Anjoum Noorani, 31, the leader of the Papal Visit Team, has been suspended pending a misconduct investigation and three other staff have been ‘moved to other duties’ and will be sent on ‘diversity training’ by the department [my emphasis]. That’s the ticket! I have written on the main themes of the book for this week’s Spectatormagazine and for Standpoint which has made it the cover story. You can also read an early review of it here. Although the book is not published in the UK, you can easily obtain it fromAmazon. I will be in Washington DC and New York City over the next few days to promote it. On Monday May 3 I will be speaking at the American Enterprise Institute in DC, and on Thursday May 6 at a Hudson Institute event in New York. perfectly legitimate to raise the topic. Big of him. The fact is that the second most pressing concern on voters’ minds has been all but invisible as an issue across all three main political parties. The most toxic aspect of Brown’s debacle yesterday, when he accused pensioner Gillian Duffy of being a ‘bigoted woman’, was that the appalling attitude he displayed could not be dismissed as a one-off, heat of the moment, poor fellow under enormous pressure sort of thing. That whole constellation of contempt for ordinary people, consisting of a) the view that their attitudes on immigration and a host of other matters are pig-ignorant and prejudiced and b) the politicians’ pretence that they are... Spectator, 30 April 2010 It is a truth universally acknowledged that reason and religion are mortal foes. Reason deals a death blow to religion; religion is clearly irrationality on stilts. If only religion didn’t exist, reason would rule the world and there would be no more wars, tyrannies or murderous hatreds. It follows therefore that religious people are either stupid or unbalanced and are inimical to progress, modernity and happiness. Well, this universal truth isn’t true at all. In fact, reason is underpinned by religion — at least the Biblical variety. Without Genesis there would have been no Western science, no equality and human rights and no liberal belief in progress. I see I’ve already caused you to throw your Spectator round the room. What about the Enlightenment, you cry. That’s what gave rise to Western science and the opening of the Western mind, precisely because it ushered in an age of reason that knocked religious obscurantism out of the park. Ah yes, the open Western mind. But if you look around you — with a mind that is truly open — you will see much evidence that the Western mind is currently snapping tightly shut. Indeed, the paradox is that some of our most noisy advocates of reason say a lot of things which are demonstrably absurd. Take those scientists who promote not science but scientism — the belief that science can deal with every aspect of existence. The scorn and vituperation they heap upon religious believers is fathomless. And yet their materialism leads them to say things which are just… well, nutty. For example, Professor Richard Dawkins told me he was ‘not necessarily averse’ to the idea that life on earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided that such an intelligence had arrived from another planet. How can it be that our pre-eminent apostle of reason appears to find little green men more plausible as an explanation for the origin of life than God? The answer is that in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology. Contrary to popular myth, Western science was not created by Enlightenment secularism. It grew out of the revolutionary claim in the Bible that the universe was the product of a rational Creator, who endowed man with reason so that he could ask questions about the natural world. With the rise of secularism, the striking thing is that people didn’t lose the drive to believe. They stopped having religious faith — but that drive was diverted instead into the creation of a wide variety of secular religions, otherwise known as ideologies. But these are the true enemies of truth and reason. Just look at environmentalism. This defines the modern ‘progressive’ — and yet it is fundamentally irrational, illiberal and pre-modern. Based on a spiritual belief in the innate, organic harmony of the universe, it grew out of pagan and animistic ideas which not only defied reason but, in elevating emotion and subjectivity as well as downgrading mankind, were to feed directly into such regressive thinking as eugenics and fascism. Indeed, all the ideologies so prevalent today in ‘progressive’ circles — scientism, environmentalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, moral and cultural relativism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism — are deeply reactionary, illiberal and coercive. This is because ideology, by wrenching evidence to fit a prior idea, is inimical to reason and sacrifices truth to power. That’s why environmentalism’s most famous offspring, man-made global warming theory, is totalitarian gobbledegook. There is no evidence to support it, plenty of evidence against it and even more evidence that much of the ‘science’ on which it is based is fraudulent. But like other ideologies, it appears immune to challenge, however compelling the case against it. And that’s because these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way, but rather self-evident truths which have the infallibility of religious dogma — and which are equipped with secular inquisitions against heretics. They represent not a point of view but virtue itself. All opposition must therefore be stamped out. So reason is replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate. Thus scientists