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Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “behind every human being there stands three ghosts; that is the ratio in which the dead outnumber the living” — far better than I remember the nonsense about monoliths and mad computers. Many young minds were blown by Phillip K Dick or the Matrix long before they knew that grown-up philosophers worried about the mind/body problem. Even a silly schoolboy writer like Edgar Rice Burroughs could be life-changing; not because his science is good — his science is non-existent — but because he gives you permission to imagine what the world would look like from a completely different perspective.
Sometimes you return to a place, or person or a book you knew a long time ago and say: “Oh: that’s where I learned that particular idea. I thought that it was just what I always believed.”Well, I finally bit the bullet and deleted my Threads account. What pushed me over the edge in the end wasn’t the racists or the smug ignorant atheists or the even more smug and even more ignorant Christians. It was the fellow who said that there were no stories in the Silmarillion and Christopher Tolkien had made the whole thing up out of his head.
The doom loop in — which I looked at Threads, saw an idiot, made a smart remark about the idiot, was called an arsehole and a nonce by the idiot, and spent the rest of the morning feeling cross about what the idiot had said — wasn’t doing me any good. And when there was, rarely a sensible exchange of witticisms, I felt bad about having cast my bread upon the ocean, if that is the expression I am looking for, rather than turning my thought into a blog post.
So here is me, turning my thought into a blog-post.
You may say that the great advantage of social media is that if I were still on Threads or X I might not feel the need to subject the rest of you to this sort of thing.
I would actually like to delete Facebook, but Facebook is a little like the Arrakis Spice. It’s clearly controlled by the dark lord, but without it, space-travel would be impossible. On Facebook the pattern is different: someone posts something which is slightly interesting: say, a picture of Clifton suspension bridge at sunset, or a news item about a new piece of Doctor Who merchandise. I notice that under the quite-interesting thing there are twenty comments, and I scroll down to see who else was quite interested in it. And, without fail, the first comment is either “Bristol is a woke shit-hole full of lefties, graffiti and poncey coffee shops” or “I am sorry, I think you will find that actually Doctor Who was cancelled in 2013 (or, it may be, 2019.)” So instead of deleting the whole app, I am deleting any thread that I think I might be even slightly interested in. I did enjoy the fellow telling the charity which helped blind and partially sighted people that they should stop fishing brown people out of the English Channel.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
If you want to look very clever, it’s often a good tactic to pretend to be very stupid. A good starting point is to pretend not to understand something which everyone else finds very simple and straightforward. If you are talking about politics, it is really helpful to pretend that you don’t understand what the terms “Right” and “Left” refer to.
I am not sure if I could say in plain language why, say, “disliking swearing on TV” and “enjoying the idea of hanging people” are logically linked, or why “believing in trades unions” and “not believing in God” seem to go together like a horse and carriage. But once I know where you put your cross on polling day, I think I could make an educated guess about where you stand on climate change, gender neutral lavatories, and whether or not the moon landings were faked.
Some people will say, as they do about pornography and folk music “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”.
I mean by "pornography" the thing which most people are talking about when they talk about pornography. If I showed a hundred people a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, Woman & Home, Readers Wives and The Dandy and asked them to tell me which one was pornographic, ninety-nine of them would give the same answer.
“Oh, but Andrew, pictures of ladies with no clothes on leave me cold, whereas I get incredibly turned on by unshaven men eating cow pies. And many people would describe Woman & Home as ‘property porn’”.
Yes, there are howevers and what-abouts and exceptions. If I say that there are cat people and dog people, you know perfectly well what I mean, and the fact that your Aunty Mavis doted on her poodle and her Siamese doesn’t make any difference one way or the other.
It is true that in older books, you sometimes find “Right wing” being used purely in the sense of “resistant to change” and “Left wing” being used purely in the sense of “amenable to change”; so that sixteenth century English Catholics might be described as “Right-wing” because they couldn’t be doing with any of this newfangled Protestant stuff. The BBC got into a bit of a muddle in the 80s because it kept calling the hard-line communists who didn’t agree with Glasnost “conservatives”, even though the thing they were conserving was what most of us would consider to be “Left wing.”
If I say Margaret Thatcher was a politician “of the Right” and that her opponent Neil Kinnock was a politician “of the Left” you know what I mean and I know that you know what I mean and you know that I know that you know… And there is nothing especially controversial about saying that Michael Foot wanted to do many of the same things as Neil Kinnock, but more so and sooner, and could therefore be said to have been further “to the Left”; and that Anthony Wedgwood Ben was “to the Left” of Michael Foot, and Fidel Castro was further to the Left than any of them. And conversely we can say that Norman Tebbit was a little to the Right of Mrs Thatcher, and Enoch Powell was a little to the Right of Norman Tebbit and Adolf Hitler was a little to the Right of Enoch Powell.
