Keeping quiet

E. M. Forster is quoted as saying "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

Several obituaries to Lord (Keith) Newton of Braintree have claimed that he was the only other politician to have known of the affair between John Major and Edwina Currie back in the eighties when they were in government but before he was leader of his party and prime minister. If he did know he cetainly kept quiet about it and won himself some warm tributes for his personal loyalty.

I'm not so sure. Did not his complicity in the cover-up amount to an abuse of political power? Had word of their affair ever got out it is highly unlikely that Mr Major would have won any subsequent party or national elections. Was this not a historically significant deception? Did not the electorates have a right to weigh such knowledge about their candidate before casting their votes? By withholding this vital piece of information did not Mr Newton ensure that John Major's campaigns for leadership were based on a false prospectus? Was this any more than a spectacular denial of democracy, the people's right to know and judge for itself?

More Confessions

"When I returned from the first of my travels in Eastern Europe, in the early 1960s, and uttered such elementary truths as that the Communist regimes were cruel, repressive dictatorships; that they had no regard for human rights; that they showed undisguised contempt for the people they governed; that their normal methods had always included torture, the imprisonment of opponents, and judicial murder; that they were hated and feared by most of the people who lived under them; that they contained as an all-pervading feature inequalities of personal power wider than could be found in the West; that they did not even have the redeeming feature of being efficient, but were, on the contrary, inefficient to the point of near-shambles; and that they devoted colossal resources to trying to cover all this over by lies, including most of their official statistics—I found virtually no one willing to believe me. Most of my Labour Party friends thought I was passing through some sort of McCarthyite episode. Nor was it only left-of-centre people who reacted against the truth in this way. My conservative friends thought I was ‘exaggerating wildly’, ‘going too far’, ‘over the top’, and so on; and they kept responding to my remarks with sentences that began ‘Come, come."



Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

Confessions of a Philosopher

"Before Freud was even born, Schopenhauer expounded what is normally thought of as Freud’s theory of repression, a theory which Freud himself pronounced to be the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Schopenhauer provided all the necessary connecting links in the argument: at length and in detail, and with memorable examples, he spelled out that the greater part of our own inner lives is unknown to us; that it is unknown to us because it is repressed; that it is repressed because to face up to it would cause us a degree of disturbance that we could not handle; that this is so because it does not fit in with the view of ourselves that we wish to maintain; that this incompatibility is caused by high levels of such things as sexual motivation, self-seeking, aggression, envy, fear and cruelty whose presence within us we do not wish to acknowledge, not even in the secrecy of our own thoughts; and so we deceive ourselves about what our own characters and motivations are, allowing only such interpretations of them to appear in our conscious minds as we can deal with."



Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

Starting over

I have for the umpteenth time in my life embarked upon a reconstruction of my religious faith, hopeful as ever that ‘all that is necessary’ is to be found in the unsearched riches of my Christian tradition.


Not quite believing in belief. Not quite fideism. But a damned close thing!

Condescension

If you think that the worst thing about being human is that we suffer and die, then you may find redemption in the passion of Christ. But if you feel, as do I increasingly, that being born at all is a very mixed blessing then you may even more come to recognise in the conception and birth of Jesus the most divine self-emptying.

An experience of family

A family, I find, is a collection of people who come together from time to time - to celebrate the birth of a new member, a wedding, an anniversary, but mostly, sadly, nowadays a funeral - without ever asking what it's all for. Moreover if anyone were so bold as to pose such a question, the others would hardly agree about what it meant, let alone the worthwhileness of asking it.

A wintry view

Most people live as though human life is pointless, whilst at the same time pretending that it is very interesting and expending a lot of money and effort to reproduce and prolong it. A truly thoughtful religion still seems the best hope. If only there was one.

Say cheese.

