This was the week in which one of the most influential musicians of his era, David Bowie, died from cancer at the age of 69. Following a heart attack in 2014, Bowie had more or less disappeared from live performance and touring. In recent years there were rumours that he was suffering from lung cancer. The rumours of cancer were true, but he actually died of liver cancer.
Bowie, who was born in Brixton, London, in 1947, and was raised in Bromley under the name of David Jones, was living in New York and died mere days after his 69th birthday and the release on that day of his final album Blackstar. Interestingly, this album was the only one which did not feature his image on the cover. Perhaps this was a fitting and symbolic way to end his performance.
We cannot, of course, be certain that Bowie planned to end his public life so neatly, but the words “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go” is evidence of an artistic life formed with no lack of wit, if not ambiguity. Bowie’s last recorded lyrics, it seems, are “I can’t give everything away”. There is no doubt that David Bowie will leave a legacy.
In 2013, his first new song in a decade, Where are we now? posed that question to all his devotees. That seems to have been a constant theme running though his music and personal identity since he burst on the pop music scene towards the end of the swinging sixties.
I first got to know the music of David Bowie when I was the warden of a youth centre in the East End of London in the early 1970s. By then, the singer had already transcended the conventional in his notions of identity in pop and rock music and had finally broken through in 1972 with the hit Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy turned out to be Bowie’s alter-ego.
David Bowie was a cultural figure who, in the words of one admirer, took the cultural conventions of the day and “hyper-blasted them into orbit, creating an explosion of myriad shapes and possibilities.” He gave others, including the devotees who attended my church-sponsored youth centre, and many others after them, “the permission to explore ‘other selfs’; alternate versions of themselves, not constrained by social norms.”
Even from as far away as Australia, tributes have been flowing in for David Bowie. One of these very succinctly and appropriately summarized the singer’s influence on popular music: “Rather than perform as an ‘authentic self’, David Bowie, through a number of concocted personas and striking performance ambits and gestures, explored the outer reaches of personal identity: male, female, weirdly normal, drug-f….d, spaceman, alien. In terms of Western popular culture this was revolutionary.” Tributes don’t come better than this.
Another tribute from the United States, however, considered that David Bowie “changed the world forever.” This grandiose, if not sublime, claim is hardly substantiated by the evidence.
Bowie was basically a pop performer (in an interview for television he once said that he was not a rock-n-roll singer, he was “a performer of popular music”). That was the source of his celebrity. He was not a politician, a priest, or some intrepid global explorer or anthropologist. The words and music of his songs could be seen as self-statements, confessions even; words and music which described and summed-up his philosophy of life.
David Bowie was a 20th century music existentialist. He expressed his philosophy of life through his music; he took responsibility for the decisions he made with his life and the various identities he brought to it. David Bowie was provocative, poetic, pre- and post-punk, creative and compelling. He was a 20th century man who explored and experimented with musical sounds and visions. He was different and, in consequence, “his sounds and mannerisms were co-opted and imitated by both the worthy artists and the poseurs of the 1980s.”
But, did he “change the world forever”. This is hardly likely and the claim applies no more to Bowie than it does to other iconic figures from the world of popular, music e.g., Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Roy Orbison and Michael Jackson, to name but a few from the same era as Bowie. With these, David Bowie now passes into the annals of late 20th century music history.
David Bowie was not just a musician. He was an accomplished artist and actor. He was an alien from a dying planet in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the British prisoner of war, Major Jack Celliers, in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill.
His political interests were interesting. Early in his career he expressed an attraction for nationalism and fascism; attractions he would later deny. In 2000 he declined the royal honour of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and turned down a knighthood in 2003. Bowie later stated: “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don’t know what it’s for. It’s not what I spent my life working for”.
Though “not quite an athiest”, Bowie considered that “Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always.” In a 2005 interview for Esquire magazine “What I’ve Learned”, he stated “I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.” His interest in Buddhism began in 1967, but very early on he was told by his Tibetan Buddhist teacher “You don’t want to be a Buddhist. You should follow music.”
As this article is being written, I am listening to Bowie’s Platinum Collection – the Best of Bowie. This triple album covers Bowie’s output from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Though choice is difficult, my personal favourites include Space Oddity, Sound and Vision, Heroes, Sorrow, Life on Mars and the Under Pressure duo he did with “Queen’s” Freddie Mercury. But, such was the quality and quantity of Bowie’s output, the list could be extended.
To those who enjoyed his music, David Bowie showed us that there are other possibilities. We are not stuck with a “given mindset, a singular process, a known destination, a predetermined sexuality, a linear destiny. Life is way more mysterious, replete with resonances, echoes and unexplored expanses.” These possibilities still exist.
A few years ago Bowie released the track Where Are We Now? One critic described this song as “a meditation on cloudy memory and dimming consciousness. For an artist who kept the personal at a distance he hits a peak moment of elemental emotional purity as the song closes: As long as there’s sun / As long as there’s rain / As long as there’s fire / As long as there’s me / As long as there’s you.”
David Bowie is dead. He’s gone. He has passed into the memories of those who enjoyed, perhaps even had their lives changed by, his contribution to music. But the above words pose the question: where are we now?
RSC
The state is the United Kingdom, but what is the state of the UK?
The daily tabloid newspapers recently carried the story of how Charles Windsor has been covertly receiving top-secret Cabinet papers for decades. Following a Freedom of Information (FIO) battle, it has been revealed that Charles, along with his mother, Elizabeth Windsor, the Head of State for the UK, has been given a weekly insight into the heart and mind of the British Government. Seemingly, this practice has been going on since at least 1992. This means that Charles Windsor has had unrivalled access to the workings of the UK government for nearly a quarter of a century. Why is this so?
Apart from any other consideration, Prince Charles has a habit of intervening in public policy matters, particularly involving some of his favourite subjects (and I do not mean British citizens). These would include planning and rural affairs. One Westminster MP has said that, “There is no control over his lobbying. He is not only the most influential lobbyist, but the best informed. He is lobbying for his own interests, which are not always benign or sensible.”
It is only a few months since the publication of the so-called “Black Spider” memos. In these it was revealed that Charles Windsor had pressed the Blair Government to listen to and act on his counsel in such areas as provision for the Armed Forces and more help for the dairy industry, as well as his criticism of the design for a refurbishment of the Chelsea Barracks in London. Following his intervention, plans for the latter were shelved.
In response to all of this, the CEO of the Republic movement said that, “Charles has no legitimate need to see Cabinet papers. His political and private interests and the high degree of secrecy surrounding his lobbying means there is a real danger this information can be abused without any possibility of accountability.”
Response to this viewpoint echoed the usual line that “it has been part of his (Charles) constitutional role as heir to the (British) throne” and “established practice for many years.” In view of this, therefore, it needs to be further asked about the legitimacy of William Windsor, the son of Charles Windsor, also receiving Cabinet information. In what state is British democracy?
The situation outlined in the above brings to mind a maxim of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who insisted that “To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.” In the light of this perspective it would seem that Charles Windsor is on the way to becoming a legend in his own lifetime!
