Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  All three successful monotheistic religions use hell to induce fear. This is partly because all three derive from the same source but mainly because it is such a cracking tool of control. Hell resembles the bogeyman in Orchard Lane. You believe it’s there, and yet it is always just off stage. Thus it can be neither disproved, nor faced. And it is yoked indivisibly to the instinctive fear of death. At the same time as the church promoted a terror of hell, it also offered a way to allay that terror, which was to obey the church. It was a closed, self-perpetuating and hugely profitable system that remains at work in every theocracy around the globe.

  Few churches, however, have ever been content to leave the punishing to god post mortem. Most have been eager to anticipate his displeasure very much pre mortem. It’s almost as though they didn’t trust him. The purpose has always been to keep the fear level high and to maintain market share. Hence, for example, the dreadful punishments imposed for heresy or apostasy. It remains the official doctrine of Islam that anyone who renounces the faith be stoned to death.

  The best-known fearmongers of history were the Inquisition, a body of doctrinal enforcers first formed in the thirteenth century as a result of a forty-five-year crusade by the Catholic church to stamp out Catharism. The Cathars of south-west France recognized neither the French king nor the Catholic church and they adopted a theology of their own. This the church condemned as the Albigensian heresy. There is dispute about precisely what the heresy comprised, but it seems that the Cathars asserted that all things on earth were the devil’s work, that it was therefore impossible to live a life without sin, that god was all loving and would forgive sinners regardless of what they’d done so long as they repented at the last moment, and so really there was nothing to be worried about. Reportedly they lost their fear of hell and became rather licentious.

  At that time there was little distinction between the political and the religious. The pope recruited allies and sent in the troops. Those Cathars who would not repent, which was thousands of them, were hanged or burned at the stake.*

  A handbook for inquisitors published in 1578 spelled out the importance of inculcating fear: ‘for punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.’

  The ideal time to instil fear is the ideal time to instil everything else: infancy. That’s when we’re programmed to learn. Hence every church’s bid to get in on the ground floor of education, even today. It’s sound business practice. I can think of few sayings more sinister than the famous Jesuit observation, ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.’ Religious education implicitly admits that god, despite being omniscient, omnipotent and all the fictitious rest of it, needs a helping hand if he is to get into people’s heads. It rejoices in repressing the one faculty that has got our species anywhere — the untrammelled, unprejudiced exercise of our limited power of reason.

  All the major religions require submission. Islam, indeed, is defined as total submission. Its physical expression is prostration. Five times a day a devout Muslim kneels and then leans forward to touch his face to the ground. That’s a lot of self-abasement.

  The gesture resembles the kowtow required of anyone entering the presence of the Chinese emperors of old. It was wise to kowtow. The emperor was effectively a god, but a god who was undeniably there and undeniably capable of wrath. The inventiveness of Chinese methods of slow execution for anyone who displeased the emperor was remarkable.

  The wrath of god, for very good reason, is never seen. Those things that used to be considered expressions of that wrath — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like — have long been shown to be both explicable by rational enquiry and indiscriminate in whom they choose to destroy. But fortunately there have been plenty of people down the ages who were able to interpret what god might get angry about and who remain happy to take on the responsibility of exacting vengeance on his behalf.

  In 2005 a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons depicting Mohammed. Nothing much happened. A few Danish Muslims protested and tried to draw the world’s attention to what they considered to be blasphemy. One of the few effects this achieved was to cause the cartoons to be republished in over fifty countries. At no stage did Mohammed demonstrate his anger. But four months later thousands of people did. The Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran were set on fire. The Danish embassy in Pakistan was bombed. A Pakistani student in Berlin was arrested as he entered the building of Die Welt newspaper carrying a large knife. The student admitted his intention to kill the editor. Over 100 people died as a result of worldwide protests.

  The people who refused to bow to these threats, who did not prostrate themselves in fear, did a brave thing and a right thing, the thing that has enabled humankind to advance some way from the swamp of superstition and religious tyranny. That roll of honour did not include many leaders of democratic countries whose constitutions are founded on freedom of speech. Their standard diplomatic line was to declare that they were all for freedom of speech, but … It doesn’t matter what followed the but. If you’re for freedom of speech, you’re for freedom of speech. Any but means you’re not.

  It also did not include the heads of other churches. When the mobs and several rabid imams were advocating violence and threatening the lives of civilians, the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope refused to condemn them. They condemned the cartoons. For god’s sake.

  12

  Keep being afraid

  On one side of Orchard Lane lay Adastra Park. I spent a large chunk of my childhood there with a mob of other boys, playing endless games of football, cricket and pug. Pug was a hunting game without rules. It took place in the winding sunken stream at the bottom end of the park. There were no teams, though sometimes you would forge, and then break, alliances. The aim was simply to shoot someone.

  Your weapon was a whippy stick, to the end of which you moulded a lump of wet clay. The key to success lay in the clay. Too big or too wet a lump and as you drew back the stick to flick it the lump would disintegrate behind you. Get it right, however, and it was effectively a bullet with a range of perhaps twenty yards. At ten, it could take an eye out. Nanny would have had a fit, of course, but none of us had nannies. Nor did any of us lose an eye.

