Chapter III 'On the Fractal Frontier'.

Morning Calm in Alcoutim

It doesn't seem much like it this morning in Alcoutim, but, says Mr Alistair Heath, in words grandly blazoned on the front page of the Daily Telegraph web-site for some considerable period:-

‘We must leave the EU quickly – it is falling apart faster than I thought’

The odd thing about Mr Heath is that he does not appear to realise that the whole world 'is edging ever-closer to the abyss', as he puts it, and the United Kingdom is pretty well to the fore. Actually one might just question the 'ever-closer' bit; human life has forever been on a knife-edge, and arguably it has been a tad closer to the said abyss on a few occasions in the past; however, more than ever, we are all in this together.

Meanwhile, the alternative, which we may presumably describe as 'peace and prosperity', is a difficult project that calls for everyone's active participation. If there is one political entity more than any other which could be said to embody this project, it is that same EU. Both in the intentions of its founders and the spirit in which it functions, it is an effort to build the peace.

I elaborate in the third chapter of my autobiographical musings below; it's my little effort to inspire care for and joy in this wonderful world, while engaging in an old man's serious business, which is enjoying it, with the flowers in full bloom and the birds in full song!

On the goat track to Sanlucar.

 'On the Fractal Frontier' Chapter III.

The short-hand headlines of history, 'the Reformation', 'the French Revolution' tend to be set up as immutable facts of our past, from strange times when some evidently thought it necessary to die for their beliefs. What has, for example, St Thomas More having to lay his head on the executioner's block got to do with us? We tend to consider that we are superior to the lot of them, from our vantage point of enlightenment, and that it is ridiculous to imagine that some such protagonist had a lot more right on his side than others; thus there is little scope for seeing those dramas of the past as ongoing stories in which we too have our parts to play.  It is a surprise when such old conflicts show beneath the surface of the present, the Reformation for example mysteriously re-emerging in terms of contemporary economics and politics, dividing Britain from Europe and to an extent northern from southern Europe, not to mention in our own little microcosm of Ireland, even in simple terms like attitudes to money and financial responsibility.

Meanwhile British upper class Catholics, such as those who support an institution like Downside, sometimes evince a certain inclination to protest their loyalty to the country's Establishment somewhat too loudly. The long years of persecution could be said to have done their job. Despite the fact that England was largely Catholic for a thousand years before the Reformation, Catholics in England seem to sometimes feel the need to prove their loyalty, untainted by regard for nefarious Latin wogs like the Pope or the King of Spain. Still, the school colours were in fact taken from the red and gold of Spain, to which country or its Belgian possession Catholic gentlemen used to send their children for education in penal times. When the (Downside) Community of St Gregory was eventually able to establish itself England, it had to tread carefully indeed; hence just one strand of what one might call the schizophrenia of the place....

However, in the atmosphere of protest that was sweeping the West in the ‘60s, one was inclined to be agin every kind of establishment, British, European, even Western in general. That war in Vietnam was a watershed, for my generation at least. One particularly startling development was that it suddenly became all too plausible to consider that the 'Anglo-Saxon' knights of righteousness, far from being as they imagine themselves to this day as the guarantors of world peace, were in fact themselves about the biggest threat to it! In the knowledge that England had more or less passed the baton across the Atlantic, we who prided ourselves on some genuine enlightenment had to take a new look at the British Empire, not to mention the budding American one!

I was of course greatly abetted in this by the fact that most of my best friends happened to be Irish, even if I myself only had one Irish great grand-mother, on my mother's side, a Madden from Co Monaghan. Growing up with a thoroughly English identity, I now have to apologise to my old Irish friends for my condescension. How was it possible, having down the years treated the Irish so appallingly, for the English to patronise and look down on them? How could we have been so blind to the fact that the great British Empire could be said to have begun with the savage subjugation of Ireland and Scotland?

We who had grown up with atlases of the world painted in vast swathes red, along with some blue for the French and a few other bits and pieces of colour for the dodgier colonial powers of Europe, finally came to recognise that the days of our supremacy were coming to an end. We had been educated with attitudes of racial superiority that were becoming ragged even before the Great War, but only now and still perhaps only by a minority was it being admitted that they were in shreds. Moreover, many remained caught up in the great dream of progress, education (our way) and democracy for all, still causing a great deal of grief despite being an improvement on what went before.

