Someone posted a picture on social media the other day of an old, rural English church. It brought back a memory, a sliver of light, a breath of a past long gone. As a teenager, I used to rub the brasses in such places and stick angels and knights as guardians up on my bedroom wall, cycling between one remote location and the next. Great, solid stone walls, as sturdy as a workman’s boot and cool, slightly musty odours.
Often, there was a brief history of the place, posted up somewhere for the occasional visitor to look at, detailing how the Saxons had built the original structure, rough hands hewing stone – a labour of love – to additions in the medieval period. One imagined medieval folk, shawled or bearded, huddled together for warmth, standing awkwardly and bowing their heads as the priest intoned the Paternoster or the Agnus Dei. The thread of belief, the eternality of faith, handed down over generations.
Some buildings seem to possess a secret life of their own. I once found myself in a tiny, anonymous church in Paris, the statue of the Madonna with inclined head – the ancient symbol of motherly love – carefully preserved and obviously looked after. Candles illuminated the building and plainsong chants from some hidden recording system filled the space. The few people in the place spoke in hushed tones and the aura of peace almost tangible. I was reminded of Bruckner’s motet “Locus Iste”.
Some come effortlessly to faith, others do not and fill their minds with other, less comfortable pilgrimages but most people, at some time in their lives, look for or imagine the existence of the transcendent. Some look to science – that elusive, slippery mistress – with final solutions eluding the grasp of the cleverest as she dangles the next tiny carrot in front of them. Others love the sea of politics, craven and inconsistent, their faith in the society that they want to create buttressed only by the crumbling chalk of political affiliation. They protest, often fruitlessly, sheltered by the comforting arms of the very democracy they are so anxious to overthrow, with all its laws and free speech, waving their flags, and chanting antiphonally like coarse medieval peasants.
Some, more theatrically minded, love ritual and dressing both themselves and their gods in costumes; others still pursue the unattainable nirvana.
Philip Larkin’s detachment in his slightly cynical poem ‘Church Going’ suggests that the luxury of belief is transitory and ephemeral and one day, we will all grow up and grow out of such foolishness, leaving skeletons behind. Yet, whether we realise it or not, the golden threads are still with us, reaching back for millennia.
If we have any kind of moral compass, we all condemn slaughter of innocents, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria or anywhere else in the world where evil seeks to triumph.
I think the narrative has shifted since 7/10, antisemitism and antizionism – in practice there is little difference – has escalated worldwide which is obvious to all. At the risk of sounding deranged, if we do believe in God, Hashem but not the salvific power of one they call Allah, then His enemies show their hand from time to time and this is such a time as it was in Nazi Germany in 1938-9. The nations will indeed one day be weighed in the balance and many whether by reason of tolerance, thinly disguised as laissez-faire, inertia or active support for the extremists who scream ‘from the river to the sea’ in other words the destruction of Israel, will be found wanting. How much more clearly must the writing be written on the wall? The world is entering a dark place and persecution of the Jews is just the tip of a larger, dirtier iceberg. Antisemitism, one of the earliest and most effective weapons in a satanic arsenal, in our day has been reborn within a cauldron of cultural Marxism fed by liberal universities, extreme left wing socialism calling for the tearing down of democratic institutions and an avalanche of propaganda on social media upon which the masses with neither proper education nor the faculty of reason feed so hungrily. We are judged on who we support, not what we believe, thus many are cowed into silence.
In the preface to the first edition of one of her signature works, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt, a German Jewess and pre-eminent 20th century philosopher who personally experienced Nazi horror and who knew of Stalin’s malevolent, murderous activities, presciently observed:
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity.”
“Progressivism” is the antithesis of “liberalism,” The latter encourages calm, reasonable debate in the face of disagreement, the former relies on shouting and intimidation to get what it wants. Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the inherent rights of the individual, not arbitrary government licensed “privileges” which can so easily be revoked, the liberty to express a controversial point of view without fear, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.
