Wars of Religion, and other topics
Here I'll try to respond to as many contributors as I can. May I first thank 'Thinking' for changing his or her pseudonym, but point out that while 'Clear_Thinking' was insufferably self-satisfied, 'Thinking' is not much better in the self-satisfaction stakes. The name implies that everyone else is not thinking. Is this what 'Thinking' thinks? If not, then I suggest that 'Thinking' thinks again. How about his or her real name? Or 'Arguing'?
So, not necessarily in logical order, here are my thoughts:
Why aren't I a Roman Catholic? I listed my reasons for not considering becoming a Roman Catholic as they occurred to me. I thought the question required an honest answer, even if some features of the answer are not specially creditable or lofty. So the fact that the RC church seems to me to be a foreign church, which it does, and which influences me, had to be mentioned even if people for whom this doesn't matter, or who cannot see it as a reason for such a choice, find it surprising. A possible parallel - if I fall seriously ill I should prefer to be treated by doctors and nurses who share my English cultural background. This isn't because I have anything against French or German or American doctors and nurses. Just that we cannot communicate with each other as well as English people can, and that in deeply important matters, such as this, the ability to make oneself understood through nuance and subtlety is specially important. Obviously it matters that they are competent as well, but if we assume that they are, then culture and nationality make an important difference.
Look at the interesting murals in the Brompton Oratory - or St Aloysius in Oxford - and you will, if you were brought up in the Britain I was raised in, feel that you are in a foreign place where many familiar stories have been reversed. Try as you may, you won't feel comfortable with this.
A brief story to illustrate the unexpected effects of national feeling. When I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I spent three rather unsettled and unsettling months in that vast and mysterious metropolis finding a place for my family to live, and an office from which to work. I then took a brief holiday at home in Oxford before going to live in Moscow properly. In this strange interlude, I was asked directions by an American tourist in Oxford. My reply was, perhaps, more detailed than the visitor had wanted or expected (I can be quite proprietorial about the city), and he said ‘Oh, so you live here, then?’ I began to say that yes, I did. Then I realised it wasn't true any more. My home was now a flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, across the courtyard from the Brezhnev family. I gulped briefly and said 'No, actually, I used to live here. But now I live in Moscow'. And as I said it, I felt like a sort of traitor. It makes no sense, but it's true.
Those who write blithely here about becoming expatriates should be aware of the strange emotions which actual expatriation can produce. I'll also never forget the terrifying feeling of distance from home that swept over me as the removal van arrived outside my rented house in Bethesda, Maryland, containing my entire life packed up in a container and brought 3,000 miles across the ocean. Would I ever be able to get back again?
There's another reason I ought to have mentioned my lack of enthusiasm for joining the RCs. As an Anglican, I have no special desire to persuade Roman Catholics to come over to my Church. I tend to think that they will be happier if they stay where they are, and I have no real belief that there is only one path that leads to the Celestial City, whatever John Bunyan may have said.
True, I do try to introduce them to the 1662 Prayer Book so that they know what vernacular services ought to be like, and I'm aware (see Evelyn Waugh's interesting biography of Ronald Knox) that the RC Church in England certainly used to be envious of Anglican liturgy and music. They have less reason to be now, because the C of E has destroyed most of its liturgy and much of its hymnody. But I often find both Roman Catholics (and Evangelicals) anxious, as it were, to recruit me to their traditions.
That's perfectly reasonable, but in the case of the RCs it's particularly problematic. Why? Because they insist that the whole Anglican Church isn't a church, that its ministers aren't properly ordained, its Bishops not really Bishops, its services for the most part invalid. So George Herbert, perhaps the greatest Christian poet in the English language, and an Anglican parson, was as far as the Vatican is concerned, a layman all his life. And many very holy, humble and devout men and women of my acquaintance are likewise deluding themselves (in the view of the Vatican) when they imagine they are part of the Apostolic tradition. This just won't do as a starting point for persuasion. And I suspect it's insuperable.
I'm still waiting for specific allegations against the Pope, justifying the campaign for his arrest, which I can examine. The often-cited case of the priest Stephen Kiesle and his 'unfrocking' (which I think was requested by Kiesle himself, so that he could be free of his vow of celibacy, long after he had been - rather feebly - punished by the secular civil authorities and removed from his church functions) is dealt with in Ross Douthat's New York Times blog of 14th April, and I would be interested if any of the 'prosecute the Pope' advocates have any response to Mr Douthat's points, which seem quite powerful to me.
