Homily for Proper 6 Year A, 18 June 2023
Last Tuesday three people were killed in Nottingham. One of them was a first year medical student. Her parents had been students of mine in Dublin and her maternal grandparents colleagues. You may have seen her parents on TV. It will not surprise you to know that I found their words and delivery deeply affecting—not only because of the personal connexion, but also because seeing and hearing distraught parents speaking in public vividly brought back to me memories I wish I didn’t have.
The following day I read that in Worcestershire a nine year old boy had been killed by his mother and her partner. His death came after a prolonged months-long period of physical and mental abuse. I want you to imagine that for a moment. A nine-year-old boy. Not a baby, but a nine-year-old boy, kicked, beaten with belts and hard objects, having his head bashed and submerged in the bath as punishment. Imagine what it felt like for that young boy. Can you even begin to imagine what was going through the minds of his mother and her partner?
Yesterday morning I felt yet more impotent rage at UK honours. A few days ago it was Johnson’s jollies for mates, and then in the King’s birthday honours it’s to them that have shall more be given. Compare the vastly wealthy rewarded for charitable work with the people with next to nothing faithfully serving the homeless at shelters, food banks and the like. I seem to remember that a wise man made a similar comparison about two thousand years ago.
You might ask why God allows this evil and corruption?
God has nothing to do with it.
It all comes down to human behaviour. The basic underlying problem is the trinity of greed, avarice, and approval-seeking. In a word, ego. In another, pride.
Because of our egotistical vanity we imagine that our opinions and desires are more important than anyone else’s, and therefore that we have every right to bulldoze and bully our way through life. We see it in international politics, national politics and individual relationships. Be quite sure of this, sisters and brothers: you are no more than a tiny pimple on the face of the earth. Don’t get too big for your boots.
The perpetrator in Nottingham, for whatever reason, felt that his only course of action was to impose his will on people who were in his way. As a result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, three people were killed and several injured.
The couple in Worcestershire, who were supposed to be looking after the nine-year-old boy were so wrapped up in their egotistical desires that they ignored their responsibilities to a vulnerable human being and performed appalling acts of barbarity on him. It’s the worst example I can recall of parental abuse since 2008 when a man near Doncaster snapped his baby daughter’s spine over his knee to stop her crying.
And now the honours list. “Rabbit’s friends and relations” divvying up the Emperor’s New Clothes among themselves. How they love themselves.
It’s all about egotistical vanity in one way or another. Pride, the root of evil. Unbridled ego, the root of evil.
Don’t imagine for one moment anyone in this church is free from it. Every time you moan at somebody else for being slow you’re putting your own needs before theirs. Every time you sit at the traffic lights behind some old trout who’s apparently waiting for a particular shade of green, you’re putting your own needs before theirs. Every time you are late for a meeting for no good reason you are putting yourself before others. Magnify all that, and you are quite capable in the right circumstances—or the wrong ones—of sticking the knife into someone else.
There is an answer to this abusive behaviour, and it’s called self-sacrifice.
We heard about it not long ago in the garden of Gethsemane story when Jesus wrestled, first saying—and I am putting words into his mouth—take this cup from me, I can’t go through with it, before accepting it, saying resignedly OK, let it be as you say, by the way, echoing Mary’s response to Gabriel at the Annunciation. This is the renunciation of pride and self so that selflessness can flourish for the common good.
I’m not saying that we must always choose the way of self-sacrifice. We are animals and self preservation requires us to be mindful of self for our safety and to avoid becoming food for predators. But we are social animals and that demands a degree of looking out for others—altruism if you like. As with much of life an equilibrium is called for: we must always have an eye on the creatures around us and try to imagine the consequences of our actions for them.
In today’s gospel we hear Jesus giving advice on how to do it: tend the sick, cheer the despairing, feed the hungry. Have an eye on those around you. Put yourself in their position. Ask if there’s anything they’d like you to help them with. Jesus told us to start local—there’s no need to be too ambitious, just deal with what you encounter day by day. There’s plenty to do here in Burton. I said in my Maundy Thursday homily that it is not until we immerse ourselves in serving others that we begin to feel in our guts our own true humanity, for there isn’t room for it to grow until we’ve first shoved out our own self-obsessed wishes.
As a friend said, all any one of us can do is try to neutralize the ego-pride we encounter by doing what we hope is good in our own small spheres. Each of us can only do a little. And as another friend put it, this will help to preserve the timeless values of wisdom, hope and authentic earthed humanity.
Meanwhile, there are grieving people. Perhaps you’re one of them. Remember them.