sceptical of man-made global warming are subjected to funding famine, character assassination or professional ostracism. Or Christians asserting the need for a child to be brought up by a mother and father find themselves forced off adoption panels and vilified as ‘homophobic’ bigots. In Manichean fashion, the left divides the world into rival camps of good and evil. Anyone who is not on the left is ‘the right’ and thus beyond the moral pale. But much that is demonised in this way as ‘right-wing’ is simply an attempt to uphold truth, reality and liberty against the distortions, fabrications and bullying of ideology. What’s really odd is this. Just like the persecution of medieval heretics, these secular inquisitions are driven at root by fear — the terror that a challenge to the Received Truth might actually succeed. Scientific triumphalists may realise that what they are saying about the origin of the universe is ludicrous. Yet they persist because of their fear of the alternative explanation — God. As the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin has candidly explained, such scientists ‘take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs’ because they ‘cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door’. So what is it about the possibility of even a Divine toenail over the threshold that terrifies these men of reason into becoming so irrational? Or to put it another way, if they are going to believe in ten impossible things before breakfast, then why not believe in the one impossible thing which happens to have an infrastructure of critical thought, thousands of years of history and their own civilisation attached to it? It can’t be that religion has committed terrible atrocities, because atheism has committed terrible atrocities too. Maybe it’s the fear that Biblical morality fetters the freedom to be footloose and fancy-free. After all, if genes are selfish why should they alone have all the fun? Maybe it’s a projection on to religion of all the bad stuff in human nature. For if the Biblical God is the cause of intolerance and war, tyranny and genocide, then humanity gets a free pass. But since Biblical religion actually underpinned reason and morality, the decline of religion means the erosion of truth and conscience. If religious totalitarianism was rule by the Church and political totalitarianism was rule by the ‘general will’, this is cultural totalitarianism, or rule by the subjective individual. In Britain, the effects are plain to see. Everything is upside down: the transgressive becomes the norm while the normal is discriminatory; victims become aggressors while aggressors are indulged; education leaves children in a state of noble savagery; broken families are promoted as lifestyle choice. And a brutal utilitarianism means elderly or coma victims are starved and dehydrated to death, with anyone who dares to mention the sanctity of human life dismissed as a Bible-bashing nut-job. Once the pre-eminent nation of reason and free debate, tolerance and civility, Britain is now the global leader of the rout of rationality and the retreat to a pre-modern war of all against all, facilitated by secular ‘human rights’. Britain — first into the Enlightenment, and now first out. Melanie Phillips’s new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power is published by Encounter, New York. Jewish Chronicle, 30 April 2010 When the Sunday Telegraph revealed the offensive and infantile suggestions for the Pope’s visit to Britain by a bunch of extremely undiplomatic diplomats, some in the Jewish community may have found themselves for once on the side of mandarins in the Foreign Office. What was uppermost in these officials’ minds was the Vatican’s recent record on issues such as paedophile priests, gay rights, abortion and contraception. It is a fair bet that what was not on their minds was the attitude of Benedict XVI towards Israel and the Jews. This record is certainly a troubling one. Benedict’s papacy has to be seen in the context of the Vatican’s continuing ambivalence towards its Jewish parent. On the one hand, it did make an effort to confront its endemic theological prejudice with the seminal encyclical Nostra Aetate, which absolved the Jews of collective guilt for the death of Jesus. It also opened diplomatic relations with Israel. Yet, despite such conciliatory moves, it has continued to display animosity towards Judaism and the Jewish people. Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, attempted to Christianise the Shoah by presenting Auschwitz as a Polish rather than a Jewish holocaust, supporting the building of a convent there and beatifying Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism. As Sergio Minerbi has noted in the Jewish Political Studies Review, Benedict has built upon John Paul’s legacy through his deeply troubling moves to restore to the church the followers of Bishop Marcel Lefebvre, who continue to hold the Jews responsible for the killing of Jesus, and to re-establish the use of the Tridentine Latin Mass. The latter reaffirms the Church’s aim of converting the Jews to Christianity; while the restoration of the Lefebvrians, including a bishop who denies the Shoah, associated the Vatican once again with open Jew-hatred. In addition, although Benedict visited Israel last year, the Vatican has consistently failed to acknowledge Israel’s unique value and central importance for the Jewish people, dwells almost exclusively on the suffering of the Palestinians while blaming Israel for defending itself against Arab terror, and maintains a cordial relationship with Iran. So it would be less than surprising if Jews raised a small