One correspondent mentions the former Boston Archbishop Bernard Law. He alleges he is: ‘A man wanted by American authorities for his part in covering up the abuse of Children in Wisconsin who is now in hiding in Vatican City’. I need more information about this. In what way is he ‘wanted’ or ‘in hiding’? My understanding is that he resigned nearly eight years ago after being shown to have engaged in a cover-up of abuse cases in his diocese, and now occupies what appears to me to be a sinecure in Rome, to which he was appointed by the previous Pope, John Paul II. Is there a warrant out for his arrest? On what charge? In what way is he 'hiding'?
‘Richie Craze‘ sighs loftily that: ‘People who suffered and died under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot did so because of an ideology, or through catastrophic economic plans. There was no direct line from the atheism of such leaders to mass slaughter. Had Stalin maintained his Christianity and completed his training for ordination, the end result would have been similar.’
Well, (sigh) Mr ‘Craze’ is straightforwardly wrong, and profoundly ill-informed.
If he were to read the relevant parts of my book 'The Rage Against God', he would there see explained and described in some historical detail the direct and unconcealed line of connection between the explicit militant atheism of the Soviet Bolsheviks and a) the deliberate persecution and murder of priests and nuns and of Christian believers b) the very nature of the regime itself, which specifically permitted and encouraged it to embark on several waves of murder against those who opposed it or of whom it disapproved. Mr ‘Craze’ may sigh patronisingly as much as he likes, but like many people who feign superiority over the rest of us, he doesn't actually know, either directly or indirectly, what he is talking about.
I continue to be baffled by the barmy, thought-free logic of those who denounce the Roman Catholic view of condoms as a protection against the spread of AIDS. The RC Church argues, as I understand it, that sexual continence within marriage is the most effective protection against this disease, which is patently true. It also points out that the 'wear a condom' strategy is medically unreliable (as condoms notoriously are) and does nothing to discourage the promiscuity which actually spreads the disease. Now, if people heed the church's message, and confine sexual relations to marriage, the spread of AIDS will be greatly slowed. If they don't, it won't.
But why do the anti-Church fanatics assume that the Church is a) so powerful and influential that its advice on condoms will lead to people having promiscuous sex without condoms because the Pope has told them not to, and b) so hopelessly powerless and uninfluential that its advice on continence within marriage will be completely ignored? This is surely having it both ways.
I believe that those African countries which have most successfully reduced the incidence of AIDS have done so through programmes which have laid heavy stress on avoiding promiscuity. Am I wrong?
On letting the cat out of the bag, I really wanted to make sure that this rather tired figure of speech came to life in the minds of those who use and read it (see the warning section on 'dead metaphors' in George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'). I still don't see any point in keeping a real live cat in a bag - let alone (having once owned a rather fierce and bloodthirsty Blue Burmese) know why anyone, having put a cat in a bag, would be unwise enough to let it out and face its determined revenge.
There are lots of lovely explorations of the possible origins of many similar phrases (including 'the bitter end') in Patrick O'Brian's matchless Aubrey-Maturin novels. It is also interesting to see how many of these phrases (such as 'the skin of your teeth') originate in the Authorised Version of the Bible. I am not, by the way, familiar with the English Vulgate because I wasn't brought up with it. But I have always been told by scholars that the poetry of the Authorised Version (William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale improved upon - mainly, anyway - by Lancelot Andrewes) is superior.
I have not heard of Paul Johnson's 'History of the English Speaking Peoples', though Winston Churchill once wrote (or perhaps co-wrote, since I believe by this time he was allowing others to 'help' him with his writing) such a book, which I read with some enjoyment and pleasure many years ago. I don't know how I would view it now, following the rather bleak revision of my own world-view brought about by the Iraq war, and the abuse and falsification of our history by various politicians to justify it.
I think the person who asked about this may have been referring to a book by Andrew Roberts, 'The History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900'. Mr Roberts is an interesting and original writer, who can usually count on plentiful and complimentary reviews (though I was never able to struggle through his much-acclaimed biography of Lord Salisbury). But I have rather wearied of him since he became a sort of historical advocate of the neo-conservative political view. I have not read his 'History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900.’
Full disclosure: A person so free with information about himself that all we are to know about him (or her) is that he (or she) wants to be called 'R', like a character in a book by Franz Kafka, asks me a number of questions. I don't think he has any special right to know the answers, but I also cannot think of a good reason to decline to answer.
‘ 1. Have you ever taken illegal drugs and if so which ones and when? (Mr Clegg and Cameron have both refused to answer this question, but Mr Brown has answered in the negative.)
