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The death of the queen was supposed to mark the death of an outmoded way of thinking. But are we still longing for something beyond ourselves?
Where are we going as a society? And will you be happy when we get there? Steve McAlpine is here to help you answer those questions.
If a Delorean time machine pulled up in front of your house - Back To The Future style - and someone offered to show you what the future would be like, would you be content with what you found? And if not, what could you do to change it? Thinking this through is what Steve McAlpine calls Delorean Philosophy.
Steve McAlpine is a well-known social commentator, respected theologian and popular author. Each week, he takes a crucial trend or event that's playing out in society now and asks, "Where is this taking us?"
Rather than just pontificating, Steve then provides practical steps listeners can take if they want to change the future. That's Delorean Philosophy.
HOW ABOUT THIS?
You could hear it snap.
The noise bounced out across the flagstones and the stained glass as the lord chamberlain broke a stick, placing it on Queen Elizabeth’s coffin as it was about to be lowered into its final resting place at Windsor Castle.
After all that magnificent pomp and ceremony of the funeral, it was a small, but significant gesture, right at the end. The snapping of the wand of office.
That’s right, it’s not a magical wand, but a symbolic token of the Queen’s reign and her right to rule.
In the past the wand was used by the lord chamberlain to give people a gentle tap if they were getting out of hand in the monarch’s court.
Breaking it, in this case by Andrew Parker, not Harry Potter, was the last signal that the sovereign’s reign was over. It was buried with her.
That snap was like a little jolt of reality – snapping us into the post-Queen Elizabeth world.
Yes this thing – whatever it is – really is over.
Some might like to say it snapped us out of a form of delusion, the casual acceptance that the monarch of England rules under the overarching reign of God the true King.
We were snapped back into the modern world, in which ideas such as Gods and kings and queens are stories best left for the children to Harry Potter, and, Game of Thrones (adults only version of Harry).
The real world – the world of Instagram, global travel, democracy, cheap whitegoods and Amazon packages arriving on the doorstep, won’t allow for wands of office and all that hierarchy.
The real world today is the world we can see. It’s a different way of looking at the real world than in the past.
but we’ve come to the collective and unspoken conclusion that the visible world is the only reality available to us, and therefore the only one that really matters.
The unseen world, if it even exists, has little to do with everyday life.
In that story, the snapping of the wand buried more than a monarch.
It was the final burial of outdated ideas around God and worship, church and state.
The burial of hierarchal world in which the visible powers are a reflection of the invisible ones.
Roll on republics. Those nations who have long since jettisoned the myths of the past. We’re all grown up now.
And yet, what do we find? Kinda the opposite. In my home country of Australia, the idea of a republic – once touted as inevitable – is the idea being buried.
And it’s not just sentiment. It seems we’re happy to think of an alternative, but not just any alternative to the British monarch being our head of state.
Give us something that’s got the worth of the office, we seem to be saying.
Give us something with weight.
Give us another story as compelling as the one ended by the snapping of the wand.
SO WHERE’S IT ALL GOING?
Well for a start I think we don’t know.
The very fact that even republicans are hesitant
About which way to jump demonstrates the problem.
Just as a global pandemic was predicted a couple of
Decades ago
Yet none of us was prepared for it
So too this post-Queen Elizabeth age
Predicted but not prepared
For me that sums it up.
There’s been a lot of talk about the loss of meaning
And purpose in our modern world
The sense of aimlessness
Rootlessness
Especially among the young
But nothing tangible given to replace
A corporate sense of meaning and purpose
That’s right – a corporate sense.
Disney – along with every other bit of pop culture –
Has been telling us to “Look into our heart”
To “Be yourself”
All without realising that to do so
We have to have reference points
Signposts
Reference points and signposts that our
Modern West has been busily burning down.
That great philosopher poet of the West
Taylor Swift put it brilliantly in a recent
Commencement service
How did she put it?
