Secular Priests, Systems at Scale and Picking a Lane
Systems at scale fascinate me.
It's the way they operate, what they attempt to replicate, and how efficiency seems to put the kibosh on the very essence of the thing they're reaching for, in some ways.
The very essence = would have seemed like the crux not so long ago.
Take welfare, for example.
I'm not sure of the history of welfare services, tracing back through social, political, philosophical questions.
A more responsible writer would pause at this point and spend the day on a personal refresher. But these are notes. I'm just surfing.
To me, it's as if we have secular priests — gatekeepers of provision. Those who stand in the gap as mediators. Those who apportion 'blessing' to the 'deserving' while holding at bay the undeserving, the disqualified, the unfortunate ones who fall into the wrong bracket, through the loophole, between the cracks…
But — is 'priest' the word I'm looking for?
There's a difference, I think.
I'm sensing it. Hmm. (What am I sensing…?)
It's something about the difference between my theological imagination around biblical priests and mediators, and a kind of placeholder functional priest, but without the — hmm. What is it?
How about this — priests in the Bible represent something infinite.
But not these 'secular priests'.
No. Those priests are only dealing with a finite pie.
In fact, slices and slithers of a finite pie.
— yes, agreed. It's not their fault. They're doing their job. They're lovely people.
But systems have finite budgets and other constrained resources. Rolling things out at scale costs (beyond imagination) in other ways.
Think about it.
To be really efficient, different services to deal with certain needs. Only those.
That comes down to different categories, arenas, qualifying factors and so on.
One service will need to know — how the applicant is on their average day.
Yes, okay, there are these days and those days, but what's the AVERAGE day.
(What does that mean? Wednesdays??)
Another service asks what about your worst day — but please leave out all the information around the origin story because, well — yes, yes, very sad, but that's not relevant to us. Don't worry, we can signpost you to another department for that…
Other services require that story, disclosed — to whatever extent you feel ready or able — and then, leave it with them…
…but??!
Sorry, we can't deal with the practicalities ourselves, but why don't you apply for XYZ, see if you qualify because of ABC, and if not, you can take your chances with the —
And so on.
Must be bewildering. For the person in the middle, I mean. They were already stranded in a desert, reeling from the crash and burn, changing their profile pic to an Edvard Munch classic, and now they're fielding no end of calls, paperwork, form-filling, queue-joining, headscratching, pleading, while trying not to sound needy or look unpresentable.
God?
(That's not an expletive, that's a prayer.)
From a big picture perspective we might say, this:
After disaster what do you need?
Ideally, you need the complexity of all that used to be natural and organic, freely available and on hand.
You need a way to try to reconstruct something, anything like that you knew and trusted but lost.
But to get there can mean dismantling yourself day after day, redefining yourself over and over in terms of vulnerabilities, negatives, lack, and then adopting the coded classifications, official labels, categories and thresholds — and all that with or without any kind of organic support structure in place to help you right now to handle it.
— and all while on the accelerating roundabout of contemporary life, while curve balls are thrown every 6 or 16 seconds.
Whee…!
So much for welfare.
Now let's turn to public discourse.
Why?
Thinking aloud, as I like to do. Sensing a link well before I have words for it. Watching with interest as the letters below try to map the unmappable.
Hmm.
I think it's about being funnelled into lanes with organic raw material that is evolving at one speed and language internally and locally, but in order to find purchase and traction and be taken seriously it has to be — chunked. (See my post Study Booths and Sabbath: the enduring requirement for headspace.)
((That interior power house has something of the infinite to it — joining the dots in directions that aren't fashionable any more, but (didn't they?) used to be all seen in one melting pot.))
(((These days, you can do that in the arts. Or in the dressing up box. But aside from that, you're wasting time, and confusing people. Seems like it.)))
Right then.
As I conceded in my post The New Latin, it's right and proper that some things are footnoted, rigorously compared and contrasted with other voices. Without that there's a cacophony and that's no good to anyone. We want a surgeon who knows what they're doing, not the one who's faking it til they make it.
But the very act of choosing texts and writers as footnotes and reference points requires choices to be made that are very similar to the picture I sketched around welfare.
You're automatically funnelled into one discipline not the other.
Twenty years ago, I was writing a masters in philosophy final dissertation, but couldn't land it three years running just because I had such a strong idea of my subject area, while the official response kept saying — pick a lane: philosophy, religion, aesthetics, or psychology. I kept saying — all of them.
These days I'm happy that theopoetics is a word. But even now I'm playing fast and loose with what I mean by it because there are various streams even in that, of course. I'm feeling my way around in the dark with more focus on discovering what I'm saying with my eyes closed, for now at least, than on nailing my colours to a mast, quite yet. I'm sure I'll still be saying this in 150 years…
Now, for all the same surgical reasons I considered earlier, the publishing world, the blogosphere, the board meeting, the social media readers, they wonder — quite rightly, I suppose — what exactly are we dealing with here? What's she ACTUALLY saying?
Is this right or left leaning? Is it progressive or conservative? Are they pro or con? Can't be both.
Unless — centrist?
South south west?
Fourteen degrees past the half way mark to the approximation of magnetic north during typhoon seasons?
(When in doubt, exaggerate.)
All this kind of thing is well-documented. It's extremely obvious, you're right again.
I'm saying nothing new here on the face of it am I.
But what I think is new (to me, at least) is this thought:
Perhaps, at some point, we/you used to be able to assume that people were forming their own positions, rather than riding efficiently on the tried and trusted coat tails of others; choosing this or that commentator as the one to get behind. As long as the minister knows he's saved, the congregation can breathe a sigh of relief, yes? As long as the celebrity thinker has churned out another book we've heard the title of, we can send it to someone we think needs to hear it. That almost counts as reading it, doesn't it?
(It's funny isn't it. St Paul said something about this. He'd heard people everywhere asking, who baptised who? And even Jesus turned this question on its head. Refusing to be the baptiser, and getting baptised instead.)
All very complicated.
But ok, back to November 2026.
It's like, whether… — should I, shouldn't I mention names here? To do so may be polarising in itself. But okay, let’s use some REALLY high profile public people.
Pope Leo,
The King of England,
Jensen Huang,
Or Mark Zuckerberg.
How about,
NT Wright,
Joel Osteen,
Dawkins, or
Lennox.
Where you lean is what's really at stake. Perhaps not even about weighing their stated positions a lot of the time. Who has diary space for that, after all.
Kanye West, or
Billy Bragg, or
Lily Allen.
I'm heading towards saying this:
The problem with systems at scale, and vicarious thinking, may be that people tend to shift responsibility.
As long as someone sounds like they're thinking, then job done.
As long as someone is dealing with that, then the rest of us can show approval to the system (clapping on the doorstep, cheering as they're mentioned), then get on with things unchanged.
My hunch is that life is not supposed to be like that.
(I know, I know — that's a statement that puts me under pressure… supposed?? hunch??)
I could go on. These are just notes.
I'll come back to this.
