Parade of Follies -- Platonizing our Eschatology

"Eschatology" – the study of the last things – typically this branch of Christian thought is dominated by "heaven", "hell", Jesus' return, the "millennium". Plato's philosophy, such as we understand of it, in broad sketches, held that what is unseen about people is better, more lasting, than what can be seen: mind, soul, heart etc. over body. And that a disembodied bliss was the best people could hope for after death. But enough of definitions:

"We believe in … the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." (Apostles’ Creed)

This is the last of N. T. Wright’s “three great quibbles” with modern western theology and it may be the hardest to really get one’s head around. What we typically say about final destiny is slightly other than what scripture teaches; and things we are not saying that the authors of scripture might deem essential and are embodied in the creed, what Wright is calling us to uphold, are closely tied to a “vocational anthropology” as opposed to a “moral” one: our final state, if is about a vocation to be restored, requires that our standard expectations about a post-death existence be thoroughly re-worked.

“If you believe in Jesus, you’ll go to heaven when you die. If you don’t, you’re going to go to hell.” That’s the simplistic message I heard when I was a child. Let’s leave hell out of this item for the moment – but I’ll refer you to Jersak’s Her Gates Will Never Be Shut for an intro to that spectrum.

And I grew up with a family story about an uncle I never met, suffering about 100 years ago, at age 15 of Hodgkins Lymphoma. He reported seeing Jesus (whom, of course, he had not seen) coming to him with his older brothers and sisters (who all pre-deceased his birth) just before he breathed his last breath.

So, along with traditional Christian belief, I believe that there is some state where the personality is separated from the body during death, but in some form that allows for recognition and relationship. But the teaching of Jesus and the apostles – as well as  at least some Jewish teaching before Jesus – promises a resurrection of the righteous – a resurrection into new bodies that will not be subject to death and decay, that will be similar to, yet different from, the bodies we have now.

This ultimate fate is quite different, I think, from what is in people’s imaginations with the phrase “going to heaven when you die” or “crossing the rainbow bridge” or whatever. This is quite different from the ultimate hope of many eastern religions of all the human selves being absorbed and dissipated into the divine nature (not even really a “self”) in a way even less differentiated than the “founders” within the Star Trek – Deep Space Nine story: these can join together in a vast, near-planet-wide lake called the “great link”, but individuals can emerge from it at will or need.

Some may claim that resurrected bodies within a renewed universe versus disembodied spirits inhabiting some “islands of the blessed” is a distinction without a difference, and it may in fact be so when push comes to shove and you ask individuals what they mean by these terms and you start driving them towards expressing distinct aspects of what they would desire for themselves in such an endpoint if it were a true account of a final post-death destination.

A TV show such as “The Good Place” makes it obvious how hard it is to imagine what a final destiny might actually be like. I am in full agreement with Wright on this quibble. As I stated in describing “moralizing our anthropology”, the stereotypical description of heaven bears little to no attraction for me. In the same way that Eric Liddell said, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” when I write great software, there’s an affirmation from God that I feel in that act: that good code honours him at least as much as a great worship song or inspiring sermon, or other more traditional endeavours. To say our future “hope” is disembodied bliss makes, to my mind, a mockery of the extravagant promise implicit in, for instance (once again), I Corinthians 2.9. And this distinction is important to me.

Parade of Follies -- Paganizing our Soteriology

This title is a bit more "inside baseball" to the Christian world -- and for readers who do not identify that way, I apologize. My writing conceit is to fit things into two pages -- in this series into one page -- and part of the cost for that is resorting to mnemonic terms which will sometimes make the text a trifle opaque. Sorry, not sorry.

But in this essay title, I'm using two highly compressed and technical terms. By Paganizing, Wright and I mean conforming the Christian message to widespread other-religious forms, outlined for instance in Mimetic Theory by René Girard, where "balance" and "order" (and "proper" hierarchy as opposed to equality -- more on that some other time) are restored by choosing a victim and pouring the community's hate out on that one. The story of the crucifixion in its barest formfits very neatly into that framework but proper understanding of the event from the Christian position points elsewhere.

