Concerning Divine Hiddenness

The argument is simple and I shall present it syllogistically although it has more than two premises. I am quoting Wikipedia here but, never fear, the rest of this essay will be my own work with no more thieving from Wikipedia and without any help from Google's AI, an AI I cannot access from this computer anyway. It runs as follows.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.
2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.
3.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
4.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
6.) No perfectly loving God exists (from 4 and 5).
7.) Therefore, God does not exist (from 1 and 6).

This argument, first proposed in this form by  J. L. Schellenberg as recently as 1993 in his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, has a beautiful simplicity and a kind of human dimension to it that other arguments for and against the existence of God lack. The purpose of this essay is to find some of the loopholes in this argument, to show that non-belief is compatible with the existence of a perfectly loving God. I have been thinking about this for several months and I believe my discussion of this argument will be both interesting and original, an argument you can't get via a colloquy with Chat GPT. I found yesterday a video essay by Gavin Ortlund called "Divine Hiddenness: My Response to Alex O'Conner", uploaded two years ago and so before AI began thinking for us, and although there will be some overlap in my own argument and his, there is less than you may expect or, to put it another way, I will be approaching his answer from a different direction. I recommend you watch this video either before or after reading this essay.

First, though, I need to steel-man Schellenberg's argument because it has a gap in it that he may not have been aware that he had allowed in. Suppose there is a janitor in St Petersburg who believes Putin's rhetoric absolutely and loves Donald Trump with all his heart. However, this janitor's love of Trump is not sufficient for them to enter into an open personal relationship with each other. The janitor lacks the power to make Trump aware that he exists. Similarly God might want to enter into a personal relationship with Alex O'Conner but lack the puissance to do so. To steel-man Schellenberg's argument, and in doing so I am being completely consistent with the history of Christian apologetics, we need to add a couple of premises. I shall set the argument forth again in its steel-manned form.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.

2.) If no omnipotent and omniscient God exists, then God does not exist.

3.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.

4.) If a perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists, then it is within His power to establish such a relationship.

5.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person and has the power and knowledge needed to establish such a relationship, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

6.) If a perfectly loving, perfectly powerful and perfectly knowledgable God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 3, 4 and 5).

7. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

8.) No perfectly loving or perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists (from 6 and 7).

Therefore, God does not exist (from 1, 2 and 8).

In discussing and challenging this argument, we need first, of course, to acknowledge that some human people believe in God and some do not. These two groups, theists and atheists, seldom see eye to eye and sometimes deny that the other group exists at all. Richard Dawkins famously regards all religiosity as delusional while a lot of theists think the atheists have "hardened their hearts" against a God the theists regard as self-evident. Atheists are happy with science, with physics, with the voluminous tracts produced by sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, with Darwinian evolution and the Standard Model. They often feel no hankering for some figure behind the scenes pulling strings. Theists, however, claim to have a clear and distinct idea of God.  If I could go back in time and pose some difficult questions to Rene Descartes, for instance, I might ask him God's eye colour and what he wears. Perhaps Descartes might answer that he conceives of God the same way that Michelangelo did when he painted the Sistine Chapel. More likely, however, I suspect that as much as theists like to say that they have a clear and distinct idea of God, in reality their conception of Him is much more diffuse. I myself used to be a militant atheist but now am on the fence – but even in those moments when I think of God existing I don't really regard him as a person with flip-flops,  muttonchop sideburns, Received Pronunciation, or with any other characteristic that I might clearly and distinctly conceive of him possessing. 

The first criticism I would like to make concerning Schellenberg's argument is that all non-believers must be to some degree resistant. Non-resistant non-belief is not a thing unless the non-believer never encounters believers at all. Let us suppose that you, the reader, are an atheist. Should you be pestered by a missionary or proselytiser on the street with a pamphlet talking about how all sinners who refuse to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour are destined for hell, of course you are going to resist his arguments, argue back. I used to meet such people a lot although they were outnumbered by devotees of Krishna. Similarly, all theists are resistant. When Daniel Lane Craig debated Christopher Hitchens, he too was resistant. If he weren't, otherwise he would have ended the debate by saying, "Of course, you're right. Christianity is evil and I forswear it." To have a firm belief of any sort is to resist the claims of those who have conflicting beliefs. The only truly non-resistant people are the agnostics who change their mind as a result of every passing influence and/or the people who never encounter opposing beliefs concerning God at all. It is because I am on the fence myself that I am someone most qualified to discuss this argument – because sometimes I have a conception of God and sometimes do not. I can speak to the fact that both belief and non-belief are real and justifiable.

What theists and atheists have in common though is that both believe in something I shall call Reality with a capital R. The Reality Principle is that the world runs according to simple rules. If I walk up the road to the cafe at the top of the hill, I expect that if I ask for a coffee and pay six dollars I will be given a flat white. When I cross the road, I look both ways because otherwise there is a slim possibility I might be hit by a car. When the fire alarm goes off, although I know that usually it is just a drill, I vacate my apartment block on the off-chance that there might be a conflagration somewhere. These are rules related to causation, rules that resemble the types of conclusions we draw from inferential reasoning even though most of these rules we pick up on in other ways, often from hearsay. There is a rule that swans in the Northern Hemisphere are white although they may be black in Australia and New Zealand. There is a rule that the people we call 'bachelors' are unmarried men. This first rule is synthetic a posteriori and the second analytic a priori to use Kant's terminology. Many of the rules are derived from the laws of physics – if I hold out my copy of The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake and drop it, I expect it to fall to the floor. If I kick the door, I might expect to break or at least bruise my toes. Rules exist at multiple different levels, the level of subatomic physics at one end of the scale and the level of human behaviour at the other. There is a question of whether some rules are emergent or all can all ultimately be reduced to particle physics but this is not a question I intend to tackle in this essay.

However, what will be important to this essay is a claim that the rules, even the laws of physics, allow for occurrences that might seem impossible. A person might be able to walk on the Sea of Galilee if every time he puts down his foot, the water molecules are rushing up towards him at that very moment. Because a subatomic particle can quantum tunnel through a wall, there is always the tiniest possibility that a person can do it too. Even the images on photographs can conceivable change in peculiar ways depending on unlikely combinations of heat, moisture, and other chemical reactions. The thing about miracles is not that they are impossible but rather that they are just very, very unlikely. So the rules by which we live our lives and base our predictions and decisions on are not iron-clad but, rather, just very very likely, so likely we tend to regard them as absolute. Both the atheist and the theist believe in these rules. The atheist thinks these rules are all there are but typical theists somehow believe both in divine control and in the Reality Principle. Suppose an ordinary theist prays to win Lotto and then does. I assert that such a theist still believes in the Newtonian mechanics underlying the ball drop but also believes that God has ordained that he or she win. God is the the God of the Gaps – when He intervenes in the world He does so in ways that the rules permit. There is a rule that it is possible for cancer to go into remission sometimes and so a theist who has cancer may pray to God to be cured, recover, and, should this happen, may believe both in divine intervention and in the medical finding that sometimes a person's body can fight off cancer on its own. For the theist, the rules we entertain as beliefs concerning how the world operates have God as their foundation. I believe some such idea animated Descartes, Newton, and, even more so, Spinoza. The theist sees God in the workings of the world, in the interstices – all events, situations, display the handiwork of the Divine. The theist thinks this while also thinking that they also occur as the consequence of causal laws. 

The atheist, as I have said, believes that these rules completely explain the world we live in. He or she does not worry about why these rules exist to any degree. When something unlikely occurs, something the rules would ordinarily loosely rule out, the atheist rationalises such an event as being a consequence of blind chance. Atheism is not just possible but plausible. Schellenberg's argument is so strong because he is suggesting that if there is a single non-believer, only one, this proves that God does not exist – in fact, he argues that even if a person adheres to atheism just for a period in his or her life and otherwise is a theist, this is sufficient to dispose of God. So if a single person believes that the rules require no first cause, no ultimate legislator, this is sufficient to negate the existence of the God of the theologians. However, Schellenberg does not argue, as I understand his argument, that believers might not imagine that they are in an open relationship with God. And so we can wonder: what might it mean, feel like, to be in open relationship with an omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent being? I have a suspicion that the people who actually think they can have conversations with God, conversations where God talks back, are people we should be wary of. It is these people who might say that God told them to burn down the orphanage. The ordinary theist, as I have said, though, just has a vague sense of the existence of a being who loves him or her and who wants the best for him or her, a being who acts indirectly through the world. How might a typical theist react if diagnosed with an incurable and inevitably fatal disease? It might shake his or her faith but, if he or she does indeed have open relationship with God, it might be that the afflicted one will simply say, "God moves in mysterious ways", chalk it up as a plot point in God's divine plan, or take comfort in the belief that he or she will reunite with the loved ones who predeceased him or her upon arrival in Heaven. The perennial question of the Problem of Evil which this essay is indirectly tackling is obviously more a problem for theists than atheists. Nevertheless, and setting aside the ways in which the presence of Evil may cause a believer to toy with atheism, it seems that, really, the only way to parse Schellenberg's key notion of "open relationship with God" is to suppose that all it means is for the person to have some sense that God exists and loves him or her.

When atheists and theists debate God's existence (usually within the Christian framework), it is often acknowledged by both sides that the only real way for an atheist to change his or her mind and become a theist is to have a "religious experience". For some people, the religious experience might seem insignificant. At a low point in her life, Sally was approached by a Jehovah's Witness, told that God loved her, and given the latest edition of the Watchtower. In this way God might be seen as displaying His desire for open relationship with Sally by acting through the Jehovah's Witness who had shown up at her door. For more resistant non-believers a more visceral miracle might be required. When atheists who haven't thought deeply about the question of Divine Hiddenness react to Schellenberg's argument, they often ask why, if God exists, wants us to love Him, and wants us to know that He loves us back, He doesn't just write "I EXIST" in the cirrus clouds over their suburb of the city. Surely, the naive atheist asks, wouldn't this immediately bring about proper communion with God? First, it needs to be said, such a miracle could still be ascribed to dumb luck. An apparent message in the sky could still be a random meteorological fluke. Or a hallucination. Richard Dawkins has said that nothing whatsoever could ever persuade him of the existence of God and, of course, resorting to 'hallucination' is the perfect get-out-of-jail card because then no sensory experience at all could ever prove the existence of God. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once put in Sherlock Holmes's mouth the atheist slogan, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Because the atheist has decided that God is impossible in advance, any alternative is better. (It should be remembered that Doyle himself believed in ghosts and seances.)

However, let us suppose that when God writes his message in the sky, it is convincing. Perhaps all the atheists in Auckland see it and decide that it is indeed proof that God exists. All New Zealand, then all the world, have irrefutable evidence that God is real, that the one who was once hidden has now revealed Himself. Would this make the world a better place? I shall argue, perhaps surprisingly, that it would make it worse.

My original contribution to this debate involves the Reality Principle. In order to function successfully and effectively in the world, in order to survive and hopefully flourish, people require some sense that the world runs according to rules that they can understand and exploit if necessary. A miracle is quite obviously a violation of these rules, regardless of whether the phenomenon that could be deemed a miracle is impossible or simply very, very unlikely. If God were to suddenly start performing miracles as a way of proving His existence, violating the rules we thought we knew governed the world, we would afterwards be able to predict nothing at all with confidence. We would always for ever after be unsure of the causes of the phenomena we observe. They could be the result of rules the knowledge of which has either been learnt by humans through inference or through being transmitted verbally or otherwise from one human to another, or they could be the result of divine intervention. This is why I argued that theists believe simultaneously in God and the Reality Principle – because otherwise they would simply sit around all day doing nothing, waiting for God to help them, make them happy, satisfy their desires. They would live in something like the Garden of Eden. I discussed the Garden of Eden in a recent post and this essay should be regarded as a companion piece to that one. If you haven't read it yet, have a quick look through it when you've finished this essay.

