Category: Religion

Israel and Gaza – keeping the faith

So much is written about Gaza. I feel outrage, and disbelief. About Hamas and the brutality, and the futility, of its actions. And about Israel’s response, which has directed our focus back in Israel itself. What does it stand for?

Zionist ideas going back to Theodor Herzl are interwoven with a sense not just of a physical return to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) but of a spiritual and territorial revival of the old biblical, pre-diaspora Israel. This isn’t the modern Israel we in Europe supported. But it is the Israel of Netanyahu, Ben-Givr and Smotrich. It is also it seems the Israel of Trump’s born-again-Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He recently visited a Christian church in the West Bank which had been attacked by Jewish settlers. He protested. But attacks on Palestinian Arabs are condoned. It is as if it’s they who are the occupiers of Jewish land, of the territories Huckabee and the Israeli government describe as, using their biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

I have always been pro-Jewish. I cannot emphasise that more strongly. My academic heroes and indeed teachers were Jewish. I never made distinctions between Jew and Gentile. The Old Testament, ‘Old’ as Christians see it, has been and is a primer for life, with God and without, as well being both magical story and superlative historical document. For my father freemasonry brought Christian and Jew together in Manchester in the 1930s and later decades. I remember reading, as maybe a ten-year-old child, a story about 1948 and Israel’s fight for and achievement of independence. Only later did I learn about the nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948) and take on board the other side of the story. Later, in my twenties, Martin Buber became one of my heroes, for his books ‘I and Thou’, life lessons that have stayed with me, and the wonderful ‘Tales of the Hasidism’, and for his advocacy back in the 1930s of a bi-national, Israel and Palestine, solution.

Yesterday I watched footage, on Channel Four, from the West Bank, of settlers fencing off land owned by a Palestinian Arab farmer and, when he tried to stop them, a settler shooting him in the leg. The farmer’s son recorded the incident on his mobile phone.  Settlers are allowed to carry guns. The farmer had a leg amputated. He’s now back defending his land.

Two days ago I learnt of the death of an Al Jazeera journalist and his team in Gaza. The Israelis did not mind taking out five others if they got their man, Anas Al-Sharif. They claim to have documents linking him to Hamas and missile campaigns against Israel. But they won’t answers questions. They can’t produce the documents. Journalists are excluded from Gaza. We are left to conclude that Israel’s claims are specious. And they don’t care. They are, it seems, past caring, locked in their own doom-loop. Al-Sharif reported from  his tent, his home having been bombed, on the day-to-day reality of Israel’s bombardment. We need to hear what he had to say.

In this week of anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we’re reminded of the terrible realities of destruction from the air. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been measured, deliberate, and slow, and no less terrible for that. And yet we feel some residual moral obligation to support Israel. And that compromises our position when we oppose the brutalities of Vladimir Putin, also the SAF (government) and RSF (rebel) forces in Sudan, and the army junta in Myanmar. There is a deep cynicism in the way Netanyahu’s government turns that obligation to their advantage.

Israel in the years up to the Likud victory 1977 still had its pioneering spirit. That I could connect to. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars it was fighting for its survival. That was enough to overcome any ambivalence I felt. This was what I’d characterise as the old Israel. I could connect to its passion, and to its genius. Friends who worked on kibbutzim came back with good stories.

Yes, we could be accused of romanticising Israel. We weren’t to know how terrible the consequences of the continued occupation of Jordanian and Egyptian lands after 1967 might be. That opened floodgates for which there is no sign of any closure. But the old Israel I know is still there, it was in its own way an inspiration to us back then, and we lose too much if we lose it, vexed and violent though its origins were.

As for the ‘new Israel’ of Netanyahu, Ben Givr and Smotrich, of Judea and Samaria as they would rename Palestinian territory, they have nothing to offer the world. Only their hatreds.  And they have turned the current conflict into, as now it seems a majority of Israelis see it, a battle for their nation’s very survival.

The forces of hatred are not yet spent. We as outsiders might long for a pragmatic solution but by its nature pragmatism cannot be imposed. Like Keir Starmer I want to see Palestine independence recognised but wonder also what good it might do and how might Hamas be excluded. Would it be no more than a token gesture? With Trump dictating our response we are little more than straws waving in the wind.  

