PRETENSE
MAY 24 2015
Or is it PRETENCE? That too is acceptable because the one with the “S” is American while the one with the “C” is English. In Canada both versions are current because we not only are a country with two official languages, in our English we also enjoy a double solitude, where both the American and the English spelling are used. However as far as the meaning of the word is concerned, it is the same in both spellings.
Pretens(c)e is defined as: a false reason or explanation that is used to hide the real purpose of something. It can also mean an act or appearance that looks real but is false.
Let me start with an economic matter. Governments pay out wages and pensions which are increased in line with the inflation rate. For governments the lower the inflation rate, the easier it is for them to balance the books. Even though they prefer inflation to deflation, they don’t want to see prices go up too much, so they manipulate the inflation rate. In Canada and the USA and I presume everywhere in the Western world they have changed how it calculates inflation more than 20 times since 1978. Each and every change drove down the official inflation rate, masking what was really happening as prices rose and your wealth eroded. Right now the official rate is under 2%, but if they were to switch back to the way inflation was calculated in 1980 we would have seen 7% to 8% inflation in recent years.
In other words, as far as inflation is concerned, we live in ‘pretense’ times.
Interest rates are another pretentious issue. It used to be that they were calculated based on the inflation rate with an added 2 percent for administration and real gain. Thus if the inflation rate were 3 percent, people like me with a bit of savings, would earn 5 % on their money. Today we are lucky to get 2-3 percent, and some banks charge people for holding their money. Basically those of us who have a few dollars invested actually get a negative return.
In other words, money wise, we also live in “pretense” times.
What is true about interest rates is also applicable to the unemployment statistics. There too it is beneficial for the rate-setting agencies to have a low figure: it looks good to the outside world, it saves money because it limits the payment of Unemployment Insurance. In the widely reported unemployment rate the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the US BLS) only counts those who have looked for a job in the past four weeks as unemployed. Once they haven’t looked for a job during that time they are no longer counted as unemployed. As a result, the real or true unemployment rate is much higher. If those who want to work but cannot find a job are counted, in April 2015, the real unemployment rate was 10.8%, exactly double the widely-reported unemployment rate of 5.4% in the USA.
In other words, employment wise, we too live in ‘pretense’ times.
We and our machines.
We are changing. Anyone who has been to a party where everyone was using a cell phone can attest to this reality. Modern technology is already rewiring the way the human brain works. Sixth-graders who went five days without any digital screen exposure did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who spent hours every day looking at their electronic devices. When a New York Times reporter asked Steve Jobs how his kids liked the iPad he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
It’s clear that technology has intruded deeply into our lives. If we do not act now, we will lose our ability to communicate with each other and the ability to enjoy meaningful employment. We are in the process of losing our humanity. And that’s exactly what the Great Adversary wants. Satan believes that technology is unambiguously good: it is “the wellspring of human progress.” Yet thanks to “progress” no net new jobs have been created in 15 years at a time when the American population increased by 40 million.
In other words, ‘progress’ means the opposite: pretense rules.
Should I mention Iraq?
Thanks to American politics and the entering of Jeb Bush into the presidential race for the Republicans, Iraq is back, especially now that ISIS, that radical, utterly evil, totally satanic bunch of fighters – in the name of religion – is gaining ground. You may remember the younger Bush, the son, George W. who, in his relative inexperience, was duped by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld into a war with Iraq, playing up the theme that Father Bush has left it unfinished, even though the general staff warned against it. Pretense entered there as in no other war. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. If there ever was a war launched under false pretentions, it was this one.
The invasion of Iraq is a crime at par with some of the World War II crimes, with the difference that the aftermath is still being felt today and will be for years to come, perhaps will lead to nuclear war as Saudi Arabia is said to be ready to purchase a nuclear bomb from Pakistan in response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
In other words in politics ‘pretense’ ruled then, and still rules now.
The pretense of battling Climate Change
We recently passed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; business as usual will take us up to 1,000 ppm, raising global average temperature (from a pre-industrial baseline) to as high as 5.4 degrees Celsius. According to a 2012 World Bank report this will lead to “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise,” the effects of which will be “tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions,” stalling or reversing decades of development work.
But that’s where we’re headed. It will take enormous effort just to avoid that fate. Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There’s no sign of that happening, or reason to think it’s plausible anytime soon.
Here is reality. Politicians want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they’re out of office.
