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.

Concerning the Garden of Eden

God, according to the mainstream Christian theological tradition, is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent. And yet there is evil in the world. This seeming contradiction or apparently irresolvable incompatibility between official religious doctrine and a seemingly obvious empirical fact about the world is used as ammunition by atheists in their ongoing turf war against the faithful while the Christians on the other side sweat blood struggling to come up with rejoinders to the atheist observation that Evil exists, producing arguments and explanations that go under the rather beautiful term 'theodicies'. A theodicy is a story that seeks to undo the knot or explain away the contradiction. I have followed arguments between atheists and Christians for years and years and at least one of the religiously minded atheists that I enjoy watching spar with older Christians on Youtube, Alex O'Conner, has said that the Problem of Evil is the best possible logical assault on the medieval castle of doctrinaire Christianity (although I don't think he has ever expressed himself in quite this style). The purpose of this essay is to present what I think may be the best possible theodicy, a response to the Problem of Evil that finds its foundation in the concepts of 'good' and 'evil', in language and semantics, a theodicy that I have never seen or heard any one else ever propose. The argument is subtle but, when I set it out, should seem patently obvious. Somehow though it seems to have been missed both by Alex and the other atheists, and by the Christian contingent on the other side, despite their continual striving to solve this most impenetrable of paradoxes. I believe it is a Gnostic argument that I intend to make and in making it I may be spilling some of the secrets of the Gnostics, unravelling a mystery that the Gnostics may have wanted to keep invisible, esoteric. I feel few compunctions about spilling this secret though because, of course, I am only relaying it to the few initiates who have somehow stumbled across this blog in their peripatetic perambulations across the World Wide Web and who may probably already be Gnostics themselves. I am not blowing the lid off all of Creation in this essay.

First, though, I want to make a couple of comments concerning perhaps some of the most salient features of debates concerning religion in the modern Western world, especially as these appear to those of us addicted to Youtube. On the one side we have atheist materialists such as, at one time, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and David Dennett. The New Atheists regarded all organised religion as wicked and wanted to eliminate it from modern society. The special bugbear for Harris is Islam but generally they focussed on Christianity. The New Atheists had a moral sense but it was a liberal humanist morality, not one grounded on any kind of religious system – Richard Dawkins has often indirectly supported gay rights for instance. Despite their moral sense, they saw no problem with the existence of evil in the world. People can be happy or sad, good or bad, whatever they want, it has no bearing on the arguments set forth by the New Atheists. In fact, as already noted, the Problem of Evil, the empirical facts concerning the existence of wickedness and suffering in the world, is probably the best argument for atheism around. Although someone like Sam Harris has weighed in on normative ethics by proposing a kind of utilitarianism, it is typical for atheist materialists to simply accept another empirical fact, the fact that apart from sociopaths most people appear to have a moral sense and seek to act morally, and then to invest their considerable intellectual capital into elaborate attempts at scientifically explaining why this empirical fact is the case. Because atheist materialists admire and espouse Darwin so much, there have been many who have sought to explain the empirical fact that people usually seek to be moral by invoking ideas from evolutionary psychology such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Indeed because neo-Darwinists have been so infatuated with the 'selfish gene' theory of Dawkins, and because, even setting aside Dawkins' update of Darwin, nature, red in tooth and claw, selects only for the fittest, the problem for atheist materialists, being so often firmly wedded to ideas from evolutionary biology that they cannot consider any alternative to it, is not so much a Problem of Evil as a Problem of Good. It is a problem concerning why people are so often unselfish and sometimes even self-sacrificing, altruistic. If the meaning of life is simply the individual's surviving and producing as many offspring as possible, why should an individual want to concern himself or herself with alleviating the suffering of others? If the actions of others so often have so little effect on a particular individual's life, why should he or she express praise or censure of these actions? This is why I claim that it is not the Problem of Evil but rather the Problem of Good that is the puzzle the atheist materialist contingent needs most desperately to address but so far their own attempts to unravel a mystery that arises from their own way of looking at the world have fallen far short of the mark.

