Whether you believe in the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection or not is a private matter, a matter for your conscience. The admonition (made to Thomas) that those who believe without seeing are blessed possibly implies that many won’t believe without seeing, and therefore aren’t blessed. Since one is free to choose, one can decide whether to be blessed or otherwise. And that’s a private matter. But the promise that Life will ultimately overcome Death is something that belongs to the public sphere.

I don’t say this in the religious or faith-based sense. I say it in a “socio-political” sense. Consider the plight we currently find ourselves in. Our social life, the life we were used to, has died. We are however being promised that it will rise again, one day, and Life will overcome.

These images of Hope, of the Light that will end Darkness, of Order coming out of Chaos, of Life overcoming Death... are all images which we need to survive the ordeal of existence.

If you think about it, however, there is very little meaning in these images. They are images that nourish courage, but don’t help in the quest for meaning. They are on a primary level, the level of existence; not on a secondary level, the level of why we exist.

Many years ago, I read a couple of books by a most respected Protestant biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A specialist in the analysis of texts, Professor Ehrman found that certain excerpts of the Gospel were added many years after the Gospels’ initial drafting, in particular the excerpts about the resurrection of Jesus. This led him to conclude that these excerpts must therefore be fake, and he lost the faith. To my mind, Professor Ehrman’s reasoning is flawed on two inter-related counts. One, the Protestant tenet that the texts are the only source of knowledge; the Protestants ignore the tradition. This must have led the Professor to (two) exclude the possibility that somebody simply added at a later the written account of the resurrection tradition – given that it had been a tradition since the beginning of Christianity. Actually, the resurrection tradition is the beginning of Christianity. Without that tradition, Jesus of Nazareth would have been another in the long series of messiahs, of freedom fighters, who promised to free Israel from the yoke of Roman rule.

I say all of this from a logical, not a faith-based point of view, to point out the flaw that I (think I) detect in Ehrman’s conclusion; I am not contesting his decision on his personal faith. I have to clarify this because we live in times marked by many contradictions. One of them is this: sexuality has been pushed out of the bedroom into the public square, while faith has been pushed out of the public square into dedicated places of worship. I keep reading books in which the authors somehow feel the need to refer to their sexuality even if it has nothing to do with the subject-matter of the book. It’s a sort of code: “Look, I reverence the Dominant Ideology, and not only, but I am on the dominant side of our times’ ideological divide.” While sexuality thus became a public matter, at the same time, faith was pushed further into the depths of the private, away from the public eye.

You’re trendy if you publicly display Pink Budapest say (the LGBT guide to the Hungarian capital) on the bus but you’re two nuts short of a fruitcake, an outright bigot no less, if you favour the display of religious symbols (e.g. the crucifix) in public places.

This reminds you of the technique used by certain newspapers in Malta. To promote their liberal agenda, they issue items that are not really newsworthy (for instance, the “spike” in Maltese women seeking abortion abroad – you would think that hundreds were demanding the service, but then it turns out it’s only 8). They then publish opinion pieces on faith that should not normally appear in mainstream newspapers. The underlying message is this: (1) seeking abortion is fine and acceptable, almost laudable; (2) those who oppose abortion are Christian fanatics who don’t even know that they should confine their faith to the private sphere. Therefore, (3) it is an outrage that abortion is not locally available because of the nefarious bigotry of the fanatic Christians.

The new religion pushes out of the public space the Christians (as nutcases) and pulls in the Sexually Liberated (the children of 1968 and 1989).

One wonders whether this new revolution follows the pattern of Hope, Light out of Darkness, Order from Chaos, Life overcoming Death.

It is telling that in times of crisis, people think of both spiritual and sexual matters.

The need for Order

For some reason, whenever I think of the word “Order” I hear John Bercow’s pronunciation of that word: “Ordaaaah!” You will certainly remember him; he was the Speaker of the British Parliament up till last year, having occupied that seat for 10 years.

Order is what Easter seems to promise. Order is what we all secretly desire. Just consider how the current epidemic has sowed disorder and how we all wish this time to go away as quickly as possible, for this chaos to end and for us to return to the order we are used to.

But order depends on limits, and this is where the problem lies. Who determines those limits? Who has the right to determine what is right and what is wrong?

