Che Guevara is an iconic hero, universally beloved and
revered. Fidel Castro is often seen as a villain, hated and reviled as one of
the world's last Stalinist thugs. But, are they really all that different? Or,
did Che just have the advantage of dying young and therefore remaining pure,
while Fidel lived on, grappling with and being tainted by an imperfect world?
This thought was triggered by the book I reviewed in my last
blog post, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. Pullman's
intent was to contrast noble, idealistic Jesus with his cynical fictional twin
brother, Christ. Pullman conceived Christ as a metaphor for the institutional
church. I understood Christ even more broadly, as a general metaphor for institutional life. The
tension between an organization's ideals and its reality is universal. The only way to be genuinely Jesus-like is to die young, and to therefore
avoid the failures and compromises that inevitably come from engaging with the
messy real world.
To further strengthen the analogy, Che and
Fidel have really cool beards, like Jesus and Christ. Though I don't think
either Jesus or Christ smoked cigars...
I read, and enjoyed, a book that called Christ a scoundrel. The book is by Philip Pullman, a well known atheist. Pullman isn’t being subtle about his name calling, Christ is referred to as a scoundrel in bold print, in the book’s title.
Initially, I wasn’t sure if I should be blogging about a book that calls Christ a scoundrel, I'm not here to offend people. Then, I found that the Church of England Newspaper called the book “magnificent” (while noting that five hundred years ago Philip Pullman would have been burnt at stake as a heretic). The former Bishop of Edinburgh wrote a thoughtful and positive review in The Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s review found in it “a voice of genuine spiritual authority”. My blogging about the scoundrel Christ should be okay.
Pullman’s book is a retelling of the life of Jesus, with a twist.
In Pullman's telling, Jesus is born with a twin brother called Christ. Jesus is a passionate, charismatic idealist. Christ is a clever, careful pragmatist, an apparatchik. Jesus connects with real people, and moves or exhorts them to a more fulfilling life. Christ hero-worships his brother Jesus, diligently records his words, and conceives of an institution he calls “the church” to celebrate and immortalize Jesus, an idea Jesus despises.
Jesus says “if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well...love your enemies, and pray for them...The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad...do to others as you hope they would do to you.”
Christ says “think of the advantages if there were a body of believers, a structure, an organization already in place...I can see the whole world united in this Kingdom of the faithful...local groups under the guidance of a wise elder in the region, the regional leaders all answering to the authority of one supreme director, a kind of regent of God on earth...I can see Caesar himself having to bow down before this body, and offer obeisance to God’s own kingdom here in the world...I can see the majesty and splendour of the great temples, the courts, the palaces devoted to the glory of God, and I can see this whole wonderful creation lasting for generation after generation.”
Pullman makes no secret of his contempt for the church, his anger about “the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse”. His character Christ is written to be the object of this contempt, this anger. Pullman explains: “I wanted this Christ to embody as much as possible of what the church later did to alter, edit and ignore the words of Jesus, and to benefit from his death and supposed resurrection.”
So, in Pullman's story, Christ betrays Jesus to the Romans. The church needs the crucifixion to happen, to serve as its founding myth. Pullman sees the church as the judas who betrays Jesus.
Yet, paradoxically, by writing Jesus and Christ as distinct characters, and by juxtaposing them, Pullman liberates the good man Jesus from the scoundrel Christ. Jesus' greatness is so much more apparent when the evil that has been done in his name can be decanted into another character.
Even his portrayal of the scoundrel Christ is kinder than it might have been. Pullman explains, “Christ developed in a way I hadn’t expected, and found himself with a human conscience, tempted and torn and compromised”. The modern church has good reason to be so relaxed about Pullman’s heresy.
I find I can relate to this tension - between an ideal and an institution that claims to stand for that ideal - more directly, more emotionally, by porting it into an Indian context. These lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali are often cited as the animating spirit behind India’s freedom:
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Unsurprisingly, the Republic of India doesn’t always live up to Tagore’s ideal. That isn’t a reason to lose faith in either Tagore’s ideal or in the Indian republic.
Perhaps the only certainty with any institution is that the institution seeks to enhance its own power. This is true for nation states, churches, business corporations, NGOs, universities, armies...the whole shooting match...they’re all out to turn themselves into something majestic, splendid and glorious, lasting generation after generation. In the process, they can do terrible things. Limiting their power, so terrible things happen less often, is good. Yoking that power to a higher ideal, doesn’t always work, but is not bad.
So, just how much of a scoundrel is Pullman's Christ, thought of both as a character in this story, as well as a metaphor for the church as an institution?
Pullman's narrative starts
at Jesus' conception. The story continues along Jesus' noble path - rejecting
Satan's temptations, the sermon on the mount, the cleansing of the temple -
until it descends to the squalor of Christ taking money from Caiaphas to betray
Jesus. That narrative arc feels like the fall of man. it shows Christ as a
scoundrel.