By Soteriology, Wright and I are referring to the branch of Christian Theology that tries to categorize and understand deeply what "salvation" (σωτηρία -- so-tay-'ree-a -- "Saviour" was, incidentally, a standard imperial title: Julius Caesar was said to have saved the empire from the civil war) is, how it works, operates, what God does, what people do, etc. Wright used it in his three-word phrases because it is such a powerful mnemonic.

The "numbered" footnotes come from my off-web composition. I'm going to re-read this and try to identify the tersest, most arcane elements here for similar exposition as above in lettered footnotes.

It is not hard to invite someone into new life in Christ but it can be tricky to bring up the subject at all. It can be complex to give even a minimally coherent whole account of the matter. It can be painful to navigate around the hurts that someone may have received at the hands of authority figures within church groups in their past – without enumerating them here, nor imbibing in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. But at some point, one who without external duress offers himself to the most brutal death imaginable and forgives his tormentors is a compelling picture.

It’s relatively easy to express analogies for what Jesus’ death was for from things that the New Testament writers said about it. The thing is simple enough that a pre-schooler can fall in love with it (I did) and follow it for the rest of one’s life.

The difficulty comes in when we try to articulate precisely what was going on in technical terms. This is not to say that the exercise is futile and ought not to be attempted, only that it’s difficult, fraught and has divided more friends over more generations than the years many of us will live out.

Was Jesus human? Was he also God? Did he only appear to be God? Did he only appear to be human? Was he only God some of the time? Did God really die?<a> In the first generation, nobody doubted that Jesus had been nailed to a cross and died, nor that he appeared alive afterwards to easily identifiable people who could give an account of having seen him<1>.

The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds settled these questions after centuries of arguments and pitched battles over the details. Then there was the running “why?” – was it to store up merits for us all? was it to restore God’s honour in the face of our disobedience? was it a gesture to make it plain he was not angry with us?

The most common western answer has typically settled on sin having incurred a blood debt with God that Jesus’ death was sufficient to cover for all mankind – or at least for the Elect<b>.

This picture, still widely preached, has an unfortunate resemblance to a father requiring the death of his own son for some religious purpose. Given how many other possible resonances are available, and how Jesus’ death is an echo of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by Abraham, which seems in one sense to be saying, “nope! I never meant you to actually do that”, due consideration ought to be given to the possibility that something else is going on here.

René Girard talks about Jesus’ death being the death-knell to the perfect-victim pattern in human history. Kruger and Young posit that the Father and Jesus (and the Spirit) were never separate, not even in Jesus’ death – that the cry of Psalm 22.1<c> by Jesus on the cross was not of dereliction, but a reference to the whole Psalm<2>. A particularly well-loved modern Christian worship song makes it sound as though “the wrath of God” something like licked its chops at Jesus’ death<3>

Whatever the cross was, I think it’s as much a mistake to cling to any explanation that makes God sound like an ancient bloodthirsty deity as I think it is to dogmatize any other medieval doctrinal tic.<d>
--
<1> I Corinthians 15:3-8 – an interesting run of “Greek-as-a-Second-Language” text within Paul’s acro-verb-ic text. Scholars argue strongly that this text dates back to within 5 years of Jesus’ resurrection.
<2> And they’re not the only scholars to point that out, e.g. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
<3> In Christ Alone (Keith Getty/Stuart Townend). Some fellowships re-write that line, the original composers object.
<a> The history of this debate over the first 300 years or so of Christianity makes fascinating reading if you're into that sort of thing, but the best summary of the results of that debate are probably to be found in "The Apostles' Creed", "The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed" and "The Chalcedonian Definition" -- all documented reasonably well on Wikipedia.
<b> In some framings, only some people, the chosen ones, are destined to be saved, others to be condemned. Using that term here, is a reference to those frames. The term itself shows up in a verse that confers no advantage on the elect, Matthew 24:24.
<c> "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
<d> if you're familiar with the pools of doctrinal positions either adamantly held to or adamantly opposed to by churches whose stream of thought stretches back to the 16th century or back through the times when Christendom dominated the west, you won't have to think too hard to figure out some of the things I'm pointing at with my elbow here. "iykyk" is a wonderful mnemonic, too!

