A political journey of marginal importance

I thought I’d write something about the evolution of my political opinions. Not because I’m immodest enough to think that my views are of the remotest interest to anyone but myself. But, as I said in answer to one of Norm’s profile questions, I started blogging to help me work out what I think - and right now I feel a need to take stock of where I’ve got to, and how I got here. On the other hand, if this blog still has the occasional reader, I think I owe it to you to explain where I’m coming from, so to speak, and to update you on how my thinking has changed since I began blogging half a dozen years or so ago. And maybe some of you might recognise aspects of your own political journey in this account.

Mind you, in case you’re tempted to take the ideas expressed here at all seriously, you should bear in mind that the extent of my political activism, apart from voting, has been my work in adult education, subscribing and donating to the odd cause or campaign, and  -  well, blogging actually. On a similar cautionary note, I should add that I feel some empathy with Andrew Marr who, when asked why he hadn’t gone into politics, explained that he tended to agree with the last person he’d been talking to.  I’m not quite so fickle, but I kind of know what he means. I set great store by Keats’ notion of negative capability – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. You could describe this as the would-be creative writer’s capacity to understand the other person’s position – or you could just call me indecisive.

I was born into an East End working-class family, and I’m fairly sure that my grandparents were Labour voters. My paternal grandfather, a council worker, was a NUPE shop steward, and I remember my mother saying (this was some time in the Seventies or Eighties) that today’s Labour party was no longer the party her late father had supported. We moved out of London to suburban Essex when I was a few years old. Despite their background, my aspiring parents were Daily Mail-reading Conservative voters for most of my childhood, and I thought this the most natural thing in the world. Even in my first year at grammar school, I remember walking home with friends, and two of us taunting a third, the son of a Labour local councillor. How on earth, we wondered, could anybody even think of supporting that lot? Needless to say, within a few years, my fellow-taunter and I would be among the most dedicated Leftists in our class.

What changed? Well, my parents, as well as being upwardly mobile, were also devout Methodists (their faith would later lead them to doubt their Toryism and go so far as voting Liberal), and I suppose it was the emphasis on compassion for the poor and the ‘developing world’, not to mention Methodism’s close ties and structural similarities with the Labour movement, that rubbed off on me. By the time I began to think about these things, it seemed obvious that, since both Christians and socialists cared about the poor, then Christians should also be socialists. And of course, I was a child of the Sixties, excited by the social and cultural changes happening around me as I reached puberty. At the age of 12, I remember being deeply affected by media coverage of the Vietnam war, and feeling a wave of solidarity with the demonstrators outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. In the quiet of my bedroom, I strummed my guitar and wrote countless unsent letters to world leaders, begging them to give peace a chance.

This hippyish yearning for peace ‘n’ love was given shape and rigour as sixth form beckoned, and I began to study history and politics with more interest. I came under the influence of Dave Roberts, our diminutive Liverpudlian British Constitution teacher, who converted much of the class to his brand of Tribunite democratic socialism. I began to spend lunchtimes in the school library, devouring the Guardian and New Statesman. Dave organised a school trip to the Houses of Parliament, where we gasped to see one of our heroes, Michael Foot, striding across the entrance hall in front of our eyes.

When I went up to Cambridge to study English Literature, my democratic socialist outlook deepened as I was introduced to the writings of Ruskin and Morris, and attended lectures by Raymond Williams. But Cambridge was also the place where, having lost my youthful evangelical faith, I began to be attracted to Catholicism. The discovery of liberation theology, not to mention the Catholic Marxism of Terry Eagleton, Herbert McCabe et al, made it possible to find some kind of accommodation between my quest for spiritual meaning and my political principles. Meanwhile, my inner monk battled with my outer punk, as I became a regular at new wave gigs down at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, with a distinct preference for the more earnestly political bands like the Clash.

My intertwining religious and political beliefs inspired a year’s voluntary work with ex-prisoners in Worcester, and then postgraduate studies in Manchester, exploring the social and political dimensions of 20^th century Christian poetry.  Here, after a brief burst of enthusiasm for my new faith, my attachment to Catholicism began to wane, and I launched into another period of hectic intellectual exploration, as I read my way through Nietzsche, Marcuse, Norman O. Brown et al., to a soundtrack of the Doors and Joy Division.

Then my grant ran out and I found myself back home in Essex with an unfinished PhD and a need to earn some money. I began to do bits of adult education teaching, including a spell with the WEA, before landing my first full-time job running an education project for ex-offenders in Basildon. Around this time I read Marx properly for the first time – nerd that I am, I remember being bowled over by ‘The German Ideology’ – and motivated myself for work by absorbing Freire and Illich. By the time I moved on to my next job, running another NACRO project in North London, I was a regular reader of Marxism Today and Red Letters. I spent my lunchtimes in the Centerprise Bookshop in Stoke Newington High Street, where I bought my copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and browsed the publications from Stuart Hall’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was now the mid-80s, the time of the miners’ strike and the high-water mark of the GLC, who part-funded our project. If asked to define my politics at this time, I’d probably have said I was a wet marxist, or a soft eurocommunist, with a dash of pro-feminism and vigorous anti-racism.

I took this outlook with me to my next job, as a community education organiser on a depressed estate in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside. Here, my metropolitan Marxian idealism ran up against political apathy, a moribund rural Labour Party, and a working-class community where the most dynamic wanted to move up and out to the middle-class villages, not to stay and foment political change, and where the unemployed adults I was teaching wanted skills for jobs, rather than Freirean consciousness-raising.

And then 1989 happened. Of course, the collapse of the sclerotic Stalinism that most of us on the Left had defined ourselves against shouldn’t have shaken our basic faith in socialism – but somehow it did. It felt rather churlish to carry on calling for socialist revolution, when the people of Eastern Europe were rejoicing in free markets and running away from any form of collectivism. There were domestic repercussion here, too, as the Communist Party fractured and then disappeared, Marxism Today went under, and the machinations of the Bennite left made Labour seem increasingly out of touch and unelectable. Britain, and the world, had changed, but the Left had failed to keep up.