Visited a local church coffee morning Saturday. Surrounded, swamped, immediately by friendly, welcoming, smiley people trying hard to make us feel at home and persuade us what a nice lot they are. Not one of them was as honest as Kelly Rowland in The Times who confesses "I can be a bitch. We all can." I personally can cope with that kind of honesty. I'm usually reassured by it. I know what a seething mass of envy, resentment and even murderous rivalry the average church congregation can be. I still carry the scars. Alan Ayckbourn's depiction of family life more nearly reflects the reality of the way Christians love and hate one another than the story we were told on Saturday.

Customers or burdens?

Adam Smith Institute expounds a typical argument on the subject of private medicine. I would once have dismissed fiercely this way of thinking, but after recent experiences and some alarming news stories I am beginning to wonder.

In a recent book on The Morality of Capitalism, US think-tanker Tom Palmer talks of his treatment for a serious condition in both public and private hospitals. In the private hospital, he was seen quickly by the right people, treated as a human being, everyone took an interest in him, and they respected his wishes. In the public hospital, he waited, was bossed around despite being in pain, had no human engagement with his doctor, and was generally treated as a piece of meat.

I don't think for a minute that working for a private or a public institution fundamentally changes people's basic humanity. But the incentives in a private system nevertheless encourage them to show more of their human side. That is because they see the clients they have to deal with as valued customers: their job, their income, would not exist if those customers were not satisfied. And they know from their own experience that the way a service is delivered – the cheeriness, the human engagement, the concern – are as much a part of a customer's satisfaction as getting the service itself. By contrast, the incentive structure in too many public services induces staff to regard customers as a necessary inconvenience. Shouldn't we prefer a system that positively encourages and brings out people's humanity, rather than one that discourages and so obviously represses it?

From here to paternity

My dad was an autodidact. He taught me about existentialism without ever using the word.

He was admittedly rueful about the terms of human existence - or two of them: that we have no choice at all about a) whether we are born, and b) whether we die. These are big decisions. It can't be right, my father thought, that we are excluded from them; having excluded me.

My great uncle George declared his own contempt for life in general and the human race in particular. He advocated infanticide whilst, to the best of my knowledge, never practicing it - to the best of my knowledge and the considerable relief of his only child, Bernard.

In existentialism - as in most things - I have been a late developer.

It has slowly dawned on me that the only things we can promise our progeny is that they will suffer, and they will die. Even taxes are not that inevitable. Our offspring may conclude that the joy of being alive has outweighed the pain, but they may not. We can never be sure.

The paradox is nicely summed up by that great existentialist Woody Allen: 

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon."

Existential Christian

I'm not sure whether this works as a description of what and where I am.


The Dean of King's College, London, Sydney Evans, in my time there as an undergraduate and trainee Anglican priest, encapsulated his own existentialist approach to life and faith in the three questions: Who am I? What may I hope? What should I do?


I'm currently more drawn to the prior question, 'Is life, my life, human life, worth living? Is human survival and reproduction a good idea? The New Darwinian Atheists I've read seem to sign up enthusiastically to propagation of the 'selfish gene'. I'm not convinced. Something missing. Religion? Transcendence? Medication?

A plea for balance

Dr Denis McEoin, a non-Jew, and senior editor of The Middle East Quarterly, has written to the Edinburgh University Student Association following their vote to boycott Israel and all Israeli goods because it is an 'apartheid regime'. He's not saying Israel's perfect, but . . . .

May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain’s great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field.

I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a ‘Nazi’ state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nüremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Baha’is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha’is... Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott.

I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it? Of course he would, and he would not have stopped there. Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense to you. I have given you some of the evidence. It’s up to you to find out more.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Denis MacEoin

A Weepie

Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says "But Doctor...
I am Pagliacci."

Beyond good and evil

There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Re-imagining Anglicanism

I'm reading 'Anglicanism Re-imagined' by Andrew Shanks.

He says the job of theology is to make life difficult. I used to preach that the job of the Church is to comfort the troubled, and trouble the comfortable. I now wonder whether we should be making life any more difficult than it already is, regardless of how comfortable we might be.

In fact the more I think about it the more it seems to me that life is nearly impossible and most of reality quite unknowable.

