have that sort of money in the "Democracy" budget.

Just a thought.

Abortions drop: More love for Kiwi Kids

Great news - Abortion numbers drop, a headline in yesterday's Herald read.

Yet today the Herald has released an update on this story, Abortion drop may mean people are being more careful, says reform group.

More careful?!!

Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand president Dr Margaret Sparrow is quoted as saying;

"I'm hopeful that what it means is there's better use of contraception, better sex education and people are being more careful. But without research, one cannot really say that."

Personally, I'm hopeful it is because Kiwis are preferring to let their children live rather than killing them.

For some reason the Herald seemed to miss this story reported last month: Birth rates at highest level in nearly 20 years. One would think a year in which abortions fell by 440, and births increased by 1000, that a person researching the topic would consider that among those 1000 births were 440 that might have otherwise been aborted, but weren't. Wouldn't that be great news!

But, according to Margaret,

"Without research, one cannot really say that. Stats will never be able to say why the figures have gone down."

One would wonder, then, why Margaret would want to employ that stats for the joy of contraceptive success, rather than celebrate 440 lives that might not have been. I would imagine it would be because that entails a moral judgment. But then, so does celebrating contraception - it contains the judgment that a caring person is someone who prevents birth.

I agree with the Herald headline, that the Abortion drop may mean people are being more careful. I think the word care is more meaningful when applied to a situation where two adults cherish and protect an infant, rather than one where they violently guard themselves against the oppression of childbearing.

Hat Tip: Kiwi Chronicles: the silence of the womb

This totally looks like fun

I've discovered my new favourite website: Totallylookslike.com. Totallylookslike.com is all about mixing and matching celebrities and noticing comical similarities.

I was watching some Creedence Clearwater Revival on Youtube and noticed John Fogerty looked a whole lot like MacGyver. So I did some googling to see if anyone had come to the same conclusion and I found Totallylookslike.com. And sure enough, there was John Fogerty and Steve Martin side by side looking almost identical.



Brought to mind a similar discovery I made a few years ago, of a strange resemblance between a kiwi icon and a character from science fiction. At the time, though, I refrained from drawing anyone's attention to the lookalikeness, as the kiwi icon had recently died. But I think time has enough passed now. And I don't mean this in any way to be disrespectful to the great man whose death came much too early.

Introducing: David Lange totally looks like Yoda :)

Jesus the Pharisee

I have now completed the Jesus, The Gospels and the Coming of God course at Victoria University. Both of the essays I wrote have been graded, and the final exam was held last week.

My first essay, titled Jesus the Pharisee, was a study of the story from Mark 12:13-40 where Jesus is challenged by the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders of the temple. They ask him a bunch of curly questions, but Jesus duck and dives and delivers answers to their questions that astound the hearers.

For the first essay we were asked to select a story from the Gospel of Mark, and explain why Mark included it, and what he was trying to illustrate about Jesus. And so I chose this story. My initial reaction to the story was that Mark was showing how much smarter than the temple leaders Jesus was. But as I read commentaries and thought about this reaction further, it became apparent that Mark, the readers of Mark and the crowd at the temple that day concluded Jesus was not just smart, but one of them.

For example, I could concur that Richard Dawkins or Bishop Richard Randerson are smart, in that they can use knowledge and reason to baffle people and get one-up on them. But I wouldn't throw my hat in with them as my leaders. Sure, they can manipulate information and people well, but without commitment to a sense of philosophical integrity that I would affirm.


Jesus the Pharisee

In my essay, I argue that there were certain philosophical constraints within which Jesus knew he had to work - more than that, he had to affirm. As the Messiah to the Jewish people, his identity as Messiah, and peoples' ability to recognise him as such, relied heavily on what had already been revealed to them about God. It relied on what was already prophesied about the Messiah according to Jewish law and to the prophets. The Messiah was not only expected and mandated by the Torah to uphold the law and the prophets. He was expected to be the ultimate judge, that is the ultimate interpreter of the law and the prophets and its application to mankind. My argument is that Mark includes this passage, the disputation at the temple, to show that Jesus willingly operated within and submitted to the rule of the law and the prophets. But also to show he interpreted the law and the prophets in a way far superior to any peers at the time, and anyone after.

