Papering over the cracks

Hard to underestimate the excitement of a council election, with in cases up to 25% of voters rushing eagerly to the polling stations. Even more exciting, of course, when the boring old major parties get swept aside by a new clown on the block.

Yes, it’s the United Kingdom Independence Party, the politicians everyone loves to hate. Well, not everyone, maybe. Just right-thinking lower-case liberal democrats.

I mean, UKIP wants to get out of Europe and restrict immigration: they must hate foreigners, which is appalling. I suppose it’s possible that they think the European Union is an undemocratic bureaucracy, and they may think that this is a small country unable to support a huge influx of people, but that can’t be right, can it?

I have to admit that the sparkly new UKIP councillors I have heard speak do not seem models of intelligence and erudition, but few politicians are. As they say on Bargain Hunt, it’s a question of scale.

In any case, we don’t really want to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, do we? We just want to scare the hell out of those familiar faces who have no policies and too many advisers, who behave like out-of-touch parents who think they know what’s good for us but are really concentrated on what’s good for them.

In many ways they are behaving like a medieval church, with UKIP nailing some new ideas to the door and the smell of burning in the air.  Or maybe it’s not that dramatic. UKIP may not have the staying power, or even the conviction. Or enough nails.

So are we going to go back to those dull old Tories and Socialists, with Lib Dems under the rather pathetic illusion that they’re a party of government and the Greens rapidly losing the argument?

Is there something to be said  for the Conservatives? In the past they have represented law and order, the maintaining of traditional values, and economic security.

Nothing wrong with that, you may argue, but the Tories have lost sight of compassion and a sense of justice. What about socialism, then?

Socialism, as far as I can see, only works in a country where everyone is decent – where they love one another. Unfortunately that country has not yet been located. Experience shows that the best you can hope for is that people may love one another as long as it doesn’t put themselves at a disadvantage. People are largely interested in what’s good for them, which is why the late 1970s were so disastrous and so many of us were mightily relieved when Maggie Thatcher got elected.

Thousands who were not there, or not even born, will pour out rage against Mrs Thatcher in retrospect, but the self-interest that she is condemned for fostering is at the very least no worse than the self-interest promoted by trade union leaders in the late 1970s. Crisis? Yes, there was.

If you are looking for love, it’s no good looking at politics. You have to look at Christianity, I’m afraid, and as a society, we’re shelving all that. Love at any cost is the answer, but unfortunately no-one is asking the question.

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” said Chesterton. “It has been found difficult and left untried.” Or corrupted.

Politics is not a natural environment for love, and perhaps the best politicians can do is paper over the cracks in our edifice of self-interest. If so, where is our hope? Where is real love?

Is it somewhere we just don’t want to look any more?

Posted on May 6 2013 in Articles. Tagged , .

Church targets hedgehogs

My eye was caught by a headline in a well-known church newspaper the other day. It read: “Church urged to help save the hedgehog.”

I sighed inwardly. The Church of England is capable of almost any kind of bizarre activity, and to be honest the salvation of hedgehogs is no odder than many of the things they get involved in, like pet services, civic services, the House of Lords and in the case of my own city’s Cathedral, building a nesting platform for peregrine falcons.

The Church of England, as we know, is broad church. As one eminent writer put it many years ago, “anything is possible in the Church of England – even Christianity”.

Hedgehogs are something else again, although I can see how they might fit in. Parochial church councils are notoriously prickly, for instance, and many congregations appear to hibernate for long periods.

The same newspaper report describes the hedgehog as a “near-endangered species”. Whatever this means (is it worse than slightly endangered, for example?), it seems to describe pretty accurately a number of Anglican communicants.

The prickliness of such church members, and their tendency to hibernate, may of course have something to do with their being nearly endangered. Perhaps if they could be more accurately described as bunnies, they would be more resilient, and church growth would not be a problem.

The Bible on the other hand has no truck with hedgehogs. It describes us all as sheep, which are not prickly but easily led. They also have a tendency to bleat, which many of us will identify with.

