society – Page 12 – All Things Considered

16 Oct

Freedom is dangerous, so let’s ban it

As a non-smoker who can’t stand the stink of cigarettes, I yet think the proposal to ban smoking in our parks is ridiculous. Just about the only place people are now permitted to smoke is within the confines of their own homes – which causes infinitely more pollution than lighting up on Hampstead Heath where a small amount of smoke won’t hurt anyone in all that fresh air. But it’s worse than ridiculous: it’s a shocking deprivation of individual freedom. Of course, individual liberty does not mean freedom to do just anything. For example, you shouldn’t be allowed to set off fireworks in the cinema or play guitars in church, but there must be a good dollop of live and let live.

The wholesale banning of stuff and actions is sinister and reflects a creeping totalitarianism. For the fact is that we are governed – policed is a better word for it – by a metro-political, politically-correct elite who are so self-righteously up themselves that their first response to anything they don’t approve of is to slap a prohibition order on it. This elite is noticeably selective in the stuff it seeks to disallow.A man may forsake the natural use of a woman and marry another bloke. A man may change his sex – so long as he remembers to refer to what God has made him by the absurd PC word “gender,” as if we were all proper (or improper) nouns. Radio and TV stations galore can fill the air waves with the pollution of mindless pop music. You can shop on the Sabbath 24/7. But if you take your child out of the lousy state school system for a couple of weeks – perhaps to show her the ruins of Carthage – you will be fined. And so on.

We have forgotten what traditional social ethics is all about. It always used to be based on the idea of the dignity of the individual and his right to do as he likes within reason. And the working out of social morality involves the discussion about what constitutes rational behaviour. Moreover, we should be permitted to do things that are bad for us – such as watching Strictly Come Dancing and Downton Abbey, reading Hilary Mantel, listening to the music of Philip Glass*** and even attending to party political broadcasts; and things that are dangerous – such as rock-climbing, driving our cars along country roads at night and voting for Ed Miliband.

The basis of social morality should not be what is approved by a politically-correct commissariat, directed by clones of Harriet Harman, Polly Toynbee, Diane Abbott, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Dame Jenni Murray but by the rational operation of free choice.

Instead, our society is a sort of totalitarianism-lite. And unfortunately totalitarianism-lite all too easily turns into totalitarianism-heavy.

PS *** Knock knock – who’s there? – Philip Glass- Knock knock – who’s there? – Philip Glass – Knock knock – who’s there? – Philip Glass- Knock knock – who’s there? – Philip Glass….

15 Oct

Private parts and the private language

I was in Skinners’ Hall in the City of London to say Grace for the Worshipful Company of Fuellers and sitting next to the Clerk to the Worshipful Company of Distillers, He asked me, “Have you ever had any doubts about the existence of God?”

Well, yes. There was a time when I was in the first flush of teenage omniscience, round about 1958, when for a few weeks after the end of the cricket season I actually declared myself an atheist. These religious hot flushes can’t last. And, prompted by my first look at Rene Descartes, I soon returned to my senses. It was the “I think, therefore I am” bit. I read it and I thought, “You arrogant bugger!”

And it struck me: how could he think his own existence more certain than the existence of God?

A few years later I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations – paragraphs 245-315 in which he demonstrates the impossibility of a private language. How could I ever know that I was using my private language correctly? Memory is only unreliable, and relying on it as a check would be, said Wittgenstein, “…like buying two copies of the morning paper to see if what said was true.” The Cogito is a tautology which merely repeats in the predicate what it articulates in its subject. The fact that I speak a language shows that there must be other speakers from whom I learnt it. In truth, I use the word “I” to distinguish myself from these others.

Years later I read C.H. Sisson’s wonderful remark: “The only word that gives any difficulty in the Creed is ‘I’.”

Descartes (1596-1650) effected a sort of Copernican revolution in which the theocentric metaphysics of the Middle Ages was replaced by the anthropocentric epistemology of the Renaissance.

