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Sermon for Maundy Thursday, Christ Church Chelsea, 28 March 2013 Earlier today, the Royal Maundy took place, in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. I thought I might tell you a bit about the Royal Maundy, as a way of framing the themes of Maundy Thursday.I've brought a Maundy set with me, from 1867, together with a page from the Illustrated London News. It depicts the ceremony that day, 146 years ago, and includes a written account of events. Do pass them around, for those of you keen on visual aids, or who need a distraction during the sermon. While it's now customary for the monarch to distribute the Royal Maundy, as you'll see from the picture, in 1867 Queen Victoria delegated the task to her Lord High Almoner, the Bishop of Oxford. Maundy was distributed to as many poor men and women as there were years in Victoria's reign, amid much pomp and ceremony. The format for the Royal Maundy hasn't changed much over the years, but the changes that have been made are noteworthy.
When the Royal Maundy was first introduced, probably by King John in 1213, the ceremony started with foot-washing. This involved a lot of nosegays – which are still ceremonially carried today – and several pre-washes by B-list dignitaries, before the monarch got anywhere near a poor person's foot. After this, the poor were given food, clothes, and as many pence as there were years in the monarch's reign. The monarch would then take off their gown, and give it to a particularly needy-looking pauper. This practice continued until Elizabeth I baulked at parting with one of her spangly numbers, and gave the poor extra money instead.
The foot-washing doesn't happen any more, either, although it was briefly reinstated by Rowan Williams in 2003, after a break of 400 years. To be fair, there may be health & safety reasons for this, given that St Oswald, then Archbishop of York, died during the foot-washing ceremony of the year 992.
The gifts of clothing have stopped too, because the poor had a habit of getting their kit off during the service, and trading with each other until they found items that fit. The amount of female flesh on display made the men present rather twitchy, so more money was given instead.
Neither is food now given out, because the poor were caught selling it for less than its value immediately after the service. This gift has also been converted to cash. The cash itself is the only thing that remains, and remains special, in that it is minted as special Maundy coinage. The current sets unusually still bear the 'young' bust of Queen Elizabeth, and comprise 1, 2, 3 and 4 pence pieces, in sterling silver, of a design that hasn't changed since the 1867 set I've brought with me. Apparently Maundy sets have always been flogged to coin-collectors. They used to gather outside the Maundy service, but now they lurk on eBay. The coins have always fetched more than their face value, so the replacement of the other gifts with a financial equivalent has had the effect of increasing the value of the Royal Maundy to the poor. Or has it?
You are probably familiar with arguments over the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor, especially in the context of the Coalition Government's welfare reforms. It seems that the Royal Maundy has always been distributed to the 'deserving' poor. Nowadays it's a bit like getting an OBE – the churches recommend pillars of the community who happen not to be wealthy, and they receive the Royal Maundy in recognition of their contribution to society.
I love this Maundy tradition, but on closer inspection it's actually rather suspect, and reflects some of the basic problems of our age.
First, money is now the sole Maundy gift, in the same way that welfare payments are supposed to salve the nation's conscience. Money! It's so easy! Do you, like me, not feel a bit relieved, when you can walk past a vagrant, with a vague smile, reminding yourself that you pay your taxes and give regularly to Shelter?
Second, Maundy recipients are no longer really 'the poor'. The poor have smelly feet, and they do things like take their kit off in church, which is all rather embarrassing. And that's just the deserving poor. Don't get me started on the other lot.
Third, foot-washing, if carried out at all, is certainly not performed by the monarch, and doesn't involve dirty feet. I'd like to bet those of you involved in it today have gone to great lengths to avoid any embarrassment in that department. Just imagine if Brian saw that corn plaster!
Finally, the whole point of the ceremony is for the monarch to humble themself in direct response to the mandatum that we heard in John 13:34. While our own Queen is a shining example of a monarch actually showing up to the ceremony, for most of its history, the job has been delegated, to the clergy. And in our own parish, aren't we rather grateful that the clergy do all that pastoral visiting, and speak to weirdos, and that there are charities we can support to avoid us having to do any actual charity work ourselves?
Back in Christ Church Oxford today, the Royal Maundy ceremony itself has been sanitised to the point of arcane ritual. Pageantry now replaces everything about it that matters. Media reports are invariably long on the Queen's hat and what a trooper she is, and short on anything to do with Christian humility or charity. And I worry that this leeching away of meaning might distract us from the heart of the Maundy message.
What always strikes me about Maundy Thursday is what a devastating reproach it is. We can blame Good Friday on power and politics, but Maundy Thursday is a tale of ordinary human failure, the sort that could affect any of us.
Like Peter, we've questioned the crazy logic of Christ's actions, we've been hasty in our own actions, and we've denied Christ at least three times. Like Judas, we've betrayed a friend, perhaps accidentally through gossip or through neglect. Like the disciples, we've been actually or metaphorically asleep on the job [Poole casts a beady eye around to check that the good people of Chelsea are AWAKE at this point]. Like the naked man, we've run away when our friends needed us, and we've all been scared that Jesus might not be who he said he was.
At a national level, we've seen that the Royal Maundy is now only really about money, and the 'deserving' poor, and there is a real danger that government policy on welfare is going the same way. Maybe we really do get the society we deserve. But while many are gloomy about this, I see it as a huge opportunity for the churches.
Before we had a welfare state, the Church was it. We ran the schools and the hospitals, and took care of those in the community who were in need. John 13:35 – by this all men shall know you are my disciples, if you love one another. But, post-war, we've had a long period of outsourcing Christian charity to the government. Now, the churches are back, leading the way in running homeless shelters, foodbanks, fairtrade, and credit unions – filling the gaps left by the State. Of course, we should be leading this agenda, not following it, but that's for another day. Today, we should think about what the Maundy message means for our Easter lives.