Congratulations

Mark Vernon applauds Philosophy Now for its 200th issue. And for dedicating it to the most important subject in philosophy: love.


But is love really more important than, say, the mystery of existence?

Better Questions

A conversation with friends this week left me searching for a paragraph in a book I read forty years ago as a young student. I found it, as if I always knew it was there. It's from Voices in the Wilderness by John Bowden.


There is a point, he writes, at which our ultimate questions turn round and question us. He then goes on to quote Peter L Berger:

A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same - 'Don't be afraid - everything is in order, everything is alright.' If all goes well, the child will be reassured, his trust in reality recovered, and in this trust he will return to sleep.

Bowden then continues:

A common enough scene, yet it raises one of those questions fundamental to our very existence. Is what the mother says true, or is she lying to the child? The mother's actions are true only if there is some truth to the religious understanding of human existence. For if reality is limited to the natural reality that we see around us, then the reassurance given to the child, as it may be given to other people in other situations, even on a deathbed or by a graveside, is ultimately a lie. For all is not well. The terror which the child is experiencing is the ultimate reality, and the reassurance given is no more than a diversion. At the heart of the process which is essential to the making of a human person, at one of the most crucial moments of trust, there is a lie.

Since my earliest years as a student of theology and throughout my training for ordination in the Church of England it has seemed to me as though psychological forces have been at work to deflect attention away from this ultimate and existential kind of question and towards issues pertaining to society and politics. Religion has come to be seen as valuable only insofar as it enables human beings to live together in peace and with justice - the more peace and justice in the world, the more firmly established, the less we need religion at all.

The above quotes from Berger and Bowden go some way to explain why I have never quite been won over by this new theology. I think that the older questions were better.

Ain't No Cure

Sally Vickers, the writer, is quoted as saying that there is no cure for being alive. I find these existential reflections ever more appealing. We have recently had a new baby born into our already extended family. I've come to see being born as being volunteered - for life.

At the same time my wife's eighty-nine year old father proudly, if naively, declares that he has never volunteered himself for anything. I suppose it could be said of his four children: he volunteered them.

The Makings of a Vicar

It was over forty years ago. I was leading worship in the parish where I served my first curacy. Two old ladies sat together in the congregation. One turned to the other and, slightly louder than seemed strictly necessary, pronounced, "He's the makings of a Vicar."


I have been striving manfully ever since to live up to that early acclamation. The burden of expectation, imagined and real, has sometimes been trickier than you might think.


For a while now I have not been what I would call a Sunday Christian. I haven't been in church regularly on Sunday for over ten years, since indeed I retired from professional ministry. I have been instead a kind of Tuesday Christian, until recently offering the Eucharist at noon in a local parish church and giving pastoral support as chaplain in a hospice and, more lately, a cathedral setting.


But not usually on Sunday.


Sunday feels to me like a day of celebration - resurrection, confidence, strong affirmation - a day to stand up and be counted - to fly the flag - a day for Christians to be at their best.


I feel that I am more of a Tuesday Christian - a marginal believer - a devout sceptic - a displaced person - a disappointed priest.

UNCOMFORTABLE

When Chris Jefferies, landlord of Joanna Yeates, was being held for questioning about her murder, a crime of which we now know he was entirely innocent, our daily tabloid newspapers wasted no time in revealing details about his hair-style, his dress, his manner, his taste in literature, his love of the Christan Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in a blatant attempt to link these 'eccentricities' to the suspicion of his guilt.


Compare this with the lead story in today's Times, Young girls lured with drink were 'sold for sex'. The nine men accused are photographed and named. They are clearly of Asian background. What their religion might be we are not told. The seven teenage girls who were abused are simply described as from the small Staffordshire town of Wellington, near Telford, again without reference to their religion or ethnicity.

A word of advice to Mr Jefferies might be: If you don't want to attract the wrong sort of attention from the press, choose your religious affiliation more carefully - or at least keep quiet about it.