From Oxfordshire I moved to an adult literacy project in Milton Keynes, and thence to a job at the Open University, developing access courses. Long conversations about pedagogy with my colleague Andy Northedge (the person who effected a personal introduction to my erstwhile political hero, Stuart Hall) put more dents in my already wobbly faith in the knowledge-lite Freirean educational methods that I’d begun to doubt as a community educator. Meanwhile, Labour was changing: I supported Kinnock’s reforms and when Blair was elected leader, I renewed my long-lapsed party membership. I saw myself as a critical friend of New Labour, liking the attempt to modernise the message, sometimes critical of the dogma of ‘choice’, but generally in favour. 

And then came 9/11. What was it about that cataclysmic event that changed so many political minds? In part, the shock of this violent assault by the forces of apocalyptic unreason on a liberal, plural, open society helped to crystallise what it was that I valued about that kind of society. And in part it was another kind of shock – of watching as many on the Left, supposedly on ‘our’ side of the political aisle, rushed to explain, excuse, and apologise for that violent assault, to see it as ‘understandable’.  There were other arenas, too, in which this Left, which seemed to have become mainstream and acceptable, ‘understood’ terror, repression, authoritarianism, as long as it was ‘anti-imperialist’ and directed against us, the West. Something else happened to my thinking as a result of 9/11. I’d become fairly pro-Palestinian in recent years, an admirer of Edward Said’s writings, and had even joined the Palestine Solidarity Campaign - at the time, it had seemed like just another of the worthy solidarity campaigns, like those for Chile and Nicaragua, that concerned Leftists should sign up to. But I’d begun to have doubts about one-sided accounts of the Middle East conflict, and the events of September 2001 helped to confirm them. I began to feel rather more sympathy for what ordinary Israelis had been suffering for years, at the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and started to see Israel not so much as as a neo-colonial oppressor, as it was characterised in the simplistic anti-imperialist playbook, but as the only liberal democracy in the region, surrounded by illiberal and aggressive opponents who desired its destruction.

These new strains in my thinking were nourished by my introduction to the world of blogging, beginning with my discovery of Normblog and then moving on to other sites associated with the Euston Manifesto and the broader anti-totalitarian democratic left. I was broadly supportive of New Labour’s endorsement of US intervention in Afghanistan, maybe more dubious about the liberation of Iraq, though instinctively more sympathetic to those who made a moral case for war than to the ragbag of ‘anti-imperialists’ and apologists for tyranny and theocracy who made up the 'Stop the War' movement.

As the first decade of the 21^st century wore on, the old political boundaries of left and right seemed more blurred and porous than before. Often, whether supporting women’s rights in the Muslim world, standing up for Israel, or fighting to defend freedom of expression at home, one found more allies on the right than in some sections of the left. Inevitably, once you’ve discovered common ground with former enemies on one issue, then you become more open to listening to their opinions on other matters. And of course, I was now a middle-aged man, a homeowner with a growing family, so there was the inevitable gravitation away from youthful radicalism and towards the political centre.

But in the last few years there’s been another influence at work too. Religion had never really gone away, and there had been a number of periods of renewed if fleeting attraction. However, these had faltered, due to what I saw as irreconcilable contradictions with my socialist-feminist principles. No, in my 50s, I’ve found myself more seriously and consistently drawn back to belief, and those objections seem less of an obstacle. At this stage, I’m only prepared to say that I’m ‘exploring’ faith, but it doesn’t seem to want go away. Inevitably, it’s having an impact on my political thinking, so that issues such as abortion assume a greater importance - another area in which, sadly, one is more likely to find allies on the right than the left. At the same time, my renewed faith, if that’s what it turns out to be, also prevents me from making a full-scale tilt to the right. In Catholic social teaching, a consistent ethic of life also means opposition to the death penalty, compassion for the poor, and resisting monopolies of power, whether governmental or corporate.

If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of 9/11 led to a shift in my thinking on international affairs, then the riots of summer 2011 helped to unsettle some of my ideas about domestic politics. I watched the unfolding scenes that night, as crowds with the merest sliver of an excuse about a possible police shooting in another part of town, callously vandalised, burned and looted, destroying the homes and livelihoods of their neighbours, built up over years of hard work. Like many others that night, I was angry and in despair at the sheer greed and mindless violence, and at the inaction of the police. The official Left response was slower and more reticent than after 9/11, as if sensing that the usual explanations wouldn’t work this time. Nevertheless, there were one or two attempts to pin the blame on police brutality, poverty, the cuts. However, my sympathies were completely with the victims – those who lost their homes or businesses, or saw their neighbourhood go up in flames – and with those public-spirited residents who volunteered to clean up the mess made by others the next day.

I also found myself wondering about those who chose not to riot – the people in the affected areas, also living in inadequate housing, maybe unemployed, victims of the same cuts to local services. Why didn’t they join in? Maybe social conservatives were right when they talked about the importance of individual responsibility, about the positive influences of good parenting, stable families, even religious upbringing and values? And maybe, just maybe, there was even something in the argument that a skewed welfare system, combined with a rampant consumerism, had bred a sense of entitlement – so that many of the rioters thought there was nothing wrong with grabbing what they could and appeared surprised when they had to face the consequences in court.

So where does all of this leave me? Perhaps it’s easier to answer that question in relation to real-life political situations.  For the past decade or so, I’ve been a devoted follower of US politics.We were in San Francisco at the time of the 2008 campaign, and if I’d had a vote, it would definitely have been for Obama. My disillusionment with him has been slower than for some, and probably has as much to with the changes in my own thinking as in his performance as President. As a liberal interventionist, I’ve been deeply disappointed by the administration’s lukewarm support for democratic reform movements in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, its tendency to blame Israel for the failure of the peace process, and its abject humiliation by Russia over Syria. On the domestic front, I supported healthcare reform but I’ve become concerned about the authoritarian requirement on religious healthcare providers to act against their own principles in relation to abortion and contraception. On abortion, too, I gave Obama the benefit of the doubt initially, believing him sincere when he said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions, but I was disgusted by the Democrats' cynical use of the issue to scare voters in 2012. In short, if I were American, I’m not sure which way I’d vote in 2016: I’d like to see a President who shares Obama’s desire to reform healthcare and immigration, but who is also pro-life and willing to stand up to tyrants and defend democratic values abroad.

