Money is Power

“You’ve heard of the golden rule, haven’t you, boy? Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

Aladdin (1992)

Just look at all those obsolete pound coins.

As I understand it, there are some lucky souls out there – you may even be among them, O Cherished Reader – whose allotment of set texts for GCSE English included J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, a work to which I was recently introduced in the form of the 1954 film adaptation starring Alastair Sim.¹ Aware as I am that jealousy of said lucky souls on this count is sinful and pointless, it remains the case that I’m certain I would have found An Inspector Calls a subject of study infinitely preferable to almost every single one of the miserable selection of GCSE set texts to which I was subjected myself (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a selection of short stories by Thomas Hardy, and, worst of all, Susan Hill’s I’m the King of the Castle – though I would probably have kept Shakespeare’s very entertaining Much Ado About Nothing²). My fifteen-year-old self could probably have written a rather elegant essay or two on what Priestley says about taking responsibility for one’s actions, as well. This post is not such an essay, but that’s not to say it won’t make use of some of the same themes, so if you did study An Inspector Calls for GCSE and are consequently still sick to the back teeth of all thematic analysis of it, you might want to give this one a miss. Equally, if you didn’t, and are still unfamiliar with the story, you might want to prevent my spoiling it for you by not reading any further until such time as you should be familiar with it.

An Inspector Calls introduces us to the Birlings, a well-to-do Edwardian family whose members have all had some sort of dealings with a young lady known as Eva Smith, whose recent death is suspected to have been suicide. At the questioning of the mysterious Inspector Poole (Goole in the original playscript, but here and henceforth I’m working from the film version I saw), each Birling admits to actions that contributed in some way to the desperate nature of the situation Eva ended up in. First up is Arthur, the father of the family, who fired Eva from her job at his firm after she helped lead the workers in petitioning the management for higher wages. And it’s awfully easy to shake our heads in judgement and dismiss his arguments about the need to remain competitive in order to remain open for business, and so to pay any wages at all, as mere profit-driven heartlessness – but I’m not really here to comment on that. I’m interested in the next Birling to have her involvement with Eva Smith exposed: Sheila, Arthur’s daughter. Because all Sheila did wrong was go shopping.

Well, all right, there was a bit more to it than that: Sheila went shopping with her mother, Sybil, and ended up in a bad mood because Sybil kept disagreeing with her about what she ought to buy. In a department store called Milward’s, she encountered Eva Smith, who had found a new job there as a shop assistant. Eva committed no greater crime than demonstrating how to wear a particular hat more elegantly than Sheila could, and then failing to entirely stifle a snigger when Sheila unsuccessfully tried to cram the same hat over her elaborate coiffure at an acceptable angle – but Sheila’s response was to denounce Eva to her manager and declare that if she saw Eva working at Milward’s again, she would promptly take her custom elsewhere. It was clearly a disproportionate response to a virtually nonexistent slight, but the point I want to make is this: Sheila had power over Eva – power over her continued security and quality of life – and the source of that power was nothing more than her ability to spend money.

Money, to use the common phrase, is power. This is, in fact, so obvious a state of affairs that I’m actually struggling to articulate it in greater detail. Money means you can acquire items; it means you can benefit from services; it means you can bring about changes in your life and the lives of others. To have money is to have some of the ultimately desirable commodity, the thing that people all over the world are striving and scheming to get their hands on in ever larger amounts. Eva Smith wanted money to live on; Milward’s wanted money to run their shop; Sheila wanted – and indeed had – money to buy hats of which her mother disapproved,³ and then to withhold from Milward’s in order to get her own way. The ever-pragmatic book of Proverbs puts it like this: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”⁴ Money can’t buy you everything, but it can buy you everything that can be bought, and that means you’ll never struggle to find someone who’s keen to relieve you of yours, whether through a legal transaction or otherwise. The cash in your pocket and the string of electronic numbers in your bank account represent power. They represent a weapon to be used – spent or withheld – for good or for ill.

But Anne, I haven’t got very much cash in my pocket or a very long string of electronic numbers in my bank account. I can see that money has power if you’ve got enough of it – if you’re a government or a giant corporation or an eccentric billionnaire or whatever – but I don’t see that my drop in the financial ocean is going to make all that much difference to anything, whatever I do with it.

