A Little Liberal or a Little Conservative

Ah, liberal and conservative. What loaded words! And how difficult to apply to the messy business of human life!

Nobody ever asks me if I'm a liberal or a conservative. Nobody ever asks me any interesting questions. They ask me how long it takes me to get to work, how many brothers and sisters I have, whether I got out in the sunshine, or whether I've been on holidays. (Answers: I've never timed it, three brothers and two sisters, not if I can help it, and 'no' at the time of writing.)

But if they did ask me whether I was a liberal or conservative, I think I might answer like this...

Economics-- fairly liberal. I don't believe the unregulated free market is a good thing, though I am not anti-capitalism per se.

Gender-- conservative. I rejoice in the difference between the sexes and I hate anything that threatens to erode it. I don't care that much about how much of the difference is cultural or biological.

Freedom of speech-- extremely liberal. There are very few instances where I think the State authorities should intervene to stop a person saying or writing whatever the heck they like. Non-State authorities, like TV stations and newspapers and schools and bookshops, are a different matter-- but I still think they should all be extremely tolerant when it comes to the exchange of ideas. I think 'hate speech' should be legal in most cases. Obscenity, scurrility and profanity is a different matter. I would be much harsher on them.

Guns-- I don't like the idea of guns and my instincts are all for gun control. However, I have heard many strong arguments against it.

Life issues-- abortion, euthanasia, human embryonic research, suicide. Conservative all the way, baby. No room for compromise there.

The penal system-- a bleeding heart liberal. I think incarceration is such a terrible punishment in itself that it doesn't need to be made any worse and should be made as humane as possible. No amount of educational or cultural or social activites can make up for the loss of your freedom and the years torn from your life, even if you fully deserve it. Even if prison was like a holiday camp, it still wouldn't be a holiday camp because you're not allowed to leave.

The death penalty-- liberal. Like the last few Popes, I am against it.

Patriotism-- conservative. I believe in the idea of the nation and I am not a fan of the idea of multiculturalism. I think the onus is on immigrants to a nation to adapt, and not the other way around. And I am not impressed by newcomers who instantly begin to complain about their reception in the land that welcomed them. If I went to live in Japan, I would be highly conscious that I was a guest in somebody else's house.

Language-- liberal. A few years ago, a book entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by a lady called Lynn Truss was a smash hit. I read a reply to it entitled The Fight for English which criticized the approach of such "language purists". It was written by a much-published linguist named David Crystal, who (incidentally) is a Catholic-- I just found that out from Wikipedia. (He is described as "a Catholic by conviction". One would hope that was a tautology. I'm not sure what Wikipedia means by it.)

Language changes all the time. That is part of its delight. Standard spelling and punctuation is not a requirement. I don't even think it's necessarily a good thing. I believe that, for instance, "txtspeak" is simply the latest manifestation of language's infinite richness.

The arts-- conservative. I believe that artistic conventions exist for a reason, that they are timeless, and that they are no hindrance to innovation and creativity. Rhyme and metre in poetry, narrative in fiction, representation in painting-- all of these liberate rather than stultify. Formlessness is what stultifies. I believe that the arts exist more for the entertainment and inspiration of the reader, or spectator, or listener than they do for the self-expression of the artist.

Social etiquette-- fairly conservative. I despise foul language and casual references to sex or the eliminative functions. The tone they set is inimical to gentleness and innocence.

Religion-- this is the tough one, isn't it? I would say 'conservative', except that might group me with sedevacantist nutcases. I will have to take the same approach as Bertrand Russell, who called himself an agnostic when talking to philosophers and an atheist when talking to the public. I would call myself a conservative when talking to someone who takes little or no interest in religion, but orthodox when talking to someone who has a deeper knowledge of the issues at hand.

Technology-- fairly conservative. I worry about the influence of technologies. I think the car has been a disaster. Hard to see what can be done about any of it, though.

Drugs-- conservative.

Tobacco and alcohol-- liberal. Yes, maybe they are drugs, but drugs of a very different kind.

Gambling-- conservative. I would happily see all betting shops and lotteries closed down. Especially lotteries. "What would you do if you won the lottery?" is such a tiresome conversational avenue. Do you really need millions of hypothetical dollars or euros to spark your imagination?