So where does the Jesus being a Pharisee bit come into this? Well, ultimately the Jews were split into the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Beyond that were the sects of the Zealots and the Essenes, and also the division between the Hillelites and the Shammaites - but all of these other sects operated within the parameters of Pharisaic belief. To be a Pharisee, rather than a Sadduccee, simply meant to honour both the law AND the prophets, and to emphasise the importance of honouring the law in one's daily life. The Sadducees, on the other hand, accepted only the first five books of the bible as authoritative (not the prophets), and were more concerned with the temple rituals than with living by Torah. So to say Jesus was a Pharisee - not just a Pharisee but the ultimate Pharisee - is to say he honoured the law and the prophets, and the application of Torah to daily life, and interpreted it better than anybody else.

Now unfortunately, despite the lucidity of my work, I was graded a B-!!! The tutor complained that I focused on a segment of teaching rather than a story. This was despite my statement in the essay that "its purpose in the Gospel of Mark is not the actual content of his teachings [but rather] Jesus’ willingness to engage with the disputation, and the authority that he demonstrates" and my reference to John Dominic Crossan; "To imagine that their purpose is to provide a set of eternal truths about how human life should be ordered is to ignore the larger narrative of which they are a part." The tutor also disputes my argument that Mark's intention in this passage is to place Jesus in the "Pharisee camp," as he puts it, but unfortunately doesn't explain why, and doesn't address why my arguments aren't satisfactory.

I wonder if this is because the Pharisees are so often thought of as the bad guys, so people like my tutor are highly resistant to think of the divine Jesus as "in the same camp". I had read about the way a negative portrayal of the Pharisees has become so embedded in the Christian tradition, but I hadn't thought I would have needed to tackle such a sociological issue in an essay on New Testament scholarship. Especially in a school so clearly influenced by N. T. Wright! Just because we ascribe Jesus the same label that people opposed to him also shared, doesn't mean we ascribe to him their negative characteristics - ie obsession with tradition and legalism at the expense of practical love to the poor and needy. How many of us willingly identify as Christian yet renounce the prolific excesses of much of the Western church? That doesn't mean we no longer identify as Christian.

To read my essay, in Word document form, click below:

Jesus the Pharisee

The meaning of life

I'm tying to pull together what I've learned about philosophy as I come to the end of my Theories of Existence paper at Victoria University. I have been looking for some sort of theme or basis to which I can attach the various things I've learned. Essentially I'm asking - what is the point of philosophy? What exactly are we trying to achieve here? This got me wondering, is it is simple as the tired old question "what is the meaning of life?" And so I've been thinking about the nature and importance of that question.

One thing that strikes me is the way a question like this feels somehow unacademic. Somehow irrational and naive. I'm not sure how much Monty Python, the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and The Simpsons have contributed to this. Nonetheless, from the small amount of reading on the topic I have done, it would seem the theme song for Monty Python's The Meaning of Life sums up the playing field quite succinctly.


Why are we here? What's life all about?
Is God really real, or is there some doubt?
Well, tonight, we're going to sort it all out,
For, tonight, it's 'The Meaning of Life'.

What's the point of all this hoax?
Is it the chicken and the egg time? Are we just yolks?
Or, perhaps, we're just one of God's little jokes.
Well, ça c'est 'The Meaning of Life'.

Is life just a game where we make up the rules
While we're searching for something to say,
Or are we just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DN-- nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.

What is life? What is our fate?
Is there a Heaven and Hell? Do we reincarnate?
Is mankind evolving, or is it too late?
Well, tonight, here's 'The Meaning of Life'.

For millions, this 'life' is a sad vale of tears,
Sitting 'round with really nothing to say
While the scientists say we're just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DN-- nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.

So, just why-- why are we here,
And just what-- what-- what-- what do we fear?
Well, ce soir, for a change, it will all be made clear,
For this is 'The Meaning of Life'. C'est le sens de la vie.
This is 'The Meaning of Life'.