2. What does the Bible say about drug abuse, and in fact, alcohol abuse? (Answered by Alex Proctor)
3. What is your reaction to the first leaders debate and, perhaps more importantly, the media response? (Answered in his Mail on Sunday column of April 18.)
4. Surely you are also pro-immigration (but anti mass-immigration)? This question relates to Mr Hitchens’ criticism of the Conservative Party in his Mail on Sunday column of April 18.
5. Are you a member of the NUJ, and if so, what is your opinion of their call, in 2007, for British sanctions against Israel?’
In answer to 1, I have many times said that I took drugs in my teenage years (I'm surprised 'R' isn't aware of this), and also that I now bitterly regret the selfish stupidity of my action. I have also recommended this course to others in the same position, so for instance if David Cameron were to say this (rather than stick to his formula about having a 'private past', I should regard the slate as clean).
Which illegal drugs? Well, I thought it was marijuana, but since I was and am a non-smoker, I think I may have imagined the not-very-striking effect that it had on me. I would add that when I was asked the drugs question by a Guardian interviewer, James Silver, back in 2005, he wrote: ’A question pops into my head. “Have you ever taken drugs?” I ask him (PH). “Yes”, he replies, refusing to elaborate.’ It isn't true that I 'refused to elaborate'. He just didn't ask any more questions about it. I would have done if he had.
In answer to 4. I am not sure what being 'in favour of immigration' means. I don't think that the borders of this country should be completely closed, but I do think that they should only be open to people the country actively needs, in the long term, who are able to support themselves, or to genuine refugees from persecution, which by definition does not include anyone who has passed through or over another possible asylum on his or her way here. It should not be used to push down the cost of labour, or to ease short-term labour shortages, or to provide cheap foreign workers to do jobs which the welfare state has made unattractive to the indigenous population. The other solution - a shrinking of the welfare state - seems to me to make more sense. And it should never reach levels at which migrants cannot be assimilated. I am also opposed to all policies which tend towards multiculturalism (a concept wholly different from multiracialism, and actually hostile to it). By definition this means I am against 'mass immigration'. I know that many deliberate lies are told about my position on this by supporters of certain political movements of left and right. Hence the length of this reply.
In answer to 5. I have been a member of the NUJ in good standing since 1973, and intend to remain so. I deplore almost all of its policy positions, but (like most members) I belong to the organisation for purely professional reasons, my membership has no political aim and doesn't in any way oblige me to support or advance whatever policies the Union's Annual Delegate Meeting may from time to time adopt, and I would ignore or reject any attempt to get me to do so. I haven't the time to engage in NUJ internal politics.
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21 April 2010 2:22 PM
How to Hang a Parliament
I hope to return to the other conversations later (perhaps tomorrow), though I hope for some more debate and facts from readers on the Vatican matter - but for now I'd like to answer one pressing question. Mark Hirst asks how a coalition might affect my long-hoped-for break-up of the Tory Party. Well, I never expected things to work out like this, assuming that the Clegg surge continues and is reflected in the votes. So I shall therefore just think aloud.
The possibilities seem to me to be roughly these:
Assume that the polls correctly predict the outcome, which would then be Labour with the third largest vote and the largest number of MPs, the Liberal Democrats with the largest vote and the third largest number of MPs, and the Tories roughly where they ought to be, that is, second biggest vote, second biggest number of seats. No majority. The Queen would then be pretty much obliged to ask Gordon Brown to try to form a government. I don't find this specially outrageous myself. All voting systems have quirks and disadvantages, and we have to ask ourselves if they're justifiable in the light of the countervailing benefits.
For me, an adversarial parliament, plus the possibility of a strong government (made up of a coalition formed *before* the election and honestly presented to the people), plus the ability to dismiss an unwanted government outright, all offer unanswerable arguments for our existing system - together with the direct personal link between MP and constituency which weakens the power of the centre over individual members. If the Tories want to get all hoity-toity about unfair outcomes, they must ask themselves why in that case they didn't decline the offer to form a government in 1951, when they won a majority of seats on a minority of votes. I'm sure there are other precedents of this kind.
In this case, it seems to me that the voters would be saying that they don't wish to sack Labour outright, nor do they wish to give the Tories a working majority. Voters in recent years have learned how to get what they want from our system, especially since tactical voting became common. And while I don't necessarily think they all agree with me about the Tories, or many other things, I do suspect that the voters agree with me that the old parties are finished and discredited, and that a Cameron government offers nothing specially attractive. They're also worried about the economic abyss which will open up after the election. They don't like the look of George Osborne, and they are reassured by Vince Cable's mixture of business experience and lived-in blokeishness. They also like the fact that he is out of his teens.