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I will not take it for granted, but readers of this blog may have heard of the “northern powerhouse”. This is a scheme that aims “to set up the northern regions of England as an economic rival to the south-east of the country. It plans to do this by devolving powers over services such as health, transport, planning and economic regeneration.” But not, it appears, by devolving education.
Having been a secondary school teacher, I have a bias that says that education and accountability for it must lie at the heart of any successful plan for economic regeneration. The present British Government does not seem to share this viewpoint. This is not surprising as it doesn’t think skills are part of education anyway, not to mention the matter of accountability. Local accountability for education is rapidly diminishing as central government takes over such things as funding, curriculum issues and structural organisation, e.g., the role of the new regional schools commissioners.
The complex nature of the flux in the circumstances of central government involvement in all aspects of education in England can be seen in the case of a boarding school set up by the Durand Academy Trust in the south of England. Finding out how many pupils should be educated at the school’s West Sussex site proved an almost impossible task for one intrepid investigator.
The school claimed that its pupil numbers were a matter for Ofsted; Ofsted said it was a matter for the Department for Education; and the DfE said it was a matter for the school. Would this situation have come about if local oversight of schools were still in the hands of the Local Education Authority? I doubt it.
I do not claim that LEA’s have always done a brilliant job, but is the present system serving the educational needs of real children – in the cities, towns and villages of the “northern powerhouse”, West Sussex or elsewhere? What is the state of education in the British state? Is it any more democratic and accountable than giving Charles Windsor and his son unimpeded access to the British Government and its Cabinet papers?
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It is appropriate to return to the wisdom of Hegel. He further wrote: “Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.” This can be applied to the tortured relationship of the UK with the rest of Europe and how quickly we can forget the lessons of history. In Britain, politicians are slaves to public opinion on Europe (no chance of greatness, then, with the present lot up at Westminster!). What does this say about the state of politics in Britain?
As the debate on whether the UK should remain within the European Community gathers momentum, it is quite obvious that a major shaper of public opinion is the press. With notable exceptions, the British press is anti-European and there are comparatively few at Westminster, as elsewhere, who are willing to challenge what one politician has labelled “the constant negativity in the press or even to question whether men who pay no taxes in Britain should have such power to dictate public opinion.” What is the state of the fourth estate in Britain?
It has been said that the first condition of democracy is for all citizens to be sceptical about what those in power do. The truth of this is all too evident in what is written in the above.
We are living in a world of constant change – social, economic, political, military and moral. This change does not happen in a vacuum, it is informed, even engineered by specific interests, objectives and outlooks. Behind each of these categories are human beings – politicians, priests, press barons, educators, generals and royals, and more. Not all of these are benign – witness the rise of terrorism and global conflict, moral relativism and climate change, social and economic inequalities and the concentration of wealth, and the dilution and diminishing of democracy.
To ask the question, “What state are we in?” is to believe that what has been written about in the above is not always inevitable or preordained, or to be adopted or adapted to.
To ask this is to relentlessly question and hold to account what we are all too often encouraged to uncritically accept. It is to unreservedly believe that circumstances and situations, possibilities and processes can be changed.
To ask this question is to favour the greater good and not the narrow interests of the few. What state are we in, and who benefits from it?
RSC
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged accountability, constant change, constitutional democracy, economic regeneration, European Community, greatness, LEA, lobbying, northern powerhouse, press barons, public policy, Republic, secrecy
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As this article is being written, the British House of Commons is debating the matter of whether or not the UK should join with other nations in bombing the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) in Syria. The debate has been called by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who is of the view that such bombing should be carried out as an extension of the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq, and in collusion with the Iraqi armed forces.
Since the beginning of this century, there have been terrorist attacks in New York, London, Madrid, Tunisia, Libya and other countries, and, more recently, in Paris. The latter has exacerbated calls for the fight to be taken to ISIS in their middle-eastern strongholds. Those persons and parties calling for the debate on whether the UK should join in the bombing, at least, in Syria, have done so in the belief that destroying ISIS in the territories it presently occupies in the Middle East will make the UK a safer place in which to live.
The present writer does not share this opinion.
The year 2008 saw the publication of a book by the American political philosopher, Philip Bobbitt. The booked was called Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-First Century. The basic thesis of this book is that terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily living all over the world. However, we have hardly begun to think properly about it. “Terror and Consent” argues that we are fighting these wars with weapons and concepts which, though useful to us in previous conflicts, have now been superseded.
Philip Bobbitt’s book aims to “provide a fundamental rethinking of the most generally accepted ideas about terror in the modern world – what it is, how it operates and above all how it can be frustrated”.
Those opposed to the extension of bombing in Syria are, amongst other reasons, not convinced that destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq will destroy their worldwide network. Terrorist outrages will go on, perhaps become more frequent and outrageous, and more widespread. “The evolution of the modern state has always produced terrorists in their own image.” The peculiarly British example is, of course, the IRA.
The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in commenting on Bobbitt’s book, has said that the war against terrorism “is new in every aspect of its nature – how it has come about, the profound threat posed by it, how it has to be fought and the revolution in traditional thinking necessary to achieve victory. It may be written by an academic, but it is actually required reading for political leaders.” Unfortunately, the book was not available in 2003, the year that Mr Blair authorised British participation in the invasion of Iraq and previous to this, in 2001, aligning the UK with the USA in prosecuting a war in Afghanistan.
In confounding the views of politicians, political commentators and military analysts, Philip Bobbitt argues that, in the war against terrorism, the “links between law and strategy” need to be re-forged; “strategies for intervention” in such a war must be “combined with humanitarian interests”. Above all, he considers that we need to rethink what “victory” in such a war might look like “no occupied capitals, no treaties, no victory parades, but the preservation, protection and defence of human rights and of states of consent.” Furthermore, it is central to Bobbitt’s argument that “we are fighting terror and not just terrorists.”
It is quite central to the argument against British involvement in the bombing of Syria that David Cameron has not been able present a substantial case for such involvement. It is questionable in terms of international law. There has been no overview of what humanitarian aid will be operational for the undoubted casualties that such a deepening of the Syrian war will entail. Little has been said about the “end-game” of the extension of the conventional warfare, what sort of victory might be envisaged and how it will be brought about. Different strategies are being adopted by the numerous nations and independence movements that are currently participating in the conflict.
Then, too, if the war against ISIS is in fact a “war on terror” and not just a combat with terrorists, what is the nature and uses of the intelligence that will enable the citizens of the UK to be defended in the event of increased terrorist activity that some believe will be an inevitable outcome of the war against ISIS? What place will the human rights abusing practice of torture have in the ongoing conflict? Will it be permissible for participating states, including the UK, to curtail citizens’ freedoms in order to, ostensibly, protect them?
Are we entering a new era when, in the name of securing an “environment necessary for states of consent and to make it impossible for our enemies to impose or induce states of terror”, we are actually curtailing the freedoms, human rights and the way of life – the states of consent – we insist we are fighting to protect?
It is at least probable that, in the debate currently happening in the British House of Commons, some of the foregoing matters will be argued. It is also very likely that the debate will raise issues relating to economic concerns, national alliances, the departmental interests of government and, of course, the role of ideology in understanding the foundations for much of the conflict that now exists between western and middle-eastern nation-states and movements.
