Christian Maoists

(A post I first wrote some years ago.)

It should give us all pause for thought that the only Christian group in the world that is increasing its numbers is … the Christians.  I mean the sort of Christians who call themselves Christians, as much as to imply that Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists and Mennonites are something else.  It’s a neater semantic trick than any other sect has yet pulled off – to stake the claim that one’s own group are the only true believers and the rest don’t count, without even going to the trouble of an argument.  To locate them precisely in the wider tradition one would have to call them evangelical Protestants, but I prefer the term Christian Maoists.  To explain why, let me give an example of their theology.

When my son was baptised, our gift from the amiable Anglican vicar was a book published by the Bible Society called Level 27: 27 Personal Messages from the Creator of the Universe to You.  It turned out to be an edition of the New Testament, presented as a computer-game manual – complete with echoes of ‘Congratulations, Mr X, you have been specially selected to receive a free gift …’.  But that was just the packaging.  Here is the first statement it contained about God: ‘GOD is the big boss’.  And, two pages later: ‘THE CHOICE IS… [in a white box] Accept Jesus, allow him to pay your penalty, follow him as the boss and end up in heaven with him.  OR … [in a black box] Reject Jesus, pay your own penalty, follow the ways of the world and end up in hell all alone.’

Here, in a nutshell, we see the winning combination of Christian Maoism.  The flattery and the threat; the fashionable marketing ploy and the eternal appeal of naked power; the amnesiac and the atavistic, all in one package.  Just so did Chairman Mao impose a veneer of modernity on an age-old tyranny.  Just so did he create a personality cult, the cult of the loving but stern father, to appeal to fear and altruism without apparent contradiction.   In the case of Maoists and Christians alike, what cannot be accommodated is history: the individual’s membership of a rooted human community, the practical wisdom of centuries, the detachment of institutions, an ancient and beautiful culture – all the things that can transform a power structure into something predominantly humane.  Christian Maoists, like their communist counterparts, glory in sweeping all that away.  What really matters about God is his absolute power, one on one: he’s the big boss.  Do you accept it or not?  Are you saved or damned?

Thanks to the Maoists’ takeover of the Christian brand-name, it is this version of Christianity that the rest of the world sees as representative; while other denominations, particularly the Anglicans with their long-standing acceptance of different points of view, fail to notice that they are being edged aside by an exclusive sect.  Some are sincerely attracted by the Maoists’ fervent belief; all are intimidated by it, because it confers an aura of superior ideological purity.  Surely a firm belief in the risen Jesus and the Bible is what Christianity is all about?  Fearing to be seen to have capitulated to the godless modern world, traditional churches hurry to adopt the rhetoric of evangelicalism.  As a result, many people who used to be ‘ordinary churchgoers’, the phlegmatic, the sceptical, those who were a bit embarrassed by religion but knew that there had to be ‘something more’ to life, no longer feel welcome.  They are replaced by people who like to be more ‘committed’, which usually means spending much of their spare time huddled together with other Christians, talking about religion.  Alpha courses.  Study groups.  Reading the Bible, isolated from its historical and literary context, as one might read tea-leaves, to find out ‘what it means for me’.  Little political cells, checking up on each other’s soundness, frantically warming that spark of assurance that Jesus loves me, that I’m saved, that God isn’t going to get out the big stick today.   

Evangelicals like to imply that the established churches have given way to modern secular values, while they themselves stand bravely against the trend of the times.  The irony is that the truth is almost the opposite.  It is the Maoists who have adapted themselves to the values of the majority, true to Chairman Mao’s dictum that the revolutionary must move among the people like a fish in water.  The problem for the established churches has never been that their doctrines were too absurd for belief.  The majority of humans still find it easy to believe in six impossible things before breakfast, from UFOs to homeopathy.  Nor has it been that their doctrines were harsh and cruel.  Why do we read the tabloid press if not because we like to see the wicked punished good and proper, as long as their vices are not those we are tempted by ourselves?  No, it was when the established churches attempted to adopt Enlightenment values like rationality and tolerance, and to banish the lumpen human tendencies to unreason and cruelty, that their slow decline began.  Christian Maoists succeed in winning converts by the thousand, simply by allowing these impulses back.

Unreason and cruelty may be timeless, but Christian Maoism is just as much at home with distinctively modern phenomena like consumerism.  In fact, evangelicalism has become the religious wing of consumerism even more than its predecessor, Calvinism, was the religion of manufacture and commerce.  As a dissolver of old allegiances and traditions, consumerism outdoes state terror by a considerable margin, in a way that Mao himself could only have envied.  Its tendency is to make everything disposable, starting with household goods and proceeding through works of art to belief systems and human relationships.  Thus, it creates an endless craving for what one has not, and, all being well, results in endless market growth.  But the by-products – shallow, lonely, discontented individuals – are the ideal recruiting pool for Christian Maoist activists offering the supernatural dictatorship of God as both punishment and cure.  Maoists gloat over the spiritual casualty list of modern life, as a First World War chaplain might have boasted that there are no atheists in foxholes.  What they don’t admit is that they are merely offering more of the same thing.  Christian Maoism just raises the consumerist thirst for power, status and security to a supernatural level.  It barely scratches the surface of emotional commitment, thought, or the sense of beauty: that would be too much of a challenge, and might even quench the insatiable addict’s craving on which the Maoists’ influence depends.

This explains Evangelicals’ dislike for worshipping in medieval churches, and their preference for carpets and TV screens; their dislike for the ritual of religion, and preference for the ritual of the political rally or the TV talk show; their dislike for Tudor anthems and Victorian hymns, and their preference for amplified rock, accompanied by congregational movements which recall the sad swaying of autistic children and by sounds which resemble badly faked orgasms.  An evangelical clergyman may claim that he favours his style of worship because it is ‘relevant’ or ‘inclusive’, but deep down he favours it because it is superficial, ugly, and demands little effort – although it may be quite expensive.  Expensive is OK.  Let his congregation earn lots of money selling people holidays and health insurance, and then use it to buy a quality sound system and some CDs.  Much better than taking time off for choir practice.  To spend all that time and trouble on mere musical performance would be the next thing to idolatry.  And so uncool too. 

