The Tree

THE TREE

Time to gather up the threads from spring and summer. I sum it up here - as briefly as I can. It is absolutely not for everyone, only for the 11-12 of you who still have the concentration and the bandwidth to see the patterns from altitude. 🦅

You can take it as October's challenge to fight your way through, if you are one of those practising learning to read again. It is worth it.

Enjoy. ❤️

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I. The Cap

There is a cap stuck to my water bottle, and it has been stuck there since the summer of 2024, when a directive from Brussels came into force and decided that it should no longer be possible to take it off.

I have got used to it, the way you get used to a stone in your shoe - you stop feeling it long before you stop limping. It is a small thing. It is in fact such a small thing that it feels petty even to mention it.

And right there, in that small embarrassment at mentioning it, lies what I would like to show you.

Because nobody asked for it.

Nobody took to the streets to get it, and nobody took to the streets to be rid of it, and when I ask the people around me what they think, they shrug and go on drinking with the plastic against their cheek, even though it cuts the lip and sometimes makes the contents slosh all over their clothes.

And it is that shrug I cannot leave alone, because it tells me something no speech in any parliament has ever told me.

The big things a civilisation prepares itself to say. Those it polishes, those it sends out for consultation, those it holds press conferences about. The small things, on the other hand, it says without having rehearsed, and that is why it is in the small things that you hear what it actually means.

And what it means is this -

Somewhere there sat People, capable and well-meaning People with long educations, looking at a continent of four hundred and fifty million inhabitants, and what they saw was not anyone you could ask for anything. They did not see a father who could teach his son to pick up after himself, or a town that could be ashamed of its beach, or a people who could will something together.

They saw a waste that had to be prevented, and so they prevented it in the only way you can prevent something in someone you do not count on - they made it impossible to do anything else.

I am not as such angry about the cap, and I would like that said, because anger would make it a cause, and it is not a cause, it is a fingerprint.

The same hand wrote, in 1988, a regulation numbered 1677, which decreed that a cucumber of the top class may bend at most ten millimetres for every ten centimetres of its length, and it held on to that for twenty-one years… and since then it has written rules for how much a company must report about itself before it may sell a nail, and how many degrees a house may lose through its windows. And every single one of those rules had a good reason, and I could quite certainly both understand and defend most of them one by one over dinner. It is not the rules I am looking at. It is the movement of the hand, the same small movement every time - like a mother straightening a collar the child outgrew long ago.

You only tie down what you no longer count on coming back by itself.

The rules are written by someone who does not believe that movement will ever come back - the thing that makes Man do what is right because it is right, even when no one sees it and no one has ordered it - and so they lay the law on the outside of us, where the conscience should have sat within.

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II. The Void

In the spring of 2003 a convention sat in Brussels under the leadership of the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and it was to write the first sentence of Europe's Constitution, that is, the sentence in which a continent was for the first time to say with ONE voice where it came from.

The first draft named Greece and Rome, and it named the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

And between them, across a stretch in which fifteen hundred years had passed with cathedrals, monasteries, universities, hospitals and a book that every single child on the continent could once quote from, there stood something about a spiritual impulse that was given no name.

Poland asked for the name. Italy asked for it, and an old and sick pope in Rome, John Paul II, asked for it again and again in his last years, and the answer was not that the name went in, but that Greece and Rome and the Enlightenment went out instead - so that none was named. And what remained was the wording that stands there still, because it survived both the French and the Dutch voters' no in 2005 and slid on into the Lisbon Treaty -

That Europe draws inspiration from its "cultural, religious and humanist inheritance".

Three adjectives and not one single name.

An inheritance you would like to have, from a relative you would rather not be seen with.

I have thought a lot about that sentence, and I do not really think it was written out of hatred, for hatred would have required a kind of faith. It was written out of the same embarrassment I feel when I mention the cap, only turned the other way - a sense that it would be improper, a bit much, faintly awkward in polite company to say out loud what the house is built of.

Athens you could name, and Rome you could name - the form and the frame, the columns and the law. It was Jerusalem that could not be said, the vertical, the spiritual, that which cannot be put to a vote, and rather than say it they kept silent about all three. They presumably knew that a house can stand for a while on two of its three load-bearing walls, long enough for those who live in it to start believing the third was just decoration.

