The other day I plugged my all electric Skoda Enyaq into a local charge point, and I got an “Access denied” message. So I phoned the provider.
“Hoy o thru Adammyatakyrnemandpozzquot?”
“Sorry?”
“Yanampozzkyott.”
“I don’t understand you. Could you possibly speak a little more slowly?”
“Hello, you are through to Adam, may I take your name and postcode?”
He had a Scottish accent. It wasn’t as if he was at a remote overseas location. He explained that access was denied me because I hadn’t paid for half a dozen charges over the previous three months.
“But how can that be when you automatically charge my credit card, and I have settled my latest account?”
Pause.
“We’ve been having software glitches.”
Ah. But billing apart, as it turned out, the charge point was kaputt.
I suppose I was a bit tetchy. It has been a difficult week for me, as the orchestra rehearsed, and performed, Mozart, Grieg, and Brahms. Maestro iterated, and reiterated the mantra, “Play nearer the bridge, James!” But I’m not sure I want to. It sounds so strident. I said to him, “Old dog, new tricks.” He wants us all to download an app on to our smart phones, and tune to A441. Why bother listening to the oboe when hi tech can do it for you?
Talking of tech, the schools in Edinburgh have been hacked and everybody’s data compromised. The pupils had to go to school on Saturday and be issued new passwords, in order to continue receiving teaching materials on line. There is a move afoot across various countries in the world to ban pupils from bringing their smart phones to school. I think this should certainly be extended to the teachers, who should be banned from using IT as an educational modality, unless they are teaching computing science. For the most part, all you need is a room, quietude, a blackboard or a whiteboard, books, and a meeting of minds.
Then the supermarkets got hacked and the shelves emptied with extraordinary rapidity. The hackers’ motive appears to be purely venal and rapacious; they want to hold the supermarkets to ransom. All viruses will be expunged, for a fee. And why not? Isn’t it just another form of trade? Business is business. Everything has become so transactional.
Tech malfunctions also seem to have disrupted business at Stansted, and at Newark. And, in respect of electricidade, there was a huge outage in Iberia. People got stuck in lifts. And nothing worked. It just shows you. When things fall apart, you must have the facility to move back, with ease, and rapidity, to the analogue world. When the computers crash in the GP surgery, doctors must remember how to keep a record using pen and ink. Aviators know this. When the instrument panel goes blank, they must reaccess and summon the ancient navigational skills of mental dead reckoning, and compass turns.
I bet the cardinals didn’t use electronic voting last week in the Sistine Chapel. Some very rare ballot papers have been unearthed in the National Library of Scotland, from the conclave of 1655, which apparently turned down the favourite Giulio Cesare Sacchetti, in favour of the compromise candidate Fabio Chigi, Pope Alexander VII. Of course used ballot papers are burnt, so these rare documents are thought to be spares, including ballot sheets and a list of cardinals eligible to vote.
They say that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. When Pope Francis passed away on Easter Monday, I wouldn’t have said for a moment that Robert Harris, the author of Conclave, would have rubbed his hands with glee. But he must have recognised that the reality of a forthcoming conclave would by no means harm the sales of his book, already boosted by its reincarnation as a successful film. I remember that I started reading Conclave with no high hopes; how could you possibly turn a prolonged committee meeting into a thriller? But having read many of Robert Harris’ oeuvres, I should have known better. It was a page turner, full of twists and turns, not least the final twist at the end.
The process of a conclave is shrouded in secrecy. We know that the Pope-elect requires two thirds of the cardinals’ votes. But what voting system is deployed? STV? Some sort of modified D’Hondt? Or is it simply a looser process of horse trading and argy-bargy? Whatever it is, it seems to work. White smoke has appeared above the Sistine Chapel. Habemus Papam.
Pope Leo XIV seems to be going down well with the people congregated on St Peter’s Square. A prerequisite of the papal role seems to be that the incumbent must be a polyglot. I believe Leo’s first address as Pope was delivered in Spanish, and he has subsequently spoken, and indeed sung, in Italian, Latin, and of course English. It would seem that he was chosen as the continuity candidate in the footsteps of Francis. He undertook a great part of his priestly career in Peru, ministering to the poor. In terms of his world view, he has called for peace; peace in Ukraine, in Gaza.
Does a papal call for peace exercise any influence on the world stage? Remember a notorious remark of Stalin in response to a previous call for peace from the Vatican. “How many divisions does the pope have?” In other words, might is right.
The notion of might being right, after 80 years of relative peace in Europe, by no means unbroken – remember Yugoslavia – has come once more to the fore. That loathsome harangue of President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, from Trump and Vance, brought it all back. “You don’t have the cards!” said Trump. Nothing about an illegal invasion of sovereign territory. Quite the contrary. Zelenskyy started it! That’s another old trope that has returned. The Big Lie. The first casualty in war is the truth. If you tell a lie often enough, people begin to believe it. Dr Goebbels understood that. And America, said Trump, has given away $350,000,000,000 of aid to Ukraine, much more than Europe. Actually the US has given about $120,000,000,000, somewhat less than Europe. But why let facts get in the way of a good story? In the light of all that, it is not merely tasteless that Trump should allegedly retweet (or rather re-X, or rather re-truth social) – he denies it – a mock-up of himself in papal vestments, it is actually rather sinister. A proponent of might dressed as the champion of the meek. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
We live in a secular world, and you might suppose that people who regard the religious life as being merely superstitious would have a refined sense of the difference between truth and falsehood. I think it was G. K. Chesterton, a distinguished Catholic, who said that the trouble with ditching a religious belief is not that you end up believing in nothing, but rather you end up believing in everything. People believe, for example, that the ills of the world can be surmounted through technology. Artificial Intelligence, says Sir Tony Blair (another prominent Catholic), is the Next Big Thing. I’m sceptical. Technology has a place, many places, but the woes of the world are at heart humanitarian. Leo’s reiterated message of faith, hope and love, lies at the heart of Christianity. Light is stronger than dark, good is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate. These notions are right now under attack, just as democracy is under attack. Things fall apart, as once more, the strong men “slouch towards Bethlehem”. The last time Europe was taken over by a dictator, it was not the white smoke above the Sistine Chapel we saw; rather the acrid black smoke issuing from the chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But as the difficulties of the world expand, coalesce and magnify, our politicians continue to trumpet high tech as a kind of deus ex machina that will solve all our difficulties, local and international. But remember what the Dean of Coventry said in 1940, amid the blitzed ruins of the cathedral. We shouldn’t seek vengeance, but rather, a kinder, simpler world.
So I continue to tune my viola to the oboe. I’m not downloading the app. A plague on your app.
jamescalumcampbell 