Dad's Army Strikes Again, and F.F.II.

'So, as Britain leaves the European Union, and we forge a new role for ourselves in the world, the strength and stability of our Union will become even more important… And when we work together and set our sights on a task, we really are an unstoppable force.'

Or she might have said, 'the only way I can think of pulling this country together is to find a good enemy, one that everyone of us (and that includes the Americans) might believe in! Maybe, if the Arabs won't do, that old EU will!'

How Mrs May could come up with words like that, in Glasgow of all places, is beyond me. I suppose we have to be thankful that it wasn't in Belfast! She really seems to think she can take 'Great Britain' back to some mythical time when that country was not disunited and dysfunctional, but ruled the world while everyone knew their place and had jolly lives doing what they were supposed to do. I have to pinch myself to believe that yes, I really did grow up there! It is a good time to try to remember what is was like....

The Fractal Frontier and the Making of a European, II.

There was a monk at Downside in Somerset where I went to school by the name of Dom Luke Suart. He was a scientist by training, a chemist. He suddenly found himself teaching sixth-formers religious instruction in the early 1960s, when another monk had said to the Abbot that he felt he was not getting through to the boys, and could he be given a break? Luke, whose watch-word was to ‘seek’, had recently been ‘lit up’ by Teilhard de Chardin, who had provided him with a basis on which he claimed to reconcile his scientific knowledge with his faith as a Catholic and calling as a priest. Now he set about applying Teilhard’s vision of a world in evolution, stretching towards its consummation 'when Christ will be all in all', to religious instruction.

I do not know whether or not he realised that the Vatican’s doctrinal office had recently concluded that Teilhard’s  'works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine... For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers'. One suspects that Abbot Christopher Butler must have been aware of this.

Dom Luke however was very intolerant of anyone who manifested the tendency of ‘cabbages’ not to think for themselves.  What’s more, this was the 1960s, and a very different world was emerging to the one represented on the wall of the long corridor down which we used to walk to the room where he taught. It was lined with photographs, five rows high if I recall aright, of young men who had left that school to die shortly afterwards in the battlefields of France. If any of them had there objected, unlikely as it may have been, that even if they did manage to gain a few yards of mud it was hardly worth leading men over the top into a hail of machine-gun bullets which would inevitably mow them down, it is to be supposed that they would have been disgraced as a coward and shot as a traitor. ‘My country right or wrong’ had been the cry, not ‘Hold on now Sir, but what are we trying to achieve? Are we just trying to see if we can make the Hun use up all his bullets?’.

One is inclined to suspect that the chaps reared to thus serve the British Empire in schools like that had only been encouraged to think for themselves within strictly limited parameters. I happened to think that probably in both the world wars there had been a genuine clash of civilisations, and for better or for worse, the emergence of the liberal democracies of today depended on their self-sacrifice. But now memories of the wars were already fading, and the most popular narrative of the new generation was that at long last we were finally emerging from that long, dark tunnel of conformity, when whole generations of young men had simply been sacrificed to the hidebound notions of a bygone age. 'The times they were a’changin’. Please get out of the new way if you can’t lend a hand'….

The headmaster when I went to Downside, Dom Wilfred Passmore, taught history by dictating notes at breakneck speed, for us to scribble down and subsequently regurgitate in essays. He would mark these with a dash of his pencil wherever we got one of the points from his notes in, and add up the dashes to produce a mark. The one redeeming feature of his classes was that he would be delighted to cover the material which he needed to for the syllabus with five or ten minutes to spare, put his feet up, and initiate a real discussion. I remember him starting one such session by recounting how shocked some Benedictine fathers in Rome had been when he was showing them pictures of the school, and they had come across some photographs of boys in the CCF carrying the old First World War rifles we used to parade with. “You mean you train your boys to carry guns?” Such discussion however was in the line of playful relief from the cynicism of the essential work, which was to train us to regurgitate all that stuff, for the purpose of passing exams and ‘getting on’, with a minimum of imaginative or critical engagement on our own personal part, keeping whatever thoughts we may have of our own to one side, while maybe even enjoying a little jazz!