On being Christian and Non-Christian

Last Sunday night I went to Blueprint Church. It was ten years to the day since I’d become a Christian, and I felt so grateful I just had to go to a good old-fashioned Pentecostal service to hype it up a bit. Blueprint is run out of the Global Cafe at Glover Park, by my mate Sam Harvey - that's right, Sam the blogger from Deep as a Puddle.

And it was superb. The music there is great - Hayden Shearman (ex-Moped) knows how to pick songs and music that inspires actual worship, not buzzy hype or soppy sentimentality, and that's quite a rare achievement in Penty churches these days. We even had a good old singing and praising in the spirit session after the preaching. Now I know what Sam means when he says the Charismatic Movement didn't finish in 1989 - it's still going at Blueprint!

That fact was proved with the preaching too. Three members of the church got up and shared stories from their life about how they were learning things from God in different ways. What was interesting was that all of the stories were about the way God has blessed them in hardship. Get that. Not out of hardship - in hardship. In trial, in struggle. One guy talked about how God relieved him from anxiety - not by rubbing dirt on his temples and saying be healed, but on his bed so nauseausly sick that he couldn't look at a tv screen without wanting to spew up. For a whole year!

What really got me though was when Sam's bro Pete got up to speak. One of the first things he said was something about not being a Christian. I figured I hadn't heard him right and waited for him to explain about how he wasn't a Christian, or about how one of his friends wasn't a Christian. But no, he said it again! And he went on to talk about how he believed in God, but was having difficulty believing the things we preach about Jesus. But he was still praying, and he asked God what the deal was with that - "I can't believe in Jesus, it doesn't make sense to me, is that ok? Please give me peace anyway." "Ok," says God. "Peace." Real and experienced. Now I don't really know all the theological implications of that sort of prayer, but I do know its much the same sort of experience that I had in my fourth year of being a Christian.

After Pete spoke Sam talked about how important it is to be honest with God. He said that something like two-thirds of the Psalms are complaints about God not coming through. In my last two posts I talked about my experience of being born again. I talked about the struggles, trials and confusion I faced before, to use Paul’s terminology, Christ was formed in me – before I was made fully alive in Christ. But being born again, having Christ formed in oneself, losing one’s life and being made alive in Christ, does not mean one has completely arrived. All it means is that there is a permanence of Christ’s spirit at the depth of one’s being. And while that makes it easier to face trials and challenges, those challenges only become more difficult!

For my first few years as a born again Christian things were actually very easy. The decision to live for Christ rather than myself, or the social norms around me, was such a radical decision that the effect of its distinctiveness on my life and identity was impossible to avoid. The sense of love and purpose it gave me, the amazing community of Christians around me at Massey, and the way student life gave me so much space to devote time and energy to God’s kingdom, made serving Jesus highly desirable and full of social and psychological benefits. But by the time I entered my fourth year of being Christian things very much began to crumble for me, even while I was president of Massey University Christian Fellowship, the biggest Christian group on campus.

Pete’s prayer at the moment is, “God, I can't believe in Jesus, it doesn't make sense to me, but please give me peace.” My situation was much the same as Pete’s. As I went through my own "dark night of the soul," or "year of despair" as I like to call it, I did a lot of writing. I've scrambled through my archives to dig up my own prayers and reflections on the time, and I found a similar prayer to Pete’s.

My prayer was;

“Lord, if I can only pray to you through Jesus then take me that way, I will gratefully allow him to be my atoning sacrifice. But if you don't actually have that much to do with Jesus God take me the way you want to. Reveal to me how I am to come to you, how I am to approach you, what sort of relationship you want to have with me.”

