Techy interlude

Forgive the tweet-like brevity of the last post. I was standing in the crowded Apple store in South Beach, holding one of the dozen or so iPads they have for customers to play around with, while a queue of would-be early adopters waited eagerly at my shoulder. Now we’re home (looks like we re-entered British airspace just in time), I can elaborate…

Thanks to Apple’s splendidly open policy of allowing customers free access to their networked machines, and as a result of our teenage offspring’s visceral need for daily access to Twitter, I had several sessions getting acquainted with Mr. Jobs’ latest toy. The verdict? Well, it’s every bit as attractive and easy to handle as I thought it would be. If you’ve used an iPhone, then it’s just like moving up to a larger version, with the same intuitive touch technology and ease of movement between applications.

My main interest was in the one application that you can’t get on your phone: iBooks. It’s stunning. You touch a virtual book to take it from the shelf, then flick through the pages just like a real book. You can change the font, look up words, and see illustrations in glorious colour. Damn: just when I’d got myself a Kindle, along comes the iPad and makes it look like MS-DOS compared to Windows. All the more annoying, then, that iBooks probably won’t be available on the UK version of the iPad, which won’t be in the shops until late May.

Incidentally, we resorted to the Apple store for our daily dose of the internet because the wifi charges in our hotel were so exorbitant. And just before we went away, there was a spate of stories about people using their smartphones abroad and being hit with shocking bills, so I’d turned off data roaming on my iPhone. I wonder, though, why service providers in the UK (like O2 and Orange) can’t come to some kind of reciprocal arrangement with overseas providers (like AT&T), as they do for calls and texts? The assumption seems to be that emailing and looking stuff up on the Web is a peripheral luxury which you should be prepared to forego when you’re abroad. Surely this is no longer the case, and most people would be prepared to pay a small additional fee, as they do for international calls, in order to check their messages and read local restaurant reviews, etc, while they’re on holiday?

(Note to regular readers: this techy stuff is just a temporary aberration and the usual coverage of politics, culture and so on will resume as soon as I get over my jet-lag...)

iPad therefore...

Posting on an iPad in the Apple Store, Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Just because I can....Normal service will resume when we get home later this week.

Soon you'll be OK

Posting will be even more sparse than usual over the next week or so, as we're off to warmer climes, hoping to lay the ghosts of a difficult year.

I'll leave you with this from The Polyphonic Spree, which seems kind of appropriate as we head off for some solar therapy.

Happy Easter / Passover / Spring to you all.

(Incidentally, the person who posted the original clip describes it as 'the happiest video on Youtube', but that's not quite true. That would be this.)

Everywhere and nowhere

Yet another post about religion: but that seems fitting this weekend. Writing in the Guardian, Cole Morton surveys the British religious landscape at Easter:

The Roman Catholic hierarchy remains engulfed in the scandal of abusive priests. The Church of England [...] is struggling to cope with the loss of its status, wealth and most of its people.

Neither organisation can muster a million followers on a Sunday, and attendance has fallen for the fifth year in a row. The pews may fill a little more this weekend, but on the whole people don't want to belong anything, let alone a needy, demanding church.

But, argues Morton, this doesn't mean that people have stopped believing. Instead, he celebrates 'the rise of a new national faith', which he calls 'the Church of Everywhere':

The Church of Everywhere consists of all those people who believe in a god of some kind but don't belong to a religious organisation. [...] They don't have a collective voice because they are each doing their own thing. But they are certainly in the majority.

And where does Moreton find evidence of this new spiritual sensibility?

You can see it at Stonehenge for solstice, or at festivals, as people seek the divine in the open air. Even new forms of morris dancing, most eccentric of 'traditional' pursuits, have become a way for people to express their spirituality outdoors.

They are part of the new faith, which doesn't mind what your god is called. Improvised, individualistic and hard to pin down, it does still have some identifiable collective values, including fair play, individual freedom and the notion of the Earth as a sacred space.

I think there's a grain of truth in Moreton's description, but I take issue both with aspects of his analysis and with his celebratory tone. While it's true that, over a long period, traditional religion has been losing both its appeal and its influence, it would be a mistake to overlook the continuing strength (and modern revival) of more conservative versions, such as evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.

Moreton correctly identifies the ecological and individualistic strains in contemporary popular thinking, but he's in danger of confusing disparate phenomena and claiming too much for his new multi-faith religiosity. The trouble with 'spirituality' is that it can be made to include pretty much anything: morris dancing as an expression of faith is taking it a bit far, I think. And surely there's a contradiction in arguing that the new spirituality is all about doing your own thing, and at the same time claiming that these 'improvised, individualistic' pursuits are part of some larger collective movement.

Moreton wants us to believe that the current popular interests in 'paganism, Buddhism and the green movement' are not only connected with each other, but somehow part of the same phenomenon as the mourning for Princess Diana and Jade Goody's funeral. He argues that the latter event 'put the new faith of the people on display, live on television with white doves, party balloons and lots of tears', adding:

The crowds watching on screens outside gasped at the home videos and blinked back tears at slushy songs. I was there, and this was powerful stuff that worked for people.

Again, Moreton has captured some kind of shift in the collective psyche. The lapsed Catholic in me is tempted to describe it as the return of the Catholic repressed, a half-conscious popular yearning for a sense of ritual meaning that was lost in the transition to modernity. But whether it can be described as a new form of faith, rather than yet another symptom of a consumerist celebrity culture, I'm not sure.