As for British politics, as a loyal-ish Blairite (and, it would appear, like a majority of Labour Party members) I voted for the Other Miliband, was disappointed by the use of union power to deny him victory, and have been irritated by union-backed attempts to cleanse Blarites from positions of influence in the party. As an admirer of Michael Gove, not only for his writings on terrorism but also for his continuation of the Blair-Adonis educational reforms, I’m irritated by the kneejerk opposition to him from the Labour front bench. I dislike Ed M’s disavowal of the New Labour policies that won three general elections, and find it hard to forgive the two Eds for their part in the Brownite cabal that plotted against Blair. On the other hand, I quite like the idea of One Nation Labour, admire some of the work that Jon Cruddas is doing, and am more sympathetic these days to Blue Labour, though I think Maurice Glasman, for all his undoubted qualities, overestimates its appeal beyond the inner-city enclaves, where ties of faith and community are weaker. Also, I’m not sure he really ‘gets’ working-class aspiration…

Which is kind of where I began.

That's about it, for now. The journey continues...

Roundhead or Cavalier (or a bit of both)?

I imagine serious historians must tear their hair out at programmes like Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You? which was on BBC 4 last night (though I noticed quite a few of them among the contributors: they must have been reading this). Me, I gave up a couple of minutes in, when the presenter described Cromwell as an ‘egalitarian’. From the little I saw, the programme committed the cardinal sin of history documentaries: reading modern debates and divisions back into an era utterly unlike our own.

Nevertheless, the parlour-game format around which the programme was built – where can we see the ‘two tribes’ of Roundhead and Cavalier in contemporary Britain, and which one do you belong to? – is a bit of harmless fun. The trouble is, speaking for myself, it’s not a question I find easy to answer – not any more, anyway. Once, in my far-off youth, it was all so much simpler. Brought up a Methodist, with early stirrings of socialist sympathies, I was an instinctive Roundhead. As a child, ‘Oliver Cromwell’ was probably my favourite in the Ladbybird history series: I felt a natural sympathy for the spiritual simplicity, the political reformism, even the clean, proto-modern lines of the uniforms, clothes, hairstyles. As for the Cavaliers, they were so obviously everything we aspiring-working-class Nonconformists were against: hierarchy, pomp, ritualism, tradition.

But then, as I grew older, it became more complicated. In my early twenties, I had a short-lived flirtation with Catholicism. That’s to say, I converted, but lapsed soon afterwards, though I retained strong residual sympathies in that direction, and if I were ever to become a practising Christian again, I can’t imagine belonging to any other denomination. I was inspired by the Catholic Worker movement and the liberation theologians of Latin America, and my conversion fractured the connection within me between Protestantism and political radicalism. (It helped that evangelical protestants, the modern-day heirs of seventeenth-century Puritanism, tended to align themselves with the political right). Left-wing Catholicism offered me a way of being traditionalist and sacramentalist in religion, while supporting social justice on the political level.

Complicating things still further, my researches in family history led to the discovery that my father’s forebears had been Aberdeenshire Episcopalians who (so family tradition had it) fought for the Bonnie Prince in the ’45: indeed, my great-great-great-grandfather bore the name Charles Edward Stuart Robb in his memory. As a result, I became fascinated by the Jacobites and by extension the Stuarts: their cause seemed far more glamorous than that of their dour Presbyterian opponents, with their grim sabbatarianism and censorious kirk sessions (before which some of my ancestors were apparently hauled for various offences against purity and sobriety).

My theological and genealogical sympathies have also inspired some recent revisionist historical reading, from which I’ve learned, inter alia, that it was the Catholic Mary Stuart who tried to introduce a degree of religious tolerance to Scotland, only to be thwarted by the fanatically Calvinist and misogynist John Knox, just as it was her great grandson James II, who, for all his autocratic ways, wanted to extend religious rights to both Catholics and Dissenters, a policy that in part prompted the so-called Glorious Revolution – supposedly the foundational moment of modern liberal democracy, but from another perspective a coup by the Protestant elite. As for Charles II, he was just a lot more fun than his predecessor Cromwell: I enjoyed reading Jenny Uglow's biography, especially the unforgettable image of Charles and James rolling up their sleeves to help put out the Great Fire.

Then, last year, I read Michael Braddick’s superb revisionist account of the English Civil War, a period I’d never really studied properly before. Braddick sees the various internecine wars of the seventeenth century in these islands, not so much as the beginnings of English political radicalism, but as a continuation of the religious conflict sparked by Henry VIII’s rupture with Rome in the previous century. I found the book revealing about the religious as well as the political beliefs of those who rebelled against Charles I. I don’t think I’d realized before quite how important Calvinism was to the religious outlook of the Puritans: rather than simplicity of worship and equal access to the scriptures being their prime motivation, as the Whig version of history taught us to believe, it was their core belief in the doctrine of predestination - in the divine election for salvation of a chosen few (and therefore the uselessness of human ‘works’) - that galvanised their opposition to Church and King. Far from the Puritans being egalitarians or proto-democrats, this was about the most elitist worldview imaginable, not to mention one that tended towards a strident paternalism, a knowing-what’s-best for the unsaved and unwashed.

