The Rock We Stand On.

 

Sherkin Mass Rock

One may read frequently these days about the English public schools and how dreadful they are, including from many who reckon they were 'scarred for life' by being hustled off to some preparatory boarding school at a tender age. The Catholic ones come in for a slagging no less that the others, but I have to say that my experience at Benedictine boarding schools, from the age of 9 to 18, was on balance very positive, while I am sad that it proved to be but a privileged moment in time. In particular, I am grateful for having been given the tools to think critically, and challenged to think about the fundamental questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is life for?' It was the radical commitment of some of the monks that above all constituted the challenge, not merely the ideas they taught. Where are the alternatives to mass education now?

     'You were well indoctrinated!' I was once informed by a Protestant clergyman. Such a charge is not easy to refute; I tried to explain why I thought that he needed to straighten out in his mind the difference between teaching and indoctrination. Was he never the beneficiary of teaching? Did he perhaps invent whatever ideas and opinions he professes out of thin air? Or did he absorb them uncritically from wherever? The encounter with another mind is essential to jog our own into authentic action!

     A good teacher does not impose his ideas on his pupils. He will respect the fact that each individual must arrive at truth in his own way. It is however essential that the teacher be convincing in the expression of his own convictions, otherwise he gives the impression that there are no grounds for conviction at all, no such thing as truth whatsoever in fact. The various views expressed in literature, as in life, are not represented in this case as possible pointers, if they are genuine, each presenting a different bearing on the truth, which can mean nothing however if it is not ultimately indivisible. Otherwise one is left with the canard of 'your truth and my truth'; at Cambridge I got the impression that it didn't matter much what one did or did not believe, so long as one did not really believe it, which leads to a highly corrosive state of mind. 'Religious studies' not rooted in a solid tradition are a nonsense.

     From my grandmother's knee, even in the 1950s, I imbibed the impression that our civilisation was slipping into irremediable decadence precisely because it was losing any sense of a shared conviction that, however difficult, it was nonetheless possible to access truth, indeed that there was any such thing as truth at all, and that it is the bedrock of civilisation. Being half German, she was no doubt particularly shaken by recent experience in that nation, which she in a lonely way continued to love and admire, even while it had so radically lost its footing in what was true and what was not. Neither however did she buy into the notion that the democracies necessariy represented all truth and light. Today this is much more obvious. But it was to the other Catholic side of the family that I had to turn for a convincing 'language of truth', which the Benedictines tried to build upon.

      Some of them naturally were more convincing than others. There was always that tension between the need to obtain good exam results and real education, which seems to have proved impossible to ultimately maintain at Downside. 'It is in the depths of minds that literature exists', wrote Joseph Joubert. It is in the study of literature perhaps that the conflict can become most acute; at least that is where I encountered it, but no doubt it can be equally so for real scientists. The depths of the mind actually need to be concreted over so that the trucks of commerce can run over its surface. This is how we have ended up with so many people who actually have no notion of truth whatsoever, and we even find ourselves apparently incapable of taking in and acting effectively on such truths as that our set-up is not sustainable and a radically new approach to life is urgently necessary, no matter how clearly they are spelt out for us.

      Where to begin? Solutions can only come by way of the human imagination. It is a steep and narrow way, but the wide and easy one has to be rejected. We have to start by breaking up that concrete, paying attention to nature and the depths of our minds. We are likely to find ourselves in a deserted wilderness, or to put it another way, at sea; hence the fact that a bloggeer who set off comfortably sailing from Baltimore can find his way without inconsistancy to these distant shores, whereon he now finds himself an intellectual stranger!

      While our imaginations must come up with answers, they will not come out of nowhere, nor should we set about ignoring science. Tired as I am of hearing mass vaccination being preached in the name of 'science', and Israel being held up as a good example of its benefits, I have a juicy anecdote from a niece who lives there. She is a student nurse, but just like everyone else, she was virtually compelled to take the vaccination. When she reported uncomfortable side effects lasting a month, she was told to forget it, it could have nothing to do with the vaccination, and no records were being kept of reported side-effects anyway. How's that for 'scientific method' in the application of a brand new therapy?!