But we must keep the faith. In a very literal sense – Christian and Jewish. We need both.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it

Book festivals are a feature of our times. The two big festivals at Hay and Cheltenham bring in big crowds. Over the last two days in Cheltenham the subjects of events I’ve been to have included trade routes centred on ancient and medieval India, the American election, and Palestine and Gaza. They are apparently disparate but there is a link I’d like to explore.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the subject, ‘Trump: The Sequel’, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, referred to his belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian civilisation.  That set me thinking. It’s not a notion to which an Indian would subscribe. 2000 years ago, and more, India traded west, to Rome and Europe, and east, as far as China. Both Hinduism and Buddhism had their origins in India. It is a necessary humility on our part, in our modern world, that we recognise India as having a status equal with our own.

A little closer to home there is an alternative and wider appellation than Judeo-Christian and that is ‘people of the book’. It’s an ancient Islamic term that refers to religions which had a shared scripture with Islam, and that included Christianity. ‘People of the book’ were protected in Islamic countries by a legal status known as ‘dhimma’.’ There is of course a wider, non-legal status – our common humanity.

We have 1400 years of divisions between Christian and Muslim. It is helpful to be reminded of that common heritage, as I was when we listened intently to two Palestinian novelists talking about their books, and about their life stories. One growing up away from her home country, the other growing up in Israel, near Jaffa, from which her parents had been forced to move.

I am English, and a Christian. My instinct is indeed that my heritage is somehow special, focused on notions of democracy and liberty, and freedom of speech, which struggled to find acceptance anywhere in the world down the millennia. Including our own, until relatively recently. I will always argue passionately for liberal democracy and a superior form of government, but to argue beyond that, for some kind of special status, and more than that, for superiority, we are on dangerous ground. (Is Christianity inherently democratic? That would be an interesting discussion.)

Other civilisations have their own sense of their uniqueness, as places apart from others, offering a world-view no others can. The consequences can be pernicious. China defines itself against the West in terms of its four-thousand-year history, and boundaries defined as the furthest point of its past imperial expansion, which has had terrible consequences for Tibet and the Uyghurs.

There’s also a deep significance in the combining of ‘Judea’ and ‘Christian’. Christian history has until recent times treated Jews as outsiders in their midst, never escaping guilt for the death of Jesus, tolerated and too often terrorised and murdered.

Now all is changed. The Jewish people have a home, and Western and specifically Christian support. ‘Judeo’ now combines easily with ‘Christian’ and Palestine is viewed by the American and most European governments from an Israeli and not an Arab standpoint. Atrocities can be justified.

The best teachers and some of the best friends of my life were Jewish. I am a passionate supporter of the Jewish people, of co-existence of Palestinian and Jew, and I am a Zionist if Zionism had recognised the constraints that sharing territory with another people, who had occupied that land for many centuries, involved.

‘Judeo-Christian’ is at risk of being associated with a right-wing and intolerant agenda, and with a form of populism that at its extremes becomes the ‘great replacement theory’, whereby an Islamist (not Islamic) conspiracy aspires by means of higher birthrates and migration to become the dominant force in Western cultures. It is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, used so perniciously from the 1920s onwards by Hitler and others against the Jewish people, refashioned.

The testimonies of the two Palestinian novelists, talking about the lives and reading from their novels, will stay with me forever. They have lost their country, and those who choose to fight on their behalf are terrorists. Terrorists, as the Irgun were considered, fighting after World War Two for a Jewish state against the British.

Beyond October 7th, and the retribution that followed, and continues, lies a Palestinian state, and a radical cessation of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. And an end to the notion that there is anything biblical, Jewish or Christian, about the process.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it.

Empire in the North Country

The legacy of the British Empire is everywhere. Some empires collapse in dramatic fashion, others fade away. At home, we came to terms with its demise. Or did we? Still we argue. And the legacy beyond our shores is vast. China doesn’t remember kindly the Opium Wars, and Narendra Modi has a very different concept of India, as a ‘Hindutva’ nation, to the liberal democracy we attempted via Nehru to bequeath.