For all of Charles I’s many faults and missteps, Braddick’s book showed the battle for legitimacy between crown and parliament as much more finely balanced  than I remembered. And the victory of the parliamentary cause seemed, in the end, more like a military coup than a democratic revolution. In recent years, there has been a tendency to confer retrospective secular sainthood on groups like the Levellers and to throw an ahistorical social-democratic patina over the Roundheads generally. But reading Braddick’s history, Cromwell seemed more like Lenin or Mao than Attlee or Bevan. As for the New Model Army, seeking to impose their theocratic will by force of arms and (when in power) banning Christmas, closing down theatres and imposing strict dress codes, one was reminded less of the dear old Labour Party than of the Taliban or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

And if you want to see what happened when the Puritans got a chance to found their own God-bothering commonwealth, just think of New England later in the seventeenth century: the memory of what happened at Salem is a useful corrective to any notion that they foreshadowed modern egalitarian tolerance. Nearer to home, the three words ‘Cromwell in Ireland’ should be enough to undermine any simple notion of a great democratic liberator.

It goes to show that you shouldn’t try to interpret past conflicts in terms of modern categories. ‘Roundhead’ and ‘Cavalier’ aren’t timeless universals, but labels with very particular meanings in a very different historical context. The same goes for ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ in the next century, labels which are easily misconstrued in terms of today’s Conservative-Labour divisions, when in fact (for example) Tories began as supporters of the insurrectionist Jacobite Pretender, while the original Whigs were those dour and paternalist Presbyterians again.

Two more points. What if, rather than representing two persistent ‘tribes’ of Britons, the Cavaliers and Roundheads reflect two complementary aspects of the British spiritual and political psyche that were unnaturally split apart some time in the sixteenth century (the Reformation having a lot to do with it)? And what if, rather than representing a cleavage in society, these labels reflect a fault-line that runs through each of us? After all, it was said of Robbie Burns that he was both Jacobin and Jacobite, a paradoxical position that sounds impossible to sustain, but one with which I have an instinctive sympathy. What if there’s both a bit of the Roundhead and a bit of the Cavalier in anyone with any kind of sympathetic imagination, and the struggle isn’t to decide which one you are, or to defeat one or the other, but to reconcile the warring tendencies within oneself...?

Proposing and performing

There’s a fascinating debate about the nature of belief going on between Norm and Peter, prompted by something Richard wrote, and with a useful contribution from Chris. In brief, it all hinges on whether religious belief is best described as performative or propositional in nature, and the original spark seems to have been Karen Armstrong’s latest book.

Regular readers will know that this is a subject of continuing interest to this blog (see here, for example). I’m planning to make a proper contribution to the discussion at some point, but in the meantime here’s something I came across recently that might be of relevance:

The guest a couple of weeks ago on Radio 4’s The Choice (a programme that is occasionally worth tuning into, despite Michael Buerk’s irritatingly doomladen tones) was Paul Moore, the man who blew the whistle on HBOS. I was intrigued to hear that Moore’s actions were inspired, in part, by his newly-revived Catholic faith. Looking him up on the internet, I came across an article in the Catholic Herald which included this snippet:

Paul Moore's upbringing was deeply Catholic. He was a boarder from the age of eight at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. But when he left he lost his faith. He pursued a career in the City of London, where, he said, he led a life dominated by a futile quest for money and material pleasures. 

"I was very miserable and I was working very hard but I couldn't find any peace or any joy and so I was looking for a way to feel happier and more peaceful." He began to rediscover his faith and in 2002 he moved to the Yorkshire village of Wass to take a job with HBOS at the bank's office in Leeds.

Wass is just down the road from Ampleforth. "When we moved back up to my alma mater I said to myself: 'I'm going to try to have faith, to pretend that I've got faith.' And as I pretended to have faith, I got faith."

Now, some secularist commentators might be tempted to scoff at this apparent confirmation that religious faith is little more than wishful thinking. But not me. Instead, Moore’s words struck me as an accurate description of how faith tends to work. Personally, I wouldn’t have used the word ‘pretend’, but I find the idea of belief deepening through external practice – working, as it were ‘from the outside in’ – true to my own experience, and to a socially-situated / embodied / materialist view of the world (the ideas of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and even Cardinal Newman come to mind – but they’ll have to wait for another time).

I haven’t read Armstrong’s book and I have to confess to an inbuilt resistance to anything she writes. (Her book on the Buddha made me realise why I wasn’t, after all, a Buddhist, and the only other volume of hers that I’ve read, her History of God, seemed shot through with a gnostic elitism which found ‘true’ faith in the ideas of a knowing minority and was dismissive of the beliefs of the humble masses. What’s more, Armstrong’s interventions in recent debates about faith have revealed her to be unwilling to apply to Islam the same critical perspective she casts on Christianity, and to be an apologist for fundamentalism and an enemy of freedom of expression.) However, I suspect that the problem with her defence of religion - as being more about ‘doing’ than ‘believing’ - is that it confuses description with justification. Yes, of course, as a description of most people’s religious faith an emphasis on everyday practice is probably more important than an analysis of their propositional beliefs. But as a justification for the validity of religious belief – and particularly of one set of beliefs over another – it’s a non-starter.

But more on all of this another time.

The internet: social interaction for introverts?

Following a recommendation from The New Centrist (to whom warm congratulations are due, by the way, on the birth of a junior TNC), I've discovered Jonathan Rauch's website, which collects together the contrarian commentator's contributions to various print and online journals. Apparently the article of his which has prompted the most discussion is one in which Rauch poses this question:

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If this seems like someone you recognise, writes Rauch, then 'chances are that you have an introvert on your hands.' And Rauch confesses that the description fits him exactly:

Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. 

He goes on to explode many of the stereotypes and misconceptions that attach themselves to introverts. For example, they aren't shy or antisocial: unlike extroverts, they're just content with their own company:

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

I would guess that much of the interest in the article has been the result of readers recognising themselves in this characterisation. And here I'm going to propose a theory, based on little more than personal experience and speculation: introverts are probably over-represented among regular internet users, and especially among bloggers. My hypothesis is that the internet enables those who tend towards introversion (and yes, I include myself among them, though I usually hate all that Jungian / Myers-Briggsian categorising of people by 'type') to express themselves, interact with others, and even make friends, without all that awkward socialising-and-small-talk business, and to do all of this in their own time and at their own pace. For some of us, the advent of email was a blessed release from the exhausting routine of having to pick up the 'phone, or worse, arrange to actually go and see someone, with all its inevitable unpredictability and open-endedness. Blogging, and commenting on other people's blogs, is a further step forward for us introverted types, enabling us to engage in full-blown, back-and-forth debates, without any awkward eye contact: indeed, without ever leaving the cosy cocoon of home or office.

