In Blood and Belonging (1993) Michael Ignatieff wrote as follows:

“If I had supposed , as the Cold War came to an end, that the new world might be ruled by philosophers and poets, it was because I believed , foolishly, that the precarious civility and order of the states in which I live must be what all people rationally desire…’

His optimism was short-lived:  ‘…liberal civilisation – the rule of laws, not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence – runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved only be the most unremitting struggle against human nature.’ He argues that tolerance, compromise, reason cannot be preached to those who are mad with fear or mad with vengeance.

And yet, to my mind, those liberal values run deep, they do not run against the human grain. But they need peace in which to express themselves. Violence and compassion – these are the polarities.

Ignatieff supported the Iraq war, and this troubles me.  Ten years earlier, in 1993, he’d written:  ‘We must be prepared to defend them [our values] by force … the failure to do so has left the hungry nations sick with contempt for us.’

It is I’d argue the force, the violence, of our interventions that generates contempt. The invasive, overwhelming nature of the aid and support we provide, and all its myriad and often unwelcome ties. Our contempt for other cultures.

A politics of argument and compromise cannot be introduced by force. Afghanistan is the supreme case in point. Nor (sadly) can it be introduced simply by kindness and compassion. The road is a long and complex one: that realisation is the beginning of wisdom.

[Quotations are from Paul Wilsons’ review of Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashesin the NY Review of Books (April 2014).]

‘Don’t put yourself on the (political) stage, Mr Ignatieff,’ to paraphrase an old song.

Democracy comes many forms. In many Western European countries the old liberal political establishments are under threat from a populist right. The radical left used to be there as a counter-poise but no more. Putin and Erdogun are two populist leaders much in the news, appealing to nationalist sentiment. At the other extreme we’ve the rare instances of eminent men, known for their wisdom, philosopher kings, parachuted in but, as the experience of Michael Ignatieff in Canada and Mario Monti in Italy shows, street-fighting capability is a more useful attribute than wisdom.

Called from Harvard by Canadian Liberal Party leaders as a potential leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Ignatieff fought the 2011 election as leader and came a mighty cropper. His book Fire and Ashes bring all his professorial wisdom to bear on what was a searing experience.

What role does wisdom have in politics? UN reports on climate change are scorned as biased, likewise balanced appraisals of Europe and immigration. And when science and appraisal are scorned as tools of the ‘establishment’, and when scorn itself becomes a weapon, we have one of the key issues Ignatieff highlights in his book.

Paul Wilson’s review (NY Review of Books April 2014) of Fire and Ashes helps us here:

‘No, the regret one feels is for the gradual death of civility in politic which his book so vividly chronicles. Ignatieff was right when he called [that] civility ‘fragile’. Of all political systems, democracy is the easiest to pervert, because it depends far less on rules than on mutual respect between players.’

When respect fails, Wilson argues, so does good governance. Witness the USA, and increasingly the UK. He ends by quoting Orwell holding up ‘common decency’ as a bulwark against ‘smelly little orthodoxies’.

Just who those smelly orthodoxies might be today is a subject for another time.

 

Just in case anyone imagines that all religions are the same or more to the point that all religious experience is the same they should read RS Thomas, quondam vicar of Aberdaron (Wales) and Father Thomas Merton, Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

And read them one after the other.

RS Thomas:

‘And God said, I will build a church here

And cause the people to worship me

And afflict them with poverty and sickness

In return for centuries of hard work

And patience. And its walls shall be as hard as

Their hearts, and its windows let in the light

Grudgingly…’

This is from The Island. There are many other poems I could quote.

Thomas Merton:

‘Yesterday Father Macarius and I went out and blessed the fields, starting with the wheat and oats… Out in the calf pasture we blessed some calves who came running up and took an active interest in everything. Then we blessed some pigs…the sheep showed no concern and the chickens ran away as soon as we approached. The rabbits stayed quiet until we threw holy water at them and then they all jumped.’

(The Sign of Jonas, May 6, Ascension Day)

I’m with the rabbits.

RS Thomas, for whom the word curmudgeon could have been invented, and who is nonetheless wonderful, and Thomas Merton walked in different worlds. The one weighed down, just surviving amid the crags as do the mountain sheep, the other spreading grace and jumping for joy, at one with the sheep who showed no concern, for sprinkled holy water or for anything else it seems.

Merton’s time to show concern would come later. (Nuclear disarmament and radical America of the 50s and 60s.)

 

A very short poem…with the first verse taken from R.S. Thomas’s

poem, His Condescensions Are Short-Lived. Thomas is well-worth reading!

 

Those who shout

 

“…Democracy is the tip

the rich and the well-born give

for your homage”

 

Now it’s those who shout

and those who have the money

to make us hear their shouting

 

What of those who reason

who argue who balance –

how will they be heard

 

and who will be left to listen?

 

 

Apropos my last post,

Nick Cohen (Guardian book review) of Daniel Hannan’s Freedom and Why It Matters

“In the end, however, Hannan loses his self-control. The book degenerates into incontinent complaints about Barack Obama, the welfare state and human rights. To his confused mind, it is apparently fine for the Americans to enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights, but not for the British to enjoy the protections of the Human Rights Act. It is as if the history of Anglo-Saxon liberty from the Witan through Magna Carta, the Levellers, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution and the suffragettes has been one long struggle to reach its perfect consummation in the hand-me-down prejudices of last week’s Daily Telegraph.”

