The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
Where is all this tech leading us?
In this episode, James talks Aaron Edwards from That Good Fight and Pod of the Gaps podcast about 'The Machine' as laid out by Paul Kingsnorth, who as written Against the Machine which I recommend listening to on Audible - and here's an affiliate link to THAT BOOK.
We also talk about Jacques Ellul and The Technological Society, CR Wiley and The Household and The War for the Cosmos, Paul Vanderklay and Joel Sallaton, The Lunatic Farmer and author of The Marvellous Pigness of Pigs!
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Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Actually, welcome to the Stand-Up Theologian podcast with me, James Carey. I am the Stand-Up Theologian. Today I'm chatting with Aaron Edwards. I start calling him Aaron at the beginning, and then he very kindly and gently corrects me that he isn't Aaron. And we have a really interesting conversation about Paul Kingsnorth's new book, Against the Machine, which I have listened to as an audiobook. I highly recommend that you do that. Get that into your ears. And I just had so many things I wanted to talk about as a result of it, and I immediately thought of Aaron, as I explain in the introduction of the podcast, which comes up after this music gets exciting and finishes. Let's have a listen. This episode exists because I listened to a new book by Paul Kingsnorth called Against the Machine, which I really liked in many ways. It's just come out. The moment I'd finished listening to it, I wanted to talk to someone about the issues raised in it, and I immediately thought of our guest, Aaron Edwards, because I just sensed he would understand my reactions to the book. I've heard Aaron on two podcasts. He's a regular on Pod of the Gaps with Andy Bannister of this parish. I think he was episode two. But he also has his own podcast called I was gonna say The Good Fight. Is it That Good Fight or The Good Fight?
SPEAKER_04:Is that That Good Fight? I think The Good Fight is some series iPlayer, but yeah, that good fight.
SPEAKER_03:That good fight. And that title alone suggests he clearly understands there is a culture war going on, even though lots of people don't want to admit it, don't want to get involved with it. But anyway, Aaron, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Yeah, James.
SPEAKER_04:Good to good to be here. I'm I'm it's Aaron, by the way, not Aaron, but you know. Aaron.
SPEAKER_03:I'm gonna go with Aaron.
SPEAKER_04:It's it's a suit, there's two A's, so it's like, what's the other A for? I don't know. But it's two. Okay.
SPEAKER_03:It feels like it should be two R's, but there we go. There you go.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, well I'll I'll correct my parents some uh one day.
SPEAKER_03:Beauty of the English language. We're gonna start by talking about Paul Kingsnorth. And partly to be a contrarian, I asked AI to describe him. And it said Paul Kingsnorth, born 1972, British writer, novelist, essayist, known for his deeply reflective work on culture, nature, and spirituality, began his career as an environmental activist and journalist, co-founding a literary and cultural movement that challenged modern faith in progress and technology, urging artists to confront ecological collapse honestly. If you're my age or older, I'm 50, you might be thinking swampy. And that's not far off. Okay? AI didn't say that, that's me. Over time, Kings North's work evolved from environmental critique towards a spiritual and theological perspective, disillusioned with secular activism. He converted first to Ethan Orthodoxy and later to Christianity in 2021, which demonstrates that AI doesn't understand Christianity. That's factually not true. He has he is a Romanian Orthodox uh Christian. There's a fellow on online called Paul Vanderclay who said he chose Romanian Orthodoxy. What an incredibly Protestant thing for him to do. But anyway, his uh writing since then include Savage Gods, 2019, and Against the Machine, 2022, uh, wrong, it's 2025, uh, chat GBT. It explores the spiritual roots of modern alienation and the tension between creation and technological domination. So, in short, he's a writer who moves between literature, philosophy, and faith. An English agrarian mystic, side note, happens to live in Ireland now, and cultural prophet, warning of what is lost when humanity tries to become gods through machines. I'm not quite sure that's right either. You knew exactly who I was talking about when I contacted you about Paul King's North. How have you come across him? What have what have you made of the King's North phenomenon?
SPEAKER_04:Yes, the King's North phonemon. I think I first came across him four or five years ago, I think. He had written something for First Things about the Machine, I think. I think it was the Cross and the Machine article where he talked about his conversion. Uh, that was kind of interesting. And then he kept coming up in relation to COVID, actually. He wrote this very viral article called The Vaccine Moment. And he was a very I'd already been subscribing to his stuff and hearing his quite you know interesting reflections as a convert who challenges secularism, as you mentioned. And that's something that you know, I don't know, anyone who's awake needs to realize that maybe all Christians go, oh yeah, we all challenge secularism. It's like, no, you don't actually. A lot of a lot of you you are you're actually funding secularism in so many of your lifestyles and attitudes. And so he's someone who was challenging that that was quite helpful, and he's very reflective and he's very literary. Um, but then he wrote this book, this article called the vaccine moment, which isn't normally what um at that time it was still really, really uncool to be anti-vax in any way. And I think he was talking about there's the totalitarianism of somewhere like Austria, I think, had done a lockdown, hadn't they? Where they'd there was something particularly pernicious about what Austria did at one time. Um he said that that's my moment, I'm done, I'm now red-pilled, and I'm I'm speaking about it. So he became like quite famous because of that for a while. He's been famous for various other things, but I think that was one that actually got him a lot of uh uh a lot of press at the time because he's willing to say what needed to be said, then I think that was quite good and courageous of him because it was uh without getting into all the debates around COVID now, that there was something even being willing to do that when you have literati friends who are definitely going to disown you uh for doing so.
