Lighting candles in the dark.

My own critique and answer to my previous post – that’ll be me not just talking to me but me talking about me – is that just a tad self referential ?

In my previous Friday post I used, at the end, a line from one of the symphonic-metal bands (Nightwish) songs – “Hard to light a candle, easy to curse the darkness” – it comes from a song of theirs called ‘Last ride of the day’ and the live version that I heard was being used to close the show and in fact that whole festival. Today I want to take that thought and use it to talk about something that iv’e been having to think about a lot as I continue to heavily criticize the Starmer government,

I would just like to say though, right at the outset, that although I have an idea about the gist and thrust of this post it isn’t like one of my boat related posts in that I don’t have it thoroughly thought out and planned, in fact I have no idea where it’s going to go so i’m flailing around in the dark.

Easy to curse the darkness.

That is the second part of the line I heard being sung by Nightwish vocalist Floor Jansen and I find it to be the easiest part to explain in the context of the political situation in the UK- we can, if you will, make some explanation and move on to the more difficult parts. In the UK right now we seem to slap-bang in the center of the children’s story that we all know ; that of the emperors new clothes, except in this case the clothes and the man are extremely dull but come along with a whole heap of political sleaze.

We might perhaps take it as the entirely negative extreme of being a critic – I think of US president Theodore Roosevelt and his words “It’s not the critic that counts” rather it’s the person with their face in the dirt (my interpretation). Another take on the same kind of idea is to question the value of TV personalities who run ‘talent’ shows – what do they bring to music or entertainment ?.

I suspect though that that idea was nothing even close to the meaning of the lyric that Floor Jansen was singing, it may have been as simple and yet profound as the idea that criticizing and cursing is easy – and my take on that, if its the right idea, is that we’re all deeply into criticizing and cursing right now but very few of us are ‘lighting candles in the dark’

Lighting candles.

This post stalled at this point, in fact it’s been sat in my drafts folder for several weeks because I couldn’t find a way of starting this section that I was satisfied with so I figured out that my best way forward is to explain some context first so here goes. Right now I spend as much time as I am able, given my poor attention span, following one or other lecture series on Dr Jordan Peterson’s new online academy and it’s one of the lecture series that i’m following that gives me the clearest lead for this post. In a big way then both JBP and several of his guest lecturers are acting as ‘Candles in the Dark’ and my first example of a lit candle would have been Dr Peterson himself.

In terms of the Peterson academy, I enrolled anticipating that there would be some lectures about psychology (there are so that’s where I started) although I had no idea where my choice of lectures would take me. There is, as you would expect from anything Peterson related, at least one lecture series about psychology (The roots of psychology with Dr Keith Craig Phd) and aside from a couple of his lectures I got a bit bogged down – one of the later lectures is really a long list of psychological problems and illnesses – only really relevant if clinical psychology is going to be your schtick. Almost as an afterthought I then jumped in on JBP’s own lecture series – an introduction to Nietzsche and I can only just hang on to Peterson’s coat tails in that one. It’s the second lecture series that I have followed that is relevant to my post this week and that was Bishop Robert Barron’s series : God, Bible & Humanity – I was surprised just how effective a lecturer Bishop Barron is.

I came across bishop Barron’s work several years ago at a time when I was briefly flirting around the edges of Catholicism and ended up doing an RCIA course but ultimately got rejected by them. I still feel a bit ‘on side’ with them almost because of that rejection although that’s another story entirely. What I came across first that I remember today was his lecture about the 4 great philosophers that have most impacted modern thinking : Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre and Foucault. As lectures go it was short and to the point – around 15 minutes on each character.

In my first attempt at this post I of course mentioned Dr Peterson in the context of someone who is lighting lots of candles as right now there are over 33.000 of us enrolled and listening to well presented and beautifully edited lectures. I did also mention Brett Weinstein (One of Dr Peterson’s gueslt lecturers) simply on the basis of things that he, a secular and atheist scientist had said about the Demonic influence culturally – strong stuff from an evolutionary biologist and a far cry from the queezy cultural Christianity approach of people such as Richard Dawkins whom I find to be a less and less valid critic of anything ‘religion’.

If you’re a bit lost (with my post) then don’t worry as so am I. In my first take on the subject I could only pick out a few individuals, such as JBP. whom in my limited view were lighting candles in the dark. I would now add bishop Robert Barron and the secular atheist scientist Brett Weinstein – I find his big brother Eric a compelling character too BTW. In my second attempt I had the distinct personal impression that I was overshooting the mark and wondered out loud whether it was possible to mark out individuals further down the intellectual scale whom in some way were also lighting candles. If so then maybe that’s a very individual thing and someone who might be something of that order to me isn’t likely to be universal.

Whatever !…..I can’t find a satisfactory conclusion to my own post although I could go on and on but find it best not to. The best explanation I can come to right now is something iv’e been saying about the post stroke effect of being extremely physically tired but with an over active ‘fizzy’ mind. With my boat posts I can pretty well chase those right down to their nuts and bolts but with this one I have neither the background, the knowledge, the belief or the faith to do so : at best i’m only a weak agnostic and that isn’t enough to work with.