Some people on the Left find people on the Right so odious, and some people on the Right find people on the Left so ridiculous, that they can’t really bring themselves to admit that there are shades of grey. You wouldn’t, after all, talk about a “mild genocide” or a “slight pedophile”. So it used to be common to hear Socialist Workers saying that Mrs Thatcher was just as bad as Hitler, and Young Tories saying that Neil Kinnock was worse than Stalin. While I was writing this piece, I heard the actual president of the actual United States describing the incoming Mayor of New York as a Communist; and saying that Democratic voters were "crazed lunatics". The Daily Mail sneers daily about centrist Kier Starmer’s “socialist utopia”.
The same kinds of people who think that it is very clever to point out that Frankenstein was actually the name of the scientist, not the name of the monster also like to point out that Adolf Hitler called his movement “National Socialist” rather than “Nazi” so well actually Hitler was a Leftie. The aforementioned Mr Tebbit used to do a little improv in which he said pityingly that the previous speaker had made what he was sure was a little slip of the tongue and called the Nazis “far-Right” where he was sure they really meant “far-Left” and it probably wasn’t the speaker's fault because he probably went to a state school and wasn’t properly educated. Slightly smarter people talk about what they call the “horse-show” theory.
If A is North, and B is north of North, and C is north of North of North, and D is even more northern than any of them, then it doesn’t seem exceptionally slanderous to say that D is “far-north”. But Politician E, Politician F and Politician G are increasingly offended if you describe them as Far-Right.
If Politician H suggested that we should kill the children of poor people and bake them into pies, then I would throw rotten vegetables and eggs and him, cross the road to avoid him, and definitely not invite him to air his views on the Today programme. I think that we should probably treat the fellow who says the world is flat, that vaccines cause autism, or that there is a serious possibility of the President of the United States being the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the same way. You may disagree with me about who comes into that category, but the category definitely exists. Free speech doesn’t mean that you have to give every idiot in the world a platform.
But outside of that lunatic fringe, it should be possible to be passionate without resorting to abuse. A less toxic discourse would benefit everyone. If Far-Right is now an insult, then we can probably find a different word to describe Politician I, Politician J and Politician K.
But it cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?
I’ll stop saying Far-Right if you’ll stop saying Radical Left Wing Lunatic and Commie and Libtard.
“That is a false equivalence, Andrew. It is wrong for you to say that we are Far-Right and Racist, because there is nothing Far-Right or Racist about us. It is all right for us to say that you are Communists, and Mentally Retarded, and Traitors because that is the literal truth.”
There is a very old joke.
A group of prisoners (or, it may be, army recruits or passengers on a long sea voyage) decide that, instead of telling the same jokes over and over again, they will assign each story a numerical value. So someone calls out “Number 53” and everyone laughs. And then someone else calls out “Number 78” and everyone laughs. A new recruit, once the system is explained to him, calls out “23” and “192” and is met with dead silence.
“Why didn’t they laugh when I called out the numbers?” he asks.
“Well” says one of the old lags “It’s the way you tell them.”
This is a joke about semiotics. Initially people are laughing at the numbers because of the jokes they point to (so number twenty three signals the one about the Irish fellow on the fair ground ride and number ninety eight represents the one about the vicar’s underpants) but gradually the numbers replace the jokes and become funny—or not funny—in themselves.
One of the windows of my house faces directly onto a pedestrian street; and I have placed an old Spider-Man figurine on the ledge so it can be seen by passers-by. Partly because it amuses me and partly because it looks less slobbish than the other kinds of things that might have ended up there —a bottle of HP sauce, say, or some fairy liquid. Some people contrive to put things by their kitchen window which make passers-by think they must be foodies and gourmets -- three kinds of olive oil and a designer jar of fresh basil -- but I have never managed to be one of those people. I still think it is slightly vulgar when you can see rolls of toilet paper through frosted upstairs windows. I suppose that is why people used to disguise them with knitted dolls. Last December, I replaced the Spider-Man figure with a plush Santa that I had bought in Primark for fifty pence. On May 6 2023 I placed a cheap Union Jack there, hopefully the right way up.
I hope that when someone sees the Spider-Man figure, they will think “The person who lives there likes the same comics that I like”, and that it will make them smile. There used to be a person who had a kind of shutter in his window, decorated with genuine 1980s Empire Strikes Back wallpaper. That made me smile each time I walked past it. I really wish I had stuck a note through his door: “Your shutter makes an aging Star Wars fan smile each morning.”
The Santa and the Flag were clearly signs. The Santa figure was saying “The last thing I am going to do is put up a Christmas tree in a bachelor pad, but I acknowledge that this is a special time of year.” The flag was saying “I am not particularly a Royalist but I acknowledge that there is an important national event going on today, and I honour it to some extent.” Or, more simply “I am not a Scrooge”, “I am not a sourpuss.”