Parade of Follies – Moralizing our Anthropology

N. T. Wright has laid three critiques against modern evangelical theology. I heard them and pondered them, and I think he’s right. They are “Moralizing our Anthropology”, “Paganizing our Soteriology” and “Platonizing our Eschatology”. I want to talk here about “moralizing our anthropology”, what it means to me, and why and how far I see it to be a valid critique.

Anthropology in its broadest sense is simply our understanding of people, from ἄνθρωπος (man, as in mankind) and λόγος (word, -ology is a common “study-of” suffix in English). The anthropology conceived of here is not one of the branches of anthropology listed in the Wikipedia article but the theological conception of what a human is.

Ever since I was a child I remember hearing sermons that implied, not even subtly, that the most important detail about any human being was whether they were a good person or not (and none of us are good in ourselves). And in the face of universal fallenness, the next important question was whether we were in a “saved” or “damnable” state. From this flowed all kinds of concern over predestination or not, “perseverance” or not (back-sliding? irreversible back-sliding?), “security” or not and how to relate one to another based on that state. Mix into it the importance of doctrinal distinctives and I don’t think it’s hard to see what kind of problems, in simple human relationships, never mind in Christian to Christian fellowship this could lead to.

Add in the rise of not just Christian pluralism but religious (and irreligious) pluralism, getting so caught up in such a Most Important Question Facing Anyone could distort the ability to relate human-to-human in normal, productive ways.

Even more, if what matters most is one’s moral standing in a “salvation sense”, then it’s possible that the subtler “character” issues might go by the board. They shouldn’t but if preaching is so focused on altar calls that it seldom deals with virtue (much less with civic virtue), that’s another problem. (And civic virtue, the softer skills that it takes to perform well at loving and living with those in the closest parts of one’s community is crucial.) Those are the resonances I hear in “moralizing our anthropology.”

Beyond that, and I think this is where Wright’s emphasis lands harder, on the second touch: what has God saved us for? The stereotype of sitting on clouds and playing harps has never appealed to me, falling far below the vision cast in I Corinthians 2.9 – which feels to me like a divine game of “you’ll never guess” or “top that one”. A better answer is right there waiting for us to see in Genesis 1 and 2.

This world, all of it – not just Earth, not just the Solar System, not just the Milky Way, nor the Observable Universe, but all of it – was built to be a temple to God’s glory. We were placed here as images of God’s person and our calling is to reflect God’s wise rule into creation and to reflect creation’s glory back to God. How big a calling that is, what it will take in its entirety to fulfill it, is not yet known but the possibilities extend far, far beyond what “eye has not seen nor has ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of any man” can possibly mean for us yet. Our moral choices, agency, alignment, repentance are important but are ultimately only one sliver (I want to attenuate not nullify its importance) of all that God means us to fulfill. I am daily staggered by these thoughts and how good the news we have to share is in terms of destiny, how far beyond a simplistic “moral standing”.

Some Theological Summaries

From the professional to the personal, and yet this and the pieces that will follow leading into the summer are of significant public import as well. I have been writing some "two-pagers" but I have a small stack of one-pagers that serve as an intro for something that has struck me as of highest current urgency.

The long version of the thoughts that led to this urgence are not easy to fit into this format, nor would the time required to compose them fit very well into the ways my life is organized. But here is an intro to some pieces I have called a parade of follies, as much as anything because I do not measure up to the scholar that the first half is summarizing, yet I deign to put my notions up beside his here, in the imitation that only a devoted but incompetent fan would dare to put out.

Tom Wright Names Our Theological Follies

This series of eight one page (or-less) pieces cover, first, N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western Christian theology.

While there’s nothing here that corresponds exactly, for instance, to C. Baxter Kruger’s and Wm. Paul Young’s thoughts on “union” versus “separation” (which in one point is almost as important, as a single thought, as Tom’s three points are taken together) these are three of the biggest problems, the deepest ways in which the Zeitgeist has infected how we think about God, about Jesus, about our relation to them and how this present period in the story of salvation is likely to come to conclusion.