  Our games had a single spectator. I have forgotten his name but he was perhaps fifty years old and famously interested in small boys. He even wore the standard issue flasher raincoat, his hands thrust deep into the, presumably bottomless, pockets. He kept his distance when we played pug because in that anarchic game he was a legitimate target. But when we played football and one team took off their shirts in order to become ‘skins’ he hovered closer. But he was a nervous man, a jitterer. It was said that he was a former schoolteacher, driven to breakdown by his classes. They used to spike the board-rubber with live match-heads, or so the story went. Anyway, he was timorous and harmless. He merely lurked and watched. Sometimes we’d wave to him.

  When we grew a little older, however, and we had more conscious an understanding of his inclinations, we persecuted him. The trick was for one boy to act as bait, peeling off shirt or jeans, while others crept round behind him. Then we’d leap from the bushes roaring. The poor sod would literally jump with terror. He’d stammer, gibber and run, a hopeless oldman run. We’d laugh. I’m not proud of it now.

  In one way he’d have a much better time of things today. There would be far fewer mobs of unsupervised boys to scare him. And there would be a greater chance of his stalking a solitary boy and perhaps befriending him. But in another way he’d have it tougher. Adults would be much more likely to trail him, to report him to the police, or even to persecute him themselves. And he might find his name and photo in the papers with the worst of all possible epithets attached. He’d be a paedophile. In Great Britain the word has become so familiar that it is abbreviated to paedo.

 
I doubt my parents knew the word. I also doubt that there were any more, or any fewer, paedophiles around when I was a kid than today. All that has changed is their profile. And that profile has been changed by the media and politics.

  The British Government wants to acquire greater powers to monitor private communications without a warrant. Here is how Home Secretary Theresa May defends the proposed legislation:

  Right now, the police and security agencies use information from phone records to solve crime and keep us safe. Looking at who a suspect talks to can lead the police to other criminals. Whole paedophile rings, criminal conspiracies and terrorist plots can then be smashed. Data like this has already helped lock away murderer Ian Huntley. It helped catch the gangland thugs who gunned down Rhys Jones. Last year, police smashed a major international child pornography website based in Lincolnshire. They then used internet data analysis to find other suspected paedophiles. Such data has been used in every security service terrorism investigation and 95 per cent of serious organized crime investigations over the last ten years … As Home Secretary I have a responsibility to keep the British public safe. That is exactly what I intend to do.

  Nice of her, of course, but bullshit. Ms May can no more keep the British public safe than I can win the Olympic 100 metres.

  The British public has never been safe. Safe means free from danger and no one is free from danger until he or she is dead. Dangers abound. There is a good chance that while you read this chapter at least one member of the British public will die on British roads. Nor is the British public safe at home. Home bristles with mortal threats: stairs, stoves, light sockets, toasters, stepladders — they all kill. Pyjamas too. Several Brits a year slip both of their legs into one leg of their pyjamas, stand up, fall down, bang their heads and die. The lavatory is more lethal still. Dozens suffer cardiac arrests while straining at stool. Dying peacefully at home, they call it.

  But in terms of relative safety, the great British public has never been safer. They live longer than they ever have. Therefore there must be fewer threats to their wellbeing. Yet it is a curious truth of human nature that perceived dangers multiply as actual dangers decrease. The British public is more timorous today in its peace and prosperity than it was in 1940, when it was far poorer and threatened with a brutal invasion. It’s as though we are evolutionarily inclined to distrust calm. The less threatened we are, the more we seek threats.

  People in power are only too happy to supply those threats. Ms May is ostensibly reassuring the public. Fear not, my little chickadees, she says, I shall fold you all to my capacious breast and guard you from the nasties, from terrorist plots, from criminal conspiracies, from whole (as opposed to partial) paedophile rings (rings?). Actually she is deliberately scaring the public.

  Terrorists, paedophiles and criminal conspiracies exist. But relatively speaking they are insignificant. Cars kill more Brits every year than terrorists have managed to kill in the last century. (And the greatest cause of premature deaths in the twentieth century, as it happens, and by a factor of several thousand, was governments waging war. Rationally, if Ms May truly wished to keep the public safe she should do everything possible to diminish rather than bolster the power of the state.)

  Ms May is effectively invoking bogeymen. Doing so serves her interest because it is a truth as old as mankind that people in power are there because they like power and are keen to get more of it. A scared public is more likely to grant it.

  In New Zealand we have less to fear than probably any people on earth. Our soil is fertile, our society democratic, our cops honest and our weather agreeable. We do have one mildly poisonous native spider but it is a timid creature and easily avoided. Otherwise the threats to our wellbeing are negligible. But fear can still be roused.