     Simple questions remain unanswered. What are the reasons why covid passes so many by lightly, while it kills others? Why not put the emphasis on understanding and enhancing our immune systems rather that usurping their function, undermining them? What resources are being put into researching such possibilities? Oh silly, of course one could not patent them, and it is precisely the possibility of making everyone depend on something that one can patent that makes the monster capitalists salivate! Where does this path of depending on big Pharma (or Monsanto) to keep us alive end? Is it actually practical in the long run? If the vaccines are so safe, why are their manufacturers not required to take responsibility when they go wrong? Why are effective steps not taken to track side-effects? 13 people died in a Bantry nursing home within 10 days of being vaccinated. Why were there no post-mortems nor efforts to determine the cause of death? Why are there plans to vaccinate children? 

     Are there signs that our society is losing the ability to sustain criticism, let alone pay attention to it? Would we happen to be deep into the prioritisation of technology and 'scientific' experimentation, not to mention the commercial interests, over elementary human rights? Are we not treating our bodies in precisely the same way that we have been treating the rest of nature in this technological age, with the disastrous results that are only now beginning to be widely recognised after so many years of being known to science?

     What Irish government would want to fall out with Big Pharma, when it earns it so much tax, or for that matter, how many doctors' conscience would rise to forgoing that handy €60 a shot and falling out with the establishment? The Nazis and the Communists exploited such weaknesses to catastrophic extremes, but the insidious  alliance of high technology and market capitalism makes me particularly nervous, although I am not living in fear of the bang on the door, thank God, yet! Are we not however in danger of travel bans and what not?  More than ever, my mind goes back to those who tried to stand up to the 20th century totalitarians. Things may be more subtle these days, but who, I ask, is being indoctrinated now, and who is really thinking for themselves? 

     

The Alternative to Vaccination

Day after day, the miseries of the pandemic are paraded at the top of the news. Funny we hardly hear of many other plagues actually killing more people, wars, pollution, other diseases and starvation! Meanwhile the massive propaganda blitz in favour of vaccination presents it as the only game in town, as if it alone is capable of delivering us from all the miseries of the pandemic, while people questioning this are represented as purveyors of doom and gloom. Actually answering their questions or attending to the points they raise hardly features,- they are generally merely dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists, etc. Anyone would think that the world has not seen plenty of plagues in the past, albeit sometimes with horrendous loss of life, but we got through them! Since I have looked out in vain for an exposition in plain terms of a positive alternative to mass vaccination, I shall just have to attempt it myself. But how might I think I am in a position to do so?

     I have prided myself in recent years of being one of those elderly people 'qui osent, enfin, être eux-mêmes', though I would also like to think the effort to 'be myself' goes back a lot further, especially since I wrote across the top of my answer in a tripos exam, in 1967, that 'expecting me to write four essays worth writing in three hours is absurd - I will give you one good one'. The esssay I did write was about Baudelaire, and I'm sure he was proud of me. Meanwhile I shared digs with a medical student, who thought that the only realities one could be sure of were bio-chemical ones. I thought that if our lives were going to be run by such people, God help us, though I doubted if Baudelaire provided quite the best alternative. Anyway the fact is that while I am not an expert about anything, I have been thoughtfully present to this world for a good while, and I have no need to look over my shoulder at anyone telling me what to think! What is more, I am at bottom hopeful.

One thing that I have realised over the years is that everything is interconnected, and on the subject of hope, I would point out that we are faced with multiple much more serious threats than the pandemic. The pandemic is a mere squall before the coming storm; it might be described as a little challenge to limber us up somewhat,- to get us used to the idea that the normal notions of Enlightenment and the March of Science have had it, and what's more the entire human race is in one big dire mess together. Curiously enough, we may find that the very things that will sort out this pandemic connumdrum may also be what we need to do to prepare for that storm, so clearly delineated by David Attenborough in A Life on Our Planet!

First move must be to batten down the hatches and take in sail, quickly. An end to speeding about! Less flying, less motoring, less crazes and crowds! We must quieten down, be more thoughtful and indeed contemplative, though certainly not just putting our heads back under the duvet; we must look after one another, while also attending to our own health and food, where it comes from, how it is produced; we need to test our resilience and see to the things we rely on, which so often we have merely taken for granted,- to keep our heads up as long as we possibly can, while being mindful of the ground on which we stand, appreciating nature and the wilderness and comprehending the extremely dire damage which we are inflicting on it. Everything that is normally good for our own and nature's health, and so often gets ignored, will increase our resistance and resilience; but we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we want to face reality, indeed, whether we really want to live at all.