I was thinking about this the other evening, as I sat on the sofa with my laptop, composing a post in which I mentioned a certain author's book. Within the hour, and before I'd even got up from the sofa, said author had responded with a comment. In the meantime, I'd been reading the latest posts by my virtual 'friends', and catching up on emails from some of my online family history contacts. Just one little snapshot of how the internet has transformed this particular introvert's life.

Seems like they only had the vaguest inkling of all this back in 1969:

Alzheimer's and atheism

There was a very affecting piece in Friday's Guardian about a woman in her early 60s with dementia, and the experience of her husband and other carers. The article traced the progress of the condition, starting with an early premonition:

One night, shortly after Carla White had a blackout at work, she sat bolt upright in bed. 'She woke up and said to me, "I'm losing my brain"', says David, her husband. 'I think Carla knew straightaway. I almost find it eerie.'

After some years of caring for Carla at home, David now resorts to leaving his wife for long periods in a residential care home:

'The first time I visited she said something about coming home but now she never mentions it. I can sit there for half an hour and hold her hand. When I leave, there is no scene. I say, "See you next time." There's no point in saying "tomorrow" because she no longer understands what it means'.

The fear of dementia has almost overtaken that of cancer among people of a certain age. What could be worse than losing not only a lifetime's memories, but your very ability to remember, and with it your sense of who you are and have been as a person? (There's a poignant moment in John Bayley's memoir of his wife Iris Murdoch's descent into dementia when she asks him, 'Did I used to be some kind of writer?')  Would it even be 'you' who lived on? And if not, would there be any point in remaining alive? 

In my evangelical Christian youth, one of the most popular books passed around the prayer groups was Richard Wurmbrand's Tortured for Christ, a Romanian pastor's account of his sufferings under communism. The author confesses that the only time he experienced religious doubt was after periods of unconsciousness following torture. Where was his soul, he wondered, when he blacked out? Reading accounts of people with dementia has always prompted similar thoughts in me. If everything that makes a person an individual, an 'I', can disappear so completely, then how is it possible to believe in a soul that survives death?

Doesn't Alzheimer's confirm that our unique selfhood is a product of biological and psychological processes in a social world, coming into being when we are born, developing in richness and complexity through life, but ending inevitably with the death of the physical body?

Believers might argue that, even when the brain dies, a certain 'something' of us survives, but doesn't the experience of dementia sufferers suggest that this 'something', even if it could live on, would be far removed from any of our ideas of personhood? What do religious people think will survive of Carla White after she dies? Will it be the person who exists now - without reason, will or memory of who she is or has been - or will God somehow reconstruct the personality that disease has slowly crumbled away? Isn't it more logical to believe that the person who was Carla White has already in a sense 'died' and can never be brought back (which isn't to deny that she continues to be a unique and valued person to those who love her)?

In debates about evolution and faith, the impact of Darwin's theory on ideas of the soul is rarely discussed. Believers who attempt to reconcile science and religion tend to concentrate on demonstrating that faith in a creator God is compatible with belief in an evolving universe. But even if we accept that belief in an ultimate Being who kicked off the whole process is at least rational, surely all religions also depend on the notion that human beings, rather than being an accidental by-product of that process, are a unique and special part of it? And isn't this notion completely undermined by the whole idea of evolution?

At the heart of Christianity, Judaism and Islam is the belief that the purpose of life is some kind of relationship with God, and crucially that it's possible for this to continue after death. But the capacity for this relationship, and its survival, surely relies on some notion of a 'soul' that transcends and outlives the body. If we accept that human beings evolved over millenia from 'lesser' creatures, who presumably were not fortunate enough to have this capacity for relationship with God, then at what point did 'soul' enter in? Do we have to resort to some deus ex machina notion of the Creator intervening in the process and 'ensouling' some of his creatures at a certain point in evolution? I suppose if you believe in an all-powerful God, then you have to believe that this is possible, but knowing what we do about the way the world works, is it likely? And at what precise point did the transformation from finite, soulless mammal to 'ensouled' and potentially eternal human being take place? Was there a generation of almost-human hominids that had no capacity for knowing God and didn't get a shot at eternal life, but their offspring - now fully human - did?

It's not that what we know about evolution, or dementia, makes religious faith impossible, but surely it makes its claims seem less likely? And it puts the onus on religious spokespeople, instead of banging on about 'militant atheists' and 'aggressive secularism', to respond intelligently to some of these questions, and rather than retreating into a defensive ghetto, try to present a vision of faith that makes sense to thoughtful, twenty-first century seekers after truth.

What would Franco and Salazar say?

New genetic research has revealed that as many as 20 per cent of Spanish and Portuguese men have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, while 11 per cent have DNA that indicates Moorish forebears. These findings are interesting for a number of reasons. They suggest that the extent of forced conversions to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries was far greater than previously imagined. They are also a reminder that we are all, to some extent, and to borrow Barack Obama's expressive term, 'mutts', and are thus a boost to pluralistic and cosmopolitan approaches to matters of personal identity. And they are a massive and welcome rebuff to the racial purism and exclusivism, cloaked in right-wing Catholicism, that has often plagued the Iberian peninsula. Franco and Salazar must be spinning in their graves.

Enlightenment pros and cons

On my list of books that I plan to read in the near future are Kenan Malik's Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, which sounds like a much-needed riposte to cultural relativism and racialised thinking, and John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, not because I have any great sympathy with Gray's ideas, but because a friend recommended it, and I thought I should read it in the interests of fairness and balance. So it was interesting to come across a link at Butterflies and Wheels to a review by Gray of Malik's book. It's not a very good review: more interested in  ad hominem insults - sneering at Malik as a 'pious disciple of the Enlightenment' and a 'remnant of the old Marxist left' - than in intelligently refuting the book's arguments.

