Share some food and find the antidote to despair

Who we eat with says who we are.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Three people stand beside a table and smile.

Lewisham Mayor Brenda Dacres with foodbank volunteers.

Lewisham Foodbank.

In my local supermarket a new foodbank collection trolley has appeared with this sign,

“Gift a toy this Christmas…give a gift this Christmas to those who need it most.”

Setting aside the usual ethical dilemma presented by the existence of foodbanks (why do they exist in such a wealthy country?), the sign prompted a thought on the nature of joy. What is more joyful than the surprise of an unexpected gift? After all, Christmas is around the corner, “Joy to the world!”.

That thought came to mind when I was recently asked; how do we cultivate and foster joy? If I’m honest I was a little stumped by the question. What even is joy anyway?

We can too easily and readily conflate it with lesser feelings like happiness or pleasure, which by their nature seem to be fleeting, like a chocolate bar: here one moment, gone the next. Thinking about it, joy seems to be thrown into relief when it is set against one of its opposites: despair. We all know what despair looks like; loneliness, isolation, a hopelessness which can yawn like a great dark chasm, without edges to get purchase on, or without a hand to hold.

Christmas can be an especially potent time for despair. The days are short and often dimmed by heavy cloud and rain. Children’s expectation that Santa will bring all of the latest goodies drives parents into debt to make their hopes come true. Those in dire straits will struggle to scrape together the food that goes into the usual Christmas feast. This combination of dark days and high expectations can and does drive many further into despair. It is this sense of aloneness, of the weight of the world heaped on your shoulders alone, which fuels despair.

This despair is not only reserved for Christmas. We see the climbing rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues in the younger generations. Having been born into the age of the internet and growing up with social media, the temptation to compare with the heavily edited and curated lives of others, encouraged by the platform algorithms themselves, only serves to make young people feel increasingly alone.

This feeling is not helped by the propaganda of the age; that we are all rational, autonomous individuals, whose fulfilment looks like self-reliance, status, and wealth, without the need for anyone else. All this breeds the solipsism and nihilism that so often morphs into despair.

Foodbanks are the proof that this most basic constituent of joy is a struggle for many, from the sheer lack of food to share

What does this despair tell us about joy? If despair is in isolation, bearing our burdens alone, then joy is in being with other people. To return to that chocolate bar, if happiness (and perhaps the despair which comes from having no more chocolate bar) is scoffing it by ourselves, then joy is breaking off a part and sharing it with another. Human beings are naturally social creatures. It is in our very nature to live with one another. If we remain alone, closed off to others, then we nurture the despair that this breeds.

An incredibly simple way we remain connected to each other is by sharing food. If despair is the isolation from others then sharing food is the negation of this isolation. Sharing food is universally important, whether it’s the realpolitik of American high school films (the jock table vs the dork table and who’s allowed to sit with who, encapsulated perfectly by Mean Girls), or the mystical heights of the Christian eucharist. Who we eat with says who we are, with all the potential for exclusion the examples above show. But eating with others says what we are. Sharing food, especially in celebration at a time like Christmas, reminds us that our humanity is only ever shared. This reminder that we are not alone is not a fleeting happiness; it is a confirmation in our very flesh and bones that we are made of the same stuff, that we are never alone.

Many of us will have this joy as part of our everyday lives; foodbanks are the proof that this most basic constituent of joy is a struggle for many, from the sheer lack of food to share. The sign that appeared in my local supermarket is more proof that we already know how simple joy can be. Many foodbanks organise specifically festive food for this season, because we know that not only sharing food, but celebrating in that sharing is crucial to what it means to be human. Even in the morally mixed ecosystem of the foodbank, the need for joy shines through; sharing food in celebration is one of those antidotes for despair. In sharing our food we find our humanity, and what is more joyful than that?

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Politics

12 January 2024

5 min read

Why we need a gentle radical revolution

Our social arrangement needs to prioritise human relationships, argues MP Danny Kruger.

Danny Kruger

Danny Kruger is the Conservative MP for Devizes. He is the author of Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation.

A group of people stand in a field by a fence and a railway footcrossing.

Danny Kruger with a campaign group in his Devizes constituency.

Democracy divides us. The political system best calculated to hold together a diverse society is also one that exacerbates differences and obscures our common opinions and interests. A two-party system - and all Western politics is largely binary, split between conservative and progressive parties or groups of parties - encourages vicious disagreement across the aisle, and polarises opinion in the country.