cheer for the insolent officials of the Foreign Office; and if the Pope were suddenly to discover a pressing engagement that prevents him from travelling to Britain after all, few would surely lose any sleep. Yet for all that, the animosity being displayed towards Benedict should make Jews very uneasy. The threats to arrest the Pope in Britain for the crimes of the Catholic Church arise from the same misuse of human-rights doctrine as the threats to arrest Israelis with a background in military command if they should step off the plane at Heathrow. It bespeaks a fanatical intolerance and malice which, using the fig-leaves of imagined or real abuses of Israeli military strikes or paedophile priests, actually have in their sights the continued existence of the state of Israel, or the Catholic Church and Christianity itself. Again, some Jews may think that a world without Christianity, with its animosity towards Judaism, would be a better place. They are wrong. For all the difficulties Jews have with the churches — and they are profound and possibly insoluble — if Christianity were to disappear from Britain and Europe, the basis of western civilisation would crumble, and our precious liberties and toleration would vanish with it. Indeed, they are already diminishing under the current onslaught upon Christianity from illiberal and intolerant secular fanatics, whose attitudes suffuse the diplomats’ pop at the Pope. The aim of all this is to eradicate all obstacles in the way of the utopia of the brotherhood of man, obstacles which lie not just in the Vatican, but also in the Jerusalem that Rome itself in turn views with such proprietary presumption Daily Mail 26 April 2010 Has someone been slipping some kind of illegal substance into the Foreign Office officials’ tea? In preparing for the Pope’s visit to Britain later this year, British diplomats circulated a memo which put forward a bizarre and highly offensive list of ‘ideal’ ways in which Benedict XVI might occupy his time in Britain, as well as other events to mark his visit. These included launching a range of ‘Benedict’ condoms and inviting the Pope to open an abortion clinic or bless a gay marriage. The diplomats also suggested he might launch a helpline for abused children, apologise for the Spanish Armada or sing a song with the Queen for charity. Such gratuitous mockery has now created an acute diplomatic embarrassment for the British Government. It has been forced to make a grovelling apology to the Vatican which, not surprisingly, takes an exceedingly dim view of this affair. Indeed, the Pope’s advisers are reportedly regretting that he ever agreed to come to Britain at all. For not only is he at the centre of raging criticism over the way the Church has dealt with paedophile priests, but he is being threatened with public protests and even arrest by militant atheists. Given that he is also being accused of attempting to poach disaffected members of the Church of England, the papal visit is clearly a deeply sensitive matter requiring the maximum diplomatic skill. Yet the response by the representatives of Her Majesty’s Government has been effectively the equivalent of an obscene gesture. So what on earth has got into the normally bland-to-a-fault Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Apparently, the proposals were made by a group of junior officials, one of whom has now been hauled over the coals. This raises more questions than it answers. How junior is junior? The Vatican insists these officials were more senior. The disciplined official is said to have been ‘transferred to other duties’. Other duties than what, precisely, apart from insulting the Pope? Why haven’t all the officials involved been sacked? After all, how can diplomats who have shown such an astonishing lack of judgment or propriety, not to say an eye-watering absence of diplomatic skills, continue to be employed in their country’s foreign service? If they’d proposed something like this about South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma or Syria’s President Assad, for example, does anyone doubt that their heels would not have been seen for dust? So, at the highest levels in the Foreign Office — which are said to be ‘appalled’ — it would appear that insulting the Pope doesn’t really matter as much as insulting the corrupt or the tyrannical. In any event, what does this say about the FCO that it employs people who do such a thing? Once upon a time, it recruited the brightest in Whitehall who had to pass a demanding entrance test to qualify. Yet apart from their insults, these officials appeared to believe — vacuously — that the singer Susan Boyle was a more influential person for the Pope to meet than the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, the most senior Catholic in Britain. Some in the Catholic Church are dismissing all this as a joke, a kind of internal office prank that somehow got out of hand. On first reading, this is certainly how it seems. After all, surely no one could have put forward in all seriousness suggestions which read like a Monty Python sketch. One retired diplomat, commenting on the furore, has written that those who have been shocked by this document are suffering from a ‘sense of humour failure’, since this was merely the kind of in-joke that is made all the time among diplomats. The only thing wrong with it was that, through some oversight, it was circulated too widely. But given that the Foreign Office is desperately apologising and the Vatican is now thinking of calling off the visit altogether, to call this a ‘sense of humour failure’ would seem to reflect precisely the kind of supercilious