Monday 17 August 2009

An act of forgiveness is essentially a response to an expression of remorse. It is a condition of its possibility that it is asked for. Otherwise it is absurd to ask a victim whether they forgive the wrong-doer, and it is confused to proclaim your forgiveness of someone who hasn't expressed remorse. In such a case all the victim can do is express their willingness to forgive.

Sunday 19 July 2009

Dr David Kelly

Harrowdown Hill

I shall probably be found, I said,
and I flashed a smile as I spoke, dead

in the woods, and he smiled back,
with that minute shake of the head,

momentary blink of eyes that lack
comprehension, and do not match

the smile, nor for the moment catch,
quite, the dissonance of mood and voice

where I, briefly revealed in speech, rejoice
to hear myself announce the fate

I’d only secretly dared contemplate:
such a blood sacrifice I thought were just

as I watched resentful men dissemble
before the cool courtesy of my call for trust;

I did not know how soon I would resemble
in the stress of my demeanour those betrayed

by the grave, insistent promises I made.
Public dishonour I could stand and face

were not this moral pride my real disgrace:
the woods, God’s glory, and myself, dismayed

into atonement with this blameless blade

Saturday 30 May 2009

CONT'D



But before we turn to Rahner, I should fill out the Cardinal's remarks, since it brings us back to that anxiety about losing the faith. I don't care what you do, my mother used to say when we were growing up, as long as you don't give up the faith. This was a bad strategic move, like the warning about the fruit of the one tree that you mustn't eat, the one door not to be opened ... except that giving up the faith is not something that one straightforwardly does. Losing the faith can sound like carelessness, and perhaps in some cases it is, though is its loss always a cause for blame? Perhaps one can be blamed for failures one was hardly aware of ... so, the precious gift that can be lost and if lost then lost on account of some failure of will or action or inner disposition that slips below the surface of one's attention. Perhaps even thinking too much? There were those who thought that a blameworthy activity that put one's faith in jeopardy. Anyway, "For Jesus the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils. You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trusts between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people". No, I don't agree with this either, gentle reader, but precisely where does the disagreement lie? And is there some truth that Murphy-O'Connor seeks to convey that one might acknowledge, and recognise that one had not taken into account? Disagreeing is not the same as dismissing it as nonsense, the latter a reactive movement that depends upon misinterpretation of what it is to be a believer.



In any event, commentators in the media were astonished that the Cardinal claimed this at the time of the Ryan Report on child abuse in Ireland. How can the 'inability to believe in God' be the greatest of evils? I suppose they might have gone on to say that surely these cynical priests and nuns and Christian Brothers did evil things and were believers. But actually it is not so clear that they were .... believers, I mean. I know that this will irritate my secularist friends--and I do, honestly, speak as one of them--but the Cardinal is not saying that the greatest evil is to be of the opinion that there is no God. To think so is to misunderstand the nature of belief. To believe in God is to have confidence in the saving power of his Word and thus to commit oneself faithfully to following his commandments --- something like that. I shall have to return to this.

But 'the rule of egoism and the loss of peace' are phrases that echo the thinking of the present Pope. The thought seems to be that the loss of faith amounts to the loss of a vision of the world, including the loss of moral vision. It is the expression of a fear, one we are entirely familiar with from that remark from Dostoevsky, 'If God is dead, then everything is permitted'.. It is the assumed loss of moral vision, and the sense that moral life loses its foundation, that sees the loss of faith as the greatest evil. This is a thought that we have to resist, but should take account of its being the expression of a fear on the part of those who believe and are afraid of the loss of that belief.

When I first read accounts of the mid-Victorian crisis of faith I wondered how late I was to undergo it myself more than a centry later.

Thursday 28 May 2009




I belong to the Catholic tribe and have in earlier years hoped to have the courage of solidarity. At the road block, the question was a tribal one, Catholic or Protestant? and 'atheist' is the wrong answer. I learnt this sense of solidarity from an Indian Muslim friend. He used to be an atheist, but even then, he said, he hoped that if he were cornered by a Hindu mob he would declare himself a Muslim and stand with his companions.