Monarchy-- Conservative. I am all for it, though I don't think monarchs should have any real powers. I think they should be almost entirely ceremonial.

Nobility-- Conservative. I am all for titles and hereditary honours. I think they make society more diverse and interesting.

Hunting-- I'm on the fence about this.

School discipline-- conservative. Seeing teachers bullied by students never sat well with me. Not so sure that corporal punishment is a good idea, though-- mostly because I believe it is the quiet kids and not the bullies who will end up getting caned.

Egalitarianism-- liberal, when correctly understood. "Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!" might be altered in our time to "Equality, what crimes are committed in your name!". All kinds of political correctness and social engineering are foisted on us in the name of equality. But none of this changes the fact that egalitarianism is a GOOD thing. Every man, woman and child on this earth is of equal value to every other-- that is, infinite value. I believe this is a spiritual and social issue rather than a political issue. Egalitarianism should be a spirit, not a political programme.

Religious liberty-- extremely liberal. I think exceptions and special privileges and special protection should be extended to religious practices, since religion is of such importance to its practitioners. And I mean serious and established religions, not some joker declaring himself a Jedi.

Spinning and Reeling with Love

While I'm linking to my favourite songs, here is a rather obscure one. But it's definitely one of my very favourite, tippermost toppermost songs of all time.

I'm a massive fan of the US version of The Office. (I like the English version, too, though I haven't watched it in many years. Somehow it seems superseded by the US version.) And one of the my favourite episodes is 'A Benihana Christmas' from that show's third (and best) series. Feel-good festive TV is something that everyone tries to make but that too often feels contrived and cheap. 'A Benihana Christmas' pulls it off superbly. (The Office never made a better Christmas episode, and some of their Christmas episodes are real duds. 'Morrocan Christmas' is possibly the worst example.)

In one scene-- showing a karaoke session as the office party is really taking off-- you hear Creed Bratton, the elderly former rock star who plays a version of himself in the show, singing a snatch from his own song "Spinning and Reeling". It's only a few seconds, but it was enough to make me go looking for it on Youtube. And I've listened to it over, and over, and over. (One Lent, I gave up listening to music, and this was the song I chose to break my Lenten music fast!)

It's so sweet and innocent and simple and fizzy.

Better Slade Than Never

I don't know if my international reader are familiar with the British seventies glam-rock band, Slade. If they don't recognize the name, they will probably recognize their most famous hit, the Christmas fixture 'Merry Christmas Everybody'. (Which is absolutely splendid.)

I am a seventies nut. Slade are distilled seventies.

They have many good songs, but today I've been listening to one of their lesser-known hits: "Thanks for the Memory".

It's subtitled "Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am", but it's not a sex song, even though Slade liked to throw double entendres into their songs. In fact, one of the reasons I like it is because the lyrics don't seem to be about anything-- just a collection of phrases that seem to go well together, with a few puns thrown in:

Como estas chickadee?
Have a housemaid on your knee
eat an apple every day
An onion keeps everyone away
Have an athlete on your feet
have some honey with your meat
Eat an apple every day
the doctor has got to keep away
He'll tell you
Thanks for the memory
thanks for it all
Wham bam
thank you ma'am
thanks for the ball.

Have a burgular alarm
Have a milkmaid on your farm
can you raise a ballyhoo
If only there's nothing else to do.
Have some butter with your fly
They sald bananas could get you high
Eat an apple ev'ry day
the doctor has got to earn his pay.

(This song is also an example of how censorship can be beneficial, artistically as well as socially; the version they played on TV is different from the album version, and the difference is definitely an improvement. The line 'have some honey with your meat', in the original, was a rather insalubrious sex reference which always makes me grimace when I listen to it.)

I also like the bouncy melody.

Well, this blog needs a break from the heavy philosophical stuff from time to time.

A Thought

Isn't it odd that, in all the Christian world and down through all the centuries, there was never (as far as I know) any attempt to rename the twelve months of the year after the twelve disciples, especially given so many of the months are named after pagan deities?

Twelve months, twelve disciples. It fits so perfectly.

(What you would do with Judas Iscariot would be a problem, of course. One month would have to be devoted to either St. Matthias or some other figure-- Our Lord himself, our the Blessed Mother, or the Trinity, or St. Paul.)