There is an argument, attributed to the eleventh century monk Peter Damian, that God's omnipotence enables Him to even change the past. Damian argued that God can restore the virginity of a woman who has lost it. Damian's argument is effectively that the moral stain of having had sex can be laundered away by God and the God can also restore the woman's hymen. However he was taken to mean that God can literally alter the past, make it so something that has been was not. Even in Damian's day there was debate about whether God's omnipotence enabled Him to break the law (the rule) of non-contradiction. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Damian argued that God is capable of changing the past, breaking the law of non-contradiction, but chooses not to because God only chooses to do good things and violating the law of non-contradiction would be an evil thing. One might wonder if a God who can change the past but chooses not to is also a God who knows the future but refuses to change it. These are ideas I encountered in a paper on Medieval Philosophy I took in 2022 and there is an essay in this blog which was the essay I wrote for this paper if readers want to look at it.

I would like to proffer the following incredible suggestion. Perhaps if God wanted to perform a miracle to convince someone that He exists, he might do so by changing the past. This would after all constitute a miracle of sorts. In order to explore this idea, I need to say something about the past. Suppose I want to talk about the famous Existentialist Albert Camus. To whom, to what, am I referring? Am I referring to the corpse buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris? It seems, if I am to avoid falling into the trap of mereological nihilism,  I must be referring to a man who came into existence in 1913 and went out of existence in 1960. The problem with the past, with people, things, and events that are of yesteryear, is that the past no longer exists in the present. So how can we know about the past if it no longer exists? To what, when asserting claims about the past, are we referring? It seems we know about the past in two ways, via memory and via various kinds of documentary evidence. It seems to me that God could change the past by simultaneously altering the memories of those alive now who think they can remember the people, things, and events of yesteryear and by miraculously altering all the documentary evidence. Perhaps Peter Damian had never existed until last week. Perhaps all the documents that seem to prove he existed are divine forgeries and all the people who can remember reading about Peter Damian before last week are the victims of False Memory Syndrome. Such a miracle would not violate the law of non-contradiction. If God were to indeed perform a miracle of this sort, there would be no way for us to know that such a miracle has occurred. However, suppose that God performs the miracle of past-changing by leaving the memories of a person intact, the same as they had been in the past, but changing all the documentary evidence – poems, photographs, letters, etc. If the person is alone in thinking there is a discrepancy between his memories and the material evidence, others may think that there is a problem with the memory of the person. However the person himself, the victim of God's miracle, may remain so convinced of the infallibility of his memory that he would rather believe that God has miraculously changed all the material evidence, perhaps as a way of arousing holy terror in the newly god-fearing convert.

Something like this happened to me last year. A number of poems, photographs, and messages seemed to communicate different things early in the year than they did later in the year. To give one example, late in 2024 I quoted a Janet Frame poem in this blog. In around July 2025 I reread it, both in my blog and in editions of the book I found in the University Library. It was subtly different, not so different as to make for a different interpretation of it but enough to make it a slightly inferior poem. Early in the year I read, online, the Philip Larkin poem "The Whitsun Weddings". This poem is Larkin's description of being on a train and seeing at every station he stops at wedding parties boarding the train. I had read this poem many years ago and thought it a cynical bitter bit of verse that you might imagine being written by a confirmed bachelor. Last year, in the midst of an experience that some might call psychosis and some might say was something like a religious experience, I reread the poem and this time it seemed something celebratory, a joyful Christian song of praise in honour of the sacrament of marriage, a union of two people that Larkin knew he was never going to enjoy himself. The poem is called "The Whitsun Weddings" not only because Larkin's train trip occurred on Whitsunday but because Whitsun is the festival commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples of Jesus seven weeks after Easter. It might be that when I reread this poem I interpreted it this later time as something profoundly spiritual because the Holy 'Ghost had descended on me. Some months later I reread the poem again and realised that both interpretations were true of it. Perhaps atheists read it one way and theists another. Readers of this blog may want to read Larkin's poem online and see what meanings they themselves find in it. Similarly, last year I read Ibsen's play Ghosts and derived from it an interpretation quite different to the orthodox interpretation. In the case of both "The Whitsun Weddings" and Ghosts, the text, I believe, is stable – it is whether or not one has received the Gnosis that is the determinate concerning how these works are to be interpreted. However, there were a number of occasions in which the actual texts of things I have in my possession or have access to seemed to have changed.

If God wanted to perform a miracle to prove that He exists and did so by changing the past, it might prove utterly incapacitating to the one who witnesses or receives the miracle. If we can have no confidence in our memories of the past, how can we plan for the future? I really want to sue the Mental Health Service for medical misconduct and libel and, if I had proof and financial resources, would like to sue my faggot older brother as well. But to do so, I need to feel confident that the past is settled. I have left a paper trail starting in 2014, not only in the form of this blog but in the form of emails, and I would like some surety that what I have supposedly written is the same as what I remember writing. I really want God, having displayed his omnipotence, to direct a little of his omni-benevolence in my direction.

Let us get back to the example of the message written in the clouds. A God who can do this is a God who can do anything. Should God throw perfect rainbows into the sky at decisive moments in a person's life, the formerly Doubting Thomas might start to feel that there are no rules whatsoever. If God were to start to announce his existence over and over again overwhelmingly, the person who is the witness to these miracles might start to wonder if anyone apart from him and God exist in the world. I think it likely that free will is illusory but I also still feel it is a necessary illusion. Even if in our most coldly rational and logical moments we doubt the existence of free will, emotionally and viscerally we need to believe that we have some control over out lives. It would be pointless thinking one had free will if there were no solid rules enabling one to predict the outcomes of one's actions. Observing multiple miracles might have severely deleterious effects on a person's sense that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy in the world and over the world. This could be at least a part of the reason God seeks to remain hidden.

We can present the argument syllogistically as follows.

1. God is all loving.

2. God is all knowing and all powerful.

3. If God is all knowing and all powerful, He is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being.

4. At the very least, to be in personal relationship with God is to feel sure that God exists.

5. The only way for God to make resistant non-believers sure that He exists is to perform miracles.

6. If God were to perform miracles and in this way prove that He exists, this might undermine the feeling the witness to these miracles had that he or she had some control over his or her world – the feeling the person had that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy.

7. If the person's feeling that she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy is undermined, this is a harm perpetrated against the person.

8. Therefore, for God to enter into personal relationship with resistant non-believers may be to cause harm to them (from 4, 5, 6, and 7).

9. If God is all loving, he will not want to cause harm to resistant non-believers.

10. Therefore, although God is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being, He will not try to enter into personal relationship with some human beings (from 1, 8 and 9).

I want now not so much to present an argument as to make an observation and then propose a hypothesis concerning the Divine Plan. For many thousands of years, non-belief was very uncommon. Plato, as I understand it, was the first known philosopher to make an argument known as the consensus gentium. Plato, and then more famously Cicero much later, argued that because belief in the gods (plural) is universal and innate among all peoples, the gods must exist. In the days of Peter Damian, faith in Christianity was ubiquitous among all Europeans. There might have been the occasional village cynic who refused to go to church on Sunday but on a whole belief in the Christian God was common to everyone, perhaps even to the uneducated peasants with the flimsiest notion of such core Catholic tenets as the existence of the Trinity. If, at the very least, to be in relationship with God is to believe that God exists, almost all people were in such a relationship. God wasn't hidden at all – he was present in the minds of almost everyone. It was only starting, I believe, in the nineteenth century, around the time that Darwin's magnum opus was published, that not only did atheism become a thing but it became permissible for people to state publicly that they were atheists. Richard Dawkins, in our contemporary world, still regards atheists as a persecuted minority. This has always seemed really fucking stupid to me but this might be because I live in New Zealand where most of the population are non-believers. It is the fact that atheism had to spread through all the Western world for Schellenberg's argument to make sense that might explain why we had to wait until 1993 for an argument of this sort to appear. It is, after all, also known as "The Argument from Non-Belief."

The rise in atheism coincided with the rise in science. Through innovations such as indoor plumbing, the germ theory of disease and disinfectant, the discovery of antibiotics, organ transplants, and so on, we were able to vastly increase the average lifespan of humans throughout the world. The Haber-Bosch process has enabled us to ensure the vast population of the world can be fed, won't starve. Electrical lighting allows us to walk safely around the city at night. Computers and cell phones enable us to contact love ones at whim at once. Science has vastly improved the happiness and well being of humans everywhere. Belief in science, and the scientific method, follows on from our faith that understandable rules govern the world. It is as though God stepped back to enable us to investigate the world, that he has allowed us the presumption that we cannot rely on God for everything, or in fact anything, but must rely on ourselves. 

In the recent essay "Concerning the Garden of Eden" I argued that Good cannot exist without Evil. I argued that we find meaning in our lives through taking steps to improve the lives sometimes of ourselves and sometimes of others. I would like to suggest, now, that God deliberately removed himself from the picture for a couple of centuries so that we could investigate and utilise the magical rules that we collectively call 'science' in order as far as possible to help each other rather than hoping and praying that some supernatural force will do it instead.

In the introduction to this essay I said that I would expose the loophole in Schellenberg's argument and I will conclude the essay by pinpointing it. The second premise is "2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person." There is equivocation in the way this premise is stated. If God is always open to personal relationship with each human person, is it God or is it the person upon whom the onus lies to initiate, establish, the relationship? In this essay, I have argued that God has to take the initiative. The only real way to turn an atheist into a theist is via a religious experience and such an experience must have God as its author, whether it is through a Jehovah's Witness at the door, a message scrawled in the clouds, or through alterations to several poems. The alternative is for the non-believer to suddenly, for no reason at all, start to believe in God. I would ask the reader if in his or her imagination he or she can envisage a scenario in which a militant atheist such as Richard Dawkins or Alex O'Conner suddenly finds faith. It might be that a perfectly loving God wants Dawkins to remain a staunch non-believer for his own sake and for the sake of his fans. God moves in mysterious ways indeed.

God Explains His Masterplan

     God, the only necessarily existing thing then existing among all the other existing things, was bored. He conjured up a contingent cloud, shaped it into the form of a foam recliner, sat back on it, extended the foot rest, and emitted a long low sigh. The contingent bourbon He had conjured up as the same time to try to quench a thirst He had given to Himself scarcely satisfied. He rested the tumbler on a small contingent table He had also conjured up and placed next to the chair. Eternity was a long time. Especially when one considered the fact that time itself had yet to be invented. God decided that he needed to take some action, of his own free will, to beguile the tedium of everlasting self-similarity. He needed to invent some conscious agents with their own free will to parlay with, to match his wits against. Consequently he conjured up a number of angels – Michael, Gabriel, Lucifer, and the Metatron among them, granting each of these contingent beings the potential to freely choose their own actions as well as the ability to talk back.

    "I have an idea," he told them. "I want to create a couple of individuals, perhaps a whole species, in My own image. They shall have two legs, two arms, two eyes, and an ability to grow a beard as long and white as My own. Or at least half of them. The purpose of these creatures I shall create will be to love each other and to love Me."

    "Interesting," said Michael. "I assume that they shall be lower down the pecking order than we are."

    "In one sense only, that you are closer to Me than they shall be. It shall be My job, and I am delegating some of this to all of you, to arrange affairs so that whatever happens to these 'humans' shall ultimately be in their own interests. I intend to make a whole world just for them. After all, I am not only all-powerful and all-knowing but also all-loving. Everything that happens, even that which happens because of the freely-will decisions of beings such as you and those I have yet to create, will happen because I want it to happen, because I have chosen for it to happen. Even should one of you, of your own free will and out of pride, rebel against Me, I will be able to incorporate some such civil war in what I want now to call Heaven into my Masterplan."