It was all downhill from then on. Once man puts himself at the privileged centre, he begins to think more highly of himself than he ought to think. Catastrophically, he thinks he can make up morality on the hoof. Deontological ethics – God’s commandments – go out of the window and are replaced by a relativistic utilitarianism in which nothing is good in itself but only in consideration of its consequences.

Jam tomorrow. The notion of the good forever postponed, like a whole series of penultimate climaxes in a Rossini overture.

In the 21st century we have reached the extremes of Cartesian self-centredness in which everyone, however unintelligent and unschooled “has a right to their (sic) own opinion. And, of course, every opinion is to be regarded as as valid as every other opinion. Our technology reflects this mood. Solipsistic babble on the i-phone. Selfies. The dissemination of pictures of one’s private parts in case, pace Descartes, there is anyone out there who might have even the vaguest interest in such pictures.

In short, atheism institutes narcissism. The creation story is reversed and man creates god in his own image – which image is himself.

09 Oct

Without whom NOTHING is strong

People look around at the political scene – the state we’re in – and ask what can be done.

There is an order of things: politics – what Sisson called “a decent set of political liberties” – depends on good law but also on institutions which are themselves allowed to flourish freely. And there must be some ethical code which is the basis of the res publica. This in turn depends on a sound theological understanding of the origin and source of all goodness. And that source is God.

People imagine that we can give up on God but all the benign infrastructure which derives ultimately from God will stay in place. It won’t – as we are seeing for ourselves. Eliot put it well in 1934:

“…such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the faith to which they owe their significance”

In short, Judeo-Christianity is not an optional add on but the origin and also the engine of our civilization. Ethics and politics have to be derived from dogma. And dogma has to be held in faith. As Collingwood put it, we require fundamentally “absolute presuppositions.” These absolute presuppositions are the doctrines of the Creed

Well, we have given up on the Creed and turned to strange gods.

The most shocking aspect of our defection is the church’s Laodicean temperament wherein “…the best lack all conviction etc” In such a condition it is obvious that “The centre cannot hold.”

A wonderful example of the wrongheadedness which prevails was given to us by Rowan Williams in his final address before he retired: “The church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.” Wrong from the start. What he ought to have said is, “Be ye not conformed to this world.”

So what to do? I can only quote Eliot again, from The Waste Land. “What shall we do tonight? What shall we ever do?”

Prophesy against the forces of chaos and the dark, outside and within. This means criticism, which, as we know, is the word for judgement. Criticism of the sort practised by such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, John Baptist AND Coleridge, Eliot and Collingwood. And this criticism – which itself must be derived from our theological understanding – must not amount to mere sniping, as it were sporadically. Our prophesying and our criticism must be a constant struggle to maintain a proper judgement and to express this judgement in English: the language that is at one with our soil

And say our prayers and receive the Sacrament. As Sisson said, “Without the Sacraments, there would be nothing.”

08 Oct

The British Caliphate

Now here’s a strange thing: the media are usually obsessed with politics, but they’ve been very quiet ahead of the Clacton by-election to be held tomorrow. Why this odd neglect amounting almost to an aversion? It could be of course that the papers and the BBC are looking to their priorities and they would rather fill more pages and programme hours with their other favourite subjects: celebs and pop music. But really that’s not the reason they have all gone quiet about Clacton. The elephant in the room is Nigel Farage and they’re all pretending he isn’t there

The media hates UKIP

They hate UKIP because that is the one party they cannot manage. There is a sort of pretend rivalry involving Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems and this is played out daily in parliament and in the media rather like a game show. Of course The Guardian supports Labour and the Telegraph thumps the tub for the Tories. And everyone knows the BBC is full of lefties. And so they squabble over the garden wall like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But it’s not a very serious squabble, because the media knows it can rub along very well with the three main parties. For, behind the speeches, the policy documents, the PR and the windy rhetoric on what are alleged to be the main issues concerning the country, all three parties are in broad agreement. All three will have to say something about the deficit. All three will promise additional funding for the NHS. All three will go in for pious utterances about educashion.

And whichever party is in power, nothing will change.