It strikes me as odd, but I quite like the fact that this never happened. I like the fact that Christianity never tried to bulldoze all remnants of the pagan past out of existence, that it was not totalitarian.

A Little Bit of Poetry

I've been rather critical of T.S. Eliot on this blog, taking him as an example of the kind of poetic modernism that I detest. In fairness, I should clarify that I believe Eliot was a poetic genius, and indeed that some of his poetry attains a sublimity unlike that of any other poet. (This might almost be a definition of a great poet. His or her poetry is the best of its kind.)

Recently I've had these lines from Little Gidding much on my mind:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

These lines haunt me and captivate me. Their power is hard to analyze.

Strangely enough, perhaps, the lines that move me the most (although move seems a strange word, considering the hushed, dreamy atmosphere they evoke) are the second and third lines of my selection:

If you came this way
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season
It would always be the same....

One sometimes encounters the silly claim that great poetry deals with the particular and avoids generalization, vagueness and the abstract. (I remember how the submission guidelines of one poetry magazine asked contributors to avoid 'sweeping generalizations'.) It's one of those theories that sounds good but doesn't bear much scrutiny. I can't remember which poet claimed that the words 'over the hills and far away' were the most poetic in the English language. But I know it was Tennyson who, as a boy, used to stand with his arms outstretched and repeat the words 'far, far away' to himself, over and over again. And what about those incomparable words, 'Once upon a time', or their relatives, 'Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away...'? Rudyard Kipling thought that the most poetic words in all English poetry (jointly with a few from Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan') were these lines from Keats:

The same which oft times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

I think vagueness can be extremely poetic, and that much of the greatest flights of poetry are great through an inspired use of vagueness. 'Taking any route, starting from anywhere, at any time or at any season' is an example. When I read these words, or say them to myself, I imagine myself walking to an old church through the crisp air of mid-morning on a Winter's day, my shoes crunching over the frosty grass of a deserted field, feeling that the air is alive with an invisible presence.

The other most magnificent lines in this passage are the ones I have italicized below:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

How majestically imperious are those ten words! How pregnant they seem with the atmosphere of the burning bush or the pillar of fire or the Transfiguration! How they stir that depth within all of us-- even the most arrogant and selfish of us-- that craves above else to fall on our knees and worship!

However, even in this brief selection I think there are clumsy lines. In my opinion (and I accept that it might be considered monstrously arrogant to even offer it, but I believe poetry should appeal to the ordinary reader) these lines seem to lapse from poetry to prose:

And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead.

(I understand that T.S. Eliot once claimed that only poets can criticize poetry. C.S. Lewis pointed out the illogicality and circularity of this claim. How is anybody to know who deserves the name 'poet' if nobody else can hope to judge them?)

But the last few lines of the selection are a resumption of interrupted greatness:

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

I think these lines might be the best expression of that mysterious state which churches and holy places occupy. We find ourselves using the word 'timeless', but it's not quite timeless. Time and eternity seem to intersect there in a very specific and elusive manner. In the same way, such sacred places seem utterly local and utterly otherworldly at once. I feel this most powerfully when I visit (of all places) the tiny little chapel in the Ilac Centre, Dublin. The sounds of the shopping centre outside-- the voices, the footsteps, the music playing over the sound system-- fill the tiny little space. In fact, there are arcade games right outside the door of the chapel. But even the shrill chirps of the arcade games only seem to make the silence and the sense of retreat in the little chapel more powerful.

I've read two whole books of criticism about Four Quartets, the extended poem which includes 'Little Gidding'. Since I found so many passages of the poem so thrilling, I assumed I simply didn't get the parts that left me cold. Well, after reading both books, and after much re-reading of the poem itself, I've come to the rather simple conclusion that some of the poem is magnificent and some of it (most of it) is far from magnificent. I think all the badness of Eliot comes from his obsession with aesthetic and poetic theories, and all the goodness of Eliot is what survived that obsession.

More Chestertonian Wit and Wisdom

In a post some weeks back, I reproduced the first five columns on the philosophy of G.K. Chesterton that I wrote for The Open Door magazine, a Catholic magazine circulated mostly in county Kildare. I understand they have led to a Chesterton craze and it's pretty much all anybody in Kildare is talking about right now. (OK, not really.)