The Guardian ran a piece last week, about how many non-Christians now keep Lent. It argued that while a period of abstinence is a worthy goal, diving straight back into our old habits rather misses the point, like my nephew giving up chocolate, then eating so much on Easter day that he was sick. The 'maundy' – mandatum – is that we should love one another, as he has loved us, and not just for Lent.
In 1867, Thomas Barnardo opened his first shelter for homeless children. That year, the last convict ship sailed for Australia, and women again failed to get the vote. Looking at that page from the Illustrated London News, 1867 feels very far away. But in 2013, are we better at helping the homeless? Are we better at dealing with convicts? Are we better at valuing women?
Maundy Thursday is the ultimate wake-up call. We have indeed erred and strayed like lost sheep, and we continue to do so. We know it all comes good on Sunday, but while we are held in the Maundy liturgy, we should let our guilt galvanise us into becoming people who strive to be better every day, not just during Lent. 1867 also saw the introduction of the blue plaque. Maybe we could all aspire to be the sort of philanthropist that merits such an accolade, by heeding Christ's mandatum, and resolving anew to be his hands and feet in our world today.
Tags: 1867, chelsea, convict, credit union, elizabeth, fairtrade, foodbank, homeless, lent, maundy, money, queen, royal, sermon, victoria, welfare, women
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The Pope (Retd) is to spend the rest of his days quietly in the Vatican's Mater Ecclesiae nunnery (sans nuns). It may be that a scandal has yet to emerge, which would explain a little better why this pope really decided to retire, the first to do so in 600 years. But if he has genuinely decided to throw in the towel on grounds of ill-health, he may have just performed his most important act as a global leadership role model. His exit contains valuable insight for those in any sacred or secular profession, particularly where a role has become vocational. It seems that as work takes over ever more of our lives, we have begun to ache for meaning. The rise in workplace spirituality is a response to this ache, as are the increasing numbers of management development interventions concerning vision, values and purpose. Cynically, these can be used to indicate an organisational requirement for loyalty beyond the call of duty, a sort of compulsory organisational citizenship in a 24x7 culture. But when such initiatives are employee-led, they more commonly spring from the very human yearning for a career not to have been labour in vain. And it is ordinarily a wholly positive thing for a job to be elevated to the status of a vocation by being imbued with meaning, because it helps a person to remain motivated when things are tough. Some roles have traditionally been viewed as vocational – clergy, doctors, nurses, teachers, public servants. They have tended not to pay as well as other jobs, but society has deemed them as more worthy (the K or the 'k's again). And perhaps these sorts of jobs need to be explicitly vocational, as those doing them can expect hard times, and need to have the personal resources ready to cope. In addition to the notion of vocation, in theology there is a term called kenosis, which describes the 'self-emptying' of a person so they become more receptive to God's will. There is also the tradition of carrying burdens for others, and this heady mix can lead to extraordinary sacrifice from religious people, wherever they work. Many secular traditions also encourage the ethic of service, and in any context it can be taken to extremes. HBR (July-Aug 1999) contains a very useful paper called Toxic Handlers, about those people at work who absorb cultural angst for the good of the organisational as a whole. We all know people who do this, at no small cost to themselves, and they serve a vital organisational function. But in some cases, this sense of purpose has a much darker side. If vocation, kenosis, or toxic handling themselves become idols, or more to do with ego than service, a person will often lose all perspective, persisting in their 'calling' beyond all reason or use. Such martyrs are hard to unseat, once they feel they are on a mission, and their increasing insularity renders their decision-making dangerous at best. And when the vagaries of being senior start to bite, it is understandable that so many leaders become filled with missionary zeal. They collect around them fellow believers, encouraging a culture of confirmatory bias, and start to believe their own narrative. In this light, quarrels over executive pay seem entirely reasonable – how could you ever pay such demigods enough? And slowly the organisation re-shapes itself to do the leader's will, rather than the job the organisation was established to do. Depending on the strength of the leader, and the organisation they lead, this process can be fairly modest, or frighteningly far-reaching in its scope. Sometimes whole companies collapse, like Enron, drunk with a sense of being on the side of the angels, and sometimes it is the leader who collapses, with burnout. In neither case is the organisation well-served. But imagine how hard it is to walk away. From the excitement, the glory, the trappings, the fans. And, in the Pope's case, throw into this mix the tradition that a calling is for life. Ignoring for the time being the particular complication of papal infallibility, the whole concept of the religious retiring is rather novel. Even in the Church of England it was only established in law in the 1970s, because you can't exactly switch God off once he has picked you out for ordination. So the Pope has done something really very extraordinary. Standing down when not required to do so calls for high levels of personal awareness, humility, and courage. Too few go before they should. Rowan Williams and the Pope both went before they had to - albeit for different reasons. Perhaps some of our secular leaders should ask themselves whether they are really the leader their organisation needs, and follow the example set by their ecclesiastical peers. Tags: burnout, kenosis, meaning, pope, retirement, toxic handlers, vocation, workplace spirituality
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My Godson fixes me with a beady eye. “If I finish my peas, do I get a sticker?” I was on holiday, taking the twins on a Progress to meet their northern relatives, and visiting friends en route. Every fridge I saw boasted a sticker-chart, and every meal seemed to go the same way, coupled with endless negotiation about getting dressed, sharing toys, doing jobs, and behaving in general. The more enterprising children would have shocked Luther with their creativity in conjuring up fresh sticker opportunities. They reminded me of those cartoon Catholics of yore, who played the system by figuring out that sinning generates more God points than leading a blameless life, because it enables you to get grace top-ups through confession and absolution. Maybe I have been in the trade for too long, but doing deals over broccoli also reminded me of some of the coaching sessions I have had with senior leaders. They, too, are ruled by the executive equivalent of the sticker-chart, and are increasingly loath to do anything that hasn't been pre-negotiated to deliver a specific reward. Management theory positions this as ' transactional leadership', in order to recommend in contrast ' transformational leadership'. Like so many trite theories, this entirely misses the point. I've written elsewhere about the worrying zeitgeist of materialism, and our over-dependence on scepticism as the narrative of choice. The point is that the sticker-chart generation shows the complete failure of our attempt as a society to inculcate moral character.