However it is not the atheists on their side of the cultural divide who I principally want to discuss but their adversaries, the religiously minded defenders of the Lord. I am thinking of Christians who are also professors, academics, often specialising in Philosophy of Religion, the ones we find so frequently participating in online debates. These high status commentators and apologists are firmly rooted in the Christian academic tradition that had its beginnings in the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was the first to say that God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent – he listed at least a dozen more essential attributes of the deity showing, I think, a little hubris when doing so (although he usually sought scriptural support for the essential qualities he attributed to the Godhead). The high-status Christian intellectuals that propagated their influence first through the seminaries and the monasteries and then later through the universities believe in monotheism, monism, unitariness. Yes, the supernatural exists but it is all wrapped up in God, finds its centre, its focal point, in one single indivisible being. There is in this viewpoint a rejection of older more pluralist conceptions of the supernatural. If God is one single indivisible being, how are we to make sense of the Catholic tenet of the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? I don't know that we can. But the apologists ignore this contradiction between natural philosophy and doctrine. Nor can we easily make sense of other older Catholic notions such as the idea that the Virgin Mary and the Saints can intercede on a person's behalf. In the past, even after Christianity became dominant in the West, the ordinary person's conception of the supernatural was usually more pluralistic than the intellectual Aquinian tradition. It was once believed that there were legions of angels on the one side and legions of devils on the other and that the devils were in the employ of an adversary to God, known as Satan, Lucifer. In folk Christianity, therefore, we could once explain away the existence of Evil by positing it as resulting from the actions of the Devil, Satan. There was a kind of Manichaean tendency among ordinary folk. Manichaeanism, which was once a religious alternative to Christianity in the West and to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam in the East, held that the world was the scene of an ongoing cosmic battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Darkness, and that human history constituted a cosmic process through which the lights of human souls were gradually liberated from the darkness of material reality and returned over eternity to the heaven of the God of Light. Now, I am not suggesting that many Christians throughout history were secretly Manichaeans. Rather I am inviting the reader to entertain the idea that the undereducated laity endorsed a kind of dualism with respect to the supernatural without being fully aware that their religious leaders rejected such a dualism. There is another tradition within Christianity, one with scriptural authority because it is something we find in the Book of Job, that presents Satan as a servant of God but I believe this cosmology too has been disavowed by many modern Christians – the wager Satan makes with God concerning Job is regarded as something metaphoric, poetic, with no relation to anything real at all. To put it baldly, I believe that many of the Christians who feature so prominently in online debates, while still believing in God and in the divinity of Jesus, actually don't believe in the devil or in Satan at all.

The point I am trying to make here is that the debates we see online between atheist materialists and Christians are debates between people who view the world, respectively, as a world without anything supernatural to it at all and people who believe in only one single supernatural being, an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God. It is because the Christians who have bought into this intellectual philosophical position with respect to religious cosmology view the supernatural in this way that the Problem of Evil arises – if God were either not completely omnipotent or else not completely omni-benevolent, then no problem of evil would appear in front of us. If we lived in a world that was at least in some perhaps vague sense Manichaean then we could attribute evil to evil supernatural beings. But because the apologists are committed to the notion that the supernatural is focussed on a point, is built up toward a single vertex or apex that we term 'God' in the same way that the Illuminati print on American currency a pyramid with an eye at the topmost point, this escape hatch is not available to them or to us insofar as we accept conventional theological wisdom. The Problem of Evil should be better titled the Problem of Divine Omnipotence and Divine Omni-Benevolence because we all seem to have empirical evidence for the former, the existence of Evil, but for the later have to rely on the word of theologians following the Thomist tradition. Philosophers of Religion are committed to the attribution of omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence to the Godhead, accept these three attributions as premises or axioms that must be deemed incontrovertible before venturing any further into any kind of theodicy, and so find themselves forced into the contorted position of trying to explain evil away entirely– some, for instance, by arguing that evil is an illusion and some, such as St Augustine, arguing that evil is an absence or privation of good. The simplest response to the atheist interlocutor, to claim that God does indeed exist but is not entirely omni-beneovent and/or not entirely omnipotent, is a didactic strategy that the apologists recoil from because, deep down, the idea that Good and Evil may both exist and that Good may not always win out in the end is a notion that makes them uncomfortable. Deep down many Philosophers of Religion are Christians who imbibed a conventional Christianity with their mothers' milk and never shook it off despite all their philosophical training.