As for Cleggomania, the Tories and their media and blogosphere groupies can't really complain about this either. They have fervently embraced the cults of youth and novelty. They have also joined enthusiastically in the attempt to wipe out Labour by making direct and highly vituperative personal attacks on Gordon Brown. These attacks are essentially non-political. They have to be, because they are intended to hide the awkward fact that the Tories agree with Gordon Brown about almost every major political issue.
They also obscure the other fact, that David Cameron doesn't actually have all that much positive charisma, and hopes to get to office thanks to Mr Brown's pungent negative charisma, which is considerable and possibly unique. There is no special reason why this Brownophobia should only benefit the Tories, and no great injustice in the fact that it seems mainly to have benefited Nicholas Clegg. If you unleash personal spite as a weapon, don't be surprised if it comes whizzing back to clonk you on the head. In the world of 'Britain's Got No Talent' and 'Big Bruvver', a new face can't be expected to stay new for four long years. No doubt Tory high command are rushing from pram to pram, and from cradle to cradle, searching for someone even younger than Mr Cameron to take over after the Cameron project fails. Time for one of those leftish young women they keep picking as candidates, I suspect. How about Louise Bagshawe for next Tory leader?
Right, so Her Majesty calls Mr Brown in. And he accepts her commission to try to form a government. Lord Mandelson (let us say, since the Lib Dems quite like him) is despatched to Clegg HQ to do the diplomacy. Back comes the word: ‘We'll make a deal, but not with Gordon. Or Ed Balls’. Here's a difficulty. Much hinges on whether it could be overcome.
Labour's terrifyingly cumbersome and unpredictable electoral college has only been used twice for a contested election (in the ritual Hattersley-Kinnock contest, long ago, and the wholly unequal match between John Smith and Bryan Gould). Nobody has risked it when there was a chance of a close fight. Dangerous or divisive challengers have been persuaded not to stand, as they were when Michael Howard was 'elected unopposed' as Tory leader. When both Blair and Brown took over, the succession was carefully stitched up in advance. But my suspicion is that David Miliband has already done the work and made the deals (could Lord Mandelson have been involved in this?) and that if Gordon Brown stepped down, the major unions would immediately declare in favour of the Banana Man, as would a large chunk of the remaining Labour MPs. If this is done quickly and convincingly enough, there'll be no contest (Ed Balls might even have lost his seat, though this is a long shot). And then there could be talks about a coalition.
Labour has already talked about introducing the Alternative Vote system (whose effects seem to me to be hard to predict but which might in fact squeeze third parties rather hard). They would - I suspect - offer a referendum on it to the Lib Dems (this would not look too unprincipled given their attempt to get such an idea through Parliament before the election was called). Or we might see a revival of the 1997 Roy Jenkins proposal of AV+ (look it up). Would they accept? I have no idea. They would also, I expect, be offered Cabinet positions, and policy concessions. Mr Clegg would not, I imagine, be very keen to attempt a deal with the Tories, as his own MPs would not like it, and the Tories are publicly wedded to keeping the existing system. Also, I suspect David Cameron might risk splitting his party if he made a deal with the Liberal Democrats.
All of this would take place in conditions of some urgency, as the pressure from the Bond Markets, to get on with economic emergency measures, will be irresistible whoever wins or whoever comes first.
What happens to the Tories then? Assuming they are excluded from the new government, the Cameron project will be seen to have failed, and I doubt if Mr Cameron would wait around for long. The actual conservatives in the party, who have long stayed silent, would be entitled to point out that Cameronism has failed and that by becoming Liberal, they have only managed to persuade the voters to become Liberal too. But as long as they remain wedded to the Tory party as such, they will have nothing original to say. The Tory left will continue to claim that conservative policies have failed too (when the truth is that it is their association with the Tory Party that has doomed them to failure, combined with the half-hearted way in which the Tory Party has embraced them). I won't be encouraged by anything short of a large-scale breakaway from the Tory Party by conservatives who are prepared to say that it is time for something new. It would also be encouraging if the Tories' traditional supporters in the media began to look in this direction. If anything of the kind is to happen, I'd expect it towards the end of the summer, in time for the Tory conference.