Would the salvation of sheep or rabbits be more straightforward than saving hedgehogs? I think it would, and one has to admire the determination of the church in tackling hedgehogs, especially when its avoidance of prickly questions at a national level is almost legendary.

Some might argue that Jesus is never reported to have said “Go into all the world and make disciples of all hedgehogs”, but of course one can’t prove anything from what is not mentioned.

We must applaud the Church of England’s radical outreach to all prickly creatures, to those who have many points to make, and to those who are asleep a lot of the time. And to hedgehogs, of course.

I understand the new Archbishop will be making a statement shortly. Or, possibly, not.

Posted on March 19 2013 in Articles

Savage cruelty – the easy option

What could be worse than being trapped in front of a television set on a Saturday night? Ant and Dec, followed by The Cube, followed by Jonathan Ross.

Well, lots of things of course. Being trapped in a rugby scrum. Or living in one of the countries that underwent the Arab Spring and discovering that, as a Christian, you are now more likely to be killed than you were when the dictators were in power.

What could be quite as frightening as being confronted by a mob of wintry Arabs with misconceived religious beliefs? Perhaps being confronted by a mob of mad Englishmen with misconceived religious beliefs, as we have demonstrated quite convincingly in the past. As novelist Petru Dumitriu put it, there is nothing quite like “the savage cruelty of people who are sure they are right”, especially when there are a lot of them.

Part of the fear (on both sides) stems from an inability to understand what is being said by those who are foreign to our way of thinking. Language barriers are fearsome things, and translation is not an easy art.

I come fresh from a translation workshop led by Dr B J Epstein of the University of East Anglia, where the difficulties of getting all the meaning of a piece of writing across from one language to another were expounded clearly.

We tried to imagine how a passage from Alice in Wonderland, with its extremely English wordplay, could possibly be conveyed into Swedish (or anything else). My rather esoteric view is that it is impossible, just as it is impossible to translate poetry into another language, because there is too much involved: precision, rhythm, context, nuance, word play of many kinds.

And as much religious belief was expressed originally as poetry – or at least in a poetic language like Hebrew or Aramaic – it is not surprising that we may not quite “get it” when it is transferred into a modern, more literal tongue. We tend to end up with chopped up religion instead of the whole body. I’m not sure how this works with Arabic, but no doubt the opportunities exist.

Getting the spirit of a piece of writing is something we seem ill-equipped to do in the modern world, with its knee-jerk journalistic view of things and its painful self-righteousness and eagerness to cast the first stone, with many more to follow.

Perhaps the answer is to be aware that you may not quite understand the other person’s point of view, and to give him or her the benefit of the doubt – or at least listen as hard as you can.

The shorthand term for that is love, but maybe that would take too much time and effort. Much easier to throw something. A quick fix: it might make us feel better. Switch channels – there may be something better on the other side.

 

 

*After attending the workshop on translation, I wrote the following poem, which is of course not about translation but is helped by some of the ideas discussed there.

Posted on March 9 2013 in Articles. Tagged , , , .

Horse meat and Leonard Cohen

I could eat a horse, and so could you. So could most people, because a healthy horse is perfectly edible.

To call it a contaminant, as many in the media have done, is as misleading as calling carbon dioxide a pollutant. Horse is not toxic or impure, and nor is carbon dioxide, which is a naturally occurring gas, just as horse is a naturally occurring animal. If anything is being polluted here, it is language.

But there is something else going on, and Leonard Cohen, the master of language, foresaw it (and much more) in his song The Future. “Things are going to slide,” he said, “slide in all directions; won’t be nothing you can measure any more.”

The problem is not that there is horse in ready foods: it is that ready foods are so mediocre that you can’t tell whether there is horse in them or not.

Some concoctions invite substitution, like meat balls. Are they beef, pork or something even more sinister? If they don’t tell us on the tin – or the packet – how can we know?

All right, we can avoid that kind of food if we’re worried. But if we do, we are still faced with another trend in supermarkets: dumbing down. I have been infuriated recently in the vegetable section (and that can be dangerous) by finding potatoes labelled “Potatoes” or sometimes  daringly “White Potatoes”.