It is perfectly possible for a young person to ‘become a Christian’, allegedly the challenge of a lifetime, without their consumer lifestyle being disturbed in the least.  The study group replaces the exclusive clique of teen peers, Jesus and his charismatic preacher surrogate replace the favourite pop star or style guru, the frisson of eternal damnation replaces the seductive danger of drug-taking or unsuitable sex.  The anomie, the fragmented individualism, the insistent refrain of ‘me, me, me’, remain unchanged.  Christian Maoism does not require contemplation, quietness, reverence, or the admission that one’s self, one’s status as ‘saved’ or ‘damned’, is less important than the divine harmony.  No wonder it’s so popular.

If Christian Maoism does take over completely, historical precedent suggests that the outlook is not quite hopeless.  Once before, under the late Roman empire, Christianity, with all its dumbing-down and punitive tendencies, succeeded in destroying an intellectual and moral tradition, that of Stoic philosophy, which was the best the western world had yet come up with.  It took nearly a thousand years for Christians to dare to bring their moral reasoning back up to the Stoics’ level.  But they brought it there and further, and succeeded in turning this moral framework into social reality to an extent unsurpassed in world history.  And now it is that achievement that the Christian Maoists are trying to destroy.  If ever they want to build it up again, the tools will still be there – but it could be a long job.

Famous Bad Poems 1

First of an occasional series: famous bad poems, why they are bad and why they are famous!

Henry Vaughan, My Soul, There Is A Country

My soul, there is a country

Far beyond the stars,

Where stands a wingèd sentry,

All skilful in the wars.

There, above noise and danger,

Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles,

And One born in a manger

Commands the beauteous files.

He is thy gracious Friend,

And, O my soul, awake!

Did in pure love descend

To die here for thy sake.

If thou canst get but thither,

There grows the flow’r of peace,

The Rose that cannot wither,

Thy fortress and thy ease.

Leave then thy foolish ranges,

For none can thee secure

Save One Who never changes,

Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Vaughan wrote one of the finest religious poems in the English language: The World, with its deceptively casual stonker of an opening line: ‘I saw Eternity the other night ...’  Visionary, but the trouble with visionaries is that they can’t always express their visions in a manner that’s helpful to those they share them with.  That the same poet could be responsible for this hodgepodge is barely, and yet all too easily credible.

What are the first things you notice about this poem?  The way it moves without warning from the naively literal (‘a country far beyond the stars’) to a wild mixture of metaphors (‘the rose that cannot wither, thy fortress and thy ease’?  The disconcerting way in which military imagery is constantly to the fore in a poem supposedly about the peace of Heaven (‘a sentry all skilful in the wars ... the beauteous files’)?  I suppose anyone who lived through the English Civil War might appreciate that even God needs to keep up a good military deterrent; however, the overall effect is more threatening than consoling, and the idea that the One born in a manger spends His risen life as a sort of sergeant-major engaged in a permanent review of the heavenly troops is anti-climactic in the extreme.

The problems centre around this quatrain, in fact.  Where does ‘Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles’ come from?  One commentator suggests that, as the other half of the sentence refers to Christ, Sweet Peace must be God the Father.  But I don’t think that even the most way-out seventeenth-century sectarian would have described God on His heavenly throne as being ‘crowned with smiles’: such a saccharine image is incredible.  This Peace can only be a personification of the actual peace of heaven, one of those allegorical figures that used to appear in classicizing masques and pageants in Jacobean times.  This means that a personification and an actual person are being bracketed together in one sentence; and, out of an allegory and God Incarnate, God is being put second.  Bad poetry and worse theology.

Then, just to confuse matters, Vaughan returns to this metaphor in the next-to-last verse: but here, ‘the flower of peace’ seems to be identified as ‘the rose that cannot wither’, which, in the well-known Isaiah-derived imagery, really is Christ.  Anyone would think he never read it over.  Or, if he did, he was still so wrapped up in his vision that he never thought about how it would sound to someone who hadn’t had the same celestial experience.  The poem can only work if the reader is so familiar with Christian imagery that each fragmentary image automatically implies its theological supporting structure to the reader, and the lack of any such supporting structure in the poem itself is not noticed.  Imagine trying to explain the essence of Christianity to an intelligent pagan on the basis of this poem!

Of course, few non-specialists would now have heard of it were it not for C. Hubert H. Parry’s masterly choral setting, which miraculously turns the poem’s overwrought sentiment into lyricism and its bittiness into an articulated structure.  Feeble poems often make first-class songs.  All credit to Parry, and long may his music keep Vaughan’s memory alive and encourage readers to dive into his other, greater poems.

'We never really meant women were evil, just ... different': oh please.

This was a rant I wrote in response to the Church of England’s decision not to ordain women as bishops:

Unfortunately what has happened is a typical Anglican paper-over-the-cracks exercise that has got stuck at the fudge stage. I love the Church of England for its fudginess as a rule, but really this is going a bit far.

Someone triumphantly remarked that you can’t find any Bible quotations to support women priests.  Silly.  Quotations will only ever give you one snapshot (that’s why arguing using them never gets anyone anywhere).  What you need is to get a sense of the wholeness that the dialectic is tending towards (sounds a bit vague I know, but ...) I mean, all right, Jesus didn’t care for convention, didn’t he? He positively wanted to turn things upside down, exalt the humble, send the rich empty away ... If you asked him ‘now, these people on whom you have breathed, and sent them to preach to all nations and lay on hands and forgive people’s sins, what sort of people do these have to be? I suppose they have to be men, to start off with ...’ I think he might just have laughed incredulously and said ‘you still don’t get it, do you?’

You notice in the Gospels that almost every time he’s actually having a conversation with someone and responding to what that person is saying, as opposed to lecturing them, it’s a woman. The only times he seems to change his mind are when he’s confronted by a woman – his mother at the marriage at Cana, the Syro-Phoenician woman who comes out with the line about dogs and crumbs, and arguably Martha at the raising of Lazarus. No way did he regard women as spiritually incapable.