But belonging to this tribe ... is a difficult life sentence, without parole. I always come back to it. Sometimes it feels as though I am an agnostic/Buddhist/humanist trapped inside a Catholic's body and that reassignment is not available. I say trapped, because it affects the whole of my intellectual life and I cannot move on, though maybe the truth is not to be expressed in this linear way, but rather the circle widens (imperceptibly) and that is a better image. Once a Catholic, you see. A certain set of questions, round and arduously round is how it seems in the bad times, my intellectual life dominated by the attempt to understand and resolve them, a set of questions that defines my life, and maybe that is the point of the idea of a 'world', whose derivation seems to be the idea of the 'life of a man', that its construction or dismantling is the work of a human lifetime. In my case the work seems to be to express the experience of its dismantling, and then to sift through the remains.

But the tribal thing: when we were kids we always knew who the Catholics were, in parliament, in the unions, on the stage, in the literary world, in broadcasting. But that was about us and who we could, should, identify with, take pride in. 'You know he's a Catholic?': rather different in intonation from that perplexing knowledge some people of a certain class tend to have: 'of course, he's Jewish, you know'. For me, nowadays, it takes the form of noticing the news when it turns to matters Catholic, a papal gaffe, a new Archbishop, another embarrassed episcopal interview, the tense, brittle, unyielding and defensive, slightly puzzled voice, about gays or contraception or child abuse, or abortion or embryo research. I am distant enough to note the intellectual disaster zone, close enough to feel their pain and want to shake them, longing for one of them to break out, break free and say what they really think, except, I realise, in many cases this is what they really think. But what is it, really to think something? These guys are loyal sons of the Church, reasonably decent men (of course notice the gender), dedicated to, even infused by the ideal of Love, seeking in their lives to be 'another Christ': but spare me that love when the ideal is mediated by life-destroying theory and ideology, precise and petty regulation, so that, confusing loyalty to Christ with loyalty to the official Church, they help to maim and cripple souls, without noticing, and all in a spirit of love, and to that extent they are victims also, of self-harm, though, again, they do not notice, where to notice is to go deeper into self-knowledge than the maintenance of their world can contain. They are loyal sons of the Church and the Church has a position on many things and one needs to know what it is in order to stand up for it, and the education of priests is a training in its articulation. But, note to self, it is dangerous to charge others with lack of self-knowledge, it tempts the gods ... except that once the world came tumbling down, and after many years I have heard again the ancestral voices in those of my contemporaries, who talk unselfconsciously about Almighty God and what he wills. inhabiting what, in my case, came tumbling down. But the faith and the loss of faith, is a high anxiety area: 'the fool hath said in his heart ...' expresses such anxiety.
In which connection, the other day the Cardinal, at the enthronement of his successor, said things which caused vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a delicious glee of affront. The problem is that the delicious glee, the affront, the outrage, also express a state of the soul, one that passes unnoticed because subjectivity is not so much not thought to matter, as never referred to. One looks out, as it were, and not in, so all unknowing of what determines what one can see. Anyway, the Cardinal. I suppose my complaint about the hierarchy is that its members are compelled to appear orthodox even if their private thoughts are not, like politicians or cabinet ministers, they must defend the line, the position, the policy, even if they are against it, this on pain of expulsion. There are not many rogue bishops, so I assume that for most of them there is no such dissonance between private thought and public utterance, but that their minds are shaped by the official teaching. But to come to particulars, the Cardinal said that in the absence of faith we were left with 'an impoverished understanding of what it is to be human', that people were 'not totally human if they leave out the transcendent'. This is what caused the vulgar secularists to hug themselves in a tabloid glee: 'he says we are less than human!' as though 'less than human' implied 'sub-human'. The trouble is that these people are incurious and do not help the cause of secular humanism, they lack charity, do not seek to see what the man is trying to say, which I take to be that in the absence of faith we are not fully human, that a dimension of what makes us human beings is absent. I offer these brief clarifications not because I agree with him but because they are thoughts that belong to generations of clergy trained in theology and philosophy.
We have, therefore, to turn to one of the eminent catholic theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner ...