    "I'm certain none of us will ever raise up arms against you!" cried the Metatron, aghast.

    "No, I'm sure none of us will," echoed Lucifer although God, who could be very perspicacious when he wanted to be, noticed that Lucifer avoided making eye-contact.

    "What we need to do first," said God, "is to create the rules for the world these 'humans' shall inhabit. I suggest we require at least four dimensions, one temporal and three spatial, that shall sometimes be usefully described with a number system known as quarternions that the humans one day will invent. These four dimensions will together be known as space-time but the relationship between time and space is something I want to remain a source of confusion right up until the very end. Right. Let's get on with making these rules."

    God summoned up an office space, a desk for himself, a desk for each of the angels, a mug full of biros, and a number of A4 notebooks that they could jot down ideas. God found it quite stimulating to have others to brainstorm with, to bounce ideas off.

    "There shall be in this four-dimensional space-time things we can broadly describe as 'objects'. My first rule is that an object shall continue in a straight line at a constant speed unless some force acts upon it. Even if it seems sometimes to curve this will be because it is following a geodesic through curved space-time. My second rule is that if a force acts upon some object, the force will be proportional both to the acceleration of the object and to a property of the object we shall call its 'mass'. My third law is that if a force acts on one object then an equal and opposite force shall act on another. These three laws will enable us to stipulate a quantity of things in general called 'momentum' which is always conserved."

    "You really do have a superb brain," exclaimed the Metatron fulsomely.

    "You really are the worst kind of brownnose," Lucifer said sotto voce to the Metatron. Lucifer had taken a dislike to the Voice of God immediately upon meeting him, either five minutes or five-hundred thousands years ago, time having no meaning in Heaven.

    God and the angels sometimes separately and sometimes in small working groups put pen to paper and, after some consultation and some compromises, came up with the rules for what they had tentatively decided to call 'the universe'. There would be six varieties of quarks, in three generations, six different kinds of leptons, a Higgs boson, and three charge carrying particles to mediate three of the four forces, the electro-magnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force. They couldn't decide whether gravity should be mediated by a force carrying particle or not and so decided to fudge the rules a little. Rules were written down concerning how all the particles would interact. What became apparent quickly was that the rules they were devising involved constants, such as the ratio of the the mass of an electron to its charge, that the rules didn't dictate.

    "Remember," said God, "that the purpose of the universe is to provide some kind of habitation for the 'humans' we intend to create, their purpose in life being to love each other and to love Me. We must fine-tune all of these constants to ensure that humankind has a chance and does not have its future swept away immediately after the Big Bang or finds itself in a universe with no structure to it at all. If the only value for the Fine Structure Constant that works is one over one-hundred and thirty-seven, so be it."

    "Amen," replied the angels. Soon the rules were completed to their satisfaction. All it took for God to legislate the laws of nature, laws unlike judicial and governmental laws in that they could not be broken by anyone other than God, was to put His signature to the long document the angels had printed out. As He signed his name, Jehovah, God paused to remind his subordinates that, in the document, there was a clause which permitted Him and Him alone to suspend all the rules. "I reserve the right to intervene in the Universe whenever I want as much I want, sometimes to answer prayers and sometimes to enact the very opposite of what My petitioners have requested."

    "Now that we have the Laws of Nature worked out," God went on, "it's time to stipulate the Initial Conditions. I would like to create a paradise for the humans to live in. It shall be called the Garden of Eden. I shall create two types of human, a man I shall call Adam and a woman I shall call Lilith. If Lilith does not work out for any reason, if she is perchance too uppitty, I shall banish her from Paradise and create another woman to be consort to Adam from one of his ribs. She shall be called Eve. In paradise, Adam and Eve shall have direct access to Me and shall have whatever they want. There shall be only one commandment. I shall instruct both Adam and Eve that they are not permitted to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, because both Adam and his spouse have free will, it is possible that they will  disobey me, perhaps having been tempted by someone or something, and eat the forbidden fruit. We must prepare for all eventualities."

    "What will happen to the poor things if they do break your one law?" cried the Metatron.

    "I will expel them from the Garden of Eden and set one of you, Michael I think, to guard the sole entrance with a flaming sword. Once evicted, they will experience all the evil of the world. Not only death but also disease, misfortune, and toil, the pain of childbirth. However, after about four-thousand years, I shall send Myself to Earth to take upon Myself all the sins of the world, and, because I am sinless, in this way shall repay with My sacrifice in full the debt humanity incurred when eating the Fruit, their Original Sin. In order to do all this I shall need to beget Myself, a parthenogenetic process in which I will simultaneously be both the Father and the Son. My manifestation and death will ensure eternal life for all those who choose to believe in Us. People will either go directly to Heaven or Hell at death or they will enter a state of dormancy to be resurrected at the Day of Judgment when We return and pronounce sentence on all those then alive or then dead on something to be known as Judgement Day. I'm leaning toward the second plan but there will be many, including a Dante Alighieri for instance, who will assume the first is what I really intended."

    "It all sounds a bit convoluted," observed Lucifer in a doubtful tone.

    "Ahem," said someone. A young man in a tie-dyed t-shirt and with long hair like a hippie stepped out of the shadows near a filing cabinet where he had been loitering unobtrusively. "I should introduce myself. I'm Jesus Christ. I am also a necessary being. In fact I am consubstantial with God the Father."

    "We didn't see you there!" cried the Metatron. 

    "I've been here from the beginning. I'm just keeping a low profile for a while. My starring role will come a lot later."

    A dove that had been perched on Jesus's shoulder flew from Him to God the Father and then back, depositing a white dropping on the shoulder of the Metatron as it flew.

    "I really don't understand this whole business of the Father and the Son being the same being," complained Lucifer peevishly. "And what's the deal with the dove?"

    "It's another confusion that will only get cleared up right at the end," explained God in a jovial fashion, adding a "Ho, ho, ho." for good measure.

    God paused for a moment.

    "After the Fall, should it occur, I intend to keep a low profile myself. I intend to keep myself concealed, hidden. I don't want the humans to know confidently that it's me pulling all the strings. So it will be important for the humans to develop belief systems that will be called 'religions'. Religion will involve believing in the divine without the assurance of any absolute evidence. The true story of the Garden of Eden will be entrusted to a dozen Semitic tribes making their home in a region of the Earth between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. After My son's heroic sacrifice –  try not to worry too much about it at the moment, Jesus – a new religion will spread to the West and the Near East that will be named Christianity after Us. However there will be many other alternative religions that will appeal to the credulous and ignorant amongst our flock. There will, for instance, be a religion known as Hinduism and another known as Buddhism. The Buddhists will believe that the world has existed and will exist for all eternity. The Buddha shall preach that all history can be encapsulated in grand cycles known as Kalpa that last billions and sometimes trillions of years. The Buddhists shall believe in something known as dependent arising – the idea that everything that occurs depends on prior causes or conditions and that change and flux characterise the experience of existing. The Buddhists shall not believe in souls to either pass to Heaven or Hell at death or be judged at the Day of Judgment. They shall reject the doctrines of a First Cause or Unmoved Mover. The Buddhist theory of dependent arising shall later be taken up by a philosopher called Leibniz who shall argue that everything that happens must have sufficient causes but that the apparently freely willed unpredictable actions taken by people have such a large number of causes, perhaps an infinite number, that the only one who can see all the causes all at once is Me, God."

    "He sounds like he's going to be a smart cookie, this Leibniz," observed Michael tentatively.

    "If he wasn't so stupid! The proof that the Principle of Sufficient Reason must be false is that I decided, on a total whim, to create a universe for a species whose sole purposes in life are to love Me and to love each other. Furthermore, Adam and Eve must freely choose to rebel because otherwise we could not hold them responsible for the Fall of mankind and it would be pointless for Jesus to suffer excruciating agony on a crucifix and then die for them four thousand years later.  Libertarian free will is the only way to go."

    "You already seem to know that they will eat the Fruit," remarked Lucifer truculently. "It's as though you've chosen Original Sin for your children beforehand without their consent. It's seems to me that you've got the whole future history for these creatures all worked out in your head before you've even created anything at all. There's no free will whatsoever in the story you're telling."

    "Well, it will make for a good story at the very least! In truth, the philosophers of religion will sweat blood trying to reconcile a God who knows everything, including the whole future, with their unassailable faith in free will, a belief indispensable as a concept to undergird concepts like 'justice' and 'responsibility'. Even the philosophers who don't believe in Me will pay lip service to the idea that determinism and free will are compatible and will describe themselves consequently as Compatibilists."

    "I hate this feeling that I might be a puppet," murmured Lucifer to no one in particular. "I'm better than that. In fact I don't see why it can't be me who gets to give the orders when not loafing around on a foam recliner and drinking Bourbon all day."

    "What about the poor things who have been led astray by false idols, false prophets? How shall they ever be saved?" exclaimed the Metatron to God melodramatically.

    "My plan is actually even more sadistic than that," explained God cheerfully. "There will be, for instance, a people known as the Maori who will live in a number of large islands on the opposite side of the world to the Levant. The Maori will not be introduced to the Jewish idea of the Garden of Eden and the Christian idea of salvation until the nineteenth century. The Maori will have, before then, their own creation myth, not because they have deliberately rejected me, but because they knew no better. In their mythology, the sky god, Ranginui, and the god of the Earth, Papatuanuku, will be entwined in such an intimate amorous embrace, clinch, that their children, gods in their own right, will be forced to crawl around in the space between them, yearning for light. The children shall assemble to discuss a solution to this predicament with the most ferocious, Tūmatauenga, proposing that they murder Ranganui. Cooler heads prevail however and it is decided best simply to force their parents apart. A number of gods, including Tumataunga, attempt this feat but fail; it is only when Tane-Mahuta stands on his head and pushes up with his feet that the separation is achieved. Light is allowed into the world. After this, Tane, who is god of the forest and of the birds, clothes his mother in trees to hide her nakedness and throws the sun, moon, and stars into the air to similarly protect his father's modesty. The rain is Rangi's tears at his separation from Papa and the mists that sometimes hang over the forests like blankets are the result of her own grief concerning the divorce. The children each take on a function – for instance, Tangaroa becomes the god of the oceans and Tūmatauenga becomes not only god of war, as you might expect, but also god of all human activities such as fishing and cultivating crops. One god, Tāwhirimātea, bitter at his parents' separation, sides with his father and becomes the god of storms and winds, often delighting in shredding Tane's trees to splinters. The internecine warfare between the gods following the separation has never really ceased."

    "I'm sure that our creation story is much superior." There was uncertainty in Michael's voice as he said it.

    "Interestingly there shall be trees in this country, a country known as Aotearoa or the Land of The Long White Cloud, known as kauri trees that will be the largest by bulk if not by height of all the trees on earth. The largest known kauri in Aotearoa, to be found in Northland, shall be named Tane-Mahuta after the god of forests."

    "With all these different religions and disparate myths concerning gods and the different ways the world might have been created, how will humans ever find their way to You and to love You as You intended?"