Perhaps it could be argued that the culture of business lends itself to sticker-chart protocols. They have certainly become de rigeur since performance management was introduced in the 1970s. But it is frankly terrifying that this approach seems to have worked its way back, through the education system via marking schemes and SATs, into our kitchens. Parents up and down the land routinely get hoodwinked into buying lego and build-a-bear accessories, by children whose first lesson in life seems to be how to manipulate the local reward system.
It is fashionable to obsess about Gen Y, and they may well be the first sticker-chart generation. They certainly seem to have a transactional approach towards employment. Ashridge research shows that their top three priorities are challenging/interesting work, a high salary, and advancing their career. Money usually comes much lower in this list in more general workplace polls, and almost half of the Gen Y-ers polled said that their salary was below their expectations. 57% expect to leave their employer within two years.
Why does this matter? Formally, it is about understanding the merits of intrinsic rewards – things that are good to do in and of themselves, not for the good they will bring you instrumentally. The classic Enlightenment ethic of utilitarianism sits well with extrinsic reward/punishment strategies, as it is all about calculating the good that would arise from a given course of action. This is the ethic of choice in the modern marketplace. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, is about the development of the right character through moral practice, and doing good simply to be good. I suppose children have always been mercenary, but we are certainly institutionalising the process through the ubiquity of the sticker-chart
Informally, and for the world of work, this matters because it is about discretionary effort. In the field of Organisational Citizenship, discretionary effort is calculated as the positive difference between what an employee is contractually obliged to do, and the job they actually perform. All the extras like attention to detail, good communication, proactive innovation, loyalty – everything that marks out your dream employee from a jobsworth – are actually legally unenforceable, but have always been assumed in the accompanying psychological contract. That a field called Organisational Citizenship is currently in vogue shows that we are already in trouble, especially as the theory tends to lag practice by several years
But if our children learn not to move a muscle unless there is a sticker in the offing, what kind of a Gen Z workforce are we generating? We can't put them all on an organisational naughty step if they are doing exactly what we have trained them to do. Learning to rely primarily on extrinsic motivation depletes will-power and the ability to self-motivate, and makes our children perpetually dependent on other people's reward systems. This makes them all the more dependent on others for their happiness. Great news for the 'self-help' industry, but bad news for Gen Z.
Tags: ashridge, extrinsic, gen y, gen z, intrinsic, motivation, sticker-chart, utilitarianism, virtue ethics
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Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge at Great St Mary's on 14 October 2012Maybe it's not done to open a University Sermon with a reference to the rather lavatorial Viz magazine. But had you noticed that it has become a place of great theological insight? I think the God cartoons began shortly after the furore over the Muhammed cartoons. One that particularly stands out for me concerns the Super-heroes, Super God and the Son of Man Wonder. In the cartoon, they arrive at the scene of a variety of disasters, where they have to sit idly by, to avoid interfering with free will. The cartoon I want to reference, however, is an argument between St Francis and St Nicholas. St Francis, of course, has taken a vow of poverty, and spurns possessions. St Nicholas, on the other hand, delivers presents to children at Christmas, that great festival of materialism. In the cartoon, St Nicholas devises ever more devious ways to give St Francis presents, while St Francis delights in giving them all away. Finally, St Francis dies, happy that in spite of St Nicholas he has fulfilled his vocation to poverty. Death will at last rid him of the attentions of this persistent present-giver. But what does he find waiting for him at the Pearly Gates? An enormous stack of presents. Materialism is perhaps the defining narrative of our time. We most often encounter it as the St Francis complaint, that we all have too much stuff. And Materialism is fuelled by Consumerism, which is designed to render us eternally restless, in an unending quest for fulfilment through possessions. Well, the Bible of course has quite a lot to say about that. But I think that Materialism defines our time in a much more general sense. This is because it is about matter, and what matters. In one sense, this preoccupation with the material represents the crowning of Enlightenment rationality. David Hume was its most famous champion, arguing for a scepticism that would prevent us from being deceived by 'sophistry and illusion'. He would well have understood the queues of people outside Northern Rock a few years ago, demanding 'show me the money'. And who is Hume's natural successor today? Enter the man Rowan Williams has described as just the latest 'pub bore' on atheism. Richard Dawkins' insistence on scientific standards of proof for any type of belief would gladden Hume's heart. And the prevalence of this highly sceptical narrative makes my job as a public theologian rather difficult. Because I think we are all public theologians now, I want to invite you to wrestle with me about it today, to see if we can find some new ways to pull it off. But why Doubting Thomas? Well, I have asked him here to help us today, because he epitomises this need for evidence. As we have heard in our reading, Thomas was so keen on proof, that he wanted not only to see the wounds of Christ, but also to feel them around his fingers. I work in a Business School, and the arena for most of my theology is the marketplace. There, whatever is measured has become the thing that matters most. This means that what matters is often whatever can be most easily measured, like revenue or share price. Of course, this isn't just a City thing. We've all seen the headlines about NHS manipulation of waiting lists and hospital beds, and no doubt many of you have felt the RAE breathing down your neck as you contemplate your publication choices. Even the Church has joined the bandwagon, issuing regular press releases to show that every other person you meet in the street is a Christian, as if that somehow attests to the health of the CofE. Doubting Thomas, the Management Guru? At the very least he