More Possible Than Ever!

I always had an interest in monasticism, which was not surprising since one of the salient features of my childhood and youth was visiting my mother’s sister, who was a Carmelite nun, and another the fact that I was educated by Benedictine monks from the age of nine to that of nineteen. This was however to become a cause of regret to my agnostic father, who though perhaps speaking from a temporary exasperation, once said as much. “Those monks” had filled my head with a lot of fancy notions, whereas at the local grammar school I might have been taught to simply “get my foot on the ladder”!

This rather gives the lie to the popular narrative, which asserts that people pay big money sending their children to posh private schools simply in order for them to get ahead in the rat-race, - not that one can deny that there is a huge element of truth in this. It doesn't even matter very much when everyone is convinced that 'the ladder' is going upwards, but when the suspicion gains ground that, on the contrary, it is going in the opposite direction, then one is in trouble. That, in Blighty and the USA, is the difference between the WW2 and the Vietnam war generations. Ladders, after all, must lean on something; if the building turns into a pit, down they must go!

Few private schools are run by monks, but back then in the '60s, I got the feeling that the tension between the monastic aspiration to seek and serve Truth alone, and the worldly requirement to enable young people to ‘get on’, was tearing at the very heart of my alma mater…. You can read all about that if you care to delve into the stuff From the Fractal Frontier back in this blog.

Before ever Christ came on the scene, Plato asserted (in the Republic) ‘that it is impossible at one and the same time to worship money and keep a high standard of honesty among the citizens; one or the other will have to go.’ In words that were apparently attributed to Socrates, he moreover associated democracy with this ‘worship of money’, asking ‘Does not a city change from government by a small class to government by the people through uncontrolled pursuit of wealth as the ultimate object of life?’ 

We might argue that ever since, for the last two and a half millennia, civilisation has been struggling with this issue, and doing its best to have it both ways, equating 'getting on' with being good, virtuous, etc, whenever it was remotely plausible to do so. Even so, we have very often seen the privileged 'guardians of truth' unmistakeably give way to smart 'wide boys', with the result that 'privileged' tends now to be a term of abuse; instead of being proud of it, one is inclined to feel guilty, while notions like noblesse oblige are laughed out of court. It's come to the point where one hardly dares to assert that anything is actually true, for one thereby implies that one has some kind of superior knowledge. 

Is it surprising that we find ourselves in trouble, with political leaders who say anything provided it serves their purposes? It is a tragic fact that the present 'champions of democracy' seem to have failed particularly dismally when the curved ball with Covid-19 written on it came their way; yet without of course being able to foresee it, I have been living with an ever stronger premonition of disaster for years, and I am certainly not alone in that. Whatever way one looked at it, The Bubble was going to pop! There could be no general well-being when the world was so sick.

Where then do we now stand ? It seems we will have to reinvent democracy for a start. Perhaps we might learn from monastic traditions, where democracy has been practised for ages, but not idolised? It is but a method of governing that only works well within a proper ordering of society, with a view to the Trinity of truth, solidarity and the active worship of God. For those who follow Christ, and recall how he (like Socrates) was put to death by popular demand, democracy is anything but an end in itself!

A smother from the East.

Nowadays Fiona and I find ourselves perforce living a quasi monastic kind of life. Undoubtedly we are very privileged, living on our beautiful and so far safe island, but after all we did have to choose to do so, and it has not been easy; yet in most basic and practical ways, it almost seems we might have been preparing for this time for years, what with the new sunroom that I have been slowly and painfully constructing now at last complete, with our communications more or less up to speed, a new fridge and the boat laid up in a safe and cheap place, and in various other little ways. 

Our lives have fallen into a rhythm that could almost be described as delightful except that we miss our family and friends, but then, one cannot be indifferent to all the terrible suffering out there. Yet what's new, except that mass misery and horror seem to be getting ever closer to home?