If we are to discuss the Problem of Evil, we need first to try to say a little about what Evil actually is. Something else I noticed about the Philosopher of Religion who taught me the year before last, in addition to his adherence to a kind of monism, is that he was unclear about what is meant by 'evil'. It is a confusion I have seen repeatedly among others on both sides of the debate. We need to distinguish between natural evil and moral evil. For instance, if an earthquake in Pakistan kills hundreds of people we should regard this not only as an evil but also as a natural evil. We cannot regard it as a moral evil unless we have evidence, for example, that the quake was caused by the Indian government dropping a nuclear bomb on their opponents. Natural evil encompasses all forms of unhappiness – suffering, pain, boredom, anxiety, depression. Death. Cancer is a kind of natural evil as are congenital diseases such as spina bifida for instance. On the other hand we also describe immoral actions committed by agents as evil – murder, fraud, assault, rumourmongering. The Problem of Evil involves both kinds of evil but communicators on both sides often confuse them and this can lead them and us down blind alleys. Alvin Plantinga has argued that moral evil is the price we pay for free will but has found no way to rationalise away natural evil. Of course we could try to claim that earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes are God's punishment for sins committed by the causalities but this seems at least uncharitable, certainly deplorable, in and of itself. It is interesting to note here that there is a widespread view that morally good actions are rewarded and morally bad actors punished, if not in this world then in the next, if not by secular police and judicial processes then, according to Christians, by God. Some apologists have argued that this is a consequence of a fourth divine perfection, perfect justice. The relation between crime and punishment, though, is not something this particular essay shall concern itself with.

The world in which we find ourselves, which we are passing through, is saturated with values and these values come in pairs. Not only do we have Good and Evil but we also have Happiness and Sadness, Pleasure and Pain, Beauty and Ugliness, Hunger and Satiety, Truth and Lies, and so on. Every possible positive value one can find in the world has associated with it a corresponding negative value that we can find or at least be aware of. Furthermore people, like all animals, are motile. We seek, through our actions, through our behaviours, to actualise positive values and avoid or move away from negative values. If I want a coffee, for instance, my desire for coffee can be satisfied by my walking to the cafe at the top of the road and buying a flat white. A person's inclination to seek to actualise positive values is analogous to the way plants grow towards sunlight, a tendency known as phototropism, or the way their roots seek water, a tendency known as hydrotropism. In seeking to actualise positive values and to minimise negative values we encounter resistance. This resistance has two forms. The physical material world itself constitutes a form of resistance. I can't say, "I wish I had a flat white" and then have a cup of coffee magically appear in my hand. I have to walk to a cafe and buy it with money. Another form of resistance is that a person's desires can conflict with the interests, the desires, of at least one other person. In these cases, in order for one person to actualise his or her own Good there would have to be a diminishing of the Goods attained or actualised by another. This is why we require morality – we sometimes need to negotiate between or find some balance between the desires felt by one person and the desires felt by another. The picture I am painting here is reminiscent of the picture painted by academic philosophers' favourite thinker, Ayn Rand, but it has one significant difference. Rand thought that that because people pursue values, people ought to be selfish, but her ethical system didn't account for the obvious possibility that one person's selfishness may negatively affect others. Nor does the doctrine she presented in The Virtue of Selfishness account for what seems to me to also be an incontrovertible empirical fact: by performing good deeds, good works, acts of charity, acts of altruism, we can actualise a sense of ourselves as Good People, that Goodness can in some limited sense be described as self-rewarding.