Briefly:

We have reduced our interest in who or what people are by being so concerned about moral standing and position in light of eternal things as to set the value of most of what any man or woman is or does to approximately nought. (moralized our anthropology)

We have espoused theories of what Jesus’ death meant which when pared down to their logical minimums make Good Friday look like a case of cosmic child abuse (to which Baxter and Paul would say, “Amen!” and “just exactly as we have been telling you”). (paganized our soteriology)

And we have clung to understandings of our destiny beyond the grave that short-change the hope that the Jews had in speaking of resurrection and painted a picture that bears little resemblance to what must be the secret in the Father’s heart when he had one of his prophets say what Paul quotes in I Corinthians 2:9 (eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of any man the things which God has prepared for those who love him), a verse which strikes me as Papa saying to us, “Guess! Whatever you can imagine, it’ll be better – not like ‘vegetables’, but like a holiday at a beach – on the other side of the world!”. Instead, under the weight of a memory of “sacred tradition”, we have been settling for the best that the Greeks could imagine. (platonized our eschatology)

In the following single pages, I first summarize each of these ideas, as I understand them, in one page, in a form that should be easier to consume than a 40 page chapter in a monograph might do, yet more transparently than the summarizing three word phrases can. (like in number alone to the silly phrases a Canadian politician has been using to raise his profile)

I follow up with three items of my own that Tom’s items called forth out of my heart – not that he needed (or wanted) an answer from this quarter, but that’s the way his words worked on me.

So here you go: Wright’s Quick Critiques explained, then Arthur’s Add-Ons (also numbering three) as chasers. Truly, a parade of follies (where the folly is all mine)

And I’m going to follow that with another thought about the intersection of religious convictions and how we western Christians are moving in the world that I consider of paramount and general importance.

Opposing Bill C22 (yet another security-backdoor bill) with Manly Firmness

Dear Ms. Royer,

I can't remember how many times the government of Canada has introduced bills in the last 2 decades asking for law-enforcement back-doors on secure communications. And I can't remember how many of them I missed the opportunity to speak up against them, as much as anything because every time we do this, it makes us look like idiots; if it were ever to pass it would make us all more vulnerable to bad actors; and really, can we just learn from others' mistakes and the words of experts and just drop this?

Earlier this evening I was watching "Vera" (the "Christmas Special" about a student group reunion on an island only accessible by car at low tide), and once again it struck me how Britain's surveillance state has used that show, Morse, Midsomer, all the detective shows to give good press to their pervasive system of CCTV cameras (which a certain band held up to ridicule on their low-budget music video -- paid for by editing and postage stamps on FOIA requests) -- which episodes always strike me as to how lazy CCTV systems made policing there. This highlights the first problem with legislated back doors in encryption: why do the hard work of human intel and gumshoe investigation if you can just unlock the communication. The automatic comparison to the PRC's Public Security Bureau (公安部) are striking to me -- the last work I did at *****, one of the things that drove me out, was realizing that enabling GRE of IPv6 traffic for routers destined for [Chinese companies] was to aid the surveillance state. Or it reminds me of Russia's Interior Ministry. Our law enforcement should be ashamed to come out in support of things that grant them those kinds of powers.

But it gets worse. If every secure channel is available through keys known only to the participants, the chances that a bad actor will get access to everyone's communication (as happened in 2024 with China's Salt Typhoon attack on American targets) is unthinkably impossible. Force access through a law enforcement key or key infrastructure, and the occurrence becomes practically a certainty -- especially over the long haul. You may be being sold on C22 making Canadians safer by helping law enforcement find the bad guys quicker but the bad guys will use illegal encryption anyway -- and our police will be foiled ---- AND bad actors have a FANTASTICALLY valuable target to hit for: get the right key and you can unlock all Canadians' so-called secure messaging -- and we'll all be walking around digitally naked in a hostile world. Your government should be ashamed to consider in any kind of a positive light any measure that has a finite (and significant) chance of leading to that outcome.

Finally, it's not as though this is new news that a back door is a bad idea. Everybody knew it already even before the Clipper chip was put out as a tentative standard for secure telephony. The security boffins knew it was a bad idea and fortunately mobilized the public to oppose it, so it didn't become a widespread, mandatory-because-everyone-uses-it like gmail or Microsoft Office, standard and it just died.

