麻豆社

There鈥檚 a rather catchy phrase in the Book of Common Prayer in which the congregation prays to be: 鈥済odly and quietly governed鈥�. When I was younger, and keener to see Christianity as some sort of revolutionary enterprise, this desire to be 鈥榪uietly governed鈥� struck me as the epitome of counter-revolutionary politics. Keep quiet and carry on. That seemed to be the very purpose of the established church: to maintain the status quo.

But now that I'm older, and have things that I love and want to protect, I feel a keener appreciation of being 鈥渜uietly governed鈥�. My inner teenager is still a Marxist sympathizer - and would, I think, far too casually accept that change requires creative destruction, chaos even. 鈥楾oday鈥檚 me鈥� looks over at the desperate people of Venezuela, millions of whom have fled that oil rich country because of the failure of its revolutionary politics 鈥� and fears the application of all that youthful political zeal. I suspect many people in Venezuela would love to be 鈥渜uietly governed鈥�.

In the scriptures, this battle between order and chaos is sometimes depicted in terms of God wrestling with the sea monster Leviathan. The assumption is clear: chaos bad, order good. That鈥檚 why, in the midst of the English civil war, when Thomas Hobbes came to write his great work of political philosophy - reacting to the turbulent politics of his day - he called the book after the monster of chaos: Leviathan.

But my inner teenager is not so easily silenced by this call for order. For the youthful me will rightly cry out that Hobbes鈥� answer to chaos was an all-powerful and absolute monarch. And indeed, that authoritarian politics often begins when people over-estimate the dangers of chaos, and so justify repressive measures in terms of their capacity to deliver order.

In other words, both theologically and politically, 鈥榦rder鈥� and 鈥榗haos鈥� are loaded terms and should be handled with care.

Now, the psychologist Jordan Peterson may not be everyone鈥檚 cup of tea, but I think he is on to something when he proposes a healthier relationship between order and chaos in terms of a very different sea based image: that of surfing. 鈥淪urfing was sacred to the Hawaiians鈥� he explains 鈥渂ecause the Hawaiians could see that when a surfer mastered a wave he was physically embodying the balance between order and chaos.鈥� And this rings true to me. Surfing sounds like a way of confronting the danger of chaos but also, through skill and determination, returning it to some sense of order.

But whether you think of it more in terms of battling monsters or surfing waves, so much of our politics exists on this sensitive intersection between order and chaos. Sometimes we don鈥檛 notice it at all. And sometimes we talk of little else.

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