It’s an understandable objection – but this is precisely why I bothered to mention Arthur Birling before moving on to his daughter. We can cast Arthur Birling, owner and manager of his firm, as the giant corporation, with enough spending power to have some real clout in the world at large, but An Inspector Calls isn’t about the effects of Arthur’s decisions on the world at large. It’s about the effects of his and his family’s decisions on the life of one young woman. And Sheila managed to mess up Eva Smith’s life just as catastrophically for the price of a hat, as Arthur did for the price of increased wages for all his employees. However much or little one has of it, money is still power. Money can still mean life or death to an individual, even if the world at large would barely notice.

 

What a profound-looking hat. I wonder what it cost.

And it’s for that reason that I suggest we ought to be very discerning about how we spend it.

Ethical shopping is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, and have built up some knowledge of (which is actually kind of hilarious given that, academically, I avoid any study of ethics like the plague). For this reason, I’ve been thinking for a good while now of writing a blog post outlining some of the relevant issues and principles and pointing my lovely readers towards some brands and retailers that can be commended for their commitment to fair trade⁵ and sustainability. And if you’d be interested in a post to that effect, rejoice: you’ll get one next week. But I wanted to get the why straight before tackling the how.

Ethical shopping is not about you. It’s not about soothing your guilty consumer’s conscience (take that jazz to the atoning blood of Christ, not the filthy rags of your own deeds) or creating a particular, wholesome, magazine-esque lifestyle for yourself (covetousness is a sin, people). I say this because I’ve previously fallen into the trap of thinking like that and I’d spare you the same. Rather, ethical shopping is about trying to use the power your money affords you for good rather than ill. The statement that best expresses the approach I try to take to the matter is the following quotation, attributable to Anna Lappé: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

I like that quotation, because I think it communicates well the way in which spending money represents an exercising of power. Just as one thinks carefully about the weighty decision of which way to vote in a election, so one ought to think carefully about the weighty decision of how to spend one’s money. At the same time, there’s no illusion here that any of us is single-handedly bringing about a fairer world economy, any more than any of us single-handedly brings about a particular election result. I vote not because my vote holds any special weight by itself, but in the hope that it might be joined by enough others to tip the scale in my favoured direction – in which sense it does hold power – and, equally, in the integrity of my own conscience, that I at least did what I could.

Money is power. If we ignore that fact in the way we spend ours, we can no more stand innocent next to governments and giant corporations and eccentric billionnaires than Sheila could stand innocent next to her father. We might not be talking about bringing about major changes in the world at large, but at the end of the day, the price of a hat can be enough to save or to ruin an individual life. What’s more, we shall all have to give God an account for our actions, and it won’t matter what we had – that’s for him to decide – but what we did with it: Jesus commended the widow at the Temple treasury for contributing her mere copper quadrans, after all.⁶

Money is power. Let’s do our best to spend it well.

Footnotes

¹ Well worth the hour and twenty minutes it will demand from you. Check out a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Ff4t2HuAE.

² Dear me, I’m sad I didn’t go to see the recent production of Much Ado… that had David Tennant and Catherine Tate in it: https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/collections/digital-theatre/much-ado-about-nothing?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=maad_what_my_dear_lady_disdain&utm_content.

³ I too like having money to buy hats (though not specifically ones my mum doesn’t like); the best hat shop I know is a little gem of a place in Lyme Regis called Pop Goes the Weasel, or The Old Stuff Made New Hat Factory, or Alison Tutcher Milliner: http://www.alisontutchermilliner.co.uk/. There you go, one ethical retailer in advance of next week (points for UK-based manufacturing and re-/upcycling, as well as quality and excessive gorgeousness).

⁴ That’s from chapter 22, verse 7: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=prov+22&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Not one word. Not capitalised. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.

⁶ The story is told in Mark 12 and Luke 21; here’s the Mark, because why not: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12&version=ESVUK.

The Good and the Bad of the Bible App

Vicar:                                       And now, godparents, are you ready to help the parents of this child in their duties as Christian parents?

Molly and Mrs. Hudson:     We are.

Siri (on Sherlock’s phone): Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Please repeat the question.

Sherlock S4 E1, ‘The Six Thatchers’ (2017)

I’m such a fan of my Bible app.¹

 

Somebody’s smartphone. May or may not have the Bible app installed.

Never again must I cart around a paper copy of the scriptures to every event and occasion where I’m likely to want to consult them, and be frustrated when I find myself wanting to do so unexpectedly; the slim little device I habitually carry on my person anyway is more than sufficient for such consultation, anywhere at any time.² Never again must I wait more than a moment to resolve any suspicions I find myself entertaining about a particular translation decision: not only does the app offer access to over fifty different English versions (most downloadable for offline use), but the text of the Westminster Leningrad Codex³ and four different Greek New Testaments are also available, so that I can take my queries to the original straight away, still using that same slim little device. Never again must I flip through page after page searching for some half-remembered reference (I think there was a number two somewhere in the citation, and I can picture where it was on the page, and it was definitely somewhere in Paul, unless it wasn’t); the app has a search function that’s recently been enhanced with more filtering options: not quite STEP Bible,⁴ but not half bad nonetheless. And, minor a point though it is, never again must I be irritated at the cramped print size or inelegant typeface of a paper copy; in both cases, the app grants its users to select their preference from a variety.