I put something down (but didn’t post it) on the subject of democracy a few months back. Recently the Economist ran a very good piece on the state of democracy, and the challenges it faces, around the world. But they missed the crucial point that I make it my piece below. Democracy is not God-given (God has never opined on the subject of democracy), it is fragile, it is remarkable that we have it, we should be thankful and guard it with our lives. We need to recognise how right and left are both valid positions, how each country’s past will colour its attempts at a democratic present, how in may countries it will not be in the way we understand it in the West, recognise too that it exists in hybrid forms, and that evolution toward democracy is slow and in no way Darwinian – bastard lines may usurp, pure lines may be sidelined, autocracy waits in the wings.

Miracles in life: 1] Democracy (other ‘Miracles’ may follow!)

The miracle is – How we all come together and beyond the ties of family and kinship set up governments and abide by their laws, and beyond that how we work within democracies, which might be the least-worst form of government, but looked at another way are a miracle, a triumph of human nature, where without compulsion and out of self-interest and fellow-feeling we come together and confront and  debate and decide.

Those who criticise and claim disillusion live in a short-sighted world where human rights are if not God-given somehow natural laws and one of those human rights is democracy, which foolish men in foolish governments seeks all the time to subvert. Democracy is a human accomplishment, not a human right, and it takes all our commitments, as voters, as fellow workers for the cause, to make it work. Democracy battles against apathy and animosity for its own survival.

Criticise politicians for their arguments and decisions but don’t criticise them as a breed of men if you’re not prepared to join and argue with them – be a part of the process. If you wish to hold them accountable, be accountable yourselves.

Foolish men and media rail against government and politicians. They are the unaccountable ones, and all their foolishness, all the vindictiveness goes without challenge.

As Yeats wrote:

Mock mockers after that/That would not lift a hand maybe/To help good, wise or great/To bar that foul storm out, for we/Traffic in mockery

Two books called Ten Billion, referring to world population, one assuming we exceed it come 2020 with increasingly catastrophic consequences, the other confident the increase will tail away before we reach ten billion.

I took a look at both books.

Stephen Emmott: ‘unscientific and misanthropic’ according to the Guardian. ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/09/stephen-emmott-population-book-misanthropic

Danny Dorling: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7e5ba20-e7e4-11e2-9aad-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ZuTyiwcG

I’ve heard Dorling talk (via an RSA video): eminently sane. Emmott I haven’t heard, but suggestions are he’s seriously OTT.

I’m for Dorling. ‘It is possible to paint a picture that has a rosier, less optimistically combative and less pessimistically catastrophic ending than many presume.’ He’s an avowed optimist but we’ll still need a huge amount of vigilance to avoid catastrophe. And that’s the line I take.

I’m as agonised about climate change and melting Arctic ice, eroding coastlines and higher sea levels as anyone, and yet the only approach is not ‘we’re fucked’ or ‘buy [your child] a gun’ (Emmott) but get engaged, work for a saner world, take initiatives. Happily it seem more the older generation who take the ‘we’re fucked’ line, or the alternative at the other extreme, ‘what problem, I don’t see one’ (paraphrasing Nigel Lawson).

Optimism and ‘can-do’ have always been more the domain of the younger generation and this old fogey (almost old, almost fogey) is more than happy to take their side in this case.

Quick plug: there’s no better way of getting informed than the Population Matters website. See http://populationmatters.org  They are kinder there to Emmott than I would be, but it’s full of good things.

Thinking of Silvain Tesson he took vodka (many bottles of) and cigars with him for his six months of isolation on the taiga adjacent to Lake Beikal.

He walked, he read, he communed, he let the simple things fill his day and yet, on 20th February, ‘I get out of bed so hung-over I’m almost upside-down’. This isn’t, M. Tesson, the eremitic path! But … we can be so prissy about all this. Each to his own.

Find your cabin and cave and do it your way.

Before questions get asked I’m not planning a drunken carousal with nature somewhere. I just like M. Tesson’s style.

I’m sometimes accused of talking too much. There is of course no truth in this. But maybe when I espouse the virtues of silence, of retreats, wide open spaces, quiet reflection in holy places … maybe I do use a few too many words.  When talking with another there’s a vacuum to be filled. When you’re alone there are no dualities, only yourself, the wide world, God in whatever form he manifests himself.

There’s a lesson for me in Silvain Tesson’s The Consolations of the Forest. Mischa is driving the author out to the cabin on the shore of Lake Beikal where he’ll spend the next six months on his own.

The landscape is bleak: ‘the ice rather resembles a shroud.’

Mischa: ”It’s dreary.’ And nothing more until the next day.

And the next day, the ice cracks, and ‘fault lines streak across the quicksilver plain…’

‘It’s lovely, ’ says Mischa. And nothing else until evening.

How does anyone in the company of another inhabit such supreme reticence, such silence?

Should, I wonder, I look for the answer in discussion with another? Tempting.

‘The giant fig, which looks like a huge grove in the distance, is at least as old as man’s recorded history on this plain… the size of six ordinary figs, it is a tree of life.’ There are, Peter Matthiessen (The Tree Where Man Was Born) tells us, no other trees for miles around.

Whether baobab or fig or in other cultures banyan, in our own a great oak or weathered yew, these are the trees that define life in our world. Life takes no grander or literally more rooted form. All manner of creatures live in or under, we ourselves find shade and shelter under them, we may eat their seeds and fruit and only in madness would we cut them down.

We need more such trees and yet – they take hundreds and for some thousands of years to become what they are. We cannot accelerate time and create an arboreal world at will but we can resist our urge to wipe out time, to wipe out time past and replace with our own feeble and transitory wisdoms.

Go shelter under the great fig, as other creatures find shelter in its branches and sit in wonder and stall your thoughts of conquest of self or others or mastery of this or that skill or fad.

Under such trees man is not only born – he finds wisdom.