This bill must die, too, and someone needs to drive a stake through its heart so that it never comes back. Please. Oppose it (to borrow a phrase from our neighbours) "with manly firmness" (read that as "with adult firmness" -- their founding Fathers weren't paragons of gender neutrality). Oppose it in caucus. Oppose it in committee. Oppose it on the floor. And sneer confidently that you're siding with the smart and the good people to mock the proposal to scorn on any occasion when it arrives in the future.

I have been having a stressful week because of all the other things your government is doing that I see ending badly for the welfare of all my neighbours here in Canada, too many to enumerate now -- and then along with the suspension of bicycle travel to work because physics overcame physical structure too many times (not to my injury, thankfully! but to my impediment), this (C22) comes along: the bad idea of escrow or secondary key that will just never go away.

I am not a drug dealer but I treasure the freedom to be private.

I have no vile secrets, neither do I write love letters and last-will-and-testament instructions on postcards.

I want our police to catch all the miscreants, but I am UTTERLY and to my last breath opposed to surrendering one ounce of my privacy to make their job easier. They're already doing a pretty good job and they don't need this kind of a short cut -- or if they feel they do need it, it comes at too high a price in the welfare of myself and all my neighbours that we should even DEIGN to consider the request, let alone to grant it.

And so I will always say, Sincerely and with utmost respect -- despite the straits of tension and inner panic its repeated consideration is inducing.

Arthur N. Klassen

Some Like It Personal, Some Like It Professional

I insist on doing both. Why am I here and not <blank>?

• registering my own domain? I could but I'm not that serious about establishing a brand.
• wordpress? even more work.
• substack? okay maybe this one would be a better fit, but then I'd feel pressure to do this regurlarly. I mean, the first blog I've read that's primarily on substack is that of Heather Cox Richardson and her volume is definitely not something I'm even capable of aspiring to. She's so big she's been typo-squatted! on substack! And there are others. Many others. I'm too busy going back and forth to work (but not driving!), trying to pull my weight on the chores, being a decent human being to all and sundry etc. etc. to try to measure up to any of those

Naw, when it comes to posting, I'm more like that old dweeb who built a myspace page back when they were big, let it rot and then went back and started posting there again later (while family and friends stand around waiting for something awful to happen, hoping they won't be embarrassed by the result). And no, I'm not doing myspace either. I'm way more about the words and ideas than the pictures and hot takes. I'll do some of that because for me, the world is an array of play buttons, on songs, on poems, on phrases, on movie clips and here, I'm gonna let 'em all leak out (in a controlled fashion if I can remember to do that). But I'll do it in text and links, to wikipedia, to the Things themselves, mostly.

This one's going to be more "perfeshunal" if it's possible to do that in a post that's used the words "naw", "dweeb", "myspace" and "perfeshunal".

I develop software. I've been doing that for 40-odd years now. Sometimes, when my employer has been a Canadian subsidiary of an American company, I've been called an engineer internally, but that's not on. I'm not even a lapsed EIT, let alone a full P.Eng. In fact, I'd been doing this for 10 years before I had even EITs as colleagues, let alone full P.Eng's (there were more than two at Dynapro when I was there). But I knew that in order to become what it needed to be, software had to become more engineering and less development (magic). And now I work for a medical technology company and, well, all the software must be engineered so it can do Great Good without egregious risk.

Some time while I was at Creo, I was reading some culture-of-development book (I think it was Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code but google isn't helping me out on this one) and there were a list of 9 priorities, in two different orders. The one was put up as a straw man, with the other, clearly more correct, beside it. The more correct list stuck in my brain (as such things do), and I've been using it as a byword ever since. I call it "The Sacred Nine" (I think I was reading Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion Cycle at the same time and I thought being a "code druid" a cool idea. I didn't get any blue tattoos to back it up but I went in pretty deep, at least in my own head, hence the pompous slightly mystical tome).

So here they are (and whoever you are, if you happen to read this, if I've got some of the middle ones in the wrong order, I take the blame on myself alone):

The Sacred Nine 

1. Correctness
2. Testability
3. Global Efficiency
4. Maintainability / Clarity
5. Consistency
6. Local Efficiency
7. Size
8. Personal Expression
9. Personal Convenience

If we work together for more than two months, you'll hear me rattle them off at least once. In some ways this is a motherhood-and-apple-pie list for software but I like having it explicit. I like having the last three on. the. list. In that order. By their true names -- by the time I'd seen this list I had seen those last three cloak themselves as something else more important-sounding, and creep their way up the list to establish themselves as -- if possible! -- Most Important Things (as if that could ever be ANYTHING but correctness).

