society – Page 10 – All Things Considered

14 Dec

Wimmins’ Freak Show

Dear Ms Garvey,

I have long been a devotee of Woman’s Hour, but something strange and unwelcome has happened to it lately. The programme has plunged into self-parody and turned into something like a satire on wimmin. Yesterday, for example, I caught the last half hour. It began promisingly with an interesting feature about a woman brewery worker who secured promotion for herself by her competence and hard work.

But after this it was all macabre and surreal. We heard form a woman who, thirty years ago, had joined the anti-nuclear protestors at Greenham Common and we learnt how she subsequently left her husband and turned into a lesbian. Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose. What was so disappointing about this item though was the lack of any intelligent examination of the unilateral disarmament supported by the Greenham women. No stray word of criticism or counter-argument was allowed to intrude. The women were spoken of in revered tones, as if they had been saints or goddesses. An intelligent thing to do would have been (at least) to ask the question, “But what if nuclear deterrence prevents world war? After all, the only country ever to have suffered nuclear attack was Japan – which did not possess a bomb of its own.” Instead, we had to endure what sounded like a grisly, sentimental sapphic love-in.

Next there was a trailer for BBC Sports Personality of the Year in which your listeners were urged to vote for a woman. But what if there are women who actually think that the best candidate is Lewis Hamilton, or that golfer whose name I forget? Isn’t it really rather sexist (and insulting) to ask your listeners to vote for a woman as it were a priori and without consideration of merit?

Then came a woman novelist who drank coffee and smoked a lot. She was mildly chided for her love of “the ciggies.” But what made me laugh was her admission that she smoked because she deplored political-correctness – when the whole of the rest of the programme was political-correctness incarnate!

The show ended with an item which had me transfixed in a sort of hypnotised stupefaction: teenage sex – though I hear the approved term is “gender” – change and a Woman’s Hour play about the subject. The extract we heard was so corny and gooey it might have been Kern Loach meets amateur dramatics.

All documentary and magazine shows benefit from the occasional oddity, but when the whole lot is so weird and untypical of what most of us take for ordinary life, then it merely becomes a freak show. And that’s a pity.

All good wishes

Yours sincerely

Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen

12 Dec

Free to do what you’re told

I am ceaselessly impressed by the ability of the human mind to shoot itself in the foot, so to speak. Consider this…

The concepts of freedom and liberty have never been so bandied about. Those words are our contemporary shibboleths. Taken together with the word democracy, they form a modern, and of course secular, trinity, so we should always give them their initial capitals: Democracy, Liberty and Freedom. Whosoever will be politically-correct, before all things it is necessary that he hold this Secular Faith.

Even when it is easy to demonstrate that this Secular Faith amounts to a pile of gibberish and that it is immediately undermined by its own internal contradictions.

The chief contradiction is in this: never so much jabber about Freedom, yet the three most powerful and influential dogmas over the last century and more are all deterministic. I refer to Marxism, Darwinism and Freudianism.

Marx turned Hegel on his head, accepting the Hegelian dialectic but re-interpreting this as dialectical materialism. Under this, all our choices are illusory, for everything that happens – and this means absolutely everything that happens in our personal lives, our politics and our history – is determined by economic forces. How odd then that Marx should promote his version of determinism and then urge us all to choose communism. Nice trick if we could do it, Karl!

Freud’s version of the deterministic contradiction famously took the form of a psychological dialectic in which the human mind consists of three sections: the Ego, the Superego and the Id. The Ego is our waking consciousness – the place where we would exercise our freedoms if these freedoms were real. But Freud goes on to say that the Ego is governed and directed by the other two sections, the Superego and the Id which are unconscious and over which the Ego has no control. So Ziggy, what’s free about free-association in the snake oil of psychoanalysis?

Darwin told us that our lives are determined by natural selection. Darwinism has evolved since Charlie’s days and now tells us – through such luminaries as Richard Dawkins – that we are the slaves of our genes. The contradiction again. So when Richard tells his wife how much he loves her, what should she think? My advice: “Don’t trust him, Lalla, it’s only his genes talking!”

This is all barmy enough already, but there is confusion the worse confounded. For many Darwinists claim also to be communists, and there are Freudians who are Darwinians too. (Choose – I use the word ironically, of course – any combination of these three deterministic ideologies that appeals to you).