Here are the next five. I am restricted to 450 words for each article. Quite a challenge for someone as keyboard-happy as me.

Last week, I concluded with this enigmatic quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “The whole of life becomes so very jolly and liveable when once we have believed in original sin.” What could he have meant by that?

Well, our first step in explaining it should be to continue the quotation:

“If we believe (as some, I am told, do today) that every man is born innocent – then I can only say that to such a believer every man must appear a devil. The words of the wildest pessimist, of the wildest diabolist, seem hardly equal to expressing the vastness of that inventive villainy. By what abominable cleverness, by what hateful wit, did that sinless child contrive to twist himself into such a terror as an ordinary man? But if we realize all ordinary men to be at one ordinary disadvantage, how simple all their struggles become! The ordinary man can be considerate towards the ordinary man as one private soldier is towards another engaged against the same enemy. If once men are under original sin, how splendid they all are!”

Chesterton was faced with a timeless problem. Is the world good, or bad? Is man noble, or evil? Which view of the world is correct, optimism or pessimism?

Given his natural exuberance, and his reaction against the fashionable pessimism of his day, Chesterton’s inclination was to rush to the cause of optimism. He sought the good in everything. In his first book, The Defendant, he tried to make the human skeleton a symbol of joy rather than morbidity: “However much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.” Famously, he urged his readers to take everyday inconveniences (like having to wait at a railway platform) in a spirit of enthusiasm rather than irritation: “An inconvenience is only an adventure, wrongly considered.”

But Chesterton’s sympathy with the suffering of humanity, and his indignation at the oppression of the poor, would never allow him to become a mere champion of the ‘power of positive thinking’. In his Autobiography, he wrote: “What could I have said, if some tyrant had twisted [my] idea of transcendental contentment into an excuse for tyranny? Suppose he had quoted at me my verses about the all-sufficiency of elementary existence and the green vision of life, had used them to prove that the poor should be content with anything, and had said, like the old oppressor, “Let them eat grass?”

The idea of original sin allowed Chesterton to proclaim the infinite goodness of life while still denouncing evil. More on this next week.

..............................

Last week we were looking at G.K. Chesterton’s thoughts on original sin, which Chesterton paradoxically viewed as a ‘jolly’ doctrine. (Chesterton was very fond of paradox. Some critics believe he used paradox excessively. But there is another famous individual who used paradox an awful lot, and who has rarely been taken to task for it. You may have encountered some of this other individual’s paradoxes before. Here is one of them: “Whoever finds his life shall lose it, and whoever for my sake loses his life shall find it”.)

One of the reasons Chesterton accepted the doctrine of original sin was because he believed in fairy tales. No, I don’t mean that he literally believed that Cinderella existed or that Jack climbed up the beanstalk. But his vision of reality was deeply influenced by the stories he heard in the nursery, and he always considered them to contain a deep insight into reality.

In the following passage from his masterpiece Orthodoxy, Chesterton reflects upon the strange conditions that are so often required of the heroes and heroines in fairy tales:

If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace." If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.

Only the sleepiest reader, surely, will fail to hear in this an echo of another story that we are all familiar with: a story involving a serpent, a tree, and a garden.

Chesterton’s belief in original sin was nothing if not personal. A newspaper once asked various writers, Chesterton included, for an essay on the theme ‘What’s wrong with the world?”. Chesterton’s contribution was two words long: “I am.” His wisdom was witty, and his wit was wise.

.........................

In the first seven instalments of this series, I have tried to outline the main themes of G.K. Chesterton’s philosophy: his insistence on the need for wonder and gratitude, his condemnation of pride and his celebration of humility, his defence of the concept of original sin, and the Christian worldview in which he unified all these different threads of thought.

At this point, I think I will step back from this rather academic analysis of his philosophy and take a closer look at G.K. Chesterton, the man.

It seems impossible to separate Chesterton’s thought from his life and personality. Of course, the same could be said of most authors and thinkers, but it seems true of Chesterton to an exceptional degree.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton breathed his last on the 14th of June 1936 and has therefore, effectively, passed out of living memory. But you might think, from hearing his admirers talk about him, that we knew him personally. A gentle light appears in our eyes and a smile plays about our lips as we tell the many famous anecdotes about him. (Perhaps the most famous is the tale of the telegram that he once sent his wife: “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?”) All these years after his death, Chesterton is loved and cherished not only as an author but as a man—in the manner, perhaps, of a beloved and eccentric uncle.