The House of Commons debate is about one of the great challenges of our times. It is about politics, as well as morality; it is about human freedoms, as well as the explicit limits of law. The debate is about understanding a threat that is new in every aspect of its nature, the imminent danger posed by that threat, and the revolution in traditional thinking that will be required to overcome that threat.
The debate is about the state of the modern world and the challenges that it faces.
RSC
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged consent, freedoms, human rights, ideology, intelligence, ISIS, Islamic State, law strategy, modern, terror, terrorists, war
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Today, 11th November, 2015, the citizens of the nations that compose the United Kingdom observe Armistice Day. This is an annual commemoration to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiegne, France, for the cessation of the hostilities on the Western Front of World War I. The armistice took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning – the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. At this time the British nation briefly comes to a halt.
World War I was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”. The reality has been otherwise.
My wife and I have recently returned from a holiday in Turkey. One of the places we visited was Gallipoli, a place of almost legendary proportions for anyone, including myself, with a background in Australia or New Zealand. In early 1915, attempting to seize a strategic advantage in World War I by capturing Constantinople (contemporary Istanbul), the British authorised an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula. The first troops landed on 25th. April, 1915, and, after eight months of heavy fighting, the troops were withdrawn around the end of the year.
As the tour guide took care to mention, the Gallipoli campaign was one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war and is considered a major Allied failure. In Turkey, it is regarded as a defining moment in the nation’s history: a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. The struggle formed the basis for the Turkish War of Independence and the founding of the Republic of Turkey eight years later under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who first rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli.
The Gallipoli campaign was the first major military action of Australia and New Zealand as independent dominions, and is often considered to mark the birth of national consciousness in those nations. The place of the landing was “Anza Cove”, with its Sphinx-like, sand coloured rock formation. The date of the landing, 25th. April, is known as “Anzac Day”. It remains the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in Australia and New Zealand.
On the Allied side one of the key promoters of this abject failure of an expedition was Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, whose reputation took years to recover. The Gallipoli campaign is sometimes referred to as “Churchill’s folly”.
The Gallipoli Peninsula is a fascinating part of Turkey. It stretches out along with northern side of the Dardanelles Straits at the western end of the Sea of Marmara and is the southern-most part of what is considered to be European Turkey. In World War I the peninsula clearly had strategic military importance. Today, it is part of a land mass with obvious maritime importance as it forms the entrance to the waterway that leads to The Bosphorus, Istanbul, the Black Sea, southern Russia and western Asia.
With a foothold in the European Continent, Turkey has a well-documented interest in becoming part of the European Community. It is no coincidence that, in the very near future, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will chair a meeting of the G20 nations. The summit meeting of the G20 will take place in Antalya – a lovely, modern city on the south coast of Turkey, and set between the Mediterranean Sea and the spectacular Taurus Mountains.
My wife, Vicky, and I spent a week near Antalya following our bus tour down the country’s superbly scenic western coast. Increasingly, Turkey is playing an important role in the transmission of refugees, asylum-seekers and economic migrants from the Middle East and other countries to the nations of Europe.
Turkey has an ancient history and a conglomerate of cultures. The country has witnessed many wars and has played a strategic role in the rise of civilization. Turkey, or major parts of it, has previously been known in turn as Anatolia, Thrace, Phrygia, Media, Lydia and Lycia. Great empires like Assyria, Persia and the Greeks, as well as the Ottomans, have ruled the land.
Some scholars consider that the area that is now Anatolia (which includes today’s European Turkey) is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world and could well have been a radiating centre for the Indo-European family of languages. Strategic civilizations in this part of the ancient world, such as the Hittites, Hurrians and the Urartu, have a longevity that goes as far back as forty thousand years ago and continue to be studied by scholars of the ancient world.
Indeed, several of the places that remain in my vision for a future visit to Turkey includes Gobekli Tepe, a site that pre-dates Stonehenge by ten millennia and has the oldest known man-made religious structure, a temple dating to 10,000 BCE. As well, there is Catalhoyuk, a very large Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia (the south-western area of central Turkey) which existed from approximately 7,500 BCE to 5,700 BCE.
Catalhoyuk, otherwise known because of its shape as Fork Hill, is the largest and best-preserved Neolithic site found to date and in July, 2012, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The area is located in the conservative centre of the country, the major city of which is Konya – a quietly and solidly Islamic city of a million people, mosques, muezzins and headscarves. It is also the place to find the Sufis and the whirling dervishes whose spinning form of dance is designed to induce vertigo by which the Absolute can be accessed – often accompanied these days by dinner!
Fork Hill was no religious artifact, no hallowed site, and no village settlement. It was a small city but which had not yet developed the concept of a corridor or a street. It consisted of hundreds of apartments built one on top of the other to form the shape of a pyramid where, for two millennia, thousands of people were born, lived and died. Next to the ancient site an apartment has been created to reflect what the originals would have been like. Fascinating!
Yes, but also enigmatic, for we know relatively little of the people, the Catalites, who inhabited the apartments of Fork Hill. The Catalites weren’t Turkic, Indo-European, Semitic or Sumerian. They came before any of these peoples. Perhaps they came before any agricultural civilization. Were they hunter-gatherers, herders or traders? They pre-dated the domestication of the cow. They had highly-polished stone mirrors and make-up, art – seen in colourful wall mosaics, and religion – probably some form of bull worship (shades of the later Minoan civilisation). They were people who beheaded their dead, put the skulls in the laps of the dead and buried them in the floors of their dwellings. Yes, truly fascinating!
But what else has rotted away without trace under the mound of the collapsed pyramid that is all that is left of Catalhoyuk? Perhaps they had an outlook on life that may change our perception of the development of human civilization. Much remains to be unearthed at Fork Hill.
During our time in Turkey, my wife and I actually visited a third Neolithic site, the well-known settlement of Troy and the story of Helen, Achilles, Paris and the Trojan Horse. However, our visit was hindered by a severe thunder storm with torrential rain. It is a place to be re-visited.
Just as the bustling metropolis of Istanbul, the former Byzantium and Constantinople, straddles the continents of Europe and Asia on either side of the Bosphorus, so Turkey brings together the truly ancient and genuinely modern. From Troy to Gallipoli; from Catalhoyuk to Istanbul, Turkey is the whole of civilization in miniature.
On Armistice Day, 2015, we do well to remind ourselves that we have much in common with the ancients who have gone before and, whilst World War I was not the “war to end all wars”, civilization goes on and has the ongoing opportunity to learn from its mistakes and build on the foundations laid in times past. Fork Hill points forward to the future.
RSC
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged ancient, armistice, Catalhoyuk, civilisation, culture, Gallipoli, Islam, Istanbul, language, modern, Ottomans, Turkey, wars
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“Assisted dying is the equivalent of a zero-hours contract with life”. This was the bold heading for a recent article by Dr Giles Fraser in his “Loose Canon” column for the Saturday Guardian.
Giles Fraser is a former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral and is now the priest-in-charge of St Mary’s Newington, south London. He strongly opposes the practice of assisted dying. Apart from other considerations, he says that assisted dying is “a method of controlling NHS costs”. Overall, his approach is surprisingly utilitarian – especially from someone who often writes from the point of view of Aristotelean virtues in the practice of ethics.