The paradox is that, despite our party disagreements, the most popular opinion with the public is that ‘they're as bad as each other’. The view held in common across the country is that ‘they’re all the same’; that ‘there’s nothing to choose between them’. And deep down, the public is right, but in a good way. Fundamentally the parties share a worldview, which derives from our common inheritance as the heirs of the Christian tradition.

That tradition taught us that individuals are intrinsically, personally, valuable, without reference to the identities of sex, household, tribe or race which, in pagan cultures, gave people their only worth (or for most people, their lack of it). It also taught us that, despite our individual personal value, our mission in life was other-facing. Our object of worship was outside the self. God’s will was made material and meaningful through the institutions of our common life, in what we came to call civil society. These institutions in turn, especially the institution of the law, worked to protect the individual and make diversity safe.

This tradition split into two parts in the modern age, as an old, anti-Christian idea, which Christianity had expunged, crept back in. In my book Covenant I call it ‘the Idea’, as opposed to what I call ‘the Order’. The ‘Idea’ is that I am god, with the creative power to order reality and decide for myself what is right and wrong. This ancient heresy has been refreshed in our times precisely by the principle of individual rights and freedoms that Christianity gave us. This is because we have steadily degraded the other side of the Christian bequest: the other-facing, institutional life that gave individuals a more textured sense of who they were, i.e. members of a community with something to live for outside themselves. The consequence is both the narcissism of self-worship and the rise of identity culture - a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency.

Individual value and dignity, made safe and meaningful by a social arrangement which emphasises solidarity, peace and care for the stranger - these are the elements of what I call the ‘Order’. They are not absolute principles: even individual rights to life and liberty must be constrained in certain circumstances, and other-facing generosity likewise needs to be limited in order to be sustained. To take a current example, ‘care for the stranger’ does not, in my view, mean offering a home in the UK to anyone who manages to arrive on our shores and claim asylum. It does mean treating every asylum seeker humanely, whether we admit them or remove them, and it means committing part of our wealth and power to preventing, or mitigating the effects of, war and natural disaster in other parts of the world.

How does such a covenantal politics approach other policy areas? The principles that Graham Tomlin set out in the report he compiled after the Grenfell Tower fire, after listening to local voices, are a helpful guide. We need to ‘humanise welfare’, dismantling the inefficient bureaucracies which see people as units to be managed, rather than as people to be helped and given responsibility and agency, and build instead relational systems of social support. We need to ‘provide homes’, which means so much more than the sterile term ‘housing’: it means attractive, affordable, safe buildings where people can live both with privacy and in community. As this suggests we need to help people ‘become neighbours’, with the means and the motivation to connect with others who belong to different identity groups. We should ‘notice faith’: as happened after Grenfell, it is local community faith groups which more than any official agency provide support, belonging, cohesion, and practical change at a local level.

And lastly, overall, we need to ‘renew democracy’. In Graham’s words, ‘we need to find ways to enable people, especially in more deprived areas, to have more of a say in issues that directly affect their lives, rather than politics happening at a distance by competing parties remote from local life.’ The sense of this is both deeply conservative (small-c) and deeply radical. Of course, we need power to be close to the people; this was the traditional way of things before the Durkheim and his followers decided that the centralised state, not local civil institutions, was the proper place for managing human services. In the Middle Ages, according to Robert Tombs’ history of England, fully a third of men, of all classes, played a responsible role of some kind in the management of their neighbourhood. Yet a return to this model would be radical, because it involves upending Durkheim’s assumptions - shared by his heirs in the school of New Public Management beloved of the Blairites - about the proper arrangement of society.

We need a gentle revolution: a return to some old ideas about social organisation that prioritise human relationships, the organic and the natural over utility, efficiency and equality of outcome; ideas which actually lead to a more useful, more efficient and genuinely more equal system. These are the ideas of what I call the Order, derived from theories of the social covenant that lie deep in our history but which are also best fitted to the modern world.

In the age of tech we can create a decentralised, responsive and personalised system that will give us both belonging and agency. We can recreate a more localised economy, but this time more fair, equal and capable of supporting a larger and more diverse population than the pre-modern world knew. And we can make a democracy that more closely reflects the principle that we all, whether progressive or conservative, share a common inheritance and belong to a single political community.

Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation is published by Forum Press.