Now I suppose there may be people who don’t know a potato when they see it, or can’t tell the difference between white and red, but when I’m looking for potatoes I want to know what sort they are. I happen to like King Edwards, but they’re becoming increasingly hard to find.

I can foresee a time when, to avoid the horse problem, all meat will be labelled “Meat”; in fact I’m almost sure I’ve come across meat curry in the not-too-distant past. Then where will we be? I’ll tell you. We’ll be on the fish counter, trying to distinguish between hake (fish) and herring (fish).

Or will we just go for one of those “meal deals” that seem to crop up everywhere, and not worry our little heads about it?

Posted on February 14 2013 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Truth is more important than speed

I was never very keen on Chris Huhne as portrayed by the popular prints. If he were a regular reader of this site, he would probably not be keen on me.

If on the other hand we met anonymously at a party (as long as it was not a political one), we might get on quite well, laughing ruefully about life’s little misfortunes and how you never actually achieve what you’re aiming at.

What sort of little misfortunes? Well, being caught by a speed camera, for instance. And then thinking it might be simpler if you pretended it was your wife who was driving.

Not much harm in that, is there? And denying it afterwards? Well, it’s all pretty trivial, isn’t it?

National newspaper columnists have not gone along with this wholeheartedly.  Some of the verdicts: “error upon error”; “dodging and scheming”; “a display of hubris and ego that is utterly bewildering”; “a very minor misdemeanour”; and “a series of stupid, utterly avoidable decisions”.

Again, we’ve all been there. But Cabinet ministers, even Lib Dem ones who are in office almost accidentally, are expected to have high standards. Where Mr Huhne went wrong was in deciding wrongly which standards were more important.

Clearly he thought that at all costs people should not know he had been exceeding the speed limit. In order to cover this up, it was worth the risk of lying and, when the lie was exposed, it was worth the risk of lying again.

I know this is hard to believe, but during the last war (and for a long time before and after) cyclists had to use lights after dark. The trouble was that because of the privations of war, batteries became unavailable. As a result many cyclists, who depended on their machines to get to and from work, were prosecuted for riding without lights and fined.

The injustice of this was raised in the House of the Commons, and the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, said that the police “should exercise a wide discretion”. He had no doubt that “in any individual case the police will take account of any mitigating circumstances”.

You may wonder about the relevance of this to Mr Huhne. It lies in the nature of the speed camera, which knows nothing of mitigating circumstances and exercising discretion. In fact it knows nothing of the quality of driving. All it knows is that something went at a certain speed and therefore had to be photographed, and that as a result, someone had to be punished.

This is actually a deplorable way of administering justice, and so one has sympathy with Mr Huhne. If it had been revealed by self-righteous journalists that the Energy Secretary had been caught speeding, I would have thought no worse of him. It happens. It did not mean he was driving carelessly, or that anyone was in any danger. No-one got hurt.

Up to that point, anyway. It was what happened next that hurt. In protecting himself from being exposed as a fast driver to the kind of people who find that deplorable – the kind of people who would back most of his lack-of-energy policies – he decided that it wouldn’t matter so much if he lied.

But he was completely wrong. Speed by itself is not a problem. Lying is. If he is willing to lie about one small thing – and worse, to deflect the “guilt” on to someone else – why should we believe him when he says we need 32,000 new wind turbines and have to wreck the landscape to save the planet? Or that speed cameras are a good idea?

A better system of justice might have enabled him to contest the “trivial” issue of speed. But lying is a different kettle of fish. Of course we all know that politicians lie about policy. But lying on such a personal level is a symptom of a deeper problem.

Nevertheless, I refuse to go along with those who will paint him for ever as “shamed” or “disgraced” politician Chris Huhne. I believe in redemption, and that goes for Cabinet Ministers, Lib Dems and Energy Secretaries as well as less exalted human beings. For all you know I have done worse than Mr Huhne, and he probably has qualities that outshine mine.

He has reached a low point. It is up to him, and not us, where he goes from there.