Now of course anti-women-priests types will say ‘no of course women aren’t spiritually incapable, there’s just this one thing that is special to men – Jesus was a man, God is a Father, there must be some essential way in which a male priest can represent him while a female cannot.'  Unfortunately, then, their only logical position is that males are made 'in the image of God' in some fuller way than females - not what Genesis says. 'God made man in His own image, male and female he created them.' Now you can perfectly well believe in a God who would create a two-tier human race - Muslims do, and I don't suppose the idea comes very hard to Calvinists as they actually believe he created some to be damned, which is a lot more extreme! But it doesn't sound like the Christian God to me. Would the God who supposedly inspired his mother to say 'He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek' then go on to say to her whole sex, 'No, I didn't mean you lot, you can stay where you are'?  If the Incarnation is to have no knock-on effects for women, how does it make sense? Women are fobbed off with Mary: 'okay, one of you carried God in her womb, one of you is higher than the seraphim, but be content with that, the rest of you can shut up, stay out of the sanctuary and go on making the coffee'. Huh?

Anyway, they can't have it both ways. Either they should come clean and admit that they think women are something midway between true human and animal, or they should admit that women, too, can be representatives of God on earth.  This ‘equal, but with different roles’ stuff is a lame negotiating position adopted much too late to be in any way convincing.  No one can explain, if priesthood is special to men, what exactly is spiritually special to women.  Motherhood?  But male Christians have always been pretty condescending about that, at best, unless it’s virgin birth. Fatherhood is reckoned much more spiritually valid.  Mysticism?  Ah, but you have to be sceptical about these hysterical women.  Asceticism?  Now male asceticism can be dignified, but female asceticism is much too much like a mere morbid exaggeration of what women are all too prone to do anyway – placate or disarm the stronger sex by masochism: look how little space I can take up! Look how few demands I make! Look what a VICTIM I am (and as for that nasty sex, I never liked it much anyway ...).  Male-priesthood defenders may try and turn the argument around by saying, well, being a priest is all about service and sacrifice and that’s why men have to do it, women do it in their everyday lives already. Well, then, if the Christian thing is to balance out gender roles, shouldn’t women get some real authority somewhere to make up for their sacrificial excess? Preferential role as teachers and preachers, maybe?  Never saw it happening ... a lot of this stuff is just bare- faced opportunism.

To argue for equality in the priesthood is not 'modern political correctness' (and in any case, where did the dogma of equality come from if not from Christianity? You won't find it in any culture that hasn't been Christian). It's simply Bible logic. Nor does it matter that the Church has been doing things differently for 2,000 years. For one thing, the idea of the spiritual equality of women has always been around, bobbing up at awkward moments. It's time for it to stay up. For another, has not the Church spent more than half its history holding out for the absolute necessity of some things that Anglicans now consider positively harmful, e.g. a celibate clergy?  Didn’t it take most of two thousand years to decide that slavery was unacceptable in any circumstances?  Hey, the Church is a work in progress. It was never guaranteed to get everything right all the time. Most of the time it just got on with it, with far less agonising about eternal destiny versus passing fads than now.

But it can’t be said either side comes out of this argument well – it gets so polarised – the shrill, moral-high-ground-grabbing, manipulative misrepresentations of the pro-lobby or the elephantine scriptural literalism and thinly veiled misogyny of the more vocal antis (and they’ve finally learned how to do the politicking too, by the looks of things).

Funny thing is, the church is in effect probably already largely run by women – the indispensable tea-makers and flower-rota-fixers, the mumsy organising matriarchy that runs rings round the poor old parish priests. My nightmare would be that the opening of the priesthood to women would result in all those types actually getting into the saddle and taking over the whole show officially as well as unofficially! (After all, being a priest is such a nice job for a married woman, a touchy-feely, second-income, people-person kind of job...) The men, of course, would find it unbearable and desert in droves, then we’d have the first ever all-female, truly matriarchal Church. Ready for that, everyone? The cliqueiness, the gossip, the backstabbing, the non-speakers, the victim points, the conflict avoidance, the covert bullying ... My hope is that getting real, recognised responsibility on merit, rather than having to get it by stealth and as part of a competition for male attention, will eventually flush out all this sludge and women will stop behaving this way, but it’s a slow process, much slower than the men going into a sulk and refusing to do any job that NASTY GURLS are allowed to do ...

And my daughter added:

‘God is (in my opinion) a genderless spirit who was described as male by the patriarchs who first wrote about him, and Jesus wasn’t a woman because he was realistic – he struck a blow for the humble and meek by being born a normal carpenter’s son instead of a prince or whatever, but he knew he needed to be an able-bodied, mobile and basically respectable person if he was to have the freedom to get around spreading his message. In a male-dominated society, that meant being male. A female Jesus probably wouldn’t have got very far. Also: fifty-fifty chance. Maybe he just *happened* to be male.

Watership Down

Watership Down: the amazing rabbit Odyssey from the 1970s, and yes, it works.  How shall I count the myriad pleasures this book has given me in the intervening years?  The heart-in-the-mouth story-telling power, to begin with, as one exciting climax is piled on to another.  When I first read it, my favourite character by far was the dashing Bigwig, and my favourite chapters were the ones in which, like some World War II secret agent, he infiltrated the hostile warren of Efrafa to arrange the does’ escape.  I still think this section is a masterclass in how to tell a story: the mind-bending claustrophobia, the lowering threat, the way in which the best-laid plans go astray and have to be replaced by inspired improvisation, the apparently hopeless last stand and last-minute rescue ... brilliant!   On growing up, however, one learns to appreciate the organizing genius alongside the lone hero.  Hazel’s steep learning curve as he cajoles and co-ordinates his motley crew of rabbits, suiting his tactics to their characters, and finally becomes their recognised chief, is absorbingly depicted.  The third of the leading trio, Fiver, I’m not quite so sure about.  I always found his prophetic visions a tiny bit contrived: whether any modern, rational writer can really ‘do’ mysticism is moot. But in the narrative context these doubts are easily swept away.