A hundred and twenty years earlier Nietzsche had, in a story, let a madman run into the marketplace in the bright morning with a lit lantern, crying that he was looking for God.

And it is worth remembering who he was crying to, because it was not the believers. It was the modern and enlightened, those who had long since stopped believing, and they laughed at him and asked whether God had got lost like a child.

Then he said what he had come to say - that God is dead, that it is we who have killed him, and that none of them had grasped what they had done - that they had wiped away the entire horizon and unchained the earth from its sun and now stood there laughing while they fell.

They did not understand him. And when he saw it, he threw his lantern down on the cobblestones and said that he had come too early. The deed was done, but the news of it had not yet reached those who had done it themselves - the way the light from a star is long on its way, and you can stand and look calmly at it long after it has gone out.

That is the time we live in now. The news has finally, and unhappily, arrived.

And what has arrived is not what the laughing ones in the marketplace were counting on, for they were counting on an empty seat, a cleared table, a Man who could finally arrange his life sensibly without having to ask anyone above him for permission.

But Man is not made that way, and I can say that without opening a single holy book, I only need to look at what happened.

The urge to be clean did not disappear. The urge to belong among the righteous did not disappear, and the sense of owing something, of being in debt for the very fact of being here, did not disappear at all. Quite the opposite. It grew larger when there was no longer anyone to pay. For what you sacrifice yourself for is your God, and a human being who does not know to whom it is sacrificing does not stop sacrificing - it starts instead to look for something to lay on the altar.

The altar was left standing when we walked away from it…

And the first thing laid on it was Man himself.

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III. The Burden

In 2004 an oil company put a little calculator on its website. Maybe you remember it too. A lot of us went in to have a look and try it.

The company was called BP, the advertising agency was called Ogilvy & Mather, and the machine was friendly and easy to use - you typed in where you lived, what you drove, how often you flew and what you ate, and you got a number back, and the number had a name that was only a few years old, and that no ordinary person had yet taken in their mouth.

"Your footprint".

Your personal carbon footprint, measured in tonnes - and I have always found something almost touching in the fact that it was an oil company, of all things, that taught us to count ourselves.

Because that is what happened, and it happened so quietly that it did not feel like an event. We were simply given a new way to stand in front of the mirror and look at ourselves.

Before, a Man had stood in front of it trying to hold eye contact with himself and asking whether he was a good father or a bad neighbour, whether he had kept what he promised, and those questions could hurt - the way they can still hurt - but they had this in common, that they were about something you had done.

The new number was about something else. Because it did not measure what you had done wrong.

It measured how much space you took up.

Thirteen years later, in 2017, two researchers based at Lund University set out to calculate what an ordinary person in a rich country could do that would REALLY make a dent in "your footprint" - and they calculated thoroughly and published the result in a respected journal, and at the top of the list - far above the car and the steak and the flight - there it stood.

Have one fewer child.
58.6 tonnes a year.

I do not dispute the arithmetic, and I do not dispute a single measurement of the atmosphere, it is not the physics I am looking at here. I am looking at the fact that the sentence could be written at all, peer-reviewed, printed and quoted in newspapers across the continent, without anyone in that whole chain of… clever… people putting down the paper and saying -

"Hang on, something is wrong here. A child simply cannot stand in that column!?"

But it had already been said straight out in 1991, in a report from The Club of Rome, where the authors wrote that they had been searching for "a common enemy against whom we can unite" - and that they had landed on pollution, warming, water shortages and famine, and then they added the sentence that makes the whole report worth remembering.

And you may want to grab hold of your chair or hang on to the edge of the table here - because they wrote that all these dangers are caused by human intervention, and that "the real enemy then is humanity itself".

Let us just swallow that and take a breath.

Since then we have learned the sentence in several languages. In the spring of 2020 we learned to see one another's breath as a danger, and our own children as something that could kill their grandmother by hugging her, and in those same years a whole generation learned that you can be born with a debt written in your skin colour and your sex, which no conduct can ever pay off.