Let's see now: anti-Enlightenment cultural pessimist versus a defender of Enlightenment values of progress and universalism - I wonder which book I'll prefer? I promise to approach both with an open mind, and report back.

Update

More on Gray from Norm here.

Live-blogging the tennis

As if to prove my point about the sexism of BBC tennis coverage, the tweedy-voiced male commentator has just (2.05 p.m.) described Anne Keothavong's blistering performance against Venus Williams (4 games all in the first set as I write)  as the 'hors d'oeuvre' before the 'main dish' of Andy Murray later on. Yuk. If you're not already doing so, you can watch the match here right now.

2.20 pm.

I don't know, I may be totally wrong, but perhaps there's a hint of something else besides sexism in play here. The same commentator has just described the spectators on Centre Court bedecked in Union Jacks as waiting to lend their support to Murray. But hang on, Anne Keothavong is the British women's No.1 - isn't it possible that their patriotic garb is as much for her as for her male counterpart? Or was the commentator betraying a feeling, however unconscious, that Keothavong, born in London of Laotian parents, isn't quite as  - well, you know - 'British' as Murray?

Sex on the brain

Scientists claim to have discovered that gay men and heterosexual women share similar kinds of brains, as do straight men and lesbians. Apparently studies have shown that gay men and straight women both tend to have a poor sense of direction, while they outperform straight men and lesbians in tasks that require verbal fluency.

I'm not sure where this leaves all those lesbians and straight men who happen to be brilliant writers, or all those heterosexual men who have difficulties with maps. Nor is it easy to see how this theory would account for bisexuality, or for the experience of those who go through a gay phase in their youth only to settle down with a partner of the opposite sex, not to mention those whose sexual preferences change in more subtle ways throughout their lives. 

I can see the usefulness of all this neuroscientific stuff for challenging those who insist that sexual preference is a mere lifestyle 'choice', but it's really far too reductive to account for the complexities and vagaries of human desire. Like all positivist science, it isolates historically and culturally shifting phenomena (the notion of 'the homosexual' as a distinct category was unknown 200 years ago), treats them as if they were fixed and unchanging, and attempts to identify 'hard-wired' causes that explain them. I often wonder if, in a hundred years time, this kind of neuroscience will seem as peculiar as the theories of those Victorian phrenologists who claimed to have identified the key features of the 'criminal' brain now appear to us.

Of saints and secularists

Reading Bob's post about forgetting to celebrate St. George's Day (I did too - only being reminded of it by the garish red and white flags in our local card shop window), and then this article by Jonathan Glancey about the re-opening of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, has sent me off into a reverie about patron saints...

Glancey's article caught my attention, in part because I've been researching my family history recently and have discovered that my Scottish-born great-great-great grandparents lived in the Charing Cross area in the 1830-40s, and that my 3 x great grandmother was buried at St. Martins.

But I was also interested because the church is dedicated to St. Martin of Tours who was, as Glancey reminds us, 'a fourth-century Roman cavalry officer turned Christian ascetic and preacher', and is 'the patron saint of beggars and soldiers.' The church's current work with the homeless (which runs alongside its more familiar functions as a cultural venue and tourist attraction) seems to be an attempt to follow in the footsteps of its saintly patron.

If I were ever to resolve my arguments with Christianity and experience a rebirth of faith, I'd probably take Martin of Tours as my patron saint. Not necessarily because of his charity towards beggars, and certainly not on account of his soldiering. Rather, it would be because of his lesser-known reputation as one of the first Christian advocates of the separation of church and state. I found this out recently via the wonders of Wikipedia, which tells the story of Martin's involvement in the affair of the Priscillianists, an obscure sect condemned by Rome as heretics:

Priscillian and his supporters had fled, and some bishops of Hispania, led by Bishop Ithacius, brought charges before Emperor Magnus Maximus. Although greatly opposed to the Priscillianists, Martin hurried to the Imperial court of Trier on an errand of mercy to remove them from the secular jurisdiction of the emperor. At first, Maximus acceded to his entreaty, but, when Martin had departed, yielded to the solicitations of Ithacius and ordered Priscillian and his followers to be beheaded, the first Christians executed for heresy. Deeply grieved, Martin refused to communicate with Ithacius, until pressured by the Emperor.

For insisting that the Church had no business using the power of the secular state to enforce matters of belief, Martin of Tours deserves to be the patron saint, not only of soldiers and beggars, but also of secularists - that's if secularists can have patron saints.

Mind you, Christians named Martin are not short of right-on patron saints to choose from. The other popular option is the Peruvian St. Martin de Porres, who has the additional coolness factor of being the first black saint in the Americas, as well as all the usual stuff about dedicating his life to the poor. Not only that, he's probably the only saint to have a piece of music written about him by a jazz legend: Mary Lou Williams' 'Black Christ of the Andes'.

Williams, who played with some of the jazz greats in the '20s and '30s, underwent a conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s and went on to write three masses, as well as the hymn to St. Martin. Friday quiz question: which other jazz legend converted to Catholicism more recently? Answer: Dave Brubeck, who became a Catholic in 1980, reportedly after a musical setting of the 'Our Father' came to him in a dream.

Holiday reading 3

Our brief Easter holiday in the sun provided an opportunity for some intensive poolside reading. Having read some rave reviews on the internet of Alan Furst's World War 2 spy novels , I decided to take along Night Soldiers, which I think was his first book. For left-leaning political history junkies, it's a must, taking in as it does the rise of fascism in Europe, the Russian NKVD, the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, not to mention the origins of the American OSS. Furst manages to combine a wealth of historical and political detail with a pacy spy story, which is no mean feat.