Last week, I referred to Kenneth Wain’s book The Value Crisis: An Introduction to Ethics (1995). Professor Wain writes, “Liberal philosophers have resolved the problem by arguing that the law, like the state, should be a neutral one, not propagating any particular ethics, politics, or religion. And yet, most people believe that there are certain moral norms which a state must enforce with its laws, for instance, that people need to be protected from the public display of certain pornographic material or from objectionable sexual behaviour.”

This is, to my mind, the essence of the Anglo-Saxon world-view. In the early 16^th century, Britain left the jurisdiction of the Pope (mostly because of the King’s sexual desires/needs) while maintaining a vague Catholicism – Brexit avant la lettre? – and then discriminated the British Catholics until they were emancipated through the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. This explains why for the British, the state should be neutral of ethics (the King needed to marry and re-marry), politics and religion.

Professor Wain continues, “The problem here, however, lies in determining what should be included under these headings [public display and objectionable sexual behaviour], even assuming that the principle itself is universally accepted, which it will not be by libertarians, because people have very different ideas both about the kind of sexuality that is or is not objectionable and about what can or cannot be displayed in public. There is also the question what is to count as public and what as private.”

This passage goes to the heart of the matter: what are the limits and who is to impose them?

It is indeed a messy situation. One solution is to resort to direct democracy: referenda. But we all know that the big risk inherent in referenda is that the mass media can influence the vote, just like the mass media influence whether you buy this brand of cola or that. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays – “the father of public relations” – used modern psychology techniques to carry out the assignment given to him in the early 20^th century by the tobacco companies to convince women to start smoking. The campaign was a complete success: many women started smoking and became addicted to nicotine. If this was good for their lungs is another story. My point is that referenda can be (but are not always) manipulated.

However, to go back to Professor Wain’s analysis. There’s something that offends my sensibility, and possibly that of others. He writes, “even assuming that the principle itself is universally accepted, which it will not be by libertarians” and the question begs itself. Who the heck are the libertarians? Why are the libertarians so important that their views have to be superior to the views of others?

I would say that the libertarians are a noisy minority who represent nobody but themselves. (Just look at the media landscape in Malta – a few libertarians making a lot of noise.) The vast majority of people want order not chaos.

Unless they are manipulated by the media into mis-seeing chaos as order.

Limits to Order

Too much of a good thing is bad, used to say my sixth-form Chemistry teacher. And he was right.

Too much order becomes obsession. And repression.

Consider the Franco and Ceaușescu regimes, in Spain and Romania respectively. The former was Fascist, the latter Communist. Ceaușescu’s was crazily obsessive and repressive: Romanian police would inspect pregnant women to ensure they carried the pregnancy through. The year Ceaușescu’s regime was finally toppled, one million abortions were performed in Romania – the repression had been too much to bear and women reacted irrationally.

Both Spain and Romania suffered because of irrational order. There’s a good book on the excesses of Franco’s regime, called The Ghosts of Spain, by Giles Tremlett. The Spaniards decided to move forward by somehow agreeing to forget the atrocities committed by the Francoists.

The question is to find limits to Order, to avoid excessive, suffocating, life-taking Order.

The promise found in the image of Life overcoming Death is probably the answer to the need of Light out of the Darkness and Order from Chaos.

A useful insight could also have been given by a Spanish 20^th-century liberal philosopher: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia”, “I am I and my circumstances”.

But the word limit is up, and we shall have to leave this to some other time.

My Personal Library (92)

In the final years of Franco’s regime, the Catalan author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published the first in the long series of the Pepe Carvalho detective novels. Montalbán wrote also Autobiography of general Franco, which I have not read and wonder whether it is similar to Tomas Eloy Martinez’s The Peron Novel and Santa Evita.

The Carvalho novels are an excuse for the author to comment on the Spanish society of the latter half of the 20^th century; the last novel, published posthumously, is a long comment on world affairs. However, the author hid these comments behind intelligent plots and extraordinary forays into the culinary tastes of the protagonist – the books are replete with recipes.

One thing that strikes you about Carvalho is that though he is a man of culture, he frequently uses books from his extensive library as firewood...