Foreign Office cynicism revealed by the document itself. In any event, this doesn’t seem to have been an email which was sent around by accident. It was a document that was sent to a senior Foreign Office official, 10 Downing Street, the Department for International Development and the Northern Ireland Office. And when you look at its covering note, it seems even less likely that it was meant as a joke. For it says these suggestions were ‘the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas’. In other words, however far-fetched they were, these ideas were apparently being offered for serious discussion. This appears to have been a different kind of brainstorm altogether. For these suggestions could not have been more carefully and deliberately designed to be as offensive and insulting as possible. Something like this could not have happened in the past, when a very different type of mandarin — stuffy, upper-class, punctilious to a fault — typified the Foreign Office. Such a type was hardly ideal. But then, like the rest of the Whitehall establishment, the FCO moved from one extreme to another. A concerted effort began to recruit from beyond the ranks of the privileged — in other words, those who had a reliable standard of education because they had been to the best schools — in favour of those from every kind of disadvantage. For whom, of course, the standard had to be lowered. Even among those educated at good schools and Oxbridge, however, the general collapse of educational and moral standards has meant public service is now populated by a certain type of young official who is callow, shallow and politically correct to a fault. Among such people, the orthodoxy is a world view in which minorities are axiomatically to be respected while Christianity is treated with contempt. The Catholic Church in particular is to be despised because of paedophile priests and its ban on contraception and abortion. For sure, there are troubling aspects of this papacy which should legitimately be questioned. But the double standard here — quite apart from the insolence — is breathtaking. Can you imagine a group of officials making such suggestions, light-hearted or not, about Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists or other minorities associated with the Third World? Of course not. But the Catholics are fair game. This world view is by no means confined to the Foreign Office, but is widespread in fashionable circles, where bullying of Christians is rife. While the Vatican’s failure to deal with paedophile priests offers real cause for concern, the hysteria this has provoked is wildly disproportionate. Compare the threats to arrest the Pope with, say, the absence of similar loathing directed towards Margaret Hodge, who has been able to serve for years as a government minister despite her failure to deal with the paedophile ring at Islington council when she was its leader. Even if the diplomats’ paper was meant to be a joke, the fact that our supposedly brightest civil servants think like this is a dismal commentary on the state of the nation, its educational standards and its values. It shows how flippancy and shallowness coexist with a brutalised arrogance. Among those who purport to be the most liberal, educated and enlightened, minds are actually closed and display a vicious illiberalism and gross absence of respect for other points of view, particularly mainstream European religious faiths. No wonder the Pope is having second thoughts about visiting Britain. Diplomats are popularly scoffed at for telling lies abroad for the good of their country. But now it would seem that they are intent on showing the world the most ugly face of Britain.
Friday, 30th April 2010
In adversity, the FCO turns to diversity
4:51pm
The Telegraph reports this morning that four members of the Foreign Office team responsible for a memo mocking the Pope have now been disciplined as a result of the outcry:My new book
4:31am
My new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power has just been published in the US by Encounter. On Wednesday evening, the Spectator very generously hosted a splendid party in London to mark its publication, and I am extremely grateful for the support of Fraser Nelson and his team.Thursday, 29th April 2010
The face of hypocrisy
10:42am
Suddenly Labour is falling over itself to say that immigration is not off-limits. This morning, the Home Secretary Alan Johnson said it wasWednesday, 28th April 2010
Election in Lemmingland
11:14am
I am slightly bemused by the general media consensus that while Nick Clegg said on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr show that he would not under any circumstances work with Gordon Brown or the Labour party, he has now shifted his position to say that he might indeed work with Labour or even Brown. I watched the Marr show, and the fact was that Clegg was all over the place on this even then. He declared that he would not work with Brown because Labour would have lost the moral right to govern. However, when he was pressed by Marr on whether he would work with a Labour party led by Miliband, Johnson or some other replacement leader he conspicuously refused to answer, thus effectively confirming that he would indeed be up to a coalition with Labour under another leader. And...
The orthodoxy is a world view in which minorities are axiomatically to be respected while Christianity is treated with contempt
Saturday, 1 May 2010
April 30, 2010
Welcome to the age of irrationality
April 30, 2010
Why Jews should not welcome the attack on the Pope
April 28, 2010
A strange type of diplomacy
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