My only criticism would be that it suffers at times from the tendency of first-time novelists to chuck in everything they know, and from an inability to resist stories that take the narrative off at odd tangents, not all of which are satisfactorily brought to a conclusion. And there's one howler, which undermines the reader's trust in the author's historical research. One episode is set in Russia on Christmas Eve: trouble is, the date is given as December 24, when it's common knowledge that the Russians celebrate Christmas in the first week of January.

Errors of a more trivial nature marred my enjoyment of another book - Sarfraz Manzoor's Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock 'n' Roll. This time the mistakes were the fault of the publisher, not the author: the book was spattered with spelling and punctuation errors, inconsistency in use of capitals, and at least one sentence which even a cursory re-reading would have revealed as making no sense at all. I noted a similar sloppiness on the part of Jonathan Cape when reviewing Andrew Anthony's book; this time the culprit was Bloomsbury, another supposedly reputable publishing company.

As for the book itself, I quite enjoyed Manzoor's autobiographical account of growing up in Luton in the 70s and 80s. The author's initial claim to fame was based on his fanatical enthusiasm for the music of Bruce Springsteen, and the supposed disparity with his British Asian identity. The Boss's lyrics are woven through this book, used as chapter titles and as sounding-boards for the narrator's conflicted feelings about family and identity as he's growing up. It's a lively account, though the thematic rather than chronological structure sometimes confuses. The sheer poverty experienced by many Asian migrants to Britain forty or so years ago comes across strikingly.

However, I thought the book lacked a clear focus. A closer focus on the experience of following Bruce and the inevitable tensions with a conservative Asian upbringing might have made it more coherent. The attempt to broaden the focus to deal with British Asian, and more specifically 'Muslim' identity, in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, is less successful. I suspect the publishers saw an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of 'Muslim memoirs' and encouraged Manzoor to go well beyond his usual musical and cultural concerns. Incidentally, the dustjacket's focus on religion jars a little: the book isn't about Manzoor's 'constant battle to reconcile being both British and Muslim': religion is hardly mentioned and the author makes no reference to being a practising Muslim. Rather, it's really about a tension between cultural identities: British and Pakistani, European and Asian. This creeping substitution of 'Muslim' for Asian or Pakistani plays into the hands of those fundamentalists who want Islam to be treated as an ethnicity or identity rather than simply a religion, and as something essential and ineradicable rather than a matter of individual choice.

And I finally got round to reading Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times. I warmed immediately to its first-person narrative, which had the ease and directness of some of my favourite American authors, and which most British novelists somehow struggle to achieve. However, my enthusiasm cooled as the book progressed. Although I found the material fascinating, and particular passages - especially the final, melancholic return to Israel after long absence - very powerful, overall I thought the book lacked sufficient thematic focus and organisation. It was interesting to read Linda Grant in the Guardian last Thursday, writing about the way that some readers have misinterpreted the book as autobiography and have been disappointed to discover that it's 'made up.' The trouble is, it reads like autobiography. It's replete with the kind of detailed observation that seems drawn from first-hand experience, but which doesn't have much thematic consequence. The 'unity' of the book is the unity of a life, not of theme, which is a bold strategy in fiction, but also disconcerting for the reader.

The last of my poolside books was George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War, on which the recent Aaron Sorkin/Mike Nichols film was based. I'm still reading it, so a detailed review will have to wait.

What does it mean to say 'I believe'?

Two brief insights into the nature of belief, and the unreliability of surveys that ask about people's faith. First, Stephen Pinker:

When people are asked a question, they don't just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to."

(via Snarksmith)

Second, J.K.Rowling:

The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot. On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot.

Mottos, monarchy and muddling along

Having chastised Tristram Hunt here for his sneering at the 'new atheist orthodoxy' and his quivering excitement at the 'radical energy' of religious faith, I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with most of what he has to say about the search for a 'national motto'. It certainly seems like a cart-before-the-horse way of bolstering British identity. As I said here, I agree with Jonathan Freedland that national identities tend to crystallise around moments of political and constitutional change and can't be imposed from above.

At the same time, I don't accept Hunt's claim that the monarchy and 'muddling along' are somehow essential to any notion of British identity. Nor do I like his sneering at the US constitutional model, or his inevitable poke at current foreign policy: 'Britain has been gripped periodically by an evangelising impulse to stuff religion, empire, free trade, and now democracy and human rights down the throats of foreigners.' We can all agree that imperialism was a bad thing, Tristram, but do you really think democracy and human rights should be confined to our own shores?

Neighbourhoods don't have a religion

And along similar lines...

Just as children shouldn't be defined by religious labels, nor should neighbourhoods.

In Small Heath, Birmingham, a group calling itself 'Clean Medina' is organising what it calls 'a jihad on litter'. According to their website:

Clean Medina says that Muslim neighbourhoods in the city are far too messy and they want to change that. So they’ve launched a “struggle’ against rubbish and waste, and whilst they’re at it they want to reclaim Jihad as a positive force.

There's a podcast in which campaigners 'explain why they’re so fed up with the dirty streets that give Muslim neighbourhoods a bad reputation'.

Sunny believes this is 'one jihad we can all support'. And who could possibly object to a drive to clean up dirty streets, or a move to reclaim religious language from the extremists?

What makes me really uncomfortable, though, is the repeated reference to 'Muslim' neighbourhoods - the identification of a geographical area with a particular religion. It's something we've grown used to - and lamented - in Northern Ireland, with its 'Protestant estates' and 'Catholic enclaves', but thankfully avoided elsewhere in the UK (well, apart for a few estates in Glasgow and Liverpool).

It's qualitatively different from describing a neighbourhood as 'Asian' or 'white' (problematic though that may be in other ways). All you're doing there is making a statement of fact: the majority in this area belong to a particular ethnic group. With religion, you're going further and identifying a place with a set of ideas - giving it a religious character. Once you do that, the tendency is to accept that those ideas should be allowed to influence the life of the neighbourhood and govern how it's run. People in the area who don't espouse those ideas -including those from a 'Muslim' background who wish to define themselves differently - can soon begin to feel marginalised and threatened.