This is not possible on the basis that we are merely the product of blind bio-chemical processes. Are we not called to anything more than keeping as cosy and secure as possible, to mere survival for a short while before the curtain comes down on a miserable farce of an existence? Is squeezing the very last drop out of our orange the supreme value? But even if we cannot get our heads around the idea that we are creatures of a loving God, indeed the very apple of his eye, and that he loves us and wants us to thrive, surely it should be possible to acknowledge that the human immune system, along with all of nature, is a most amazing phenomenon, worthy of our greatest respect, indeed reverence, mostly way beyond our understanding as it still is? Certainly we should seek to understand it better, but no doubt every answer we get will raise greater questions. Meanwhile a wise man will certainly not think, as Boris Johnson said recently in a unguarded moment*, that greed is a sound motivation for intervention, nor indeed that a clever new technological fix can do better than our immune system, or even foster it better than nature, enhanced as may well be with methods produced carefully and disinterestedly over time. Actually any really good fisherman could tell him that there is no luck in greed!

Let it be noted that I am not claiming that technology is necessarily destructive and idolatrous. Like capitalism, it is a good servant but a bad master, and we too need to see see ourselves as servants of the Supreme Good. If we confide our undertakings to God, he will indeed lead us into the fullness of truth and empower us to complete his creation. No doubt many medical practitioners of all kinds aspire to work in this spirit, but few express it as well as did the father of modern homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who is said to have had a notice on his desk stating 'I treat, God heals.'

Homeopathy today continues to attract the scorn and indeed opprobrium of the medical establishment, and one has to ask why? They claim it is a dangerous fraud, which anyway does not work, for the simple reason that it does not work according to their way of thinking. One can only reply that as a matter of definite experience it does work, but in a subtle way more in the nature of a work of art or indeed a sacrament. As a matter of fact the Eucharist, as understood by Catholics, provides a good approach to the understanding of homeopathy. If you put brain cells under a microscope, of course you do not find ideas, memories or thoughts, any more that you can find feelings, emotions or love by looking at a heart, or the body of Christ by inspecting a consecrated host. They are nonetheless really present, just as Catholics down the centuries insist that the Blessed Sacrament 'works'. The attempt to 'go straight to God' started out by denying this; away with papist or any other paraphenalia! But it is not given to us to comprehend reality directly, head on; it would probably destroy us if we did; we must work obliquely, as it were, and mainly content ourselves with images and symbols, while remembering that effective ones do actually embody what they represent....

We do not understand properly why homeopathy works, though it may be that quantum physics will prove enlightening. Meanwhile we see that it does work, and since it also works on animals and babies, don't go down the rabbit hole of placebo effects. Certainly, there is a chicken and egg dimension to it all, and Christ could not perform his miracles where there was no faith.,- but faith is not necessarily blind, rather it is a matter of looking at things differently. It by no means excludes reason, any more than love itself does; there is just a lot about it which is beyond reason. If one cannot accept that, one has to say goodbye to love, beauty, and as it turns out, health and life itself.

So having thus attempted to clear the ground, as it were, allow me to report that covid 19 has proved quite amenable to homeopathic treatment, and indeed there are prophylactics that appear to be as successful as any vaccine in preventing it. There are also other holistic treatments, ones that do not consist of arrogantly brushing aside our immune system, but rather of seeing what we can do, respectfully, to enhance it. Zinc, vitamin D supplements, among other things, have their place in overcoming the deficiencies of our own particular constitution and life-style. Collectively alternative therapies do however have the 'disadvantage' of threatening the interests of a multi-billion dollar industry, with very many interests vested in it.