However, Jesus is not Adam. His story didn't begin at his conception. Jesus was born into a context, a context which is
apparent even in Pullman's tight narrative. Jesus was born into a world of
brutal Roman oppressors, of the rigid and corrupt Jewish establishment, and of
any number of transient spiritual cults. These cults, however transient, gave people
something they valued - a sense of purpose and belonging. In that context,
creating an durable institution that would provide people with some of this
value feels like the right thing to do.
Was it worth betraying Jesus to create such an institution?
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Pullman's Christ is like one of John Le Carre's spies,
Smiley's people, doing shady deals that may or may not work, for a cause that may or may not turn out to be just, like Kim Philby, the upper-class Englishman who betrayed his people to spy for the soviets because he sincerely believed in the communist ideal. Maybe Christ's dilemma was like Brutus':
Brutus loved Caesar, but loved Rome more. History judged Brutus kindly. Either
way, Christ seen in context is an ambiguous character, not obviously a scoundrel.
Or maybe (I don't like this thought, but it is too strong to resist) it comes down to youth. Jesus had the charisma, idealism and moral clarity of youth. Like John Kennedy, Jim Morrison and James Dean, like Gautam Buddha, Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, Jesus died young, and remained pure. Christ lived on, to be tarnished by an imperfect world, to be called a scoundrel for his troubles. Looked at this way, the benediction that follows most naturally from the life of Jesus and Christ are the words of another man who was once called Judas: "may you stay, forever young".
But is this person with Liz Hurley really Shane Warne?
The ultimate ornery, brawling Aussie has become a metrosexual pretty-boy. Why? I think it is for the same reason that I initially expected Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar to work.
My theory, or more precisely, my understanding of Jungian psychology, is that any couple needs a balance of yin and yang. Liz is one tough honey: determined, hard-working, ambitious, rich, successful and totally in charge. She is a woman with a lot of yang. She needs a man with plenty of yin for the two of them to work as a couple.
Initially I reasoned that the modest and unassuming Mr Nayar would work for Liz because he would provide that yin-yang balance. He would be happy to play the beta-male to Liz’s alpha-female. The way Liz put it in an interview, “Arun is astonishingly good-natured and would be the last man on earth to feel overshadowed by me. He’s thoroughly comfortable in his own skin”. With 20:20 hindsight, perhaps Mr Nayar was not all that comfortable being overshadowed by Liz, dissolving his identity to become Mr Liz Hurley. And actually, I have no reason to believe that Mr Nayar is full of yin-energy. Having a featureless personality and having yin-energy are totally different things.
If one were looking for a man with some yin-energy to balance Liz's yang, the old Shane Warne, the beer-bellied scrapper that cricket fans have known for decades, would have been central casting's last choice. Liz getting back together with her long term boyfriend, the posh, floppy-haired, finely chiselled Hugh Grant, would have felt more natural. Given that landscape, for Liz to step away from an obvious choice, to take on the raw material she found in Shane Warne, and to turn that beast into a pretty-boy with enough yin to keep the couple in balance, that has been an act of astonishing inventiveness and chutzpah that that old leg-spinning wizard Shane Warne himself would have been proud of. And heck, it just might work out for them.
I hope some film makers are following the Liz and Warnie love story. It has terrific potential as a modern, feminist interpretation of William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.
"Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle". I chanced upon this quote a couple of months ago, and it has stayed in my mind ever since. It is an old quote, by the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's political mentor, but it has stayed in mind because it feels contemporary, and is less cynical than it sounds.
Good principles - like, for instance, that all human beings are created equal - tend to be very abstract. It is never obvious how these abstract principles translate into programs of specific action, into doing. However, it is always tempting to invoke these principles to build support for a program of action.
The problem with linking an action plan closely with its animating principle is that it makes it harder to abandon the action plan, which is a pity, because only certainty with any action plan is that it will be made to look silly by "black swans", by real-world conditions that the plan did not, and could not have, known about. The bigger the agenda, the more quickly the black swans will strike.
A program of action which is tightly linked to a cherished principle usually means a program of action that isn't adaptive enough. von Moltke the elder was pointing in the same direction when he said "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy"
"Follow your dream" is advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. However, in most circumstances, this advice is worse than useless. I need to make choices about my career as a business executive in the here and now. Reminding myself of my childhood dream, to open the batting for the Indian cricket team, doesn't in any way help me make better life choices.
I discussed this in an earlier blog post, titled "Follow your dream, not".
More recently, I came across the words "let us take what the terrain gives", which make the same point more elegantly, more positively.
These words were spoken by Daniel Kahneman back in 1996, at a graveside eulogy for his lifelong research partner Amos Tversky. Apparently, "let us take what the terrain gives" was the maxim Amos Tversky lived by. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel prize in 2002, his partner Tversky tragically missed out because he died so young. "Let us take what the terrain gives" is clearly not a case for embracing mediocrity, but it does recognize that "the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does".
BTW...I loved these pictures of Tversky on holiday in Switzerland in 1972...