If God is omni-benevolent, maximally good, and also omnipotent and omniscient, we would expect to find ourselves in a world that is maximally good for all its inhabitants. It is helpful to bring in some ideas from ethics here, in particular the ethical systems that go under the banner 'consequentialist' or 'utilitarian', currently the most popular ethical frameworks among philosophers. Utilitarians think that individuals should act in such a way as to realise the greatest possible utility. There are three main sorts of utilitarianism. The first holds that people should seek to maximise pleasure or happiness in an impartial impersonal kind of way: this is known as hedonistic consequentialism. The second, known as desire-satisfaction consequentialism, holds that we should try to maximise as many desires that agents have, again in an impartial impersonal kind of way. The third is known as objective-value consequentialism which holds that there are objective goods that should be maximised. The literature surrounding consequentialism is incredible complicated and I cannot do it justice in this essay so, for the sake of the argument I intend to make here, I shall focus only on the first two conceptions and come back to the third later in the essay. I shall set aside the complications, provisos, provisions, convolutions, and involutions that a thoroughly rigorous explication of consequentialist thinking would require but which would need me to write an essay the length of Kant's Critique of Pure Judgment if I wanted to set it all out. All that is sufficient to say here is that insofar as God can be considered Himself a person, an ethical agent, and a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, we would expect to live in a world without any natural evil in it at all. We would expect to live in paradise. Yes, if Plantinga's argument is sound, moral evil might still be possible, although unlikely, but there would be a complete absence of natural evil.

In Christian mythology, paradise features twice: at the beginning of time when Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and, after a person's death, if the person has been good enough to avoid Hell and earn Heaven, after the person disembarks at Heaven's train station. What would paradise be like? If hedonistic consequentialism is correct, God presumably organised the Garden of Eden in such a way that Adam and Eve enjoyed absolute joy, absolute bliss, all the time. It must have been the case that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Even were totally content eating delicious sumptuous fruit, effortlessly writing perfect lyric love  poetry for each other, and, I dunno, having front row seats at perfect sporting fixtures carried out between rugby playing animals in which the home team always won. I am of course being slightly facetious here – it is difficult to imagine a paradise in which its two human inhabitants enjoy absolute happiness all the time. (Sometimes people like to imagine that the pre-colonial Pacific Islands were paradises and this view informed the first and most popular novel by Herman Melville, Typee.) If hedonistic consequentialism is true, then Adam and Eve only have ever experienced positive emotional and physical states. If desire-satisfaction consequentialism is true, then we need a subtly different picture of Paradise. Every time Adam or Eve formed a desire for something God would immediately grant it. If Adam formed a desire for a flat white sometime while in the Garden of Eden, God would then immediately make one materialise in his hand. Presumably, in a similar way, He also ensures that the virtuous faithful who have found their way to Heaven will enjoy absolute joy, absolute bliss, for the rest of the eternity that they are spending there. This view of paradise informs the film This Is The End by Seth Rogen – at the end of the film, when Seth and his friend Jay arrive in Heaven, they find themselves in a place in which Jay can wish for a Segway and have one magically materialise under him and in which Seth can wish for the Back Street Boys to reunite and perform their greatest hits and for this too to magically happen. In Paradise, there would be no resistance; its inhabitants would not need to actively work for anything at all but instead would passively have all their wishes instantly and supernaturally granted. In Paradise, there would therefore be no physical or material reality as we understand it, and it would be a world which either has only one resident or a world in which no one person's wishes or desires conflict with the wishes or desires of anyone else. So maybe two max.

In the last story in the collection A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Barnes paints a picture of what Heaven might be like. It has been a long time since I've read this story so in talking about it I am relying on a blog post called "Kahn's Corner: The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters."" In this story, the narrator dies and finds himself in his idea of paradise – an exclusive country club staffed by angels, in which he dines extravagantly every morning and evening, has sex with a different beautiful woman every night, and spends his days perfecting his golf game on the best possible golf course. After millennia, his golfing skills having improved to the point that he gets a hole in one with every single drive and succumbing at last to terminal boredom, ennui, the narrator chooses total non-existence rather than continue as a guest in Heaven's country club. Before he goes, he is told by one of the angels that everyone in the end makes the same decision at last. This story has the unusual distinction of being a work of comic fiction that is frequently referenced by Philosophers of Religion. One moral we could draw from it is that if we are to go to Heaven indefinitely, God must do more than satisfy the desires we formed while we were alive but also fulfil new desires we need to form after we have died. If the catalogue of desires can be endlessly refreshed after death, then God can go on satisfying them eternally. But even this may not stop Heaven becoming too insufferably dull to remain in.