    "Well, it gets even more sadistic than I have so far implied," went on God mercilessly. "Starting in the nineteenth century, there will be inaugurated a new quasi-religion I shall call 'scientism'. In the twentieth and twenty-first century people everywhere will suddenly start becoming very sciency. It will be proposed and accepted that the universe began with a bang about 13.8 billion years before then and that life first emerged about seven or eight billion years later. At the beginning living things were simply self-replicating molecules to be found near volcanic vents in the ocean floor. There will be a theory known as Neo-Darwinism that shall presume that the physical and often mental characteristics of living things are coded into sequences of DNA to be found in the nuclei of the cells of living organisms. Advantageous traits shall be selected for by nature itself and deleterious traits weeded out but, because of continual mutations in the genome, there shall always be enough variety among members of any particular species for Natural Selection to continue to act upon. Variation will always be replenished by continual random mutations. In this way, the peoples of the twenty-first century will be able to explain human and animal life without resorting to any loose talk about a Creator or Designer. It will become fashionable among many, including many Youtubers, to insist that I don't exist at all. It will even be proposed that the world was once ruled for millions of years by feathered reptiles known as dinosaurs although the faithful will maintain that dinosaur fossils are all hoaxes planted in the ground by the Adversary to test people's faith."

    "You don't say," said Lucifer, jotting a note down on a small piece of paper and then surreptitiously pocketing it.

    "I'm surprised that you would want to create a species so irredeemably obtuse!" said the Metatron.

    "Indeed. There shall in truth be a woman, whose name is Sophia, who will wander from mental health unit to mental health unit in New Zealand. She too will be very sciency. She shall brandish a ballpoint pen when trying to get her views across to psychiatrists, saying, 'What is this pen made of? Plastic. And where does plastic come from? From petroleum. And what is petroleum made of? Dinosaur bones.'"

    "If I am to understand your prophecy correctly," said Lucifer slowly, "this Neo-Darwinism is predicated on a world of death and suffering, on the survival of only the fittest."

    "We don't need Neo-Darwinism to explain this fact about the world I intend to create. To survive the people will need to kill and eat other living beings. This will be true even if Neo-Darwinism is proven false. There will be a philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who will say pithily, and this will be an exact quote, 'Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.'” 

    "It doesn't seem to me that You can satisfactorily reconcile your omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent nature with a world in which to survive living creatures must kill and ingest other living creatures," complained Lucifer.

    "That is why I shall sanctify the killing of animals through rituals of animal sacrifice. The children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, shall each make offerings to me. Cain shall proffer up vegetables and Abel shall sacrifice a sheep. My preference for the latter will shut up all those libtard vegetarians as well as provoking Cain into murdering Abel, thus proving beyond doubt that all vegans are inexcusably evil. I shall order Abraham, latter on, to kill his son Isaac and then, omni-benevolently, replace Isaac with a sheep in the nick of time. In this way, the humans shall know that I want and require them to kill and eat other animals. After each sacrifice, the animal will be mostly eaten by the community and the remainder burnt. When, on rare occasions, the whole animal is burnt as an offering to Me, this shall be known by the word 'holocaust'".

    "Will animal sacrifices continue right up into age of sciencyness?" 

    "No, because Jesus will be the last sacrifice I will require. His crucifixion and death will be entirely analogous to an animal sacrifice and this why He will be known as the Lamb of God – not because he is small, white, cute, and fluffy, but because he will be the last in a long line of ovine sacrifices. Before his arrest, Jesus will tell his twelve disciples over supper that the wine they are drinking is really his blood and the bread his flesh. The Christians who will follow him until that ominous moment when the balance tilts irreversibly in favour of scientism will remember his sacrifice every Sunday by partaking in a ritual known as Communion in which they drink wine that has been transubstantiated into Christ's blood and wafers of bread that have been transubstantiated into His flesh. In this way, by partial reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus every week, they shall ensure no further sacrifices are needed. There will be a paradox associated with Communion because Christ's death will be seen at once as something terrible to be lamented and something wonderful to be celebrated because His death, Our death, has ensured that all his followers will have eternal life."

    "Hold on," said Lucifer. "You told us that you are creating this world so that a particular species to be found within it will both love each other and love You. But it seems You want to keep Yourself hidden from most of them and allow a whole lot of evil to exist in the world. I do get the idea that the world requires a First Cause and that maybe, if everything else is contingent, a necessary being must exist. I get that, in the future, even some sciency humans may think that the world is too finely-tuned to not be explained by You or someone like You. But how can You expect the humans to know You if You provide them with no sense-data at all confirming your existence?'

    "I shall plant in the minds of many of them a concept of Myself," responded God pompously. "There shall be in the eleventh century after My death and rebirth a monk called Anselm who shall say that he can conceive in his mind a Perfect Being, a being greater than which none can be conceived, and that, because such perfection entails existence, I must therefore exist. There shall be a later philosopher, Rene Descartes, who shall make a similar argument to be called the Trademark argument. He shall argue that I placed within his mind a conception of Myself as a kind of stamp to reassure him that I am real and created him. There shall be many who lack a conception of God but sometimes a person may undergo a spiritual reevaluation, reconstruction, and come out the other end with a conception of God that he or she lacked beforehand. For instance, such a person may like to conceive of Me wearing a sky-blue kaftan and lounging back on a recliner, with My long white beard plaited and a tumbler of bourbon near at hand, listening to The Best of the Smiths on a Sony walkman."

    "It seems to me as though He's working this all out on the fly," said Lucifer to himself. "I'm sure I'd do a much better job if I was in charge. For one thing, I'd create a universe which made at least a modicum of sense.."

    A little later there was a kerfuffle in Heaven that we don't have to describe here. After the contretemps had been sorted out, God decided to get down to the serious business of world-building. He changed into His overalls, rolled up His sleeves, and set about the task of creating the universe. On Monday, He said, "Let there be light." On Tuesday, He hurled the sky up into the air. On Wednesday, He filled the hollows of the earth with water, thus making the rivers, lakes, and seas. On Thursday, He flung the sun and the moon up into the sky to orbit or be orbited by the Earth forever after. On Friday, it was the turn of all the animals of the air and sea. On Saturday He introduced the first land animals to the world and sculpted Adam and Lileth from clay. On Sunday, God decided He needed a well deserved break from all this artistic endeavour and so rested. He conjured up a Pacific Island beach, two coconut trees, and a hammock slung between them. Dozing in the hammock with a White Russian in a contingent tumbler close at hand and Kid A by Radiohead playing on his Walkman, God was able to reflect upon the fact that, in Heaven, everything is fine. The Dude Abides.

Infinity Capital

In a recent essay, "Concerning the Garden of Eden", I argued that both Good and Evil exist in the world. The gist of my argument was that either a kind of Manichaenism is true, that there is both a Good principle and Evil principle in the world, opposed to each other and in constant conflict, or that if a good God exists, he or she has thrown us into a world in which there is both Good and Evil because in this way he or she has provided us with a world in which our decisions and everything else in it has Meaning. The aim of tonight's essay is to discuss the Evil that is inherent potentially in Capitalism. I want to begin by imagining how someone receiving a sudden fortune might spend it and then go on to discuss a kind of maleficent alliance between landlords, banks, real estate agents, property developers, and the construction sector to generate fortunes ex nihilo. I want to show how a large country can engage in economic warfare against a smaller one and then consider how likely that this might be genuinely occurring.

Suppose a person, Bob, is recipient of a sudden windfall. Suppose he wins Lotto. He has choices concerning how he spends the money. He might fritter it all away on a trip to Santiago, Chile, expensive restaurants, parachuting, ski lessons. In this case the money dissipates in forms of goods and services that lose their value almost immediately after being purchased, when used. He might alternatively buy a car or two. In this case he owns assets that will only gradually depreciate in value – if he sells a car after a couple of years, he will receive less than he spent on it but he will still get some money back. However, Bob might want to invest the money somehow, make a return on it. He might start up a business that processes venison, a meat works. In this case he spends the money buying the land, premises, and equipment, and then makes arrangements with local farmers that raise deer to supply his factory. He will employ people to work in his abattoir. Money is going out but soon, if he is lucky, if the consumers at the supermarkets and restaurants he is selling venison to like his product, money will start coming in. Perhaps he eventually starts making a profit. In this case it seems probable that the asset he has built, the business, will appreciate in value. His net worth will not reduce but expand. Money sometimes makes money. And, arguably, he is doing something good. He is paying wages to his employees and, furthermore, by entering the venison market, he may be making venison cheaper overall because supply of it has increased, benefiting consumers. (At least this is what is supposed to happen.) The only negative economic repercussion is that other venison sellers will receive a little less in earnings. Bob has at least one other option to spend the money he has. He could buy property, houses or apartments. In this case, he has assets that will always appreciate in value and a guaranteed source of revenue from the tenants he is now landlord over. This last option is obviously the safest but the only person who benefits from such arrangements is the landlord, Bob himself. Because there is only a limited amount of real estate in a country like New Zealand, a decision made by Bob to invest in property, together with the decisions of many others to act similarly, forces up the prices of houses and apartments, putting them ever further out of the reach of those not lucky enough to have won Lotto. Importantly, the more venison producers there are, the less each individual venison seller will make – but the opposite is true in property speculation. The more property speculators there are, the more the prices of properties increases – as more and more people try to get into the property market, the more the net worth of existing landlords goes up.

And herein lies the problem.  When we think of capitalism, we form idealised pictures in our minds of entrepreneurs, people who take risks to bring unusual new products into the marketplace. Perhaps they have acquired the startup funds from other businesses they own or from loans from banks prepared to take risks. But such people are rare. In the real world, there is monetary inequality to begin with and the few who have both a large amount of excess capital and the willpower needed not to fritter it all immediately away are usually neither capable enough nor daring enough to take a risk starting a whole new business, a business which might fail as most do. The safest bet is property speculation. So we have a class of people who make a whole lot of money without contributing anything to society. All they do is occasionally visit the properties they own to ensure the tenants are keeping them clean and tidy. Money makes money. Brett Weinstein, when I once watched his show, often spoke about "rent-seeking elites" and I see in this class of people a kind of new-born feudalism. Presumably decades of economic policy in this country has allowed this new feudal class to emerge but the details of its history is something I know little about although generational wealth is involved and the processes that brought this class of people into existence presumably began after the Second World War.

The thing about this class of people, rent-seeking elites, is that they are in the main invisible. They have their homes in St Helliers and occasionally visit their properties to ensure the upkeep of their cash-cows. It seems that our current government and sometimes Auckland's local rag, the Herald, are lackeys to their feudal lords. In the case of the government and perhaps the Herald, a part of the reason for this is a worship of capitalism, pure unadulterated neo-liberal free market capitalism. They venerate the great god Mammon. Because landlords have acquired their wealth and wealth-making assets through a permitted exploitation of the capitalist system, their wealth is regarded as legitimate. But, more than this, our elected representatives are if not part of this class then adjacent to it. Recently the Herald published details concerning a number of MPs, from all parties, who owned multiple properties but had failed to declare them all. Rather than trying to help all New Zealanders our elected representatives, particularly those now in Government, side with their mates and their donors, the landlords.

Earlier this year, I became acutely aware of all the evil in the world. I wandered a lot around Auckland, particularly the CBD, in the middle of the night, and for the first time in my life was struck by the number of enormous buildings to be found towards the bottom of Town. I think many of them are empty or mostly empty. Some of them may be mostly vacant apartment buildings but usually I think they are empty office buildings. It is a secret in plain sight, somehow invisible to all the people wandering around Fort Street or lower Queen Street because they are all half-asleep, because they never look up. And yet we are constantly being told that we need to build new constructions. I see cranes around the corners of every second road. An issue that has been with us New Zealanders for at least twenty years is that, to use the phrase commonly employed, "first home buyers are shut out of the market". The solution? We need to build lots of new houses they tell us. I would like to suggest though that the problem is not that New Zealand lacks places for people to live but that prices have been forced up by property speculators and this is the reason young salaried couples cannot buy homes in which to raise children. It is a conspiracy by the construction sector, by real estate agents, by property developers, by the landlords, and by the banks who finance them. In my view this unholy alliance is keeping afloat the economy but only by diverting huge sums into pockets of the landowning class and those who enable them. A simple solution to the housing crisis would be to convert the empty buildings in the CBD into apartment buildings containing large enough apartments that families could dwell in them, assuming we are comfortable with the idea of children living in the buildings around Fort Street. Instead though we seem to trapped in a cycle where monied elites invest through real estate agents and real estate developers in newly built or still being drafted apartment buildings that, in a culture of rampant property speculation, can only increase in value.