Our crucified Saviour offers the only hope of living with it! We say our morning prayer with the Church on universalis.com. After breakfast and a morning ‘communication session’, I generally get out to do some physical work, priority at the moment being the construction of a new wood shed. Noon brings that little effort to an end, with Mass online from Glenstal Abbey at 1210. (I thought that was an odd time at first, but find it works very well at the pivot of the day, before lunch.) A read, a snooze, a

Nugget on the beach.

cup of tea, before I head for the garden, and generally going for a walk with Nugget in the evening. Then another look at the computer, supper, phone calls, a game of backgammon, night prayers and bed. The days whistle by.

So where is this going? Might we manage to simply drive all the woe from our heads and hang on to our privileged position? Yet it is a precarious, funny kind of privilege! Here am I, aged 73 with a bit of a heart condition and Fiona struggling to get herself around, with apparently no future and no way out, and the world we are leaving to our grandchildren in a terrible state. I labour away, and most likely will be called away from this lovely spot just when I imagine it is coming right.

However, I am not depressed. Far from it, in fact; perhaps I was never better; and I shall be even happier if I feel that the world is at last actually making the Great Transition, and we have made a little contribution to it; that the world is at last waking up to the threats and the possibilities of a new era. Surely we will finally put behind us silly notions like 'there is no such thing as society', - but can we avoid too the opposite, totalitarian danger?

I am more convinced than ever that small communities, not in isolation, but in dynamic relationship with other communities and also with Nature, are the way to go. Their members will balance prayer, physical and mental work. In their mutual dependency, encounter and solidarity, a new space will open for truth seeking; they will rediscover transcendent reality, as people do when facing challenges together, even while they will become increasingly self-sufficient. They will be thoroughly orientated to sustainability, yet undismayed by all the disasters of this world; they will become convinced of the transcendent reality of love and its final victory. They will discover and worship the Lord and Master of it all, and celebrate their redemption!

It is a vision I and many others have had for years, many centuries in fact, but all too often felt ourselves struggling in vain to realise. 'new worlds, i suggest, are born and not made', said e.e.cummings. A bit of both, I rather think, but it does now feel more possible than ever!

‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’.

Primroses for the confined

“I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.” -
Mr Johnson at the press conference where he had announced his Government’s ‘Coronavirus Action Plan’ on 3rd March. 

You can watch him saying it here. A week later, on Saturday 8th March, he was at Twickers for the England v Wales rugby game, setting an example of ignoring the coronavirus for the Cheltenham Festival to follow 3 days later. ‘There is growing concern at the decision to run the four-day Festival, which attracted more than 250,000 people, after a number of attendees reported symptoms consistent with the virus’ reports The Guardian.*  At his press conference on 12th March, Mr Johnson claimed that “We’ve done what can be done to contain this disease and this has bought us valuable time.” It's worth recalling that this was nearly 2 months after the World Health Organisation labelled Covid-19 as a “public health emergency of international concern”. Is the British Government really that incompetant?

With Mr Johnson himself in intensive care as I write, one does not want to be hard on him, and we hear the call from Dr Ghebreyesus' of the WHO for people not to use the virus to score political points, but reality does not fit into convenient compartments. This pandemic raises profound political and economic questions. Mr Johnson is but an extreme example, but he got where he is with a thumping majority. We all need to realise more clearly than ever just how very dangerous our lazy disregard for reality is. Is there any hope that a close encounter with death might precipitate a change, in the UK Prime Minister himself, and more importantly, right across our civilisation?

Two long months ago, in all his glory with his shiny new majority, Mr Johnson set out his vision for Brexit Britain. It is worth having another read of his speech* in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. He began by referring to Thornhill’s painted ceiling overhead, which he even touted as England’s answer to Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel! He explained that it is entitled ‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’. 300 years later, this slogan seems to have degenerated into ‘the triumph of ideology and the feel-good factor over reality’!

