Church Times

One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever.....The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”?
Ecclesiastes 1:4, 8-10

It whisper'd too, that freedom's ark,
And service high and holy,
Would be profaned by feeling dark
And passions vain or lowly;
For, Freedom comes from God's right hand,
And needs a godly train;
And righteous men must make our land
A nation once again!
Thomas Osborne Davis

I did something bad this week: I joined Second Life. Now, since there were no cleric's garments handy for me to wear, I went in as a rather non-descript college student. It was – well, different.



Why bother telling you this story ? Well, the one thing I noticed about Second Life that distinguishes it from eRepublik is its prosaic style, You meet someone, not knowing what to expect. And truth to tell, few conversations you have will rival Great Expectations or Pride and Prejudice. But in all encounters, there is a kind of episodic drama, of the sort that we never achieve in eRepublik. Perhaps it is the 3D stimulus, and the scenery – some of which, of course, is quite tacky. But for a game with no rules, no apparent purpose, and mechanics that you purchase as you go, there is something to be said for even the most casual encounters. In the meantime....

I see our own virtual society slowly withering away. What to do ?

It is of course convenient to offer verbal brickbats at this juncture to our admins, whose greed certainly does not exceed the owners of Second Life. Perhaps the admins never quite thought of having us make and buy our virtual clothing for gold. For in Second Life, one can indeed buy weapons, and land, if not manufacturing and food. I know of no governments or elections in that realm, but perhaps there are. But in the meantime, what the admins of eRepublik have triggered is yet another economic collapse, a radical drop in prices which typically accompanies each and every one of their “reforms”.



In this case, I think this is actually just a good old fashioned capitalist panic. Many of us have money and capital in abundance. And we might be inclined to commit those resources to increasing productivity, the better to continue to prop up the untenable wage rates that have prevailed for months. But if we imagine, as I do, that soon and very soon, the admins will, once again take actions that overturn our hard-won investments, well, the smart money is to keep your money at home. As the Teacher says, there is nothing new under the sun, even the virtual sun.

In the meantime, I cannot help but notice that new players, those being younger than I, outnumber the old. This also appears to make no difference to how the game is played. Having never been especially comfortable with the tactics and techniques espoused by the elite as normative, I find it especially annoying the elite has managed to clone a new generation of players in its own image – just as blindly nationalistic, fanatically militaristic, and unaware of the higher nature of politics and policy, much less of the kinder graces that one finds self-evident in Second Life. I do appeal to Dr. Quinn to address my alienation, but it has recently come to my attention that the Voegelinian theories of modernity-as-gnosticism have emerged in the writings and speeches of my episcopal colleague, the esteemed former Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright:

NT Wright on Modernity and Postmodernity

Now, one might dismiss Bishop Tom's reflections as remnants of the ancien regime, even though in many respects he has burned his bridges and left his baggage behind him – after all, so did Lord Corwallis on his march to Yorktown. But I put it to you, the reader, that he has a point. For when I look at the works of our virtual worlds, their bestial power games, their hierarchical clannish behaviors, their utter lack of real individualism, one thing stands clear. While, to some extent, we are importing civilization into these online spaces, their nature is anything but civilized. This bothers me and it should bother you.

I've also taken to listening to interviews and debates involving the so-called “New Atheists” these days. You might know the names of their “Four Horsemen”: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris,Daniel Dennett, and of course my favorite, the late and recently departed Christoper Hitchens. As the Wikipedia article notes, this school of thought asserts that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises”. I have to confess a certain fondness for the memory of Christopher Hitchens whose jeremiads against Christian teaching were only matched by his own strong sense of moral rectitude and his often-bitter verbal assaults on those he chose as targets of his ire. Nonetheless, when push came to shove, I find that Hitchens managed not only to throw out the Old and New Testaments from the Western canon, but most of Plato's Republik and Aristotle's Ethics as well. When Sam Harris says that atheists should not spare Christians the sting of social ridicule and exclusion from the ranks of civil society, he is actually violating Kant's Categorical Imperative. With malice aforethought. Did anybody notice ?

And since the young are impressionable, and often socially and psychologically vulnerable, it is this – I cannot describe it as anything other than moral blindness, which seeps into the pores of these new worlds that are popping up like mushrooms online, we cannot expect a great deal of virtue from their inhabitants. If in fact, the likes of Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Harris have their way, not only will “turning the other cheek” be a rather quaint and curious relic of a long-forgotten faith, but even Plato's milder and more cautious juncture from the Republic, to the effect that virtue constitutes minding one's own business, be also consigned to the trash heap, as we regress to Chapter 1 of the dialogue, to Thrasymachus's dictum that justice is the will of the stronger (party) and to the eye-for-eye code of old Cephalus, who Socrates refutes in passing, but not before having admitted these thoughts:

“For let me tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age.” (Plato's Republic, Book I)



And so, while the New Atheists and their antagonists tie themselves in knots as to whether an omnipotent, all-loving, and just god may send their souls to universal suffering or universal bliss, the works of classic Greek philosophy sit unread, praised by the many and studied by only a few. Such is the world in which we live, live or virtual