Although I am focussing on New Zealand, there is a similar problem in the United States. I watch CNN enough to know that there has been for a long time a problem there too of prospective first-home buyers being similarly shut out of the market. The root cause of this evil is again a devilish alignment between construction firms, real estate agents, property developers, banks, and landlords. Donald Trump made his fortune as a property developer. MAGA faithful like to imagine that the riches of their hero evince his acumen as a businessman but, as I have already pointed out, if you have a little bit of money to start with, a certain flexibility of moral character, and a little luck, it is easy to make money as a property developer. Trump's wealth does not prove that he has the slightest intelligence, taste, or judgement. All it proves is that, given a little capital to begin with, capital he got from his father, property development is the simplest way to become a billionaire.

When I first started noticing all this evil in the world, when, as I like to put it, my Third Eye was opened, I was wandering around Broadway in Newmarket a great deal. I suddenly noticed that every second store was empty, for lease. Those stores that still seemed to be open were, I suddenly realised, fake stores. Sometimes they were Pop Ups. Sometimes they were stores which might have been subsidised perhaps by the Newmarket Business Association to maintain the false impression that Broadway was not in serious decline, that the Westfield Mall at one end of Broadway hadn't sucked away the commerce from the rest of the strip. All the foot traffic had been diverted through its electric doors. I cannot believe that even the stores in the mall are really prospering. I do not know how three quarters of the shops I see in Newmarket, in Karangahape Road, in Queen Street, are managing to survive. Unemployment is at over 6 percent in Auckland and this does not take into account all the people who are in fake jobs. The depression had been invisible to me and then it was as if some God-like power told me, "Open your eyes!" and suddenly I saw. I saw the most hypocritical, most pusillanimous, face of capitalism. Rather than let people see the evidence of a serious depression civic authorities had decided to make stores that otherwise would have been empty into dressed stage sets. When my Third Eye opened I saw something else that had been invisible to me, the fact that the vast majority of people in Newmarket were now Mandarin Chinese who preferred speaking Mandarin to each other rather than English. This is something I shall come back to later in this essay because it is important to the claim I wish to make.

One night, at around 1AM,  I wandered along Greenlane West Road past Alexandra Park and found the premises of an important real estate firm. I heard a voice that said, "This is ground zero." I had stumbled on one of the premiere real estate agencies in Auckland. In the windows of the real estate agency, there were pictures of some of the apartment buildings they were selling off piece of piece. There was a picture of a just being built apartment building at the top of Khyber Pass that I pass twice a day every day on the way to and from my mother's house. There were pictures of many sometime enormous apartment buildings. The pictures of the real estate were always accompanied by the pictures and names of the real estate agents entrusted with selling the sites, people who given the fever to buy property must be making money hand-over-fist. The face of corruption, of graft, is quite visible if you know where to look. Over half of them were Asian with Asian names. As I walked around the complex I found myself in a space with a Lone Star restaurant on my right and a Chinese restaurant on my left. I felt like I was New Zealand caught between the hammer of the United States, the billionaire Republicans now often based in Houston, and the anvil of China. I had already formed the belief that rich Americans had taken advantage of the recession in New Zealand to buy properties and businesses here and then to sell them on to newly arrived immigrants from China or to Chinese still based in their own country. The symbolism of finding myself right between a Chinese restaurant and a symbol of Texas only reinforced my frightening suspicions concerning all this my eyes had been opened to. Our whole nation is being asset-stripped. Of course, you might say that I have no real evidence that this is occurring. However a couple of months ago I read in the Herald that a restaurant in K Road, a labour of love built up by its owners over decades and considered one of the best in the city, had been bought out and that the new owners had decided to replace it with yet another American style fried chicken fast-food outlet as if Auckland doesn't have enough of them already. I was told by a friend of the family that the owners had been made an offer so large that they couldn't refuse it. Game Theory, as invented by John von Neumann, shows that in certain situations if all the participants in a game act out of self-interest the overall outcome is worse then if they all acted altruistically. If you were offered ten million dollars for your small business, would you not consider taking the offer? It seemed to me that rich investors were buying up New Zealand businesses with the sole aim of making them worse, of destroying New Zealand culture and undermining our sense of national identity.

But this is not the worst scenario we can imagine unfolding. I have a conspiracy theory that I cannot be confident in but which is worth setting out if only as an eventuality we should all be prepared for in case some country attempts it. First though, I need to say something about the nature of money.

From around 600BC until the late nineteenth century, currency in all western countries was based on silver or some mixture of silver and gold. In the late nineteenth century, in Britain and the Commonwealth, the Gold Standard was adopted – all British pounds should in theory be exchangeable for gold. This ended in New Zealand in 1914. From 1944 until 1976, the international monetary system was based around an arrangement known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. All capitalist nations guaranteed that their currencies would be exchangeable for US dollars while the United States guaranteed that US dollars would be redeemable for gold. I believe this is why Fort Knox has always been supposed to have tons and tons of gold bullion. In 1976, though, the Bretton Woods system was abandoned and currencies in the US and around the world became fiat currencies. Money is issued by particular governments, and laws and regulations establish how these promissory notes, this paper money, is to be used as legal tender in their respective countries. Paper money only has the values it does because all the people in a particular country agree that it does. Today of course money is binary code in the computing systems of banks both private and public which we access through debit or credit cards. The printing or creation of money and its management is handled by central banks and reserve banks, institutions directly answerable to the government, the state. 

Now, one might wonder why when the government of a particular country, say New Zealand or the United States, finds itself short of the funds it needs to pay for the functions and services it provides it does not just get its central bank to print a whole lot of money and spend that. The reason this is considered bad economic policy is that it leads to inflation and currency instability. If suddenly a whole lot more money were to appear in New Zealand today it could be massively inflationary, pushing up the prices of goods and services, reducing the relative value of assets such as property, and eventually forcing the bosses to pay their workers more. The massive printing of money led to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany and has for decades been causing unmanageable inflation in Argentina. So when governments need money and don't want to increase taxes, they borrow. They issue government bonds. In buying bonds from governments, other countries, private corporations, and individuals are effectively lending money to the governments, loans that theoretically could or should be repaid at some time. I might digress to say that there seems to be some logical error in this thinking somehow, some kind of ideological chicanery involved here, because selling bonds brings in liquid cash and so should cause inflation in exactly the same way that simply printing money would. It may be that the threat of bond buyers asking for their vouchers to be redeemed to some small extent dampens inflationary pressures.

Think, now, of China, a state that is secretive, capitalist, and totalitarian all at once. Imagine that the government of China is secretly printing money and funnelling it to Chinese aligned private equity firms and supposed venture capital companies, companies 'investing' in countries such as New Zealand. These firms might buy assets and then sell them on to Chinese nationals. This would be a very effective way of waging economic war on another country so long as it remained unnoticed, invisible. First, it would involve the transfer of asset ownership to immigrants who may have more loyalty to their nation of birth than to the parasitised host country or to people still living in mainland China. Second, the new owners could undermine or hollow out the host country's sense of collective national identity by taking it over culturally. Third, if any inflation occurs, it does not occur in China even though these practices arise from the creation of Chinese currency. Rather because it is New Zealanders inside New Zealand who are recipients of the cash injections inflation occurs here rather than there. This would make any recession here worse and further reduce the value of property and businesses relative to the Chinese currency, the yuan or renminbi, making it even easier to continue aggressively buying out the whole of New Zealand.

When walking around Newmarket, I found near the door of a newly built building near Broadway, home to Mercury Energy, a plaque or sign that reads "Infinity Capital". Doesn't this sound like the name for a company that has unlimited financial backing, for a company that is a front for the Chinese Central Bank? Doesn't it sound a little evil, a little diabolical or Satanic? Especially to those of us suspicious of modern capitalism? The fact that the owners of this company could hint at its agenda in its very name gives a hint of their chutzpa, their devilish genius. They are relying on people walking past not thinking very deeply about the name of the company housed in the building, on a kind of magic that has made them invisible. I really felt this year that many things in Auckland are wrapped in magic spells that stop people seeing them. It was only when the voice said, "Open your eyes!" that I began to notice them. A little later in the year, I was watching CNN and there was an item about the US government's use of drones to police the border between the United States and Canada. There was a shot of one of the drones and I saw that it had "Infinity Capital" stamped on it. So a little later I looked up Infinity Capital on Wikipedia. Looking it up again just now, I found that the entry concerning it had disappeared but there is an entry for 'Infinity Group'. Infinity Group is a private equity firm backed by the China Development Bank, the government owned bank that funded the Three Gorges Dam among other things. Infinity Group has offices throughout China and Hong Kong. Its only offices outside China are in New York – and in Tel Aviv. In fact its Tel Aviv office is its head office. 

The fact that the head office of Infinity Group is in Tel Aviv has a perverse kind of fitness to it. If China wanted to create a puppet company to give invented money to, to extend its influence overseas and to degrade the culture of other countries, having a head office in Israel, a head office that is protected by both the Israeli state and the forbearance of the international community towards Israel, is a genius move. Historically the Jews were the money lenders, the usurers, but today any talk of a Jewish conspiracy to control the banking sector is seen as antisemitic. Therefore if anyone were to suggest that Jews in Israel were accomplices in a scheme orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party to deploy financial instruments in order to degrade and then take over smaller countries, the person might be charged with repeating and recycling ancient ant-Jewish stereotypes and tropes. If some scheme such as the one I outlined is being implemented, we cannot be sure if Israel and China are in cahoots or if Israel is just being used, perhaps with the consent of unscrupulous actors within the Jewish state. There is something here that I find very difficult to articulate. In the previous essay, I discussed magic and it seems to me that some kind of symbolism with thaumaturgic consequences operates in the world sometimes. The Jews as a people have a strange relationship with Western civilisation because, on the one hand, the Old Testament is a Jewish document and Jesus Christ was a Jew but, on the other, the Jews have historically been despised and ostracised, accused of being Christ's murderers. The shadow of the Holocaust also hangs over everything and is much of the reason Israel is given a blank cheque today. By acting through a headquarters in Tel Aviv, the Chinese government may be exploiting a paradox that has supernatural implications. It is a secret undermining of Western civilisation.

There seems to be a secret undermining of New Zealand identity going on certainly. New Zealand's sense of national identity has for a long time not been the strongest thing, based, among other things, on the national sport, rugby union, on national beer brands like Steinlager and Lion Red, on indigenous flora and fauna such as the kauri, the kiwi, and the kea. Traditionally New Zealand culture, by which I am thinking of distinctively New Zealand art and literature, has been preserved and perpetuated by the universities, academic institutions, but for a long time the University of Auckland has been a willing worshiper of the money god, Mammon, perhaps Pluto. (Pluto was the Roman God of both the Underworld and wealth because the Underworld was where gems and precious metals like gold could be found.) An orientation towards the pursuit of profit by both the universities and young people has had a couple of noticeable effects. Because degrees in subjects like English and Philosophy do not lead directly to jobs, both departments are if not now dead then almost dead. Ideally the universities would be custodians of our national culture but now this mission has been outsourced to, if anyone, the advertisers who, because they are not always competent and because they are also chasing the dollar, are not always the best people we can imagine handling the stewardship of New Zealand's national identity. Another even more obvious consequence of neo-liberal ideology is that the University of Auckland has come to rely on foreign students to make money, foreign students who do not always speak English and often remigrate back to East Asian countries when their degrees are finished. This is no way to assist in the forging and maintenance of a national identity. A couple of months ago, I decided to wander down the side street near the University where New Zealand's most prestigious fine arts school, Elam, is located. As you might expect, Elam is a magic secret – you have to have known students who had attended it to know where to find it. I found, almost next door, a couple of enormous buildings designed as student accommodation for all the many University of Auckland students from China who had decided to learn English and take Commerce Degrees here. These buildings don't even try to hide the fact that all the students domiciled inside them were from China and probably spoke Mandarin (not Cantonese) as their first and only language. However the fact that these buildings are hidden down the same side street where we can find Elam makes them as almost invisible as Infinity Capital.