The in-depth descriptions of the natural world seem to hold up the action at first, but on further readings are relished as providing the solid underpinning of reality for this apparently whimsical tale.  The epigraphs from poetry and prose that open every chapter are a joy in themselves, incredibly well chosen, and anchor the book without pretension in the great sea of literature. For instance, the Threarah, a one-rabbit distillation of the Establishment, whose equivocal leadership is wholly inadequate to the challenge he faces, is introduced with lines from Henry Vaughan’s Eternity that are almost more telling in this context than in the great original poem:

‘The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog, moved there so slow,

He did not stay, or go.’

The gem-like stories within the story, the rabbits’ creation myth and legends of their folk hero, El-ahrairah, the Prince with a Thousand Enemies, are endlessly apt and resonant, ranging from uproariously funny to deeply serious, as when El-ahrairah confronts the ‘Black Rabbit of Inlé’, the embodiment of death:

‘The Black Rabbit drew his claws along the floor.

‘”Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah,” he said.  “There is not a day or a night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit’s.  Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not.  But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.”’

And now the pleasure has been multiplied by being able to read the book aloud to my own children and see its language pass into family parlance – especially the bits that convey the rabbits’ touching conviction of their own centrality in the universe, the ‘Great Indestructibility of the Rabbits’.  ‘You must realise, Lord Frith, how important they are and not interfere with their beautiful lives.’  ‘Oh, Frith on the hills!  He made it all for us!’ And the ever-popular ‘Hoi, hoi, u embleer Hrair ...’  

In interviews since Watership Down became a world bestseller, Richard Adams has been at pains to downplay the ‘political allegory’ and ‘symbolic meanings’ read into the book and to emphasise the spontaneous, storytelling aspect, and he is right.  Adams the artist, letting his patterns emerge by feel, is far better than Adams the conscious thinker.  This is clearest in the treatment of the female rabbit characters.  The emphasis on male adventure to the almost complete neglect of females has earned him a lot of adverse criticism, understandably when you come to passages like this:

‘The kind of ideas that have become natural to many male human beings in thinking of females – ideas of protection, fidelity, romantic love, and so on – are, of course, unknown to rabbits ... they are not romantic and it came naturally to Hazel and Holly to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren.’

This makes it sound as if, for Adams, the only possible male approaches to the female are pedestalization on the one hand, or dehumanization (derabbitization!) on the other – you are either a shining ideal, or you are ‘breeding stock’.  Fortunately, things look up as soon as he introduces any actual female characters.  When Bigwig goes undercover in Efrafa, he is far more concerned with the reliability of the does as fellow conspirators than with their ‘breeding’ qualities.  The undoubtedly eugenic Nelthilta almost betrays the whole attempt with her big mouth (in a subtle touch, Bigwig admires her ‘spirit’, not quite realising that she is an immature version of himself – Bigwig the way he used to be before the wide world taught him better).  On the other hand, Hyzenthlay, although on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is Bigwig’s real equal in courage and intelligence:

‘Bigwig realized that he had stumbled, quite unexpectedly, upon what he needed most of all: a strong, sensible friend, who would think on her own account and help him bear his burden.’

Notice, too, that Hyzenthlay is less prone to uncritically accept the culture of her warren than are the males.  She neatly analyzes an Efrafan’s face-saving, conformist behaviour for Bigwig’s benefit.  ‘But you’re an Efrafan,’ objects Bigwig.  ‘Do you think like that too?’  To which Hyzenthlay wryly replies, ‘I’m a doe’.

Actions speak louder than words in Watership Down – and to those who are against the very idea of a male-dominated quest narrative, I would gently say that storytelling is many thousands of years old, while gender equality is in its infancy.  It may be a long time before stories catch up, and it’s a bit unfair to expect individual authors, like Richard Adams, to pull it off all at once.

What I find as disturbing, or more so, is the treatment of art and what we usually think of as civilisation.  The rabbits’ tales emerge from the ‘collective unconscious’ in a very Jungian way: handed down from one storyteller to another but with no identifiable authors.  During its travels the rabbit band arrives at a luxurious warren where the stories of El-ahrairah are considered old-fashioned.  The rabbits here go in for experimental poetry, and have also discovered the concept of visual art (‘shapes’ made with stones in a wall, meaningless to our heroes).  But this artistic development comes at a terrible price: it emerges that the warren has lost control of its fate, being fed and protected by a local farmer who sets snares around it for a constant supply of rabbit meat.  These rabbits’ advanced culture is merely a distraction from their helpless state.  Does this mean that Adams thinks that a tribal society is natural and best for humans, and that civilisation is literally a ‘snare’ and a delusion, in which our vital survival skills are atrophied by the social and technological defences we have set up for ourselves?  If he did, I would think him seriously mistaken – but in fact I think that is only one position in the complex dialectic of Watership Down, belied by Adams’s revelling in the depth of his own literary culture. 

This aspect of the story, however, was taken up with enthusiasm by the conservative journalist Christopher Booker (in The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade).  For him, Watership Down was a protest at the way our technological civilisation dehumanises us while despoiling nature – though a protest that was likely to stay on the level of fantasy. ‘It is all very well to dream of getting back to a simpler, more natural world where we might once again become fully human.  But in the conscious, outward world, the truth is that we are still doing almost everything we can to ensure that we are travelling self-destructively in the opposite direction.’  Well, as a mere ‘doe’, I have to say that Booker’s notion that we might be more fully human in a state of raw nature fails to inspire me, and indeed strikes me as false and sentimental in itself.  Humans are technological animals by nature, and the ‘drive to subject nature to our own use and comfort’ – when it results, for instance, in hospitals and libraries – is far from self-destructive, ignoble or lacking in compassion. 