What then follows is that you have set yourself not merely at the mercy of an internal contradiction in any one of the three, but the compounded contradiction involved in believing two or three ideologies which are also the contradictories of one another.

Specifically, if unconscious forces are the basis of all that happens, then both economic forces and genetic forces are relegated to a place of only secondary consideration. Work your way through the whole unholy trinity. Perm any two from three…

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll

01 Dec

“Islam is Peace”

Bless me father, for I have sinned. I’ve been reading The Guardian again…

“Muhammad has become the most popular name for baby boys in the UK. The list of the top 100 baby names of 2014 showed Muhammad has risen 27 places from last year to claim the number one spot for boys. There is a surge in Arabic names generally, with Nur a new entry in the girls’ top 100, jumping straight to number 29, and Maryam rising 59 places to number 35. Omar, Ali, and Ibrahim are new to the boys’ top 100.”

The 2001 UK census showed a population of 1.6 million Muslims. In April 2008, the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced that the government estimated the Muslim population at 2 million or 3.3% of the UK population. This represented an increase of 400,000 in seven years. The 1951 census showed the number of Muslims at less than 22,000. Therefore, between 1951 and 2001 there had been an annualized increase of 31,500 Muslims in the UK; but in the seven year period between 2001 and 2008 there was an actual annualized increase of 57,000.

There are 44 million Muslims in Europe, excluding Turkey; 1.7 million in Paris; 1 million in London.

In the interests of “balance,” I turned from The Guardain to the Daily Telegraph: “Census figures reveal a startling shift in Britain’s demographic trend with almost a tenth of babies and toddlers born in England and Wales being Muslim. The percentage of Muslims among the under-fives is almost twice as high as in the general population. Less than one in 200 over 85s are Muslims – an indication of the extent to which birth rate is changing the UK’s religious demographic.”

As I noted yesterday, the former Bishop of Oxford wants Islamic prayers to be included in the Coronation service so that Muslims will feel “embraced.”

If the Queen lives for another twenty years, will the Muslim Council of Great Britain – founded 1997, motto “Islam is Peace” – let us have any Christian prayers in the Coronation of the Queen’s successor?

30 Nov

Harries the Apostate

Lord Harries, aka Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, suggests that the Koran should be read at the next Coronation. He says this will make Muslims feel “embraced.” Well, you hug who you like, Richard, and I’ll hug who I like.

This suggestion is a form of apostasy, a sin not unusual among the modern bishops – for the Coronation is a Christian rite and the holy oil with which the monarch is anointed is sacramental. Islam is an alien ideology. If Muslims want to feel embraced, then they had better embrace the traditions and customs of our Christian nation, for these and nothing else are our British values. We live under a political settlement which dates back to Elizabethan times when it was summarised by Richard Hooker: “Every man of England, a member of the Church of England.” This was not an onerous imposition, for it required only that people should attend church three times in the year and keep the peace. The Elizabethan Settlement instituted the monarch as head of both state and church. This arrangement has given us a decent set of political freedoms these last 400 years and when refinements were added to accommodate Dissenters (1828) and Roman Catholics (1829), it provided for a broad and tolerant society. Everyone in England has freedom under the Crown. This goes for Muslims, Jews, Hindus and atheists as well as for RCs, Methodists, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists and Scientologists.

If we are to read the Koran, then should we also read from Mary Baker Eddy’s barmy book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures or perhaps those passages about being “cleared” from our “engrams” by the charlatan L. Ron Hubbard who declared, “if you want to be seriously rich, start your own religion.” Which is exactly what he did.

When it comes to iconoclasm and the practice of godless materialism, Harries has got form. He is a strong supporter of embryo research, although this practice necessarily results in the death of the unborn. Harries justifies this on the grounds that “many embryos die anyway” – which is like saying that because some people are killed in traffic accidents, it’s OK for me to shove you under a bus. Harries, though formerly one of the most senior bishops in the land, is hardly a Christian at all. After murdering the unborn, he then announces that we should not use Our Lord’s words, “This is my Body….this is my Blood” in the Holy Communion. Why not? Why should we renounce the words of the Saviour? “Because visitors will think we’re cannibals. We should use phrases such as ‘angel bread’ instead.”

Chuck him out!