  Fifteen years ago Winston Peters evoked the threat of an Asian takeover of New Zealand through immigration. Thus he tapped into and fostered xenophobia, our instinctive fear of otherness. The gambit was hateful and divisive. It was also bullshit. Asian immigrants, like most immigrants, tend to work hard to forge a new life. And their children assimilate with ease into the society in which they are born. The process is socially refreshing, as demonstrated by the various immigrant groups that created the United States.

  But the bullshit worked. Fear got Peters and a gaggle of ineffective followers into Parliament. Whereupon they did nothing about immigration because it wasn’t a problem.

  The political exploitation of fear follows the pattern of commercial advertising. It stokes an emotion, creates the perception of a need, then offers a way to gratify that need. So, for example, in the early 1990s the National Party ran television advertisements in which the portrait of some leering ill-shaven thug was erased as if by a rubber. The accompanying slogan was ‘Rub out the crim’. The none too subtle implication being that if people voted National then crime would disappear. They did, of course, and it didn’t, of course. But the arousal of fear in voters, most of whose lives were quite unaffected by crime, had done the trick.

  13

  Bad news isn’t bad news

  Do you remember the stockings? Did you even buy a pair at the airport, perhaps? They were supposed to stop your legs swelling and the veins in them blocking or bursting. The malady was known as deep vein thrombosis, abbreviated from familiarity to DVT, and you were supposed to contract it when you took a long-haul flight. Why going up in the air did this to your legs (though not to your arms) was never made plain. But a decade ago it received considerable coverage and for a while was considered a threat to our wellbeing.

  And then, somehow, it disappeared. As far as I know planes didn’t change and neither did legs or the veins inside them, but it seemed that one no longer threatened the other. No one to my knowledge announced that the threat had been warded off, or that the medical science, if there ever was any, had been wrong. The idea of DVT just receded like the tide, leaving the strand littered with stockings out of which someone had made money.

  At 11.59 p.m. on 31 December 1999 I was walking along Harmans Road with Pete, Lois and three fine dogs. All the dogs are now dead, rest their bones. The night was damp and cloudy. We were going from my place to Pete and Lois’s because I’d run out of booze with which to toast the new millennium. But we timed it wrong. The global odometer performed its big tick while we were walking past some insignificant pine trees. (Apt really, because the significance of the moment was spurious. The universe knows as little of our efforts to tame it with a calendar as dogs do. The millennial moment was just another arbitrary point on time’s unimaginable continuum.)

  Anyway, ships’ sirens sounded. Fireworks went off. We could vaguely hear cheers and singing from the crowd in the port far below. But the three of us looked upwards. We half-hoped to see planes spiralling to earth, because their ill-programmed computers were unable to cope with the change of prefix from 19 to 20. No planes came down, of course. Indeed as far as I am aware no computer systems anywhere crashed. Either Y2K had been averted by the hordes of consultants who scurried around fixing things in exchange for great wads of propitiatory cash, or it had been a myth.

  I doubt that either Y2K or DVT was deliberately generated to deceive. Most things are never meant. I suspect that each arose as a genuine question, a possibility of a threat that found its way into the media and gained purchase in the collective mind. What they have in common is technology. And what they both latched onto was a latent fear, a suspicion, that we’ve got above ourselves, that we’ve been a bit too clever for our own good, and that retribution is due. We’ve perverted the world and the world will strike back. We’ve stolen fire from the gods and the gods will strike back. We’ve subverted the natural order, and the natural order will strike back. We’ve flown too close to the sun.

  This fear seems an ancient one, as the myths alluded to suggest. It is, I think, an expression of perceived, or perhaps merely sensed, vulnerability. The ease of my existence is entirely dependent on technology that I do not understand and cannot replic
ate or repair. My car’s engine is a mystery, my computer even more so. I don’t know how to make metal. I couldn’t spin cotton into cloth. Though I can read and write, I have less practical skill, less ability to survive in a raw world, than my remote ancestors who hunted and gathered.

  This renders me vulnerable and I sense that vulnerability in a wordless bit of the brain, the same bit of the brain that made my ancestors aware that they were dependent on things that lay similarly beyond their understanding and control. If the seasons failed, they starved. So they did what the juju man advised and sacrificed a goat. I just pay the consultant, or buy stockings. But when something comes along to prompt that sense of vulnerability I have to make a conscious decision to judge it on its likely merits rather than to be fearful.

  And such a thing comes along with great frequency because the media are keen to bring it to us. The media today are ubiquitous. In our cities it is now hard to escape a screen. They’re in our houses, our workplaces and our pockets, in waiting rooms and airports and even in giant form out on the street overlooking our paltry day-to-dayness. And any sort of threat to our wellbeing will make us look at them.

  As scare stories, swine flu and bird flu could not have been bettered. The suggestion that a virus had mutated so horrifically that it had crossed ‘the species barrier’ dug deep into the nervous psyche. No matter that viruses constantly mutate. No matter that plenty of other things cross the species barrier. Here, it seemed, was the natural world taking revenge for us buggering it about. It felt fitting. Here was the plague again, here perhaps was the end of days. As a local virologist put it with regard to bird flu striking this country, ‘It’s not if, but when.’ Though we are still, as it happens, waiting.