We arrive now at the core argument, the theodicy this essay has been inching towards. If there were no Evil in the world, could there be any Good? If we were living in the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists, we might be in a state of constant unadulterated bliss but we wouldn't know that we were happy because we would have nothing to compare it with. For happiness to have any meaning at all we need to contrast it with its opposite state, unhappiness. To know happiness, we also need to know unhappiness. Adam and Eve may have been happy but they did not know it because they had nothing to compare it with. All of the values I talked about earlier come in pairs and the meaning of one element depends on the fact that it has a binary opposite – we cannot have a notion of Beauty without a notion of Ugliness, we cannot have a notion of Truth without also a notion of Falsehood, we cannot have Sweet without Sour or Salty without Bitterness. Light without Darkness, Good without Evil. Adam and Eve knew only the positive term in each binary opposition and so lived in a world without values at all. This is why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it is why after the snake had tempted Eve to try the fruit and then she had convinced Adam to disobey as well that God expelled them, banished them, from Paradise.

The story of the Fall is probably the most well known of all Biblical stories and those of us who spent a little time at Sunday school when children remember it even if we recall nothing else of the Biblical tradition. All children and generally speaking all the adults that they grow into interpret the story of the Fall alike,  in quite a simple way. God said, "You shall remain in paradise eternally so long as you abide by one rule – don't eat that particular fruit!" Adam and Eve were banished for breaking God's one rule and they were banished because they had broken it. It seems to me that all children and almost all the adults they grow into fail to see the significance of the name of the fruit – it grows on a tree called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Having broken God's rule, Adam and Eve were thrown into a world in which evil exists in all its forms – death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc. They fell into a world of values in which every positive value had its equal and opposite. What people miss about the story of the Fall is that Adam and Eve could not have truly known Good without also learning about Evil. The secret is in plain sight. The fact that somehow people fail to notice this, the name of the tree, when thinking about the story of the Fall, is reminiscent of the way people often have the "To be or not to be" speech from Hamlet memorised but fail to recognise that the secret at the heart of Shakespeare's most famous play is hinted at in it when Hamlet describes the afterlife as "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns," Hamlet says this in his most famous soliloquy even though he has had a conversation with the ghost of his dead father at the beginning of the play. The secret at the heart of Hamlet is that Hamlet does not know himself whether or not he is mad, if the ghost he parlayed with in the first scenes was real or not. This is why he is so indecisive. In the same way, the vast majority of people think that they understand the story of the Fall but have missed its inner kernel of meaning, the meaning indicated by the name given to the tree in Genesis.

I would like to suggest that a world which contains no evil but also no good cannot really be a paradise at all. It would be something like limbo. This is because to be human must surely involve the pursuit of positive values and flight from or fight with negative ones. A world without values of any sort would be a world without any meaning at all. 