The gradual undermining of our national culture is apparent in other ways. The national drink of New Zealand is not anymore Lion Red or Steinlager but the 'flat white'. Some disputatious Australians think they invented it but I take it on faith that New Zealand got there first. A few cafes in Auckland not only serve expresso-style coffees like flat whites but also chai lattes. What I noticed this year, though, quite suddenly, is that all the cafes in Newmarket and the central city have started serving matcha lattes and had even started giving matchas priority over the Kiwi one-third expresso, two-thirds steamed milk. Matcha lattes are made from steamed milk and powered green tea. It may be that all of these cafes are catering to the huge number of recent immigrants from China and Chinese students or it may be that there is a kind of concerted campaign going on to demote the flat white and make matcha lattes the national hot beverage. I do not think this campaign is deliberate, organised, but rather a kind of group-think. I hope I don't appear racist in pointing all this out. I do draw a distinction between individual immigrants from China and a kind of Chinese cultural force, a dissemination and inculcation, a force that is acting only partly through these recent immigrants and temporary students, and mainly through systems and structures set up around them and for them. It is a force that is working mostly through the buy-up of New Zealand businesses by, I suspect, people from mainland China. I am aware, of course, that many Asian immigrants do not come from China but from other south-east Asian countries such as South Korea and Malaysia – I have even met a few that I think have come from Hong Kong and these immigrants may well hate the Chinese government more than anyone else apart from the Taiwanese. What I am trying to discuss is a cultural change that is a result of capitalism itself and possibly pseudo-capitalist practices. The sudden appearance and promotion of matcha lattes as the drink of choice for consumers both Asian and European is just one indicator of a sea-change in New Zealand culture that had been occurring invisibly for many years and only abruptly became visible to me this year. 

I want to bring the essay back to the ideas I have been discussing in the previous couple of posts. How can we relate these economic developments and the conspiracy theory I have posited to a war between Good and Evil? It relates to identity, personal and collective. That which threatens one's identity can be considered Evil. If New Zealand culture as I knew it is being changed, and often it seems for the worst, at the behest of actors outside New Zealand, this threatens me as a New Zealander. The recession threatens me as a New Zealander because it degrades the society in which I participate. The shifting of ownership of New Zealand assets, properties and businesses, into the hands of outside investors threatens me as a New Zealander because I would prefer New Zealand to be owned by New Zealanders. The zealots who have inherited the neo-liberal mantle bequeathed by Roger Douglas may scoff at me for this squeamishness because they regard the sloshing of capital around the world as always good – it always benefits the rich, their benefactors. The purest neo-liberals are quite non-racist. They'll like you so long as you're rich and as long as money is being made by someone. It is conceivable I will be scoffed at by people on the left because they might possibly interpret this essay as anti-immigrant and so I want to clarify my position. I have no problem with poor immigrants coming here from China or elsewhere, working in the sectors where the country needs labour, and then gradually, over a generation or so, integrating into New Zealand society. The immigrants from China I like are the ones who hate the Chinese Communist Party. I have great sympathy with the Falun Gong practitioners I see demonstrating in Newmarket or Aotea Square. What I am worried about is the purchasing of New Zealand by wealthy Mandarin-speaking Chinese who are friendly with the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese who when they do move here are not interested in integrating into New Zealand society but rather want to change it.

I recognise, and this is a very important admission, that there is a little hypocrisy in my position. When I talk about New Zealand identity, I mean primarily a Pakeha New Zealand identity. In the same way that Chinese immigration and investment is making New Zealand more Chinese, the British suppressed the people and culture who existed here before them, the Maori, for something like a hundred years. Many think they are still being suppressed today. Maori culture may have come close to being eradicated. In my ideal world, I would like a New Zealand that combines the best of both English and Maori culture. I would like there to be a place for Shakespeare as one of the fathers of the English language and of English literature as well as a place for Maori customs, huis and tangis and karakia. There would be a place for Chinese culture too in our universities if our universities had their priorities straight. Ideally there would be a place where Chinese culture would be visible, talked about and taught, not a kind of secret malign sorcery gnawing away at the foundations of the country I try to love. However, in my darker moods, I sometimes wonder if there might not be some justice in British colonisers being replaced by Chinese ones as the most powerful people in New Zealand society. Perhaps I should just accept that the yellow peril might win the battle.

Given what has been discussed in this essay, is there anything a prospective Labour-Green government can do about it? Christopher Hipkins plans to campaign on introducing a Capital Gains tax which should dampen the property market a little. But it might not go far enough. Perhaps there should be laws limiting the number of properties landlords can own. But this is a dramatic prescription – I admit I have not thought it through and it would perhaps be far too dramatic to be feasible. There certainly seems to be a need to have some kind of governmental body to scrutinise large planned investments in New Zealand to see if they are in the national interest. Is it really beneficial to New Zealand for dairy farmers to sell Fontera to the French dairy giant Lactalis? Winston Peters opposes this sale and I find myself in agreement with him. However our government seems mainly to be in ideological cloud cuckoo land. Neoliberalism right-or-wrong. Luxon has talked about the need for foreign investment in New Zealand but people forget that when someone invests in a company or business or apartment building, it is not a charitable donation – some ownership passes hands. It feels, in fact, as though the steering of our country is no longer under our Prime Minister's control. The blindness, the sleep walking, the mass hypnosis, doesn't just affect pedestrians wandering around Fort street, it has afflicted our leaders. It is possible we have already been annexed by China. Early this year, the Chinese Navy performed exercises in the Tasman sea between New Zealand and Australia and a few of us were frightened briefly that China was going to literally invade New Zealand. Perhaps this exercise had symbolic significance. In the tariff war between the US and China, New Zealand may have been forced to side with China. Perhaps the subjugation of New Zealand to China is a fait accompli, a done thing. Perhaps we have already become a vassal state to China. Of course, all this occurred to me while my Third Eye was open and it has closed again now. But it was open long enough for me to notice and pay attention to a sign by the door of a very large, very new, and very costly building in Newmarket that reads "Infinity Capital."

Concerning Magic

Over the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2000 and 2001, when I was just twenty-one, I travelled overseas and visited the Spanish city of Barcelona for a couple of days. This was a year before Spain adopted the Euro as its national currency and the small denomination coins were made of copper with holes in their centres. In Barcelona I took one of the coins, put a string through it, and started wearing it like a medallion. For a number of years after, I wore it underneath my clothes until eventually the string disintegrated and it could no longer be regarded any more as a functional talisman or amulet. Not that I consciously thought of it as either a talisman or amulet – in those days my sartorial choices were whimsical and bohemian and I never rationally considered this choice of accoutrement as an item I had picked for its magical properties, as a lucky charm intended either to protect me or to bring me good luck, but nevertheless, in a way, I had. I was superstitious then and am still superstitious today. The term 'superstition' is often considered nearly synonymous with the word 'magic' and it is magic (and magical thinking) which is the subject of tonight's essay.

When we think of 'magic', what do we usually think of? Stage magic may be the first thing that comes to mind – the paid magician who draws a rabbit from an apparently empty hat in front of an audience or seems to saw his glamorous, usually female, assistant in half. We might think of David Copperfield, Seigfried and Roy, Penn and Teller, or David Blaine. More recently street performers have adopted the term 'mentalist' to describe their profession and employ a more psychological method when performing their tricks. These are the magicians who can work out which card you've drawn from a pack or what you've written in a note contained in a sealed envelope. Today, and possibly from the time it emerged in the late 19th century, people regarded this form of 'magic' as being fake magic. People always believed there to be a rational scientific explanation for the the feats being performed but the wonder associated with stage magic was built on the fact that the magician would refuse to reveal how the con worked, the mysterious hidden inner mechanisms and devices associated with the trickery. The secret behind the trick was kept hidden from the credulous public who attended such performances. Supposedly there are schools and colleges of magic founded to share the secrets of stage magic with selected initiates but there is also supposedly a kind of code of honour among magicians never to disclose the mysteries of the craft to outsiders. We might think of the film The Prestige. In this film, the rival magicians are so desperate to learn the other's secret that they are prepared to commit murder to do so. In this film, the secret behind the fake magic of one of the performers ends up being actual magic, actual magic pretending to be science and supposedly taught to the protagonist Robert Angier by Nikola Tesla. I find it very interesting that David Bowie was picked to play Nicola Tesla and I wonder if he was chosen because there is some actual magic associated with Bowie. I know the reader may find this hard to accept.

What else do we think of if we want to try to define the term 'magic'? Much of our contemporary understanding of sorcery, witchcraft, wizardry, comes from fantasy fiction. (For some reason bookshops now put fantasy fiction under the rubric "young adult" and I think this a sad decline.) Think, of course, now, of the Harry Potter books. These books are absolutely full to the brim with magic of all different sorts. Nevertheless it is nevertheless possible to generalise. Harry and his fellow students learn how to make magic potions – often these potions are constituted by multiple otherworldly ingredients and then rendered efficacious through the recitation of an incantation over them. Such potions can make someone fall in love with someone else, age a person, or cure paralysis. Another form of magic consists simply of the practitioner pointing a wand at something or someone and uttering some appropriate word. If a person points his or her wand at someone else and says "Expelliarmus" he or she can disarm his or her opponent. If a person points the wand at someone else and says "Leviosa", he or she can make the other levitate. Thus, in order to perform such spoken-word spells, the practitioner needs a little knowledge of another language, a language which in the world JK Rowling invented seems to be a kind of mashup of English and Latin. A third important way magic is manifested in this world is through magical objects, such as a cloak that confers invisibility, a map that appears on a particular parchment only when wanted, and Mad Eyed Moody's eye that can see through solid objects. Presumably these enchanted objects have been enchanted at some point in the past but I cannot recall if Harry or his friends ever create a magical object – although Voldemort must because he puts one sixth of his soul into each of six horcruxes.

Another fantasy series which might inform our understanding of magic is The Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula Le Guin. In this series the wizards control the natural world by speaking in a language different to their common tongue, a language which the author calls the True Speech or the Old Speech. For instance, by calling something by the name 'tolk', which is the True Speech word for 'stone', the wizard can create a temporary illusion that the thing is a stone, and there are methods, which are more difficult, of actually permanently turning the thing into a stone. As I remember it, the ability to perform magic in these books depends not only on the knowledge of the True Speech that the person possesses but also on an inborn facility or talent for magic, an innate ability that the protagonist of the series, Sparrowhawk, has in spades. In this world, the true names of people are items of information shared only with close friends and family because to know the true name of someone else is to have power over them,

Magic features sometimes in the comic book series The Sandman authored by Neil Gaiman. The magical act that I think especially worth mentioning occurs in the very first issue. Morpheus is summoned by a magical spell and confined within a pentacle for eighty years. His summoner had intended to summon Death so that he that he could live forever. The pentacle is drawn in chalk on the floor of a basement and Morpheus is able to escape at last when one of the chalk lines is smudged, leading to a break in the enclosing lines. Gaiman is drawing on a rich history, in fiction and also outside of it, of imagining that magical symbols and sigils having been drawn in chalk or in other substances can have supernatural powers, a tradition that many believed possible for centuries. It was thought that such symbolic patterns and associated rituals could summon and sometimes trap supernatural beings, often devils and demons, who could then be parlayed with and who might offer extravagant gifts for their release. This tradition informs the opening part of Marlowe's Faust in which Faust summons the demon Mephistopheles and makes a deal with him - in return for selling his soul, Faust receives twenty-four years of magical power. In Faust, the consequence of selling one's soul is going to hell eternally.