In other words, the Bible app allows one to access a huge volume of scriptural data in an extremely convenient and facilitatory fashion, and of that, my friends, I am such a fan that I will unequivocally urge you to go and download it right away.

Nonetheless – and you knew a caveat was coming – there are some elements of the app that I’m less keen on. I’m a huge fan of the Bible part of the Bible app, but there are all these other random peripherals that have me rather scratching my head as to why the developers should have included them. For example, whenever I open the app, it greets me with an update on my current ‘streak’ of Bible reading: Good evening, Anne. You’ve connected with God’s Word for 34 days in a row! It’s a feature reminiscent of the kind of motivational strategy used by educational apps like Duolingo⁵ – staking something on continued daily practice, and celebrating achievement – but it seems rather inappropriate to applaud me in such fashion merely for opening the Bible app. For one thing, the opening of the app alone doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve actually read any scripture; and moreover, I have a hard enough time battling my pride as it is, without one more voice adding itself to the chorus of my sinful heart in its persistent urging that I should feel pleased with myself for maintaining godly habits like Bible reading (however loosely). In fact, to hear from God through the scriptures is a privilege, not an achievement.

The app also seems obsessed with persuading me to complete devotional ‘Plans’ (I frequently receive emails to this effect). One signs up for a themed ‘Plan’ – current headline examples include ‘The Way Back – Get Your Christian Life Back On Track’, ‘Developing The Leader Within You 2.0’, and ‘The Winter Olympics And The Bible’ – and is then presented with a quota of stuff to read, including some Bible extracts and some reflections by such-and-such an author, split up into supposedly day-sized chunks. Personally, I’ve never found this kind of devotional pattern particularly helpful: I’d rather read scripture by itself, and do my own research if I feel in need of further commentary, since scripture is, you know, inerrant and that, and the devotional content of ‘Developing The Leader Within You 2.0’ or whatever is, you know, not. Still, the app is oblivious to my views on this, and tries to tempt me into committing to Plans with the promise of special achievement badges for completing certain numbers of them. Plus, get this: the Badges, once achieved, appear on my profile so that any Friend with whom I am connected on the app can view them. In fact, my Friends can view as much of my activity on the app as I choose to disclose to them, including the bookmarks I’ve placed, the verses I’ve highlighted, and the notes I’ve made.

Stop right there, Bible app. Stop. Right. There.

Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.⁶ – Matthew 6:1

Maybe I should highlight that one, hmm?

 

Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of highlighting my Bible; it’s all equally inspired, after all. Thanks to thanunkorn at freedigitalphotos.net.

 Granted, allowing and encouraging people to show off just how engaged they are with the many possibilities offered by an app amounts, on one level, to nothing more than good app-building strategy. But this is the Bible we’re talking about. There are more important things at stake here than merely good app-building strategy. Jesus said that if we do righteous things – like studying the scriptures – in order to be seen doing them by others, then being seen doing them by others is all the reward we’ll get. It’s the good we do unseen, conversely, that pleases our unseen Father. How on earth is the Bible app’s system of adorning its users’ profiles with shiny trophies for all the world to see, in return for their apparent pious activity, consistent with that? More to the point, have the very people who put together an app designed to encourage people to engage with the Bible, not read it thoroughly enough themselves to have twigged that its divine Author takes rather a dim view of people parading their righteous doings before others?

Perhaps it’s patronising to imply that the mere existence of the Badges would compel us all to helplessly fall over ourselves completing Plans and highlighting verses and making notes, not caring whether such activity was actually edifying for us or pleasing to God, in order to add another Badge or two to our profiles. But regardless of how users respond to the system, the fact remains that it exists. The fact remains that the way the Bible app is built contains an entirely unbiblical encouragement to sound a trumpet before one’s own obedience in the hearing of others.

I remain a huge fan of the Bible part of the Bible app, for the reasons expounded above. I still, therefore, recommend downloading it – but because I think it will probably be useful for you (as it has certainly been for me), rather than because the implied values its developers have woven into its features are worth endorsing. After all, nothing in this world being perfect, we’re inevitably going to end up providing custom to services whose values don’t entirely match our own. It’s just a peculiarly acute shame that in the case of the Bible app, its values prove not even to match those of its own divinely-inspired product.