Again, Adams is a more subtle storyteller than all this might imply.  The rabbits themselves are not averse to technological experiment – an old pallet that floats across a river, for instance – and human intervention more than once has a positive, rather than a destructive effect in the story.  The rabbits, of course, are human, more than anything else in their tricksterishness, their adaptability, and their playfulness.  It is more than anything the sheer spirit of play, of thought-experiment, something that would be lacking in ‘mere’ nature, that suffuses Watership Down with joy rather than doom.  

'Lifestyle Choice'

Mr Osborne's announcement that working couples will receive money to pay others for looking after their children (but not for looking after their own), and his justification that 'stay-at-home parents' (in other words those who believe that having a baby should also involve looking after it) make a 'lifestyle choice', was all too disappointingly familiar. 

The whole interconnected morass of pay, benefits and tax for families needs taking apart and redesigning from the bottom up. At the moment it appears purposely designed to undermine a healthy, supportive environment for small children.  At the bottom end of the income scale, men in low-paid work simply cannot afford to be good fathers - their partners are better off living on state benefits than on joint wages.  Are we simply to put such men on the social scrapheap?  In the middle reaches, work-work-work, consume-consume-consume, to a constant background drip of denigration of parenthood and family life (see Hannah Betts, passim, on the subject of 'breeders').  And at the top end - the nanny, as it ever was.  Looking after small children is regarded as the dumbest possible occupation: not vital work but a 'lifestyle choice' for the idle rich or the feckless poor, or the lowest-paid of jobs, suitable for gormless teenagers without any GCSEs.  

Then a few years later, we have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes because no one cooks family meals any more but lives on unhealthy snacks, we have young teenagers holed up in their bedrooms watching porn, or being bullied to the point of suicide because their self-esteem depends on their status on social networks, and it's 'duh?  Where did that come from?'  Certainly not from middle-class parents not being there to support their children through the confusions of childhood because they were too busy working!  Oh no!  A good feminist, a good citizen, gets straight back to work and develops her career!  Stay-at-home mothers who want tax breaks are whingers!  There's a lot of covert bullying and outright denial about these attitudes, which really makes me angry. 

If you do take some years out to look after a young family, everyone assumes that you are unenterprising and your brain has died.  The reality is the opposite.  Being a full-time parent for a few years makes you a better worker as well as a better person. The balance of physical and mental tasks is better for you than sitting at a desk all day (very like what Matthew Crawford advocates in his book 'The Case for Working With Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us', although that is a very male-oriented, motorbiker sort of book); you come away with more ideas and more creativity as well as better time management and negotiation skills.  But try getting any employer to recognise that!  Particularly as in many jobs they are forced to pay you on an age-related payscale - they might have more incentive to employ come-back mothers (or fathers!) if pay could be related directly to experience. 

It's not a question of 'lifestyle choice' for the individual, nor yet a gender issue: it's a question of how we, as a society, are going to raise a future generation that is basically functional.  But this idea is clearly beyond Messrs Osborne, Cameron and Clegg.

Culturally determined?

A couple of months ago I was in a gathering of academics when the subject of music came up: they all agreed that responses to music are culturally determined, i.e. the way a piece of music makes you feel depends on where you’re from and how you were raised.  (And this although most of them were Wagner fans!)  I was disagreeing quite strongly in my head, but they were all lovely people, all knowledgeable and senior to me, and in any case the conversation moved on so I didn’t get round to saying anything.  However, I felt they were so obviously wrong that, unfortunately, ideological motives must have been involved – cultural relativism, of course: the strong taboo that educated Westerners tend to feel against saying anything that might claim a wider appeal, let alone superiority, for Western culture – the reflexive urge to be apologetic for it.

I believe one can easily prove that a high proportion of anyone’s response to music is determined by simple mathematics and biology.  Vibrations that cause ‘harmonious’ chords are evenly proportioned in their frequency, and thus sound restful; those that cause ‘discords’ are uneven and sound, well, discordant.  It doesn’t need me to say this, others have said it far better.  Few would disagree, either, that responses to certain basic musical gambits are physical.  Coming back to the same key you started in sounds predictable, moving to an unrelated one causes surprise; ratcheting the notes or harmonies upwards sounds like effort, bringing them swooping down sounds like relaxation, etc. – to say nothing of the obvious relationship of rhythm to a heartbeat, relaxed or stimulated.  Surely one doesn’t need much cultural training to recognise that the repeated incomplete downward scales in the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony sound like heartbreak, or, to stay with Tchaikovsky, that the upwardly striving chord sequence in the Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker, followed by the complete scale plunging downwards, is a musical orgasm.  All one needs, I would suggest, is a working pair of ears that hasn’t been deafened to natural stimuli by the exceedingly limited (but excessively loud) repertoire of techniques to be found in contemporary pop music.

I think Western classical music, like Western science and art, became increasingly ‘naturalistic’ from the Renaissance onwards while most musical traditions remained more stylized.  While most art styles of the world have worked by encoding a viewpoint or message about the object being depicted, Graeco-Roman and Renaissance art approaches more closely to depicting the subject simply as it is.  While the Greek theory of the humours and planetary influences, and the Chinese theory of the elements, developed a highly theoretical model of how the human body worked based on a limited number of observations, modern Western medical science multiplied the observations and brought the theories much more into line with physical fact.  In the same way, the supposed differences in ‘mood’ between the different modes of ancient Greek music (whereby the Dorian mode was supposed to be martial, the Lydian mode lascivious), or between Indian ragas, really are culturally determined: you have to be immersed in that culture’s way of hearing to appreciate them, and the palette of visceral emotions they express is subtle and quite limited.   The system of keys and modulations in western classical music, on the other hand, has allowed music to ‘play’ on the instrument of the listening body in ways that are much more blatantly stimulating as well as subtle.

This is not to say that other musical traditions are inferior or deserve to be taken over.  Good art is good art wherever it comes from.  But the idea that you can only ever appreciate a piece of music if you are fully conversant with the culture it comes from is unnecessarily defeatist about the ability of music to be an ‘international language’ bringing peoples together – and quite condescending, for instance, to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean musicians who have become some of the foremost practitioners of Western classical music.