SPEAKER_03:Um and so he's in that moment, just to say on that, let's just pause on that for a moment. Yeah, he must have been fairly startled in some senses, but he he must have known what he was getting into. Because of his, you know, his swampy origins in the eco-activist movement. I mean, historically, they are famously anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers in in England, at least, in the UK, are bohemians and leftists and uh sort of the unschoolers and those sorts of types, people who live around Glastonbury, not far from where I am. And so suddenly he's saying, I'm I'm dubious about vaccinations, and suddenly everyone's going, No, we're not dubious at all. Hang on, you're all boomers, you're all meant to be. What? Did I miss a meeting where we suddenly became vaxxers? So, like it felt like the script had radically changed, and yeah, he can't have been unaware of it, but I guess he was probably quite surprised at the whirlwind that he reaped.
SPEAKER_04:Do you know that's a really good point, actually? There's there's a chance, maybe there's a chance that he already that's his maybe that's his eco, even his secular eco uh side coming out and going, he's being more consistent with the principles than the leftists who were like, oh no, actually, yeah, everything the government says is likely to be correct. I mean, even though we know that our our whole philosophy was built on the fact that actually we're challenging and revolutionizing the system because we don't trust who's in power. Yeah. Now we can, it's completely fine. So yeah, I think that that's probably part of it that he uh that he had some of that in him. But he still, yeah, as you say, it still took something courageous in him to do it. And he maybe he just like, no, this is just obvious now. But it sounded to me like it was a bit of an existential crisis for him to kind of go, right, I've weighed this up and thought about it, and now I'm going to jump out, I'm just gonna dive into the pool. Yeah, and I know that you're gonna lump me with everyone else, etc., but I'm gonna do it. And I think and I think for him, he probably sees he does see that as part of the wider machinistic, if that's a word, mechanistic, machinistic, yeah, sense of of what's going wrong in modern society. So if it's a tech again, vaccines are a technology which is technically unnatural, um, and so therefore there's there's something about that that's clearly on point. He's not doing something, it wasn't an aberration from his line of thinking. It's just he's it's good that he's consistent. There are many people who uh something comes along that is in their slipstream that they ought to go for or go after, usually speaking against something as well as speaking for something, and they choose to pull their punch because they realise I know this is exactly what I'm supposed to be saying and doing right now. I've been saying it for 10 or 20 years, and now I've got a chance to really go for it. I'm not going to. And I think that's that's where the cowardice we've seen in many, many institutions, establishments, and many churches have that that's been an issue. So it's good when you have writers, a part of the proliferation of the social media boom has been all of these. What's the latest term that you hear from Mikhail Truman? Gig gig Eva. Oh, that's great. Big Eva was the uh evangelical mainstream platform speakers who are, you know, well respected. And now there's gig eva, um, which would be those who are kind of I guess that's the the pejorative connotation of that is that it's uh yeah, people who are grifting online, like you and I doing podcasts and stuff, you know. Who are we uh thinking we can put our thoughts out to the world and write things that might challenge the people who are authorized to write things? So it's very ironically un-protestant to say it's very Protestant of him to choose Roman or uh Eastern Orthodoxy as well, but Romanian Orthodoxy, but uh yes, of all things. Unprotestant of yeah, unprotestant of us to uh to then say, well, actually, no, the authorized voices are the ones, the cardinals on the circuit are the ones who get to say what what the time is. And if they they they always know what the time is, so don't worry about that. You can just trust them, it's fine.
SPEAKER_03:Paul Van der Clay, who just produces so much online content, he's a he's a pastor in in the west coast of America, reformed Dutch, reformed guy, super open, really interesting, made loads of videos a long time ago about Jordan Peterson when the church was just not talking about him at all. And uh, he points out that in this Orthodox movement, the three three key voices in it are Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Pageot, and Rod Dreyer. Well, none of them are priests, and this is an entirely ecclesiastical priest-based order, and so yeah, he just it's it's quite interesting how Protestantism is just in the absolute um software of the West now. Uh so that even Roman Catholicism, there are people who um would say they're Roman Catholic, but if you say, but do you believe this, this, and this, you go, Oh no, no, no, I don't believe that. Oh, so you're you're choosing which bits of Catholicism to believe. How how how very Protestant of you? Oh, I'm not a Protestant. Uh okay, sounds like you are. Let's just move on to talk a bit about the the book, which I know you haven't had time to read because it's literally just come out. So Kings North's idea of the machine, which will be very familiar to you, is quite well spelled out in this book, and it's quite hard to disagree with how it is just this completely totalizing system that reshapes reality kind of in its own image as well. It just kind of hoovers up everything. And it is interesting that we're now kind of waking up to this, but because I'm heartened by the amount of pushback against digital ID, at least on the internet. Whether people actually do it. I mean, I'm I'm registered as a company director, and they're rolling it out to company directors. Oh, you need digital ID. And I'm just like, Can I be bothered to not do this? I also hear that it's being rolled out to veterans, army veterans, in order to improve that access to benefits and services and that kind of stuff. And it just seems like the government are determined to ram it through. But that's just like a symptom of this wider thing about the machine. It's not wrong to be really worried about that, and yet we seem sort of powerless to do anything about it.