Sunday 29 March 2009

Ramadan goes on to say that without an intra-religious dialogue between Muslims 'it is impossible - and it may indeed be counter-productive - to engage in a 'dialogue of civilisations'. One has to do both, however: 'one should enter dialogue as one looks at oneself in a mirror ... and draw on the ... information that dialogue with the other reveals about oneself ... one should indeed, when starting a critical, constructive dialogue with other civilisations, ask oneself about one's own meaning and objectives.' (p 305). Ramadan is writing of course as a Muslim concerned about the current condition of Islam, but when he says 'one' here he surely refers to anyone who is concerned to start a dialogue, though he finds too many of his fellow Muslims wanting in this respect:

"Referring to ethical outcomes should give rise to a collective, critical and constructive approach of the very notion of "dialogue" and its meaning. Instead of such fundamental reflection, idealistic reflections appear here and there about common values and respectiing diversity'. One knows what he means, but what is the exact nature of its limitations? 'The debate over "civilisations" and "cultures" must not act as a screen and be a pretext behind which the other real problems of contemporary times are hidden ... Depicting the "dialogue of civilisations" as the positive ideology of our time to avoid discussing the strategies of political, economic, cultural and military domination is a smokescreen and, when all is said and done, nothing but hypocrisy ... a twofold displacement is being performed in the North: a kind of ideology of fear is created, fixing attention on differences and on potential disruptions and clashes between religions and cultures, then debates focus on issues concerning civilisations and values, far from any general political or economic considerations. This clever strategy encloses the agents of dialogue in an isolated Universe where issues that suddenly seem the most important are discussed without dealing with previously existing real problems that nevertheless remain essential" (p 306)

Ramadan claims that this kind of displacement occurs nationally as well as internationally, thus, 'in many European countries, problems are being 'culturalised', 'religionalised', or 'Islamisised' while they are in actuality primarily social and political in nature." (p 306)

He goes on to talk about the monolithic construction of one's own civilsation and that of the other, and that the West needs to overcome its own selective memory and recall its hidden islamic sources. Ditto the Muslim world, nurtured by Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian thought: 'it is impossible to start earnest ddialogue about present diversity if one persists in denying the plural reality and diversity of one's own past'. (p 307)

Crucially, 'ideas and values should not only be discussed, but measured through their concrete implementation in reality ... ... we must undertake a true critical and self-critical analysis to measure the gap between our values and our practices. Dialogue between civilisations is meaningful only if it compels its agents and involved parties to ponder the inconsistency between ideals and respective concrete policies. Intellectual probity calls for such self-awareness in the mirror of the other's questioning. One can then realise that the problems encountered have less to do with values, which have often been historically or philosophically shared, than with disagreements about their ideological use or with the inconsistency observed every day in political, social, or economic practices. Both universes refer to dignity, justice, equality, and freedom and in both Universes-to various dehrees-one can observe undignified or wrongful treatment of human beings (from immigration policies to torture), conspicuous injustice ... persistent inequalities ... breaches of freedom' (308)

Some of these realities are presumably to be understood in terms of the 'shadow', thus our self-image is framed in terms of the positive values, our practice is furtive and concealed from ourselves and there is an aura of resistance in the demeanour of the political leaders who announce the one and practice the other. Tony Blair and Jack Straw manifested this kind of demeanour in their public utterances about the Iraq war and it came out most strongly when they resolutely refused to acknowledge what everyone else knew clearly, that the war was a recruting sergeant for violent extremism, which was put down to corrupt forms of Islam, whereas in fact it was expressed in those forms and not caused by them. We quite properly want to counter violent extremism but find it impossible to acknowledge that our own actions and policies have something to do with its growth. Now, it is one thing to acknowledge a link and another to condemn those policies. That is an independent question. In principle, if we think our policies are just then we ought to pursue them and accept that we shall to suffer violent reaction from some quarters. But violence is often allied to a sense of injustice, and if the policies are unjust ...

