by A. N. Wilson
If the first premises were accepted, that religion causes such abuses of human power as Al Qa’eda, or the Spanish Inquisition, who could have not sided with Hitchens and those who believed in ‘open-mindedness for its own sake’? But what if he was using language lazily? What if by saying religion causes enslavement he was making a syntactical utterance of the same order as ‘War causes nuclear weapons’? Human beings will always wish to exercise power over one another, and the invention of a ‘Santa Claus’ who shared all the xenophobic or misanthropic prejudices of the (usually collective) inventors was indeed toxic. It was unsurprising that the anti-Godders took this view of religious origin at a period in history when they had about them so many examples of those deluded by religious hatred. Hitchens’s need to enlist Mother Teresa in the same brigade of murderous maniacs as Osama bin Laden, however, was revealing, as was Dawkins’s suppression of the religious foundation of a great science teacher’s ideas.
It would be frivolous to have denied that the anti-Godders had alerted their contemporaries, if such alert were needed, to a poison deadly indeed. Whether one considered the mental processes of the religious right in America, or of the radicalised Islam, or of the enraged Buddhists of Sri Lanka, or of the anti-Islamist Hindu nationalists in India, it was impossible to ignore the fact that religion appeared to be at the heart of very many of the world’s most intractable political problems. Far from providing peaceable solutions to these problems, religion appeared to be the problem. One could indeed go the whole way with the anti-Godders–religion was the problem–if, a very big if, religion connotes the closed mind, the implacable will, the ability to swallow nonsense and justify murder and suppression in the name of an invented Deity.
The scientific work before the world is to co-ordinate, to harness the radio-active souls of men, just as we have to harness the energy of the atom. This is the stupendous work for which you boys are to be prepared: in the existence and needs of which you have to believe.
And for this the centre of gravity must be changed. The viewpoint must be changed. Astronomy was once looked at from the earth as the fixed centre of vision. Through much conflict and many persecutions the viewpoint was changed to the sun–the sun a fixed star. Then the sun began moving. It is now changed to an ‘atom’, shall we call it, of light, moving with the velocity of 186,000 miles per second. And the new things must be viewed from that moving chariot of light…
A new vision. A new Horeb and Sinai. A new Mount of Transfiguration. ‘And after three days He took with Him His disciples, Peter, James and John, and went into a mount and was transfigured before them.’ So, too, if we are to see a new world arise out of this conflict and strife, we also must go up into the mount–the new mount of vision.
See, boys, that you make it after the pattern which hath been shown you on the Mount.14
The attitude of that kindly liberal Protestant headmaster towards science was very decidedly not that of any of the popular defenders of what might be called a scientific viewpoint from the middle of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Karl Popper has been mentioned as the advocate of an open society and the identifier of its enemies. He did not invent the open society. It has come about as a result of a number of factors, chief of which is economic growth. Popper was also concerned with the philosophy of science and in the more difficult area of trying to establish the objective truth of scientific statements. He tried to wrench the subjective element out of traditional epistemology which must always lead to the logical scepticism of Berkeley and Hume. (If your sole criterion is your own sense-perceptions, you cannot be said to know the laws of thermodynamics.) Popper, however, was as unable as anyone else has ever been to establish any criterion by which we could be said to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, is true.
The modern idolatry offered to ‘scientific truth’ goes back far beyond our times to the late seventeenth century, when the Cartesian philosophy threatened the very notion of objective knowledge. Unbelief in God began at this time, as did the deist conception of God–the idea of God as an inventor or mechanic who established the laws of nature and then retired to allow the universe to run itself. The pathetic need for certainty, in a world of unalterable, impersonal laws, led to the development of the ‘scientific outlook’, the need to claim that some concepts or objects were beyond dispute, were verifiable or falsifiable by some means other than sense-impression, so that they might be accepted as universal truths. From this superstition–the idea of ‘science’ being the sole arbiter of the verifiability of statements–sprang the slow death of religion(s). This was not, as scientists such as Thomas Huxley supposed, because scientific facts had been presented which disproved religious claims. It was because the human notion of truth had altered, and Christianity disastrously reacted by adopting the ‘scientific’ or ‘materialist’ outlook. Christians began to defend the Bible and its stories as if they were works of ‘history’ or ‘science’. In so doing, whole generations of men and women, whether or not they believed in God any more, were seduced into thinking that these matters could be decided by ‘scientific’ investigation. Hence the truly ludicrous spectacle in our times of clever journalists or popularisers of Darwin thinking to set themselves up against the deep wisdom which had produced the Upanishads or the Book of Psalms or the works of Pythagoras.
A belief in ‘science’ as the sole arbiter of what is true must always resolve itself into a belief in force, in blind force. Before this idea, the nineteenth century fell prostrate, and from it emerged two of its most influential determinist prophets, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. The writings of Marx were said to have been discredited in our times, although it only takes a crisis in the stock market or a run on a bank for his picture of Western man’s dependence upon the vacillations of capital to seem mythologically true. Too much concentration on the failure of Marx’s prophecies–that the revolution would first take place in the industrial heartlands of England, for example–can blind observers to how much Marx actually got right. Darwin got many things right, too, about the evolution of finches’ beaks, about the breeding habits of earthworms and the expression of emotion in animals. That was only part of the reason why this great Victorian natural historian was deified in our times. He was placed on the throne once occupied by God, overseeing like a sad old bearded Jehovah the workings of a purposeless, blind process of procreation.