SPEAKER_04:It's a huge issue because you uh it's the it's the convenience, obviously. This is this is the issue with technology in general, of course. Jack it's Jack Alul's uh technological society. He kind of has putting his finger on stuff, and that would be I think uh 70s, I think. Right.
SPEAKER_03:Who is that? Say that name again.
SPEAKER_04:Uh uh Jacques Alul, T-L's, E-L-L-U-L, and uh a great Christian theological sociologist of sorts, like he's a very interesting thinker, and and his book, The Technological Society, like it's that it's like a magnum opus of like challenging technology in modernity. And of course, the examples he's using are going to be wildly different to what we're dealing with, but the principles are very similar, and he's doing a kind of historical take on what technology even is when you go back to the ancient world, etc. What actually is it? Instrumentalizing our own skills and trying to outsource them. And of course, ultimately, what comes with that is is the convenience, and it's what we lose when we lose the value of using our bodies to be able to um enact the tasks that our bodies are created to do. So clearly, the convenience of that is great in loads of ways. Um but uh that's also where bureaucracy comes in. So the digital ID thing would be like if we can do this, why wouldn't we do it? Yes, it will save us time. If we can do this, there's no reason why we shouldn't do it. And so it's actually it's voices like a little also Wendell Berry, obviously, and he's a bit idealistic, um, and Kings North and others, who then are like, Well, actually, maybe you shouldn't do that, maybe it will completely destroy um civilization longer term if we continue to do that. Um, but at the same time, it it can be so um unrealistic because uh some of those voices couldn't do what they're doing without the technologies they're leading. It's a classic problem with any technology critique, like what technology is okay and isn't okay. I think Doug Wilson has written, wrote, I remember reading a book by him a long time ago, maybe maybe not that long, maybe five years ago, called Plodactivity. Oh yeah. Um it's a very short little book, and it's just like quite practical. But I was interested at the time um to come across his little it's just again really short, and it's just uh a little reflection on technology as as wealth. His conception of technology was technology as wealth, and so it's you you think of it in the way that you think of gifts from God, and I know that people could then be quite that could be quite dangerous in the hands of some technocratic mogul. But at the same time, Christians, if we're supposed to be those who take dominion on earth, using our bodies, our minds, uh to achieve things and to do what Adam was given in the garden to do, then we are given tools for that for that endeavour. And so it it should be seen more like tools for taking dominion in the earth, and therefore we have to be fighting to do it well and being at the forefront of it. I mean, I had a student who came to me uh in 2017 and he was an Anglican, a reader in the Anglican church, and he said, I'm really concerned about the fourth industrial revolution. At the time, I was there like going, like, hmm, because you're because I'm the program leader of the Masters course, I know what fourth industrial revolution is.
SPEAKER_03:You have to nod like you've heard of it. What do you what do you understand by that term?
SPEAKER_04:Everyone has different there's many definitions of the fourth industrial revolution. What is your definition? Yeah, and he said the issue is I know what's going on in that world, I can see what's going on in the Silicon Valley, and secularism, scientism, etc., is at the heart of this, and there are no Christians at the table because the Christians are being too holy and staying out of it and being worried about technology, etc., but still kind of using it and being consumers. No one is leading. There are no Christians who are leading in technology, and that's terrifying. And there's also no people on the ethical boards who are going to like in terms of politically speaking, who are going to like oversee this. So the worldview issue of not having Christians who even think about this is ridiculously terrifying. And even then, 2017 sounds like it wasn't that long ago, but even then, in the discussions, when he every question you can imagine, in every class or seminar or lecture he was in, it would be his question would be the question about how does this relate to the fourth industrial revolution? And AI, and you could see people being like, Oh, yeah, but that's just sort of like in the future, it's like weird space agey sci-fi stuff. Like that stuff isn't really gonna like, yeah, because we've been hearing it like all through the 90s and and noughties. You like you always heard about these great technologies, but it was always at this like tech show. Yeah, you'd go to some there'd be some conventional world of tomorrow.
SPEAKER_03:That is a quotation from the pilot episode of Futurama that goes like this.