Emitter, carrier, oppressor.

Three vocabularies with three sets of experts and three kinds of forms, and beneath them lies one and the same grammar, and I assume every one of you knows it by now - it says that YOU are the problem, not by virtue of anything you did, but by virtue of having come.

The Old Story also knew something about guilt, I will be the first to say so, indeed it practically begins with it. But it did not begin *quite* with it.

For before the Fall there stands another sentence.

Said six times, and the seventh time with emphasis - that it was GOOD, very GOOD, and Man was set into the Good as something Willed, and when the guilt came, it came to one who was already loved - and it came with a door in it.

The new guilt, in the Story of the Zeitgeist, has no door. And a guilt you are born with, which no one can take off you, can only be made smaller in one way - it is what you feel being communicated to you every single day -

By there being less of you.
Less of you.

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IV. Necessity

On Wednesday 4 November 2020 the Danish prime minister stood at a press conference and announced that all the mink in the country were to be put down, more than fifteen million animals, an entire industry - and I remember where I was sitting, and I remember shaking my head.

It turned out a few days later that there was no law giving the government the right to do it, and a good year and a half after that a commission produced more than sixteen hundred pages on who knew what and when, and all of that matters - but it is not what I want to point to.

I want to point to the days in between. The days when nobody asked about the law, because something in the room had already spoken that stood above it.

The year before, in January 2019, a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl had stood in Davos before the richest People in the world and said that she did not want their hope, she wanted them to panic, and that they should act as if the world were on fire.

And they clapped. And clapped. And clapped. Some cried. Some of it looked almost like tears of joy. But what do I know. At any rate, the year after they invited her again.

In November 2019 the European Parliament declared a "climate emergency" with 429 votes in favour - and two weeks later Ursula von der Leyen presented "the Green Deal" and called it, hold on to something, "Europe's man on the moon moment".

Then came the virus. That period can hardly have passed you by.

Then came 27 February 2022, when Olaf Scholz stood in the Bundestag three days after the Russian tanks had rolled across the border and said the word Zeitenwende and put a hundred billion euros on the table, and here at home the prime minister told her acting chief of defence in February 2025 that he should "buy, buy, buy", and in March it was called "ReArm Europe" and eight hundred billion. Euros.

Three emergencies in six years, and I am not saying any of them is made up. The virus killed People, as viruses do every winter, the tanks are made of steel, and the atmosphere does not care what I think of it.

It is not the content that is alike.

It is the sentence.

Every single time it was the same sentence, said by the same people from the same podiums in the same tone of voice - "there is no time, and so there is no choice".

And notice what that sentence does to a people already walking around with a debt it cannot get rid of. Because it does not land as a threat. It lands as a relief. At last there is something to pay with, at last you can do something, go without something, sanitise something, sort something, keep your distance, keep an eye on the others, turn something down, and while you are doing it you are for a while among the righteous - and whoever asks about the law or the price or just for a pause to think it over has at once placed himself outside. With the price that comes with it.

I have stood there a few times by now, peacefully, watching.

The German jurist Carl Schmitt wrote in 1922 that "sovereign is he who decides on the exception", and unfortunately he knew what he was talking about. For in the old Europe there was something that stood above the king.

The king was under the law, the law was under the truth, and the truth had a source no king could move, and that is why a prophet could walk in to a king and tell him to his face that he was wrong and walk out again alive.

Take God away, and the law is still there, in thicker volumes than ever, but there is no longer anything above it - except the one thing that has always been able to set a law aside.

Necessity.

That is how Europe got its new highest authority, and it has a property no God has had before it - it must not end.

A danger that blew over would take the authority with it, and that is why one replaces the next, without a gap, and that is why they all pull in the same direction, towards the state where necessity is at its purest, where anything can be demanded and nobody asks why.

He who can only gather his people around a danger - instead of the Good, the Beautiful and the True - comes to need the danger.

I leave it to you to judge who you think is playing that game.

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V. The Law Over Our Heads

On 2 June 2017 Folketinget, the Danish parliament, abolished the blasphemy clause, and it was done with a certain solemnity, for a provision of that kind had stood in the criminal code since 1866 and had become a relic, it was said, of a time when a state thought it had to protect the sacred with prison.