But even if Moreton has identified something real stirring in the collective imagination, both the lapsed Christian and the secular humanist in me question his excitement at this new all-embracing, content-free spiritual 'movement'. Traditional Christians (and Jews, and Muslims) would argue that true faith leads to selfless action in the interest of others. But Moreton's Church of Everywhere appears to encourage a narcissistic absorption in one's own feelings which has more in common with pop psychology and the self-improvement industry.

And then there's the suspicion that this new faith-lite is little more than a popular version of the 'faith in faith' peddled by the likes of Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong. The crowds blinking back tears at Goody's funeral and the rhetorical manoeuvres of the multi-faithists are both caught up in a cloying sentimentalism: a sense that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe in something. Don't worry whether it's true, just feel the faith.

This Easter, humanists and traditional believers can unite in their rejection of this worrying irrationalism.

Hellfire and homophobia

Well done Peter Tatchell, for sticking up for the Christian street preacher fined for 'homophobic remarks’ that were ‘aggravated by religious prejudice’. The perhaps unfortunately named Shawn Holes, an American Baptist evangelist touring Britain, was arrested for telling passers-by in Glasgow city centre that homosexuals deserved the 'wrath of God' and would go to hell.

As Peter says, however distasteful Mr. Holes' beliefs: 'The price of freedom of speech is that we sometimes have to put up with opinions that are objectionable and offensive.' He adds:

Just as people should have the right to criticise religion, people of faith should have the right to criticise homosexuality. Only incitements to violence should be illegal.

Quite. If we're going to start prosecuting people for expressing views that some find offensive, where will it end? The same law that's used to prevent fundamentalists articulating their hostility to homosexuality, abortion, etc, could just as easily be used by religious groups to stop secularists publicly criticising religion. We have to maintain the distinction (as I argued here) between legitimate criticism of ideas and stirring up hatred. Mr. Holes wasn't inciting the crowd to attack gays: he was happy to leave that to the judgement of what atheists would call his Imaginary Friend.

I suppose my only caveat, and where I might depart from the Tatchell line, is that I do have qualms about allowing unrestricted hellfire preaching in public places. I wouldn't prosecute preachers for expressing their personal prejudices, but I might restrict their activities on the grounds of disturbing public order. As I argued here, there's a sense in which the fundamentalist screaming damnation in the shopping centre is restricting my right to go about my business in peace. If we tolerate the Strict Brethren reminding us of our sins as we sip our lattes outside Starbucks, why not allow Islamist hate-preachers to vent their wrath in the public square?

Incidentally, one does wonder what's got into the police these days. First they take action against a legitimate TV documentary, then they harrass an innocent blogger and pay a visit to a Tory MP, now they arrest a Baptist preacher, all in the name of preventing 'religious prejudice'. Is Plod compensating for its own former reputation for racism and homophobia with this kind of over-reaction? Or is it the case that, when it comes to the difficult and sensitive issue of hate crimes, many officers just don't have the flexibility, judgement - dare I say intelligence? - to interpret the law in anything other than this hamfisted way?

Well said, Archbishop

...and that's not a headline you'll often see on this blog. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has actually said something quite sensible. In his Easter ecumenical letter, he draws attention to the very real persecution of Christians in some parts of the world, describing the 'butchery, intimidation...and harrassment' suffered by believers in places such as Egypt, Mosul, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. This continuing reality, said Williams, should remind Christians who live in 'more comfortable environments' of the need 'to keep our own fears in perspective': 'It is all too easy, even in comfortable and relatively peaceful societies, for us to become consumed with anxiety about the future of Church and society'.

Coming only days after senior Church of England figures, including Williams' predecessor George Carey, sent a letter to the Sunday Telegraph complaining that Christians in Britain were being discriminated against, the Archbishop's statement is seen by some as a rebuke to religious leaders who encourage this kind of persecution complex and victim mentality. Instead, citing the example of murdered Salvadorean archbishop Oscar Romero, Williams suggested high-profile Christians would do better to use their influence to defend the rights of the poor and campaign for political change.

So two cheers for the Archbishop of Canterbury. There'll be a third cheer when he follows the logic of his own thinking, joining the dots to realise that almost all the examples of real persecution that he cites happened in countries dominated by one faith and where there is no separation between religious and secular law. Whereas what he describes as more 'comfortable' environments for believers tend to be those in which liberal secularism holds sway. Perhaps he'll remember that next time he's tempted to call for the introduction of Sharia in Britain.

An afterlife for Democratiya?

Newly added to the blogroll: 'Arguing the world', a new blog from the folks at Dissent, with some help from writers from the disbanded Democratiya. Looks like it might go some way to assuaging the grief of those of us who bemoaned the absorption of the latter into the former. I know unity is strength, and so forth, but Democratiya was the best thing to happen in British political journalism for ages, and being part of a US magazine, however noteworthy, is not the same as having a distinctively British progressive anti-totalitarian voice.

There are good things on the new blog already from familiar names such as Alan Johnson and Martin Bright. Good, but tantalisingly brief. Perhaps they're intended as tasty morsels to tempt our palates and more substantial pieces will appear in time. I hope so, otherwise I shall continue to miss my regular fix of Democratiya.