BYOP — build your own plague
A new/old World Order: 1, 2 , 3, 3a, 3b, 3c, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 8a, 8aFR, 9, 10 & 11
This follows on a post here exhorting us to know our language and our sources, in order to not only properly communicate, but also to better understand what we are communicating in the first place. This post picks up also on mankind’s hubris — to think we are more clever than God — in Part I of the mini-series A natural world order here (imbricated in this series, as explained in previous post’s intro here).
I only half joked in an earlier post here about acronyms used in the title here: “You know in N. American barbecues you BYOB, bring your own bottle […] well here it’s BYOP, buy your own prince”… Let me present to you another BYOP!
This stems from another chat, referring first to the Ten Commandments (Wikipedia), then to the Ten Plagues of Egypt (Wikipedia) in Old Testament Exodus as a result of Israelites exiled in Egypt being enslaved by the Pharaoh:
… my sponsor and I commit to live by those commandments: our world has not only utterly forgotten them, but holds them in utter contempt. And we get our just deserts by ruining our only home… our planet Earth! We are truly creating our home-grown biblical plague… Why bother being exiled to be freed from foreign kings? Pah! Let’s be clever shall we? Let’s roll our own enslavement and destruction into one, in our own homes via our own errant leaders… Simples!
This also follows this in Part II of the afore-mentioned mini-series here:
That’s where we need faith in a superior entity that crystallised millennia of practices into a structure that governs our behaviour. For today we behave as if the Ten Commandments didn’t exist — and it doesn’t matter who created them and how they reached us, we’re just tribal brutes without them. In other words Man is lost without God — as mentioned before, Man’s hubris is to think it’s better than God, for science has taken us to the edges and to the origins of the Universe… Yet it cannot cure the common cold or stop the battery of women and children! And did someone mention the current climate emergency? Lord help us as we head to the next extinction event as, say, here!
In other words, the current situation with demagogues (Russia, Brazil) or incompetence (UK, US) plays into the hands of the climate emergency that proceeds unabated as we focus on easy targets such as COVID or economics.
I’m still a Quaker, who recently posted here how to address the climate emergency at the dinner table or in coffee shops — for it is in sore need of debate, else we’re all complicit — highlighting the need to be clever about our communications:
During the first session of our Exploring Faith and Climate Justice course last month, I was asked why Quakers in Britain don’t generally use the term ‘climate emergency’. It’s not because we don’t think it’s urgent. It is.
But research has shown that messages of fear and doom don’t always spur people to action. While each person’s emotional response may be different, these messages tend to make people switch off, as a kind of defence mechanism.
It can also be confusing for people in the UK to keep hearing the language of ‘emergency’ when many are not yet seeing drastic changes in their lives as a result of climate breakdown. The rallying cry of ‘two/five/ten years to save the planet!’ can start to sound like a false alarm as deadline after deadline passes — even though activists and scientists know that projections are proving correct.
That is why I try to highlight the issue using half humoristic acronyms and juxtaposing biblical and current stories. The information is incontrovertible — incontournable in French, ‘cannot be avoided’ — we’re simply not able to wake the powers that be into action. And that leads to discouragement among activists at, say, Extinction Rebellion I talk to.
Again this is where I argue faith helps: I proposed in another chat that we must find a way to battle discouragement as, say, this prayer during my walk today a Fen Drayton Lakes just outside Cambridge UK (photos):