If the putative Lib-Lab coalition goes for and wins a referendum on AV or AV+, I would say that all was by no means lost. Both systems could still create decisive results and sustain the adversarial system. But if actual Proportional Representation results, then a wholly different prospect opens up. I am reluctant to say that it would be entirely hopeless, as I can imagine the creation of two socially conservative, anti-EU parties, one with Labour roots and one with Tory roots, which might be able to combine to form an effective majority government against the pro-EU social liberals. But it would certainly make everything much more difficult, and would threaten the traditional adversarial shape of the Commons in a worrying way.
I may be accused of having helped to bring this unintended (for me) consequence about. Maybe I will have played a small part. I wouldn't want either to boast of any greater influence than I actually have, or to be burdened with too much blame either. But the real blame lies with those, in politics and the media, who threw themselves behind the Michael Howard takeover of the Tories on behalf of the establishment after the IDS collapse (detailed in my book 'The Cameron Delusion'), and the Cameron project which machine-gunned Gordon Brown with personal venom, while refusing to develop or offer a political alternative, because they preferred to adopt the policies of the Left. The venom was highly effective. Labour is more or less in ruins as a result of it. But that did not and could not guarantee that the Tories would accede to power or office. If we now face a new age of PR and continental-style politics, it is the Cameroon method of attacking New Labour which is largely to blame - as I argue above - for the current popularity of Nicholas Clegg. From my point of view, an uncomplicated mass desertion by Tories would be better, giving nobody anything that really amounted to a mandate and dealing a blow to all the major parties. But I think a lot of the Cleggomania vote actually comes from young non-Tories who had previously been planning to stay at home. I doubt if many of them would listen to pleas from me.
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19 April 2010 5:07 PM
My wonderful logic
Responses to contributors follow. A 'Richie Craze' (really?) asks a number of silly questions, which he presumably knows are silly, and suggests unconvincingly that he thinks (for instance) that I believe that ‘If other organizations do it, then it's all right for the Catholic Church to do it.’ He must know that I am saying nothing of the sort. Rather the opposite. Why must people twist what I say in this way?
But in case he genuinely doesn't understand, the point I am making is similar to the one I often make about selective criticisms of Israel, whose many faults I also willingly concede (not that it does me much good with hot-eyed Israel-haters, but one has to try). As I keep saying, I'm not a Roman Catholic and have no dog in this fight, except a desire for the truth.
Are the critics attacking the RC church because of what it does? Or because it is the RC church? (See the other posting, about Philip Pullman, for some interesting sidelights on this.) The church and its priests are as subject to law as anyone else. State institutions are as capable of covering up misdeeds as anyone else. And many political utopians do indeed regard the socialist state as the source of all morality and society's main engine of goodness.
Various correspondents ask me why I don't become a Roman Catholic. Because I'm English and view it as a foreign church. Because I hesitate over many of its doctrines and don't find its forms of worship, ancient or modern, specially edifying. Because I prefer the Church of England (the actual one, not the simpering bureaucracy which now usurps the title), its Bible and Prayer Book. But this does not make me a sectarian.
I have no idea what the 'Big Society' is or means, and suspect it was invented one evening as a slogan by people who also don't know what it means. The idea that we are all going to rebuild Britain in our spare time is laughable. Who has such time, when both parents work and spend hours commuting? Also, I find it infuriating to be told (for instance) that though the state has spent billions of pounds and years of civil service time wrecking the best state schools in the country, we are to be left to try to build new ones by ourselves - and then we won't be allowed to make them academically selective. I ask you. Anyway, it looks as if it doesn't matter much any more. The Cameron project has seldom looked so shaky.
A 'Paul', who thinks nations are 'built on blood' asks: ‘Perhaps he could explain to us why children in British schools whose roots lie in Africa and Asia should feel the same way about the history of ‘this country’ as children whose roots lie in ... this country.’ To which I can only answer that they should because they live here and so become the inheritors of the tradition that made it the country it is. Why shouldn't they?
Yet again (how many times have I answered this now? Why is it so hard to get something so blazingly simple across?). I don't urge anyone to vote for anyone. Nor will I, at this election. Do what you like, as long as you don't vote Tory or BNP. Why? You cannot change the government of this country at this election. No party capable of forming the government would be substantially different from the one we have now. I couldn't care less which one it is, as long as the wretched, fraudulent anti-British Tories are not revived.
But you can get rid of the Tories and so clear the space for a new opposition, so that at the next election there will be a choice, and I can urge you to vote for a party that offers real hope.
Mr 'Foxglow' declares: ‘I was taught how to really LEARN in my classes - to question everything, to examine all sources, bias and context and come to my own conclusions.’ Why is it that I can't help suspecting those 'conclusions' he came to just happened to coincide with those of the anti-British left?