It seems such men still did not realise that they were playing with fire. Dom Wilred, otherwise known as Pod, was pushing the limits of his eccentric kind of pious cynicism with regard to education and in particular the exam system, successful though he still was. A few years later, his successor was having to cope with the likes of a revolt on the morning before a general parade of the 'Combined Cadet Force', when the cricket pavilion where the visiting officer was to take the salute was daubed with ‘Make Love Not War’, and the uniforms were thrown into the swimming-pool. These were the years, it should be remembered, when the Civil Rights Movement had set the Southern USA ablaze, and pictures of nonviolent black protesters being savaged by cops were flashed across the world's tv screens, while the Rev Martin Luther King received his Nobel Peace Prize.

There was a resonance between those beaten and murdered 'Negros' and our own poor inner selves, as there was (and remains) a resonance between militarism and an oppressive class system. Even Downside was not immune to the fundamental shifts taking place in the spiritual and sociological basis of Western civilisation. England was taking its time about recognising it, but the wars had knocked the stuffing out of the class system, of which the racial segregation in the USA was but an extreme example. It had been taken for granted in the past that there were in society ‘officers’ and ‘other ranks’, and while it was mostly admitted that access to promotion from one to the other was desirable, the basic set-up was taken for granted on all sides.

The advantages were not entirely one way. The ‘other ranks’ remained to a large extent rooted in their own communities, even when they went to war in their local regiment. Officers were expected to lead their men ‘over the top’, the young ones that is, and also to be able to communicate and to think for themselves, in judicious amounts, and therefore to be educated. At the same time they had to be 'loyal'. It was expected that they could move around wherever in the world the Empire required them, and suitably represent it, while keeping the natives in order; so if for example Catholics were to take their place in it and serve it, the odd outfit like this was needed to train them up as ‘Catholic gentlemen’. Your working man, if he was not utterly ground down, was perhaps more free to think his own thoughts! He did not have to don the spiritual straight-jacket of 'bearing the white man's burden'.

People had been thinking their own thoughts somehow, and now the class system had lost its aura. Probably some sort of class system is inevitable, but it can only work satisfactorily with an underlying sense of solidarity and basic equality. When these are absent, the whole idea of service breaks down. Anyway the middle class ‘public servants’ and backbone-of-the-country types, doctors, solicitors, gentlemen farmers were beginning to be priced out of 'public school' education. It was more the slick city financial wheeler-dealers and cosmopolitan super-rich who could afford those fancy fees, that kept on going up as the cheap manpower provided  by monks became scarcer. It may have retained its appeal in terms of climbing the social ladder, but it was becoming more and more difficult to identify it with any kind of idealism, rather than the gospel of 'enlightened self-interest', let alone with the vocation of a monk.

In fairness, those who battled on in the system were determined, one must suppose, to ‘go down fighting’, upholding certain values in a world which stood in desperate need of them. How could someone steeped in Gregorian plainchant and even polyphony call that jazz racket 'music', let alone rock? Dom Wilfred went on to become Prior and then Abbot. Dom Luke, on the other hand, had found his religious instruction course suppressed, had suffered a ‘nervous breakdown’, and fighting off the effects of heavy sedation, had jumped out of a window and killed himself. This fact only emerged ‘sideways’, because many of the monks in private conversation had too much integrity to go along with the official story that Luke had died of a heart attack or something. But this in itself exacerbated the growing opposition between ‘the establishment’ and the ‘radicals’, so characteristic of those years. Their failure to reconcile their differences has left us with the extreme polarisation we suffer from today.

I found myself in a difficult if not untenable position as head boy in my last term, even to the point of wondering at one point whether I too should jump out of a window. I had been a good son of the set-up, and suddenly found I had lost faith in it. I said something, no doubt naively, to the Head Master, about the matter having been handled most unsatisfactorily by trying to sweep it under the carpet, and I was merely told not to ‘bite the hand that reared me’!

By extension of course one got cross with the Church.  Any child of the ‘60s was bound to despise the methods of the Reverend Fathers of the Holy Office. The painful admission that actually they did have any kind of a valid point, with regard to Teilhard for example, was to come very slowly, much later.  However some of my more cynical and down-to-earth friends had rapidly concluded that Dom Luke was for the birds, if not mad, and Teilhard much the same. Personally I was both attracted and repelled by Luke’s teaching, but marginally more the former, and I went on to read anything by Teilhard that I could lay my hands on. Only recently, half a century later, do I feel I have resolved in myself the conflicts this situation evoked. I shall return to the tragedy of Luke, but there's more that needs to be said about its wider context first.