Racism and the Weakest Link

Anti-racism protesters have torn down a statue of 17th century slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol, United Kingdom on Sunday (CNN.com)

Last week, protesters in Bristol hauled down a public statue, a 19^th century memorial to Edward Colston, a 17^th century slave-trader from the city who, as well as bequeathing his wealth to city charities, was responsible for transporting about 80 00 men, women and children from Africa to the Americas. That act has triggered a week of protests, including calls for similar acts of cleansing.

Predictably, the shrill and judgemental public arguments have started. For one side, the act was right – an appropriate response to the brutal ending of yet another black person’s life by intrinsically-racist white forces of law. For the other it represented the undemocratic rule of the mob, an impermissible unleashing of violence.

But I wonder whether such a bipolar axis of right and wrong, is the most appropriate, or helpful measure of the action that, in the end, brought Coulson’s statue to rest at the bottom of the river Severn? Is it right to keep the ethics of an act, that clearly points beyond itself to so much more, at a personal distance in this way?

Allow a very short digression. I remember one of my first ‘grown up’ science books I was J.E. Gordon’s classic ‘The New Science of Strong Materials’. It struck me with the sort of delicious shock that science is so good at. For as soon as we know the strength of the tiny bonds between atoms in a metal or compound, we can calculate the strength of a large piece, say a strut, made of those atoms by simply multiplying up the number of bonds. The shock comes in the actual  measured breaking strength –  it is always thousands of times smaller.

What did we forget? A material’s strength depends not on its ideal perfection, but on the presence of its hidden flaws, its misalignments, its pressure points – literally its weakest links. Cracks, when they occur,

Micrograph of a crack propagating from a fault in steel.

start there, and focus the external stress so that it shatters and divides. I don’t think that by now I‘ll  be needing to ask anyone to ‘keep up at the back’ with the metaphor. Fracture is sometimes the only way finding out where the flaws are. This is true of societies as well as materials. We can argue for ever about whether a destruction was a good or bad thing, but sometimes the most significant implication is what it shows us.

St. Luke in his gospel recounts a sudden material failure: a tower that fell on eighteen people, killing them. The people around Jesus wanted to know if blame should be laid on the shoulders of those who suffered. But Jesus refused to respond to that axis of judgement. Shockingly, he urged everyone to ‘repent’ – to turn around and change the way that they lived, loved and thought – rather than to judge: ‘for unless you also repent,’ he said, ‘you too will perish.’ We might take that to heart. Black lives have to matter to us, in a way that is reflected in deed and word. But characteristically, Jesus saw even deeper than that – for it also involves the identification of structural material flaws in us, those that, unless they are annealed away, can result in cracks that rend not only me and you,  but the communities in which we live.

Remarkably, this very material analogy is contained and continued in the Biblical tradition explicitly. To take one of many examples (the one that Handel and his librettist chose for Messiah):

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.

Malachi 3:2-3 (ESV)

Removing the fault-lines that tear us apart is a necessary though painful aspect of a relationship with the Living One who is our Hope and Healer.

Advertisement

Privacy Settings

But Where can Wisdom be Found?

This is a different sort of post.  There is a fair bit to report in due course on the central theme of Faith and Wisdom in Science –  the great cultural story of science within our communities, its deep (and theological) roots, and how it needs healing.  I will write in days to come on the Times Cheltenham Science Festival Debate, ‘Can Science and Faith Coexist?’, and on an evening at the Cambridge Wesley Methodist Church ‘Science and Faith’ series – but not today.  For today other ligaments within the body of our society need healing. 

Once again, and desperately, we need not fighting spirit,  not left or right wing concepts, not racy rhetoric or the sure soundbite, but Wisdom.  At the end of the darkest week I can remember in this country, the appalling, senseless, tragic murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox has opened our eyes to a shadow of evil that has been stealthily blocking out the light.  Since the first days of the campaigning in the lead-up to this Thursday’s EU referendum in the UK, our public debate has become increasingly sour, twisted with untruth, debased to thoughtless side-taking – and worse of all – infested with what Albert Camus called La Peste, the repeatedly resurfacing evil within us that dehumanises humans for political gain.  The people that Jo Cox spent her life as an MP to help, and before that with the charity Oxfam, the men, women and children in positions of fear, homelessness and despair, through no fault of their own, that she sprang to aid – these people, all equally as we are beloved of God, have had painted on them the objectifying ‘Immigrant’.  I wrote a book decrying the dehumanisation of science – but much much more needs to be done in the face of the dehumanisation of people themselves.  When our media and our political leaders do this we need to speak out and condemn it.

It’s strange how the themes of the predicament that I think science has been driven into are amplified and deployed more widely in this case.  The use of language to dehumanise is one.  It has happened with science.  The replacement of depth with shallowness, of contemplation with instant gratification, of complexity with superficiality – this is another.  One of the leaders of the campaign to leave the EU, Michael Gove, in on record (quite astonishingly and irresponsibly for a Cabinet Minister) speaking out against ‘experts’ and their voice in the debate.  But what is an ‘expert’ if not someone who has spent years of study in acquiring knowledge, experience, information and competency in a field.  Science rejoices in expertise – not in isolation – for it needs a critical public to ask it questions, to challenge, to weigh up, even to enjoy.  So should any political process, and to abjure it is to abandon the role of a responsible leader in any field.  This question, of the subtle balance of a nation’s sovereignty, trade, and position of global responsibility, needs expertise of the highest order to decide.

The commentator on US politics for the BBC for over 40 years, Alastair Cooke, in one of his broadcasts cited an elderly US Senator pleading that what that nation needed now was neither more hawks, nor more doves, but was suffering from a lamentable shortage of owls.  We too, at this time, so need the precious commodity of Wisdom.  But where can wisdom be found? Where does understanding dwell? is the great cry in the Hymn to Wisdom of the Old Testament Book of Job (chapter 28).  The writer wanders to the depths of the earth, to the ocean bottom, to the marketplace of gold, precious gemstones and fine goods – and finds no sign of it.

At the very end of the Hymn we read something astonishing – that the way to wisdom, as God knows is, is to view ‘everything under the heavens’, ‘appraising’, ‘confirming’ and ‘testing’.  And to follow this ability – this expert and God-given ability to see into the workings of the world in response to Him (that is what is meant by the ‘fear of the Lord’ here) – that is wisdom, and finally:

and to shun evil is understanding

That is the word for this week.  May this terrible death not pass utterly in vain, may her words and life remind us what wisdom is, and to choose our future accordingly.