But in Clacton other voices are being heard – or rather not being heard very much, owing to the media’s dislike of what these voices are saying. Actually, the BBC’s neglect of tomorrow’s election is not total. There was one short item on Today this morning – tucked away after the sport and just before Thoughtlessness for the Day. A woman in Clacton said she was concerned about immigration, the way it is out of control. She was articulate and knew whereof she spoke. Out of control immigration, she said, is not a problem of foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs and our benefits. Immigration out of control is, she said, “…about the changed character of our country. There are no go areas now.”

She didn’t mention that other elephant in the room: the elephant that is even bigger than Nigel Farage. Well, she didn’t mention it by name. I will. The elephant is not called Jumbo or Daisy. The elephant is called Islam.

The Clacton woman added, “I’m glad I’ve had my life. And my children – they’re not going to have any children of their own.”

She is right. The character of the country is being changed. There are no go areas. And the Clacton woman is not the only one to have noticed this. Bishop Michael Ali – the only bishop who speaks his mind – probably the only bishop who has a mind – has said it too.

Where are these no go areas then? Not around Hampstead, The Barbican, Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster where the metropolitical elite – that cosy menage involving the politicians and the media types – live, move and have their being. Not in the sleepy villages in the Home Counties. Not in Upper and Lower Slaughter. Not in Grantchester where our posh new TV vicar lives.

Try Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Stepney, Leicester, Bradford, Dewsbury, Batley, Oldham, Rochdale, Blackburn, Accrington and some suburbs in all our major cities. Here, and in many other places like them, is where you will find the no go areas. And here’s a note: there are now more Muslim schoolchildren in Birmingham than indigenous whites. Immigration has continued unchecked for two generations and recently the rate of immigration has increased alarmingly. I should say catastrophically, for it is probably now too late to avert its consequences. The spurt in immigration over the last decade owes largely to Tony Blair who gleefully encouraged it, saying, “We’ll rub the noses of the middle class in diversity!”

Thus what started as a device to irritate the Tories has actually ruined the country.

And we don’t get diversity. Diversity would mean people of many different backgrounds rubbing along together. That’s not the reality. The reality is ghettos created by mass immigration of the members of an alien and separatist ideology. When such a condition obtained in South Africa, the lefties expressed their detestation. It was called Apartheid. And that’s what we now have in Britain – thanks, incidentally, to the policy of our Tories, Labourites and Lib Dems who, while they condemned Apartheid in South Africa, were busy creating a similar reality in our own country. Only they don’t call it Apartheid in Britain. Here it’s called Multiculturalism.

Perhaps Nigel Farage will be our Nelson Mandela? But how many years must he spend in the wilderness – or in jail – first?

Have we got space for three elephants in the room? The third jumbo is the very high birth-rate among Muslims. The Education Secretary says,”We have a baby boom and need to create 500,000 new primary school places.” No baby boom among the indigenous whites where it is 1.9: parents not even providing their own replacements, so to speak. Muslims do not like our way of life and so they absent themselves from it and wait patiently for the time when there will be enough of them to change it everywhere and in every respect.

They – and we – will not have much longer to wait. Give it a few more years, a lot more mosques, a little sharia (which Rowan Williams is so fond of), a little more of the contempt for electoral propriety we saw at last May’s elections in Tower Hamlets, and Britain will resemble the sorts of shambles we now see all across North Africa and the Middle East.

But don’t forget – if you don’t like the way things are going, you’re not allowed to say so.

That’s Islamophobia.

27 Sep

The state will provide

Young first-time buyers in England could buy a house at 20% below the market rate if the Conservatives are re-elected, David Cameron has pledged.The Tory leader said the party would build 100,000 new homes reserved for those under 40 buying their first home. They would be exempt from some taxes and would be built on brownfield land already identified for development, Mr Cameron said. Making this pledge – an extension of the Help to Buy mortgage scheme – Mr Cameron said the Conservatives wanted more young people to “achieve the dream” of owning their own home.

“I don’t want to see young people locked out of home ownership,” he said. “We’ve already started to tackle the problem with Help to Buy mortgages – and these new plans will help tens of thousands more people to buy their first home.”

Sounds good eh?