deserves to be made Patron Saint of performance management regimes. But is measurement always so bad? Sometimes it can bring about great good. Witness the amazing strides being achieved in the reduction of child mortality rates in Africa. A focus on this metric has led to the widespread introduction of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, with the result that child mortality is now falling twice as fast as it did during the previous two decades. But the risks of measurement are high. We have seen at first hand the damage that can be wrought by incentivising business executives with shares. This has led to the widespread manipulation of share price by fair means or foul. And the bonus culture has fuelled risk-taking in banking, leading to extraordinarily fierce and elaborate trading, and the invention of ever more complex ways to increase profits. Do you remember the way we all chatted authoritatively about CDOs, or Collateralized Debt Obligations, at the height of the financial crisis? These fruits of the measurement culture in banking led to the downfall of the financial system in 2008. Recent blips have also been created by high-frequency trading, where computer algorithms make automatic trades, to take advantage of infinitesimal changes in asset prices over fractions of a second. Perhaps this is just an argument for better and more elegant measures, which is certainly the Government's current approach, in its attempts to cure the ills of the City through regulation. The bad news is that this obsession with measuring the world by reducing it to the sum total of the available evidence is endemic. More than just the gradual creep of managerial norms into all walks of life, it resides in the heart of our dominant ethical narrative, too. This is no accident, because the traditional capitalist emphasis on the transactional has grown up hand-in-hand with the Enlightenment's favourite ethic, Utilitarianism. This ethic, of course, holds that a moral act can be measured, actually in retrospect or theoretically in prospect, by the amount of 'good' it produces. In economics this has become the 'utility function', whereby it is assumed that consumers are driven by a need to maximise the good for them personally in any given transaction. And because the modern State relies increasingly on public transparency for its legitimacy, economic and legal systems that are evidence-based are hugely compelling and politically popular. Theologically, this evidence-based approach is more than just the triumph of Doubting Thomas. It echoes the Reformation's famous fault-line between faith and works. Works are proof. Works can be measured. Works are convincing. They persuade other people, and – perhaps more crucially – the believer themselves, that their faith is real. Cathedral attendance up? Increasing numbers of church weddings? Legendary waiting lists for Church schools? These pieces of evidence get fired out in response to the doubters with monotonous regularity. But being this sort of Jew to the Jews and Greek to the Greeks massively misses the point. Indeed, it is the very things that flee measurement that have been found publicly lacking in recent years, as people lose their faith in the banks, in the politicians, in the newspapers, and in each other. Instead of competing for space in the public debate by going native, I think it is the scandalous nebulousness of religion that the world really needs the most. Because the discipline of faith is, to coin a management phrase, the core competence of religion. Let me say a little more about this. When someone is trying hard to believe something that they're not very sure about, they do things to reassure themselves. For example, they do lots of behaving ‘as if’ so that nobody finds out about their doubts, least of all themselves. As the t-shirt has it, 'look busy, Jesus is coming.' If the belief is about a person or situation, the believer will also indulge in so-called Confirmatory Bias. This means that they seek out evidence in support of their meagre belief, largely ignoring contrary evidence, unless and until it achieves critical mass. Religions know this pattern well. How do they school us in faith? First, they make belief a good thing, in and of itself (see Luther's emphasis on sola fides). Next, they use liturgy to feed confirmatory bias, rehearsing faith narratives week by week and year by year, as a perpetual reminder. Additionally, they encourage believers to enact their faith in their everyday lives, the classic ‘fake it til you feel it’ strategy. To help, they use role models to show us the way. These may appear in the stories of holy scripture – whose re-telling is always a vital part of the liturgy – but are also retrieved from the centuries since, through the prophets and saints and other famous followers, many of whom enjoy dedicated memorials and feast days. Inherently, the trump card in most religions is a reward or punishment strategy (heaven or hell) that kicks in after death. Because the afterlife is itself an article of faith, the concept serves to reinforce a religion's entire mindset. Hence Pascal's famous wager, or, as Parry so beautifully sets to music in today's anthem, 'eternal be the sleep if not to waken so.' The religion of Christianity is also helpfully hot on ambiguity, with a central figure who is somehow both God and man, dead and alive, historical and eternal. And don't get me started on the Trinity. This is compounded by the famous woolliness of Anglicanism. Viz, again, provides a surprisingly good example of this tradition, in pillorying the Archbishop of Canterbury: '”People have accused me of sitting on the fence about gayness, but now I'm firmly off the fence and able to sidestep the issue square on,” he said, through his beard... “I can now categorically state that I am 100% unsure about the matter...In a sense, it seems to me that I can neither condone nor condemn it.” In the trade we would call ambiguity Anglicanism's meta-competence. Do you remember Lewis Carroll's White Queen? To paraphrase her, Anglicans are brilliant at believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And this is a very helpful strategy in the business of faith more generally. In the secular world, developing an ease with ambiguity is now considered a core life skill. If you canvass my business school colleagues, you will encounter a high degree of certainty about the need for modern leaders to embrace uncertainty! Loving shades of grey is not about the sort of book that has restored the fortunes of WH Smiths. Rather, it is about the courage to entertain the unknown, and to hang back from the premature and presumptive leap to conclude. Why? Because the future is less predictable than we suppose, and in an increasingly diverse and complex world we need to hold our hypotheses lightly. It helps, too, if we recognise this urge to resolve uncertainty for what it really is – the urge to control and to dominate. This need to subdue the world around us by measuring it is recognised as a common trait in personality psychology. This holds that we demonstrate our competence and potency, indeed our very agency, by taming our surroundings. 