When we get up in the morning our brains start problem solving – they are designed to do that. We deal with practical issues, plan ahead. We hope everyone else is doing the same from the electricity generating people to the bus drivers. There are rules, habits, structures, which simplify things but we also need a lot of personal creativity to thrive. In leisure times we have clubs and organisations with constitutions which again combine collaboration with control. This is helpful.
It’s often said that the best coaches are not necessarily the ones with the best players but the ones who develop the strategy and game-plan around maximising the skills available. This is harder than it seems as it demands integrity, caring enough to help individuals reach their potential, showing you value them while working them hard, developing a self-sacrificing team-spirit. The coach somehow needs to win respect while remaining vulnerable and responsible for setbacks.
This applies not only to sports but to every endeavour, and is the best of being human, a blend of responsibility, earned authority and humility.
Everyday life, though, is often marked by stagnation, waste of human potential, material and emotional poverty. This is because we don’t have the virtues of the good coach – indeed in our weakness and sin we substitute shortcuts to get success without service. This leads to elites, nepotism, party-spirit, corruption.
How to get into an elite
You have a mental facility to pass exams, get to the Ivy-league universities, overwork as an intern. If you act like you’ll be an asset to the existing elite, you slide upwards. You too quickly believe you are superior to those below because you’re with the in-crowd, so obviously brighter (and now considerably richer). You’re proud to have the right to decide things for others. Given time you’ll consider them ‘deplorables’. The problem is that you don’t recognise that your decisions are often not the result of rational thought but of prejudices and self-serving choices that your very cleverness does a good job of hiding with rationalisations. You’re surprised that others challenge you, point out fallacies, you’re threatened, you can’t believe it, you try to shut them down in a myriad of clever ways. You have your 100 ‘intellectual’ reasons for doing something, although there were 100 others that you rejected simply because the other lot suggested them. You don’t even realise how infantile and deluding that prejudice is.
Respecting humanness
Brian Lee Crowley, who coined the phrase ‘Gardeners or Designers’, tells the story of two new universities campuses. On one the designers laid out walkways in geometric neat patterns according to their vision of how people ought to plan their days. When the campus opened students and staff found other routes more convenient and soon the grounds were a mess, and angry ‘do not walk on the grass’ notices proliferated. The other university planners decided they did not presume to know how students and staff would want to use the facilities so waited to see what paths were naturally trod, and then paved them – a happier situation. What was the difference? Both sets of planners had similar academic degrees, but someone in the second team had a greater sense of humanity or ‘meekness’ and therefore wisdom. These are the Gardeners who look at what is, respecting it, actually enjoying studying its behaviour so as to better serve it. The others, Designers, want to manage things and if it doesn’t work out it’s the subjects’ fault. Some of the Gardeners may have started as Designers, begun the slide up to elitism, but by God's grace saw it for what it is and was able to 'get wisdom, get insight'
God as Gardener
God is obviously a master Designer of creation - but that was the easy part – physics and chemistry! Making man’s personhood, in His image, touching His glorious character, is a different and more wonderful category. It’s reflected in God conversing with man and woman in the Garden, in the cool of the day, desiring the fruits of freely-chosen good. Come now, let us reason together. The cosmos knows this higher, infinitely precious calling ‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.’
Civilisation flourishes when it follows the same principles. Nations that have excelled materially and socially are those that fitted closest to this precept – valuing people, creating trusted institutions, educating, allowing talent to rise.. It wasn’t perfect but it was better. In their core governing structures they recognised the fallenness of mankind, the addiction to power, the moral & intellectual weakness we are prone to - so built in myriad ways to constrain it. But this only happens when God has first shaped them with His Spirit.
Grace under pressure
Undoubtebly one of the greatest leaders, Winston Churchill said 'democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…', it balances control with accountability. His strength of character amid humility won him loyalty, but he was also highly creative and resourceful. His love for his country and its people was never doubted. He accepted defeat at the election after the war but persevered to be returned later as PM.