“Progressivism” in its current incarnation is, at its most charitable, a mental disorder originating in a boiling stew of irrepressible narcissism, unreasoning hate, socio and psychopathology, delusion, intolerance, amorality and depravity.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap. It has taken decades for us to come to this – but, looking back – the pathway, somewhat overgrown, is visible if we care to look for it.
At the time of the late Walter Hamilton, Head Master of my old school, we, as is common with many public schools, had a nickname for him. We called him The Bodger. His wife was Ma Bodger. I’m not sure if people still do this; perhaps the modern world has changed the language of spotty, overprivileged adolescent boys. I once won a prize for French Literature and had to go to the Bodger’s study to have him sign my prize – a book of English short stories. Creaking with oak and sherry, he began by asking me if I could translate ‘in the language of the Gauls’ into Latin. I recall shaking with fear, since one was only ever invited into his great Victorian School House study for one of two reasons – either a commendation of some kind, or a ‘beating’. One was not told until one’s arrival. The Head of the Levée – in other words, the Head Boy, had the power to drag you out of lessons without explanation and accompanied me. Walter H was not as fond of beating boys as most of his predecessors, nevertheless my mind went totally blank and I forbore to mention that I had won a prize for French, thus Latin was not something I was especially good at. He, of course, was, having won multiple prizes for classics. The inscription, which I still have somewhere, read ‘in lingua Gallica’, written in his quite beautiful classical handwriting with a gold Parker fountain pen. Strange, the things one remembers but since in my declining years I collect fine writing instruments, perhaps not so strange after all. He later retired to become Master of a Cambridge college at which, years later I found myself passing the port at High Table.
The word ‘bodger’ has a different meaning – at least in 20th century parlance. It refers to someone like myself who, with the best will in the world has no aptitude for DIY yet is supposed to accomplish miracles when asked to do so. Jobs attempted are thus ‘bodged’. Surfaces are inadequately primed, paint trails run like tears down a window frame, floors unaccountably resemble a Jackson Pollock. I have hands like violin cases, or possibly hooves, am unable to follow a plumb line and find the intricacies of interior decoration beyond me. I visit home décor superstores and marvel at the electrical gadgetry, designed to make my life easier with a mixture of disbelief and bewilderment. All of this is because, having a wife with an inherited ancient apartment, untouched for well over half a century has asked me to help make it fit for human habitation. Even the spiders have died. The main fuses are made of porcelain and screw into a dark black fusebox like light bulbs with Russian inscriptions. I swear the plumbing pipework is made of lead. A gigantic cast iron bath rubs shoulders with a tiny sink. The boiler – no longer operational – is the size of a V12 engine and its switchgear appears to be made of Bakelite from which 1940s era telephones were made. When Communist era window panes are knocked, a shower of old putty hits the internal surface, filling a cavity over an inch thick; a Soviet answer to double glazing. There is cheerful talk of mice, creeping skyward to find morsels.
Despair is not a feeling I normally share with John Bunyan, yet his giant looms large. Some, it would seem, relish the challenge. Curiously, I have discovered the art of deception. If one can cover up, screw down, paint over, the world will never know what lies beneath. But, I will. The word ‘sincere’ comes from the Italian ‘sin cera’ meaning ‘without wax’. Sculptors, bodgers, perhaps, covered their mistakes in marble with wax so as long as people saw from a distance, or the temperature did not rise, all was superficially well.
All of the above will not make me a better handyman but at least I’ve got the whole thing off my chest, thus feel better about bodging. A little.
The novelist Jeffrey Archer once held a competition to find the best short story of exactly 100 words.
This was my attempt on a wet January day.
A Love Story.
Paolo and Eva with her twin Francesca lived in a tiny Calabrian village. Paolo became the village carpenter and when they were eighteen, Paolo and Eva carved their initials on an ancient olive tree. They married one month later. Francesca left to train as a nurse in Naples. Years later, Eva was dying of cancer. Francesca came home, nursing her twin until the end. Paolo and Francesca married a year later and revisited the old olive tree. The carving was intact. Except for the E where a piece of bark had broken off and it looked exactly like an F.