What else do we think about when we think about magic? We might also think of the Haitian practice of Voodoo. If a Voodoo practitioner makes a doll and then attaches to it something like a thread of hair or nail clipping that once belonged to a particular person, then any harm the Voodoo priest does to the doll also befalls the person whose likeness has been represented. By sticking pins in the doll we can cause pain or harm to occur to a real person in the real world. We might also think of the ordinary superstitions people entertain. I might try to avoid walking under ladders, feel worried when a black cat crosses my path, or fall into panic should I break a mirror because all three occurrence can prefigure spells of bad luck.

In trying to give a broad encompassing picture of the types of actions and effects that we think of when we think of 'magic', I have drawn largely on how magic is represented in at least a few works of popular fiction. But, right up until the Enlightenment, learned people believed in the literal truth of magic and it may be that ordinary people continued to believe in it right up until the end of the nineteenth century. To give just one example, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and published in 1533, comprise three 'grimoires', that is books containing precise instructions for performing a variety of magic spells often involving astrology. In his influential book, The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, James Frazer argued that human civilisation typically has three phases: belief in magic followed by belief in religion followed in turn by belief in science. Frazer himself, like a good late Victorian, didn't believe in magic because he thought it had been supplanted by a more realistic paradigm, the belief system we call science, a paradigm that first became dominant in the Victorian era and is still more or less dominant today although we now have far come complex scientific theories than the Victorians had. (Think of Chaos Theory for example.)  This tripartite distinction is important to what I shall discuss in the rest of this essay. Because The Golden Bough is an important work of comparative anthropology, although one now largely discredited, it may be helpful to describe Frazer's view of magic. Frazer though that magic was the opposite of science, and said that it was based around the idea "that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy". Frazer called this 'sympathetic magic' and divided it into two sorts: homeopathic magic and contagious magic. Homeopathic magic involves the idea that a resemblance between two things enables one to affect the other, for actions performed on one to bring about some positive or negative change in the other, while contagious magic involves the idea that one thing can continue to affect another thing that it has at least at one time had contact with after they are separated. These two conceptions, incidentally, seem to be echoed, respectively, by the quasi-scientific theory proposed by Rupert Sheldrake of 'morphic resonance' and by the now well-established scientific theory connected with quantum mechanics of 'entanglement'; however, in Frazer's day, the dominant paradigm was that the natural world worked something like the mechanism of a clock and that anything like spooky action at a distance had to be a relic of a now discarded belief system. Like all bold ideas Frazer's views of magic (and religion) had a seductive appeal and influenced some notable poets, such as T.S Eliot and W.B Yeats, but we should try to resist being swept away by its audacious simplicity. Frazer's definition applies well to Voodoo dolls but much less well to a boy wizard exclaiming "Expelliarmus" and disarming an opponent or a person's sense of foreboding occasioned by the possibility of walking under a ladder. It does not apply to something discussed by Andrew Mark Henry in a recent interview with Alex O'Conner watchable on Youtube, that in antiquity and through the medieval period ordinary people would write curses on clay tablets and place them in the vicinity of temples. None of these examples of magic fit with Frazer's ideas of homeopathic magic or magic via contagion and so obviously we must seek a broader definition.

Certainly in the Western world, we can identify a general development of belief systems. In the longago human beings were animists, believing the world to be full of spirits. There were spirits, for instance, associated with particular rivers and mountains, spirits that wandered the forest at night or invisibly afflicted villagers with disasters or diseases. The spirits had to be placated or guarded against. Carl Sagan wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World which I think an apt phrase to describe the world view of ancient peoples. Animism was succeeded by polytheism. We might think of Greek mythology or Norse mythology. Polytheism then gave way to monotheism in the West. It is interesting to consider how this happened. According to what I have read, the ancient people who became the Jews were polytheistic but came to venerate their thunder god, Yahweh, over any of the other gods in the pantheon until eventually Yahweh was it, their only god. This consolidation of belief around a single deity was a means of helping create solidarity, unity, cohesion, among the Jewish people. Christ emerged in this monotheistic setting and then as Christianity spread so too did with it monotheism (even though Christians decided that God was somehow three persons in one, something I have never myself understood and maybe is ill understood by almost everyone). Even through the middle-ages though, occasional Gnostic or Manichean tendencies led some to believe that there were two supernatural forces in the world, Light and Dark, Good and Evil. Such heretical sects were all stamped out by the Christian church as for instance happened to the Cathari in the eleventh century although, as I discussed in the previous essay, Gnostic or Manichaean tendencies may have persisted subterraneously. With the Protestant reformation, Protestants sought to suppress and replace the veneration of saints and of the Virgin Mary, calling such vestiges of a kind of polytheistic and mythopoetic belief system "Popish superstition". The only viable objects of belief, the only ones to be supplicant before, were God the Father or God the Son. We came to have about as pure a monotheism as you can get. Then starting in the nineteenth century science took over from monotheistic religion as the belief system of choice for intellectuals and, despite the diatribes and vituperations of people like Richard Dawkins, I think almost everyone today is effectively an atheist. That is, even the people who profess faith in God still prefer to entrust themselves to the care of doctors and other practitioners of science-based systems than priests. Few would choose prayer over medical care. Despite the angry polemics of proselytising atheists who think the contrary, I think most people today are effectively atheists because most of those who claim to be Christian believe that God has very limited power over their lives, thinking that God's sole role is to furnish the believer with appropriate accomodation after death rather than magically granting the wishes of those still alive while they are still alive.

How does magic fit into this development? It seems to me that if we are to look at magic historically, that is try to understand how it was once conceived as well as how it is conceived of today by people who know of it only through Harry Potter books and Dungeons and Dragons computer games, we need to try to distinguish between two types of magic. Some magicians, historically, had power because they allied themselves with supernatural spirits, often malign ones. In the world of the animists, a world which still exists today among the lower classes in China, gifts given to spirits could ward of threats or bring in good fortune. In Europe in the Middle Ages, witches were supposed to have attained power to harm others by consorting with or having intercourse with the Devil. The black cats who accompanied them were familiar spirits, demonic personages who had assumed the form of cats. Magic was considered anti-Christian – this is something I shall come back to later. However, starting in the Renaissance, a different conception of magic became prominent among intellectuals: magica naturalis, natural magic. In this system, magic was a kind of neutral non-conscious force or power that could be harnessed through appropriate procedures, appropriate rituals or incantations. Alchemy fits into this worldview. Alchemists sought the Philosophers' Stone, the power to turn lead into gold or to attain immortality, but the closeness of natural magic to modern science in many ways can be shown by the fact that the science of chemistry grew out of the magical practice of alchemy. It seems to me that the best modern conception of magic, the kind of magic we find in the Harry Potter series, is magic as a kind of power to alter the world utilised by a magician through appropriate means, incantations, or rituals  – the drawing of symbols, or the writing of curses in obscure languages.  Appropriate rituals or procedures can focus the will of the magician, enabling the magician to manifest his or her desired goals in ways that seem to defy simple rules-of-thumb concerning how causality is really supposed to operate. Consciousness, properly channelled, can directly influence reality.

These two different conceptions of magic, the first being that supernatural effects are the result of relationships between the magician and supernatural beings, and the second being a kind of quad-scientific practice in which human practitioners perform specific rituals in order to try to harness a neutral power and thus attain specific ends have always co-existed. And importantly, up until the nineteenth century, magic was believed to co-exist with Christianity. Even the Church founders believed in magic and magi even though they also believed that Jesus was both God and the son of God. In The Acts of Apostles a certain Simon Magus, who was either a magician or founder of a religious sect, asked Peter if he could buy the power to perform miracles from him and it is because of this that the church invented the sin of 'simony', the sin of trying buy holy office. The relevant quote from this book can be found in the Wikipedia page associated with Simon Magus and it is interesting to note that (in English translation) Simon Magus is described as a sorcerer who had bewitched the inhabitants of Samaria. In The Acts of Peter, Simon performs magic in the Roman forum. He is carried aloft by invisible spirits. In one apocryphal source Peter and Paul and in other sources Peter alone pray to God for Simon to fall and he does so breaking a number of bones in his body. It seems like a contest between white magic, associated with Christ and God, and black magic. In around 200AD, the writer Celsus argued that Jesus was neither God nor the son of God but rather was able to perform apparent miracles because he was a magician. Celsus was rebutted by the church father Origen. Thus it seems that early Christians believed in two forms of the supernatural, magic and sorcery on the one hand and divine miracles on the other. They sought to place Christianity in the second camp. The former kind of magic was utilised by sorcerers with or without the aid of supernatural beings, spirits or demons, and the latter kind of magic arose ultimately from the ultimate spiritual being, Jehovah, either directly, or through his son, or through the intercession of one of the saints, and could be harnessed or accessed through the medium of prayer. 

I arrive now at one of the central conceits of this essay. Could we regard the practices of the Church historically as being in reality a kind of magic? I would like to speculate that there came to be two types of magic. The first was the magic of witches and warlocks, the magic of village herbalists and cunning folk, the magic associated with beings like fairies, trolls, and elves. The second was the magic that operated through the Christian church. A number of the rituals performed by various churches could be regarded as having all the trappings of magical rituals. There is baptism and funeral services which are intended to ensure that the person born or the person now dead will go to heaven. There is the practice of the Eucharist which through a kind of cannibalism commits the congregation to a shared community. There is confession and absolution in which the sins of a person are washed away. Think of the faith-healing carried out by some Evangelical clerics even today– this certainly seems like a kind of magic. Prayer can be considered as something like a magical incantation in which the person supplicates an ultimate spiritual being, God, Jehovah, Yahweh, for assistance. Consider the opening verse of the British national anthem:

God save our gracious King!

Long live our noble King!

God save the King!

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us,

God save the King.

Consider also the first verse of the New Zealand national anthem.

God of nations, at thy feet,

In the bonds of love we meet,

Hear our voices we entreat:

God defend New Zealand.

These anthems are both prayer-like and both incantation-like. Through a collective recitation, ordinary people seem to be performing a magic spell to protect the linchpin of their respective communities, monarch via the first and the name of the new-born nation via the second. Frazer distinguished between religion and magic by saying magic "constrains or coerces" supernatural spirits while religion focuses on "conciliating or propitiating them". To Frazer's definition, we could append the observation that if we suppose the whole supernatural world is focused on a single point, a single source, a single supernatural being with a single name, as is the case with monotheism, this might render the magic particularly efficacious. The first lines in the Bible are, of course, "In the beginning was the Word. And the word was God."

I can illustrate the overlap between religion and magic with another personal anecdote. In many churches, including the Anglican Church, a person can make a prayer and light a candle which is then allowed to burn and somehow, perhaps, send the prayer to God through the medium of smoke. In 2013, I felt as though my soul or life was in danger and on a couple of occasions visited the Anglican cathedral in Parnell where I lit a candle and offered up a silent prayer. However, though, I had not decided to become a Christian, that is start attending services and receiving the eucharist – rather I was literally trying to harness the magic associated with Christianity to protect myself and others I cared about. I felt as though praying and lighting a candle was the only way I could assert control over my life. It was superstition rather than faith that impelled me.