We had VE day celebrations recently and at the final concert everybody got thanked, but there was no sense of gratitude to God. Important days of prayer were held during that existential conflict and the steadiness, courage and eventual success of the Allies bore God's providential hallmarks as did the generous post-war rebuilding via the Marshall plan.
These God-given virtues are not automatic and as people turn away from God so they revert to ‘Designer’, manipulator mode. This was so clear in the Covid response, but had been growing for some time. The UK parliament, almost beyond belief, tried to subvert the will of the people over BREXIT. The elite had learnt well from the centrally-designed managerialism of the EU, which with sleight of hand and national self-deception, turned it from a trading partnership into an authoritarian quasi-superstate. This now abounds in laws but not liberty, self-serving not God-fearing, elite wealth not general prosperity, replacement of now contrary citizens with alien cultures.
Wishing woe on ourselves
These EU arrangements were viewed with approval by the UN who partnered with the WEF in its wish to rule the world - for it’s own good. They cleverly arrange things that look plausible but are as fake as Theme Parks. But who controls the UN? It started off as a respected diplomatic assembly largely paid for by the US, but has morphed into this autocratic institution absorbing vast sums of tax money that seem to get lost (Oxfam report). It's imposing its Strategic Development Goals, that most have never heard of and certainly didn’t vote for but are happening anyway, through its influence on prestige-seeking government and regional authority leaders. Even its diplomatic role is in disarray – the UNRWA association with terrorists, the lack of meaningful peace-keeping.
A UN employee Emma Reilly showed how the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) seem to be the ones calling the shots (literally in the case of Covid). She worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) who was arranging a meeting for Chinese dissidents in Geneva and was asked by the CCP for the names of the attendees. She was shocked and refused, but this had been going on for years (they didn't want to upset the CCP!) and led to dissidents being unable to attend and their families open to harassment or worse. She complained and was dismissed. Many in the US & UK are aware of this and other issues that render the UN a rather corrupt, negative force for the world and, with its agencies, should be disbanded. The good done by some can be taken over by new accountable bodies which could operate at a fraction of the current cost.
CCP rules
In China the CCP rules. It’s leaders have never been popularly elected. They are just another dynasty of emperors, Communism being the means to that end. The aim of all policies are to keep the Party in control and the best way is to dominate at home an abroad. There are 3 main departments the Party machinery, the military (which as the People's Liberation Front serves the CCP not the country), and the economy. But it is still made up of individual human beings who rely on their personal power over others to survive. China as a nation should be rich given all the wealth flowing into the country from its exports – but the average person is not – they are hard-working, poorly paid and the huge profits made are used to subvert countries abroad and control their people at home.
The CCP has been waging a Hybrid Cold war on the West for many years, deliberately price-fixing to wipe out manufacturing elsewhere, which actually affects developing countries like Vietnam, South Korea, India, more than the West. Everywhere in the developing world where they ‘invest’ they end up holding the controls to infrastructure projects and Government ministers. They are supplying aid and support (with North Korea) to fight in Ukraine. They have undue influence in our Universities and in our Governments – this is where a lot of the money goes, along with massively expanding the military, and elite wealth transfers abroad (BBC).
Gardeners or designers?
Such regimes only thrive because faithless technocrat ‘Designers’ (our politicians, businessmen, city-councilmen, and indirectly ourselves) allow them to, assenting to the idol of authoritarianism. This happens through not imposing appropriate trade and non-trade sanctions, tolerating human rights abuses, accepting academic grants in return for censorship, IP theft, and a myriad other ways. In that sense the damage they are doing is Judgement on us.
As Phil Moore in his book on Revelation says: "When we pray 'hallowed be your name', we are asking the Lord to judge the idols of the nations and to vindicate himself before the world. When we pray 'your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven', we are asking him to flex his royal muscles and remind the nations that he is on the throne."
It’s up to us to ‘understand the times’ and to know what to do, how to get back to the Garden.