25 Nov

Bad karma

We can always rely on the Labour party to come up with plenty of creative thinking. Here’s today’s dollop…

Britain’s private schools will lose £700m in tax breaks unless they agree to break down the “corrosive divide of privilege” and do more to help children from state schools, according to Tristram Hunt, shadow education secretary.

His logic is impeccable. It is as if I should argue that the local first class butcher should be fined unless he agrees to assist the filthy tripe shop on the next street.

On the department of education’s own admission, 43% of children leave state education, after eleven years of compulsory and expensive schooling, unable to read, write and count efficiently.

I taught for years in a bog standard comprehensive as a head of department and I know that state schooling resembles that filthy tripe shop. Half the teachers were themselves in need of remedial education. One maths master required every Monday morning the assistance of the PE man to add up his pupils’ dinner money. An RE teacher in my department thought that one of the gospels was written in the Middle Ages – by St Paul. An English teacher spoke of something as “mitigating against.”

Parents send their children to fee paying schools in order to escape a state system, so awful it amounts to child abuse. Moreover, most of these parents are not Russian oligarchs or wealthy coves such as Dave Cameron, and they scrimp and save, denying themselves and their families many of the good things in life, so desperate are they to avoid having to send their children to the state school dumps. And this payment off fees is over and above the extortionate amount they have already paid in taxes to support the useless comprehensives.

There be two sacred cows: the NHS and state education. Both receive more and more of taxpayers’ money as the years go by. And the result is that they relentlessly get worse. This is because state education and socialised medicine have grown so monstrously large and so overwhelming bureaucratised that they no longer exists for those they were set up to serve but for the hordes of highly unionised and politicised “professionals” who manage them.

I mentioned sacred cows and the phrase makes me think of bad karma. And that’s what state education is: “on a board untrue with a twisted cue and elliptical billiard balls.”

24 Nov

He’s behind you!

If you can’t wait for Christmas for the pantomime, I can tell you where you can see a performance today – but you’ll have to travel to Vienna for it. That’s where six of the world’s great powers – including our most wonderful allies Russia and China – are talking to the Iranian Islamic dictatorship about their project to build the atomic bomb. Sorry, I mean of course their peaceful use of atomic energy. I leave aside for the moment the question of why a nation which sits on more oil than water should require nuclear power to keep the lights on.

Today is the deadline when the current round of talks must conclude. The purpose of these talks, and the threat of sanctions against Iran, is not to prevent that country’s acquisition of the bomb, but only to fudge, delay and generally play for time and hope, in the words of the International Atomic Energy Commission, “…enough progress may be made to reassure Iran’s neighbours.”

Which, being interpreted, means to try to discourage Israel from a military attack on Iran’s bomb factories.

The IAEA is referred to as a “watchdog.” It can certainly bark, but it has no teeth. The IAEA was powerless to prevent either Pakistan’s or North Korea’s obtaining the bomb. To what shall I liken this reliance on the IAEA? It is as if you should wake in the middle of the night and discover the house is one fire and, instead of phoning the fire brigade, ring The Guardian and ask them urgently to send round half a dozen of their finest journalists. The IAEA resembles the UN peacekeeping force, which is a wonderful institution – if you discount the fact that it has never anywhere or at any time kept the peace.

So what will happen when the deadline is reached? My guess is that it will be extended. More fudge, delay and playing for time. More ganging up of the great powers to cajole, falsely reassure and threaten Israel on the dire consequences which would follow any unilateral military operation on its part.

Will Israel accept an extension of the deadline? It’s hard to tell. But it should be emphasised that the matter for the Israelis is not theoretical, as it is for the great powers and their poodle the IAEA. For Israel the issue is existential, because the Iranians have threatened many times to wipe Israel off the map.

In June 1981, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactors at Osirak. At the time Israel issued a statement which set forth the so called Begin doctrine which stated that this attack should not be regarded as a one-off but as “a precedent binding on all future governments of Israel.”

So at midnight tonight when the deadline is arrived at, what should Benjamin Netanyahu do? Should be listen to the soft-soapers, the great powers, be reassured by the Job’s comforters in the IAEA and sheath his sword?

Or send in the IAF?

What would you do if you were ultimately responsible for your country’s security, its continuation or its destruction?