The abolition did not last very long, though.

Six years and six months later, on 7 December 2023, the same Folketing passed, by 94 votes to 77, a law that makes it punishable by up to two years in prison to treat a writing of significant religious importance to a recognised religious community in "an improper manner".

Read that sentence once more, the way it stands, and notice what it does not say.

Everyone in the chamber knew which book it was about, and which embassies had been calling, and the book is not named. Not by a single word.

And that is how they all look when you lay them side by side.

Since 1 August 2018 it has been forbidden to cover your face in public places, and the police guidance on the law also mentions false beards… and balaclavas, because the law could not say what it meant.

That same year it was agreed that children in certain residential areas who are not already in day care must, from the age of one, be handed over for twenty-five hours a week to learn about Danish traditions and holidays, Christmas and Easter included, from a state and a current government that does not itself believe in either of them.

And since 1 January 2019 you cannot become a Danish citizen without shaking hands with a representative of the municipality, palm against palm and without a glove, that is how it is written in the executive order.

I understand every single one of those laws, and I would have voted for several of them if they had been put to a vote - and that is precisely what makes them so hard to look at.

For the need for a law about a handshake is a confession.

A handshake is something a boy learns from his father without knowing that he is learning it, and it sits in the body long before it can be explained, and the day a people has to write it down in a paragraph and set an official to watch over it, and the police and the courts to enforce it, it has said out loud that it no longer counts on that sort of thing being passed on by itself.

It is the cap again. It is the same hand with the same movement, only laid on something that means everything.

France has done it longest and most thoroughly - the 2004 law on conspicuous religious symbols in schools, the 2010 law on the face, the 2021 law on respect for the principles of the Republic, and in August 2023 a minister who had to come out and ban a particular long dress. Twenty years of legislation, each step more detailed than the last, and I do not think there is a single Frenchman who would claim that the country is more united today than in 2004. Certainly not after the past few weeks.

Then came the EU's pact on migration and asylum, ten legal acts adopted in May 2024, and it does solve a problem, it has to be said, it just solves a different problem from the one we have.

The problem we have cannot be written into a legal act, and it has nothing to do with skin colour and very little to do with borders. For if three hundred thousand ethnic Danes converted to Islam tomorrow, we would be standing in the same place.

Muslim newcomers have come here with an order in which the Law lies outside Man and above him, in scripture, in the clan, in honour, in the eyes of others, and that order is old and coherent and knows where it comes from.

Here the new arrivals met an order in which the Law once lay inside Man, as Conscience, put in there through a thousand years of one particular story about each person being accountable to one who sees in secret.

A Man can pack his faith in a suitcase, but he cannot pack his scaffolding, and that goes both ways. They brought their faith with them. We had torn ours down and called it "liberation".

And that is why the guilt is ours, and I mean that entirely without the relish we otherwise take in saying that sort of thing. We invited People into a house without telling them whose house it was, because we no longer knew ourselves - that was the sentence Europe's Constitution could not write - and when they did not become like us by living here, we sent social workers - and when that did not help, we sent paragraphs.

The believing Muslim who came is not confused. He is often the only one in the room who knows what he kneels before, and he looks at us with something that resembles pity - and I cannot blame him for it.

We answer an Islamic law over our heads with a law over our heads, and we lose - for his has a God behind it, and ours has a committee that no longer believes in anything.

He who does not know what he himself kneels before ends up having to legislate on how the others must stand.

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VI. The Goat

In Leviticus, the sixteenth chapter, there is a set of instructions.

Two goats are brought before the entrance of the tent, and lots are cast between them, and one is sacrificed, and over the other, the living one, the high priest lays both his hands and confesses the guilt of the whole people, all their transgressions, EVERYTHING that has gone wrong in the course of the year, and lays it on the animal's head, and then the goat is led out into the wilderness by a man standing ready, and it carries all of it with it out into a desolate land.

What has always struck me about that text is how awake it is.