Not if you think, as I do, that the state has no business getting involved in the housing market. But, as a true socialist, Cameron has announced a state subsidy. He wants to appear generous. How easy it is to be generous with other people’s money! The scheme will be paid for, of course, out of further taxation and, as he has said, tax exemptions on those who are helped to buy.

Thus the taxpayer – already labouring under a heavy burden – will pay yet more in taxes.

This amounts to the abandonment of morality in politics as Cameron tries to buy votes with our money.

Not only is the scheme a state subsidy, it is a subsidy tomorrow – like jam tomorrow. If he was going to do it, why hasn’t he done it already?

Is Cameron really so cynical as to think that the public will fall for this trick?

Yes, he is. And we will.

08 Sep

IPSO is a Facto

Sir Alan Moses starts work this morning as chairman of the new Independent Press Standards Organisation IPSO and promises that it will not be “a sham.” Indeed it is not a sham: it is a political quango set up in response to campaigns by Hacked Off and Guardian journalists to abolish our free press. This must not be allowed to happen. The health of the nation depends upon the freedom of the press. Even that old Puritan John Milton understood this and argued vigorously in its defence in his 1644 speech, later printed as Areopagitica. Muzzling the press is the first act of all tyrannies. Just reflect on states such as the USSR under Stalin, Germany under Hitler and China ruled by Mao and his successors. Look at any dictatorship you fancy and ask yourself whether you would prefer to live there or here in Britain, with all its faults.

Newspapers are a pretty untidy business and actually their methods of news-gathering are often despicable. But not as despicable as the methods of all governments which control the mass media. These governments are thereby enabled to hide their own misdeeds and criminalise public scrutiny. The freedom of the press is what guarantees our liberty – or at least some measure of freedom. The free press can hold governments to account and this is ever more necessary given our current debased and corrupt political class.

There should be absolutely no regulation of the press. This does not mean that the papers and the broadcasters can do as they like. They must be subject to the law of the land as everyone else is so subject. If I break into your house, or even if by my words and writings slander you or libel you, then I have committed an offence and for which I can be arraigned. The same goes for journalists, newspapers and television companies.

There are enough laws and we don’t need further regulation. Control always works in favour of authority. Yes, and the basis of all authority is freedom.

23 Jul

The religion of peace and love (women’s special needs)

The government declares that those who practise female genital mutilation (FGM) shall be prosecuted. It is hard to imagine how anyone could perpetrate such acts of cruelty and barbarism. Who are these people? FGM, like forced marriage, is a practice found principally among Muslims. Yet yesterday there was a five minutes’ discussion of this matter on The Today Programme but the word “Muslim” or the phrase “Islamic practices” were never mentioned. Ah but, the presenter did say that “religion” is often implicated. So are we to suppose that FGM is endemic among chapel-goers in West Wales and Quaker ladies in York?

The refusal to mention salient facts in any analysis of a state of affairs goes beyond bad journalism and descends into a euphemistic partiality which obscures the truth. Journalists are taught from the cradle upwards always to ask the specific questions Who? Where? When? – before proceeding to the more difficult question Why? Because, unless you first answer the factual questions, you will be quite unable to proceed to attempt the more difficult problems of purposes and causes. Journalists are usually good at their job and they are scrupulous in the observance of these basic methods. So why ignore them in the case of Muslims and FGM?

Answer: because political correctness trumps truth every time. Actually, political correctness is the enemy of truth. Facts are facts. But once you say that some facts are unmentionable, then you forfeit all ambition ever to arrive at the truth. This is a disgrace and it is a disgrace which has consequences. The main consequence is that we shall not be able to perceive reality as it is. This amounts to a willed psychosis. As Faust cried out to Mephistopheles, “Ah, but let me be deceived!”

Are we to die of political correctness then?

20 Jul

Truth by head-count

The BBC are advertising a new series in which they will ask one of those nebulous questions they delight in. This time it’s “Is Britain still a Christian country?” The blurb adds another question, presumably dependent on how you answer the first: “Should Christianity still play a role in public life?” This is predicated on the statement that there are fewer people calling themselves Christians in this country than there used to be. In other words, the truth value of Christianity is not to be measured by attention to scripture, to historical investigations or theological and philosophical reasoning, but by counting heads. It’s that shibboleth “democracy” again, the prevailing fantasy of our age.