'And Adam gave names to all the animals.' Not for nothing is there a tradition that possessing someone's name – Rumpelstiltskin? - gives you power over them. And all you hippies out there may remember that this was a point famously made in that 70s publishing phenomenon Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, about our ego-driven need to carve things up into categories. Because certainty, along with its companions, evidence and measurement, is really arrogance. What happened when Job insisted on an explanation? 'Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?' roars God in response. Anglican Liberalism has been very good at avoiding this sort of arrogance. For the theologian Christopher Insole, humility and a generosity towards others is what defines the liberal project. He calls this 'principled reticence', in which 'political liberals make room in their hearts and in the heart of society so as to allow for a diverse range of incompatible but humanely possible identifications of the good.' Indeed, in any religion where omniscience is reserved to the divine, it could be argued that a faithful agnosticism is the theologically correct stance. As the father of the child in Mark 9:24 says, "I believe; help my unbelief!" Even Richard Dawkins is agnostic now. In his Oxford debate with the Archbishop earlier this year, Dawkins admitted that he was only 6.9 out of 7 sure of his beliefs. And in my view, the peculiar vocation of the Public Theologian is to be agnostic. To sit on the fence, and to stay there, until it becomes a communicating door. But in the marketplace, where I spend most of my time, the fence between the sacred and the secular has become a spiky, uncomfortable one, with anti-climb paint between the world of God and the world of Mammon. It has been said that it is easier in the workplace to admit that you're gay than to admit that you're a Christian. My secular friends tell me, that if someone at work says they believe in God, people think that their judgement is suspect more generally, which can prove pretty career-limiting. If being a public Christian might be costly in terms of career, sitting on the fence for a living can be existentially costly. The Jewish philosopher-mystic Simone Weil describes this as the 'dangerous and very painful' vocation to anonymity, being 'ever ready to be mixed into the paste of common humanity'. For her, this anonymity extended to a refusal to be baptised when she converted to Christianity. She said that her grounds were that 'I cannot help still wondering whether, in these days when so large a proportion of humanity is submerged in materialism, God does not want there to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ, and who yet remain outside the church.' Perhaps we do not need to go quite this far, but her emphasis on solidarity with those outside the faith is to me the essence of St Paul's approach 'to the Jews as a Jew'. It is not about duplicity, to go 'disguised' to the Jews or the Greeks, rather it is about respect and humility, and the archetypal 'walking a mile in their shoes.' Agnosticism is above all else an orientation. When as part of my PhD here I spent some time analysing types of theology, I noticed that most theology is conducted either in the Indicative or the Imperative mood: 'I believe' or 'Thou shalt'. Where might the gaps be? Very little theology, particularly in the public sphere, is conducted in either the interrogative or the subjunctive. Few questions, and little doubt. This may well be because it feels heretical or at least faithless to question or to doubt, like the hapless Thomas. But the beauty of mood is that orientation does not necessarily bear any relation to reality. I can still believe in God most profoundly while carrying on my job as a theologian in questioning the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Maybe I'm getting too deep for this time on a Sunday morning, so here is a lighter example. It's what I call my 'Gruffalo Defence'. Those of you with small children or grandchildren may know the story. In it, a mouse invents a beast called the Gruffalo to frighten off would-be predators. Imagine his horror when he discovers that the monster really exists. The point is, that whether or not God exists is not affected by our certainty. God does not get somehow bigger or more powerful just because more people believe more certainly in him. Let me ram this point home. Are there any Terry Pratchett fans out there? He wrote a book called Small Gods as an elaboration of this idea. In his Discworld, the size of each God is directly proportional to the number of believers they have. Those whose believers have dwindled have become, like Tithōnos in Greek Myth, just a disembodied voice in the desert. This seems to be what we fear might happen to our God if we do not defend him loudly enough. But, as we have seen, there is something rather arrogant about certainty. This compulsion to prove God's existence is supremely well-intentioned, but it certainly seems to be more about us, than about God. Modernity's Thomas-tendencies are not a call to the faithful. Rather, they are a snare for the unwary. They are a distraction and, if we could better see them as such, perhaps we could turn back to more productive ways of being Christian. Have you heard of the famous poker incident? It took place in 1946 just over the road, in H3 in the Gibbs building at King's. Wittgenstein and Popper were arguing about problems and puzzles. Wittgenstein felt so strongly about it that he reportedly threatened Popper with a poker. Popper's essential point was this. There are solvable things, like mathematical problems, and there are un-solvable things, which are the proper concern of philosophy. To muddle them is to commit a category error. It is also not a very practical way to spend one's time. While as a theologian, speaking in Cambridge, I would defend to the death the importance of pondering the imponderable, for the everyday Christian, this distinction is salutary. One could spend a lot of one's day wondering whether or not one actually existed, there being no proof for realism. But that wouldn't get the laundry done or the tea on the table. So most of us just Keep Calm and Carry On. The same applies, in my view, to the debate on the existence of God. Back to Wittgenstein, famous for his notion of 'language games'. Everything is a language game, really, driven by a fairly haphazard combination of location and convention. And I think this is a very releasing concept for public theology. It would certainly stop the likes of Dawkins in their tracks, if we were to deny them the oxygen of outrage, by responding instead with a rather Gallic shrug. 