Am I being controversial, or stating the bleeding obvious?

Horsemeat

Much too late, I came across what may have been the best joke of the horsemeat-as-beef scandal.  Q: what sort of cheese goes in a Findus burger?  A: mascarpone.  Geddit?  Mask-a-pony.  Tee, hee...

Seriously, though, I wasn't too shocked at the idea that I might have eaten a morsel of horse in beef by accident.  I was slightly more worried by the argument that anyone who is prepared to sell horse as beef may not be keeping to more important hygiene rules with the utmost rigour either.  What shocked me most in comments on the news reports was the proportion of people who said, 'well, what do you expect for a pound?'  Or implied that anyone who would buy meat so cheap shouldn't complain if what they got wasn't what it said it was.  Giles Coren of The Times was a prime culprit here.  People should buy properly sourced meat from a decent butcher, he said, if they wanted to be confident of its quality.

Huh.  People with money to spare have always been able to insist on the best anyway.  If their butcher cheats them they can go to a better butcher, and the old one will feel the loss of their custom.  No one feels the loss of the custom of the poorest.  It was precisely for their sake that the Trade Descriptions Act was necessary.  For people who don't have any choice.  Whether any firm can afford to sell four beef quarter-pounders for a quid is neither here nor there.  If it says it's beef it ought to be beef, end of story.

What is happening to sympathy for the poor?  Once it used to be normal, now it's assumed everyone who's poor is a scrounger.  And that's true, in the sense that no one in low-paid work can survive without tax credits and benefit top-ups, rather than employers being expected to pay them a living wage.  The old working class has split.  Some, perhaps most, have moved up into the middle class, but the rest seem to be worse off than ever.  Middle-class professionals compare the British poor unfavourably to energetic Eastern European migrants, not seeming to realise that the Eastern Europeans we see here are self-selecting, the young, bright and enterprising.  What if you aren't gifted with such youth, energy and enterprise?  Do you belong on the scrap-heap?  'The British just don't know what work is any more,' says a pillar of the local establishment, a comfortable retired professional who has never know what it's like to have to get up at five o'clock on a winter morning, with a sore throat and a bad back, to work digging up a road all day.

Sometimes I worry that we're going backwards to the 1920s: as Siegfried Sassoon wrote of his well-heeled friends:

'Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?
Leisure?  They'd only spend it in a bar!
Standard of life?  You'll never teach them Greek,
Or make them more contented than they are!
That's how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike,
And that's the reason why I shout and splutter,
And that's the reason why I'd almost like
To see them hawking matches in the gutter.'

Church Music and Corporate God

Today it is time for a rant about church music.  My parish choir is a good one, but members are ageing and numbers are dwindling, and the children mostly seem to leave when they reach the turbulent teenage years.  We sing core Anglican music – anything from Byrd to Rutter by way of Stanford and Elgar, and traditional psalm chants and hymns with organ accompaniment.  There are eight or more other Protestant establishments in the town none of which does anything like this, and even at our church, you get the impression that the majority of the congregation are indifferent to or at best tolerant of the music supplied, and would be quite happy to see it replaced by guitars, amplified pre-recorded music and ‘worship songs’.  Why is this?

Why do the majority of Christians think it appropriate to include infant-school songs with actions in church services, forcing respectable, arthritic elderly people to beat their chests like gorillas and sing ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle’?

Why do most Christians – even the most morally conservative – feel it right to address the Almighty in song with the moaning, sobbing and gasping that were developed in commercial music as indications of extreme desire for sexual intercourse, if not the act itself?

Why do pillars of the church establishment readily dismiss a great variety of traditional hymns as ‘dirges’, when most of these are demonstrably more interesting, musically, than ‘worship songs’?

Why do most Christians refuse even to sample the heritage of traditional church music, but call traditionalists who dislike pop ‘narrow-minded’?

Why do they work and scheme to get traditional music edged out of the few places where it is still in use, and label anyone who stands in their way ‘intolerant’?  Why, in short, do they define themselves as victims when they are in control, and as rebels when they are a conformist majority?

By now someone will be pointing out that most cathedrals (and Oxbridge colleges) have perform traditional music, that the Royal School of Church Music is at the heart of the Establishment and that grand state occasions still showcase the Anglican classics, etc.  To which I reply, yes, but are not these beleaguered islands whose supports are being washed away by the floods of uncaring ignorance that surround them?  I don’t know, in fact, whether things are getting better or worse.  The signals are mixed.  What we are seeing now may be a slack tide which is about to turn, or the lull before the final assault.  The Church of England has a musical tradition that is unique in Europe and perhaps in the world.  But if it vanished, how many people would actually notice?

I have stood in the choir stalls at a sung Eucharist at our church, moved to tears as a soaring treble sings Holy, holy.  It is better than any concert you could pay to get into in this town all year.  It’s better than any concert, in fact, because it has a purpose beyond entertainment.  And it’s free.  Yet there are, what, twenty people in the congregation if we’re lucky.  Does anybody care?

It is much easier to ask these questions than to get answers.  In fact I have been pondering them in a melancholy way for most of my life.  Why don’t people value what seems self-evidently beautiful?

The problem, of course, extends beyond the Church to society as a whole.  The ‘decline of classical music’, or rather its demotion by the cultural establishment, began in earnest in the 1960s.  It was then that the Left got its hands on the levers of power, and decided that to promote high culture, especially classical music, to the people at large was patronising, a hegemonic imposition of elitist values, an abuse of power.  The people must be allowed to make their own choices.  The Right was not too upset, as its members had quietly realised that it was more profitable to sell the people disposable crap anyway.  So the people, of course, ‘chose’ what was most vigorously sold to them. 