The actual policy of the BNP is racial bigotry. All the other things Mr Griffin from time to time does or says, from seeking help from Colonel Gadaffi to campaigning against Islam (did he mention, when in Tripoli, that he thought Islam a vicious and wicked faith? I do often wonder), are positions adopted to gain the main goal. Why don't any of these BNPers ever read or respond to the speech he made in the presence of David Duke? It's easily found on YouTube. It makes the position perfectly clear.
Macaulay's history of England is a great read (thrilling and fast-moving) and not, as one contributor suggests, hard going. But it covers only a small part of the national story. I too would like a reading list which covered the whole narrative.
As for those who damn the so-called Whig interpretation of history, I wonder whose interpretation they prefer? My guess is that they prefer that of Karl Marx. But of course they can't say so, as that would give the game away. Rest assured, once the left triumphs, there will be a standard history agreed at the highest level and taught (no nonsense about 'sources' and 'discovering it for yourself' then), packed with lies and full of gaps, to justify the nasty state they will by then have erected on the grave of Great Britain.
Mr Rowlands asks: ‘But what IS this I read- Hitchens complaining about his lack of 'Rights' and 'freedoms?!'
No he doesn't. I am complaining about an attack on the freedom of speech by a major political party. The freedom of speech which is one of the freedoms of this country and has nothing to do with 'Human Rights', which it long predates. I also believe in a plural society - I can hardly praise the Gdansk shipyard strike and be opposed to free trades unions, can I? (Nor have I ever here or elsewhere attacked the existence of trades unions, not least since I belong to one). I also joined Liberty at the invitation of its previous director, John Wadham - after I criticised it for its preoccupation with left-wing causes and he said 'in that case, join it to change it'.
Shami Chakrabarti, who has made several effective stands against plans to destroy English liberty, has understood this problem, and Liberty has (for instance) been prominent in at least one of the cases of persecuted Christians fighting against prejudice. I think it right and reasonable of me to seek such help in a general battle for free speech. I have not invoked any statute I disagree with, and, if this behaviour shocks Mr Rowlands, I'm glad. Too many people have narrow ,prejudiced ideas about what conservatives can and cannot believe, and not all of these people are silly leftists who think conservatives are stupid and oppressive (though most of them are).
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Philip Pullman takes the cat out of the bag, plus thoughts on the Pope
I believe this figure of speech (like 'no room to swing a cat') refers to a cat-o-nine-tails rather than to a moggy. Once the cat was taken out of its cloth bag by the Bosun, I believe, it was a signal that talking was over, and savage punishment was about to take place. But that's by the way. The interesting thing is that the author Philip Pullman, interviewed in Monday's Guardian by Laura Barton, lets us know what the Atheist Liberation Front (ALF?) actually think about the RC church and the paedophile scandal. And it is as I had thought.
Here's the relevant extract from Ms Barton's article: 'I ask him if he thinks the scandal will change the Catholic church. “I hope so,” he says quickly, and then draws back. “Well why do I hope so? In one way, I hope the wretched organisation will vanish entirely. So I'm looking on with a degree of dispassionate interest.” He does not, at this moment, seem so dispassionate.’
I'll say that's not dispassionate. But then remember his 2001 remark to the Washington Post's Alona Wartofsky, that he was 'trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.’
Mr Pullman, so far as I know, hasn't retracted this, though many of his media admirers plainly find it awkward and tend to say that he 'reportedly' said it, or use similar formulas to try and soften its effect. Possibly by pure coincidence, it doesn't seem to be possible to find it on the Washington Post site any more (I have my own copy). Why don't any of those who actually get to interview him ask him why it is that he's so cross with Christianity?
He's a funny fellow. My meetings with him have been brief. He once appeared at an Oxford debate - I attended, hoping to question him, but questions to him were severely limited. He once complained to a gossip column that I had stormed off after meeting him at the Oxford Marks and Spencer, which wasn't exactly my recollection of this brief and affable encounter at the check-out, as I struggled to persuade the automatic cashier (I don't use them any more) to let me buy three bottles of wine.
He went around for years saying that he had asked his publishers to put the words ‘the most dangerous author in Britain’, attributed to me, on the covers of the paperback editions of 'His Dark Materials'.The words are part of a headline ‘Is this the most dangerous author in Britain?’ which was placed on an article I wrote about him in the Mail on Sunday - and which is often reproduced elsewhere without the question mark. (He used to have the article stuck up on the wall of his writing shed.) Eventually he said it on a Radio 4 programme and I wrote to ask him which edition this had been, since I had never seen it and would very much like to obtain a copy. He wrote back to concede that the words do not in fact appear on any edition he can find. I'm not surprised. The publishers might be worried that innocent grannies and aunties might see them, and hesitate over buying them for little Wilhelmina, and little Tarquin. Which would never do.