It's not that I would necessarily rule out the use of vaccines, in the fire-fighting mode that allopathic medicine excels at. I do however much doubt if they constitute a viable mass method of moving beyond the pandemic, and Fiona and I agree that they do not offer either of us a desirable way out individually. People are not all identical bio-chemical machines, and the road to healthy living is different for each of us. We all have our problems, and we must also remember that none of us will get out of this world alive. What is important is living in a vibrant way; while we all should try to live our lives to the utmost, prolonging physical life in a fearful, zombie fashion when our vital force is spent and especially when our every move is commanded by a controlling Government, does not avail! Meanwhile, who would buy a new car from a manufacturer who does not stand over it, one that is likely to be obsolete by the end of the year?

Does a future beckon in which we must be taking shots for every disease and variant that comes along, while not alone depending on governments to pay for them, but also to pick up the tab for casualties? The Irish Government is already paying out millions in compensation for victims of the swine flu vaccine. What sort of a bill is coming down the tracks for covid ones, while we have to take more and more of them? But the homeopathic approach trains and strengthens our natural immunity; they say it is like training a horse to jump higher and higher fences, and will tell you how sickly children thrive better after overcoming a disease like measles, which our mothers used to send us around to the neighbours in order to catch and get over with, while we were young.

We have come a long way from 'sailing the Gannetsway', and with my poor old boat laid up and gasping for life in Portugal, I sometimes wonder why I keep on with the blogs. Yet they keep presenting themselves to my mind, generally in the early hours of the morning, and I know of no better paradigm for the voyage all of us must make on the seas of life, nor particular context more interesting to me than this west coast of Europe, nor opportunity to bring vibrancy and interest into my own life, nor any more likely place in which to keep the flags of joy and freedom flying.

I hope the blog will soar better than this old steamer called 'Gannet', which can't have been very gannet-like when my father as a student sailed on her from Hamburg to England on the 2nd August, 1932. I think it must have been much more fun that flying is today, or even going on a liner, but as my brother-in-law Anthony points out, who dug the photo off the internet, that was two days after the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. My father's aunt had said to him 'This means war, Bernard. All they think about is war.' I wonder if he thought of the Gannet when, after long and difficult years when civilisation seemed to be dying, he and I sailed west from Rye in the Scoter, a 27' sailing boat, and our hearts soared with the first gannets which we met off the Dorset coast. I never saw them east of the Isle of Wight, where I suppose the water is too opaque for them, and presumably the southern North Sea is the same. Still, I expect that other voyage similarly felt like an escape!

As an 'anti-vaxer' one feels rather as a pacifist must have done in Germany in the 1930s, but as surely as we most urgently need to find an alternative to war as a way of coping with the difficulties of life, so we need to stop thinking about this pandemic as a war, with vaccines as our weapons. I do not underestimate its miseries, but this pandemic in itself is a less drastic challenge than that other one, and furthermore we need to see it as a potentially creative opportunity.

The good news is that I shall hopefully be back to confronting more immediate obstacles than the likes of the pandemic and Brexit soon, though they will still be there, and not in any abstract sense either. I am planning a trip to Nazaré next month....

*https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/23/greed-and-capitalism-behind-jab-success-boris-johnson-tells-mps

Easter Proclamations, Old and New.

 Christ is risen! What can the original Easter proclamation possibly and practically mean to us, here in this tortured world? Could it possibly be an adequate response to all the suffering in the world?  What do I know about torture, you may ask, any more than of the historic sufferings of Ireland? Here the 1916 affair, that our President and Taoseach are busy commemorating, comes in. After all this Easter Sunday has been a most beautiful day here on Sherkin, where we are privileged to go about our lives in peace, tending our gardens in tranquility as life breaks out on all sides so exuberantly in this season so full of wonders. 

     So have we the right to proclaim the overthrow of  grief? No, but our proclamation is not in our own names, rather in that of Christ crucified and risen. Of all the human beings who have existed, he would seem to be the only one who might be said to have earned such a right. He alone meets our deepest needs, those of our hearts and minds, our imaginations and conscience, our individual and social existence; all that he said and did was just right, and so we believe in him and proclaim his death and resurrection. 

     There remains the trifling business of working out what this actually means, here and now! I say flippantly 'trifling' because perhaps in a sense this is possibly a lot less important than we like to think, while if we try to proclaim salvation in our own names, we not alone become obnoxious, but absurd. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Nonetheless, to each of us falls the responsibility of passing on The Proclamation, and if indeed it is what it claims to be, there cannot be any greater responsibility. 