17 Nov

Making it worse

Appalling car crash in Yorkshire. Five killed, including four sixth formers from the same school.

Then the head teacher comes on The Today Programme to be interviews by John Humphrys and all the now obligatory rigmarole starts: “Counselling…support…flowers…candles lit…books of condolence…no words to express our feelings etc”

Yes, there are words and I’ll come to what they are in a minute.

Post-Christian society cannot cope with the fact of death and so its only recourse is to sentimentalise it. And that does no one any good, because it is really an avoiding of the issue.

I have some experience in the deaths of schoolchildren. When I was eight, I walked into the school yard one morning and there was the dead body of one of my mates who had been climbing on the back of the milk lorry for the fun of the ride. He’d fallen under the wheels and was crushed. A teacher stood by the body over which he had thrown a blanket. He ushered us all through briskly. We were all disturbed and scared. In a very silent assembly the headmaster told us what had happened, said some prayers and cautioned us all not to climb on to the back of the milk lorry in future. The death of our friend had been a shocking lesson and none of us went near the milk lorry again.

Thirty years on from that event, I was myself a teacher, head of RE and chaplain in a downtown state secondary school in Bolton, Lancashire. There were two incidents of untimely deaths in the four years I was there. A brother and sister killed crossing the road on their way home from school. Then two boys drowned in a mill pond.

Naturally, on both occasions the whole school was upset. But no words? Yes there are:

“There has been a terrible accident. Two pupils have been killed. They were our friends and we shall miss them. We send our sympathy to their parents and brothers and sisters. And we pray for the repose of their souls, these our friends who are now in the nearer presence of God. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them.”

The headmaster followed me on to the rostrum and repeated his warning about the dangers of running into the road without looking and of playing in the mill ponds.

The whole school walked out in silence and we got on with our lessons.

12 Nov

Lily Allen and the bishop’s balls

A bishop has praised the pop star Lily Allen for her feminist songs and claimed that misogyny is “still very evident” in the Church of England. The Rt Rev’d Martyn Snow, our youngest bishop, said Allen’s lyrics on the single Hard Out Here “poignantly” capture society’s sexist double standards. He commends the song to his thirteen-year-old daughter.

The edifying ditty goes like this:

“If I told you ‘bout my sex life you’d call me a slut / When boys be talkin’ ‘bout their bitches no-one’s making a fuss… Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits / It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard out here for a bitch.”

Just the thing for the bishop’s pubescent offspring to sing along to.

Bishop Snow refers to Allen’s lyrics in what he calls an “essay” reflecting on his daughter, Roxanne’s thirteenth birthday. This “essay” is worth quoting at length, not least for its literary merits:

“The passing of this particular landmark has caused me to reflect a little on the world my daughter is entering and in particular the effects of the so-called feminist revolution. In 2010, Lily Allen won an award for her song The Fear which brilliantly captured the manipulation, insecurity and fear which is at the heart of consumerism. Four years and two babies later, Allen has returned with a song which angrily and poignantly captures how far the feminist revolution has not brought us. Allen highlights the double standards in private sexuality and public work. It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests while women are blamed for being loose and free.”

He concludes: “None of this is new, of course. Indeed, it is depressingly familiar. But it is worth stopping to think about the way the feminist revolution, while bringing huge gains in some areas, has had almost no impact in others. Far more women may go out to work now than they did fifty years ago, yet a woman is paid £82 for the work a man will be paid £100 for. By now, you may be asking how a bishop in the Church of England would dare to write about feminism. After all, it has taken us twenty years to accept that women can not only be vicars but can also hold senior leadership positions in the church. We are hardly the model of equality. And my female colleagues are very clear that even as the first woman is appointed as a bishop – expected in the next few months – misogyny is still very evident in the pews of our churches. So the church is no better than the rest of society but at least we are moving in the right direction.”

Can I play at teachers and pupils for a minute and mark the lad’s “essay”?

First, it has not taken the church twenty years to get around to ordaining women. It took 2000 years and many wonder why it was ever attempted.

Secondly, the phrase “We are moving in the right direction” is a meretricious slogan where reasoned argument would be more meritorious: who says we’re moving in the right direction?

Thirdly, “It’s fine for men to boast about their sexual conquests, while women are blamed for being loose and free.” Hasn’t the lad noticed that scores of women journalists fill the papers with reminiscences of their sexual exploits, and get well paid for it? There’s a word somewhere for that profession.