When confronted with this mythology, the Christian fundamentalists were stupid enough to question the impersonality of nature, or, more horrifyingly, they tried to personalise it, so that the blind force of nature which led to a child developing cancer became the act of a cosmic sadist.15 Whether siding with the atheists who worshipped Darwin, or with one or another of the muddled ‘creationist’ standpoints, Western humanity found itself still in the Victorian ‘semi-recumbent posture’ of a worshipper at the throne of blind force.
For Simone Weil, ‘the modern conception of science is responsible, as is that of history and art, for the monstrous conditions under which we live, and will, in its turn, have to be transformed, before we can hope to see the dawn of a better civilization’.16 Her book The Need for Roots was first published in English in 1952, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession. Half a century on, it seemed a no less remarkable diagnosis of what had gone wrong–as undoubtedly something had gone wrong–in Western European society. Simone Weil, who had died aged thirty-four in 1943, was in England working with the Free French. It was they who commissioned this luminous genius to write a manifesto for what might bring regeneration to France after her defeat and occupation in 1940. Weil wrote The Need for Roots in her last months of life, and it is a frenzied, urgent book. T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction to its first English publication, said, ‘I cannot conceive of anybody’s agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them.’ He nonetheless urged readers to ‘expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a
kind of genius akin to that of the saints’.
Weil made the connection–inescapable to anyone who has read his by now innumerable biographies–between Hitler and the nineteenth-century worship of science. She quoted Mein Kampf: ‘Man must never fall into the error of believing himself to be the lord and master of creation…He will then feel that in a world in which planets and suns follow circular trajectories, moons revolve round planets, and force reigns everywhere and supreme over weakness, which it either compels to serve it docilely or else crushes out of existence. Man cannot be subject to special laws of his own.’
Simone Weil added, ‘These lines express in faultless fashion the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from the conception of the world contained in our science.’17 She added, ‘Who can reproach him for having put into practice what he thought he recognized to be the truth? Those who, having in themselves the foundations of the same belief, haven’t embraced it consciously and haven’t translated it into acts, have only escaped being criminals thanks to the want of a certain sort of course which he possesses.’18
Simone Weil, as a French patriot and the daughter of a secularised Jewish family, had every reason to work ardently for Hitler’s defeat, but she was able to see, as were her readers more than half a century after she wrote, that Hitler was Darwin’s natural heir. The regeneration of post-war society could only, Weil believed, be achieved through a rediscovery by France–by Western society as a whole–of how it understands truth itself. She saw the defeat of France by Hitler not as the victory of a lie over truth, rather ‘an incoherent lie was vanquished by a coherent lie’.19
As Queen Elizabeth II’s reign drew to an end, the lies in which her subjects were asked to believe became, if possible, increasingly incoherent. The intellectual classes–taking that phrase broadly to include the academic world, the more intelligent writers and journalists–nearly all subscribed to the worship of blind force which Weil rightly diagnosed as impossible to detach from the modern view of science. To counteract this belief, to guarantee, as it were, that they would not turn into Hitler, the thinking classes and their pupils the political classes tried to invent a number of ‘values’ in which everyone was supposed to believe. After the elevation of Gordon Brown to the premiership, these values became vahlews and his audiences were compelled to hear quite a lot about them without being left much wiser about how the vahlews were to be defined or understood.
In denouncing ‘the modern conception of science’ Weil was tempted to denounce science itself. This was a mistake. If quantum physics was, as she claimed false, how are we to explain nanotechnology, silicon chips, computers–all of which owe their very existence to the pioneers of quantum physics?
Science did, however, take over from theology, or the Church, the role of intellectual dictator.
The science of genetics teaches us that we are the inevitable consequence of our inheritance. Scientific knowledge of our environment has led to what is, in effect, the chief alternative religion of our times, the belief that the planet itself is doomed by the failure of the human race to be its responsible custodian. The catalogue of loss–of rainforests, of flora and fauna–is presented as a new Myth of the Fall, with greedy Humanity raping the environment for short-term gain and thereby imperilling any chance of future happiness. Global warming is an alternative hellfire, with believers dividing, as in the old dispensation, between those who thought that by good works it is possible to be saved–that is by recycling milk cartons, reducing gas emissions and avoiding air travel–and those who believe that it is all too late, that the Chinese and the Americans are beyond persuasion, and that we shall all without doubt perish everlastingly. Another form of determinism which grips the modern mind is economic determinism. Though Marxist states have abandoned communism, Karl Marx nevertheless left the world with the belief that we are all the product of our economic and social environment. It would be very rare, perhaps impossible, to meet anyone of our times who did not believe this.