SPEAKER_01:Why do you always have to say it that way? Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called showmanship?
SPEAKER_04:Come your destiny awaits! And you just kind of thought, yeah, this is just an interesting thing for people who are into that stuff. It's never really going to come in. And people have been warning about this is inevitable. Like people who talked about the internet and the effect of it way before it was happening, or even television, like Neil Postman's uh amusing himself to death. Like it's an issue that it's almost a prophetic voice in the wilderness because people go, Oh, yeah, everything's gonna be completely fine. Our life will basically function as it does now, yeah, even if this completely transformative technology comes in. So I am sympathetic to those definitely who see that issue and say we need to think about it carefully, clearly, reflectively, and courageously in many ways to be able to um lead and speak into it before it happens. But like I said, there's there's a there's always a balance of power tension with the fact that you need technology, you need to have a positive conception of it before you can have the negative critique of it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's really helpful. And actually, this chimes with something I was thinking about because we're so slow at looking back on the effect of the technology. And I was listening to uh podcast called uh the Civitas podcast with uh Peter Lighthart and uh some other guy, and they were interviewing some guy who'd looked at quite a lot of Marxism and that kind of business, and he and various others just said the conservatives in the 19th century didn't conserve anything. I mean, this is the um the Peter uh Hitchin sort of thing. Well, they say fancy yes, you know. Uh what are the conservative party for that? They haven't conserved because Theresa May's not a conservative bone in her body. That's kind of fair, but it feels like we're we're not only bad at seeing the effect of technology coming in the future, so everybody gave their kids screens ten years ago. I'm really lucky that screw that phones when my kids were small were pretty rubbish, that the iPhone 3 just didn't really have any apps and it couldn't be used as essentially a silencer uh for your children in public places. There was like an app with animals on it, that was it, you know. It was it was basically a Fisher Price thing. Um but looking back at the 19th century, and this is something that I've reflected on for a year or two, because I come from a farming background and I now live on the edge of a town, but literally I've got 20 miles of green at that window there between me and Glastonbury Tool, which I can see. But I'm just really interested in the effect of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, and this was very nicely encapsulated in Kings North's book, where he said 1850 is the tipping point because uh at the beginning of the 19th century in 1800, 80% of people lived in the countryside, and 20% lived in the uh cities. By the end of the century, that was the other way around. So we went from 2080 to 8020. So at 1850, there was now more people in cities than the countryside, and that has a completely dehumanizing effect and a denaturing, because also the moment that you live in a city, you are now dependent on the state for services because you you can't control mass transit, you can't uh take out your own rubbish, you can't bury it, you can't do your own water supply, you can't grow your own food, you you can't do anything. You are now at the mercy of the state and and the markets, as it were. And it feels like we still haven't quite processed that or worked out what we do about that. So even the technology that we've had recently, we still are sort of in denial about. And I think Kings North really taps into that really well. So I I was enjoying for a lot of the book saying, yes, you've he expresses extremely brilliantly the dehumanizing effect of technology and the way we live today, even though I don't necessarily go with his um solutions. So that's kind of but that is a key part of his work though, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04:I I don't I didn't look it up, but I'm almost certain he will have been a reader, an avid reader of Wendell Berry as well. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he he quotes it's not just the fact that people the flight to the cities in the Industrial Revolution, but it's also yeah, the effect on agriculture and the and the and the divorce. This is something Wendell Berry does talk about a lot. I think it's the fact that when you just go to a supermarket and pick up meat, a slab of meat in Aldi or Tesco or something, um, and you divorce yourself from the process, you it's something happens to you like that that it's hard to put your finger on, uh um, especially when it just happens, you know, decade after decade, and people just are so divorced, they hear about farmers' protests every now on the news, and now and then on the news, they might see an image of a load of tractors driving into Paris or something on Twitter. Yeah, and they might visit the countryside for a kind of Airbnb escape or something. Yeah, but a lot of these rural places that so we've lived in rural villages in Derbyshire before, and it they're lovely places, but they're strange places as well. No one can afford to live in them. They all they all cost you, you have to rent a house, um, and the community people go there for the community life that had a connection to the land, that had a connection to a an economy of people bringing things together. Even the whole notion of those agricultural festivals, and we were in one where our children would bring, you know, they grow stuff for the allotment and bring, and you're putting it as a kind of challenge uh against the other people in the village. It's like it's like they still do that in some of these villages, which is lovely. And it's why like rich Londoners will go to those villages, but when they do that, they don't always they they bring it, they bring like the superficial aesthetic of I want to be part of a community that looks like that. Yeah, they're not willing to be part of the actual community about what it took to maintain that community, so it becomes this fake veneer of it, and so you don't actually have communities like that anymore. This is this is the problem. Yeah, we become ultimate, ultra consumers who don't understand what it takes to put meat in that position and what it takes to feed cities like that, therefore, industrialized farming, um, which is has all sorts of other problems, probably causes cancer for many more people than it or you know, there's loads of issues. So and these aren't luxury beliefs. It's not like, oh yeah, we go to a butcher because we want to look fancy. No, you go like it's just why would you want to feed trash to your children? Um processed food that that has to be processed like this. We have to add these additives in in order to maintain the levels of production because no one knows what to do anymore. I don't know if you have you heard of Joel Salatin. That name does ring a bell. I think he's done stuff on the canon in the canon world before. Um, but he's the loaders that a book called The Lute The Lunatic Farmer. But he's quite a big name in America. And my wife's from Norfolk originally, so that's why I've I'm a city person. Right. So I've had to learn all of this stuff um from some of her reflections as well. Like where's we talk about these you know, seeing the issues that of urban versus rural life, and anyways, and she bought me a book uh what many years ago, a few years ago, called The Marvellous Pigness of Pigs by Joel Salatin, and it talks about literally the effect of pigs, how pig keeping um is a key into so many other things that have gone wrong. So the fact the fact that, for example, you're you're using the using the pigs in order to to to sort of um you know chew up the land, then you move them onto somewhere else, they are happy, your land is happy, um, and then you can use that for other things. It's part of this whole economy. And so it's like the the he just he focuses on the pigs for the city.