Ramadan talks rightly about the conditions for the possibility of dialogue, humility, respect, self-criticism and so on, and similarly with inter-faith dialogue ...

Saturday 7 March 2009

I have been reading what seems to me an important book, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation by Tariq Ramadan. He talks about how 'Popular demonstrations, so excessive in the Muslim world, against the Danish cartoons or Pope Benedict XVI's speech in Germany, reveal far more about societies where critical debate is lacking, where civil society is muzzled (and sometimes cunningly instrumentalized to vent its anger on the outside world, the West), where hypocritical formalism is institutionalized, than they do about the specific object of the anger. The same is true of mobilizations against the war in Iraq or of opposition to the Israeli government's repressive policy towards the Palestinians. From the top leaders to the grass roots of Muslim societies and communities, one can observe emotional mobilizations determined by the timing and the intensity of media coverage. There is no in-depth debate between trends of thought, no critical dialogue, no long-term strategy ... and always the same lack of vision and co-ordination' ( p 305).

Friday 6 March 2009

School is out

Well, it has felt like school is out after a heavy few days inserting other people's proof corrections into a master copy and producing an Index. All is in hand then for Philosophers and God, which should appear some time in the Spring: there are some interesting papers in it, though I say so myself. Anyway, I managed to get out of the house and do a circuit of the north end of the island, the sky blue, the wind not too hard, but one breathed it in like delicious sips of iced water. I was thinking about death again, though not for gloomy reasons. I wonder whether representations of it as an utterly bleak deprivation of sense is precisely a result of attempts to imagine one's own non-existence. There is heaven and there is Hell, of course, neither of which are 'non-existence'. For those who hope for the life to come the problem is that they cannot imagine the positive, only the absence of what belongs to this physical, mortal life. As for 'non-existence' or 'extinction', when the bubble bursts there is no bubble, when the flame is extinguished there is no flame.. Neither of these images are of the sensory deprivation that some people imagine as the negative aspect of a presumed or hoped for survival..


One cannot stress enough the significance of the ebbing of the Sea of Faith. I find it very difficult to think in terms of 'the meaning of life' or the idea that 'life has a meaning'. Both these expressions are predicated, historically, on the idea of a life to come, a life that will make sense of this one, restore the balance of justice and affliction and so forth. In the absence of these concepts ... the trouble is that people will then ask, well what is the meaning of life? Whereas, it seems to me that at best we are dealing in metaphor when we apply this term to 'life'. A person loves their life or hates it, they are anguished at the prospect of losing things they hold dear, they will be relieved of what causes them affliction, they want to live or they don't want to live, they live for this or they live for that, they are bored or in despair, they are absorbed and engaged, and so forth, these are the primary categories. In the absence of what we love, the presence of what we recoil from we might start talking of 'meaning' or 'loss of meaning', but these expressions are derivative and to understand them we have toi refer to what is primary.
I have just taken delivery of something completely different, Hutton's Arse.




Saturday 28 February 2009

It is hard to imagine one's own non-existence, one's extinction, one's own life going out like a candle flame, there is the flame, then there is no longer any flame. Well, actually it is impossible to imagine it because one is still there, reflecting on absence or darkness, on some negative or neutral image of non-being, which is no longer non-being just for that reason, that one is there and one is regarding it. But what of hope for the life to come, that we might overcome death? What is the source of the hope, though, why might one hope, what is it that one clings to, that one wants to hold on to, even if one's life ends like a half-finished sent .....



'But hope would be hope for the wrong thing ... '



But what do I think of this. Well, I have no idea, but I think anyone should consider all the possibilities and be reconciled to them. And can one be reconciled to all of them, all the possibilities?