My history of Hebden Bridge in the late nineteenth century (see my previous post) describes a village which cotton manufacture turned into a town. It looked over the border to Lancashire for supply and routes to market. Supply came from slave plantations before and after the American Civil War, and as the century progressed more and more from India. Raw cotton in India was shipped to England and it left the vast Indian market open to imports from England, from Lancashire mills, via Manchester. It was in the UK’s interests to keep India impoverished, the better to govern it, as Orwell characterised British policy.

We sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms. That kind of pride in Empire is a false emotion. But it was very real in late Victorian England. Trade was its lifeblood and Empire was the (initially) accidental legacy of trade. In India and the Caribbean, and later in China, trade was a single-minded and ruthless activity. But as Empire put down roots it took on a moral, and a spiritual, aspect. With that went a sense of superiority, and arrogance. And pride. We did rule the waves.

Army and government, and the Church of England, were the backbone of Empire. But while Empire was physically distant from the non-conformist populations of upper Calderdale they too made their contribution, not just through the output of their mills but also in the money, and compassion, they vested in missions to the big cities – and overseas.

Take missionaries as an example. They were hero figures right through to the 1950s. They were part of the imperial as well as Christian ‘mission’. Eric Liddell, hero of the 1924 Olympics, died as missionary in China in the 1940s. Old timers might remember the movie the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, a story of missionaries in China: it seems quaint today. But this was the old Britain, patronising without realising it, exercising an imagined and inbuilt superiority.

I’m resisting the temptation to engage in the current debate about Empire and its legacy. Save to say that I understand the anger. Also the benefits (and disbenefits) of industry and communications that came with Empire. I’ve little time for apologetics. The one lesson we must learn is that we have to look forward.

Implicit in the apparently unstoppable advances of industry and Empire were a confidence and self-belief which don’t come so easily these days. They didn’t look back. That’s the sense I’ve had researching and writing about Hebden Bridge, a small corner of the Empire in which its mighty neighbour Manchester was such an extraordinary player.

Taking sides

I quoted from a song called The Partisan is my last post. It has a history as I’ve discovered that long precedes Leonard Cohen. It was written, as ‘La Complainte du partisan’, by two members of the French Resistance, in 1943. It was widely popular. It expressed for me the emotion of the moment, as of a week ago, but it is a song about resistance to an occupier, and freedom from that occupier is clear-cut. And the current conflict around Gaza is anything but.

Far too little is written in the English and American media about the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine, of many many centuries standing, by the Jewish immigrants who created the state of modern Israel. (The plan of course had been that Jew and Palestinian should live together in harmony, communities side by side.)

But that wrong cannot be put right by the destruction of a country, modern Israel, which has been heroic in many ways, and which I’ve long supported.

I, like so many others, am conflicted.

While l support Israel in its determination to remove Hamas forever from Gaza, I also support Palestinians seeking to create a country of their own, with boundaries which allow the old areas of settlement, in and around Gaza, and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and beyond, to flourish.

The Partisan is a song Palestinians might take up. For Israel, it would be a different song, though ‘song’ for Israelis facing what seems like an existential challenge is totally inappropriate.

Whatever our politicians say, the only answer has to lie in the UK, US and Europe identifying as much with the Palestinian cause as they do with the Israeli. And that means all of us, people and governments. Only if we do so will we ever find a solution.  A solution which both sides, those of Christian heritage, and those of Muslim heritage, can readily accept.

Amid all the terrible carnage, and the apparent intractability of the conflict, and the way in which all the world takes sides, and we polarise all the more, we have to keep that in in view.

The wind is blowing

Did Israel bomb the Al Ahli Hospital last night, or was it a misfiring Hamas rocket? If it is proved to be the latter, the Israelis are almost vindicated, in their eyes, and maybe many Americans. Also yesterday, an Israeli bomb hit a UNRWA school and at least six people were killed. Whatever the actual figure, the numbers killed by Israelis bombs in Gaza are appalling.

I won’t rehearse recent events here. We’ve all read about them. For Israelis, for all of us, the events of last Saturday week are reminders of the Holocaust. But I am also reminded of many wartime situations where the aggrieved party wreaks terrible vengeance on civilians. Whatever they say, that is what the Israelis are doing. It should be uppermost in Israeli minds. And it isn’t.

How can you have the open spaces and relative affluence of southern Israel and, across a fence, two million people living in poverty? Hamas and militant Islam have little or nil regard for human life. But Israel by its actions has given them a cause, a casus belli, and a location.