The Empire may have been theoretically replaced with an approach of pragmatism, enlightened self-interest and living for the day, but this wasn’t working out very well either, as plenty of the men who educated me understood, while despite so much oppression, others still clung to a backward looking nostalgia, as they do to this day. Yet many of us put our hopes in some kind of new consciousness being born. Was the prime focus to be American, European, or something else? All were probably naive and rather confused, but at least the 'Beautiful People'

A Beautiful Person.

tended to have this in common: a conviction that for anything worthwhile to emerge, that might save the world from further catastrophe, it had to come from people who were capable of thinking for themselves and were true to their own hearts and minds. Our naivety stemmed from a failure to realise the power of the forces at work that remain fiercely opposed to any such thing, and the many different guises they come in.

Anyway, the combination of events and circumstances had the effect of destroying my confidence in the whole system I had been educated in, and making it extremely difficult to go through with getting my degree at Cambridge. The idea of swotting up authors, going into an exam and churning out four essays in three hours, was anathema to me. It was to recruit even literature in the service of the System, the Empire, or whatnot; exploiting and devastating our intimate inner consciousness. Accordingly the level of awareness, the quality of engagement with reality in that supposedly prestigious university, seemed to me pathetic. One great thing that can be affirmed about Downside in those days is that there was some serious questing going on. If there was any serious intellectual life at Cambridge, it was over specialised and truncated, but more of that later.

It was looking as if the counter-culture's Brave New World would have to be again put off for another day. Some of my friends took to drugs. As, by the eighties, grim ‘realism’ had overtaken so many more, as they applied themselves to the serious business of making money, we who see ourselves as survivors even well into the 21st century may be forgiven with still wondering about what might have happened, had we succeeded in getting our act together; could the world have been spared the subtle spread of new tyrannies and the severe trials that it is now undergoing?

After that generation, the System did appear to become more sophisticated, even sensitive and humane. It gradually changed its spots, donning the clothes of the liberal and progressive. In this year of 2017, it is actually hard to know which of the two great American parties is the most dangerous, while drugs have tended to become more subtle. The rebels are as much of a counter-culture as ever, though bizarrely this current American president seems to be trying to steal some of their clothes. The orderly current of life may seem to have been largely restored in places like Downside and Cambridge. I remain sceptical, yet I hope to be spared the fate of the old men who simply shake their heads and bemoan the chaos of our time. It would seem to be too late for Downside to take up the place it once had within English Catholicism; I think it had its chance, and blew it. More of that anon!

Through all the turmoil, it seems to me that the Catholic Church has been travelling more or less in the right direction. The least trendy pope of recent times, Pope Benedict, had this to say in 2011 - I quote from the National Catholic Reporter:  ‘during a July 24 vespers service in the Cathedral of Aosta in northern Italy, where the Pope took his annual summer vacation July 13-29, toward the end of a reflection upon the Letter to the Romans, in which St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship, the pope said, "It's the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had: At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host. Let's pray to the Lord that he help us be priests in this sense," the Pope said, "to help in the transformation of the world in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves."’ The great gift of Teilhard and other Catholic thinkers of the 20th century was to help us to love God and to commit ourselves to the troubled journey of humanity in one movement of the heart and mind!

Across that gulf of chaos, Christ crucified, a renewed humanity is indeed arising. Meanwhile our ideas of ‘chaos’ have embarked on a massive modification in the half century during which Benedict himself must have been pondering the conundrum of Teilhard.  There has emerged, along with other radically new concepts in physics, that bastard child of mathematicians and physicists known as ‘chaos theory’.  One of its main protagonists, Benoit Mandelbrot, invented the word ‘fractal’. He took it from the Latin fractus and frangere, meaning ‘broken’ and ‘to break’. His new word worked in both French and English (he ended up with dual French and American citizenship). His background adds to its resonance, for Benoit Mandelbrot was a Lithuanian Jew who was born in Warsaw in 1924. Anticipating the Nazi invasion, his family moved to Paris when he was aged 11, then when war came to Tulle in the Corrèze, south-central France. He was lucky indeed to escape the death-camps, not to mention the fate of the 97 victims of the Waffen SS, who were hanged from the balconies and lamp-posts of that town in 1944.

This appalling incident was but one small instance of a flood of horror that had engulfed Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. In such outbreaks of ‘chaos’, marked by such gross inhumanity, where could we possibly find hope? Well we did; and thanks largely to Catholic statesmen, it found political expression in the European Community.

And it finds another kind of hope every Spring!