I came up before things like Test Driven Development, or being Test Infected, before any testing / mocking frameworks were in common use on "PC-class" computers (where I did ALL my development before Infonet). My first source control system was MPW Projector -- before that everything was escrowed floppy disks -- and the next ones I used were MS Delta (discontinued for the dumbest reasons, also known inside Microsoft as SLM or "slime" -- no independent link for this system survives) and MS Source (Un)Safe. I can't imagine what my life would be like now without git -- thank you again, Linus Torvalds (also the creator of Linux).

When I came across this list, it was obvious:

• software has to be correct; no correctness? no value (think Pentium floating point bug, which spawned the "Borg" spin-off: "I am Pentium of borg. Prepare to be approximated")
• if you wanted to say "this software is correct", having extensive enough tests to prove it was obviously desirable, too. So when C++ came of age, and a colleague brought in googletest and googlemock at Teradici, I fell in love with my favourite language all over again
• when you're doing stuff, do the big things the right way (global efficiency) or your users will curse your memory every time your "pessimized" code steals another slice of their lives through waiting.
• tell the obvious truth in your code (maintainability/clarity): computer op code sets are so complex now that the compiler's optimizer will be better at optimizing your code through arcane constructions than you will be
• write new code in the same dialect (consistency) as the code beside what you're inserting is doing -- and do the small things right (local efficiency)
• size used to be important -- I've had colleagues who pushed it up (at least emotionally) to #2 in day to day operations (this was before good test/mock frameworks were available on our end of the market)
• and this is a creative effort (expression) that takes up piles of our time (convenience) so the last two are CLEARLY important to include. At the bottom -- I've had colleagues/managers who pushed them up, in interchangeable order to items 1 and 2 -- but always under different, more important sounding names (I name no perps here). 

So there you go. That's the Sacred Nine and I've finally written them down somewhere independently linkable, something I've been meaning to do for a long time, except mostly my life has been full of life except when I'm trying to sleep, (audible version) so I didn't get around to doing this until now.

(not quite a "Sea of Blue" but edging there... this is one place where I can let the noises in my head bother you without feeling the need to apologize)

It's 16 months old but still topical

I wrote this awhile ago but it keeps seeming topical and I want to put it out there. There may be an up-tick on these in case anyone cares. I've been writing things off in a corner and this, from a series of "two-pagers" that I've come to refer to as "tract-lets" is #22:

As a Guy To Guys

(On Martin Luther King Day, 2025) If what I am about to write doesn’t apply to you, ignore it. But before you ignore it, do me a favour and consider what you would do, what you have done in situations such as these: Today the US could have inaugurated its first woman president, a mixed race black- south-asian woman of more or less good character and a track record of serving the people who elected her at every level so far, on Martin Luther King Day, and instead they inaugurated an adjudicated rapist, felon on 34 counts of fraud in an attempt to subvert an election – with around 50 other counts of state and federal indictments duly rendered by grand juries, not political gangs – but, for a variety of reasons, untried.

The only explanation I can conjure up that comes close to satisfying the facts as I see them is that we guys are a pack of racist, sexist, excrement dispensers (RSED). (I’m sorry. I just can’t bring myself to using a terser, more colloquial term.) And what’s worse, we’ve co-groomed the women in our lives to hold the same prejudices – if not in fact, then at least in effect.

Long before this “Rough Beast”’s<1> first election, David Sedaris compared being undecided in a certain election to this: when given a dinner choice of some chicken dish and a plate of feces and broken glass, asking how the chicken was prepared<2>. I wish the comparison were becoming less topical but it isn’t. And it’s not entirely an American problem, either. Over the course of Justin Trudeau’s term in office, he has treated more than one woman disrespectfully, but I call to mind especially, the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould (J W-R). In every case, but especially with regard to this attorney-general, the loss of standing, of reputation affected the various women FAR more than it affected Trudeau.