Rambling Rector Retired 
Thank you, Mr Froghole. As we have explored elsewhere, we exist in a deeply immoral and corrupt system. As for managing AI – hollow laughter! Can already opened, annelids everywhere. I am a bear of little economic brain, but what I can’t figure is: if AI takes over functions previously performed by members of Homo (not very) sapiens, what will said apes do and how will they support themselves? The human experiment has lasted long enough. Time for a mass extinction to let evolution pick up again.
Indeed, and many thanks, but Silicon Valley and their lackeys in the political and banking trades will say that mass unemployment resulting from generative AI is the chance to put everyone onto universal basic income, an idea which has been knocking around for some time (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transfer-state-9780198813262?cc=us&lang=en&😉 but which has lately crept beyond the lunatic confines of the libertarian right. However, many are not sold on the idea, especially if housing costs remain sky high, and there are other contrary arguments (https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/universal-basic-income-good-idea, https://www.thirdway.org/memo/five-problems-with-universal-basic-income).
Of course, if huge numbers of people are reduced to mendicancy, they will either be driven to what Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton have called ‘deaths of despair’, or they might revolt. They will also be acutely vulnerable to the highly contingent and perhaps precarious goodwill of the plutocrats who would finance UBI. However, if UBI does eviscerate the middle class, it has to be asked: how on earth will the very rich tech bros in California be able to maintain their wealth, underpinned as it is by extracting rents from middle class consumers?
So very true, Stanley. Unfortunately, and especially since Milton Friedman (1970), we have come to think of ourselves as the sum of our self-interests. The famous old aphorism of Adam Smith (1776) – “It is not from the benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” – became a shibboleth for late 20th century economists, and proved to be insidiously influential within wider society. Thus firms ceased to think of themselves as entities with multiple stakeholders – shareholders, employees, customers and society as a whole – but as profit maximising entities whose sole function was to maximise dividends paid to shareholders. Company directors were not rewarded on the basis of the wider contribution which their firm would make to society but on the profit margins realised (often at the expense of their firm’s future if ‘financial engineering’ was necessary to reach bonus targets). Short-termism became the norm, Ponzi dynamics would take root, and more and more firms in advanced economies (especially in Anglophone countries) became sociopathic, if not psychopathic, leaving trails of environmental and social wreckage in their wake.
Yet Friedman traduced Smith (Smith was, after all, a moralist much more than he was ever a political economist): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/adam-smith-and-inequality/.
We ought to be more conscious that the ‘I’m alright, Jack’ mentality which characterises so much public and private behaviour reinforces Joseph de Maistre’s notorious argument (1811) that a nation tends to get the politicians and government it deserves. It is a self-defeating tactic. Take the outstanding example of the housing market: since 1955-65 politicians have delivered untaxed capital gains to owner occupiers in exchange for votes (Who is the more corrupt? The person who proffers the bribe or the person who takes it?). Credit was liberalised in 1971 and 1980 in order to finance housing speculation and prices have – mostly – moved upwards in parabolic fashion. Yet it is a zero sum game: the owner occupier receives an untaxed capital gain without having to earn it, but the gain must still be earned by the successor in title or tenant who must work harder and for longer to finance the gain and the additional interest payable to the lender. That is a problem when so many successors in title are also defined contribution pensioners who must save much more than their predecessors for lower returns and less security.
To stop the bubble deflating (for a deflation in house prices would imperil the banks – housing equity now being their primary collateral) more and more credit must be pumped into the system; this entails diverting more credit from productive investment in industry to non-productive investment in housing (the untaxed gains also often being spent on consumption, aggravating current account deficits). By reducing investment in productive capacity it becomes harder to realise productivity gains, which means wages stagnate, and the end result is that owner occupiers become even more dependent upon the capital gain for their future security at the expense of everyone else. Politicians live in fear of retribution by owner occupiers who are not getting the capital gains to which they believe themselves entitled. This is the greatest instance of self-defeating selfishness in the UK (the capital gains are now approaching £10 trillion).
Of course, the UK is now wanting to break out of this productivity trap using the supposed panacea of AI: but what the AI game is really about is conserving the capital gains of existing voters, especially retirees, whilst exposing many of the more vulnerable in society to long-term unemployment or massively reduced incomes. In other words, the authorities would rather productivity improvements be realised via AI (even if the medium/long term costs are profound) than by diverting credit from housing towards productive investment in manufacturing, which might risk owner occupier votes. Selfishness on this scale is a form of collective madness.