'You say tomādo and I say tomato.' The rules of the language game that is religion are perfectly designed to inculcate faithfulness. Wouldn't it be better for the faithful to use their skill at it, on the solvable, rather than the un-solvable? I think we would have some really useful things to say about the collapse in public trust, and about how best to rebuild our broken society. So, back to my title. Do you reckon Thomas was a guru or a bore? Perhaps both, or either, or neither. He certainly wasn't your typical Anglican. And amidst this modern clamour for certainty I would argue that a studied diffidence towards evidence is the most heroic and useful mode for us Christians to adopt. Of course, the supreme irony of recent times has to be the Higgs boson. Like Macavity, it's not there. It can only be proved by its absence, an infinitesimally small 'decay signature', that suggests that it might once have been. In defiance of habeas corpus, this proof, in absentia, is likely to be the most exciting scientific event of the age. And if even the scientists are convinced by absence these days, I think it's time for us Anglicans to sidle absent-mindedly into the limelight. It's time we started a better conversation. Perhaps we might start by making more use of the subjunctive. And could we ask the world better questions about how to be more faithful? Like Thomas, we could obsess about whether or not we could put our fingers through Christ's wounds. Or, we could instead wonder about what Christ's wounds actually meant. And we can do so with confidence, with John's words ringing in our ears: 'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.' Tags: agnosticism, cambridge, consumerism, enlightenment, gruffalo, guru, hume, materialism, popper, pub bore, richard dawkins, rowan williams, scepticism, simone weil, small gods, st francis, st nicholas, terry pratchett, thomas, tithonos, utilitarianism, viz, wittgenstein
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When I was at Deloitte, and a Partner fixed you with his beady eye and barked 'Feedback – offline!' your knees started to knock. I gather the culture at Apple was similar, if more public, and someone I know at Tesco once had his report torn in two by Sir Terry at a board meeting and was told 'there's your feedback'. This Apprentice-style approach seems only to be on the rise. A recent study of contract workers reports that fewer than 7% of them would consider returning to traditional employment, and I suspect this insidious 'feedback' culture is partly to blame. But why does feedback have to be such a negative experience? I once watched an exercise whereby someone walked into a room and the crowd had to get them to write their name on a flipchart solely through the use of booing and jeering if they put a foot wrong. After 10 minutes or so, they froze on the spot, scared that any move would produce a negative response. The exercise was then repeated with a fresh subject, only this time the crowd had to applaud and cheer if the subject made a move that would contribute towards the goal. It took this person only a few minutes to achieve the task. Simplistic perhaps, but this exercise sums up years of research into negative incentives. This should not be taken as an argument for vapid cheer-leading, and it is also true that no feedback at all leaves you essentially blind, but there is a difference between destructive and constructive feedback. This difference can be tracked through a concept called 'ego depletion'. Each of us self-regulates through our executive function, the brain’s PA. This function organises our behaviour, regulating and monitoring it in response to the environment, and controls our actions and emotions. Work carried out by my Ashridge colleague Angela Whelan studied the extent to which this functional battery is topped up or depleted by a variety of managerial activities, and showed that feedback received as constructive boosts our ability to function, in contrast to negative experiences, which run our will-power battery down. Like the booing and cheering exercise, physiologically we become stymied by negativity, not motivated by it, which suggests that Alan Sugar-style management is ultimately counter-productive. So how do you ensure that colleagues – peers, juniors and bosses – benefit from accurate read-outs of the effect they have on their environment, particularly when their behaviour is unhelpful, without resorting to the traditional 'shit sandwich' approach that any canny person can see coming a mile off? Giving good quality positive and negative feedback is both a gift and a skill. Places like Ashridge use a variety of acronyms to signpost the features of constructive feedback, for example BOFF – feedback that is about an observed Behaviour, the Outcome it produced, the Feelings it gave rise to in the feedback-giver, and that person's request or suggestion for Future behaviour. Other models stress the importance of specificity and timeliness, and the need for the feedback to be about helping the receiver rather than allowing the giver to let off steam. I also advise the reluctant feedback-giver to limber up on positive feedback until they have a comfortable routine with which to deliver harder messages, and to get into the habit of giving feedback to anyone, not just to their direct reports, and whenever a behaviour is notable, not just during an annual appraisal. It doesn't matter too much which protocol you use, it just matters that you do it, and that it is done without destroying the vulnerable people around you. In the workplace we may be getting ever better at pretending we're tough, but no-one likes abuse. One of the most unforgivable facets of modern management is the requirement to subject yourself to your boss's feedback, no matter how poorly it is given. Indeed we seem to be encouraging bad bosses at the moment, in the mistaken belief that personality flaws are the price you pay for brilliance. Work by Mary Jacobsen suggests that this is absolutely not the case. Because it offends against our ideas of equity that some people should just be more gifted than others, we compensate by assigning them – in literature and in films – personality flaws, so that they are invariably socially inadequate. This may be the case where a gifted person owes that giftedness to autism or psychopathy, but these are exceptions. The truly talented literally use more of their brains than the rest of us, including their emotional and social faculties, so this myth is not accurate, even if it makes us feel better. So let us stop accepting poorly given feedback, by offering immediate feedback on the feedback, to help the giver to re-cast their message in a way that is actually helpful by the use of careful questions. This takes guts – and practice – but the more we can create cultures of elegance in this art, the more we can all improve. Tags: angela whelan, apple, deloitte, ego depletion, feedback, mary jacobsen, tesco