"I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now and how to act in order to get where you want to go. I have some good news: it’s totally up to you. I also have some terrifying news: it’s totally up to you."
The huge increase in anxiety
And the long wait lists at counselling clinics
Suggests it’s more “terrifying news” than “good”
Good news
Another word for that?
Gospel!
Taylor Swift has articulated the gospel for the modern age
An age in which we are all kings and queens of our own hearts
And it’s terrifying!
The French writer Michel Houellebecq
Constantly points this out in his searing novels
About life in the secular age.
He’s a modern day prophet
A licentious, libertarian, hedonistic, over-sexed prophet
But a prophet nonetheless
In fact his novel Submission
About the threat of radical Islam in French culture
Was published the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre
His next novel – Serotonin – was not a reflection after the event of France’s violent farmer protests –
He wrote it before those events happened.
He saw it coming.
So it’s worth hearing this hard-core, hedonistic atheist when he says things like this:
“The Church tried to conform itself to the world at a moment when the world was becoming uglier.”
His beef with the Catholic church in his own country
Was that it was too much like the world
It blinked in the face of modernism
At exactly the wrong time.
Instead of playing up difference
It played sameness
Instead of leaning into faith and ancient mysteries
It leaned into sight and modern anxieties
And these are not just religious observations.
We’re in a stage of history in which the past is
Not simply being exposed for its crimes
But expunged for its crimes
Statues disappear
Never to be talked of again.
Books are burned or banned
Because we’re leaving the past behind
And heading towards
Well, heading towards what exactly…
The Queen was like our grandmother
Or great grandmother perhaps.
Equal doses of stoicism, duty and joy.
Grandmothers love their wayward children
Nonetheless for their waywardness
And wayward children – despite their waywardness
Know the road back home because of their grandmothers
Even should they choose never to take that road.
We see this inability to carve out a clear path
In the current reassessment of the sexual revolution.
In want of any other descriptor
The Boomer generation was sung to
Lured by its poets into the fact that
This was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
Or the Gershwin number from Porgy and Bess
It ain’t necessarily so
How does it go?:
It ain't necessarily so
The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible
It ain't necessarily so
The song was covered by rock bands
Throughout the sixties and seventies
Before the big sound given to it
In my youth by
Bronski Beat –
A sexually charged, homo-erotic and politically motivated group
Led by the indominable – and outrageously talented –
Jimmy Sommerville.
Sex and politics was set to change!
Biblical orthodoxy was set to fall.
A new age was being ushered in
What age exactly?
The album title
Containing the single gives it away:
The Age of Consent.
And here we are forty years later
Lamenting that all we have left to us
When it comes to Sex is consent
And who even knows what that is.
It truly is the Age of Consent
And it doesn’t feel liberating at all.
With book titles such as Louise Perry’s
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Questions are being asked.
Men – says Perry
Were the winners of the Sexual Revolution
Though given the scourge of online porn
And its devastating effects on relationships
Winning the Sexual Revolution
Might just be a Pyrrhic victory
And speaking of revolution
What about political revolution?
When so much of the activism in our political world
Is predicated on the need for a permanent revolution
Well that’s just a turn off to most people
Who are struggling to pay power bills
And who are just coming out of global lockdowns
That will affect us all for years to come.
“Ain’t nobody got time for that”
As we might say.
And if you do have time for that
And you do have time to superglue yourself
To the major arterial roads heading into your city
To protest “something”
You’re more likely to be told to “Get a job!”
Than you are to be philosophically challenged.
Yet amidst all of that
Let’s be careful.
As New York Pastor, Tim Keller, was oft to remind
Those of us prone to slip on our rose-tinted glasses
And long for a kinder, gentler past.
“Christianity? Oh I remember that.
That’s when blacks had to sit at the back of the bus.”
Here in Australia on the day of mourning for the Queen
We saw First Nations people
Burning the flag
And scorning her death.
While news came out that at least one elite level sports team
Was subjecting its young indigenous players to what can
Only be described as racial profiling.