My main problems with Christian theology and our dependence on Christ’s atoning sacrifice for our salvation were: a) the assumption we have sufficient power to be held responsible for our sin (ie addressing problems of predestination, fate, determinism), and b) the implications of Christ’s centrality for “God-fearing” Muslims, Sikhs, etc. (ie will God comdemn those people to eternal judgment for ignorance of a gospel they haven’t heard of?). Thankfully I came to a philosophical position by which I could reconcile God’s sovereignty with an idea of human freewill and moral responsibility, and I also found a satisfactory way of understanding the nature of salvation and God’s grace with regards to people of other faiths. With these issues resolved, the story of Jesus as God’s ultimate and definitive demonstration of his love towards us remained irresistible to me.

I may blog a series of posts on that “dark night of the soul.” As I dig up what I wrote at that time I am surprised at the depth of thought and authenticity I find there. We are beginning to touch on existentialism in my philosophy class at the moment, and the idea of spiritual crisis seems central to an existentialist approach to life and thought. What is not central is a positive role for religious belief as a free act or “upsurge” which resolves the crisis – in fact religion is more typically seen as the trappings that are stripped away in such a crisis. As I prepare for my own essay on existentialism I may review that “year of despair” in this light.

Christian gestation

In my last post I talked a bit about what it means to be born again. I talked about the types of Christian commitments I made as a kid, and how my final commitment was more of a surrender than a statement. I asked, "If we are so much at the mercy of God, yet are not accepted into his Kingdom without that rebirth, then what on earth can we do about it?"

The scriptures indicate, as does Christian experience, that true spiritual rebirth is entirely dependent on the grace and sovereign will of God. Yet it seems that human beings quite consciously make decisions to be involved in that process, at many levels. Today I would like to explore this paradox, and try to answer that question; What can I do to be born again?


The scriptures

The Apostle Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, makes a statement that, though short, reveals some more detail about the nature of Christian rebirth. Frustrated at the way his disciples are being persauded by false teachers, Paul is concerned "that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you" (Gal 4:10).

He says (Gal 4:19);

"My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!"

Again;

"...for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you..."

This statement seemed quite odd to me when I first read it. The idea of the second birth seems to be clearly rooted in Jesus’ own divine conception by the Holy Spirit. The born again Christian is begotten of God. That means, rather than being the product of a biological union conceived of father and mother, we are conceived spiritually, as Christ, by the Holy Ghost. But in this scripture Paul talks as though the Holy Ghost is not the only parent of the born again. As a mother carries and bears the seed of the father, so Paul talks of himself as the mother of these Galatians, bearing “the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.”

This seems unusual, because as Jesus said to Nicodemus (John 3:8), “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Paul seems to be in the know, or at least hopes he is, that the wind of the Spirit is blowing in the direction of the Galatians. The Virgin Mary held to the words of the Angel Gabriel that the child in her womb was conceived of the Holy Spirit. Paul speaks as if he has a similar prophetic conviction that God was most certainly at work among the Galatians.

But then, this is not so strange. Rather than creating tension with other scriptures, Paul’s self-reference as mother to the "children" of Galatia fits perfectly with the most common analogy for the relationship between Christ and his church – that of bride and groom. If the church is those who have already been born again, then this makes total sense of Paul's gestation analogy.

When Christ died on the cross, as a rib was taken from Adam's side to make Eve, blood poured from Christ's side to make a redeemed, forgiven and called out church – Jesus’ disciples. Seven weeks later the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost and 3000 people were saved. Those people joined in fellowship with the disciples at Jerusalem and, as the Book of Acts puts it, were devoted to their teaching. As the disciples taught and pastored those people, their conversion and hope was made sure. So well were they converted that they endured persecution and hardship and ministered dynamically throughout the Roman Empire, forming the most powerful and enduring institutional movement the world has ever seen. Just as these early Christians were devoted to the teaching of the apostles, so Paul admonishes the Galatians to “become like me” (Gal 4:12) “...until Christ is formed in you."

In Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians we find a similar image. Paul talks of Epaphras, who “is always wrestling in prayer for you, that you may stand firm in all the will of God, mature and fully assured” (Col 4:12). This analogy, of extreme physical exertion by one person for the spiritual development and growth of another, also echoes resoundingly the gestation image. What seems clear is that for Christ to be fully formed in us, for us to complete the gestation and be successfully born again, a lot of work on the part of the church is typically required.