A substantial portion of Dr Fraser’s argument focuses on the economics of assisted dying. He mentions the fact of an aging population and the need to raise taxes to meet the demands of pensions and NHS costs. He points out that intergenerational conflict over fairness will intensify, as he supports his argument with the statistic that “there are four people of working age supporting each pensioner in Britain”.
What Dr Fraser, and others who argue this way, seem to forget is that the pensioners to whom he refers are former workers who have paid their taxes and given their time, energy and gifts to provide the security for their more advanced years of life. They have also played their part in providing the framework for the workers of today and the opportunities available to them.
Whilst he is careful to bring the factor of “personal choice” into the matter of assisted dying, Dr Fraser qualifies this by adding that “let us not pretend that ‘personal choice’ is unaffected by economic realities”. At this stage of his article, Giles Fraser changes his reference from “assisted dying” to the more emotive “suicide option”, as well as posing difficulties with the “personal choice” aspect of assisted dying. He states: “And here the wider pressure – cultural, social and economic – will inevitably press towards a greater take-up of the suicide option”.
This direction of Dr Fraser’s argument is void of statistical evidence. He goes beyond enquiry and submits his readers to personal opinions and statements. Instead, he offers us an anecdote about an elderly lady in his parish. She is 90, on her own, is critical of today’s young people for not caring about the elderly and is obviously someone whom Dr Fraser, in his role of parish priest, visits and knows well. He uses the story of Maud to underscore the conclusion that “assisted suicide is the ideology of the young and healthy and suited for the well-off”.
Furthermore, “assisted suicide amounts to the renunciation of our obligations to each other and to the vulnerable”, with “everyone encouraged to make their own individual choices”, whilst “strong and stable communities are dissolved…even ethics gets done in the first person singular not the first person plural”. He continues his critical comments by saying that “Assisted suicide is a freedom to do what you bloody well like and sod the rest. Caring for each other is just another choice, just another option”.
For Dr Fraser assisted dying becomes a symbol for, even the ultimate expression of, “the freedom to realise one’s own individual goals. It became all about self-realisation, all about me and what I want”. For, with assisted dying “we have arrived at the existential equivalent of a zero-hours contract with life, a contract that can be terminated at will”.
In view of the fact that Dr Fraser is an Anglican priest, it is to his credit that he does not explicitly bring the belief in God into his argument. It is, however, not difficult to understand and appreciate that such a belief is never very far from the surface of his argument.
Notwithstanding, if, as many believe, there is no God, then human beings have no excuse but to be in control of their own lives and destiny. This is a basic tenet of the existentialist approach to philosophy and ethics. If peoples’ belief in God determines their moral outlook, then that is acceptable – but arguable. Nonetheless, religious beliefs are a personal choice and should not circumscribe the ethics of unbelievers. It can be said with some certainty and supported by statistics that the United Kingdom is no longer, even if it once was, a Christian country.
Despite the evidence that the vast majority of British people support a change in the law (a fact seemingly ignored by constituency MP’s), Parliament recently rejected The Assisted Dying Bill. This Bill had received cross-party support in its attempt to legalise safeguarded assisted dying. It was specific and focused on the recognition – repeatedly expressed by the courts – that “only Parliament can change the law to allow terminally people the choice to end their own suffering within a safeguarded framework”.
As a member of The Campaign for Dignity in Dying I would not share Giles Fraser’s expected satisfaction at the failure of this Bill. Curiously, his attitude to a similarly contentious social and ethical issue, abortion, is that it should be “legal, safe and rare” (see the “Loose Canon” article called “For the red pope, being pro-life is more about social justice than abortion”, 24.09.15). The issue of assisted dying is on the same ethical and social justice canvas as that of abortion. Both should be matters of pro-choice and be seen from a humanitarian perspective. This is a rational and mature ethical approach that can apply to all religious persuasions, but beholden to none.
In a House of Commons debate in 2012, without opposition, MPs endorsed the principle that someone helping a loved one to die for compassionate reasons should not be prosecuted. Though a welcome step forward, this left dying people with the unenviable dilemma of either suffering against their wishes or attempting to take their life without the support of healthcare professionals, or, alternatively, travelling to another country to die. With the defeat of the Assisted Dying Bill in September, this situation remains the same.
Dr Giles Fraser’s desire to protect persons like Maud is commendable. His misgivings that society no longer seems able to withstand the winds of change brought by cultural, social and economic pressures – including situations that cause a loss of personal power, is understandable. But for many people this has always been the case – especially the frail and elderly, the terminally ill, the vulnerable young, the poor, disabled and those in need of social care.
Notwithstanding, preventing the confirmation of those things suggested in The Assisted Dying Bill was retrograde. In support of this view The Campaign for Dignity in Dying campaigns for:
* Choice over where we die, who is present and the treatment options.
* Access to expert information about our options, good quality end-of-life care and support for
loved ones and carers.
* Control over how we die, our symptoms and pain relief, and planning our own death.
The campaign’s overall purpose is that, together, we can help end the unnecessary suffering that some dying people are forced to endure.
It is against this background that arguments against assisted dying – economic, social and theological – need to be viewed. Human beings do not have a say about the manner or circumstances in which we are born. In this sense, the beginning of life can be seen as something of a lottery. This places our death in a more significant and personal perspective. How we die is one of the most important social and ethical decisions of our, or any, time.
In view of Parliament’s recent decision, it becomes even more imperative that salient and rational voices, including those of critics like Dr Giles Fraser, are heard in order to bring about much needed change. This process starts with the situation of those who are suffering and dying and, in consequence, wish to end their lives. Then the movement is towards a solution. This is the purpose of The Campaign for Dignity in Dying.
RSC
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged abortion, assisted dying, cultural, death, dignity, economic, existential, healthcare, humanitarian, ideology, parish priest, pro-choice, social, suffering, suicide, The Assisted Dying Bill, theological, utilitarian, virtues, zero-hours contract
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(The third in a series of three articles focusing on aspects of contemporary religion)
In the second of this series of three articles on aspects of contemporary religion (see Winds that blow, 02.09.15) I concluded with the view that the whole enterprise of “rescuing” the Christian Church from its historical and theistic owners seems to me to be an attempt, in words reminiscent of Jesus, to put “new wine into old wineskins”. My conclusion was “why bother?”
There are those who would consider that, somewhat tenuously in my view, it is worth bothering about rescuing the Christian Church from its past and present state, so that its future may become more of what they further consider it was meant to be. Implicit in this rescue operation is the concern to redefine the concept of god.
Two approaches suggested for this process are Unitarianism and Quakerism.
The official website of the Unitarians states that “most Unitarians still affirm the oneness of God, but individual definitions of ‘God’ can vary from person to persons.” For some Unitarians, Christian language about god as “a loving, personal power” comes closest to their own belief. Others consider the concept of god to be “the human ideal against which we measure ourselves”. Some, on the other hand, avoid using the word god at all because they consider it to be a meaningless title.
Aspects of the foregoing approach would surely appeal, for instance, to many within the Sea of Faith (SoF) movement, those who are still trying to come to terms with what the concept of an “un-real god” actually means.