"But," the reader may say, "you have been discussing the story of the Fall from the perspective given by hedonistic consequentialism. What about the desire-satisfaction consequentialists?" In the same way that I have argued that the paradise of hedonistic consequentialists contains not only no evil but also no good because it involves only positive physical and mental states and no negative ones, I would like to argue that the paradise of desire-satisfaction consequentialists likewise contains not only no evil but also no good as well. Remember that in our Fallen world, associated with every desire there is resistance. The resistance may be small for small desires, small wishes, but very great desires, great wishes, may be associated with very great resistance indeed. Many of our biggest desires, such as winning Lotto and flying to Australia to travel up the West Coast, may not be satisfiable at all. Some of our desires are ongoing such as the desire not to be beaten up or not to be rained upon when walking round the city – such desires can be put under the heading 'freedom from' as opposed to 'freedom to'. Both sorts of desires though require actions by the desirer. I would like to suggest that a paradise in which all desires are automatically satisfied would be no paradise at all because the goodness of actions, according to the desire-satisfaction consequentialists, is associated with the overcoming of resistance. There is always a gap or interval between the forming of a desire and its actualising and what I would like to argue is that the goodness associated with active desire-satisfaction-seeking does not lie in the moment when the desire is satisfied, an idea which would return us to the paradigm associated with hedonistic consequentialism, but rather with the active seeking of such satisfaction. Consider the cup of coffee example again. I form a desire for a cup of coffee, walk up the road to buy one, and then enjoy the taste. If it is the satisfaction of the desire in which the goodness of the action lies, then it would be in the anticipated and then realised taste of the flat white where we would find it – it would seem then that desire-satisfaction consequentialism has collapsed into hedonistic consequentialism because the movement towards fulfilment must be understood as secondary to the enjoyment associated with the taste of the coffee, with the reward. In order for the two ethical systems to remain distinct, the goodness associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism must lie in the forming of desires and the quest to fulfil them rather than in the moments when the desire is actually fulfilled. The forming of the desire and one's attempts to satisfy it can be regarded as Good and the resistance to these attempts can be regarded as Evil. Every time I buy a flat white from the cafe up the road this can be regarded as a small victory of Good over Evil. But, in a paradise in which all wishes are immediately, automatically, and magically granted by God, there could be no victory over Evil because there would be no Evil at all to resist one's wishes and thus, even in the paradigm associated with desire-satisfaction consequentialism, no Good either. If the goodness of desire-satisfaction is not to lie in the emotional and physical states that arise when the desire is consummated, then it must lie in the triumph of individual will over the resistance erected to try to stymie the desire.

There is a second argument I would like to make concerning the desire-satisfaction ethical paradigm. Resistance is associated with the material physical world and the desires of others. A world without resistance would also be a world that lacks physical materiality and a world without other people, people who if they did exist in it might sometimes have subtly different and sometimes enormously different sets of desires. Earlier in this essay I hinted that I am a value pluralist, that I think that there exist many different types of value. Perhaps the positive value associated with having a flat white magically appear in one's hand is outweighed by the negative psychological effects that arise as a consequence of being in such close proximity to an omnipotent, omniscient and 'omni-benevolent' God, specifically the rather terrible implication that there is no stable reality at all and that other people may not really exist, that the people one seems to see are only phantasms or apparitions. Earlier this year, on a couple of occasions, I had small wishes seemingly magically granted. On one occasion, I decided that in order to write an email, to help me concentrate, I needed cigarettes and then seemingly magically found an almost full packet near my bed. I did not attribute these tiny miracles to God but rather to supernatural beings, fairies or pixies, fair folk who were mischievously granting the small velleities that appeared in my mind but had no inclination to respond to my more deeply felt desires. On three occasions this year I saw perfect rainbows but the effect was not to make me feel that there was an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent God wanting a personal relationship with me but rather to make me feel that there was something malevolent about these optical phenomena. It made me feel as though God were kicking me in the head and repeating over and over again, "I exist!" All this has bearing on another argument atheists direct at their Christian opponents, the Problem of the Divine Hiddenness of God, but, although I may well discuss this problem in a later essay, I do not intend to talk about it now except to say that it is related to the Problem of Evil and that, in a way, this essay is an indirect riposte to this problem as well.

The Gnostics interpreted the story of the Garden of Eden in quite a different way to ordinary Christians. The Gnostics thought that the creator of this world and ruler of this world was not God but an inferior being, the Demiurge, one of many 'aeons' who 'emanated' from the true superior good God known as the 'Monad'. Many Gnostic sects thought that the Demiurge was actually Evil himself while other sects held that the Deminurge was simply a somewhat incompetent servant of the true good God. There were apparently (according to Wikipedia) some Gnostics who thought that the Demiurge was actually ignorant of the Monad entirely. Jesus was either an angel or aeon who had descended to Earth to teach mankind about love and compassion or an enlightened prophet: he was not God Himself the way Christians today regard him as God Himself. According to many Gnostic writings, it was the Demiurge rather than the Monad who had created the Garden of Eden and laid out its rules. And according to this tradition, the snake was not actually evil but rather, as Christ would be later, a representative or emissary of the true good God, a God who actually wanted mankind to have Knowledge of Good and Evil, an instrument of the good God. Remember that the term 'gnosis' is simply Ancient Greek for 'knowledge'. The Gnostic interpretation of the myth or fable of the Garden of Eden can thus be set out in this way. The true good God, the Monad, wanted Evil in the world, wanted a world containing death, despair, disease, disfigurement, toil, violence, cruelty, shame, etc, etc, because without Evil in the world there could not be Good. Adam and Eve could not have knowledge of Good without knowledge of Evil as well, without knowing about both natural and moral evil, and they could only have knowledge of all these evils if these evils actually existed.