Posted on February 6 2013 in Articles

Just a little bit lower, and I’ll feel better

Funny thing, temperature.

Over the past week or two in the UK we’ve experienced some pretty low temperatures. Not as low as Antarctica, or even Braemar on a bad day, but low nevertheless.

However, if we wear the right clothing, we can survive it without much trouble. In fact a brisk walk up to a nearby hill (taking care not to break a leg on the unsanded pavements or the uncollected rubbish) can be quite invigorating. The nip of frost on bare cheeks is kind of pleasant, in a bracing sort of way.  The outdoor life holds no terrors for us.

And yet when the temperature goes up, so that it’s about ten degrees warmer – say five or six degrees above freezing – we start to feel unpleasantly cold. The outdoor life is suddenly not for us, and we hasten inside to make friends with the central heating.

Why should this be? Why is a lukewarm bath somehow less pleasant than a cold one? Are we designed to prefer extremes? Or is it just me?

Maybe it’s a psychological thing. Very cold weather has visual compensations: the beauty of icy spider webs, the purity of fresh-fallen snow – the stunning, inexplicable attraction of something that is actually threatening to us, like floods and bombers. Not many of us would share the view of a friend of mine, who believes that “if you’ve seen one snow-covered mountain, you’ve seen them all”.

Slightly warmer weather, however, has no visual excitement. It brings dampness, greyness, mud and a vague uneasiness. The countryside becomes flat and tedious, like a dithering driver. There is no stimulus for our minds to grapple with. No vital questions, like “Why does butter remain hard in winter, even in a centrally heated house?”

Somehow, cold seems to enliven us, as long as it doesn’t go too far and remove our toes and fingers. We dive into it, make snowmen, ride sleds, throw snowballs.

I have this suspicion, for what it’s worth, that snow and ice open our minds to other dimensions, but maybe this is because I live in a temperate, comfortable climate and can put up with a limited amount of ice and snow, as long as it eventually goes away and releases my car from its clutches. If I lived in an igloo, perhaps a heatwave would open my mind to other dimensions.

Maybe we’re desperate for something to open our minds to other dimensions, even if it’s just a change in the temperature. Something that makes us see things differently.

Posted on January 29 2013 in Articles. Tagged .

Are you concentrating, or have you dropped something?

I can’t say this very often, but I was pleasantly surprised by an article on road safety that appeared in Norfolk County Council’s “magazine for all residents” that eased its way carefully through my door this winter.

It was titled “Keep your mind on the road”, and I read it very attentively, keeping my mind on it. I was not driving at the time.

What surprised me? I don’t think the word “speed” was mentioned once.

Speed limits, cameras and associated persecution are not – taking the world as a whole – very high among the great evils of our time. But they do affect many of us in Britain almost every day, sometimes for long periods. So I think it’s reasonable to hope that transport authorities might see sense on the issue. In recent years, that has not happened much, and it has been unusual to see anything written about road safety without speed being seen as the main problem.

That article, by contrast, concentrated on what is clearly a major cause of accidents: lack of attention. It pointed out: “There are lots of distractions every day which take your mind off the road, from jogging while listening to music to turning round to talk to passengers in the car.”

It also struck fairly new ground in suggesting that cyclists, walkers and joggers need to concentrate just as much as drivers. It offered courses in cycling and motor cycling training for young people and in teaching children to cross the road, as well as co-ordinating and promoting driver development – important when it takes years to learn to drive really well.

By that time you know how fast it is safe to drive in most situations. You also know what causes accidents – stupidity, inattention, boredom and poor judgement tend to top the list. Excessive speed is also dangerous, of course, but this is not the same thing as going faster than speed limits that are for the most part inexpertly fixed. And it’s rarely uncovered by cameras because they are normally set to catch people, not to keep the roads safe.