The oyster catchers are back, in the meadows with the geese, one walks quietly along the track in the darkness and they still take alarm and rise in panic from the water-logged fields

Saturday 17 January 2009

Purity of Intention

More on the uses of political rhetoric, though as soon as I get hot under the collar about these things I wonder how I could be so naive. There was a discussion of the role of that most frightening of men, Dick Cheney, and the general idea that a State's strategic actions (eg securing the oil) would be routinely concealed under layers of moral justification that had nothing to do with the original and real motivation, justification in terms of the overcoming of tyranny, in terms of liberty and democracy, and so forth. This doesn't give Public Relations a good name as a profession. (Actually, I noticed that Cheney said on more than one occasion that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD. The wilier Tony Blair only ever said that he had no doubt that he had them).

But then the news turned to the situation in Gaza and that angry and eloquent Irishman, John Ging. The Israeli Public Relations team work with routine forms of defensive rhetoric. Thus Hamas intend to kill innocent civilians (which is wrong, certainly) whereas Israeli forces do not intend to kill civilians, they are concerned only to kill militants, and to that extent they are in a morally superior position because they are acting in legitimate self defence (with the implication that Hamas are not, and that rather than acting as a resistance to an occupation are sending off their rockets out of malice and nihilism).

But there is an interesting ambiguity in what they say. They don't intend to kill civilians, even though an awful lot of them get in the way and are killed because there are militants in their midst whom the IDF does intend to kill. The problem is ... that it is not the case that they intend to avoid killing civilians in such circumstances. It is significant that they get very angry when people say this sort of thing. To repeat what I said in an earlier post, it would certainly be wrong of Hamas to use civilians as human shields in a UN facility in the course of a military operation, if this is indeed what they have been doing. One Israeli spokesman said that their doing this constituted a war crime, with the implication that, rather than withdrawing, the IDF would rightly attack the position even in the knowledge that there would be many civilian casualties, civilians that they did not intend to kill but did not intend to avoid killing either. If they did intend to avoid killing civilians then they would have withdrawn.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Silence after music, again, as important as the music it is coloured by and follows.

It is in such silence, and just occasionally, that one regards the human condition, and thus one's own life, from a position beyond it. Well, I say beyond it, but this possibility is also part of it, isn't it, except that when one refers to the human condition one has in mind its bliss and blunder, its turmoil and calm, and I am talking about a regard that casts its gaze upon all of this gathered into a single whole. I should like to say that this regard is one of love, since that seems to be its quality, though it also takes the form of compassion.

I think I really do mean a perspective that looks quietly at the whole, often exemplified in a single scene. Thus it is to be contrasted with the real indignation that one feels about what is now being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and this, one might think, is an inescapable moral indignation, but the phenomenon and the response are also part of what one is sometimes aware of in the silence. Both, though, are capable of leading to action, and I wonder whether the transcendent perspective works towards peace and reconciliation, whereas the indignation inclines more to punishment and revenge, even though both seek justice, which is anyway a condition of peace and reconciliation. It would be a grotesque error and self-indulgence, though, to seek to cling to the contemplative aspect of this transcendent perspective at the expense of its active element which, I think, should sublimate (ie raise to a higher condition) the natural feelings of righteous indignation.

More generally, what is one to make of this capacity to be a witness of the whole, the whole nexus of cause and effect in human conduct? The most significant thing is that it is not neutral or 'disencchanted', it is from a point of view ...

And the music? I've been listening to Elizabeth Watts singing Schubert. most of the songs unfamiliar and yet at moments deeply familiar as they evoke memories of other songs by him in moments of the melody.