(There is another even odder interpretation of this myth and parable one could defend. Perhaps all of these evils pre-existed the nibbling of the apple but Adam and Eve were not aware of them until after partaking of the Fruit. In this interpretation, the Garden of Eden was no paradise at all but rather just something its inhabitants thought was a paradise because all the evils in it were invisible to them until the moment when they received Knowledge of them. This would seem to suggest that the writers of Genesis might have endorsed the postmodern tenet that the world is simply what we know about it, that reality is a social construction, but this seems suspiciously poststructuralist for a work written presumably around six hundred years before Christ. In this context, one may also think of an aphorism coined by the poet Thomas Gray in 1742, "Ignorance is Bliss".)

It certainly seems self-evident that we live in a world containing both Good and Evil. We live neither in Heaven nor in the Garden of Eden. Some people like to imagine that they pass through life continually making decisions between right and wrong but this is not really true of me and I believe most others. Rather we continually make decisions in which we regard our desires as automatically Good and often only much later realise that we have done something immoral or censurable. This may have happened to me recently although I cannot be sure because I lack solid intelligence either way. Early this year I was told that I was Good and that my older brother was Evil and that in the forthcoming conflict or struggle between us I would win out. Certainly any conflict between individuals can be framed as a conflict between Good and Evil – have you noticed how often both sides of a war or both sides of a sporting match claim beforehand that they have God on their side? Humans pursue positive values and it is helpful to imagine one is Good to do so and that God has one's back. Furthermore, in the pursuit of Good, in the overcoming of resistance, a person may not only improve his or her own life but the lives of others. The mystic poet William Blake, a man who had his finger on the spiritual pulse of the world, penned the following in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." Blake's argument is rather different from mine but this sentiment fits well with what I am trying to say myself. Without movement, motility, nothing in the world would change – the world is designed for active agents that form desires, seek to attain them, seek to actualise positive values, and then either enjoy the benefits of having satisfied these desires or the penalties of having failed to do so or of having been the victims of blind fate or accident. Not only in pursuing values individually can individuals sometimes improve or at least change their own lives but through collective actions we can sometimes improve or at least change the world. The political sphere is full of politicised conflicts – between Russia and Ukraine, between Democrats and Republicans, between climate change activists and conservatives, between David Seymour and Chloe Swarbrick. It makes one think of the Hegelian dialectic. However I am less optimistic than Hegel was when he argued that history progresses through oppositions between theses and antitheses coming together to form new syntheses because I am still undecided as to whether or not we can put any faith in the notion of human progress at all, in a divine masterplan.

I would like to quote some more Blake. This is the last part of the poem "Auguries of Innocence," the full text of which can be found elsewhere online.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the Soul slept in beams of light.
God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But doth a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