If I put the flag back in my window tomorrow, what would you take it to mean?
Symbols mean what they mean in themselves. They mean what the person who displays them intends them to mean. They mean what the person looking at them takes them to mean. And they mean what the person who displays them thinks the person looking at them will take them to mean.
You remember Screwtape’s anecdote, about how one human says something with a clear intention to wound and then pretends to be hurt and offended because the second human didn’t take it at face value. “I simply ask when dinner will be ready and she flies into a rage…”
Even if we had never come across it before we could spot that a little silhouette of a figure in a skirt represents “Women” and a little silhouette of a figure in trousers represents “Men”. Which is a good thing, because I can never remember if I am a pointy up arrow or a pointy down cross. I suppose if you came from an entirely different culture, you might not know that dresses were traditionally worn by females and pants were traditionally worn by males. But the icons, drawn in that particular way, have come by usage and intention to mean “public toilets”. (You wouldn’t, I think, use them to indicate which shelf at Marks and Spencers had the bras and which had the Y-fronts.) So plumbers and the water company can use the male/female sign to tactfully indicate that they are talking about loos even when it makes no difference whether they are fixing the Gents or the Ladies. But the signs don't just inform customers what shape the plumbing behind a particular door is likely to be. They have also acquired a cultural and political meaning. If I put them on my doors, then I am saying, whether I intend to or not “I don’t want to offend JK Rowling.” If I use a different signage, I am saying, equally clearly, “I want to offend JK Rowling very much indeed.” And it is impossible for me to not know that the signs now carry that meaning.
Everyone knows that a red flag with three white stripes and a crown emblem represents the nation of Ruritania. When I hang such a flag in my kitchen window, I may mean that my Granny was a Ruritanian. I may mean that I am backing Ruritania for the annual Curling championships or I may mean that I want to show my respects to the emperor of Ruritania during his state visit. In order to know what the flag means, you need first to know what is going on in the world.
So perhaps I am flying the Ruritanian flag because I want to show solidarity with the Ruritanians in their war against the Sylvanians. And that I am entirely free to do. The fact that I fly the flag doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate all Sylvanians; or believe that Sylvanians cheat at cards and put olive oil on their cornflakes; or that the nation of Sylvania ought to be wiped from the face of the earth. I can be against the annexation of Ruritania without being anti-Sylvite.
But there is a snag.
Very many of the people who are flying Ruritanian flags are, in fact, anti-Sylvites. And many of them do think Sylvania should be wiped out and probably do believe the silly stereotypes about the cards and the olive oil as well. So very many of my Sylvanian neighbours think that when I hang out that flag, I am insulting them personally. And I knew they would think that when I hung it out. I couldn't not have done so. So the flag is not, and can’t be, a harmless indicator of my interest in the Curling tournament.
"I don’t give a shit about how my neighbours feel" is part of what it means.
And let me be clear: I personally respect the Sylvanian culture a good deal. I have read Sylvanian poetry. I go to Sylvanian restaurants and am actually rather fond of cornflakes-in-oil. Some of my best friends really are Sylvanians. But I also think that it was a bit out of order for Sylvania to rampage across the Ruritanian peninsula, burning farms and kidnapping children and forcing them to work in their cornflake factories. I do in fact think that Sylvania is on the wrong side of history. I do in fact think that our government ought to back Ruritania in the conflict.
But there is another snag.
It may even get to the point that the whole subject is so fraught that when writers want to discuss Ruritania and Sylvania they have to substitute the names of entirely fictional countries.
We have talked about the definition of “fans” before. A fan is a person who is not only in to something, but also in to being in to it. You don’t just watch the movie: you also buy the t-shirt and the record and the figurines. And it has also been noted that "being in to a thing" can easily become a substitute for the thing itself. You continue to spend your Saturday afternoons scouring Oxfam Shops for Star Wars action figures long after you have stopped caring about the actual movies. You have every Doctor Who annual going back to 1964, but can’t remember when you last watched the show. Possibly, you actively dislike it. Or perhaps you can point to a single moment, say Season 6 or Season 14, as being “real” or "true" Doctor Who, and believe that every other version has been an intentional desecration of that one true form.
George Orwell said that “patriotism” meant loving your country, and “nationalism” meant being proud of your country, and that the former was OK but the latter was Not-OK.
Some people prefer the formulation that patriotism means loving your country and nationalism means hating everyone else’s country.
Both definitions have the same snag: if you aren’t careful you end up limiting “patriotism” to meaning “any manifestation of national identity I personally approve of” and saying that any manifestation of national identity that is not to your personal taste is “nationalistic”.
