I gave a lecture on Tuesday.
“So what”, I hear you cry.
Well, it is my job; but this one was actually fun, because I got to talk for an hour about my favourite artist, the dazzling star of the Florentine Renaissance, the one, the only Donatello.
Thing is, it was a terrible lecture.
It wasn’t terrible because it was incoherent, or inaudible, or even because nobody but me cares about Donatello.
It was terrible because it was biased.
My somewhat opinionated argument was simply that Donatello is the greatest artist who ever lived, anywhere, in any medium, at any time.
Now I’m not supposed to say things like that. I can like Donatello. But I can’t like him that much.
I’m supposed to be appropriately measured, academically balanced.
You see, no-one likes bias. Bias smacks of unfairness, inequality, inequity.
And yet I reckon we are all biased.
We prefer Bolly over Moet, Eternal over All Saints, even a female Doctor over a male, perhaps.
It seems almost impossible to take a balanced view of everything.
And in that, I’d argue that we’re in very good company.
Because I have a suspicion that God is biased.
It’s very hard indeed to read the Bible without noticing how often we are told to care for the poor, how often it’s the foreigner, the widow, the orphan who is the object of God’s concern.
Now I’m pretty sure that God loves all of us, equally. But I’m equally sure that she recognizes that we don’t love each other equally – so God’s bias points us to where love and care are most needed, where a change in the balance between the powerful and the powerless is required to make things fair, to bring about justice.
So we can continue with our other, petty biases, mostly because it doesn’t matter which band or brand of champagne we prefer, or even whether Donatello is the greatest artist who ever lived. (He is.)
But when it comes to caring for the weak and the vulnerable, bias isn’t just desirable; I think it’s essential, so we can say, as Dr Who does of Earth: they are protected.
The image above is a detail from Donatello’s Zuccone, or Habakkuk, made for the campanile of the duomo in Florence, c.1423-5.
The guests were David Tennant, Jennifer Saunders and Louise.
God is definitely biased to the powerless.