I once wrote him a note (part of another correspondence) asking why there were Zeppelins but no trains in his imagined parallel Oxford in 'Northern Lights' (I was wrong. There are trains, though they play little part in the story). He wrote back saying that it was because they had been privatised.
And then he appeared in the left-wing weekly, 'The New Statesman' last Friday, and seemed to imply (at least his interviewer certainly formed that impression) that he believed that I and other Christians had felt 'offended' by his books. I can't speak for others, but I am not in the slightest bit offended by them. Nor do I want to ban them, as so many people who write to me seem to think. I have never said I want to ban them, for the simple reason that I don't. I'm against banning books.
And I loathe this fashion for being 'offended' by other people's points of view. I just think that Mr Pullman's current status in the literary world has more to do with his leftism and his atheism than it does with the quality of his books. Some of them are all right, but some (especially the latest 'The Good Man Jesus etc') are heavy-handed clunkers. The really interesting thing is that he has written a very large number of books, but most have come and gone without attracting much notice or praise. The ones with an anti-God agenda, on the other hand, get both praise and sales. I've discussed the workings of the book world elsewhere.
Mr Pullman, by the way, turns out to be predictably left-wing in his politics, which I would guess are those of the 1980s state school staff-room. Here's more from the New Statesman: 'Does he despair of the political class as a whole? “No. I always vote. Voting is a privilege. For much of my life, I lived in a safe Tory seat, but I still voted. Oxford in 1997 was fairly marginal and I wanted very much to get rid of John Patten, and I wanted a Labour government. But there was no point in voting Labour at that stage, so I had to vote Liberal Democrat. Our stupid voting system requires you to make calculations like that all the time. It's preposterous and we must change it.” ’
This is unintentionally funny. Mr Pullman should stick to fantasy. John Patten, a Tory Education Secretary who noisily fell out with education radicals (presumably the reason for Mr Pullman's desire to 'get rid of him') actually retired from the Commons in 1997, and did not stand in that year's election for Oxford West. Nor was it a safe seat. It fell to the Liberal Democrats, in the interesting shape of Dr Evan Harris. Since then, Mr Pullman has moved house, presumably because he has made so much money from his books that he can afford to live pretty much where he likes. I don't think I'm giving away any secrets when I say that he's still in the same Oxford West constituency as he was in 1997. Whereas, if he had moved to my bit of Oxford, he'd have had a Labour MP since 1987 - and indeed his vote might be crucial in saving Mr Smith from the considerable Lib Dem threat to unseat him on 6th May.
But back to the Roman Catholic Church. I'm struck not just by Mr Pullman's open desire to see it vanish, and by the similar hostility of some contributors. Do they really want it gone, including all its many charitable activities, its educational institutions, its provision of help and comfort at the end of life, its uncompromising stand on many moral issues (whoops, perhaps that's what they don't like).
And what of its artistic, musical and architectural heritage? How will that survive if the church that nurtured and sustained them is gone?
But there's another point here.
Let's go through the case as it stands in general.
Did Roman Catholic priests engage in abuse of children? Yes.
Were these crimes sometimes covered up? Yes.
Does the Church admit this? Yes.
Does anything in Roman Catholic theology or belief mandate or excuse such behaviour? No.
Is the RC Church the only institution in which such abuse has taken place? No.
Have the transgressors been punished and have steps been taken to prevent them having renewed opportunities to transgress? Yes, though not as swiftly as it should have been, some are now beyond the reach of the law, or dead.
Has the Church admitted that it was at fault? Yes, unequivocally and repeatedly.
Have steps been taken to prevent a repetition? Yes.
Has the current Pope in any way condoned the crimes? No.
Has he repeatedly and explicitly condemned them and those who failed to act against them? Yes.
So what I want to know, in detail, is what those who now call for the prosecution of the Pope specifically allege against him?
Then we can debate the strength of these charges.
But my point about pre-Christian societies and what we now call paedophilia remains. Some people will actively wish to misunderstand me here, so forgive me if I make this point in a rather heavy-handed way.