Footnotes

¹ It’s this one: https://www.bible.com/app. The first one that comes up when you stick ‘Bible’ into your device’s app store search engine, basically.

² My particular device is a Fairphone 2, https://www.fairphone.com/en/, which is fabulous for several reasons, including: its modular design so that it’s repairable and long-lasting; its ethically sourced materials; and its general good quality as a pretty high-end smartphone. I got mine factory-refurbished (just to add an extra layer of ethical soundness to the process) from the Phone Co-op: https://www.thephone.coop/.

³ A key Old Testament manuscript, if you didn’t know.

⁴ I love STEP Bible: just stick whatever it is you’re looking for into the search bar and boom, the information is handed to you on a plate: https://www.stepbible.org/. Though I’m still waiting for them to put a Syriac Old Testament on the list of available versions…

⁵ Duolingo has now raised the standard of my Modern Hebrew from ‘can really only hazard a guess based on Biblical Hebrew’ to ‘stands some small chance at understanding a simple statement, especially if it’s about cats’: https://www.duolingo.com/.

⁶ The examples given in the chapter are charitable giving and prayer, but that first verse makes it clear that any sort of righteous activity falls into the same category: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6&version=ESVUK.

Proud of You

“Sometimes I think you adopted me because Fred was such a disappointment.”

Hop (2011)

Often when I write a blog post featuring a specific book or film or television serial or stage production or piece of fiction in whichever other format, implicit in my doing so is a suggestion that I would recommend said piece of fiction as an enjoyable way for my dearly cherished readers to spend their time. I would like to make clear from the off that that is not so today; on the contrary, this post is about one of the least inspiring motion pictures I have ever seen. I can think of no redeeming feature on whose account I can honestly soften such criticism, unless one were to count the fact that one of the many facets of the film’s storyline that I greatly disliked will provide the analogy for the point I’d like to make today.

 

To suit the theme of Hop, a rather charming rabbit. Or hare. How does one tell?

The plot of Hop is so altogether unoriginal that it employs the most unbearably overworn trope of recent computer-animated films – that of a misfit son with crazy dreams failing to live up to the standards of his respectable and conventional father¹ – not once but twice. The two misfit sons are E. B., the CGI son of the Easter Bunny, and Fred O’Hare, an unemployed (human) Californian still living in his parents’ house. To spare you any unnecessary rendition of the tedious narrative that follows, I’m going to completely ignore E. B., and pluck out only two scenes that showcase Fred’s relationship with his dad, Henry.

The first is an intervention that Fred’s family holds with the hope of persuading him to get a job, move out, and generally start behaving like a competent adult. “You need to get a life,” is the way Henry puts it. A moment later, Fred’s adopted sister Alex chimes in: “Sometimes I think you adopted me because Fred was such a disappointment.”

“Alex, that is a very hurtful statement,” Henry chides her.

“You’re not denying it,” she counters.

The second is taken from the end of the film. After a series of rather silly and frankly uninteresting adventures, E. B. and Fred have been appointed as co-Easter Bunnies. Fred’s family aren’t massively more impressed with that as a career choice than they were with Fred’s previous unemployment; his mother describes his uniform as a ‘costume’ and Henry states that whenever Fred talks about delivering Easter baskets, he mentally replaces ‘easter basket’ with ‘pizza’ as a coping mechanism. But then E. B. stops by in the duo’s work vehicle (it flies, is pulled by a horde of festive animals, and travels the world bestowing gifts upon children, but it’s definitely not a sleigh, mmkay kids?) and all of a sudden Henry changes his mind: “Fred, wait – this is amazing! … I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time. I’m proud of you.” They hug it out. Fred thanks his father and trots back to his definitely-not-a-sleigh. “Easter Bunny – wow! The one who makes it all happen,” Henry continues to enthuse.

As I say, I’m pretty spoilt for choice in terms of things I disliked about Hop, but this one might just take the Easter biscuit.² Oh look, it’s the happy-ending reconciliation scene that inevitably caps off an instance of the misfit-son trope: Fred’s dad is proud of him now, isn’t it all wonderful? But Henry had made it abundantly, relentlessly clear that he was disappointed in Fred, right the way through the film, and only changed his tune at the sight of a leporine³ colleague and a set of flash wheels. His pride in his son has no basis but these flimsy trappings of success that Fred now carries. It arose in a moment and will presumably vanish just as readily if Fred is to lose those trappings for whatever reason. Are we the audience supposed to be satisfied with that as a conclusion? Shouldn’t Henry be proud of his son regardless of whether he has a fancy definitely-not-a-sleigh to drive about in? Shouldn’t he proud of his son no matter what?