It knows exactly what it is doing. It knows that a people cannot live with its guilt, and that the guilt has to go somewhere, and so it gives the guilt a date, one day a year, and an animal, and a wilderness, and a ritual with witnesses, so that nobody can be in any doubt about what is going on.

It is not primitive. It is some of the wisest writing there is about human beings, and the French thinker René Girard spent a whole life showing what happens when you forget the ritual and keep the urge - then the hands find a head to rest on by themselves - and it is no longer an animal.

And now comes the part I can hardly write without growing uneasy inside. And with me that takes a bit.

The people who gave us the word became the people we did it to.

To the capitalist the Jew was a communist, and to the communist he was a capitalist. To the nationalist he was the rootless one without a fatherland, and now that he has got a fatherland, he is a nationalist, and as everyone knows, that is just about the worst thing you can be.

The Church, the tsar, Hitler, Stalin, the ayatollahs - regimes that could not agree on a single other thing in the world could agree on this. Just as, it seems, lecturers at the University of Copenhagen can.

When a prejudice follows a culture, you can explain it by the culture. When it turns up regardless of which culture we are talking about, it is measuring something else, and it is not them it is measuring.

Then look at which words our own time has chosen.

Colonial power. Apartheid. Racial segregation. Genocide. I am not saying one may not judge a war, and I am not saying the dead children in Gaza are any less dead than they are. A state can do wrong, and Israel's government can be criticised like any other. I am just asking you to notice the vocabulary, for every single one of those words is the name of a European sin.

They are our colonies, our race laws, our genocides, it is exactly the debt the third movement above was about - the debt we are born with and cannot get rid of, and here it is gathered up, word by word, and laid on one head.

And feel the relief in it.

If only the Jews have become the Nazis, then the accounts are settled, and Europe can for the first time in eighty years straighten its back.

In the UN Human Rights Council the agenda has since 2007 had a fixed item, Item 7, which deals with only one country, while the rest of the world's countries - Iran and North Korea and China included - have to share what is left.

That is what a ritual looks like once it has become rules of procedure. And when the EU's Agency for Fundamental Rights published its large survey of Europe's Jews in 2024, carried out before 7 October, 96 percent answered that they had encountered antisemitism in the past year, and 76 percent that they at least now and then hide who they are.

They are leaving again. From here. Ask them why.

But there is something new this time, and it is what makes the rage so bottomless.

The goat was supposed to go out into the wilderness and stay there. It was not supposed to build a country out there, and it certainly was not supposed to have an army, for the whole mechanism rests on the one who carries the guilt not striking back, and a scapegoat that defends itself has broken the only agreement it was ever offered.

And beneath that there lies yet another layer, and it is the one I think goes deepest.

It was this people who carried the sentence that Man is created in an image - God's image - through three thousand years, letter by letter, and it was they who came with the Law that stands above the king.

They are the witness. They are the third load-bearing wall itself, the city Europe's constitution could not bring itself to name - and a civilisation in flight from its source can forgive almost anything - except the one who reminds it where it came from.

Here the tree's two branches meet.

Necessity needs a danger.
Guilt needs somewhere to be.

And when the two find the same head, you have what in every other age has been called the prelude.

A people that has forgotten how to be forgiven always remembers who usually pays.

Did you catch that?

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VII. The Door

There is a sentence most of us know by heart without ever having decided to learn it, because it was said over our heads at baptisms and weddings and funerals, long before we could have an opinion about it, and it goes -

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

I think I have said it several thousand times.

I think I was over forty before I heard that it is a sentence about an account, and that it asks for the one thing none of the six preceding movements has been able to provide - that a figure be struck out.

The one who taught it to us stood one morning in the temple court in Jerusalem when a band of men came dragging a woman who had been caught in the act. They had the law with them, and the law was clear, and they had the stones for her in their hands, and they had necessity on their side, for what becomes of a people if that sort of thing is allowed to pass.

Everything this essay has been about is standing in that square.

The Guilt, the Law over our heads, the Haste and the Necessity - and in the middle of the circle one Human being on whom all the others' unrest can be laid.

And He the story turns on does something strange.