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No company worth its salt neglects these days to have a set of corporate values. Merrill Lynch famously had theirs etched in stone in the lobby of their London office. To these are customarily linked a set of leadership competencies, to facilitate the annual appraisal process. I'm sure these change with the weather, but Barclays traditionally had a set of 'leadership imperatives' which included things like 'Driving Value Creation' and 'Pulling Together'. The list included 'Inspiring Others', 'Straight Talking' and – Bob - 'Sharing Power & Responsibility.' Their then CEO, Paul Varley, delivered the 2009 Hugh Kay Memorial Lecture in St Martin-in-the-Fields, and spent a lot of his talk being a little bit smug about his bank not having had to be rescued by the taxpayer, and invoking Barclay's Quaker founding values of prudence, plain dealing, philanthropy and probity (he also praised the Barclays' commitment to paying taxes, which with hindsight is intriguing). His talk makes interesting reading in the light of recent discoveries. For example, at one point he says: 'most bank employees are not motivated by earnings per share or share price (even when, as is the case of a majority of our employees here in the UK, they own shares). They are motivated by a desire to help – a very Christian value. It is the helping of their customers that brings a sparkle to their eyes.' I wonder where he is in the current debate? Varley aside, the Barclays story raises for me again a professional niggle, about the value of all of these values if they don't defend against bad behaviour, and the point of these competencies if they result in incompetence. Enron was famously a business school poster-child even as it imploded, and I'm sure every business miscreant has just aced an appraisal against the most searching review of corporate competencies and behaviour. So it would be silly of me just to recommend another super-value to add to the mix, as a panacea to cure corporate evil. But were I to do so, the one I would choose, as a specific requirement for leadership, is Honour. This, for me, is the dog that isn't barking. The fabulous Stefan Stern has elsewhere written about the need for more corporate shame and, for me, honour is shame's siamese twin. Honour is not always a clean virtue, having been used through the ages and by many cultures as a vehicle to control and subjugate women through their sexuality. Chivalry has also been pilloried, Monty Python-style, as an anachronism, and in many cultures has been taken to extremes through suicide and honour killings. But if we de-couple honour from these particular readings of it, the concept has a lot to teach us. The last duel to be fought on Scottish soil took place in 1826, between David Landale, a linen merchant from Kirkcaldy, and his bank manager, George Morgan, on a point of honour. Landale held that Morgan had slandered his business reputation and, while he had never before handled a pistol, he managed to shoot Morgan, a trained soldier, through the chest, wounding him mortally. The whole business of gauntlets, gloves, and pistols at dawn seems irrelevant to the current banking fiasco, no matter how attractive it might be to call out your bank manager like Landale did. But why do so few leaders offer to resign, until they are forced to do so? Even if the Board refuses to accept a resignation, it should surely be a leader's first reaction when something goes wrong on their watch. If a leader can claim ignorance of something happening 'further down' their organisation, either they are not doing their job properly, or the organisation is too big. If any case can be made for the extraordinary amounts that leaders are now routinely paid, surely it is because they are responsible for the organisations they lead, for better, for worse. In his famous dictionary, Samuel Johnson lists the first definition of honour as 'dignity; high rank'. Honour has always been seen as part and parcel of a senior role in society, hence the terminology 'honours' for decoration by the monarch. And while it might feel a bit Baden-Powell, I would add it to my list for leadership, and ask for evidence of honourable conduct in any leadership interview or appraisal. As a Board member, I would routinely hold my CEO to account, until they got the message that anything that happens on their watch is their responsibility. And as a member of society, I will keep asking the question – what is the honourable thing for this leader to do, and why are they not doing it? Tags: barclays, competencies, duel, honour, johnson, leadership, shame, stefan stern, varley
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Probably everyone has read Thaler and Sunstein's book Nudge by now. Their thesis is simple: we are overwhelmed and often paralysed by choice, and public policy should do more to 'nudge' us in the direction of better choices where possible. Influencing 'choice architecture' doesn't remove our free-will, but it makes it easier for us to choose a better path, like opting out of organ donation, rather than in. The Cabinet Office now has a 'Nudge Unit', and I am very keen on this route as a subtle and more effective way to improve the market, rather than just coming up with more red tape. Here are my favourite Top 10 Nudges, some because they are admirable, and some just because they are so clever. 1. Free peanuts on the bar: uses salt to boost beer sales 2. 'Rinse. And Repeat': doubles shampoo sales 3. Mirrors in lifts: uses vanity to reduce graffiti 4. 17 mph speed limit: makes drivers focus harder on their speed 5. Ubiquitous alcohol gel in hospitals: has reduced MRSA by 40% in a year 6. UCLA's crowdsourcing games: uses hobby time to help diagnose malaria in Africa 7. Planting trees in housing estates: reduces property and violent crime 8. Paying benefits weekly rather than monthly: helps with household budgeting and to avoid loan sharks 9. The Archers: written to encourage farmers to try new techniques as a productivity drive after WWII 10. God (when state-sponsored): belief correlates with better levels of adherence to the law. Tags: 17mph, benefits, choice, choice architecture, god, mirrors, mrsa, nudge, peanuts, shampoo, the archers, trees, ucla
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I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not being funny, some of my best friends are introverts you know. But it would be odd, in the face of all these articles on how fabulous and under-appreciated they are, if an extrovert didn't wade in just to remind you all of 10 reasons why extroverts are also rather fabulous. But by all means, introverts, please re-read the articles first – I know you like to be on top of the data (Harvard; Susan Cain on TED and in The Guardian; Psychology Today).