The “gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century”, which spoke of the “supreme national self-confidence” which our hero was claiming to be reincarnating, set the tone for the rest of his appalling speech. I have been asking myself for years what it might take to dethrone such an entrenched and pervasive, though thoroughly warped, narrative? Now all of a sudden, the question is becoming immediate and very urgent, as events lay bare the destructive perversity of that narrative at this particular time. That Mr Johnson was so engaged in promoting his Brexit fantasies, at the very time when he was failing dismally to prepare for the pandemic crisis, speaks volumes. The feckless failures to heed the warnings in both cases are certainly of a piece.

Turning to the Brexit issue, that a proper new agreement with the EU might be thrashed out by the end of June is of course out of the question. Does this suit the likes of Mr Raab, who apparently relishes the prospect of crashing out with no deal at the end of this year?  Does their penchant for self-harm know no bounds? The harm that Brexit has done, and which will only become a lot worse when and if the ‘cliff-edge’ event unfolds in its full glory, has been endlessly flagged by experts on all sides. ‘Fake news’, said Johnson and the Ducky, just as they did subsequently about the pandemic. Do we let them away with their lies?

Is Mr Johnson really determined to inflict another completely unnecessary disaster on top of the current one?  The exasperating thing about him is that he is intelligent enough to know, in some corner of his mind at least, that this is plain ‘bonkers’; the frightening thing about Raab is that he appears to have no such doubts. If Johnson were to go down, where would that leave us?  But leaving this aside, and after all we have to pray for the man’s recovery, is there any chance that a close encounter with death might cause him to review his record in this case?

Speeches of his such as that one at Greenwich are such a dollop of b******t that it would take a book to answer them, so I shall just offer a few ‘steers’, since according to Mr Raab, this seems to be the way the U.K. is being run these days.

1)Lesson one from the pandemic:- the human race constitutes a single entity, but despite this totality, physical propinquity counts for a great deal, while the cohesion of this body is only a work in hand, and suffers from a constant tendency to break down.

2)We still do not know how the health crisis will pan out, let alone the economic one. In terms of health, enhanced European cooperation could certainly have improved things, helping to raise the awareness both of scientists and governments (especially the British one) in a more timely fashion; in terms of the economy, it will be indispensible. In the face of the opposition of the Ducky and the UK, this will however be only harder. To claim that somehow the UK will make a bigger contribution by means of a futile attempt to relaunch the British Empire (Commonwealth+free trade area) than by taking its place in Europe is, again, downright bonkers.

3)‘Free Trade’ indeed constitutes a most important facet of the global economy; at Greenwich Johnson said - “It was fantastic at the recent Africa summit to see how many wanted to turn that great family of nations (the Commonwealth) into a free trade zone, even if we have to begin with clumps and groups”. So the Commonwealth is ‘a family of nations’ while Europe is not, and the work is only just beginning half a century after Europe? Which body is more likely to help the world up its game in relation to the threats we face? Any statements that I have come across on the matter from Commonwealth leaders were to the effect that they would much rather relate to a Britain within Europe than one trying to resurrect the British Empire, and as for Ireland and indeed Scotland...!

4) The notion that ‘freedom’ equates with the absence of constraints and laws is spurious, in trade or any other sense. How free were the pirates and buccaneers of 1707? Perhaps Mr Johnson would like to have been one of them, but in fact the particular ‘explosion of global trade’, which he celebrated and professed to champion anew in that ‘charter for Brexit’ of his, was underpinned by the British Empire.  For all the self-identification with those romantic buccaneers, it seems probable that actually he would rather situate himself safely within the Establishment, and would have been, like so many insiders, quite incapable of perceiving how very unfree most of the Empire’s subjects/victims were.

Along with bringing on the end of formal empires, the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century finally generated two huge, as it happens highly pertinent, steps forward: public health services like the NHS in Britain, and the European Union. This century we have two massive economic shocks of a different kind.

Time to be reading books again!

What benign developments may they yet finally produce? What lessons can we already begin to learn?

*https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020