The Life of Brian Debate, Again

I'm rather fascinated by the famous debate on The Life of Brian between John Cleese and Michael Palin (on one side) and Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood on the other.

I know I've written about it before, but I come back to it for several reasons:

1) It's interesting to me that the Monty Python team have completely won in the court of popular opinion, all these years later. You can read the comments on any YouTube upload of this debate and none of them are sympathetic to Muggeridge and Stockwood. Even Christians turn on them. I find this depressing.

2) I feel a strange sort of love for Malcolm Muggeridge. He was well-known in his time, a national figure, and now he's completely forgotten. But he was astonishingly right about many things, including the evils of activism and the prophetic wisdom of Humane Vitae. And there's just something endearing about him, right down to the way he pronounces graffiti "GRA-fitti", with a stressed first syllable. 

(I've noticed that this is a marked phenomenon among crotchety old men-- they choose a particular word, or several words, to pronounce in an idiosyncratic way. I knew an old man who always pronounced "immediate" so the second syllable rhymed with "head". My own father insisted Latvia was pronounced Lat-ria.)

3) The most moving part of the programme is this contribution from Muggeridge, where he reproves the Pythons for cheapening the story of Christ: "Remember that story of the Incarnation was what our whole civilization began with...remember that it has inspired every great artist, every great writer, every great builder, every great architect, to celebrate that marvellous thing.."

(At this point John Cleese makes the cheap shot that it also inspired the Thirty Years War and the Inquisition, and gets a round of applause from the audience, who are clearly on the side of the Pythons.) 

Muggeridge resumes: "But nothing can alter the fact that if you were to make a list of all the greatest works of art in all fields, and all the greatest contributors to those works of art, you will find that this scene of the Incarnation, the story of the Incarnation, has played the largest part. Now, in our twentieth century, this film produces a sort of graffiti version of it, and I don't think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place..."

On that last point, Muggeridge has been proven wrong, at least so far. But there is something inexpressibly beautiful and graceful about the way he makes his point. He speaks slowly and sadly, pointing his finger (presumably at a screen where clips from it were played), with all the gravity of an eyewitness to much of the twentieth century's insanity.

I'm particularly impressed that Muggeridge bypasses any of the tiresome arguments about artistic or intellectual freedom, or respect for religious sensibilities. I very much doubt he would have been in favour of censoring the film. He is, in fact, saying: "Shame on you. Shame on you for trampling something beautiful and lofty." An argument that conservatives have more or less stopped making. We are too frightened of ridicule.

4) This debate is interesting to me, also, because of its relevance to current debates about political correctness and woke and freedom of speech and all the rest of it. Both John Cleese and Michael Palin have become outspoken critics of political correctness. I admire them for that.

I'm sure they would say-- and doubtless they have said-- "We were opposed to the moral guardians when they were Christian conservatives, and now we're opposed to them when they're woke leftists." The idea is that Mary Whitehouse morphed into Owen Jones.

I'm not at all convinced of this. In fact, I don't believe it for a moment. I think political correctness is part of the same wave as Life of Brian. I don't have time to make this argument right now, and I'll admit it's more an intuition than anything else. 

5) I do think both the bishop and Malcolm Muggeridge were at fault for attacking the film as "tenth-rate". It is indeed a funny and accomplished film. What's wrong with saying that something is both funny and tawdry?