Fourthly, has he considered the spectacular success of Lily Allen by which she becomes the living refutation of the feminist manifesto?

But the most amusing aspect of the lad’s “essay” is the remark about the church’s alleged misogyny. Hasn’t the lad also noticed that actually the church has become terrifically feminised? Or did I only imagine that I have had to sit through all those services – ululations, more like – conducted by women and featuring night lights, mawkish prancing about the chancel and God addressed as “She”?

What more can I say? Beta minus, Snowy lad.

And end by adapting a line from the great Lily Allen’s song: Forget this balls and grow… Grow what?

How about Up?

08 Nov

Wimmins’ Hour

I try to listen to Woman’s Hour whenever I can for, beyond the political chit-chat of everyday, this programme keeps me in touch with the things that really matter, things that are dear to a woman’s heart. The other week, for instance, the programme fearlessly exposed the failure of so many of our local councils to provide adequate lavatory facilities for the transgendered. There’s a lot about rape and the rumours of rape. Intense debate about the 5:2 diet, or the stone-age diet or whatever Manichean foodie obsession happens to be in vogue. Wall-to-wall celebs, it goes without saying. Inanities and banalities by the bucket load: the soap operas of course, by the side of which real life is a mere shadow. Historical novelists whose own linguistic register is out of synch with the period they write about: Hilary Mantel, that disgorger and forger of the 16th century, is ever popular.

But the programme’s fondest obsession is pop music. Today, for example, Jane Garvey confessed she had been “weak at the knees” during her interviewing an aging punkster called Blondie and her side-kick, Chris. They play you blasts of the “music” unfortunately, but that’s not the worst part. The most sickening part is the way the Woman’s Hour wimmin go all gooey over this trash. Rock music has its place. It is for teenagers, to allow them to imagine they’re being cool and anti-establishment during that most uncomfortable part of growing up. Most do grow up, but many alas live on to stretch the folly of their youth to be the shame of age – as G.K. Chesterton put it. For goodness sake, gooey Garvey is fifty years old! Shouldn’t she have got past going weak at the knees at the sights and sounds of the past it perpetrators of audible filth and learnt to go weak at the knees at such as the Beethoven late string quartets?

I will keep listening though. What cheaper or easier way is there of keeping up with the sub-theatrical absurdities of the meedja world. Oh hell, if we really do get the media we deserve, then God help us!

I can’t help thinking that things would be better if the wimmin – all with impeccable leftie CVs – reverted to being women, or even ladies, and told us the secrets of jam-making and demonstrated the creation of net curtains by the forgotten art of croquet.

Those were the days, alongside Mrs Dale’s Diary, Top of the Form, Journey into Space and, new every morning, Housewives’ Choice. It was a far, far better thing they did than now they ever do.

05 Nov

Credo quia absurdum

Every newspaper and magazine should follow the example of the Spectator and appoint its own in-house surreal comedian.

Although Matthew Parris begins a recent article by misquoting Lewis Carroll – the White Queen said she could believe six impossible things before breakfast – he proceeds to outdo Carroll in the production of things bizarre and fantastic. His article is titled Why I intend to become an addict. That Spectator piece should be made compulsory reading in all our state secondary schools. You’ll see why in a minute. But enough preamble, let the great man speak for himself…

“Heroin, by all accounts, is the big one and for decades I’ve wanted to experience addiction to that drug…

“I did have one wholly abortive attempt at getting hooked on nicotine patches. My mistake was to attempt a shortcut and apply patches that were classified as the equivalent of 30 cigarettes a day. I put one of these patches onto (sic) my lower back, forgot all about it, went out to dinner – and ended up literally crawling to my host’s sofa, unable to stand, lying there with my heart thumping, ripping off the patch, passing out, and not waking until dawn…

“A friend tells me he knows a non-smoker who…tried e-cigarettes and has become seriously addicted to them. Sounds promising…”

“And how often would I need to vape in order to let myself effectively but gently into a possible addiction?

“People who are not addicts should try it and report. Sooner or later, and one way or another, I intend to.”

Parris’ virtuosic feel for narcissistic farce is beyond all comment or criticism. Give him the Spike Milligan Award for Surpassing Daftness.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society