Since 9/11 we all had to get up to speed fast with a new threat when Osama Bin Laden’s gruesome attack on United States soil changed the world for ever. We learned the vocabulary of Islam. We learned the meanings of words and why their primary motivations represented a new gate of Vienna for Europe and the West.
It’s not without significance that OBL’s ‘letter to America’ resurfaced recently, inflaming tensions across the globe, legitimising anti-Zionist rhetoric – flimsy smoke and mirrors for naked and unrestrained antisemitism. To whom does he address his remarks? Mostly to the young of America; the disaffected, the impressionable, the easily led. Who does he blame? On page one of the eight-page document, we read the following:
“Your former president warned you previously about the devastating Jewish control of capital and about a day that would come when it would enslave you; it has happened…”
He goes on to assert:
“Palestine has been under occupation for decades, and none of your presidents talked about it until after September 11 when Bush realised that your oppression and the tyranny against us were part of the reason for the attack. Then he talked about the necessity for two states. Obama is trying to address the issue with the same solutions suggested by his predecessor; they are quilting fruitless solutions (sic) not of concern to us. If you want a real settlement that guarantees your security in your country and safeguards your economy from being depleted in a manner similar to our war of attrition against the Soviet Union, then you have to implement a roadmap that returns the Palestine land to us, all of it, from the sea to the river, it is an Islamic land not subject to being traded or granted to any party.”
So, there we have it. The underlying reason for all the screaming and gibbering in cities all over the world. We’ve all seen the flag-waving, sheeplike chanting and taken notes about who is there and why, thus those who still believe a two state solution is possible under current scenarios are gravely mistaken. A call for an ‘end to occupation’, ‘jihad’, ‘from the river to the sea’, ‘apartheid state’, etc are all coded messages demanding the destruction of the state of Israel, by, it would seem, any means possible. This simply isn’t going to happen. The only weapons the general public has is either to simply ignore those who attempt to influence public opinion on the streets, by social media or any other method. Or, to start a civil war. The more they are listened to, the wilder the rhetoric from mosques and street activists, moreover some are actually beginning to believe that their actions will bring about the end of the ‘Zionist entity’. One deluded man preaching recently to a large crowd asserted that ‘Jesus was a Muslim’. to enthusiastic cheers. These people don’t speak for me and probably large numbers like me around the world, who were fortunate in being able to imbibe democracy with their mother’s milk. I find myself wondering to what percentage of – shall we say – ordinary Muslims this kind of nonsense does appeal.
We only have to listen to a few Friday sermons from mosques in the UK, the US and the Gulf states to understand how people are being relentlessly manipulated, lied to and whipped into a frenzy of hatred for the Jews, their land and their people.
And yet, the British police, caught between rocks and hard places, have had one hand tied behind their backs since the law is applied translucently and people can, it would appear, scream whatever offensive chants they like with relatively little fear of either arrest or conviction.
Since the beginnings of Islam, the term ‘jihad’, derived from the Arabic root jahada, meaning “to exert strength and effort, to use all means in order to accomplish a task” has been used. Islamic texts show that it was used most particularly in time of war against the Jews. In its expanded sense, it can be fighting the enemies of Islam, as well as adhering to religious teachings, enjoining good and forbidding evil. The peaceful sense of “efforts towards the moral uplift of society or towards the spread of Islam” can be known as “jihad of the tongue” or “jihad of the pen”, as opposed to “jihad of the sword”. Its use in Islamic jurisprudence is mostly in the latter, warlike sense, which is how most Salafists view it. Indeed, it is transparently obvious that this is its plain meaning to those who chant it at full volume with tedious repetition on rallies and marches.
The attack on October 7th bears greater comparison with Mohammed’s massacre of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza in 627 than with the Holocaust. In both cases, Jews were mercilessly slaughtered, people were beheaded and women and children taken as slaves – in our day, hostages.
We have turned loose demons among us.
And, finally, a ceasefire has been agreed to exchange hostages with prisoners, three Palestinians for one Israeli hostage, together with humanitarian aid to be supplied to Gazan civilians – unless Hamas steals it first. The next few days will show without doubt who is sincere and who is the father of lies. Will it hold? I’m not betting the trust fund on it.