Monday 12 January 2009

Naming prejudices and the full moon

Many names for racial or national groups start off as more or less descriptive or as abbreviations or metonymies for foreigners with curious dietary practices or common names (such as le bifsteak for a 'Brit' or Mick for an Irish male or Jimmy for a Glaswegian). Many other names are abusive from the start, often coined in times of war or conflict, or after conquest as expressions of contempt for those who are subordinate or inferior. But even the neutral descriptive terms come with an attitude, and the attitude contaminates the descriptive term so that it becomes an expression of racial prejudice, and so a new term is invented, but it is tracked by and then overtaken by the negative attitude, which then contaminates the term, so a new one is devised, but then is tracked by ... until there is no longer racial or sectional contempt. But political correctness can at least raise awareness and make people think about the cultural prejudies they hardly know they have.

You don't have to be drunk to fall into a ditch (though presumably it helps) but if you leave a house late at night on this island and walk back home you are liable to fall into one or walk into a wall if you don't have a torch because the dark is as dark as dark can be, especially if the sky is overcast with cloud. Thus one sees the benefit of a moonlit night which, as a townie I neglected except for its aesthtic aspects. The point is that you can see. On the other hand, I suppose there are circumstances when the concealing darkness is an advantage. One is close to anient times here .. the danger of attack, the advantage of surprise, it is still in the air, somehow, though the local citizenry is of course benign.

Tuesday 6 January 2009

One thing that might start a person along the path to doing philosophy is just paying attention to the words of politicians, or perhaps one is already on that path when one assesses the relation of these words to the realities. Thus the Hamas spokesperson tells us that this war against the Palestinians is actually against the whole umma itself; thus George Bush says that Hamas is to blame for the current crisis; thus the Israeli spokespersons insist that Israel has a right to defend itself, and tell us that they are making hundreds of thousands of phone calls to request people to get away from the bombs and rockets. There are truths and falsehoods here, but in both cases there is evasion and a refusal to acknowledge the full dreadful reality. Thus it is true that Hamas should be condemned for embedding themselves and their weapons within the city and in the midst of the civilian population, and it is right that it should be condemned by Israeli spokespersons. But these same spokespersons then claim that their smashing of these human shields is just what any nation would do in defense of its own citizens, whereas what they thus do is itself quite wicked. It is the reality of rhetoric that leads to the necessity for dialectic. What is shameful is that the politicians still think that they can get away with it: that is to say, they still have cause to think that their populations are credulous. There is also much anger and much suppressed moral discomfort under the anger, disguised by the raised and indignant voice. There is a certain comfort in anger, it is a familar garment worn easily but not so easily discarded.

Sunday 4 January 2009

On the Meaning of Life

This picture of the Skara Brae village remains which look as though they are about to be overwhelmed finally by the waves ... makes me think of the fragilty and contingency of human existence. But as the New Year has arrived it's time to start thinking about work. I'm still reading and benefitting from John Armstrong's book on Goethe, though at some point I need to think my way through the issue of 'the Meaning of Life'. I have even bought a little book on the theme by Terry Eagleton ... I suppose to see what he makes of the question. There are certainly diverse and opposed experiences which some writers will describe as experiences of meaning, the sense that life has some meaning, or that it lacks meaning, and so forth. But I find myself quite doubtful about whether to go along with such assessments. I am inclined, perhaps wrongly, to associate talk of life having a meaning with the idea of its being a preparation for the life to come, though I know that puts it too crudely, with the implication that life does not have meaning after all if we abandon the relevant religious beliefs. But this is just to say that in that case the concept of 'meaning' has no application, rather than that meaning is now absent and it is all 'absurd'. However, there is still the problem of the negative sense of life that sees it is as allegedly pointless or meaningless. I wonder whether this negative experience of life, which is real enough, is better described in other ways, in terms of despair, perhaps, or a sense of futility, as opposed to engagement and fulfilment, absorption. Everthing would then turn on what it was that one found futile or absorbing. No answers here, just a preliminary thought that talk of meaning in relation to life is at best not helpful, possibly a metaphor. I suspect that what is more fundamental is an ethical sense. Okay, just notes ... I think this last thought is not quite connected. I'm thinking about the idea of Bildung or 'self-cultivation' and it seems to me that its deepest impulse is an ethical one, and that this determines the form of the cultivation or attention to the self. I don't say 'should' ...