The Left by its nature is deeply suspicious of enjoyable music, art and literature.  Enjoyment is a distraction from the class struggle; it is morally wrong to enjoy anything while misery and injustice stalk our world (in other words, ever).  Art is good if it has a social message.  It is allowed to be ‘challenging’, i.e. ugly, horrifying or incomprehensible.  Or it can be enjoyable at an ironic level if it is frankly rubbish, kitschy, popular in the commercial sense.  Because then it demonstrates the decadence and approaching collapse of the capitalist system.  Here an unholy alliance develops between socialism and consumerism.  As Ursula Le Guin pointed out long ago in her essay ‘The Stalin in the Soul’, late capitalist society needs art to be disposable.  ‘They want products to sell, quick turnover, built-in obsolescence.’ (I saw an example of how far this tendency has convinced the consumers in a shop where a toddler was asking his mother to hire a video.  ‘Not that one, darling,’ she smilingly said, ‘you’ve had it before.’) 

After about fifty years of this two-pronged attack, we have got to the point where the man or woman in the street knows nothing of classical music, and doesn’t want to know, because they have an overwhelming impression that, whatever it may be, it is a bit ‘snobby’ (the left-wing view), and also ‘uncool’ and ‘boring’ (the commercial contribution).  When I was in my teens most schoolchildren had at least heard the names Mozart and Beethoven, even if they only understood that they were cultural bugbears to be laughed at.  Now most have probably never heard of them at all.  The exception is a determined minority of the upper middle class.  What the lefties always claimed – that classical music is only for a privileged elite – may not have been true then but, thanks to their efforts, it certainly is now.

This is where congregations are coming from.  In the churches the dynamic is very similar – indeed, it has been going on for much longer.  Socialism, after all, derives directly from the puritan and millenial wings of Christianity.  The refusal to accept pleasure that does not contribute to the class struggle is just another avatar of the old refusal to enjoy yourself in this life because you are saving your pleasure for the next.  There has always been a strong iconoclastic strain in Christianity: the fear that in approaching God by means of imagery in art or music, the believer will be deflected from the truth and end up worshipping the image, the creature rather than the Creator.  The effort devoted to the image – the art or the music – risks becoming an end in itself.  So thought the reformers who knocked the heads off the statues in Ely’s Lady Chapel.  So, in their more moderate way, think high-minded pastors who want their church members to flourish in faith and good works, rather than expending their energy and resources on ‘difficult’ music.  By taking a relaxed approach with some simple choruses and three-chord worship songs, they hope to create a ‘prayerful’ atmosphere that will be ‘inclusive’, not putting off any ordinary person who happens to stroll in from the street. 

All well and good, but do such Christians ever wonder if they are perhaps being too ‘inclusive’ of traits in modern society which most thoughtful people agree are not such a good thing?  Passivity, addiction to undemanding entertainment, demand for constant novelty – all those same consumerist tendencies that have sneaked in under the radar of the cultural commissars of secular society.  Fans of ‘worship songs’ are mostly evangelicals.  In some ways, they are ready to take a stand against modern culture.  They may reject the theory of evolution, or the liberalisation of sexual morality.  But they ought to watch out that they don’t reject the good and thought-out ideas of the modern world, while unthinkingly accepting the bad.

I can see plenty of reasons why traditional church music no longer holds immediate appeal for the average church-goer.  What I still do find hard to understand is what they like about the stuff they do.  Evangelicals believe in a God who is very strict and quite scary, who is ready to send the unrepentant to hell.  But he doesn’t seem very dignified, if choruses of ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle?’ please him.  They think it right to fear God.  But they don’t seem to reverence him much.  Reverence is not really a word in the evangelical vocabulary.  Over the centuries, God has been given many names: Creator, Father, Lord, Author of Life, Supreme Spirit, Eternal Love.  But in an edition of the New Testament handed out to converts by the Bible Society, he is introduced as ‘the big boss’.  It seems to me that in their attempt to marry a conservative theology with a modern consumerist culture, evangelicals have the worst of both worlds.  Their God is arbitrary without mystery, matey without loving-kindness.  He’s awfully ... corporate.  How fitting that he should be worshipped with motivational slogans, carpet tiles and overhead projectors.

Easy enough to rant, much harder to persuade people to broaden out from this horribly ‘relevant’ style of worship.  What might be the best way to set about it? 

'Free Speech'

This week in the Sunday Telegraph I read this piece by Matthew d’Ancona strongly in favour of David Cameron’s new initiative to make it harder to access violent and illegal porn on the internet.  ‘Great,’ I thought.  ‘If Dave can pull that off, he’ll get my vote’.  Then I went to the newspaper’s website and looked at some of the readers’ comments.  Hardly one had a good word to say for Cameron and his policy.  They divided pretty evenly between those who thought that it was a nice idea, but technically unfeasible (‘Cameron has no idea how the internet works’); those who thought that it was a cynically populist pre-election posture; and those who thought that it was the thin end of the wedge to bring the entire Internet under political control (‘next stop China’).

Depressing, that.  You would really think that the Prime Minister could afford the best advice on how the internet works, if anyone could.  You might also ask who is the populace that is supposed to be wooed by this populist measure, if Telegraph readers are so universally contemptuous.  (Could the PM just possibly be acting out of principle?)  And you might think that ideas about free speech have become somewhat skewed.  You might even wonder whether there are a lot of secretly porn-viewing Telegraph readers out there who aren’t admitting their real agenda, but that might be a touch paranoid.

Of course Matthew d’Ancona is a Cameron puffer, but he’s not an idiot. I think we should pay attention when he says ‘Nor is this sort of regulation in any sense a threat to free speech: those who say otherwise give a bad name to a precious ideal.  These are criminally disseminated images of criminal acts.  Shame on those who claim that their continued accessibility is the price we pay for liberty, or for the digital revolution.  That is a confusion of freedom with lawless savagery.’  That was when I threw my hat in the air, as I do when Caitlin Moran, the most unlikely Mary Whitehouse, riotously mocks porn in its own language.  When dry political commentators and down-and-dirty girls-about-town speak out against porn, it might at last undermine the dirty-mac brigade’s claims that only prudish authoritarians are whipping up ‘moral panic’ about the issue.