Those who know me may have been surprised that I have not written about the latest explosion of violence in the land of Israel. In truth, I have been appalled into silence this past week, never having seen anything like this in my lifetime and paralleled only by the grim remnants of the Holocaust. You’ll be aware that I am not a Jew and I’m not a citizen of Israel. I’ve lived there – more than once – and the place burrows deep into my soul. I count Jews and Israeli Arabs, Muslim and Christian, amongst my many friends there. I know the Biblical narratives, Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim. Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. I know a little history, from the Kings, the Prophets to the Romans, the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans. I know about the birth of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Picot and the British Mandate, May 14, 1948, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur six years later, the two major intifadas and the Gaza giveaway in 2005. I know about the loss of life, from flare-ups in Judea and Samaria, to bombings, stabbings and suicide attacks on the Jerusalem Light Railway. Who cares? Humanity certainly should and does – and I’m a human being.
The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered by Hamas a week ago in sovereign Israel were human beings too.
Those who did it to them barely qualify as such. and the Jews were left with no choice but to root out and excise the festering sore on their border.
Imagine what kind of irrational and ethical contortions are required to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival, indiscriminate mass slaughter in a kibbutz, taking scores of hostages including the elderly and young children, or actually beheading a child and setting fire to it. Depravity is a barely sufficient word. To even join a conversation about these appalling, disgraceful and – yes – evil acts with a rehearsed retort about territorial ‘rights’ or Gaza being an “open-air prison” stinks of moral bankruptcy.
If you scream and gibber about your land, your dignity, your rights, oppression and poverty brought about by those whom you elected to govern you but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children then I don’t have to listen to your reasons.
When the video footage, photographs and stories of last Saturday’s carnage come not from “Israeli propaganda” but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how are we to read anything else into it but that the invader wants to claim credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.
So, if you besieged the Israeli Embassy in London, calling for genocide; if you choked cities worldwide with Palestinian flags and chants of ‘from the river to the sea’, if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against “apartheid Israel”; if you sang along to “gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House or hung a “one settler, one bullet” Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you’re telling me loud and clear who you are.
In Sydney, a child wearing a keffiyeh in the crowd.
Civilisation is a slow growing plant. It’s real and grows despite the poisonous moral relativism so carefully nurtured by humanities departments of Western universities who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is indicative of culturally hip intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions reveals monochromatic intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, together with a fetishisation of victimhood.
It is interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate outrageous arguments in public protests. You couldn’t march in support of education for girls in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, or gay rights in Kuwait. The Ayatollahs of Iran don’t allow women to protest the hijab there. But London, New York, and most of Europe allow marches where people actively call for genocide under the umbrella of lawful protest and free speech and even in places where they do not, such as France, the protesters ride rough-shod over the law and gather anyway.
Perhaps when the dust has settled we should examine the insidious links between leftism and antisemitism, plus the strange cross-linkages such as cultural Marxism, BLM, critical race theory, white apologetics, LGBTQ+ rights – the list keeps getting longer and, by the way, the dripping poison has found its way into classrooms for children as young as five. Historically, political parties have embraced multiculturalism and diversity, welcoming those with a very different worldview into their towns and cities and expected them to quietly assimilate when the reality was that many abused their freedoms under the guise of religion and stood alongside the worst human-rights abusers in the Middle East. I find myself wondering if all these manifestations are in some way connected, tentacles reaching back to one malevolent head. Perhaps you know what I mean.
This has nothing to do with the existence or not of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred – that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. The great delusion has persisted over millennia and this is just one more surfacing of the river of Babylon. Every time we think it has been defeated and healed, some monstrous dragon claws it open again. Perhaps some need reminding that antisemitism is unique, a paranoid and murderous derangement of the mind directed at the Jewish people alone.
Hamas aren’t in hiding. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh, safely in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved.
His subordinates in Gaza, on the other hand, hide behind the petticoats of women in schools, mosques and hospitals. They, having been bankrolled by Iran, created a web of tunnels – a city under a city, the length of the London Underground from which they manufacture chaos. They have declared a war which is unwinnable. It is these that the IDF must locate and destroy.