It would seem, however, that more important than labels is the general Unitarian confession that “humanity is one and the human person is one”. That “ultimate unifying principle or spirit” is what many Unitarians mean today when speaking of god. Not far, perhaps, from where a selection of members of the SoF movement already are at!
At the heart of Quakerism is worship. Quakers consider that: “We come together in stillness and silence to open our hearts and lives to God.” An intrinsic aspect of that coming together is “the joy derived from reflecting on God’s creation.” However, not every Quaker finds the word god helpful; some Quakers use a different image or concept such as “Spirit” or “Light”, but Quakerism generally “affirms the love of God for all people.” I have the distinct feeling that such beliefs would not strongly hold with the concept of an “un-real god”.
Therefore, Unitarianism and Quakerism seemingly would not offer the new wineskins into which we could pour the new wine. Neither would ultimately accept a “godless Christianity”.
Throughout its evolution, humankind has been most adept at inventing and developing new institutions. Indeed, this was the case with the historical Christian Church. This institution was not founded essentially on what Jesus, the radical rabbi of first century Judaism, taught, but, rather, on what certain followers of Jesus – particularly one very astute Roman citizen of Jewish extraction and Hellenistic learning, Paul of Tarsus – turned him and his ethical teaching into.
This being the case, care needs to be exercised in using anything of the contemporary Christian Church as a template for some new form of movement or institution.
The “Christ” of the New Testament – a theological, even mythological, interpretation of the teacher who taught and practised a humanitarian ethic in a very natural world – was developed as a literary construct by self-interested successors, as well as by a myriad of reformers from essentially the same schools of thinking. In consequence, we need to be wary of any attempt to transform the Christian Church into anything other than what it has been or currently is.
There is a view, if not hope, that something different can be developed for the Christian Church, a renewal if you please, by an actual return to what Jesus really was, said and did – as difficult as this may be (as evidenced by the historical and literary problems posed by the ongoing study of the “historical Jesus”). Perhaps this would include a specific focus on what is regarded as the “this-worldly”, rather than “other-worldly”, teachings of Jesus. I do not share this view.
My personal experience of the Christian Church, as well as my observations of the experiences of others, would convince me is that the institution, and those who control it, has an inbuilt antipathy towards renewal – for this might mean breaking with the accepted taboos of the past. As the philosopher of religion, Daniel C. Dennett, quipped: “O religious folk who fear to break the taboo: Let go! Let go! You’ll hardly notice the drop!”
Personally speaking, I feel that a more radical alternative would be wiser and more practical.
Leave the Christian Church to fade away as part of the detritus of the history of religions. As an alternative, seek to develop new institutions for the pursuit of community, justice and harmony – a task the Christian church has failed to do to any universally evident and acclaimed success, despite the claims and efforts of the various strands of liberation and political theology, or social gospel. In this, the Christian religion, as with any other religious faith and, it should be noted, many non-religious movements and organisations, has been an institutionally abject failure.
Therefore, this situation calls for a renewed emphasis on politics, sociology, psychology and the human sciences generally, as well as a focus on a scientifically grounded truth that does not involve religious dogma. This, rather than a religious philosophy that constantly attempts to re-invent or reform old religious concepts. What we need, it seems to me, is a “Star Trek” mentality.
If a movement such as the SoF categorically rejects the belief in a real god, then its individual members, as well as the movement per se, will seek out new structures and practices in order to support new concepts and beliefs – to boldly go where organised, systematised, institutionalised and internalised religion has not gone before, or doesn’t want to go, or can’t go!
It is nearly 30 years since the green shoots of SoF began sprouting in the concrete wilderness of theistic religion. There should now be signs of specific flowering – even maturity.
In the first of this series of three articles (see A strange glimmer of hope, 17.08.15), I referred to the writing of Ronald Dworkin and specifically his book, Religion without God. In the book, Dworkin focuses not on traditional or systemic religion but on how the “meaning of life” and what he calls “the sublimity of nature” can be conceived and expressed. He speaks of a world view incorporating universal values, “those values which transcend individual religious preferences”.
In a moving concluding passage to his latest publication, Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking, the Cambridge philosopher and inspiration behind the SoF movement, Don Cupitt, writes this about his world view: “A view that remains close to the original Jesus, and admires him without any cult of him. ‘Authority is dead’, ‘revelation is dead’, and the two-worlds, mediated kind of religion is dead too, now. So my remaining ‘faith’ is purely philosophical, with a dash of loyalty to Jesus, and to the ancient humanitarian strand in our own cultural tradition.”
These words, and the world view they convey, are poignant and most thought-provoking. They present a world view, a faith even, that I can understand and live with. They are the icing on the cake of “theistic non-realism”.
“Fred and Mary, are you ever coming in – or may I eat your cake?” (George Eliot, at the end of Middlemarch)
RSC
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Tagged authority, Christian Church, community, faith, godless, harmony, historical Jesus, human sciences, humanitarian, institutions, internalised, justice, liberation theology, light, mythology, non-theistic, politics, psychology, Quaker, religious concepts, renewal, revelation, Sea of Faith, social gospel, sociology, spirit, Star Trek, theism, Unitarian, world view
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During the past year or so Gordon Brown, the former leader of the British Labour Party, has been in the headlines.
The first occasion was in August of last year, when he broke nearly four years of political silence to give an impassioned speech urging residents of Scotland to vote against Scotland becoming independent from the United Kingdom. Whether due to his eloquent appeal or not, Scotland remains within the UK.
His second foray into renewed public prominence was his recent address to the Fourth Estate. Here he was urging the Labour Party to be very careful about whom it will shortly elect to be its new leader. Though he did not mention any names, it was the view of most commentators that Brown was seeking to alert the Labour Party as to the dangers, as he saw it, of electing Jeremy Corbyn, the genuinely left-wing candidate for the leadership.
Mr. Brown took this calculated course despite, perhaps in spite of, the popular appeal Mr. Corbyn seems to have and the support he is attracting.
With the above in mind, this week I read a magazine article called “Heirs to Hardie” in which Mr. Brown argued that Keir Hardie, the very first leader of the British Labour Party, “has a lesson for today’s pretenders” to this high office. Brown was quite fulsome in his praise for the first Labour leader stating that, in his view, Hardie was certainly the party’s greatest hero (a straw poll at the 2008 Labour Party Conference in Manchester confirms this opinion).
The magazine article immediately caught my attention as for seven years in the 1970’s I worked and lived in Plaistow, Newham South. This is the location of the political constituency that first elected Keir Hardie to Parliament in 1892.
The name of Keir Hardie still echoes through the streets and estates of the London Borough of Newham, particularly in the Keir Hardie Estate in Canning Town. Further, when I began my residence in Cumberland Road, Plaistow, I was told that I lived opposite the site where the Keir Hardie Hall, the first meeting place of the Newham South Labour group, was situated (now a modern, residential, Community Centre).