They will not ask the one question that matters: Is it true? because to the modern mind there is no such thing as truth, only opinion. And every opinion is adjudged to be as good as every other, no matter how idiotic, incoherent and uneducated. In these conditions the only recourse left is to count heads and frame your policies on what the larger part of the mob…I was going to say “thinks,” but the blundering mob doesn’t think: it only feels, emotes and reacts.

As a matter of fact there are coherent philosophical and theological arguments for the truth of Christianity. The new programme will not even mention these. There is strong historical evidence for the reliability of the gospels. This will not be gone into. They will only ask petulantly what “right” have Christians got to a say in the public realm in this wonderfully progressed and superbly diverse society of ours.

Furthermore, the truth of Christianity is not a theoretical truth, but an existential, moral and eschatological truth. Specifically, we are all going to die and after death comes the judgement. It is vital that we prepare for this properly. Whosoever will be saved, it is necessary above all things that he hold the catholic faith. And the catholic faith is this: that God is Trinity in Unity; men are fallen, sinners, Christ died to save us; he rose again and ascended into heaven where he is even now preparing a place for us.

Tell you what though: the BBC would never dream of trying to establish the truth-value of the theory of evolution by counting heads. Just a thought.

19 Jul

The religion of peace and love–part three

Muslim propagandists – ironically described as “scholars” – often put it about that the word Islam means “peace.” It doesn’t. It means “submit.” This is being interpreted very literally in Mosul in northern Iraq where those exceptional Islamic devotees in ISIS have ordered local Christians to convert to Islam. Like good representatives of peace and love, they have not left the Christians without options. If, for whatever perverseness of intellect and spirit, Christians decline this kind invitation to give up their faith in Jesus Christ and instead espouse barbarism, they must pay the ancient tax on infidels known as the jiziya. ISIS’ generosity of spirit knows no bounds. Those Christians who elect not to pay to this protection racket must give up their homes and all their possessions and leave. If they persist in their obtuse rejection of all these generous options, they will be put to death. ISIS’ official proclamation ends, “…or else nothing awaits you but the sword.”

Before the loving Muslims in ISIS took over in Mosul, there were 3000 Christians in the city. Most have now fled. All the churches as well as the shops belonging to Christians have been destroyed.

Truly, God is great!

14 Jul

Saint Matthew 24:15

This at last is the day when the Church of England will decide to consecrate women as bishops. A great day for equality. A marvel of emancipation. A triumph for democracy. The very paradigm of diversity. What it all means is that the church is content to order its theology and ecclesiology according to secular principles. There really is no difference between the Archbishop of Canterbury and David Cameron. Both are agreed on the superior righteousness of secular enlightenment and all things progressive. It is truly a wondrous thing to see the Church of England being brought up to date at last.

But consider for a moment, over your fit of enlightened rejoicing at this brave new dawn. that theology might still reserve to itself some vestige of meaning. What if the arrangement of divine orders in the church of God is not a secular matter? What if there are fundamentals which, if they were to be shaken, would bring down the whole and presage disastrous consequences for the church, for society, for humanity, for our sanity?

Despite what the modernising pigmies such as the faultlessly-plausible PR man Welby would say, there are things here which matter. And they are theological things. That is to say they are not about diversity and getting the balance right. It is to say that these matters are about God and his frequently-declared intentions for humankind

God has set his pattern before us in a wonderful order. Male and female created he them. Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is the Bride. Women priests and bishops invert this whole order of things. This order has prevailed for the last 2000 years. Use you imagination: can you really – and leave the religion, leave human psychology unchanged – have a woman standing in sacerdotal robes at the altar and speaking for the masculine Christ “outos estin ten soma mou” – this is my body? You may wish to have things otherwise than Christian tradition allows. And after today’s vote, you will get them otherwise under the glib, grinning monkey face of Justin Welby, with all his clever fixes, compromises and done deals

When you see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place…

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society