To paraphrase Richard Dawkins: There is no such thing as a 'Muslim' neighbourhood, or a 'Christian' neighbourhood (or there shouldn't be). There are only neighbourhoods, lived in by people each with their own private beliefs, none of which should be allowed to dominate the public ('secular' in the true sense of the word) space that they all share.

(via Pickled Politics)

Extremist groups linked to 'honour' killings

There are links between some cases of 'honour' killing in Britain and extreme Islamist groups, according to a BBC investigation. No great surprise there. What's worrying is that such crimes can't be dismissed as the last vestiges of a dying 'traditional' culture. Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service's national lead on honour crime told the BBC that violence of this kind was not confined to father and grandfathers but was also carried out by younger relations:

'You have a second generation youth who have an exaggerated concept of what home is like,' he said. 'They get their identity and their ethnicity from these traditions. We know they are bizarre and outdated but they get their identity from those traditions and they feel very strongly that how you treat your women is a demonstration of your commitment to radicalism and extremist thought.'

I'm waiting for the first person to blame it all on British foreign policy.

Republicanism: an idea whose time has come?

Following on from my last post - and Jonathan Freedland's suggestion that Britain needs a republican revolution before we can be sort out what we mean by 'Britishness' - I see that Stuart White is suggesting (in the latest Renewal) that republicanism may be the Left's 'big idea'. Though not starry-eyed about the history of actually existing republics, White argues that:

an adequate social democratic philosophy of the state should incorporate some basic republican ideas. These include the value of procedural goods in political life; the need for a wide participation of citizens in public decision-making; the importance of attending to inequality of wealth (as well as income); and a way of thinking about national identity based on republican values rather than ethnicity, religion or imperial history...the idea of grounding social democracy in a republican conception of citizenship and the state is one we urgently need to rehabilitate.

Amen to that.

Anyone for a British Republic Day?

Government ministers trying to encourage a sense of 'Britishness' make me deeply uncomfortable (with one or two exceptions), for many of the same reasons as government ministers meddling in religion. So yesterday's proposals from Liam Byrne and Ruth Kelly for a tougher citizenship test and a 'national British day' were calculated to make me squirm.

As with the religion issue, I'm sympathetic to the underlying intentions: in this case, to reduce alienation among some migrant groups and encourage them to identify with shared national values. But there are a number of problems. Shuggy suggests a couple: that celebrating Britishness is actually rather unBritish - and that the suggestions for a national day of celebration have a predominantly English rather than UK-wide flavour. Jonathan Freedland identifies another: that the proposed citizenship test expects more of incoming migrants than we do of native-born Britons.

I'd add to this my own sense that national identity is not something that can be imposed from above, and certainly not by ministerial fiat. As Freedland says, countries that successfully celebrate their national identities, such as the US and France, tend to focus their festivities on momentous political events. I like his suggestion here:

July 4 and Bastille day are celebrated because they mark great political upheavals. We can't just skip that awkward bit and jump straight to the barbecue and bunting. No, first we have to have a political change of our own. That doesn't mean bringing out the guillotine. It could be the bloodless drafting, at long last, of our own written constitution. If such a document established a British republic, so much the better. We could even pass it into law on June 15, the same day Magna Carta was enshrined in 1215. Then make June 15 British Day - and make sure we're all invited.

A British Republic day: I'd support that.

One further point: Kelly and Byrne want to make 'volunteering' part of the package both for intending citizens, and for the populace more generally. They even suggest that student loan repayments could be reduced in return for volunteer work. This is in line with other recent trends in New Labour policy, particularly youth policy, which has shown a similar desire to micro-manage citizens' lives and encourage young people especially to be what Nikolas Rose calls 'entrepreneurs of themselves'. Questions: how can 'volunteering' be compulsory, and doesn't 'incentivising' pro-social behaviour in this way deprive it of its very essence...?

A brave attempt to define British identity

You have to admire his pluck. After his controversial intervention in the veil debate last year, Leader of the Commons Jack Straw has moved on to the thorny issue of British identity, and has met with a lot of predictable criticism. Today's Guardian leader, for example, linked his speech to a new report on poverty among minority communities, seeming to suggest that it was illegitimate to even raise the identity issue until economic inequalities were sorted out - as if a sense of Britishness would follow in a deterministic way from greater prosperity.

Straw is to be applauded for setting out the context for the identity debate in unequivocal terms:

Today the most fundamental world divide is between liberal democracy and certain narrow misinterpretations of religious belief. The most frightening expression of that is a brand of terrorism that uses religion to justify its evil. Democracy is incompatible with any such identity.

Straw argues that a shared British identity must be rooted in a belief in democracy, but he suggests that espousing such an identity need not mean groups and communities giving up 'distinctive cultural attributes', such as religion.

I'm always wary when politicans try to define 'Britishness' (Gordon Brown's recent intervention was particularly dire), but I think Straw makes a bold attempt. At least his version is free from the usual royalist sentimentality, faces up to the problematic legacy of imperialism, and is grounded in the story of the progressive struggle for liberty:

That means freedom through the narrative of the Magna Carta, the civil war, the Bill of Rights, through Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, the fight for votes, for the emancipation of Catholics and nonconformists, of women and of the black community, the second world war, the fight for rights for minority groups, the fight now against unbridled terror.

Straw argues that Britain can learn a lot from countries that 'have a more developed sense of citizenship, and what goes with it: notably from the United States, Canada, Australia, and those in western Europe who have had to develop the idea of citizenship to survive as nations, or indeed, simply to be nations.' The difficulty for Britain is that many of these countries, notably the US, have a written constitution and/or bill of rights as a focus for common values. Without this kind of explicit statement of what we're about as a nation, Straw's narrative is open to dispute from others who may see Britain's 'story' in very different terms. I note that David Cameron's Conservatives have recently supported the introduction of a British Bill of Rights. Trouble is - would you trust them to write it?