He bends down and writes with his finger in the ground, and no one knows what, and he lets them wait, and that is perhaps the first thing he does to them - he takes the haste away from them. Then he straightens up and says that whichever of them is without guilt can go right ahead and throw the first stone, and then he bends down again.

He does not abolish the law, and he does not say that she is innocent.

He just moves the question off her head and back into their own chest, in where the Law was supposed to live. And it is written that they went away. One by one. The eldest first.

The eldest first. They had lived the longest and knew the most about themselves.

That could have been enough, and many clever People have thought it was enough, a teacher with a good line who got a crowd to drop their stones. But he did not stop there, and this is where I can no longer talk about him the way I would talk about a thinker.

Not long after, he stepped into the circle himself.

The Romans had the Law, the priests had Necessity - it is better for you that one Man should die for the people than that the whole people should perish, that is how it reads, word for word - the crowd had shouted, and his own friends ran. There is no one in that story who can point at the others. We were all there.

And the man by the river, John, who had seen him come walking three years earlier, a Jew speaking of a Jew in words from Leviticus, had already said what was going to happen - behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

So this time the guilt was not laid on one who could not say no.

It was taken up by one who could.

That is the whole difference, and it is so great that the world has been divided into a before and an after ever since.

For a scapegoat only works as long as no one sees that it is innocent, and here the innocent one hangs out in the open on a hill outside the city, so that no one can help seeing it, and since that day the mechanism has not been able to bring peace, only to demand more. That is why our age has to sacrifice so much and gets so endlessly little for it.

Now go through the Tree here from the bottom up with that in your hand.

And let me say it quite plainly.

Everything I have described comes from one thing - we abolished God and kept the guilt.

We still feel that we owe something, that we are wrong, that we take up too much space, but there is no longer anyone we can go to and have it forgiven. So we have to pay ourselves, and when we cannot pay, someone else has to.

Christianity says something very simple about that guilt.

It does not say that you are innocent. It says that the guilt has been paid, that Jesus took it upon himself when he died on the cross, and that you are therefore forgiven, not because you have earned it, but because he did it for you.

That is what the word Grace means.

Now look at what happens to each of the things we have been through, if it is true.

You are not a burden. You are willed. Your footprint, your breath and your skin colour are not a debt you have to go on paying off for the rest of your life, and your child is not an entry in a ledger.

You can no longer be frightened into obedience. He who is forgiven does not need to buy himself a clear conscience by obeying the next emergency, and he can calmly ask about the law and the price and ask for time to think it over, even when everyone is shouting that there is no time. The first thing the angels say in the Bible, almost every time they appear, is - FEAR NOT.

The Law can come back inside Man. He who knows that he is seen and loved does what is right because it is right, and not because someone is watching. That is what the prophet Jeremiah, a Jew, wrote six hundred years before Jesus - "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts". A people that has the Law there does not need a paragraph in order to shake hands, and it can meet the believing Muslim without fear and without contempt, as someone who knows what they themselves believe in.

And you need no scapegoat. He who is forgiven has no need for someone else to be guilty in order to be innocent himself. He has no need for Israel to be the worst country in the world, and he has no need for the Jew to carry what Europe cannot bear to look at in itself.

I cannot prove any of this to you, of course, and I am not going to try. It cannot be passed in any parliament, and it cannot be imposed on anyone, for a forgiveness you were forced to accept would just be one more law. You can say no. It is the only thing in this whole essay that does not bind you.

Jesus himself told what God is like, with a story about a father whose son wanted his inheritance paid out so he could leave home.

The father gave him the money and let him go. He did not hold him back, and he set no one to follow him, he just stood every day looking down the road for him, and when the boy one day came into sight far off, poor and ashamed, the old man ran to meet him as fast as his legs would carry him.

That is how God waits for a Man and for a people. Or for you.

Nietzsche's madman looked for God with a lit lantern in the bright morning and did not find him. But it was not God who had got lost.

It was we who had left.

You do not have to be the sacrifice yourself, and you do not have to find one.

It was offered once and for all on a Friday outside Jerusalem, and on Sunday morning the tomb was empty.

❤️‍🔥🪽

Yes. I know it was long.

Do you think a formed mind comes from reading short or thinking short? 🙃