Back in June, 2019, with Mr Boris Johnson newly installed as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I professed myself 'aghast and appalled'. I went on, 'I for one am settling in for this morality play in London with both a grim fascination, a frisson of amusement, and a fair degree of trepidation. Ladies and Gentlemen, let us take our seats! Here comes the ogre, but where is the hero who will slay it?' Perhaps I was rather saguine in hoping to remain a mere onlooker! Did I not turn my back on England back in the '70s.?
At this stage I find myself even more 'aghast and appalled' and hanging into my seat somewhat desperately, by the seat of my pants in fact. I could not have foreseen than the little ogre of the Brexit Government would find itself overcome by the greater ogre of a pandemic. I am not helped by the fact that I do not buy the idea that 'Science' is going to ride to the rescue with its vaccines; in fact I consider this hope on the daft side. Are we to suppose that it is safe to continue to pump dodgy substances into our veins, to combat successive threats, viri, 'flues, mutations of viri, etc? I am unfortunately of that persuasion that becomes extremely suspicious when I see massive political, economic and social interests piling up behind widespread, uncritical acclamation.
Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientic Advisor of the UK Government, opines brightly:- 'In science it is always the case that truth will out and so it is important to identify it along the way, not after the event.' Yes indeed, a highly commendable aspiration there, but it invites the rejoinder, what planet is he on? How long, for instance, did it take for the dangers of the swine 'flu vaccine to be recognised? (Not that Glaxo Smith Klein has done so, but the Irish Government at least was obliged to pay out compensation.) How long did it take for the dangers of smoking to be recognised? What about climate change, the science of which has been known since the 1970s? And when was this famous 'new variant' of the Covid virus first indentified by scientists anyway? Back in September, according to a WHO scientist on tv, though establishing the truth of that has not proven easy for me. Our Sir Vallance will probably say, that's where science comes to the rescue; all that stuff about God, religion, even art, only gets in the way!
Your scientific fundamentalist asserts that we are merely bio-chemical machines. Scientists are the priests of this religion, and what they say must be attended to. Since they frequently disagree, and what they assert one year is frquently obsolete the next, and their logic seems to point to a society of robots whose function is simply to carry out instructions, some of us treat them with extreme suspicion. It would be unfair to include your true scientist, who has the humility to recognise his limitations; in fact it will not probably be scientists who end up manipulating the robots, but merely people who are smart enough to know what levers to pull.
My friend Kevin Maguire was wont to say, quoting John Milton and Thomas Hardy after him, 'Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.' But probably our eminent scientists have not encountered such gems, while your average punter will cover their ears in embarrassment at the mere mention of that b- word; mostly they all barely understand the issue that those useless literary types were grappling with, - how are we to identify and recognise truth, when the assertion of the most basic realities invariably encounters some kind of visceral opposition?
That contemporary realities are piling up together to force us all to grapple with such matters is for me the bright side of all this. Such a crisis is long overdue. Sir Patrick is on the money, when he implies that the unwillingness of people in general and some politicians in particular to face reality has caused havoc, and that scientific facts can sometimes help. Yet it may be still more helpful, if we are to thus open minds, to understand the basic requirements of human nature that have to be satisfied first. If we ignore these requirements, leaving them for dodgy actors to exploit, such as the Ducky, who in spite of everything does have some kind of degraded grasp of them, well that is worse again!
First of all, we must belong somewhere. Those who regard this need as a despicable weakness delude themselves; they do not understand the many different ways that exist of attempting to meet this need, which can even be said to include tossing ourselves into oblivion. Intimately associated with it is the absolute necessity for human beings to have some kind of a language of meaning; and it is this very combination of belonging and meaning that brings us to the third dimension, by enabling us to care, to love.
By now you may have guessed where this is leading. I am proposing a rather different approach to understanding the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whatever notions your paid up scientific fundamentalist, or any other kind of fundamentalist, is likely to entertain. In fact I wish to suggest the key to getting our whole world back on a footing of something approaching sanity. And I am wishing you all a genuinely happy Christmas, where you may welcome Truth coming into the world, 'the Light that shines in the Darkness, that the Darkness cannot overcome!'