When Doctor Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, I don’t think he meant that everyone who felt affection for the place where they grew up was a good-for-nothing scallywag. I think he meant that once the scoundrel has said that he didn’t do it, and that even if he did do it he didn’t mean to do it, and that even if he did mean to do it, it wasn’t very bad to begin with, his last resort is to say “Let me h'off, gov’nor, h'after all, we are both H'inglish.”
Perhaps it would be better to say that some people are “fans” of their country. They are not just in to England, but in to being into it. They love the trappings of patriotism, while actively disliking the country itself — except, perhaps at some arbitrary point in the past; say 1776 or 1945. The Flag entirely replaces the republic or the constitutional monarchy for which it used to stand, in very much the same way that the numbers replaced the jokes.
The papers recently pretended to be very angry because a school girl had been disqualified from a pageant because she had incorporated a Union Jack into her representation of "British culture". It may well be that the school handled this badly. Schools often handle things badly. I am still bitter about the time Miss Griffiths told me to share a text book with another pupil and then chastised me for looking at the other pupil’s text book. It may also be that the school had specifically said that flags weren’t allowed in the pageant and she was disqualified for breaking the rules. But what was a person whose family came from Warwickshire even unto the third and fourth generations meant to wear to represent “my culture”?
Fine word, “culture”. Very often it seems to mean “that funny hat that Johnny Foreigner wears”. You have a culture; but I am just a base-line normal human being. He is religious; I am Church of England. And it is perfectly true that the English don’t have a distinctive funny hat that we wear on ceremonial occasions. That isn’t because nefarious commies came and took our hats away: it’s because the Irish and the Welsh and the Scottish all wear English hats. Largely because the English forced them to. That is why the Welsh and the Scottish have particular funny-hat wearing days and the English don’t.
CS Lewis once said that Scottishness consisted in “simply being Scottish”. It would have been truer to say that it consisted in pointedly not being English.
If at the age of eleven I had been asked to talk about “my culture” I would have claimed, as I still occasionally do, that my Daddy was Cornish and my Mum was cockney and turned up dressed as a tin miner or a pearly king and contributed a pasty or some pickled whelks to the bring and share. Not that my mum was ever “cockney” in that sense, but then neither was anybody else’s. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say that my culture was British. And if it had, I would have said that “British Culture” was the Beatles, Mr Bean, and cucumber sandwiches. Or the Lord Mayor’s show and the Silver Jubilee. Or Hamlet and Dennis the Menace. What the girl in question allegedly said was that British culture was about queueing and complaining about the weather, which is a bit like a French child saying that her culture is all about shrugging.
But surely she ought not to have claimed to be British in the first place? Surely that wasn’t quite in the spirit of the thing? You don’t answer the question “What, in a good way, makes you different?” by explaining what it is which you have in common with everyone else? Saying “I am British” as opposed to Somali or Jamaican or Jewish or Muslim only makes sense if Somalians, Jamaicans, Jews or Muslims are not British. And I am guessing that wasn't the point of the festival.
What would happen if I asked one of the nice people who spends their spare time daubing red crosses on road-signs and hanging Union Jacks from lamp-posts what it is they actually like about this country?
As a matter of fact, I think they would have been primed to say that that was exactly the sort of thing that libtards always ask, and that if you have to ask the question you were part of the problem and if I like socialism so much I should go an live there. Fans of Britain have become much more defensive of late, and understand that “what do you mean by woke?” is a question intended to catch them out. So they pretend that the fact that it as no possible answer is a point in its favour.
There are a lot of things we can honestly be quite pleased with in this country: socialised medicine, human rights, a sensible constitutional monarchy, an unarmed police force, a moderate state church and a live-and-let-live attitude to religion in general; a still pretty good state broadcaster; a lot of interesting castles and old buildings and organisations which manage, interpret, and promote them; volunteers who risk their lives to stop people from drowning. But those are, almost without exception, things that the Britian Fans are actively opposed to. I imagine that the much longer list of things that are quite silly but definitely ours -- cheese rolling, the Women’s Institute, the Woodcraft Folk, Border Morris, Punch and Judy, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue — would mainly consist of items they either haven't heard of or don't care about.
There are however and what-abouts and exceptions.
I saw a neanderthal meme the other day in which a football hooligan dressed in a cross of St George was imagined to be saying “We are British, we eat bacon, drink beer and respect women and if you don’t like that fuck off”. Obviously it was tempting to just fire back the Lone Ranger joke. But the relevant response was actually “First they came for the Muslims — but then they came for the Jews, the Vegans, the Methodists, the Wurzels and everyone who enjoys 1970s situation comedies.”
I have nothing against 1970s situation comedies. I might well argue that Carry On… and On the Buses were pretty valid examples of cultural Britishness. But respectful to women? Not so much. Anyway, I thought feminism was one of the woke things your lot were agin’?