In her oral autobiography, Golda Meir once said “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs (or better, Islamists), for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
So, it’s true. Must be, if it’s in the Daily Telegraph. No more getting soaked on Tottenham Court Road. Spooks are working from home in spite of Government fears of increased vulnerability to attack by those up to no good. We’re all a bit paranoid these days. Oh, yes. We know who you are. China. The Red Peril. Led by a demagogue who pays into North Korea’s piggy bank. Especially because of all that sabre rattling off Taiwanese shores, where 90% of the world’s most advanced computer chips are made, buying up half of Africa by lending them money they can’t repay and being far too over-represented at British universities because they pay more than the lad from Dagenham with four A*s at A level who wants to be a vet. Chinese infiltration fear has spread like the measles and shows no sign of abating in spite of my own modest attempts to destabilise the Chinese economy by never buying another item of clothing that says ‘Made in China’ on the label. I’m even getting spooked by eating Peking Duck. Spying through LinkedIn – how easy is it to hack a home broadband connection – and headhunting for suitably disaffected types amenable to a spot of extra cash, especially if they work from home for Government organisations with a lot of sensitive material. Has MI5 been compromised? The Secret Service? Is Bond Beijing’s poodle? The people need to know. Does James Bond work from home?
Imagine the opening scene from the next Bond film.
Scene: a suburban spare bedroom. Aston Martin poster on the wall. A mobile phone rings. James Bond appears, wearing jogging bottoms and an old T-shirt with ‘I Love MI5″ written on it.
Bond: “Hello?”
M: “007, we’ve got a global emergency. An evil supervillain has acquired a weapon that could destroy the whole of the Western world – and, unless we accede to his nefarious demands, he’s going to launch it from his remote secret lair in Siberia. You must get out there immediately.”
Bond: “Sorry, M, no can do. You know I work from home these days. Those endless punch-ups with henchmen on the roofs of speeding trains were terrible for my work-life balance.”
M: “But 007, this could be the end of civilisation as we know it. Only you can stop him.”
Bond: “But I’ve got the school run at 3.30. I can’t possibly get to Siberia and back by then. Especially not now I’ve traded in my Aston Martin for a Nissan Leaf to avoid the congestion charge.”
M: “Please, 007. It’s desperately urgent. The evil supervillain says we’ve got precisely one week before he unleashes his deadly weapon.”
Bond: “A week? In that case, I definitely can’t do it. I only work four days a week now. On Fridays I play golf with Q.. Cheerio.”
Beijing was, of course listening, having tapped Bond’s phone, and breathes a sigh of relief.
With thanks to the Telegraph. Sleep sound, everyone.
Lewis Carroll’s enchanting story for children is over 150 years old. From its earliest release, speculation has swirled around the curious inhabitants of Wonderland, from a caterpillar who smokes tobacco – possibly – through a water pipe, to croquet played with flamingos as mallets and the disputatious Humpty Dumpty. One of the consequences of drug use is a disconnect from reality; as Alice eats the mushrooms her reality shrinks and grows so many have supposed that the celibate Oxford mathematician had experimented with psilocybins or perhaps laudanum and his mind flew in ever-widening circles as a result. One consequence may therefore have been the solemn and utterly vapid pronouncements of the overblown talking head that is Humpty Dumpty. “When I use a word,’ (as distinct from when others use the same word) Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.
The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
Lewis Carroll would have groaned with head in hands had he seen what we see in our day, how language has been systematically wrung out and mangled so words like sex and gender mean exactly what some people want them to mean, no more and no less. The final part of the dialogue is the most significant – the outcome of a war of words is that the side who wins becomes master. We have seen this at its most crystalline in the trans war. Disagreement is stifled, indeed worse, sanctions, often severe are applied against the disbelievers. People have been de-platformed, lost jobs, had reputations ruined and appalling threats made against them, all because of words. Why is this so important? There is a statue of Orwell outside Broadcasting House in London. On the wall behind it is inscribed a quote from an unused preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Those who have retained some semblance of sanity in the TERF wars must not shrink from telling the trans lobby what it does not want to hear. XX or XY just…is; the biology is irrefutable without apology and regardless of feelings. If you want to think of yourself as a XX woman when you are really an XY man, you are at liberty to do so. Don’t expect me to pander to your delusions by acknowledging you as such with this or that pronoun. We descend into chaos if we follow the logic of the mother whose son identified as a cat and was refused treatment by a vet. She threatened to sue.