That famous line from Wordsworth, ‘The child is father of the man’, is unquestionably true of Chesterton. In his Autobiography, which is the last book he wrote (and which I am increasingly inclined to think the best book he wrote) he describes his childhood at length and leaves the reader in no doubt as to its importance for his subsequent life and work.

Chesterton, unusually amongst modern writers, came from a very happy family. As he ironically put it:

I am sorry if the landscape or the people appear disappointingly respectable and even reasonable, and deficient in all those unpleasant qualities that make a biography really popular. I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.

A happy childhood, then, but not a dull one. More on this next week.

.................

Last week, after several weeks of an introduction into the thought of G.K. Chesterton, we began to look at the man himself. And we began at the best place to begin, especially in the case of Chesterton—that is, with his childhood.

Chesterton left us a very vivid and lyrical description of his childhood years in his Autobiography. (When I first discovered Chesterton, I would have concurred with the general opinion that his great work of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy, was the best book he wrote. But I am increasingly of the opinion that this accolade should go to the Autobiography, which he was persuaded to write very shortly before his death. It actually appeared posthumously, and we are very lucky to have it.)

In the Autobiography, this is what Chesterton says of his boyhood:

Without giving myself any airs of the adventurer or the globe-trotter, I may say I have seen something of the world; I have travelled in interesting places and talked to interesting men; I have been in political quarrels often turning into faction fights; I have talked to statesmen in the hour of the destiny of states; I have met most of the great poets and prose writers of my time; I have travelled in the track of some of the whirlwinds and earthquakes in the ends of the earth; I have lived in houses burned down in the tragic wars of Ireland; I have walked through the ruins of Polish palaces left behind by the Red Armies; I have heard talk of the secret signals of the Ku Klux Klan upon the borders of Texas; I have seen the fanatical Arabs come up from the desert to attack the Jews in Jerusalem. There are many journalists who have seen more of such things than I; but I have been a journalist and I have seen such things; there will be no difficulty in filling other chapters with such things; but they will be unmeaning, if nobody understands that they still mean less to me than Punch and Judy on Campden Hill.

Chesterton’s family background was secure, comfortable and happy. His father was ‘the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors.’ The Chesterton household was not especially religious. He was “brought up among people who were Unitarians and Universalists”. But he also wrote that: “The general background of all my boyhood was agnostic. My own parents were rather exceptional, among people so intelligent, in believing at all in a personal God or in personal immortality.”

And yet Chesterton’s mature (and stoutly orthodox) Catholic faith was rooted in his boyhood vision of life. More on this next week.

...................

For the last few weeks, we’ve gone from looking at the ideas of G.K. Chesterton to looking at his life, and seeing how his life influenced his ideas.

Chesterton insisted that the Victorian era, in which he grew up, was not a time of faith as often claimed but was in fact an era of widespread agnosticism. His own family was unusual in practicing a religion at all, although their Unitarianism was a far cry from Chesterton’s eventual orthodox Catholicism.

But there were aspects of Chesterton’s childhood that presaged his future path. One was his tenderness towards the Blessed Virgin.

A lover from his boyhood of the rather risqué poetry of Charles Algernon Swinburne, Chesterton describes how he would deliberately alter those lines of Swinburne that mocked Our Lady when he recited the poems to himself, replacing them with more respectful ones.

I cannot resist quoting in full the wonderful passage from The Well and the Shadows where Chesterton explains the Blessed Virgin’s lifelong significance to him, and the role she played in his ultimate conversion. It is one of the most affecting passages he ever wrote.

Men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity.

The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.

Next week, we’ll look some more at how Chesterton’s boyhood influenced his eventual conversion.

Welcome, Crux de Cruce!

For some reason, other Catholic sites (or sites of any kind) rarely link to this one. So I was pleased, and surprised, to see a link in my stastistics from this new blog by a young Catholic. Its approach is calm and reasoned, which is unfortunately not always the case with Catholic blogs (or Catholic writing of other kinds).

Find it here.

I hope it prospers!