I do, in fact, know that Frankenstein was the name of the scientist who created the monster, not the monster itself. And I also know that George the Martyr, who may or may not have been a real person, was probably born in modern Turkey and probably died in modern Syria, and that he probably never came to England and probably never killed a dragon. But I am not entirely sure what this proves. Nicholas of Smyrna probably never owned a sleigh and probably didn’t have a long white beard, although in fairness he did once punch a Jehovah’s Witness during a boring meeting. But that leaves the question of the commercialisation of Christmas very much where it was.
Anyone who says that Union Jacks hanging on lampposts are a pleasant way of brightening up the urban scene is being deliberately disingenuous. No-one believes that a movement called Operation Raise the Colours is trying to make the point that morris dancing, the Archers, little shops, china cups and virginity are jolly good fun. If you say that angry mobs with placards saying “send them all home” or “Enoch was Right” have legitimate concerns about how local bureaucrats handle unprocessed immigration applications you are telling traditional English Melton Mowbray Porkie Pies.
Maybe the plan is that if we all pretend that we think the flags are a symbol of nostalgia and inclusiveness, that is what everyone will take them to mean, and the protest will be de-fanged. That is how very progressive school teachers used to treat extremely naughty children, isn't it? “Oh, you have written FUCK OFF MISS GRIFFITHS on the lavatory wall, have you? Well, hasn’t that brightened the place up! And such neat handwriting too! A gold star for spelling all the words correctly! Now, would you like to make a nice mural with the Art Teacher?”
I don’t give a damn about the Union Jack, except in so far as it is a logo I have become familiar with. It would be a bit of a pity if we no longer saw it on bunting at village fetes and in the crowd on the Last Night of the Proms, in the same way that it is a bit of a pity that WH Smiths, where I bought all my Conan and Tarzan paperbacks, has somehow morphed into HW Jones.
But I think that we decent people who quite like our country have to cede the British flag to the people who are not only in to being British, but in to being into it. When I see Union Jacks on Labour membership cards (and doubtless on this ludicrous electronic BritCard that Starmer wants to make compulsory) and when I see Labour politicians posing in front of not one not two but three flags, I am afraid I think “Why are you trying to look like a 1970s National Front political broadcast?”
I would not expect my Jewish neighbours to be very understanding if I explained that the shape I had daubed on their door was actually intended as an ancient Hindu life symbol. Labour long ago dropped the hammer and sickle and played down the red flag, not because there is anything wrong with industry and agriculture and even the blood of our martyred dead, but because other people associated them with communism. There is no point moaning about it. If I say that I remember when the Union Jack meant the Queen Mother, Boy Scouts and school fetes, I will sound exactly like one of the old geezers who is sad that he can’t use “homosexual” in the sense of “cheerful and brightly coloured” any more.
It isn't true that it is only the Union Jack if it is flown at sea; and even if it were true, that wouldn't effect the argument one way or the other.
There is a very old joke.
“When you are dead you do not know that you are dead: it is difficult only for other people. It is the same when you are stupid.”
I think this is probably also true of racism.
Some time ago, I wrote a short autobiographical essay about an unfortunate cos-play costume I wore at a LARP event some thirty-five years ago. I said that I now felt that it had been a terrible horrible very bad not good cos-play costume. Some nice people in the comments, interestingly, said “Yes but…”, to which I responded “No: just no.”
One of my friends who had attended the same LARP event remarked that many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s tended to think of “racism” as “personal unkindness”, and that a black-face caricature was not racist if it was done without conscious malice, or indeed, if there were no Black people present. I think we are all now agreed that that actually made it very much worse. We’ve all become a lot more sophisticated, and are mostly on board with concepts of systemic racism, white privilege and cultural appropriation. The problem isn’t that a particular Ruritanian may be upset by a particularly offensive anti-Ruritanian joke. And it is no defence to say that one of your obligatory Ruritanian best-friends thought that the joke was quite funny. The problem is that we live in a society in which jokes about Ruritanians are widely told and in which people think it is okay to wear nasty caricatures of Ruritanian dress at cos-play events.
There is not much point in a brewery spending a lot of money saying “Older Irish Men—have you ever thought of trying Guinness?” Older Irish Men already drink Guinness. If you want to sell more of your indifferent stout, you need to persuade younger English women that Guinness is good for them. So get some clever film maker to make a little three minute film in which some young, fashionably dressed women in a trendy nightclub order pints of your beer. This is not the same as “erasing older Irish men”, or “saying that older Irish men are no longer allowed to drink Guinness”. And it is certainly not a reason for older Irish men to demand a national boycott of the brand.
It would be rather odd to write a history of Christianity in England and entirely omit any reference to Henry VIII because he was a horrible person and baby Jesus would not have approved of him.