We’re all familiar, and fed up, with puerile slogans like Speed Kills (it doesn’t) and It’s Fifty for a Reason (yes, usually a very bad reason). I’m in favour of speed limits, set by people who know what is realistic and safe (experienced traffic police, for example) but preferably to advise rather than punish motorists. It is only poor drivers (and non-drivers) who like slow limits punitively policed, because they don’t understand how fast is safe. They assume they’re safe because they’re obeying the law. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Reckless behaviour in a motor vehicle is a serious offence, but this is masked by the pretence that speed is the major issue. Even those few serious accidents attributed primarily to speed by the police are usually the result of some other criminal activity, like drug-taking or theft.

Reckless behaviour in a car always involves a lack of proper attention, and that includes using a mobile phone, fiddling with the cd-player, watching the speedometer, carrying on a vigorous debate with a passenger, pointing at landscape features and trying to find the glasses that fell off the central console. Driving is dangerous, and we mustn’t forget it.

My solution? The same as yours, probably: more traffic police. And in the cities, more visible police generally. And more education as suggested by the article that prompted this one. Not fatuous slogans, and wilfully diverting people’s attention from the real problem.

Posted on January 9 2013 in Articles. Tagged .

Do we believe Christmas is real?

Do you believe in Father Christmas? All right, that’s an easy one. But what do you really, really believe in? And what connection does it have to reality?

Someone said that reality is what remains after you stop believing in it. In other words, reality doesn’t depend on  belief. Or does it?

Experiments in quantum physics suggest that what happens may depend on who is watching. St Paul says that an act of faith is necessary for the veil to be lifted from our eyes: that we can’t see what’s really going on until we place our faith in God.

Most people, of course, reject that entirely. Seeing is believing, we say. Give us proof, and then we’ll believe.

A lot of people believed the world was going to end on December 21 this year, because certain calculations involving the Mayan calendar suggested as much. You don’t have to be cranky or gullible to believe that an ancient people may have known something we don’t. To paraphrase Linus in Peanuts, some of those ancient people were pretty sharp. But to put all our eggs in the Mayan basket would have been unwise, to say the least. All prophecies attempting to date the end of the world have been wrong. So far. Obviously.

Many people regard faith in much the same way as putting all your roulette chips on one number. Others see it as a no-cost bet. But people who believe Christianity is true (as opposed to those who see it as a respectable lifestyle) don’t see it as a bet at all. They agree with Stephen Verney, who wrote that “faith is being grasped by a truth which confronts you and which is self-evident and overwhelming, and then trusting yourself to the reality which you now see”.

This is, I suppose, an irritating viewpoint to those who don’t believe and would prefer the matter to be settled in a “rational” way. But the coming together of faith and reality is a powerful thing.

To many people, Christmas consists largely of a temporary suspension of disbelief. And despite a few high points, this can only end in disappointment. Fooling ourselves can be fun on the kind of superficial level that occupies us most of the time, but how much more exciting if the essence of Christmas were actually true.

Is it a coincidence that all the great stories in world literature are about sacrifice, salvation and redemption? That is what really grips and moves us, until we return to reality. Unless of course we have it wrong: maybe we’re returning from reality when we put those stories aside and concentrate on the mundane horrors of making a living.

Reality and belief are intertwined. Don’t be fooled by the tinsel.

Posted on December 21 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , .

Who cares about the public interest?

It will take more than three wise men and an infinite number of women bishops to decide the right action to take on the Leveson Report.

In one camp we have those who think we must install a statutory body to keep newspapers in order: failure to do so would be a cop-out. And in the other assortment of tents we have those who are concerned that any legal handcuffs could be misused, and that a free press is vital to a democratic society.

The former argue that any government likely to be elected in such a nice country as the UK would hardly shackle the press in any damaging way. They have clearly forgotten that the Germans, who are basically nice people like us, elected Hitler.

In other words, put temptation and enough fear in the hands of those keen to secure power, and they are likely to succumb to it. Why make it easy for them to shut down a main focus of criticism? Cameron probably wouldn’t do it, but I can think of a few other prominent politicians who might.

We are not quite at the time of year when three wise men might be available. Sadly, women bishops are also not to hand. But we do have Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye and panellist on Have I Got News for You, the TV news quiz that teeters between funny, puerile and self-righteous (the last two usually simultaneous).