What, then, are the implications of this? As a seeker of genuine spiritual rebirth, what can one do to ensure the work of the spirit in us? What can we do to avoid miscarriage or stillbirth? How transferable is the gestation analogy to Christian conversion?


My story

When I look at my own conversion I can certainly see parallels. What's more, I think that useful principles for the seeker and for the evangelist can be drawn from the analogy. I certainly had my fair share of Pauls and Epaphrases around me sharing in the labours of my second birth – my father and mother for one, my best friend from school Jeromy (without me even knowing it), and the new friends that I made when I entered university.

If spiritual rebirth involves a point of conception as well as a point of birth, then I would point to the preaching of Dave Mann and worship leading of Craig Jones at Eltham Easter Camp 1998. There God's word, to use Jesus’ cultivator analogy (Mark 4:1-20), fell on freshly tilled soil. There were a few thorns around – “the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things,” but despite that, the impact of that camp left an eternal echo in my soul. When I picked up the Bible and read the Book of Ecclesiastes some time later it was because my heart had been so softened by that camp. I made a Christian commitment when I got home from the camp, but it took another year and 20 days until the seed of faith became mature enough to graduate from the pot to the garden! The whole time my father and mother were doing what they could to teach, encourage and pray for me, as were my friends. But obviously I made for a difficult labour - it wasn't until I was at university, surrounded by teaching, encouraging, praying friends, that I finally understood what it was to be born of God, and I was “made alive with Christ,” to use Paul's terminology (Eph 2:5).

Just before I entered university I read the Book of Ecclesiastes and was shocked at the inherent meaninglessness of a life without God. As a result, when I got to Massey, though my main priority was to get boozed and have heaps of fun during O-Week, I was quite interested to find out whether there were any Christians around and what they might be up to.

Very early on I met Mike, a rowdy Christian guy who went on to become one of my best mates. Before he’d even moved into the hostel Mike had been to a Christian camp for university students, run by Massey University Christian Fellowship (MUCF). Now MUCF is a group run by students to reach and help other students with an interest in the Christian faith. It has a long history as part of a wider international student Christian movement that has included the likes of CT Studd and John Stott. Massey has been a particularly fruitful ground for Christian student ministry. In the 1970s and 1980s Massey students were particularly impacted by and involved with the events of the Charismatic Movement. A decade and a half later, MUCF still had a strong sense of seriousness about mission, and charismatic but challenging spirituality.

Mike became a regular at “CF”, as did two other Christian friends I made in my hostel – Steve and Matt. Soon MUCF was on my case – they’d heard I was open to Christianity. Next thing Gavin and James were on my doorstep giving me freshly cooked baking for free, and inviting me to their hostel bible study group. Soon enough I was roped in – I was going along to bible studies and actually starting to learn some things about the Christian faith.

But at the same time I was learning some things about just how much fun life at uni could be, and how good it was to have finally left home and be free to do whatever I wanted. And if I was honest, what I really wanted at that stage, what was more attractive than anything, was to be able to go and get boozed whenever I wanted, and to kiss and take whom whoever I wanted. I knew Christianity demanded a more sober lifestyle, and a more sensitive and respectful attitude to relationships. So I stopped going to the bible studies, and tried to avoid these new Christian friends, and smoke dope with the stoners instead!


Successful labour

Thankfully my friends didn’t give up on me. My family were praying from home, Jeromy was praying from Wellington, and Mike, Steve, Matt, Gavin, James & Marion at Massey were all teaching and encouraging me, and praying for me. Like Paul with the Galatians, this great team of saints were enduring the pains of childbirth to see Christ formed in me. And it was painful. I can remember raising all the problems I had with Christianity to Steve and making him feel like throwing it in as well. And the closer I got to true conversion the more I pulled away from everyone. Once I realised the hugeness of what Christian commitment actually meant (Luke 9:23-26; Gal 2:20) I ran in the opposite direction before running to Jesus and his church.