Or would it? A Marxist might write a history of the Wars of the Roses from the point of view of the peasant and the artisan, without even bothering to talk about the arcane genealogical questions the nobles were killing each other about. That wouldn’t be neutral history: it would be making the point that, from one point of view, the Wars of the Roses involved very rich people fighting other very rich people in order to decide who would be top rich person, and that who ever won, Private Baldric would be knee deep in the same shit that he would have been knee deep in in any case. But the standard history, the one that expects us to care that Henry Tudor had a dubious claim to the throne because his mother was the illegitimate descendent of Edward III, is no more neutral: it expects us to care about the ins and outs of the British royal pedigree. So a history of Christianity in England which sought out sincere souls in towns and villages who were actually doing their best to live a Christ-like life—but ignored all the clergy and nobility who weren’t—would be Quite Interesting, and no more or less polemical than the ones which define “Christianity” as “an argument between a German and an Italian about the precise definition of indulgence”.
Was Henry VIII a Christian? From one point of view, obviously, yes. From another point of view, obviously not.
I am told that hyper-Lutheran Bible Colleges in the United States don’t have any books about Catholicism in their libraries; or that if they do, they classify them under “cults”.
CS Lewis said that the whole of Christian theology could be extrapolated from the existence of rude jokes and ghost stories.
He didn’t really mean it, of course. His point was that human beings find the fact that they have physical bodies which urinate and defecate and copulate amusing. And that they are surprised an unnerved that their bodies eventually stop working, to the extent that they find graveyards spooky and make up stories about dead people who somehow carry on existing after their body is gone. Isn’t it rather odd that animals should be disgusted and amused and scared by the fact that they are animals? And isn’t that oddity jolly well explained by the ideas of Original Sin and Cartesian Dualism? Lewis saw this as an argument in favour of his version of Christianity; it could equally be regarded as an argument against it.
It occurs to me that my entire political philosophy, and certainly my entire approach to textual criticism, could be extrapolated from one Radio 4 comedy sketch and one letter to the Times.
The sketch comes from I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. John Cleese (pre-Python) was playing a doctor who had just asked a female patient to dis-robe for a medical examination. From memory, it went thus:
Patient: You’re not really a doctor, are you?
Cleese: That depends how you define the word ‘doctor’. If by ‘doctor’ you mean someone with a qualification from a medical college who is skilled at diagnosing and curing a wide range of illnesses, then indeed I am not a doctor. But if by ‘doctor’ you mean someone who pretends to be a doctor in order to make young women take their clothes off in front of him, then indeed I am a doctor. So take your clothes off.
The letter to the Times is the one I quoted the other day in my tribute to Tony Harrison. If you aren’t of a certain age, you probably don't know just how much of a cultural force Mrs Mary Whitehouse was in the 60s and the 70s. If you are of a certain age, you may think she was a silly old fuddy duddy who didn’t like people saying “bum” on TV and thought Tom Baker pretending to drown the Master before the watershed was a bit too scary for kids. She was in fact both of those things, and I might be prepared to argue that a loud spokesperson for censoriousness was a good and necessary thing in an age of growing permissiveness, even if you are on the permissive side. And she had a very good point about Deadly Assassin. But she was also an extremist who literally didn’t think that homosexuality existed. She thought that nasty educationalists told children experiencing perfectly normal “crushes” that they had an entirely fictional quality called “being gay”. And she thought that the educationalists had bad, probably political, motives for doing so. The comparison between those views and those of certain contemporary writers of children’s fantasy fiction is left as an exercise for the reader.
The letter I have in mind is the rant about the use of the f word, the c word and the s word in Harrison's poem.
THE four-letter word, referring as it does to sexual intercourse, has within its very sound, let alone context, a harshness, even a brutality, that negates and destroys the nature of the love, sensitivity and commitment which is or should be its very essence.
And there are the two extremes: both pretty obviously nonsense. A word means anything you want it to mean; or else a word has an intrinsic, magical meaning, so that even to pronounce it moves a great power from slumber.
Is the story of Jesus Christ a myth? Well, that depends on how you define the word myth. Do you define “myth” as an ancient story involving gods, demons and supernatural events? Or do you define myth as a load of old codswallop that no-one sensible would pay the slightest attention to? Both usages are defensible, but if you are going to argue honestly you had better make it clear which sense you are using. I can point to angry American evangelicals who pretend that when CS Lewis said that the story of Jesus was (in the first sense), a myth, he really meant that it was in the second sense, only a myth.
It sometimes happens that a particular activity or practice is so taboo that it is impossible to accuse someone else of being guilty of it—and impossible to conceive that you could be guilty of it yourself. The Parson tells you each week about a sin called Sodomy, which is so bad that it cannot possibly be described or even named, and which cries up to heaven for vengeance when anyone does it. You aren’t quite sure what he means, but it doesn’t occur to you that it has anything to do with what you and your boyfriend sometimes get up to in the hay loft. The wise-men tell you that the one thing that the gods absolutely won’t put up with is incest, and that even marrying a cousin would bring down their wrath on the entire village. But it’s a very small village, and everyone is related, so you end up saying things like “My wife may happen to be the daughter of Uncle Tom, Dad’s brother, but how dare you insinuate that I am one of those god-cursed cousin-marryers.”