(Interesting how this phrase is starting to be used as a way to brush off objections and shut down debate on any sort of public vice.  As C.S. Lewis’s demon said in The Screwtape Letters, regarding ‘Puritanism’: ‘May I remark in passing that the value we have given that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years?  By it we have rescued annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity and sobriety of life’.  ‘Moral panic’ is rapidly becoming the equivalent for the second decade of the twenty-first century.)

However, the battle must be won on the field of culture.  Legislation can only ever be a blunt instrument, especially with such a slippery and vaguely defined enemy as porn.  With the internet, we have to grow up and learn to use it while resisting its addictive tendencies.  It’s a new medium and new media have intoxicating qualities.  The track record of humanity in coping with any of these in the first century or so is not good. 

The rise of print and mass literacy in the sixteenth century?  Every ploughboy could read his Bible: Renaissance humanism gave way to rival Christian fundamentalisms, rabble-rousing, mud-slinging and hideous religious wars all over Europe. 

The rise of the cinema and mass-circulation newspapers in the early twentieth century?  Cue manipulation of the populace by demagogues, fascism, Nuremberg rallies, and World War II.  Only when sated with destruction did people develop a healthy scepticism for what they saw on telly/read in the newspapers.

And now the rise of the internet.  Instant information, communication uncontrolled by the Establishment, marvellous.  Quack ideas, conspiracy theories, terrorist cells, child porn shared across continents with one click – not so marvellous.  This time can we ride the wave and tame the tigers?  It’s quite important.

Might return to this subject.

‘Rational Religion’

To inject a slightly cosmic tone into this blog at the earliest possible stage ...

Religion: ‘belief in … a higher unseen controlling power or powers’ (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary).  Isn’t it inherently irrational?  To answer the question ‘Why does anything exist?’ with ‘Because an invisible super-person put it there’ seems like fairly childish guesswork; and religious experience, a sense of the presence of gods and spirits, can easily be explained in terms of the poorly understood quirks of the human brain.

Yet arguably it is ‘rational’ to have a religion, if ‘rational’ means ‘knowing what’s good for you’; plenty of studies show that people with religious beliefs are happier and live longer than those without them.  To take up religion for your health’s sake, though, seems absurdly back-to-front.  Equally arguably, religion can seriously damage your health: it causes wars and justifies oppression.  And yet to wish it away from the world seems about as realistic as wishing humans didn’t have to be bipeds.

It was much simpler in the days when no one needed to make any effort to ‘believe’ in God – when gods and spirits were just ‘there’.  Then, there was no conflict between rationality and religion.  Having a religion included thinking about it as well and as clearly as you could.  Once reason seems to conflict with religion, however, you are in a no-win situation whichever side you choose.  Choose religion and you have to keep on consciously avoiding certain questions and trains of thought; in effect, choosing to be stupid, as we see so clearly in the case of fundamentalists of all stripes.  But choose your critical faculties and when they have done with demolishing your religion, they turn on everything else, themselves included.  Many philosophers believe that language is a system that refers only to itself and can tell us nothing real about the outside world; hence, that truthfulness and objective knowledge are impossible and that culture is nothing but a jostling crowd of conflicting fantasies – or ‘narratives’.  Stymied by their own logic, they are in no position to defend us from the worst excesses of idiot fundamentalism, for if truth does not exist then is not fundamentalism as valid a viewpoint as any other?

To divorce faith from reason ends by making thinking pointless.  From the religious point of view, thought is unnecessary; from the rational point of view, thought is illusory.  For those of us who actually like to think, and even believe that it is useful, we have to find some way of bringing the two back together, uncomfortable and contradictory though it may be.  To declare that clear thinking is valuable is itself a religious claim, an act of faith as groundless as any supernatural belief.

That is why I wish that there could be a reconciliation between religious people who have room in their belief-system for reason and conscience as well as revelation and authority, and non-religious people who still believe in the ultimate value of truth, as well as other un-provable values like liberty, equality and fraternity.  And that is why, by contrast, I get deeply uneasy when I hear, on the one hand, intelligent Christians saying that they need to make common cause with other believers, not excluding fundamentalists, in the battle against secularism and materialism; and, on the other hand, old-fashioned freethinkers like A.P. Grayling and Richard Dawkins thundering against the tolerant, Enlightenment-upgraded traditional Christianity of the western world as if it were their ultimate enemy, as if there were not far fiercer enemies of reason hemming them in all round. 

It might irritate him inexpressibly to tell him so, but Richard Dawkins is a man of deep faith.  Perhaps the definition of being ‘religious’ needs to be modified from ‘believing in higher unseen powers’ to ‘having a vision of what is ultimately good and sticking to it’.  Dawkins believes in truth at all costs; he believes that we can really know things about the universe; he believes that it is our human vocation to see the world as it is, in all its grandeur and terror, regardless of anything we can get out of it; in theory at least, he is as pure a contemplative as St Anthony of Egypt.  All these positions need faith.  Logic alone will not maintain them.  Recent church leaders in this country, on the other hand, have gone out on a limb to try to defend the humane and reasonable in religion against the forces of visionary fundamentalism – with precious little respect from secular intellectuals. 

So, please, can’t those of us who believe in faith with reason, stand firm on our common ground?  The fundamentalists will accuse us of being wishy-washy sell-outs, the cutting-edge philosophers will call us nostalgic and muddle-headed; we have to wear both badges with pride.

The Dragonfly

It is turning out to be a wonderful year for dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies. Looking around for the text of Tennyson's poem The Dragonfly, I chanced across this beautiful blog:

See also Simon Barnes's article in Saturday's Times: 'A bevy of damsels with no signs of distress':

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/simonbarnes/article3815606.ece

The banks of my local river (more like a canal really) are thick with willow-herb and fluttering with hedge browns and small tortoiseshells, more than I've seen for many years.  Perhaps nature isn't giving up the struggle yet.

Welcome to DOWN WITH COOL!

If you are a little tired of the pace of modern life, the pressure to be ‘on trend’ and always acquiring the ‘latest’ thing ...

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