Finally, on the night of Monday May 3, 1999, after a weekend of drunken & hallucinogenic debauchery, followed by a surprise visit from my father, I realised I couldn’t run from God any longer. My doubts weren’t good enough excuses anymore. The person of Jesus and his work in my life was just too real for me to deny him. He made too much sense. The depth of life he offered made the mundanity of living for the mob or my whimsical dreams seem abhorrent. I couldn’t deny Christ and then just live a normal life as if nothing had happened. Christian or depression-ridden junkie were the only options – the choice was easy.

And so that Monday night I went back to the bible study group. Gavin and James had decided that this would be a night of sharing testimonies –stories of how people came to faith. It got round to me and I had to tell the guys I didn’t have a testimony to share, but I did have a confession to make. As I began to talk about how I’d been running from God, and that I wanted to finally accept him, I totally broke down. I was completely red, tears in my eyes, face in my hands – I killed the night! But there my friends prayed for me as I accepted Jesus Christ as Lord, and asked him to change my life.

And this is why I see that final decision, that true spiritual rebirth, as a surrender rather than a statement. I could see Jesus in all his brilliance. I could sense his transforming love at work. I knew there was no other source of authority that could compete with him, and no other power as able to help me make sense of life. How could I dismiss all that I’d seen in this Christianity as mere fable and superstition? This Jesus was truly the bread of life – spiritually, intellectually, emotionally – and I was starving!

Yet the whole process of Christ revealing himself to me involved individuals making choices every day. I had to at least be willing to take an interest in the Christians, and to let them talk to me about Jesus. They had be willing to be bold enough to talk about their faith with a skeptic on the edge looking in. Salvation is the sovereign work of God, but the seeker can do something by simply being willing to be open to people God is working through. The Christian does his bit by being willing to share his faith, and willing to help, admonish or challenge someone who’s on the edge.


TSCF & Catalyst

I would like to close this post by making a plug for Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship, the national body of the movement that touched my life so dramatically at university. TSCF has 34 different groups on campuses throughout the country. If you are a student you will find a link for your own campus on the “Your Campus” page of the TSCF website. If you are interested in supporting financially a movement with a significant kingdom impact then visit the “Support Us” page.

I would like to particularly promote the work of Mark Grace in Palmerston North, where he has been serving for over seven years. As any Massey Christian student will tell you, Mark puts in a lot of energy and a lot of hard work. On top of the campus ministries he has more recently been developing the Catalyst network. Catalyst is “Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship’s ministry to graduates in the marketplace, post-graduate students and academics.” And the big news is that next month is the first Catalyst Conference, from June 26-28 at Forest Lakes Camp, Otaki. If you want to think seriously about your profession and/or career through the lens of the Kingdom of God, but need a bit of help, then this conference is for you.

Find out more:
Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship
Catalyst Conference

My 10th Birthday

Yesterday was a significant day in the life of A.J. Chesswas. I turned 10.

Jesus said;

"I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

Another guy asked,

"How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born."

Jesus replied;

"I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."


1950 odd years later I heard about this from Mum and Dad, from church and from Bible-in-school. As a wee tacker I figured this verse was saying that being a Christian means that you have to live quite differently to if you weren't a Christian. You can't be bad anymore. Being born again means being good.

Being good got too hard for me as I got older. Especially when the older kids in the playground started beating up on me. Especially when I found out it was because I was a Christian. And it seemed like everyone I knew wasn't Christian and didn't care so much about being good.

Not that any of this excused me.

Another thing Jesus said was;

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

I don't remember being taught that as a kid, but even if I had I don't think it would have made a difference. From that point on I didn't simply hide my Christianity - I gave up any commitment from my own will to the cause. I'd still go to church with the family - kicking and screaming at times. This change was so rapid that when a new kid started school the next year, an older kid told us he'd heard this kid went to church, and I mentioned that I'd seen him at church but that I was only there because my parents forced me to. Not only that, but I went on to be one of this kid's main tormenters. I won't forget the furiousness with which my teacher sent me from the room for telling everyone this kid had AIDS! It's so easy to forget how nasty childhood is sometimes!