Gordon Brown informs his readers that Keir Hardie was the illegitimate and unloved son of a Lanarkshire coal-miner and that he worked in the mines from the age of ten. After becoming acquainted with the Evangelical Union, he taught himself to read. Hardie was apparently impressed by the EU’s emphasis on the humanity of Jesus. Believing that the liberal virtues of honesty, temperance, frugality and hard work were qualities to be cultivated (shades of Brown himself), Hardie’s early political associations were with the Liberal Party
However, Keir Hardie was a trade union leader (as was, coincidentally, my Scottish father) and, in this, received little practical support from the Liberal Party. His conversion to socialism was sudden but sincere. He campaigned for a minimum wage, an eight hour day, nationalisation of the mines and railways, and power for workers in the face of confrontation with local employers.
Hardie was clear as to how he should dress and behave as a parliamentary MP. The representatives of the workers “should wear working men’s clothes, speak in ordinary language and refuse to be in thrall to out-of-date parliamentary conventions.” Parliament was not the place for airs and graces. Keir Hardie he was in favour of Indian independence, votes for women and, as a convinced pacifist, opposed the First World War.
His principled opposition to WW1 caused Hardie to lose many friends and parliamentary colleagues. Indeed, there are political historians who consider that this bold stand signalled the end of Keir Hardie’s political career and, eventually, led to his premature death.
The historical record shows that Hardie was a co-founder in 1893 of the Independent Labour Party and became its first chairman and leader. Later, in 1899, he was a member of the Labour Representation Committee. This eventually became the Labour Party.
Some of foregoing important historical and institutional links are not mentioned in Gordon Brown’s article. So too, Brown omits the fact that Hardie was pro-republican. He lost his Newham South parliamentary seat in 1895 as a consequence of a controversial speech in the House of Commons in which he criticised the monarchy for its self-interest and self-indulgence.
Nevertheless, he remained indefatigable in his work for the labour movement, subsequently being returned to Westminster in 1900 as the Labour representative and junior MP in the dual member constituency of Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare in the South Wales’ Valleys.
A further quote from Brown seems to get to the heart of his article and the incipient warning it seeks to convey: “While Hardie is thought of as Britain’s first socialist, his uniqueness was that he was the first to build a Labour alliance to win power.” That may be the case, but it is also very important to remember that Keir Hardie “knew that you could not deliver in power without principles (even if) you could not deliver on principles without power.”
This is a classic political dilemma, as important today as it was a century ago. The play-off between principles and power is a key debating point in the present-day Labour leadership election.
Keir Hardie died of pneumonia in Glasgow in1915 – a century ago almost to the day. He died in that part of Glasgow, Partick, where he had spent his boyhood – a stone’s throw from where I had spent the first few years of my life. Hardie had materially very little to leave his widow, sons and daughter. His lifetime was spent in the poverty against which his politics railled, as the title of his book “From Serfdom to Poverty” exemplifies.
However, to refer to a key point in Brown’s article, this did not prevent Hardie from creating a Labour Party that “was dedicated to winning power by winning popular support. Labour had to become electable if it was to make any difference to people’s lives.”
The sentence which concludes Brown’s article, echoing as it does his previous speech on the matter of the Labour leadership (see above), leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie: “It (Hardie’s principle about winning power by winning popular support) is a lesson that some who see themselves as Hardie’s heirs might do well to recall.”
There is much in Gordon Brown’s article with which I could agree.
However, unlike Mr. Brown, I am convinced that, based on his article and a further study of Keir Hardie’s personal circumstances and his career as a politician, his achievements and faithfulness to the cause of working people, the only candidate among the four in contention for the current Labour leadership that gets nearest to imaging the Hardie mould, the rightful heir to Keir Hardie, is Jeremy Corbyn!
Touché, Mr. Brown?
RSC
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Tagged alliance, election, founder, heirs, hero, Keir Hardie, Labour Party, leadership, pacifist, popular support, power, principles, republican, socialism
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(The second in a series of three articles focusing on aspects of contemporary religion)
I recently tuned-in to an episode of the BBC Television programme “Sunday Morning Live – religious, moral and ethical questions”. I squirmed as I listened to the discussion on the question, “Is there an afterlife?”The protagonists said nothing that was particularly original or newly challenging or exciting. It was evangelically bereft. The antagonists said little that could genuinely enter the discussion at a level that would mean very much. It was intellectually moribund.
It seemed to me that this was an aspect of the gap that the Sea of Faith was envisaged, by some at least, including this writer, to fill – not a gap necessarily in belief, faith, moral and social outlook, but a space in the conversation that meant sense, if not intellectual liberation, to 21st century non-realists (those who no longer literally believe, or may have never believed, in god).
So too, I adhere to the view that it has become somewhat passe to simply speak of “spirituality” as a replacement for belief in god and all of the rituals, paraphernalia (personal and organisational) and writings that appear to enter easily into the conversation about matters that once seemed to be the very life’s blood of those who saw – may still see – in the Sea of Faith a supportive way forward into a godless future.
Furthermore, I am persuaded that that the Sea of Faith movement is presently at that in-between “rumouring” and “leaping” stage described above (see the first article in this series, “A strange glimmer of hope” – 17.08.2015).
I am somewhat perplexed, therefore, as to whether the Sea of Faith movement is an ending looking for a new beginning, or a new beginning that is unsure where to go. Does the movement possess a melancholy for what is perceived as being left behind, or apprehensive about the new wisdom it may discover? Is the Sea of Faith circumscribed by the limits of its non-realist imagination?
Or, perhaps there is the need to face-up to the challenge presented by Richard Dawkins: “There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeat’s ‘Winds that blow through the starry ways’” (The God Delusion, p.355). Perhaps it is inevitable that those who sail on the sea of faith are susceptible to the winds that blow.
One thing seems incontrovertible, namely, that the history and traditions of the Christian church, no matter what branch, pre-supposes a belief in a god who is regarded by the faithful as real and active in human affairs. The traditional narrative is meant to be understood in a “realist” way. This is axiomatic in each of the great monotheistic world religions and the religious world from which these faith systems derived.
This belief in a supreme divinity has had profound influence on the thinking, development and practices of the Christian Church. It follows, therefore, that to adopt but one atheistic philosophical viewpoint, that is, the rather radical notion that there is no god – that belief in god is “un-real” – is to adopt a situation-in-life that will have equally radical consequences for the adoptees.
Further, it is a “revisionism in extremis” to suggest, as seems increasingly to be the present-day case, that Jesus was simply an apocalyptic (a word that affords revelatory or prophetic powers to whomever it is applied) teacher of a humanitarian ethic that needed to be practiced in the “new age” that was imminent.
This view requires qualification in terms of the “humanitarian” nature (a relatively modern and convenient term) of the ethics, its genesis within the life and experience of Jesus and a critical appraisal of the practicality and consequences of its mass adoption (something that is not confined to ancient societies). So too, the “humanitarian ethic” that is being put forward as the intention of the teaching of Jesus does not appear to have been original.
Apart from the teaching of the Noble Eightfold Path, the core ethical teaching of the Buddha (India), other great philosophers/teachers of what has been termed the First Axial Age (800-200 BCE) conveyed similar and complementary ethical ideas. Zoroaster (Persia), being concerned to maintain truth, considered that this was achieved through participation in life and the exercise of constructive thoughts, words and deeds. Still earlier, the ethical philosophy of Confucius (China) emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity.