Israel and Palestine as two separate states working together, with no illegal settlements and Jerusalem a shared city. It is conceivable. Tragically, the current Israeli government continues to fall into the trap Hamas has laid for it. And the wider world takes side, and distrust between nations grows deeper.

How would I feel if I were Jewish, as so many wonderful people in my life (not least my best and wisest teachers) have been and are? Or an Israeli? And…. how would I feel as a Palestinian? As an Arab? As a Muslim?

Borders are the great curse of humanity. Our urge to possess. Or it could be our urge to reclaim. Behind and across too many borders are leaders, usually of an autocratic mindset, for whom violence is always an option, stored away, but excusable, they imagine, in certain circumstances, and of their choosing. And they are persuasive. Populist is not an unreasonable word to use.

I recalled Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Partisan’ last evening, listening to reports from Gaza.

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished

An old woman gives him shelter, but the soldiers came and ‘she died without a whisper’. Then three verses in French, and final one in English:

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we’ll come from the shadows.

I was also, yesterday evening, watching a movie, Walk With Me, about the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist and peace campaigner, Thich Phat Hanh. He wasn’t allowed back into Vietnam after 1973 by the Communist regime and he set up his Plum Village community in the Dordogne in France.

The movie is about individuals funding truth, finding their own peace. About landscape and community. But also about a battle with self, running, all the time, and arriving home. There is tacit and expressive and wonderful mutual support. You watch the seasons pass.

Isolationist? Remember that Thich Phat Hanh was an active peace campaigner, who risked his life. He died last year. He was, finally, back in Vietnam. He knew all about borders.

An act of theft

Edmund Burke, whose heyday as a politician, and as a writer on politics, was the late eighteenth century, remains today the respectable face of the political right-wing. Often quoted, and much revered.

At least he was the ‘respectable face’ until the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation came along and adopted his name for their version of far-right conspiratorial conservatism. In its own words, ‘the Edmund Burke Foundation is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.’

Simply, to my mind, an act of theft. Taking a good man down, albeit some 225 years after his death.

It is a foolish liberal who trespasses on to territory which conservatives in our time are fighting over, but Burke more than merits attention. He believed in tradition, but it was an evolving tradition, based on where we are now, and not a throwback, an attempt to return to a lost age that never was. (For background on Burke, see Jesse Norman’s excellent biography, published in 2013.)

Burke’s most quoted words are ‘the little platoons’. We should ‘love the little platoon in society to which we belong’. We are part of an organic whole, and there is a natural hierarchy. Jesse Norman expands on this to focus on the supposed faults of the Enlightenment and liberal individualism, from which he argues many of the problems of modern society emanate. It’s interesting to read back ten years and see how David Cameron and Jesse Norman were promoting the idea of the ‘big society’.

Attacks on liberal individualism can take us to some unfortunate places.

Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, in December 2019 praised Hungary’s ‘interesting early thinking’ on ‘the limits of liberalism’. (‘Short Cuts’, in the London Review of Books, 1st June 2023.) For an idea of what those limits might be, see below. Hungary is about the imposition of change, the imposition of values, Burke is about evolution.

Unlike those who claim to be his modern descendants Burke was also an astute judge of the realities of his time: arguing for financial reform, for greater freedoms and representation of Catholics in Ireland, and against the abuses perpetrated by the East India Company. If governments had listened to his wiser counsels the American War of Independence might have been avoided. And his reading of France after 1789, and how the revolution might and did play out, proved quite remarkably accurate.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the king-in-parliament as a successful modus operandi, and while the king alone might appoint his prime minister and cabinet, only with the approval of parliament could they operate with any degree of success. Political parties, in nascent form in Burke’s time, have provided the underpinning to parliamentary democracy as it has advanced over the last almost 350 years. And yet …

One feature of the new Tory Right has been an attempt to discredit parliament, witness the Daily Telegraph’s milking of the expenses scandal in 2008, and the attempt to elevate executive, or more specifically prime ministerial (Johnsonian) control.

Back to the Edmund Burke Foundation.

The recent National Conservatism Conference (NatCon, the eighth of its kind, the first in London), is a brainchild of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and attracted a lot of publicity. MPs Braverman and Rees-Mogg attended. So too, Michael Gove.