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, they they absolutely devastate green space, but they'll churn it up, they'll poo all over it, um, and then they and then you can grow stuff on it, and it's just it it's unsightly to us, yeah. Even though pigs are absolutely beautiful, they're absolutely gorgeous uh creatures, but yeah, but yeah, they are they're they're a real engine room of uh of an of an agrarian community. And actually, if you've got a couple of pigs and a couple of this and a couple of that, you can do an awful lot, you know. They're just kind of multures and and that and they're delicious, you know.
SPEAKER_04:Uh that is an added bonus. Yeah, yes, that's right. He he was I remember him talking about this on Joe Rogan podcast a few years ago, and Rogan makes a valid point, which is a key to when we get to get to Kings North again, like what do you want to happen? So Salatin's whole view was about farming communities, we need to be uh connecting to one another more, um, making use of each other's different skills as an old school community would have done. And it means you're more human because you're reliant on other human beings to help you do stuff. Of course, he and he's not anti-technology, you can use technology as wealth, as a something oh, we can make use of this. Um, but everybody should have some kind of connection to doing something physical and to help uh you know, putting in terms of production of food, especially. So I think he has an issue of the loss of common land, etc. The enclosure acts in Britain in the 19th century, which stopped you being able to have this notion of common areas where you would and people used to have pigs and cows, etc., as a normal thing. It was not that long ago that it was normal for you to have that in your garden and grow loads of stuff in your garden. Lots of houses have these big old cities, have these big old uh long strips of garden, which don't make any sense in a modern sense, but they do if you are as a cottage garden and you're expected to grow stuff. So anyway, but Rogan said to him, like, well, but how would you feed LA on your model? Like a city like Los Angeles. How would that work? Um he says, I don't know, but I think we could make it work.
SPEAKER_03:What you can then do is say, I'm not prepared to live like that. So how are you gonna feed LA? Well, it looks like some people are gonna have to move out of LA, doesn't it? So it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, isn't it? Because some say, well, it's a good job we did get rid of the uh common land and enclosed it all because agriculture became much more efficient, which meant that we could have very rapidly fast growing cities. Isn't that great? Uh I don't I don't know. It probably meant that we had more stuff, yeah, but the cities were filthy and unsanitary and unpleasant. Also, a man would go out of the office and go left and go one way to one factory, his wife would go out of the office, go out of the house and go right to another factory, the kids might go to you know, or be grandparents or whatever. Life completely changed. Hello, me interrupting myself here to tell you that in the past you could have gotten this episode early because it was dropped to members of the Wycliffe Papers called Loyal Lollards. They got access to this episode. It was a 53-minute version with everything left in, and they got it early as well. So if you would like to support the podcast, why not go over to the Wycliffe Papers, which is full of jokes, which are free, but then you become a paid subscriber and you get early access to the free jokes and you get to rate and review them, as well as supporting me, getting early access to episodes when I make them or when they become available, and an extra Zoom chat a month with me and a whole load of other things besides. There's even a documentary of me walking from Glastonbury Tour that I've mentioned to Wells Cathedral, and we walk and talk, and I tell you a bit about what's going on in my head and how I've got to where I am at the moment. If all of that sounds of interest, then why not go over to the Wycliffe Papers and become a loyal lollard? And that helps keep the lights on at this end and keeps things going. Anyway, I don't have much else to say. There are so many other things going on I can't decide, so I'm not going to say any of them. Let's get back to the podcast. Actually, that brings us rather neatly because I mean I think we could probably talk all day, but we're not going to. That takes us to the solution, which is the household. Because arguably, come to think of it, that 19th century industrialization probably was the absolute cracking body blow of the household. Because suddenly you need two wage earners going out and for 12 hours a day or whatever, and that maybe the wife might work in service or or whatever, um, but also just worked in factories like men. Yeah. Kings North's fairly low on solutions, but the one solution I did like was the fact that he talked about the household. Because the book makes you feel pretty hopeless. But the thing is, we've been trained to feel hopeless by an always-on global media which continually presents us with problems that we have simply no possible way of fixing. If there's if there's an armed uprising in the Philippines and a thousand people die, and then two thousand people are executed. Okay? I can't do anything about that, and telling me about it, I don't think achieved an awful lot. But you have made me sad and scared and frustrated, and you make me say the most dangerous words that you can possibly say, which is something must be done. And so suddenly you've got, you know, you've got globalist kind of UN type organizations and the IMF. And I was very I was listening to a different thing yesterday, uh, an audio book about how governments love the IMF because it meant that an international financial organization could be blamed for the fact that we've got to make cuts to balance the books. And so we are saying to the people who vote for us, oh, our hands are tied, we can't do anything about it because we need to borrow money from these people.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And therefore, that disconnection that we're now feeling with the government, which I mean, these are such weird times that we've just elected a government in who are instantly awfully unpopular. You know, let's say I've never seen you know, and there hasn't been a war or anything, nothing's really changed.