I agree with and disagree with
Australian Muslim commentator Waleed Aly
In equal doses.
But I’ve got to hand it to him
He’s always pushing the limits of what
We imagine might be possible.
He’s a republican
But in a Sydney Morning Herald article
Made this brilliant observation:
“If you’re going to ask Australians to forgo the monarchy, you’re going to have to replace it with something more fitting, but still magical.”
Do you hear that?
More fitting, but still magical!
That’s it, yes?
Aly is right.
After all the huffing and puffing about
How modern life has no space for the magical
How the only things that are real
Are the things we can see
It turns out we need something magical.
Not privately
Not our own personal séance
Or tarot reading
But something that collectively says
there are mysteries we don’t understand
But can still assent to as nations
And a grey-suited President
Chosen by politicians
Receiving people
In an office replete with Danish furniture
And a carefully curated wall of Australian art
Just isn’t all that magical
It screams out “immanence”
In a world that is crying out for transcendence.
That is the republican movement’s Achilles Heel
In Australia
And I suspect in other parts of the Commonwealth.
That, and the fact that as we look across at
The most powerful republic ever known
The United States of America
All we see is dissolution, bitterness and decay
With leaders of both parties significantly
Older than King Charles the Third
When he took the throne.
Leaders who have been in power since
My generation – Generation X
Was born.
It’s a Claytons monarchy
The monarchy you get when you don’t
Have a monarchy.
And increasingly
Ain’t nobody got time for that either.
Meanwhile two other states
With self-styled nonroyal monarchs
Russia and China
Set about building their case
For the future.
Anyone?
Anyone?
So What Can We Do About This?
Lest this sound like merely an exercise in despair
Perhaps it’s the rising tension that is giving us hope.
1. Perhaps it starts by us asking ourselves
Some hard questions as a society
Questions like:
Where is the optimism that accompanied the idea that we could get rid of the old moral/ethical frameworks
And we’d be liberated.
Perhaps too we need to put this
Modern “uglier” world – as Houellebecq says
Under the same microscope
It placed the older world of
Kings and queens.
Why is there so little consensus
Around what should replace it?
How might we start that conversation:
Perhaps it’s as simple
As joining a reading group
Devoted to books that speak
About there being something
More than what we can just see
And if you’re not a reader
Then film
Ask why so much modern film
Is devoted to worlds and universes we can’t see
Or access
But are right next door.
2. But more pointedly than that
Perhaps you need to ask yourself some individual questions.
If you don’t have a “transcendent” view of our existence.
Why not?
How did God fall off the radar for you
And why?
How sustainable is a godless existence?
And how honest are you about what
Is replacing it?
I met a young woman recently
Married with two children
Who’d moved from not believing
Anything about God or a world above us
To becoming a follower of Jesus
I was genuinely curious
How?
Why?
What did it feel like?
It felt light – she said
As if a burden had been lifted.
It felt like in her high performance job
She was no longer constantly seeking approval
She felt like she had that approval thing
Locked away now because of Jesus.
If in this non-transcendent world
We’re always looked horizontally
And only horizontally for approval
Well that is fraught.
Taylor Swift is right
It’s terrifying!
Now none of that is to say
That the transcendent
- God – exists.
But it’s interesting that the new atheists
The likes of Richard Dawkins etc
Who were so confident they
Had gotten rid of God
Or at least the need for him
Don’t hold as much sway
In people’s imaginations as they once did
And that celebrated side-of-the-bus advertising campaign
They ran back in the day
“There’s probably no God
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”
Yet here we are crippled by waves of anxiety
Worry at record levels.
At the very time
God has exited the public square.
It’s worth asking ourselves why.
As Waleed Aly observed
You’re going to have to replace
This world that the Queen represented
With something “still magical”
Perhaps the best thing to do is
To sit in that space
In this latest post-Elizabethan age
And ask ourselves
Why?