In some pre-Christian societies, activities which now rightly fill us with nauseated disgust, particularly the sexual exploitation of pubescent boys by older men, were once regarded as normal and acceptable. It was Christian sexual morality, with its belief that sexual acts should be confined to lifelong marriage between a man and a woman, which led to their being first made unacceptable and then made illegal. That morality has largely been discarded for heterosexual acts and our continuing taboos survive mainly because of public opinion (though as anyone over 50 can attest, public opinion on sexual matters can change immensely in a very short time).
If this is so, there appears to be no 'universal' instinctively-discoverable code of sexual ethics (independent of Christianity) which mandates that paedophilia is wrong. In which case, what precisely is the moral basis on which the atheist critics of the church found their ferocious disapproval of this activity, while they take a pretty much Kinseyist anything-goes attitude to almost all other sorts of sex? I'm not saying they don't have such a basis. I just would like to know exactly what it is. I have no doubt that 'consent' will play a major part in their answer. Yet this contains problems of its own. Are those who consent really capable of giving it? How old does someone have to be, to be able to make such a momentous decision free of pressure? It's a murky area.
For as I also pointed out, the radical materialist left has been active for decades in sweeping away almost all restraints upon sexual behaviour - in minimising the importance of marriage for heterosexuals, in separating sexual acts from their natural consequences with powerful drugs and easy abortion, and in lowering the age of consent, especially for homosexual acts. Some want it lower still. Even where the age of consent laws have blatantly been broken, the authorities are often highly reluctant to prosecute, so making the law a dead letter.
Meanwhile, what of all the other places where sexual abuse of the young takes place? Does anyone have any figures on how common sex abuse by priests is, as compared (for instance, to pluck some samples of other potentially risky occupations and relationships out of the air) to youth workers, scoutmasters, secular school teachers, sports coaches, stepfathers in marriage-free households, stepbrothers in similar situations, etc etc? Is our concentration on the undoubted misdeeds of the RC church proportionate?
Once we have sorted these matters out, we can decide if this is really a campaign on behalf of the victims of disgusting priests, or a campaign against the Roman Church, which some would like to vanish.
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17 April 2010 6:44 PM
Finally, a reminder that these islands DO have a proud history
Can we have our history back?
You know, the story we all used to have by heart, of how our liberties were founded by Magna Carta, of defeating the Armada, of the Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revo lution and the Golden Age that followed, of victory abroad and peace and prosperity at home?
There’s time enough in later life to find out that the reality is more complicated.
The basics are still true, the tale of an extra ordinarily lucky country uniquely blessed
by geography and nature, developing in two small islands one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen, based on individual liberty. Who wouldn’t be proud and pleased to be living in such a place?
And who – knowing these things – wouldn’t instinctively stand and defend those liberties against insolent authority, panic-mongering morons trying to make our flesh creep with exaggerated tales of terror, numbskull Ministers who can’t see why Habeas Corpus matters, wooden-headed coppers who want to be continental gendarmes, demanding our papers?
To be deprived of this knowledge is to be like the beneficiary of a generous will, whose wicked stepfather keeps him from knowing that this document, which could change his life for ever, is locked away in a safe.
I would have liked my own children to learn such proper history, except that by the time I found out the sort of confusing, demoralising trash that passes for history in today’s schools, it was too late.
As I gazed in disgust at the feeble, babyish pamphlets – designed in many cases to undermine the version I was taught – and scraps of photocopied paper which nowadays do the duty of textbooks, I wondered what had become of the histories I had studied.
They had vanished in some vast Sixties bonfire, in many ways as bad as Hitler’s book burnings, part of the great destruction of knowledge and continuity that took place in that accursed decade.
The revolutionaries knew that one of the things they had to destroy was the decent, modest patriotism that had until then been pretty much universal. How better to do that than to slander our past and conceal it?
Now, the publishers Stacey International have had the superb idea of reprinting the fine, elegantly written school histories of Carter and Mears, whose rediscovered pages took me back in an instant to a long-ago classroom.
Reading them now, I find many things that I had forgotten come to life again in my memory.
My only worry is this. That our young have been so deprived of the background to this history that they may not be able to make sense of it.
The voices of the past are drowned out by TV and computer slurry. The memories of grandparents are ignored or never discussed.
The village churches are locked and disused.
Hideous new build ings and brutal modernisers have obliterated or obscured what Philip Larkin called our ‘guildhalls and carved choirs’ and the other great monuments that used to make a walk down a British street a history lesson.
I hope not. Poor Poland, wiped from the map by the two worst tyrannies in history, its cities and culture utterly destroyed and its best men and women massacred and thrown into pits, recovered in a generation.
Our fate is nothing like as bad. We can recover what was lost. Make sure your children read these books, and encourage this fine enterprise.
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