In June 2022 a group of National Conservatives put together a manifesto. Among the ten core principles: ‘the free market cannot be absolute’, the paramountcy of the Christian Bible, and severe restrictions on migration. A NatCon supporter and British MP Danny Kruger railed against faceless ‘powers that be … who are not on the side of the British people, but serve the abstractions of human rights, international law, or other signals of middle-class virtue’.

We are, with all this, living in the past – and with the danger that the future might lie with the likes of Orban and Erdogan, where parliament, media and judiciary are suborned, and where the religion of another age is called on to provide underpinning. Netanyahu it seems has similar ideas for Israel. Putin and Russian Orthodoxy is a story in itself.

For Burke ‘all the major religions were the products of custom, tradition and “long and prescriptive usage”’. (Norman, p91) He would have profoundly regretted our drift from religion but any notion of its reintroduction by diktat would have been, literally, inconceivable.  

How the NatCon Tories and how I read Edmund Burke are radically different. Let’s leave it at that.

Travelling in India …

I began my last blog with a few words which may give a misleading impression.

‘All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to.’

We returned from a two-week holiday in north-western India six weeks ago.

‘On the surface.’ I left open what might lie below the surface. India as envisaged by Nehru and the Congress Party in 1947 was to be a secular, non-aligned state. Nehru looked to the West, but also to communist Russia. India was partitioned, with terrible consequences, and the tension between India and its neighbour Pakistan is palpable, seventy-five years on, even to short-stay visitors. The army’s presence, in the areas where we travelled, is everywhere.

Over the last seventy years the Congress Party has gone into sharp decline and the fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP, has taken hold of the levers of power, at a national and increasingly local level. The BJP under Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014.

In 1992 Hindu activists destroyed a mosque, at Ayodhya, on a site widely believed to have been the birthplace of the god Rama. If this act was symbolic of an India reconstituting as a Hindu state, the 2019 decision of the Modi government to revoke the status of Jammu and Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim territory, as a self-governing entity, and the transfer of power to the central government, was, and is, widely seen (outside India) as brutal act of suppression of Kashmiri, and Muslim, aspirations. Also pertinent is the 2019 legislation extending the National Register of Citizens to the whole country which would have the effect of leaving several million Muslims stateless.

Our own sampling of Hindu opinion during our stay in November suggested a disdain toward a Muslim population which is more and more ghettoised as threats and sometimes specific acts of violence increase. The irony of Delhi’s and Agra’s great tourist locations being Mughal and therefore Muslim forts and mausoleums, not least the Taj Mahal, seemed lost on our (otherwise splendid) Hindu guides.

All that said, India remains a functioning democracy of not far short of 1.4 billion people. We were in Shimla on election day for the state of Himachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly. We chatted to a friendly BJP teller outside a polling booth. (The BJP were noisily confident, but in this particular election they lost – and Congress won.)

The mood among the Hindu population was positive, almost aggressively optimistic. The economy is growing fast, and Modi, like him or not, is an influential figure on the world stage. The contrast I made in my last blog between the UK and India is for real.

And yet … quotes from my travel journal are apposite here:

‘Am I soft-pedalling on Modi too much? What of the Hindutva nationalist philosophy of the BJP? The Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy is no friend of the BJP. She writes in a recent book of essays of how “the holy cow and the holy script became of the chosen vehicles of (Hindu) mobilisation”. The “holy script” is Hindi…

… In The Times of India I read about a move to convert Christians among the Adivasi, India’s indigenous tribes, to Hinduism. Shivaji, the 17th century Marathi leader, is celebrated not least in movies as a Hindu proto-nationalist. The Shiv Sena movement, the leader of the local branch of which was shot the day before our arrival in Amritsar, is radical in its advocacy of a pure and dominant form of Hinduism. Muslim culture, and the Muslim population, which existed side by side with Hindu culture for many centuries, is under unrelenting pressure. And yet Bollywood still has many Muslim stars.’

Arundhati Roy, as an outspoken opponent of a regime increasingly hostile to dissent, lives dangerously. She sums up the situation, as she sees it, succinctly as follows. (The RSS is the ideological arm of the BJP.)

‘The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of a National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions all they need to do is pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villain, Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi infiltrators or anyone of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors.’