SPEAKER_04:Um there's no honey, but they had no honeymoon period.
SPEAKER_03:So it's straight in with the stand up row blazing argument over breakfast the next morning. It's just a
SPEAKER_04:Incredible.
SPEAKER_03:But I think that sense of the household is really important. And I I would hope that Christians can at least lead the way on that. But again, I this is why I thought of you. I don't think you're terribly optimistic that Christians are quite getting the message on this one.
SPEAKER_04:No, that's true. Yeah, I I you might you might have seen my interview recently I did with uh C. R. Wiley.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_04:Um, American author. I'd recommend his book, those who are listening, The The Household and the War for the Cosmos. He hit the quote that that really struck me when I first read the book was when he said, Yeah, I never saw the household codes in the New Testament um as that big a deal. I just read I read over them like everyone we read them. Yeah, that's kind of fine, headship, etc. I didn't think too much of them until I started to read, uh, to notice the extent to which people go out of their way to avoid them or to explain them and caveat them away. Then I realized, why is this happening? Maybe there's something that there's a conspiracy afoot almost. There's something like maybe they're actually not these kind of things, these niche things off to the side that, yeah, sure, you if we get time, we care about them. Oh yes, we or yes, we believe them, but we don't need to think of them as that important, they're just there. Um, you should order your household in this way. Because they come up a few quite a few times in the New Testament, and because everyone in the modern secular world, and even in the secularized church, seems to go out of their way to avoid them. Maybe they're actually some fundamental, maybe they are the heart of the war for the cosmos. Um, and so I I think the spiritual dimension of that is significant, but I think as we've been talking about, the socio-political ramifications of the household and the loss of it in Christendom or what was Christendom in the West is significant. And we I don't think the church is ready to uh even go there because we're still we're still actually avoiding those household codes themselves, Ephesians 5 or even more, 1 Peter 3, you've got the Colossians as well, etc. And many other hints in the New Testament of God seemingly He could have set it up because the new new the new covenant is so powerful and transformative. Um Jesus coming, the the power of the resurrection, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the fact that the church is is is God's people, his new nation. Why do you still need households? Like it could it's quite conceivable that with everything else we see in the New Testament about the gospel and the power of the gospel, the God will go, you have heard it said that households matter a lot, but that was only so that I could create the line to Jesus through humanity. And now you're part of my household, which is again biblical when one Timothy, I think it's one Timothy, or is it one of the other letters? Uh the how the church, yeah, the church is the household of God. Paul literally says that in the end of 1 Timothy, isn't it? I've given you the instrument these instructions so that you know how to conduct yourself in the household of God, which is the pillar and buttress of the truth. And earlier on in that, that includes stuff like women not exercising authority over men. So why do we think in secular modernity we we need to avoid all of these all of these issues that speak to the household both of the church and of the home? It's because we don't want to challenge the big, the big bad bull that is that is feminism, or we don't want to challenge it with any significant degree. So even complementarian churches have often compromised because they've been soft in the sense of they go, Oh, we technically believe this, but only because it's technically in the textbook, we have to believe it because we're evangelical, so it's there. But they don't think of embodying the wisdom of it and going, why did God set up the world this way? Why did he make men and women different? Why did he set up households even in the new covenant where we have this amazing vision of the church as the bride of Christ? Why didn't he just do away with households and say now you're just individual souls who are all part of the family of God and God's the patriarch uh or God's the father of the household? So you don't need to have individual households, you don't need to care about your families, but there's so much about it. This the the the qualifications for elders relate to how he manages his he manages his household, his children. They've got the Titus II, you've got the women, older women teaching the women, the younger women. The the Titus II passage is about teaching them how to love their husbands well and working at home. Working at home.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yesterday I was writing a chapter for a book. I'm writing a short book based on my God the Bible and everything show, which is about Adam and Eve and all that kind of stuff. And so I've just got to the bit where uh Eve is tempted by the serpent, and Adam is blamed for this. What are we saying? Did he not explain to no no, she knew that they weren't to touch the tree, but Adam it is the sin of Adam, Romans 5, just as the first Adam sinned, the second and so that sense of responsibility, but that household idea runs all the way through. And I've just you know when we got married, we had Joshua 24. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord, and that continues in the New Testament in Acts, you and your household. The word household does come up a few times, um, and those are problem passages for Baptists, uh, but not for um not for Anglicans like me. But that aside, I don't know why I would even go on that third rail, but I mean we've already lost our egalitarian listeners. Bye. Bye. Thanks, thank you. Tune in next week. The household is just really super important, and it's interesting just looking at early chapters of Joshua, because I'm uh doing some Bible notes for Pathfinders. Rahab and her household. So it's interesting that it's actually not a man who repents, but it's a woman, but even the fact that it's her household and her family are saved through her. So, but because we're so uh individualistic, which is partly a result of Protestantism, but is also partly a result of the Enlightenment and partly a result of communism and Marxism, um, it's just the individual and the state, that's it. Whereas Christians would say, Oh, but there's the church, yes, and the household, yes, and the household is really super important, and it doesn't feel as you say, yeah, it's just it's just miles away from where we are. So I think in a way, uh Paul Kingsnor's thinking on this feels like a forlorn hope that we can just get together and stay in households, live at the fringes, and I guess that's the the very last thing just to mention before we wrap up, is he's very pro-hermit. He annoyed quite a lot of first things people last year when he gave a lecture where he was essentially advocating living like the desert fathers, and that's again great to be a desert father until you need penicillin. Um, I don't know where you I don't know where you think that's coming from. Uh or if you need a laptop to write your substack post so you can promote your book, as you sort of said at the start. But there is that lack, I just felt overall there is that lack of confidence not only in the cultural mandate that you get at the start of the Bible, which is we are to use technology, even some of it has dodgy origins in Genesis 4, you know, comes from the line of Cain, yeah. Um, which is kind of very strange and troubling, but we we know we never read that bit, so it doesn't matter. But the the prospect of Christ's return is great, and I hold hold a post post-millennial view anyway, so I'm kind of generally fairly optimistic. But I think it's just disappointing that he lacks that sense of the white pill, which is often referred to, you know, there's the red, you take the red pill, which means you go down the rabbit hole. You then take the black pill because you think, oh my goodness, it's even worse than I thought. Yeah, uh, and then you take the white pill, which is oh Jesus is coming back. Oh, fine, well, okay, well, what can we do between now and then? And the irony is that he is slightly doing the one thing that the machine does, which is fear-mongering.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So he's slightly feeding all of your worst fears about the intrusive state and corporations, uh but not really giving you quite enough hope, which he's perfectly entitled to do because he's a Christian, so he should. So it's quite a frustrating experience, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, it's interesting. I've read his book, for example, Alexandria, the novel, uh, which I think basically might be the novel form of the book he's just written about it's the that hideous strength to the uh, it is like that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. The the the premise of the book is basically this is the last community on earth. It is a kind of monastic household, basically, that has rituals um that kind of keep them together. Um, but they always they keep bleeding people. Everyone else in the world, I think, for at least in the known world, has left to join this thing called Alexandria, this this pursuit of human knowledge where basically you end up you sort of beam your body, you lose your body, and your mind and soul join this kind of Uber library, and you can go and do anything you want because you don't have the limitations of a body anymore. And obviously, the reality is it's like people are just getting actually killed. Um, but like it's the temptation is this earthly physical world is the problem. That's the problem of sin, all the bad stuff that happens to the world, it's because of your flesh and your desires and your body. And so, if you could just have your soul and your mind, um you could it basically classic Gnosticism. So he's a critique of Gnosticism, and and that's the issue. And the household is because it's actually dealing with it, does link to stuff we were saying earlier in many ways, it's like it's anti-Gnostic because it's dealing with the real world, it's dealing with reality physicality. Um, each person has roles and jobs to do within this household, and that's what the positive vision of the household actually is as well. It's like it's not a drudgery, it's not this this de you know, the dem the the uh relegation to something worse, it's actually vital to it. And so in it in Alexandria, like I said, it's the opposite of that. It's it's you leave all of that, you leave reality, you leave physicality and materiality and and and meaningful work, as it were, to become this uh uber consumer of I don't know, aesthetics, uh purely aesthetics in some in some uh uh mindful, um weird uh dystopia, uh utopian dystopia. So that's like him, his regalia against the machine, and the fact that we um yeah, that we are drawn to that, and therefore we need to do something against it. But it's also interesting that the writer you mentioned earlier, Rodre, has a similar, um a similar kind of black pilly thing in the Benedict Option, arguably. I think he's done he's done some excellent stuff, Rodrea. But I remember his image in the Benedict Option was of an arc. We need to get aboard the ark because everything is kind of going to pot. And so his and I think that's where he talks about households as well. Like we just need the church to be like a few households connecting together. Um I don't know whether he uses the analogy, but you can imagine the king of acts, they went house to house, right? That was significant. Households mattered only purely as well, not purely for this