Anyway, my point is that my faith as a child was obviously not a very deep one. Once I learned Christianity and social mobility didn't go hand-in-hand in my community, I pretty much kicked the faith to the kerb.

Through my teens there were stops and starts where I made Christian commitments, only to go back on them really quickly. There was the time everyone got sick on a school trip to the South Island, except me. On this trip I also noticed how different I was from everyone. I figured God must be protecting me and keeping me well, and that I should see sense and be a Christian. But once I returned to the drudgery of home life as a 14 year old, being a good obedient son to my parents was just too much of a strain so I gave up on the idea! What I could never do is go about calling myself a Christian without living a "good" life. At least in this sense I had something of an idea of our need for a different spirit in order to enter God's kingdom.

Of course, once I actually became a Christian when I was 18 it seemed I couldn't go anywhere without hearing about how we can't be good people on our own efforts - that I needed the very spirit of God which raised Christ Jesus from the dead to perform a similar miracle upon this dead heart of mine. But I'm sure that before this actually happened to me I could never have understood what people meant by that. And I'm not sure it would have been helpful anyway.

When I finally made that lasting commitment, the night I think of ten years on as the night I was born again, it was more an act of surrender than an act of determination. I still desired to equate my Christianity with a commitment to be "good", but when trials and temptations came I realised the goodness I knew in Christ was more about surrendering to and relying on his work in me than valuing or doing anything of my own accord.


A friend and I had a quick chat in the car on Saturday, about the mystery of a spirituality that acknowledges God's supreme power in the work of salvation and sanctification, yet looks remarkably like a self-propelled daily determination to do good.

Now get ready for this big sentence! [BREATHE]

God's sovereignty often makes us feel like our powerlessness in living right and avoiding sin indicates an absence of God's grace. Thereby we excuse ourselves - we couldn't have done otherwise! But we can never know the degree to which God is helping us. We can never know when doing his will is experienced with a sense of salvific exhilaration, or of rugged and war-like determination. Whether God's will seems easy or hard, the fact is that without the help of his spirit it would be impossible.

And this is why no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.

But, as I said, all this sort of talk is so frustrating when you're on the other side of spiritual rebirth. If we are so much at the mercy of God, yet are not accepted into his Kingdom without that rebirth, then what on earth can we do about it?

Coming up: Christian gestation - how to be born again

New Zealand's own parrot goes to town

A month ago I was jogging up the top of Highbury (the Wellington suburb), near Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, when I noticed a couple of kaka noisily having a bunch of fun in a tree in someone's garden. How cool is that, I thought, I bet you Wellington is the only city where you can see a kaka in someone's section. Having noticed the boom in the tui population already, I pondered how cool it might be if kaka would successfully repopulate what was once its rightful habitat. But then, I figured it was no miracle given that these kaka were so close to the sanctuary.

But the very next day I was busy cutting up some wood outside my sleepout when I heard the same noise, and looked up to see a kaka fly past. And this is in Kelburn, much further from the sanctuary than Highbury. It was very cool to see this big bird swoop across the sky in front of me, with its noisy guffaw, New Zealand's very own native parrot.

However I didn't see a kaka again, although I was rather preoccupied in this time, with getting engaged and helping my fiancee pack for America, then spending a week in Taranaki. And I wasn't back in Kelburn a week before I was treated to the sight of not one, not two, but at least four kaka flying across the top of the Aro Valley from the Botanical Gardens, making their way in the direction of the wildlife sanctuary. And before I saw them I'd already recognised their cheeky & flirtatious whit-whio.

Now when I noticed the tui population boom, I anticipated an article that appeared in the Dominion Post on the subject. So I got online and did a google search to see if anybody had written about the kaka, and I came across a couple of images on Flickr; one of a kaka feeding from an exotic tree in the Botanical Gardens, taken November 2008, and another of a kaka living it up at a party in what looks like Higbury, December 2008. Both birds have tags on their legs, so it's not as if the population is booming wildly, but it's still cool we can see these beautiful birds around our city.