      It may be claimed that the affair of 1916 was a genuine working out of what it might mean for us in practice. 'In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland,... In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.' Nowadays however, we look around the world and see the grim results of 'nations asserting themselves in arms'. We reflect that even here in Ireland the results were not exactly good, while it was not ultimately violence that achieved a partial national independence, but moral force. It was very hard, though it was tried, for Britain to continue to suppress it, having just allegedly fought the Great War to 'vindicate the rights of small nations'! Nowadays it is authoritively maintained that the taking up of arms 'in the name of God' is a contradiction in terms.

      We Catholics like to think that we meet our responsibility to the Easter proclamation by getting along to Mass of a Sunday, albeit along with the kind of example we set for the rest of the week; but this needs the Sunday effort both to give it point and sustenance. Now we are suddenly told we may not do it. We are told how lucky we are to be able to watch it on the internet, but of course it is not a mere matter of private consumption; it is a public proclamation. So how do we work this out? Are we not in a strange position, now that the Irish state, heir to the 1916 effort but alone among the nations of Western Europe, finds itself suppressing our Proclamation, our Sunday Mass?

      It will be said that this is different, merely a temporary expedient for the common good.  But havn't we heard this before? Must we keep reminding our Government that in the famous text, its claim to authority rests on 'the name of God'? Without that grounding, it will not stand, while the Church has shown that she is well able to exercise the constitutional right to worship with due care and responsibility,- of course she is, and more so than the State, which is heading down a road that is likely to alienate many hearts and minds, while losing real sovereignty to that web of powerful interests which is none the less real for all the difficulties of putting a name on it without descending into the realm of conspiracy theories!

     Some kind of a start was made (in finding a name for it) by President Eisenhower when he coined the term 'the military-industrial complex', to which he feared that Americans themelves might lose their sovereignty. Perhaps a much older term. 'the gates of Sheol', comes nearer to the mark! Anyway today we must at least acknowledge that we need a wider frame of reference than Ike's; consider how the current Government in London hands out lucrative contracts to their friends in connection with the pandemic, or that, according to the Guardian, 'Barclays analyst Carter Gould is predicting sales of $21.5bn in 2021' for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, while the Bio/NTech founders 'became multibillionaires last year, when the potential of the vaccine and the deal with Pfizer prompted the shares to surge.' Meanwhile 'the Serum Institute boss Adar Poonawalla has rented a Mayfair mansion for £50,000 a week'. Indeed there is obviously some serious wheeling and dealing going on! 

     So do we have to speak of the 'military-medical-industrial complex', not to mention other aspects of 'big tech'? How about pesticides? We have been told that they are essential for us to be able to feed the population. How do you fancy our chances, living in a world with no insects, butterflies, birds? After all, even the atom bomb was thought to do good at the time, putting a stop to that nasty war with the Japanese, and still a majority in Britain and America seem to approve. What chance of humanity's survival in a world depending on far bigger bombs for security? But is it remotely fair to associate vaccines with pesticides and bombs?

     As a matter of fact, I would not absolutely rule out their  use in strictly limited and emergency circumstances, which would also be my own attitude to guns and vaccines alike, - but it would be with extreme regret, and as a matter of policy to be strenuously avoided. Is vaccination to become a permanent feature of our lives, along with all the other horrors of the modern world? Meanwhile what you do not use, you lose, and our own immune system is surely no exception.

      As a gardener, let me take the less extreme example of pesticides. In order to avoid their use, one has to look for the flaws in one's set-up, to think organically of soil and plant health and avoid monoculture and over-crowding; remember beauty too, keep flowers and variety in there! Actually Nature is on our side; yes, it comes from God and he loves us, the Almighty One wants us to be healthy; he also wants us to learn how to overcome sickness, put aside greed, embrace justice. He wants all his children to have access to the land, to his gifts for us all. He would surely much prefer us to appreciate and cherish his gifts, in our own experience, than to depend on governments and remote agri-business for our food, or Big Pharma for our health! So might we learn wisdom, how to work with Nature rather than fighting it,- to be a lot healthier, while understanding at last, with all our faculties, and thus proclaiming that Christ is truly risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! 

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