India has a militant China on its Himalayan border. It needs a strong army and a strong leader. You could argue it now has both. And a growing economy. But the cost in terms of its move away from the secular and open society that Nehru aspired to has been a high one.

‘A man without trust’

See also my last post, ‘The Mandate of Heaven’.

In the West we have no over-arching sense of the political and spiritual spheres conjoined. They have over two millennia been mutually engaged but never (despite the Papacy’s best efforts) combined in one individual. ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God, the things that are God’s.’ (Matthew 22, 22.) The divide is clear. Think back to the Papacy versus Empire, in the Middle Ages, or Henry VIII versus Rome, ultimately a marriage squabble, in 16th century England. Secular and spiritual rest uneasily, or at worst, violently, together.

Our politics in the UK have long been pragmatic, mercantile, self-interested. God treated as a justification ex post facto. Our political system, and that of other Western countries, is underpinned not by divine sanction but by the rule of law. Compare the Confucian order, where there is no place for a legal system as we understand it. Confucius believed in moral education as the best way of creating a just society.

However radical their differences it is true to say that at the heart of both systems, Western and Confucian, lies the basic concept and imperative of trust. An acceptance that justice will ultimately be done. Tibet, the Uyghurs, and most recently Hong King, all demonstrate how far China, where moral education is equated with the diktats of the Communist Party, has departed from Confucius.

Michael Wood, in ‘The Story of China’, quotes from the diary of ‘an old Confucian farmer, teacher and mine manager’, Liu Dapeng, writing near the end of his life, and under Japanese occupation, in the 1930s.

‘The superior man must be trusted before he can impose labours on the people….Confucius said, “I do not know how a man without trust can get on.”’

The old order was already under terminal threat.

*

But Confucius does have relevance for us, here in the West. Trust remains a universal requirement of open government and, if we define ‘superior man’ as someone who governs, and with no wider sense, we can see how it might apply to our own time, to our own politics, in the UK, in early summer 2022.

We have no mandate of heaven in our politics. We elect MPs to a House of Commons, we don’t elect a ‘president’ as they do over the Channel, with parliamentary elections following later. The MPs have the mandate. And they need to ensure that the ‘superior man’ is someone we can trust.

This you might argue is no more than a squabble, a ripple on the vast ocean of history. But ripples are indicative of what lies beneath. Without trust in individuals, and more broadly in a political system, people will disengage. Liberal democracy is a balancing act and trust is required to maintain that balance. Take away that trust and the way is open for the apparently simple and crude solutions of the populist.

We need only look across the pond to the USA to see the consequences, actual, and still worse, potential, when trust breaks down.

The Mandate of Heaven

By what right does any person or group rule over any other? Or any dynasty? I thought it worth taking a brief look at China, with the help of historian Michael Wood. See also my next post.

Chinese emperors as far back as the Western Zhou, circa 1000 years BC, governed under a ‘Mandate of Heaven’, linked to a specific astronomical event, a rare five-planetary conjunction that occurs every four or hundred years. A king who acted tyrannically would arouse the displeasure of heaven, disturbing cosmic harmony.

So was born the notion of the sage-king, preserved in our time in the person of Mao, and now Xi Jinping. Challenging that notion in the 19th century were the very down-to-earth British, who speeded the decline of empire in their demand for trading rights. Sea power and weaponry ensured victory in the Opium Wars and humiliation for the empire after the Boxer Rebellion.

Wood’s splendid book, ‘The Story of China’, draws on his remarkable TV series of that name, and provides as close as any history can a visual sense of China as it changed – towns and cities achieving unmatched levels of prosperity and civilisation only to collapse before barbarian invaders – over four millennia.

At the heart of the story lies Confucius, still the great sage as he has been for 2500 years. For Confucius the ideal ruler must be humane and learned. ‘Chinese thought, it may be said, has revolved around two central questions, the harmony of the universe, and the harmony of society, cosmology and politics.’ (I’m quoting from Wood’s book.)

‘As for the role of the intellectual, the key was to determine the Way (dao). When the Way is lost, the sage has a moral duty, above all else, to reform society, to set the away back on track, to define the tradition and advise the prince.’

