I rather like Taylor Swift’s version of “Last Christmas,” though the rest of her Christmas album is less good, particularly “Christmas Must Be Something More,” which is very Christian in a way I find kind of unappealing. This isn’t just because of my general bias in favor of a secular Christmas; there’s something unpalatable about Swift’s attempt to advance a Christian theme in a modern idiom that lacks any kind of theological weight, and so is forced to rely on mere earnestness. This is actually an instance of a more general problem I have with Christianity, which is, as historically fascinating as I find it to be, on some level, I just don’t believe in it. I don’t mean that I don’t accept the religious tenets of Christianity (although I don’t); rather, I doubt Christianity’s empirical existence: I find it much easier to imagine that all those people who today say they are Christians are just somehow confused, than to imagine that they really believe what they say they do.

Of course, this limitation of my imagination has little bearing on the actual state of the world, but I was reminded of my emphasis on the historicity of Christianity by a post condemning Reverend Tim Jones’s recent sermon justifying shoplifting in cases of extreme necessity (via). What’s odd about this post is that it doesn’t just disagree with Jones, but presents his position as so obviously wrong it could only be a result of theological illiteracy or utter stupidity. But the compatibility of expropriation in the case of extreme necessity with Christian ethics is by no means obviously wrong; it was, indeed, the mainstream position among the scholastics and, indeed, looking at what Jones says (particularly, “the observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are”), it’s not clear to me that even Calvin (whose approach to private property was a historical innovation) would object. The author of that post is, apparently, a professor of Biblical Studies, but I’m mystified as to how you could study the bible without taking into account the historical specificity of the concepts it employs. In particular, the concept of private property due to which we today condemn all shoplifting alike as theft simply didn’t exist until the early modern period, and was, in fact, developed in large part in theological debates around poverty and natural law which would be a fruitful source of inspiration for an actual discussion of the ethics of expropriation.

Thinking about it, “people who aren’t historicists” would be another thing I have trouble imagining the existence of.

Related posts:

1. “There’s a red star up on the Christmas tree” I think I may have been living in California too long, partly because I found myself saying “thank-you so much” to somebody the other day, and also because I was surprised yesterday when, on landing in London, the pilot wished everyone on the plane “Merry Christmas,” rather than some more...
2. Im­ma­ture Chris­tianity In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show – I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR,...
3. Arendt in the West Wing On the way out after a talk on Arendt last week, a friend turned to me and said, “so, I guess you’re pretty pissed off.” And indeed I was; I’m not especially knowledgeable or enthusiastic about Arendt, but she’s certainly more interesting than her American epigones (but I repeat myself;...

After I’d stopped laughing at Rowenna Davis’s description of Martin Jacques as a “credible leftist advocate,” I realized the story of the erstwhile Marxism Today section of the CPGB is not really very funny.  When Tony Blair and people decided that an electable social democratic party would have to make some rapprochement with neoliberalism, they, eventually, ended up in government. Martin Jacques made the same ideological move, and ended up writing newspaper columns tailing whatever New Labour had just done. So little reward for such ideological upheaval.

The other interesting thing in that article is the way it depends on constructing two fantasy figures of “the left.” On the one hand, the left are those people who have failed to live up to their responsibility to put forward a coherent agenda, to make a suitably serious case, who fail to understand economics. On the other hand, the left are people who would flock to this coherent agenda if only it was articulated. Now, I don’t think either of these lefts really exist; Davis herself links to a coherent, if rather modest, left wing agenda assembled by Jon Cruddas, while providing no evidence of a left-wing public merely waiting to be summoned. What’s interesting, though, is the space that these two fantasies leave for the columnist; positioned between the reticent experts and the expectant public the columnist’s mere speech appears both radical and necessary.

Related posts:

1. Ironically… … this article is incredibly stupid. So stupid, in fact, that it makes the article next to it, Martin Kettle’s condemnation of the lack of “consensus” in US politics, look almost coherent. But not quite, obviously....
2. The empire never ended So it turns out Hillary Clinton isn’t just an isolated Communist conspirator, either: We know that in 1991, the Soviet Union “spontaneously” collapsed and that its leaders, who remain in power to this day, suddenly, independently, at precisely the same moment, inexplicably transformed into…Democrats! He continues: In short, the Soviet...
3. Barack Obama, neo­conserv­ative? When Žižek wants to support mainstream leftish politicians, he argues that they make clearer the essential indistinguishability of mainstream candidates; when the right is in power, the superficial differences make arguments for the necessity of radical change appear false (we certainly saw this with Bush). But when Žižek wants to...