Kaka fees from an exotic tree at Botanical Gardens, Wellington


Kaka takes a nibble at Highbury party, Wellington


Kaka enjoys the view from the balcony, Higbury, Wellington

Steve Crow is a loser

Unfortunately I was unable to attend a service on ANZAC morning. But as I drove from Stratford to Wellington it was touching to see services and soldiers in the streets of little places like Waverley and Maxwell, and listen to commentary on the radio. The last post boomed eerily from my radio as I drove through the Wanganui hinterlands, where Arthur, Frank, Bert & Harry Chesswas grew up before serving their country during The Great War (thankfully all of these uncles returned, although Harry was seriously injured by a granade). As I drove, I couldn't help but feel a deep sense of respect and honour for those family and community members that had gone to war and even to death to protect my homeland.

Sadly, though, this ANZAC weekened has brought to light the sad state of affairs of the RSA in my home city of New Plymouth, a city judged time and again as best city in the country, even best city in the world. In February last year, despite the protests of many Taranaki people, including myself and a number of New Plymouth RSA members, New Zealand's most famous pornographer Steve Crow, with his brother David, purchased the New Plymouth RSA clubrooms. In August David took over the management of the club, concerned at the previous year's defecit of $200 000. In order to achieve this he has hiked up prices of drinks and banned people from bringing their own food, and as a result has got a number of members' backs up and become front page news in the Taranaki Daily News and the Sunday News.

Now it is important that the presence of the RSA is sustainable, so perhaps the Crows are actually doing the noble thing here. Mind you, they have already made a $40 000 profit this year, so maybe there is scope to soften the policies a little. But Steve himself tells the media "They say we're in it purely for the money," and it would seem that their hard-hitting management style won't be necessary for cashflow once the north-facing mural is removed and replaced with billboards to create more revenue. But wait, Crow is planning to use these billboards to advertise New Plymouth's first Erotica expo, and of course its associated torrid Boobs on Bikes display. That's right - not only is Crow bringing his trash to the world's favourite city, but he's advertising it at our local RSA!

But what can we do? It sucks that money runs the world. It sucks that there's a man greasy enough to enter one of the most lucratively demeaning markets the world has ever seen. It sucks that my home province produced New Zealand's most famous pornographer. It sucks that he held his Auckland expo on my birthday last year, almost ruining it completely except that later that day I received a suprise text from a random girl who went on to become my fiancee! But, keeping on point, it sucks that Steve Crow is now planning an erotica expo for New Plymouth, all the while ripping off and demeaning our local RSA.

Former RSA member Hawea "Guv" Grey says advertising an Erotica expo does not fit with the image of an RSA. I would say that holding an Erotica expo does not fit with the image of New Plymouth. I would hope this is a sentiment shared by leaders in the community, and I will be disappointed if I don't hear the likes of Mayor Peter Tennent, Bishop Philip Richardson or other community leaders make similar statements. New Zealand is not an oligarchy - money does not rule this country. Democratic and church leaders have a responsibility to open their mouths and lead with principles and conviction. It was once said the pen is mightier than the sword. I would like to think, too, that the microphone and keyboard can avail the dollar.

In the meantime, I have found a fun Facebook group to help with the cause:

Steve Crow is a loser!

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

Last week, on Easter Monday, I asked my girlfriend of 7 1/2 months to marry me and she said yes. Five days later I drove her to Auckland Airport and she departed for a 3-month trip to the American continent.

Stephanie Jones is travelling through the USA to take in the sights and sounds of jazz and gospel music in San Francisco, New Orleans, Texas and beyond. Stephanie has also started her own blog, and has already written two posts all about her visit to a San Francisco gospel church. Easy to read, fun and breezy, perceptive and interesting, Steph's USA Adventure will be a great read for anyone interested in American jazz and gospel culture.

And if you have any jazz or gospel contacts on the American continent do email them to me at ajchesswas@gmail.com, and I will forward them on to Stephanie.

Check it out:

Steph's USA Adventure