We have no sage, no Confucius. But we did have Socrates, and indeed Plato, who shared with Confucius the ideal of power vested in a wise ruler, a philosopher king. Karl Popper in the aftermath of World War Two (‘The Open Society and its Enemies’) made clear how damaging that notion has been in the West, and we see in too many countries how dangerous it still is. ‘Wise rule’ descends into tyranny.

Comparisons between China and the West can be instructive. But any presumption on the part of a Westerner that he or she understands China is foolish. We have no notion of a ‘mandate of heaven’, now vested in the Chinese Communist Party, woven into our national psyche. Our ‘mandate’ has to be our democracy, and specifically our parliamentary democracy.

We are the ‘barbarians’ at the gates of China, and they at ours (‘ours’ being the West, broadly defined). Is it too alarmist to say that only one can prevail?

Richard Dawkins comes to town

Saturday morning, 10am, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Richard Dawkins has been woven into our lives if not our rainbows for a few decades now. I can still remember reading The Selfish Gene. It’s somehow associated with a bus from up north heading down to London, sitting near the front, with big views either side of the motorway. Yes, it changed how I view the world.

Before last Saturday, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I’d not heard him speak in person. Interviewed by Matthew Stadlen, who he knows well, it seems, not least from previous interviews, he was as direct and blunt as I’d expected.

One cheerful discussion was around whether ‘altruistic’ rather than ‘selfish’ would have been a better title for that famous book. But it wouldn’t have had much of a zing to it, but there’s certainly a good case for arguing that genes are operating altruistically, since our survival, and progression up the evolutionary ladder, is tied intimately to our genes. Where they go we follow.

Genes have our interests at heart, though watching The Mating Game last night I was rivetted, as, accompanied by David Attenborough’s whispered, I-don’t-want-to-interfere’ voice, a male praying mantis manages to get its head bitten off by a larger female and yet, abdominally alive for several hours, still manages to mate. At the same time it provides the female with sustenance to feed the brood which will in due time follow. The male is allowed no time to rejoice in successful procreation.

Back from the jungle to Cheltenham. What I miss, and I’m more aware of this from a front-row seat, so not more than a few yards away, is the absence of a human dimension in his projection of himself as a scientist. Human beings of social, cultural, mixed-up, error-prone, imperfect beings. The human dimension doesn’t get a look in.

Take religion as the classic example – and Dawkins’ favoured territory. For my part, it’s so closely tied with ideas of love and compassion, and security, and re-assurance, and atheism does such a bad job of providing any substitute, that you’re throwing out a great chunk of human civilisation if you dismiss religion. The easy target of a personal god is only one manifestation. The instinct to believe or, if not to believe a such, then find re-assurance somewhere beyond ourselves, is innate to human beings.  Science, you could argue (and it would be interesting to do so!), is skeletal without it.

On climate change there was something similar. Dawkins didn’t mention the human dimension, and all the actions that will be required of us if the no-more-than 1.5% increase above pre-industrial levels is to be achieved. (‘What are your thoughts on Greta Thunberg’ would have been a good question.) He accepts Global Warming, and responded (I read) positively to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. If only, he once commented, Gore rather than Bush has won the presidential election in 2000. A few hanging or dimpled chads changed the world. But his focus last Saturday was only on the science.

We have the surveillance state that is China on the one hand, and the spectre, so appealing to one section of Republican opinion in the USA, of scary Peter-Thiel-style libertarianism on the other. We need to promote the human dimension across the board, at all times, in all things. The religion-versus-atheism debate is old hat. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, atheists – we’re all in this together. Science must be and remain the servant of humanity, and without that context it can become so easily, as China demonstrates, the instrument of an authoritarian state.

(I’d like to chip in here with comments on Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality. But I haven’t dipped into it yet. One comment from a Guardian interview from last month: ‘If only everyone were capable of reasoning properly, Pinker sometimes seems to imply, then our endless political arguments would not occupy so much of public life.’ There’s the rub, of course. We don’t reason ‘properly’, and the application of reason doesn’t always lead to the same conclusions.)

Dawkins signed off with his thoughts on the transgender debate. Men and women are defined by their chromosomes and whether or not they are born with a penis. That is the biological definition. How they define themselves to themselves and to others is up to them.  No questions from the audience, so no debate ensued. But Dawkins had been clear, as always – the science must prevail.