Mr Hislop is a wise man where press freedom is concerned, although (or maybe because) he runs a satirical newspaper. He makes the rather vital point that all the misdemeanours, outrages and appalling behaviour that gave rise to the Leveson Inquiry are in fact already crimes, and so the perpetrators could have been arrested and charged, whether or not they happened to run or work for newspapers. The fact that they were not cannot be laid at the door of the Press.

There is absolutely no need for further laws, of which there are already far too many: after all, the freest country has the fewest laws. And we want to be free, don’t we?

In any case there is an important distinction to be made between scandal sheets and newspapers. The Code of Conduct for newspapers, adhered to fiercely by the local and regional newspapers praised by Leveson, relates borderline behaviour, like long lens photography and violation of privacy, to what is in the public interest, and that is a widely misunderstood term.

It certainly does not mean “what interests the public”. The public, sadly, does not like what it says it likes; if it did, the Sun would never have had the highest circulation figures. Like St Paul, the good that the public would they do not: but the evil which they would not, that they do. Or as Clive Barnes said in relation to television, “the most terrifying thing is what people do want”.

I think we all understand that. We are the public.

The public interest is defined by the Code of Conduct as “detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety; protecting public health and safety; or preventing the public from being misled”; and these are important matters, truly in the interests of us all. It cannot be right to  hamstring newspapers who are doing this kind of public service. Can it?

Of course it’s possible to be too idealistic about “good” local newspapers, who may not engage in phone hacking, but can skew readers’ views of key issues by taking positions that shut out views other than their own. There is no such thing as truly objective news, just as there is no such thing as a truly objective tweet or Facebook status.

You could go further and say it’s futile locking journalists away and handing out free klaxons to those with no code of conduct whatsoever. Either you want free speech, or you don’t.  It’s an interesting question.

Posted on December 6 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , .

A hat with no rabbit

I am thinking of buying my wife an iPhone for her birthday.  Earlier I had been thinking about an iPad. You may think that either of these pieces of magic is an extravagant luxury, but someone has to stop the recession, and anyway, she’s worth it.

Magic? Close enough. Someone once said that any technology distinguishable from magic is not advanced enough, and Apple seem to be in the magic business.

It’s odd that eating forbidden fruit – often portrayed as an apple – was the temptation that Adam and Eve fell for, propelling us down the road to the mess we’re in now. Even odder, the tree involved was said to be the Tree of Knowledge. Maybe that’s Google, but Apple have the logo.

Either way, you can see what T S Eliot was getting at when he asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” He might have been talking about the Internet.

The precise location of the Tree of Life is probably not to be found in the garden of advanced technology. For all the magic technology produces – and if you think computers are magic, wait for replication technology – it lands you with a disproportionate amount of frustration.

The problem is not that it is insufficiently advanced, but that is too advanced in some areas, and inept in others.

The iPhone has a wealth of features, most of which I do not want. The same is true of video recorders and washing machines, and anything electronic.

But let’s stick to the iPhone. It’s absolutely wonderful, but much of the time it will be useless. Why? Well, leaving aside the possibility that the battery will run out, what is definitely going to happen is that you will soon find yourself somewhere where you can’t make or receive phone calls.

We are not talking Outer Hebrides here. We are talking large chunks of Norfolk, my home county, and practically anywhere I’ve been on holiday this year, which happens to be Aberdeenshire, Dorset, Devon, Catalonia and Normandy.

OK, that’s an obscene number of holidays for one year, but they all have one thing in common. The area I happened to be in was out of range.

That’s not magic. That’s a hat with no rabbit.

I know this is not Apple’s fault. The intricate technology they provide usually works very well, but if you can’t actually use it to do what it’s intended to do, is it worth the trouble?

Maybe that’s what the Tree of Knowledge is all about, in the end. Anger and frustration. Not delivering what it promises. The Tree of Life was the one to go for. Can we start again?

Posted on November 5 2012 in Articles. Tagged , , , , .