'Eft, 'Ight!

I well remember the day when it was definitely proven that I knew better than my father, at the great age of 17. We were sailing back to Cornwall from Ireland, in those happy days before fancy electronics, with only a compass and a patent log as navigational aids, in a 27’ sloop. Walker’s patent log came out of its wooden box, smelling of the special oil with which it was lubricated through a hole in the dial; it was fixed to its little plate on the taffrail, and its spinner was hooked to the revolving disc at the back of it, and solemnly streamed as we made our departure.

So we knew that we were somewhere in the general vicinity of the Scilly Isles or Land’s End, but the visibility was not great. A cliff with a tower on it appeared. “Ah, there’s St Martin’s Daymark, very good!” said Dad, mainly because that’s what he expected it to be. He was on the tiller, and I had the advantage of having studied the chart. “Doesn’t look like St Martin’s Daymark to me!”  And I was right! The tower turned out to be in Cornwall rather than the Scillies, which meant that we had to turn right rather than left. Such choices make a huge difference when one is in a small sailing boat off Land’s End!

I mention this not to blow my own trumpet, but by way of reiterating the truism that youngsters always delight in knowing better than their seniors, and sometimes they may even be right!  Age has its disadvantages, especially when it comes to dealing with preconceptions at a time of rapid change. Mind you a teenager today would probably just take out his smart phone to see where he was, if there was any doubt about it. All you need is the right technology man! So, mastering that, they reckon to be away ahead of the game. Never mind that old stuff about experience and tradition; the machine will keep you right!

For a modern person, the main preoccupation seems to be to get ahold of the right technology for the job in hand. I’m going to do a spot of building here on Sherkin Island  this summer, and here I am digging the footings, by hand! Where's the digger? When I mooted the notion to the guy in the building supplies place that it might not be necessary to have a big truck with a crane on it to deliver some blocks, he looked at me as though I had two heads. It’s rather the same story when I mention to some people that I have no car.

No digger!

If you take the odd break from technology, you will find out to what extent we tend to be conditioned by whatever technology we use. Perhaps it’s partly because you nearly have to use a car to get anywhere these days, and then immediately you must choose one side of the road or the other, that progressive folk in Ireland long for a proper left/right divide in our politics. The lefties are hoping the two ‘right-wing’ parties will have to get together to form a government, so that they can form the opposition, and when in due course it comes to the delightful business of throwing the next government out….

The fact that you really do have to choose one side of the road or the other, if you’re going anywhere by car, does make driving a pretty good image for politics. Democracy after all is a technology, a mechanism for undertaking tasks in common, like the building of roads, and agreeing regulation for their use, a matter that admittedly can assume huge proportions if there happens to be thousands of refugees on them! The word democracy means rule by a demos, that is a people who have more or less common assumptions and objectives. The more they agree and in fact have an underlying love for each other and for life in general, even when they quarrel, the better it works and the  less regulation is required.

Meanwhile, in this world where brotherhood remains aspirational, if you want to engage in politics, you must indeed choose one side or the other, either going to the left or the right. Which way you turn is a matter of where you want to get to, or to get away from. The young are liable to want to turn in the opposite direction to their parents, just to prove they’re their own people, and that more than anything else sets the tone for many people’s politics. My Dad had a saying about anyone under 25 who was not left-wing having no heart, and anyone over 40 who was not right-wing having no head; but it can take more than 25 years to get over the need to react to father!

All this is compatible with love, or at least with travelling in a loving way. But where love fails, one must fall back on regulation, on laws, on force. Whichever side of the political road you are on, if you leave love out, depending more and more on brute force as you go on, you will end up in a similar, nasty, place, commonly known as Hell; witness Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

It would seem that the place for a sane man would need to be on the left in Nazi Germany, and on the right in Soviet Russia. The important thing is to realise that the left/right thing, though it may be a necessary part of the practise of politics, is far from absolute, and will be irrelevant when we arrive home!

A sailing man like myself is more likely to take the line that if other drivers and the cops are getting even madder than usual, the best thing is to leave the high-road altogether, hoist sail and take to the seas. I cannot claim that this is necessarily heroic. It just doesn’t do to simply wash one’s hands of either politics or religion; they are both inescapable parts of what it is to be human.

Generally we must get along with other people as best we can, so there’s politics for you, with its laws and its compromises. Then there are absolute, transcendent truths in the world. For example, however one travels, patience and respect for others are good, while careering madly on one’s way with utter disregard for them is bad. Such truths, I would suggest, belong essentially to the religious dimension of life; religion when it is about anything worthwhile is about cultivating truth and love. People without any religious language are inclined to end up thinking and acting religiously in the language of politics, as if this could mediate transcendent truth, and they do nearly as much harm as those who act politically in the name of religion, having no hold on the real thing. 

If only get we can the right relationship between the two sorted out, we will have a lot less trouble on our hands. I do not mean to divide them into completely separate compartments. The embarrassing fact (to our secular society) is that the managerial and regulatory business of politics becomes destructive when it loses its basis in truth and love, inevitably pitting people against each other. One would hardly think, from the media coverage, that the outgoing Irish Government's crushing defeat had anything at all to do with its stance on abortion and marriage, though I can think of quite a few voters who turned against it precisely on these grounds.

While it is true that religion has the primacy, whether this is acknowledged or not, it must respect the polis and its autonomy, always remembering that our grasp of absolute and transcendent truth is very much a work in progress. Meanwhile it is good that some people, mystics, hermits, sailors, head off into the blue, trying to get a better handle on it. As one leaves the coast behind, one gets the land into a truer perspective!

Sailing into the Blue.