Although actually, let’s pause on that thought for a moment. Suppose Fred had chosen a different career path; suppose he had become a professional serial killer, say. (Hard to imagine, I know, but indulge me.) Would it be reasonable for Henry to express pride in him then? Much as conditional pride seems shallow and valueless, if we’re to argue in favour of unconditional pride instead, then our only option is to claim that pride in an individual can be completely detached from any endorsement of what that individual actually does with his or her time – and I’m just not sure that I buy that. One can hardly tell someone, “I’m proud of you, but at the same time I think every life choice you’ve ever made is idiotic and evil.” What would the first half of that statement even mean in such circumstances?

 

Theoretical serial-killer Fred claims another victim. Proud of you, buddy.

I imagine that we all want the people we care about to be proud of us. (I certainly do.) But if they’re proud of us conditionally, then we’ll live in constant fear of falling short of their standards and losing their pride in us; and if they’re proud of us unconditionally, the victory is nevertheless hollow, because that means that nothing we do actually matters to them. What are they proud of, at the end of the day – just the idea of us, completely removed from the reality of what we’re actually like?

Is there a third option? Is there another way to be proud of someone?

Well, consider this: there’s another way to be proud of something. If I say that I’m proud of that essay I wrote or that artwork I produced or that solution I thought of to that tricky problem, the onus is on me, not the source of my pride. The essay doesn’t have to do anything to ensure that I’ll continue to be proud of it, nor is the question of what it’s like totally irrelevant to my pride in it. I wrote it in such a way that I’m proud of it and that’s the end of the matter. The essay is totally passive in this process; all it does is be written, by me, so that the entire responsibility for whether I will be proud of it rests with me, and not any agency of its.

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious; essays don’t, after all, have any agency of their own to exercise (whatever it might feel like when the actual contents of your word document have turned into something very different from the plan you discussed with your lecturer). And this kind of pride therefore can’t apply to inter-human relationships like Henry and Fred’s, because the latter does have his own agency independent of other humans, as do we all. But if you’re familiar with me and my weekly ramblings, you’ve no doubt already twigged that I have a somewhat different relationship in mind.

“For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one, for which reason he is not ashamed to call them brothers,” wrote the author of the letter to the Hebrews.⁴ Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers – why? Not conditionally, because of what we have achieved or the trappings of success we bear, seeing as nothing we do could ever meet God’s standards; not unconditionally, detached from the reality of what we’re actually like and so meaningless; but because we have been made of one with him who sanctifies us. That is now the reality of what we’re actually like, and that was all his doing, not ours; we had no agency in our being made one with him. He’s the author and we’re the essay. He’s proud of us because he has made us, in Christ, something worth being proud of.

Of course, when I write an essay, even if I am proud of it, it’s never going to be perfect, because I’m not perfect. God, on the other hand is, and so there’s no threat that he’ll make a mistake and end up ultimately producing in us something that’s not worth being proud of. Every bit of sanctification that he achieves in us, every way in which he edges us closer to being like Christ, is something worth being proud of – because Christ is worth being proud of. God is proud of us because he is proud of the one with whom he has made us one – the one who demonstrated love and mercy and humility and obedience and every pride-worthy virtue you care to name to the absolute maximum when he gave his life for us on the cross.

Our story, like Fred’s, ends up with us being reconciled to our Father. But we didn’t need a definitely-not-a-sleigh to convince him to be proud of us.

Footnotes

¹ More of my opinions on this narrative trope can be found in ‘Variation of Animation’, under ‘2016’ then ‘April’ in the box on the right, if you feel at all inclined to consider them.

² Easter biscuits, if you didn’t know, are really tasty sugary biscuits with currants in them that are for some reason associated with Easter. But the vaguely Hop-themed recipe to which I’m going to point you today is actually one for carrot cake which I tried out recently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/classic_carrot_cake_08513. It makes a seriously good cake, but you’ll probably want to halve the quantities unless you own a cake tin the size of a small lake.

³ That is to say, of, like, or pertaining to rabbits or hares. I have found a directory of Latin-derived animal adjectives and am extremely pleased about the fact: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/animalaj.htm.

⁴ My own translation, because I didn’t like the way the English translations tend to dream up a noun to attach to the number, but you can have the rest of the chapter according to the ESV as usual: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+2&version=ESVUK.