I think that is how priests and PE teachers and children’s TV presenters got away with it for so long. Not because anyone ever thought it was okay; but because everyone agreed that it was so incredibly not-OK that it was impossible to say, or even think, that it was happening.
If racism means "hating all Ruritanians on general principles", then the existence of even one Ruritanian who you do not hate proves you are not a racist.
If Hitler was Far Right and Hitler was the worst man who ever lived, then it is a terrible slur to say that anyone other than Hitler was Far Right.
If Racism is the very worst thing there is, then only the very worst people in the world can be Racists.
Since I am not one of the worst people in the world, then, clearly, I cannot be a Racist.
It follows that there are no Racists and no Far-Right politicians in the world, and never have been, apart from Hitler.
Gilbert and Sullivan told us many years ago that when everybody’s somebody then no-one’s anybody. I have long suspected that when clergymen say that everything is holy, everything is sacred, and everything is sacramental, then what they mean is that they don’t believe in holiness, sacredness, or the sacraments.
The other day, someone told me that Christianity was obviously better than Islam because Islams are told to only pray five times a day, whereas Christians are told to pray without ceasing. I said that that could only be true if you had redefined “prayer” so it included peeling potatoes and going to the toilet. They said that it was possible to pray and peel potatoes at the same time. I said that I thought that must be very tiring. Thank you Lord for this knife, and for its sharpness. Thank you lord for this potato and its knobbiness. I pray that thou wilt in thine infinite mercy protect me from accidentally slicing the top off my thumb. It is, of course, possible to do ordinary things like eating and washing prayerfully. That is why some faiths have rule-books explaining "the proper religious way to peel a potato" and "the proper religious way to brush your hair." I think that a Muslim or a Jew who tries very hard to stay kosher or halal is probably “praying without ceasing” in a truer sense than the Christian who says “god bless this flush and this toilet-roll and this soap”. Which I don’t for one moment believe he does.
Rilstone’s third law goes like this:
1: The word “woke” means “anything the Right does not like”
2: The Right does not like anything.
3: Therefore everything is woke.
The Right would doubtless, and not completely unjustifiably, retaliate with a law of their own
1: The Left call everything they don't like racist
2: The Left don't like anything
3: Therefore everything is racist.
It is apparently now possible to say that someone who was born in Ruritania and has lived there for his whole life; and whose parents were born in Ruritania and lived there for their whole lives but whose grandparents migrated from Sylvania in the 1920s is not a true Ruritanian and should not be allowed to sit in the Ruritanian parliament while simultaneously insisting, to the point of litigation, that I am not anti-Sylvanian.
When nobody is anybody, everyone is somebody. Racism is so bad it doesn't exist. Everyone I don't like is Hitler. If that is how you define Racism, then indeed I am not a Racist. So take your clothes off.
There is a small controversy going on in the British Monopoly Federation. (So far as I know, no such organisation exists, and no dispute is going on. This is another of those paragraphs where I very wittily write about one thing and then do a surprising reveal that I am actually writing about a different thing.)
The dispute is about whether the printed rules say that….I don’t know….you can level up every time you run out of manna, or whether you have to have promoted your Bishop first?
This is obviously very important if you play Monopoly: and the fact that there is a difference of opinion suggests that the rules are not clear on this point. But if you don't play Monopoly it is arguably none of your business.
I don’t think it would be very sensible or interesting of me to say that it doesn’t make any earthly difference when you level up your top hat, because Monopoly is a silly game and a complete waste of time. I might be right: but the people who are currently having the argument are apparently quite keen on Monopoly.
I don’t think it would be very sensible of me to say that the levelling up rule was added when the game transferred from Parker Brothers to Hasboro and that the only true Monopoly is Mr Charles Darrow’s 1924 edition. I might, again, be right: but if the Monopoly club is arguing about the present rules then it isn’t much help to tell them that they should be arguing about a completely different set of rules.
There would be more point in saying that the ambiguity of the rules is evidence that Monopoly is not a very good game and everyone ought to resign from the Federation and take up Magic instead. And certainly, if one of the rules says that you can collect an extra $200 when you pass go if you shout “Down with Sylvanians!” then there would be some point in saying that Monopoly is not a very nice game. But even this wouldn’t contribute very much to the bishop/manna controversy.
I personally don’t have any problem with the ordination of women in the Church of England, and I have never met anyone who does. At any rate, no-one whose opinion is worth paying any attention to.