reason, but it was helpful for them to have places to go. Yeah, yeah, and it was a familial environment, and the familial uh image of the church is good as well. Whereas we when we wear house to church, um actually it becomes this more easily a consumeristic entity that isn't connected to the the runnings of households anyway. But but the the positive vision, uh, to get to your point on the white pill, I would say um, yeah, it it it that in Alexandria for for Kingsaw, it doesn't seem to be there. It is it is quite a tragic set of affairs. The kind of forget precisely how it ends, I don't want to do spoiler alerts for those, but basically, there's a process of people leaving this community and eventually joining uh joining the entity, a bit like that. Uh I don't know if you heard of a famous play called Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. Romanian, so maybe Kingsaw is he was he was a critic of Marxism um in the I think this was the 1970s, um, and it's basically it's an amazing, hilarious play about all of the absurdist, and all of these people basically end up becoming rhinoceroses or rhinoceri if you wish you're talking during the play because they one person becomes a rhinoceros and it becomes it's like a crowd think thing, and it's like this is weird, like this person isn't here. Is that is that person turned into a rhinoceros? This is weird. How do we explain this strange absurd event? And gradually people start preferring the life of the rhinoceros to the life of the and then it just be whittling down the human beings until there's just like one person left. Um, and so there's something about yeah, there's something about that in like in the sense of like well, the technological world that we're in, um, that that that would be the black the in secularism. That is, you need to see through the black pill lens because you do have to see that that's where it goes. People just they change their views on these things, they they become convenient with their principles, they believe the things that are expedient rather than what are true. This also goes back to households with the CR Wiley thing again, because it's like, why do I not want to believe what the New Testament says? Because it's inconvenient, because people will call me names if I believe this and put it into practice, and they which will, and it'll be difficult. I might, my job might suffer. Uh people won't like me. I'll have to explain it, and even when I explain it, they won't, they won't understand, they'll misunderstand it. And maybe I'll just soften it and compromise. And when you just tiny, tiny, tiny little steps like that over generations, you get you get to the kind of modern world we're in where we're totally out of sync with creation as well as with in many respects with the word of God.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So yeah, there are there is hope on the horizon then.
SPEAKER_03:There is, yeah, and I think it but you've put your finger on it in terms of we don't do certain things that we know will be difficult, partly because we're cowards, and that another book I would love to write would be about cowardice. But we don't do it because we know it's going to involve time and we're busy, so we're hopelessly overcommitted, so therefore we're suckers for convenience and not having not digging in. And the the reason I think people particularly find disciplining their children so difficult is you have to stop what you are doing and deal with this thing and deal with it properly, and it's just always easier not to do it. You mentioned that uh play there, a Romanian thing. It just reminds me of there's not a lot of funny stuff, I don't think, in dystopian fiction.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of it is very serious, but it did remind me of one of my favorite onion headlines, which was a video, actually, which I will put a link to and maybe play a little bit of this week magazine released its annual Air Travelers Report this week with Prague's Franz Kamafka International Airport ranking last in customer satisfaction due to long flight delays, poor service, and an overall oppressive impersonal atmosphere. The report found the average delay at Franz Kamovka International is 31 hours longer than the next worst airport. We spoke to several American travelers who reported spending weeks and in some cases months waiting for flights.
SPEAKER_02:And everyone keeps calling me S.
SPEAKER_01:If there is a problem, fill out complaint form and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born.
SPEAKER_00:The airport also created a toll-free customer service helpline. But when our reporters called the number this week, they found it connected them to a hack store in Stuttgart.
SPEAKER_03:That's that's a lighter note on which to end. But thanks so much, Aaron, for being with us with me on the podcast. I suspect this is the beginning of a number of conversations. Uh, but you can hear more uh from Aaron on his own podcast, That Good Fight, and also Pod of the Gaps, where I think it's fair to say yourself and Andy Bannister don't always see everything quite the same way. Is that fair?
SPEAKER_04:No, we we have a we we've got a good little banter with an evangelical umbrella, so that's good.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, no, it really helps because you know you you you you hear a really good version of two different sides of things, so that's that's a hard recommend uh as well. So thanks very much. Thanks for listening to the show, and I'll speak to you next time. Hope you enjoyed that. Could you do me a favour? I'd love to grow this show and get it in front of more ears. I don't quite know how you say that. Into ears, into ears. But is there anyone you could share it with? Anyone you could send this episode to or another one of the ones we've done, and then you could have a conversation about it. That's the way to grow a podcast since no one's gonna find it otherwise. Thanks for listening. Is this how it ends? Yep.