I’m not a partisan animal when it comes to politics and have no dog in the 2024 US election fight. But, justice has to be served, as blind as she is. Words, millions of them have been and will be spoken over the Trump indictments over the next few months. The Democrats are desperate to steamroller the proceedings to get a conviction before the Republican choice for President is made. Of the eight other candidates, Trump currently leads in the polls by a country mile, not even bothering to turn up to debate in Wisconsin the other night, preferring instead a one-on-one with Tucker Carlson. If they convict in time, Trump cannot stand again and the blues know that he will be a formidable opponent if they fail. Alan Dershowitz believes that the Trump RICO case or indeed any of the other indictments he faces cannot in the interests of justice be brought to trial in time. Slam dunk? Not a chance – the current administration allegedly wants to muzzle the potential opposition using judicial partisanship which is a travesty of democracy. In addition, the Democrats howl and gibber about what they have called a ‘smoking gun’ – the allegation that Trump tried to influence the count in Georgia. Trump actually said ‘ (I just want to find) 11,780 votes.” He didn’t say ‘concoct’ or ‘make up’ or ‘use illegal electoral padding to find….’ This smoking gun is perhaps a proclamation of innocence, not guilt – ‘just want to find’ quite simply means ‘they are there, we just lost them. Find them.’
Words mean exactly what we want them to mean. Be careful, America.
No tickets, no scanning, no queues. I would have loved to have been there.
Now the years are rolling by me They are rockin’ evenly I am older than I once was And younger than I’ll be, that’s not unusual. No it isn’t strange After changes upon changes We are more or less the same After changes we are more or less the same.
Modern and postmodern societies, especially in our day of massive social and cultural upheaval, are so overwhelmed by the present, they forget the past. After changes upon changes as crystals layer upon layer, the imperfections change the structure permanently. We may may not quite be more or less the same any more. People are running to keep up. I think it no accident that jogging has become popular – it is a metaphor for life itself.
The media are full of stories about AI, the catastrophists and the opportunists vie for our attention, our approving little clicks or our doom-laden prognostications. Wars and rumours of wars are invading our personal spaces. Genders blur. Wildfires sweep Europe, North America and elsewhere, temperatures soar, homes and livelihoods are destroyed, the old die panting in their beds. Change is everywhere and as Francis Bacon wrote – death being the final milestone of change:
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
Climate change is a clear and present reality and we are told that mankind in his profligacy and ever- increasing mania for progress is responsible so we use terms like ‘net zero’ to reach for the unreachable – a thermodynamic impossibility – propagated by a scientific community both frightened of change and who lack the tools to adequately address the problem without tipping us all into a dystopian dictatorship, enforceable worldwide to drive us into manageable little boxes where the iron gates of politics compel us to not only obey but to love Big Brother. The 1960’s was a watershed, a time when all over the civilised world, the baby was systematically and deliberately thrown out with the bathwater and the roller coaster has been accelerating ever since.
Bacon again:
If we are to achieve things never before accomplished we must employ methods never before attempted.