What I find very hard to understand is how an entire church could have accepted female vicars, and then accepted female bishops but think that female archbishops are a step too far.
I see the point that there are Anglo-Catholics who would like very much to drop the Anglo- part, and are annoyed every time the Church of England does something that might antagonise the Church of Rome. I am not quite sure why denying the eucharistic miracle, denying the immaculate conception and bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary and denying the special authority of the Pope are not insuperable barriers to reunion with Rome, but that a differently gendered Archbishop of Canterbury is.
I think the African church would say that the issue is not the Rev Mullally’s gender per se but the whole question of Scriptural Authority. The problem isn’t so much “You have put a woman in charge” but “You don’t respect the Good Book when it says that you shouldn’t have a woman in charge.” But why the new Archbishop has provoked the split, where, say, relative toleration of divorce — and even liberal interpretations of key Christian doctrines — did not do so is a little obscure. Possibly they would say something like “You can be nice to homosexuals in your denomination if you insist, provided we can carry on being horrible to them in ours; but your wrongly gendered leader is normally our wrongly gendered leader too, and we can't be doing with that."
I don’t propose to re-litigate the proof texts. I suppose the actual question is whether you think that the practice in the Pauline churches is an irreducible model for all churches for all time (head covering, glossolalia, agape feasts, baptism for the dead and all) or whether you think that each generation catches the ball and passes it onto the next.
It is by no means clear to me that if Catherine of Aragorn had supplied Henry VIII with a male heir, England would have sided with the Pope and against Martin Luther in the reformation. I certainly don’t think that the present day Church of England remains simply a clumsy workaround to allow some Tudor Trump to dissolve his marriage before there were divorce courts. It is certainly the case that the Queen Elizabeth II was a woman, but the monarch isn’t “head of the church” in the same sense that an Archbishop is. Frankenstein is certainly the name of the creator, not the monster.
There was a time when I would have been inclined to argue that the persons opposed to a female archbishop were wrong and silly but not necessarily sexist. The thing I would have meant is still broadly true: you can be against lady bishops because you think that ladies in general are silly and yucky and can’t be trusted with any responsible job; and you can be against lady bishops because you have a complicated theological belief about priesthood and the eucharist and the gender of the supreme being. But I now think that it is perfectly valid to say “That belief is a sexist belief” and, indeed, “That theological system is a sexist theological system”. To say “but perhaps the person with the sexist belief derived from the sexist system is not themselves a sexist" is to speculate about how many angels can dance on a split hair.
Kier Starmer appeared to say that a particular political policy may be racist; and that the party that promotes the racist policy may be racist; but it does not follow that the the person who votes for politician who leads the party who supports the policy that lay in the house that Jack built is necessarily a racist themself. Which is simply to play a word-game and equivocate on definitions. So take your clothes off.
If the Far-Right has degreed that the word Far-Right is as offensives as the f-word or the n-word, then by all means let us stop using it and think of something else to call them. I think that the best solution is to say what you actually mean. If someone says that all French people are excitable and shrug a lot, don't call them Racists, say that they are promoting racial stereotypes. If someone says that the grand-child of an immigrant is nevertheless a foreigner, say that they are nativists. If someone says that only white actors and models should appear in advertisements, call them white supremacists. If they say that they don't dislike people with dark skins but that there are too many of them in this country, or that a dark-skinner person can't be British regardless of what his paper work says, say they believe in an ethnostate. I am not sure what word I would apply to someone who wants to deport legal immigrants who have lived in this country for donkeys years because it would promote something called cultural cohesion. Mono-culturalist? Assimilationist? Powellite?
Or maybe I am over-thinking this. We mustn't call them Far-Right. But they can call us Woke. So what is needed is a word which serves the same function. A word without meaning, but with an etymological history. A word which means "a person or thing that liberals dislike" in the same way that woke now means “a person or thing conservatives don’t like”.
A word, in fact, which means “not on our side”.
Is there such a word which has been commonly applied to the political Right? I am sure there must be such a word. If it occurs to me I will let you know.
I remember in maybe 1986 I was in London, trying to visit a mate who lived in an apartment block, unable to remember his flat number, looking for a red phone box to phone him up and for a shop where I could change a pound note into five pence pieces which would fit the machine. “I have had enough of this” I thought “I am going to have to get one of those newfangled Mobile Phones as I believe they are called.”
I did not realise, at that moment, that I was committing an act which would, twenty years down the line, cause me to spend valuable writing time trying to encapsulate my thoughts in precisely one hundred and forty characters and which would, twenty years after that, result in the election of an authoritarian mono-culturalist US president, and therefore of the political emasculation of the BBC.
Frankenstein was the name of the scientist; and the Creature that he Created got out of control and destroyed him. We can’t see the end-result of Artificial Intelligence: but I am pretty sure that it will something that we wouldn’t remotely have expected.