Of course, these teachers, including Jesus, were embedded within a particular context. They were not universal figures. This tends to be conveniently ignored, especially in the case of Jesus, by those theologians and teachers of philosophy and ethics who have been immersed in the western traditions of these disciplines.
Jesus was a Jew (not a Christian as many of the faithful appear to believe), thoroughly schooled in the Jewish Law and conversant, at least, with the Jewish prophets. The latter, themselves active during of the First Axial Age, were likely the pre-cursors of the apocalyptic events about which Jesus is reported to have preached.
Amongst other responses to his radical message, there was the requirement to practice a new ethical life-style, what the Cambridge philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt, has called “solar ethics” (See Solar Ethics, SCM Press, 2000). The description may seem a little “strange and furious”, but the writer advocates the view that “This is a religious ethic to fit the truth about the world and our own life as we now understand it.”
However, it cannot simply be accepted that Jesus was a Rabbi, who instructed in what we could term a “new age” ethic, without also accepting that he was a Jewish Rabbi, with all the nuances that such an office implied – no matter what accretions have been loaded on Jesus by subsequent Christian Church history and dogma, or what have been taken away by critical philosophical and scholarly biblical speculation.
Therefore, this raises the issue as to from where ethics are acquired – ancient or modern, and the developing debate over the question as to what comes first, ethics or beliefs, and the inter-relationship between the two? This is a conversation in itself, but it does seem to be a rather “chicken and the egg” situation – debateable, but probably irresolvable.
Furthermore, it surely cannot be countenanced to say that the Jesus movement which developed in consequence of the community of the Jewish followers of Jesus, as well as the parallel formation that could be identified as the “Paulinist” approach to the Jesus legacy, had no belief in a personal and institutional god. Both of these, the Jewish Jesus movement and the all-pervasive influence of the Apostle Paul and his acolytes, with their tentacles into Jewish Law and Greek philosophy, are the major factors in the genesis and growth of the Christian religion.
The Jesus movement had to deal with internal divisions as it sought an identity that was distinctive from its Jewish origins. The theology of the Apostle Paul is riddled with other-worldly, mythical ideas of existence, divine figures and events almost beyond human understanding – what Ronald Dworkin calls “a Sistine God” and “extensions of the human imagination”.
From such beginnings came the Christian Church. The rest, as they say, is history.
We live at a time when the Christian Church’s vast system of sacred law and order, belief in divine beings and the prescribed institutional and personal behaviours that eventuate from such belief, is seriously being called into question. Indeed, the critique of this way of life has been under increasingly severe scrutiny ever since the Enlightenment, at least. The Sea of Faith movement is one contemporary strand of this critique.
However, this critique has not been without its hesitations. There seems to be the idea abroad that the Christian Church can be rescued from the god-believers and be turned into something other – overturning nearly 2000 years of what the New Testament historian, Bart D. Erhman, has called the victory of “proto-orthodox church history, teaching and tradition”.
The whole enterprise of “rescuing” the Christian Church from its historical and theistic owners seems to me to be an attempt, in words purportedly spoken by Jesus, to put “new wine into old wineskins”. Why bother!?
RSC
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Tagged afterlife, apocalyptic, atheist, Bart Erhman, Buddha, Confucius, context, Don Cupitt, enlightenment, First Axial Age, humanitarian, Jesus movement, non-realist, Paulinist, proto-orthodoxy, Richard Dawkins, rituals, Ronald Dworkin, solar ethics, spirituality, Zoroaster
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The present UK Conservative government has just registered its first 100 days of government in the new parliament.
Whilst much of the political attention during that time has been devoted to the ongoing saga of the Labour Party’s leadership battle, the government, in a rather quiet and unobtrusive manner, has been going about making changes to the way in which the British people are being governed.
The Labour Party opposition has not been entirely unaware of what is going on outside of its own party rooms and recently came up with a critical list of some of the government’s actions so far. The list included the following items:
* the intention to cut tax credits;
* watering down the child poverty target;
* dropping the NHS waiting targets;
* ending the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme;
* trying to relax the hunting ban;
* dropping plans for rail electrification in the Midlands;
* tightening controls over the trades unions.
This would seem to indicate a government intent on making changes as soon as possible; a government motivated not by the desire to “put working people first”, but one that is hard-driven by ideology.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has said that “it is a moment for a Conservative majority government to be bolder still.” This would include the move to enable all government schools to become academies so that they “can benefit from the freedoms this brings.” The “freedoms” have yet to elaborated and specifically shown to be in the interests of “working people”, especially in terms of the funding and management of academies and their public accountability.
Of course, with a Prime Minister as opportunistic as David Cameron, the Conservative Party has also taken the time to comment on the trials and tribulations of the Labour Party as it undergoes a leadership election.
In particular, the Conservative comment has focused on the bias towards and the influence of the Labour Party’s left wing. The popular myth would seem to suggest that resurgence of left wing thinking in the Labour Party is detrimental to the possibility of the Labour Party winning a national election in 2020 or, indeed, at any time.
Such thinking ignores the direction in which UK politics appears to be going. The rise of the SNP, the increasing popularity of the Green Party, the voice of ordinary Britons that can be heard in UKIP, the rediscovery of a radical approach within the Liberal Democrats, as well as the left wing swell within the Labour Party, would all suggest that there may well be a paradigm shift occurring in British politics.
This possibility is underlined by the renewed interest in British politics by young people.
Of course, the Labour Party’s problems do not begin and end with the question of the party leadership. There are a number of things that are pertinent to include on its short term agenda.
These things would include the need to change its position with respect to reform of the voting system, revival of local government, the abolition of the House of Lords and the internal democracy within the Labour Party. These are all issues that a modern democratic political party needs to address. However, the Labour Party is not alone in needing to address the foregoing.
The Conservative Party appears comfortable with the present situation. The Conservatives might consider that there are very few oppositional forces being forged against its current dominance in British governance. On the contrary, after conniving to nearly obliterate the Liberal Democrats at the last election, the Conservative Party in government seems quite gleeful about the prospect of a left wing member of the Labour Party becoming its next leader.
It is well to keep in mind that the Conservative Party is itself not devoid of right and left divisions – with the right wing of the Party seeming to dominate at present. So too, it is a common observation that the party’s internal divisions are always very close to the surface.
Therefore, as time goes by, the Conservative Party in government will come under increasing pressure to show clear and consistent evidence that it, too, can be a political party that deserves to govern and can sustain governance in a contemporary UK – in the interests of “all working people”.
The paradigm shift in British politics has already commenced. It may be expressed as follows.
In a conservative and tradition-directed political world there was little appetite for change. That is in the nature of conservatism. What came first was an ideological belief, a set of political principles from which there developed a way of pronouncing and living the contemporary life. This was basic to the misguided development of modern politics, hence government – including the present government at Westminster.
What we are now witnessing in British politics, the paradigm change, is what may be seen to have been initially brought to life in the period immediately after the Second World War. It was a time when the needs of people were given priority in government thinking, a time when political ethics were primary. Political ideology was secondary.