Was Bacon right? Perhaps not quite. One thing modern man has failed signally to do is to learn the lessons of the past. From whom are such lessons learned? The Elders, perhaps, since with age comes wisdom, a trite little phrase that makes young people laugh. The job of the elderly – I am beginning to count myself in this category – is twofold. First, to be – as George Vaillant put it – ‘a keeper of the meaning’. Being a keeper of the meaning means handing on the values of the past to the future. Age brings the reflection and detachment that allows us to stand back and not be swept along by the mood of the moment or passing fashion or the madness of the crowd. We need such wisdom, especially in an age as fast-paced as ours where huge success can come to people still quite young. Examining the careers of recent iconic figures like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, we discover that at a certain point they too ran out of steam and turned to older mentors who helped steer them through the white-water rapids of their success. Yet, arguably, their very success has been dependent on bad advice since one might argue, for example, that the meteoric rise of social media has done more harm than good, warping the human crystalline structure, especially to the young and impressionable. The second responsibility of the old is – Vaillant again – the maintenance of ‘generativity‘, to invest one’s substance in forms of life and work that will outlive the self. The Jews do this so very well – the old invest in the young, mentoring and teaching them, both in terms of personal contact and involvement in projects designed to empower them to reach higher. The great example of aging in the Torah is Moses who, at the upper limit of sustainable life – 120 years – was still investing in others, still teaching, still encouraging despite the fact that he himself would not see the conclusion to his life’s effort, entry into the Promised Land. We are told that his ‘eye was not dimmed and his natural energy was unabated‘ in other words, he was vigorous in both seeing the need and energetic in supplying it. The Prince of Egypt gave place to the Lawgiver who gave place to the Teacher.
He ‘did not go gentle into that good night’. And, neither will I.
Books are like alcohol. It is unwise to allow a five year old to drink twelve year old whisky. Similarly unwise is to assume that all books are written with benign intentions. They are not. Authors rage against the machine, the Government, the sexual morality in which they feel constricted, the racial straitjacket in which they happened to have been born. They have stories to tell – this is true – but telling them to those who will not understand because they are simply too young is at best, counterproductive and at worst, dangerous.
Many American states have, it seems, donned Crusader armour and headed out to battle.
There is a difference between the Nazis burning Hermann Hesse and restricting access to books in schools that may be psychologically harmful. Books about queer theory, anti colonialism, critical race theory and so on are often polemics on the part of authors – a scattergun protocol that disseminates their opinions without context to a larger number of young, credulous minds. Children believe what they read because grownups are supposed to know.
We confuse what we allow children to read and what adults are allowed to read. And, there is a huge difference.
The legend of the Sibylline Books tells us that in an ancient city, a woman offered to sell its citizens 12 books containing all the knowledge and wisdom in the world, for a high price. They refused, thought her request ridiculous, so she burned half of the books right then and there, and then offered to sell the remaining six for double the price. The citizens laughed at her, uneasily. She burned three, offering the remainder, but doubling the price again. Somewhat reluctantly – times were hard, their troubles seemed to be multiplying – they dismissed her once more. Finally, when there was only one book left, the citizens paid the extraordinary price the woman now asked, and she left them alone, to manage as best they could with one-twelfth of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world.
Books carry knowledge. They are pollinators of the mind, spreading self-replicating ideas through space and time. We forget what a miracle it is that marks on a page or screen can enable communication to the far side of the globe. Yet, our primary directive is to manage knowledge. This isn’t fascist, it’s common sense. Children cannot appreciate laws of gravitation unless they have first been taught Newtonian mechanics.
We belong to an enlightened generation. The Catholic Church for a long time discouraged people from possessing their own copies of the Bible, and approved only a Latin translation that few ordinary people could read. But, the State of Utah has banned the King James Bible in some of its schools because of its violent content. (see the end of the Book of Judges, for example.)
The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez was given the award “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts” Adult novels, capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
In 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which had been published in Italy the previous year, but not at home. His award angered the Soviet authorities so much (the state-controlled media called it an “artistically squalid, malicious work”) that he was forced to turn down the award. The government despised the book as much for what it did not contain – it failed to celebrate the Russian revolution – as what it did: it contained religious overtones and celebrated the worth of the individual. The power-mongers, the rewriters of history – after all, history belongs to the victors, does it not…won again.
The generation in control – parents, governors, politicians, has in some degree lost the mandate to protect. Our children are the very reason that we procreated – to pass on what we knew, and to guide young, fragile intellects. Exploding grenades into their emotional and intellectual lives is unlikely to do anything more productive than tear down and destroy.
johnvagabond 