Thought for the Day

Good morning. How do you feel about mind control? New research from a laboratory in Zurich suggests it may be possible to make people less selfish – by sending electrical currents through their brains. Forty-four volunteers were asked to divide money between themselves and an anonymous partner. Remarkably, when certain neural pathways at the front and back of the head were stimulated, participants gave more away.
It sounds like science fiction. But other forms of bio-hacking are, of course, already common: weight-loss drugs, metabolic trackers, sleep technology. Medicines are routinely used to lift mood, sharpen attention, steady anxiety. So why not use science to make us kinder as well? That way, we might all become more beautiful people inside, as well as out.
Just imagine it. Wellness centres offering holistic packages, body and soul: Botox top-ups in the morning, altruistic boosting in the afternoon. More seriously, researchers claim this new technology could be used for the treatment of certain brain disorders and prove invaluable for people who struggle with social behaviour. It could be just the nudge they need to become better citizens.
It’s a wholesome idea. Yet as I read the academic article on this impressive experiment in brain-hacking – forecasting gains in “cooperation, productivity, and cohesion” – I became increasingly uneasy. I was put in mind of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published almost a century ago, which describes a civilisation held together not by conscience but by chemistry and conditioning. A terrifying vision. Once virtue is treated as something that can be engineered, the line between encouragement and enforcement grows thin. A society might become more efficient, more compliant, even more outwardly generous, and still lose its soul. Huxley warns that people who allow themselves to be controlled may eventually come to “love their servitude”.
Even if such dystopian fears never come to pass, the ambition to control our moral impulses through technology raises questions about the nature of morality. Christian thought has long distinguished between shaping behaviour from the outside and forming the person from within. Charity — what theologians call caritas — is not simply a matter of generous action. Intention matters too: affection that is freely given is what lends acts of generosity their meaning; without it, they risk becoming little more than reflexes.
It’s fascinating to learn that science can influence our moral behaviour, but it is fatal to confuse this fact with morality itself. The Christian vision insists that a person is more than a set of automatic responses. Morality only makes sense if it is chosen. As a society, we have already surrendered ourselves to our smartphones, our computers, and our digital habits; let’s at least fight, while we can, to love one another freely.

14 FEB 26

13 FEB 26

12 FEB 26

Good Morning,
In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes.
But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims.
Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.
Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light.
In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’
I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang.
‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’
Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted.

This thinking infects the Epstein files where women and girls, some reportedly as young as nine, are offered as though they were meat on a menu. They do this without shame and an entitled belief that the rules don’t apply to them.

The Psalmist describes this: ‘In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect their sin. Even on their beds they plot evil; commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.’
Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’

In his ministry Jesus sided and stood with the abused and the used. His compassion for the victim was an implicit critique of the system, forces and ideologies that produces victims.
At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power.

One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.