Unfortunately, and to the detriment of the body-politic, this awakening was of a short duration. All too soon, politics as ethics was consigned to a state of suspended animation and politics as ideology resumed its normal business. This change of anima, this re-directing of the political inner personality, was short-lived across all political parties, including a New Labour that initially promised so much but ultimately delivered so little.
What is now happening in British politics, as evident in what was earlier stated, is the return of an ethics-driven body politic – the very antithesis of what is going on with the Conservative Party’s present approach to governance.
The needs of ordinary people, the genuine “working people” (not those of the Conservative Party myth) are, once again, being placed at the forefront of political, economic and social concern. The energy behind the movement is not just a popular left wing campaign, it is a strong and insistent restatement of what lies at the heart of the British nation, what the British people have historically striven for but never quite succeeded in attaining.
It is the movement against privilege, unfettered power, and the manipulation and perverse use of wealth and position. It is a movement for justice, fairness, and human rights for all. It is a statement that people matter more than things; that ordinary people, the “working people”, have a major part to play in the building and sustenance of this world. It is the world-builders, the world-makers who really matter, not the world-shakers!
As time goes by, this movement, this paradigm shift, will become stronger and more evident. It is a new world that is slowly emerging. It may not have had much of a past, but, if tried, it may give us a better future.
RSC
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Tagged achievements, Conservatives, elections, governance, government, human rights, ideology, Labour Party, leadership, left wing, myth, New Labour, paradigm shift, reform, voting system, workers, world-makers, young people
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(The first in a series of three articles focusing on aspects of contemporary religion)
Recently, I was captivated by reading the comments of someone who had re-read George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “But in revisiting Middlemarch in middle age, the melancholy I experience in reading its final pages is augmented by a strange glimmer of hope, even optimism. I see in it now what I could not see as a young person: that wisdom is always being acquired, and is never fully accomplished.”
The above words from Middlemarch suggested to me that, even as we get older, our own limited lives might perchance contain the possibility of acquiring further wisdom. Surely it is only a child who believes that a grown-up has stopped growing. It has been one of the privileges of retirement from formal work that more time is available for reading, writing, conversation and correspondence with others, reflection and working-on further personal growth.
When I taught secondary school philosophy and ethics, I occasionally referred my sixth form students to the work and words of the late American writer Ronald Dworkin. He sometimes featured on a series of educational DVD’s that I used with my students. Even though Dworkin’s prime focus was on legal philosophy and, therefore, possibly more useful for law studies than religious philosophy and ethics, he obviously has major relevance to the question of human rights and, within that, the matter of values and religious experience.
This reiterates the role that religion and religious values (both ideas – philosophy; and ethics – practices) has played in human affairs.
Ronald Dworkin’s focus, of course, is not on traditional or systemic religion but on how he conceives and expresses the “meaning of life” and what has been called “the sublimity of nature”, as well as those values which transcend individual religious preferences (universal values?). These ideas, in my view, go beyond the traditional religious expressions that incorporate belief and obedience to a god or gods.
It seems to me that he is saying that we come to an understanding of objective values (those that have meaning and practical value) and then compare our ideas about god(s) with a divine being we then seek to worship as an extension of those ideas.
On this, he would echo philosophers such as Daniel C. Dennett, who consider, as I do, that religion is part of that branch of learning known as “Phenomenology” – religion is a human phenomenon, a construct of the human mind, and has developed with human social evolution.
One of Dworkin’s conclusions is, therefore, that if there is any “religious” basis at the foundation of ethics (human moral behaviour and practice), then that basis is a “religion without god”, a religion without creed, chapels, worship or salvation/redemption.
My further personal view of Dworkin’s philosophy is that he would share my scepticism of a Christianity that simply casts-off the belief in a cosmic or personal god but continues with the practices and allegiances that derive from such a belief. This is a form of religious faith wherein we discard belief in a “real” god (the god of the theists, or the “realists”), but continue to hold an allegiance to the infrastructure and institutions established by that belief and the practices developed by and within it.
By extension, this would mean that a “godless Christianity”, or a Christianity that wishes to retain the Christian church without its fundamental and historical belief in a god who is “real” (and, of course, the ritualistic and ethical practices essentially based on this belief), is a form of false consciousness.
Readers of this article will be aware that in previous articles I have written about the Sea of Faith movement (refer to Surfing the Sea of Faith, 30.10.2015, and Is God back?, 15.01.2015).
In the past few years, through the reading of Sofia and Portholes, the magazine and newsletter respectively of the Sea of Faith movement, as well as attendance at regional group meetings and conferences of the movement, I have become aware that some members of the movement have expressed their disbelief in a cosmic or personal god whilst, at the same time, they have retained their office within, membership of, or simply regular attendance at, a Christian Church.
So too, such writers and conversationalists seem quite comfortable with the language, liturgy, music, worship, architecture and “religious spaces” of a Christian church. By implication, that would suggest a church of the more established variety where “keeping the rumour of god alive” is accompanied by a “leap of faith” rather than any specific belief – an existential wrestle without the possibility of providing an answer which could be regarded as smug, or making a decision that could be interpreted as dogmatic, or signalling a change of direction in life and career that could be threatening.
The initial impetus for the development of the Sea of Faith movement was provided by the publication in 1984 of the book of the same name and written by Dr Don Cupitt, a Cambridge University philosopher of religion. Dr Cupitt recently completed his fiftieth book in the general areas of religion, theology, philosophy and ethics. Much of Don Cupitt’s writing has a literary foundation in what is termed a “non-realist” understanding of god, that is, a supernatural, objective god does not actually exist but is an evolved construction of the human imagination.
Don Cupitt’s literary output has ranged wide and gone deep. In the process, however, he seems to have diverged somewhat from his original thesis and gone in search of ways to change the traditional understanding of Christianity so that the latter fits a different mould. In the process, the initial ideas behind the Sea of Faith movement have been inexorably stretched.
This would suggest that, in order to retain a relevance for Christianity, and a place of being for those persons who have lived much of their lives within its cloisters, Dr Cupitt has sought to re-vision, re-adapt and re-formulate the Christian message and tradition in order to try to retain a basically Christian outlook that could be incorporated into the Sea of Faith movement.
My hope would be that this will not be seen as compromising Don Cupitt’s theological position as that of one who has been a ground-breaking advocate of theistic non-realism.
Presently, I am wondering as to where, if anywhere, the Sea of Faith movement can legitimately go in order to further pursue its more or less original intentions – even though I am aware that there would be those who would question that the Sea of Faith has, or had, pronounced intentions of any kind. The latter might well include those persons who are of a mind to be satisfied with a gentle meander through the green and pleasant pastures of selective doubt about religion, faith or spirituality, without seriously questioning this doubt or seeking to settle in any one place, or putting down roots in the brown fields of non-realism.
But, like the person who re-read Eliot’s Middlemarch, those who have the courage and endurance to sail on the Sea of Faith might experience a form of melancholia for the things that once seemed the very stuff of life, but a melancholy that is “augmented by a strange glimmer of hope.”
“Every limit is a beginning as a well as ending.” (George Eliot, at the end of Middlemarch)
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Tagged doubt, ethics, hope, human rights, ideas, intentions, limitations, meaning, non-realist, phenomenology, philosophy, realist, Sea of Faith
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Robert Stewart Culbard 