Despite what seems to me and seemed to Frazer to be a considerable co-extensiveness between magic and religion, the Catholic Church historically has tried as hard as it can to distinguish between the two. People suspected of witchcraft or sorcery were often excommunicated or executed. The miracles associated with saints that sometimes occurred before the death of the saint and sometimes after were seen as evidence of God working through people whereas magic was seen as something Satanic. I would like to suggest that the persecution of magicians, like the persecution of heretical sects, by the Catholic Church, was a means through which the Christian establishment could maintain a monopoly on magic. Perhaps we could regard Christian priests as magicians. Even though we have no documented cases of Popes individually attaining magical goods like eternal life here on Earth, perhaps this monopolisation of magical power is what enabled the Church as an institution to maintain its considerable political, social, and cultural power right up until sometime in the previous century.

Then religion fell away and we had the advent of science. Arthur C Clarke once wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Imagine you are Agrippa and have been teleported from the sixteenth century to the present day, to a world in which people fly to the other side of the world in metal birds and can hold conversations with intelligences that are not human but have absorbed the totality of human knowledge associated with consensus reality into their data banks. Would you not regard this as magic? Consider cell phones. I can punch in a phone number for someone living in the Northern Hemisphere and my cellphone will send out a ballooning sphere of RF waves that somehow latches onto my friend's cell-phone and enables him and I to have a private conversation unaffected by the millions of other cell-phone communications occurring at the same time. This seems to me to fit Frazer's definition of magic, the notion "that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy"; because I do not understand how cell-phones work, to me cell-phone technology is indistinguishable from magic. However almost everyone draws a sharp line between science and magic. There is an assumption that such scientific marvels always have 'rational' explanations. Although an individual may not understand all the sciences, all the various domains from physics, through chemistry, to biology seem to fit together in a near seamless whole that, together with our faith in scientists, undergirds our confidence that science provides a coherent rational world-view that can account for such marvels. This is why Frazer and many after him have made the case that science and magic are polar opposites. Where once Christian priests fought to distinguish magic from religion and largely succeeded, we now have a world which sharply separates magic from science and has largely succeeded, presumably by fostering the perception that scientific technologies have scientific explanations whereas magic either has non-rational explanations or no explanation whatsoever.

In the previous essay, "Concerning the Garden of Eden", I described how arguments between atheists and religious adherents are disputes between people who believe in an atheist materialism grounded in science and people who believe in a single unified supernatural being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent and who they term 'God'.  It is a dispute between people who believe nothing supernatural exists and people who believe really only in one supreme spiritual being, although some may profess that this supreme being has underlings such as angels. What I was trying to defend, in the previous essay, was the notion of some middle ground between the two views, some intermediating metaphysics. I was trying to argue that either that the supreme, perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent deity venerated by popular defenders of Christianity does not exist or that He is so far removed from our shared reality that we cannot guess his motives and intentions. At the same time though I was arguing that the supernatural might still exist. God put us in a world in which Evil exists as well as Good, suffering as well as happiness, and so it might be a world of good and evil spirits, good and evil magic. Rather than having to choose between a strict monotheism and a world with no intrinsic values at all, perhaps we could depart from both science and religion and opt for the world of magic instead. I think many of the songs that become popular function like magic spells – this was something I noticed very keenly earlier in the year. I am not talking about singers like Morrissey who are easily intelligible. Rather I am talking about the vast majority of successful pop music that has been released since the 1950s, songs the lyrics of which are often hard to make out but affect the listener subliminally the same way spells chanted or sung in a dead language might affect listeners subliminally. For example, listen to the song "Come Out and Play" by the Offspring, preferably the lyric video. Violent crime in the United States and around the world climbed significantly from the 'sixties or 'seventies until the early 'nineties when it started to recede. I honestly believe that this song, first released in 1994, is a kind of magic spell that may have contributed to the decline. I'll make an observation about much of this successful and in my view magical popular music. Often it plays around with the prepositions 'in' and 'out' and somehow the magic is invoked through these notions of people being 'inside' or 'outside'. Another example is the Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere" with its recurring line "Come on inside".

Every person lives in his or her own world but there is considerable overlap between my world and the worlds of those I engage with socially. I believe one's beliefs about one's world may somehow magically affect it and the worlds of others just as one may be affected by others. The rituals and practices we term magic act to focus, structure, realise our intentions regarding the world. I think something like real magic indeed does exist but it is largely invisible – it acts through dead languages few now understand, through symbols we know only through a Jungian inherited collective unconscious, through song lyrics and poems that we can only partly decipher. I would like to bring back a world of magic. Why? I believe that an attention to potential magical influence may be the best way to help a person recover from serious mental illness. I believe the God of the Gnostics might have given me some kind of revelation that the best way to view serious mental illness is through the prism of magic – black magic, malign sorcery, curses. It may well be that often the reason a young person develops psychosis and may end up diagnosed schizophrenic is that members of his or her own family have put a curse on him, not through deliberate conscious means such as writing the curse out on a clay tablet, reciting an incantation in a dead language, or summoning a demon to torment him or her, but through their beliefs concerning the person and feelings towards the person. Earlier this year, I thought that if it could be established that a family member of a patient is a bad magical influence on the patient, the patient could be cured or at least have his or her condition alleviated by separating the patient physically and geographically from the family member causing the patient harm. But because magic can act a distance, the severing of the connection might require a stronger magic than just literal physical separation. I am still uncertain how to phrase and recommend to others that mental illness has a magical cause and thus a magical cure partly because workers in the Mental Health sphere would be fishing in the dark if trying to implement magical therapy. In my experience, often mental health workers are more part of the problem than the solution because at least some of them are simply not particularly good people and so, in suggesting that magic is both the cause and cure of serious mental illness, my advice may not be that constructive. When recovery does occur, it may occur simply through dumb luck.

Nevertheless some major paradigm shift is required in the treatment of serious mental illness. At the moment the only real treatment considered practical by psychiatrists is medication. If antipsychotic medication works at all, it works magically, through something like the placebo effect. However, if a person opts to accept his or her treatment, to take medication for the rest of his or her life, he or she is also willingly acquiescing to all the negative baggage associated both with the term 'schizophrenia' and the side effects often believed to accompany psychiatric medicine. This is not a satisfactory answer to the problem of schizophrenia. Often, in fact, when people recover from 'schizophrenia' they attribute their recovery to finding God. In the paradigm I am presenting, this can be explained in terms of the extraordinary magical power belief in a perfectly powerful, knowledgable, and beneficent deity can channel. But because only a few can find this way out, I think the intermediary realm of magic might at least sometimes be a better way to treat serious mental illness. At the moment, though, the magic is largely black. To have Mental Health workers put falsehoods in a person's record, either of their own volition or at the behest of family members who are themselves psychologically compromisesd, is definitely bad juju. It is as though the workers have made a Voodoo doll of the patient and are sticking pins in it.

I'll give an example of magic associated the street layout of the Auckland CBD. I have wandered around Auckland city for decades and had never noticed this until this year. The central landmark in Auckland is the Skytower, a building vastly taller than any of Auckland's other landmarks. The Skytower is on Victoria Street. Victoria Street is, of course, named after Queen Victoria who was the monarch in charge when Auckland was established as a city in the nineteenth century. If you stand by the Skytower and look down Victoria Street in one direction it terminates in Victoria Park Market, once a thriving commercial space and now in sad decline. If you look the other way, you notice that Victoria Street crosses Queen Street, the most important street in Auckland, and then terminates at Albert Park. Albert Park is named after Victoria's consort. Where Victoria street terminates, there is a stone sculpture known as the Gateway Arch because it resembles a kind of enormous portal. It was made from stones gifted by a Northland Iwi after the tapu on them was lifted. In Albert Park, there is a statue of Queen Victoria, a statue of New Zealand's first governor-general Sir George Grey, and a statue commemorating the New Zealand soldiers who fought in the Boer War. Still looking from the ridge upon which the Skytower was built, it is possible to see, over the trees of Albert Park, the clocktower of Auckland University, the university's most historically important building and probably also built in the nineteenth century. If one were to continue to follow the line suggested by Victoria Street, you will pass through the building which housed the English Department of Auckland University, once custodians of New Zealand's literary heritage. The line continues through the Auckland Domain, almost, but not quite I think, passing through Auckland Museum, a museum which houses a number of very significant Maori artefacts. The line continues almost directly to Sarawia street, a street my older brother lived on with his partner when his son, my nephew, was an infant. At the bottom of Sarawia street one could once pass onto Newmarket Park. Newmarket Park marks the Eastern border of the land given to Governor Hobson by local iwi Ngati Whatua in 1840, land which became the city of Auckland. There was once a Maori settlement where Newmarket Park now is but after effluent got into Slaughterhouse Creek, this pa was abandoned. If we keep going we arrive at Bassett Road, where I lived for most of my life, and if I am not mistaken where Allen Curnow, who helped establish New Zealand poetry as a thing of its own, once lived, although it is possible he lived on the next street over, Seaview Crescent. 

There seems thus to be a ley-line or city-level kind of feng shui involved in the layout of Auckland City. It seems that in this way the Victorian colonisers could stamp their ownership or governorship, their hegemony, onto a city that was then and is now New Zealand's largest city and was then the capital of the country. It seems this ley-line has a magical influence on the city's inhabitants even though few are aware of it. This magic is to most people invisible.

In wrapping up another long essay, I would like to comment, as I sometimes do, on its structure. I have suggested that I believe that magic is real phenomena and so it may seem paradoxical that when attempting to describe it, in moving towards some definition for it, I began by talking about how magic is represented in fiction. There is a profound puzzle involved here. Why do children love books with flying broomsticks and letters called Howlers designed to scold errant children but get bored by stories dealing with cell-phones even though cell-phones are at least as magical? A rational explanation might be that by playing in an imaginary world, children can learn skills related to navigating the real world. Or it might be that these books enable access to a real world of magic that adult society ignores, dismisses. Perhaps these books furnish children with an unconscious understanding of a magical reality that, in order to survive and function in the real world, adults must suppress. This is a puzzle that I may come back to in a later essay.

Finally I intend to discuss my life a little. I had another 'psychotic episode' this year and my experience of madness has informed the last couple of blog posts. I am back under the Mental Health Act. Now, I am aware that people like to make up stories about others, stories that have a magical effect on the characters contained in those stories. People who read this blog may in a way have wanted me to become psychotic again having managed to get off medication entirely at the beginning of this year. Perhaps people who read this blog are committed to the notion that if a person is on medication, at whatever dosage, he or she is well and if not he or she must become 'ill' again. Or perhaps people quite like the idea of reading a blog by someone diagnosed schizophrenic and under the Mental Health Act. If either of these conjectures is correct, I would like my readers to show a little compassion, send a little of their thoughts and prayers my way in the hope that I will in a short time be allowed off medication again, this time without falling prey to another psychotic episode. Why want your favourite blogger to be stuck on medication, with neither a job nor a girlfriend, for the rest of his life? However things are not as completely bad as I may be suggesting. My Key Worker just last week forced my psychiatrist to write in my medical notes that I am heterosexual and always have been. I have also in the last couple of days realised the enormous harm perpetuated against me by my older brother, something I have suspected for eighteen years but had no solid evidence in support of. I still have no absolutely solid evidence but I am now quite confident. I am not sure what will happen to me next but, oddly, even though I am back under the Mental Health Act I now feel a little quietly optimistic. It may be that the black magic has passed and I due a little white magic sometime soon.