My reason for quoting these lines is because it captures a sense I have that some people just have miserable lives while the fortunate few who have so much power today are not just unwilling to understand the quiet desperation of most others but are unable to understand it. And every life ends in pain and death. How can we watch footage on TV of children dying of starvation in Gaza and believe God to be not only omniscient and omnipotent but wholly benevolent? "Auguries of Innocence", as a whole, is a poem concerned with the visible empirical fact of evil – the conceit at the heart of it is that small evils have can send cataclysmic reverberations throughout the state of England and the supernatural domains both above and below it. The failure to "see thro' the eye", the failure to be aware of all these small evils, to pretend that evil does not exist, is to be led to believe a lie. We need to acknowledge the viewpoints and experiences of "those poor souls who dwell in night". This passage is saying something even deeper though, I think, something that perhaps many readers will not have noticed is there in it because of an ambiguity in the way Blake is expressing himself and because they may not be attuned to the mystical tradition I am discussing. As already noted in this essay, there is a tension between organised conventional Christianity and some off its ordinary followers because the West's religious leaders have perpetuated as dogma since Aquinas that there is only God and that God is only and wholly good while under the surface, among the hermits and pariahs and non-conformists, the mystics like Blake, there has always been a kind of subterranean Manichaeanism or Gnosticism. It is an esoteric teaching that we find hints of again and again not just in poetry but in modern pop songs. I believe that those "who dwell in night" are the Gnostics, the Manichaeans, while those "who dwell in realms of day" are the orthodox comfortable Christians who have no doubt that God is a person who exists and is good and that they are destined for a blissful afterlife. The ambiguity is that, if one reads this poem closely, Blake seems to be saying that it is this second group who are "led to believe a lie" and so seems to be aligning himself with "those who dwell in night" even though a more cursory reading would tempt us to suppose, because the poem finishes the way it does, that Blake is saying that he is one of those who "dwell in realms of day". It is a tension between an overt Christianity associated with the sun and a subterranean counter-culture which saw the world in terms of Light and Darkness and which took its tone from the asterisms visible only at night. Only those who have experienced something like the dark night of the soul can appreciate the grave truths in a poem like this. The ambiguity in the poem arises from the fact that Blake is unwilling to pledge loyalty either to boring bourgeoise Christianity or to a more sexy but more dangerous because heretical alternative – perhaps in this poem he was shifting from one camp to another. 

I return now to an idea I touched on earlier. If evil exists, it seems then that we might have to abandon the Thomistic axioms concerning the attributes of God. Either there is continual conflict between two opposed supernatural forces, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, and we cannot know for sure which one will win out, or, if God is indeed omniscient and omnipotent, He is not omni-benevolent and may have plans for us which may not involve all of us having more happiness than unhappiness in our lives or involve the satisfaction of our deepest desires. This might explain why I found the appearance of three perfect rainbows in my world this year so menacing. I thought it might be the handiwork of a Demiurge who, if not evil, might have been utterly amoral. However, I would like to end this essay on an optimistic note. Could it be possible that there actually is a supreme God distinct from the Demiurge who is indeed not just all-powerful and all-knowing but all-good? We can imagine this to be true if we suppose, for instance, that it is not just God who is hidden from us but also His goodness. Perhaps in order to live in this world we need to believe in Good and Evil, as I have already suggested, and also, in order to do things, to perform actions in the world to help ourselves and others, we need to doubt that a good God exists and that an afterlife exists. We need to rail against death, to fight for ourselves and for others. "Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." And, if an afterlife does exist, it can be nothing like the picture painted by Julian Barnes in his story. This is why I find reincarnation a more probable eschatology than the Heaven and Hell of conventional Christianity. I do not believe in the Hindu doctrine that good actions lead to rebirths in more fortunate circumstances though because I am not sure that I believe in free will, It may yet be though that after a person dies there is an interregnum period during which he or she selects the next life he or she wants to have out of a kind of dispassionate curiosity– I think Plato himself proposed such a scheme and something like this is discussed in the scholarly work When Souls Had Wings by Terryl Givens. Perhaps after I die I may want to return to Earth to learn what it was like to be Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu or the Marquis de Sade. Or perhaps to experience the life experienced by Ramses III. It may well be that the Knowledge of Good and Evil is at a deeper level indeed an illusion. Perhaps a supremely good God may want us to believe in free will, in Good and Evil, may want us to be unsure if He exists and whether or not an afterlife or pre-life exists. Perhaps it is only if we possess such Knowledge, even if such Knowledge is at a deeper level indeed an illusion, only if the lives we led before we were born and will lead after we die are concealed from us, that we can most fully participate in the common human endeavour of seeking happiness for ourselves and others. Is ignorance paradise or perdition? The Gnostics knew the answer. *