I missed this magazine’s deadline for last month, but it was a much earlier January when I collaborated with civil servants in the design of a government programme of change within industry. The Chairman was always ‘First division,’ and most members were junior colleagues.
These young folks had razor-sharp minds and once they knew the purpose of the gathering, they were off like greyhounds out of the traps after the hare. Speedily the subject was dissected into bite-sized chunks; analysed and solutions posited. Positives and negatives were listed, and they went away to draft a programme of work for every solution, with costs.
This memory was prompted by a headline; “Government Announces a Ten-Point Plan to deal with the Immigrant Crisis. My immediate thought was that they had as much chance of achieving the plan, than has a greyhound of catching a hare tuned to outpace the hounds.
Such plans always seem logical, and, in theory, the government can budget sufficient resources. However, because funds are not allocated all at once, managers immediately feel pressure to show results and so tackle the easiest issues first, rather than the most important tricky ones.
Not so in China, which has built a city for twenty million people in three years, whereas we can’t build a third runway at Heathrow in thirty. Of course, China has different politics and vast surpluses of cash from making and selling the things we used to make. Mercifully, we do not have the Chinese Communist Party, and so, although our political systems are not as effective, we may credit them with other virtues of governance. But is change now in the air?
During the winter of 1947/8, our pipes froze underground for three months, and we had to take daily buckets to a bowser at the bottom of the hill. We had a non-flushing outdoor lavatory in the garden and had also to carry those buckets down the hill to the corporation muck cart which came fortnightly. Everyone regarded the conditions as ‘something to be worked around and we simply ‘carried on walking and working.’ The local mines kept digging coal, factories and farms adapted, schools stayed open, and the older children shovelled snow to make paths. There were disruptions to food supplies, but nothing was unsurmountable. As far as I knew, snow was just another hurdle to be dealt with. This was life!
The idea that folks could choose a lifestyle did not exist. If it did: it could only have been in the minds of a miniscule number of the upper middle-classes of London. It most certainly did not exist in the minds of those who did not have electricity and had to make and patch their own clothes.
My Great Grandfather was born in 1860 and died when I was thirteen. He would be amazed at modern technology and the ease of travel and communication around the world today. I know he was alert to the dangers of assuming that tomorrow will always be like yesterday and so did not take life for granted. Scepticism also made him wary of man-made utopian ideas especially Marxism then practiced in Russia, and much praised by the British Intelligentsia.
That utopian vision lost traction when Russia invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Belin Wall fell. But, as ever, when one ‘vision’ falls others arise and take centre stage. Today, differing visions compete to draw-in those who have time and resources to make choices as to what ‘end’ they visualise and to which they will commit their talents.
With this thought in mind, our Judaic/Christian tradition asserts that God created us as individuals with free-will, and a soul with its own free link to his own immortality. Could 2023 then be the year to spend more time working on building up the infinite Kingdom of God already within us, rather than time on an external finite utopia?
Times and ideas are changing and the Bible is back. So I end with an example of the relevancy of the book of Genesis to one of several issues competing for our minds today. For example: Ideas of racial superiority arising from a belief in Darwin’s theory of Evolution, are shown to be erroneous when we read that God created humans, and that it is One Race Not Many.
Furthermore, other trending issues are discussed on YouTube by leading scientists in Biology, Physics, Cosmology and Mathematics. Each shows the relevancy of Biblical answers to issues of the day. See the interview between Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute, and Biologist Dr, Stephen Meyer.
Mind you. they didn’t know that Samson was the best musician of his time. because, ‘He brought the house down’.
View from the Pew 