I said, from his swearing-in as our Prime Minister, that he suffered from being a performative twerp. I have been shunned by some acquaintances of otherwise good will over that remark, but I stand by it. He knows how to say the right thing. All too often he has no idea how to do it. In nothing did this ailment show up so starkly as in how he treated JW-R, but it affected others, too. With JW-R’s departure, Chrystia Freeland could have – should have – been groomed to take over from Trudeau. She was not. She was loyal – too loyal one could say until almost the end, when she was asked to make a statement on Canada’s finances that she had points of disagreement with, at the same time as she was to be shuffled out of the very high profile Finance portfolio to some other of significantly less standing. It seems to me that Justin felt too threatened by her.

Now, she has a reputation of being “damaged goods” politically and the tar of the later parts of Trudeau’s term is sticking to her, so that

(a) if she were chosen as leader of the Liberal Party she would likely lead it to a defeat similar to the sinking ship that was delivered to Kim Campbell and which she steered to an undignified appointment with an iceberg, but

(b) she’s not likely to be chosen anyway – whether any of the other options has a particularly good chance of keeping government out of the hands of a fascist-adjacent performative twerp who is probably also a foreign asset. (the current leader of the opposition)

To my mind this situation has come about almost entirely because the voters, especially the men (and even in Canada) are largely RSEDs. And it’s not just white guys. I mentioned this idea to a Macao-Chinese co-worker, narrowing it to white guys and he said, “no. We are too.” And I’ve seen more than one article about the state of play around gender and “white-ness” in south Asia: When “eye candy” is “needed”, especially the women being so presented are unvaryingly of more pale skin than not. This situation is intolerable and needs to change. And so, as a guy to guys, I’m going to call it out.

Prove to yourself, in terms that might convince a black or brown woman that you aren’t an RSED, or else. Or else, be willing to assume that you’re probably acting like an RSED some of the time, even if you aren’t actually playing the part 24x7x365. Look at your voting patterns, your preference patterns in politics, in business, in every kind of relationship. Stare them down, each one, like Chuck Norris wearing the last two verses of Psalm 139 like X-ray glasses.

A young man of my acquaintance once thought of spending a “gap year” in Asia and made a passing remark to his Mother about finding a wife among the women he might meet there and asked her (he thought of her as a pretty open-minded and accepting person) what she would think of such a thing. Her response was that she would cry – and that left him stunned.

I tell the story because the “grooming” into racism, and like it, into sexism, is subtle and durable, deep and pervasive, like the extent to which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown’s neighbours were perceived by him to be in league with evil powers. That story has multiple lessons and resonances to read, but one of them could be this: that when a community has been devoted to any kind of evil for multiple generations, it becomes a structure that is hard to oppose, even if the community loyalty to that evil (as in the case of that young man’s mother) isn’t overt or intentional, but comes clothed in concern and care. In the case of this young man and his Mother, perhaps it was cultural differences, or what would become of mixed race children, or maybe she just didn’t want her grandchildren to have divided loyalties between living nearby or near to their other grandparents. Who knows!? And at some point, what does it matter? The prejudice is still problematic.

And this is not to impugn the Mother – any more than Obama told stories about his white grandparents to impugn them – but as a demonstration of how deep-seated and thorough-going these racist structures are – and therefore how deep-seated and thorough-going the accompanying sexist structures are, too. Nobody is immune from a tendency toward bias. You’re not. I’m not. “This is my trouble, these were my fathers. So how am I supposed to feel, living on the rim of the broken wheel? ... You and me we are the break in the broken wheel, a bleeding wound that will not heal...”<4> Or cue up the better known line from Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil going through every human heart.

If you’re unattached and looking for a potential relationship, where do your preferences as to looks run? Whiter? Blonder? “Caucasian”? What does the record look like? Do you put up with mansplaining when you see it happening? Do you mansplain? Are you as ready to follow a woman’s lead as a man’s in work/life? Time to grow up folks, to leave childish things like this behind us, to see with new eyes.

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<1>Olear, Greg. Rough Beast. 2024. referring to "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats

<2>Sedaris, David. “Undecided”. The New Yorker, October 20, 2008

<3>Joke line: “Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares at them until they quail and hand over the info he wants.”

<4>Cockburn, Bruce. “Broken Wheel”, Inner City Front.