Climate scientists feel pressure to provide fake figures. While I am writing this in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, scientists are protesting because the Harper regime is muzzling them. Governments don’t want to hear the truth. There is not a politician on earth who wants to tell his or her constituents, “We’ve probably already blown our chance to avoid substantial suffering, but if we work really hard and devote our lives to the cause, we can somewhat reduce the even worse suffering that awaits our children and grandchildren.”
Many climate experts are now arguing that 2°C is an inadequate target, that it already represents unacceptable harms. We are facing a situation in which limiting temperature even to 2°C requires heroic policy and technology changes, which won’t happen, because the status quo rules.
In other words, in Climate Change too, ‘pretense’ rules.
Is the church any different?
The nation of Israel was in exile for 70 years when a remnant returned to the old country and Jerusalem. Malachi – the name means “my messenger’ – was the last Old Testament prophet. The book is short -4 chapters – and ends with “The Day of the Lord”
That was God’s final message to his people about 500 years before Christ started his mission. During that interval the church was supposed to prepare the people of Israel for the ‘sun of righteousness with healing in its wing’ (Malachi 4: 2) describing Jesus, the firstborn of creation, humanity personified. God granted the people of Israel 5 centuries to prepare for Christ’s coming. Over these years the church devised all sorts of statutes and regulations, making religion a matter of strict observance to rules and outward appearances. Its weakness was revealed when the three magi appeared from far away, following the star, looking for information where the heavenly king was born. The then priests and bishops and theologians knew the exact location, but refused to connect the dots, because it did not fit into their organizational setup. The baby-king did not conform to their expectations, and, when he went public after 30 years, they arrested, judged and killed him because he flouted their ecclesiastical rules. The then church utterly failed to prepare for the coming of the Messiah.
Theologically speaking, the church then lived in ‘pretense’ times.
On October 31 1517 Martin Luther, the Catholic priest turned whistleblower, attached 95 theses on the front door of his church in Wittenberg, Germany. On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1983 – he was born in 1483 – my younger brother, my wife and I were in Wittenberg. On the steps of the church, in front of the very door where he had affixed his defiant statement, were two young people shooting up drugs, perhaps a metaphor for the state of religion in what was then the former East Germany.
We are more than 30 years beyond 1983 and very close to the 500th anniversary of October 31 1517, commonly called “Reformation Day.” During the 500 years prior to Jesus’ mission, the church failed to prepare for his coming. On the contrary it crucified the Savior. Now, 500 years after Luther shook up the Roman Catholic Church a remarkable man has emerged: Pope Frances who is using his office to take on Capitalism and infusing both Roman Catholics and Protestants with courage to take on the forces that are destroying creation. I wholeheartedly endorse the Pope’s valiant efforts to battle those who are bent to destroy LIFE for the sake of money.
The Final Battle
It is THE battle of the 21st Century and that at the very time the world is more confused and confusing than ever. We’re now in a post-imperial, post-colonial and, in many places, post-autocratic age. Large sections of the world are in total chaos. Just as the oceans increasingly have dead zones where life has gone extinct so the earth too is filled with regions where nobody can live anymore. No one wants to touch these disorderly zones because when they do, they suddenly are responsible for feeding tens of millions extra mouths, and that while money at home is running out as well. The West prefers them to die quietly.
I pray that the Pope will be successful. We are engaged in the last battle: the battle where the rich West fights on two fronts: the West versus the Climate, and also that same West fighting the world’s poor: a war in which we all are losers. We pretend to help the climate. We pretend to assist the poor. In the final analysis we do nothing else but protect our temporary relative advantage. We try to be the first. Somewhere in the Bible it says that the first shall be the last. We are so dependent on fossil fuel and electricity which powers our Internet and computers, that, once these cease to function – and some hostile virus will cause this – within three days we are totally dysfunctional. We pretend to be invincible. In reality of all the people ever lived, we are the most vulnerable.
How about the Church now?
The church is supposed to follow in Jesus’ footsteps and tell the world of the Kingdom – the New Creation – to come when Christ will appear again.
Sorry to say, the church today almost without exceptions, still clings to the Heaven heresy.
I admire Pope Frances whom I believe will be much in the news this year. Will he tell the people, will Christianity at large tell the world to prepare for the Kingdom to come? Will the church’s main message be, in line with Christ’s teaching, both in word and action, to prepare for the transition into the pure, pollution-free, pristine planet that is about to come?
Or will humanity kill creation, just as it did with Jesus when he came? The French saying comes to mind: Plus ça change, plus ça la m?me chose: The more humans change, the more they remain the same.