Religions have often themselves been forms of determinism, as the previous paragraphs would suggest. But they have also been ways of making the kind of illogical leaps out of the determinist circle, which modern physics appears to have made. Whereas genetics and economics follow deterministic patterns of thought, physics post the Big Bang Theory has been a story of surprises, of lurching out of systems, of inhabiting a universe which did not need to be the way it is, and which began its life in a completely weird series of throbs, leaps–no words can succinctly describe what it is that astronomy seemed to have been saying since the 1980s and 1990s.
This corresponds to those religious traditions and myths which, in the past, have insisted upon free will.
The struggle between free will and determinism is one of those philosophical conundrums which can never be adequately solved, which is why neat-minded people will always be determinists–it is easier. But determinism crushes the imagination, and almost all exciting developments in Western thought, Western art, Western music and literature over the last seven hundred years have been in one way or another an assertion of free will. Without free will, the human race has lost its moral purpose. Each generation, therefore, tries to escape its determinist straitjacket by some myth, or ritual, or grand gesture, which will give to us dignity, individuality, freedom. Those who hate religion will see it, and especially Islam and Evangelical Christianity, as the ultimate determinism. But is not the advantage of religion over irreligion (speaking of it merely as a life tool, and ignoring for a moment the question of whether ‘it’ is ‘true’ or ‘false’) that it sees every person as a soul, a person who carries about their own destiny? If this is the case, then the Muslims in their seemingly identical ranks, bowed to Mecca in prayer, may perhaps be closer to perfect freedom than a Western materialist who believes he is merely the product of genetic inheritance and economic circumstances. Ever since the Second World War, as Weil’s Need for Roots makes plain, the human race has been trying not to live with the knowledge that if the blind determinisms of science and economics were the only truths, there should be nothing to prevent another archipelago of Gulags, another Belsen, another Dachau, another Auschwitz. The little spark, the ‘irrational’ little glow in the dark, the belief that each individual is of importance–it might not derive from religion, but when religion goes, it becomes very difficult to keep it alight.
29
Gordon Brown
After the death of its leader John Smith on 12 May 1994, the Labour Party had the chance to change direction completely and make itself electable. The only way that this could possibly happen was for it to abandon its left wing, and to become a party of Social Democracy, with a plausible economic policy, largely indistinguishable from that of the Conservatives. Hence, New Labour was born. There was more than one architect for the idea. Director of the London School of Economics Anthony Giddens, the author of The Third Way, was perhaps the theorist. Peter Mandelson had been the spin doctor. But the two heavyweight politicians who embraced the idea and made it their own had been Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. One of them was bound to succeed John Smith and put the Third Way into practice.
Smith’s death had taken Brown by surprise, and he had been even more knocked off course by the speed and ruthlessness with which the Blair camp, a word which seems rather too apt, was directed by Mandy. By the time Brown had assembled his supporters in the House of Commons, he found out that the Blair bandwagon was unstoppable, and he felt ‘betrayed, devastated’.
He did not have the courage to run against Blair. Had he done so, there were those, chiefly his Scottish fellow countrymen, who believed he would have stood a good chance of winning. But it was not in Brown’s nature to take risks. ‘Prudence’ was his favoured fiscal and economic policy, and luckily for him it coincided with a period of stability in the world markets and economies which lasted for most of the time he was Tony Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. At first, licking his wounds, Brown directed his hatred against the mincing and absur
d figure of Mandy. After they came into power, however, with Tony as Prime Minister and Gordon as Chancellor, Brown was unable to conceal his hatred of the Blairs, and their mutual detestation made for one of the most peculiar spectacles which public life had known for decades. The public had grown used to stories of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet finding her difficult. But such legends paled beside the implacable, relentless feud which continued, in season and out of season, between the increasingly mad-seeming Blair and the not-obviously-much-saner Brown, with his dour manners and a tongue disconcertingly too large for his mouth.
The extent of the bad feeling between Brown and Blair astounded all who encountered the two men for the first time. A marked feature of it was the filthy language used by the Vicar of St Albion’s (‘I’m going to take no more shit from over the road’–i.e., from Brown). Brown believed, or let it be believed, that Blair had entered into a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ over their ‘dual premiership’ that he would stand down and allow his former friend, now his bitter enemy, to take over. Blair and the Blairites denied that any such ‘gentleman’s agreement’ had ever taken place–as how could it between these non-gentlemen? One shrewd political observer, Andrew Rawnsley,1 saw them as like the terrible twins Esau and Jacob, vying for power while even in their mother’s womb. When Blair was talking big to his supporters, he pretended that he was on the verge of sacking Brown. Given the disloyalty of Brown and his acolytes, it was undignified of Blair not to have sacked him. But he did not dare, partly because Brown’s power base in the Cabinet was so great, and partly because, for much of the decade of Blair’s spell in office, it was indeed a dual monarchy, with Brown balancing the books in his counting house and Blair strutting the world stage. Brown, equally cowardly and just as painfully, locked into an abusive relationship which caused both parties more pain than delight, was too weak to resign or to stand openly against his leader.