But back to us extroverts – those 10 reasons:
1 you can always hear what an extrovert is thinking
2 they make the day go quicker by organising lots of meetings
3 they distract the boss a lot with all their talking and body language
4 they make you introverts look terribly wise and thoughtful
5 they don't tend to mind being interrupted
6 they break the ice for you in awkward social situations
7 they tend to pay more attention to their appearance and so are often more decorative
8 you can free-ride on their fight for reward and recognition
9 their love of brainstorming generates lots of material for introverts to research and ultimately scoff at
10 with extraverts, you can generally get away with poor listening, as long as you tune in at the end of their stream of consciousness. Tags: extravert, introvert, mbti, myers briggs, susan cain
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Of course it is the prerogative of the current age to be arrogant about everything that has gone before. But the seemingly minor and snap decision to drop the existing barriers on Sunday trading needs more thought, particularly as no-one seems to believe the line that this is only a temporary arrangement. The argument to 'keep Sunday special' isn't particularly about Christianity, it's about humanity. In his book The Dignity of Difference, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, explains that the world's great philosophies and religions emerged from a pivotal context in human flourishing, as the people of the world moved from a scattered and nomadic existence towards a more consciously societal one, that needed frameworks for organisation. Over time, because of their supernatural content, the religions in particular have remained 'sticky' as ways of explaining humanity to itself, and of encoding ways of living that, in the main, have served communities well for over four thousand years. And while modernity has rightly developed a degree of scepticism about the suitability of some of this guidance, given the way the world has changed, the world's wisdom traditions still have much to teach us. One feature of the monotheistic religions in particular is the idea of a day of rest. Because of its Christian heritage, in the UK this day falls on a Sunday, but the Sabbath for Jews lasts from Friday sundown to 'the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night', and for Muslims it is Friday prayer and rest. Indeed, rest-days appear in most religious traditions, for 'cleansing the mind' or just to make time for the contemplation of the meaning of life within a given tradition. The notion also crops up in academia and in some other walks of life as the less frequent but all-important 'sabbatical', which aims to structure in periods of enforced reflection to improve a person's professional practice. The idea of a day of rest for the whole community is a concept worth protecting, even if we can't row back to where we once were. Having just one day that feels a bit different protects family time and creates space for leisure and reflection – or just time to read the Sunday papers - whether or not it includes any sort of religious observance, and Saturday has long-since ceased to have this flavour. Jesus himself said that 'the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath' but I don't think this was meant as an encouragement for Dave to be quite so cavalier with it. I for one am rather fed up with the relentless parade of policies of late that seem only to be in the interests of commercial gain rather than human flourishing. And maybe choosing the Olympics as the time to experiment facilitates the 'taxing' of our visitors. But looking at it as a more general change, wasn't it too much 'retail' that got us into this mess in the first place? When credit was cheap and shops started opening for longer and in more enticing formats, shopping became leisure, and the consumer borrowed up to the hilt to finance this new national hobby. I thought what we needed at the moment was for consumers to save their cash, preferably to help re-capitalise the banks, or to invest in enterprises that struggle to get bank credit. So why are we stimulating retail again at this particular moment in time? Maybe it is to boost jobs. If so, I'd like to see the argument for that, and how it has been reconciled with Cameron's promise to make the UK the most family-friendly county in Europe. As Albert Schweitzer once said: 'do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.' Tags: albert schweitzer, chief rabbi, jonathan sacks, rest, sabbath, soul, sunday, wisdom
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Of course, if neuroscience were to 'prove' that we have no such thing as free will, we'd need to re-think our entire legal system. So on Valentine's night I took my husband on a hot date to LSE to hear about neuroscience, responsibility and the law. Because in its modern incarnation it is such a new and disputed discipline, the verdict from the excellent panel seemed to be that, like advances in DNA testing, neuroscience would most probably be used to support the legal process rather than to replace it, e.g., in determining brain development in young offenders or assessing pain in damages claims. But given the claims being made in some quarters, they did cover some very interesting ground about the nature of the criminal justice system in particular. If justice tends partly to be retributive, partly restorative and partly distributive, a lack of genuine moral agency leaves only the latter two kinds of justice standing. Society would have a legitimate interest in these, but would find it hard to 'judge' in cases that would normally attract a retributive sentence, if neuroscience could be used to show that a person had no real choice over their actions (this 'competence' defence is already used in some cases). We can't 'blame' people if they are not morally responsible. The panel again were very interesting on this point, suggesting that this would not so much affect verdicts as sentencing. As happens at present, a person might be found guilty of harming someone else, but if there were mitigating circumstances, the sentence they would receive would reflect a degree of leniency. These mitigating circumstances could be social, psychological or environmental, as well as biological, and neurobiology would be just one of several being considered. I think the debate is likely to settle somewhere in between the idea of the hand you're dealt and the way you play it – our DNA and brain structure may very well pre-dispose us to all kinds of behaviours, good and bad. But whether or not tests show our 'meat' reacting faster than our 'mind', these responses have been learned over time. So I suspect a complicated causal interplay between the meat and the mind, and would agree with the panel last night that, whether one precedes the other, as long as they both happen, we can still take the mind into account and therefore hold it responsible. So there may well be more appeals on the basis of a lack of mens rea or intent (diminished responsibility), but society will continue to have to hold individuals to account for unhelpful behaviour, irrespective of how it is motivated, to maintain public order. As Prof Roger Brownsword put it, the law might become more about managing risk than assigning blame, but it would still be required, and neurobiology might instead be used more to prevent criminal behaviour than to prosecute it. Tags: criminal justice, criminal responsibility, free will, law, lse, mens rea, moral responsibility, neurobiology, valentine
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evepoole
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