Corbyn and Peter Pan politics

“Every time a child says, ‘I don't believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”

Peter Pan leads the way to a fantasy land
where fairies depend on children's beliefs

“I believe it because it is absurd,” said Tertullian, one of the fathers of the Christian church. It’s a powerful and highly sophisticated statement.

Christianity, like any belief system, requires faith, an ability to believe despite a lack of evidence, even against all evidence. After all, you need no faith to believe that the sun will set in the West: that’s the definition of the West. To believe that a man can be executed and rise on the third day, that does require faith.

This is as true of trivial beliefs as these more profound ones, such as Peter Pan’s statement about fairies. Or the belief that a portly, white-bearded man in a red suit will come down a chimney to bring good children presents.

I find it impossible to make such an act of faith. I say that even though I know the great comfort that faith provides. It’s no accident that the words “communion” and “community” are linked: shared belief creates a community and belonging to one is a deep human need and a source of consolation in a difficult world.

Even so, I can’t make that leap. Like Diderot, I find it less of a miracle that Lazarus was brought back from the dead, than that nobody, but nobody, chose to record the fact. Surely, somewhere there’d be something from a neutral third party: a spice merchant from Asia Minor, a Roman officer writing home, perhaps a sailor from Alexandria, even if all they were saying was “there’s a really weird tale going around this place at the moment, about a guy called Lazarus. They say, would you believe, that he died but a visiting miracle-worker brought him back to life.” Instead, nothing, nada, nix. The only authority is from the gospel writers themselves, those who were promoting the belief in the first place.

Not a problem, of course, for those like Tertullian who believe because it is absurd. But for someone like me, looking for evidence to support a point of view (which isn’t quite as strong as a belief: it can be overturned by new evidence), I simply can’t accept the story on such thin backing.

So I’m deprived of the child’s joy in waiting for the tooth fairy to call, believing in the fairy even though no one’s ever seen her. Or indeed the sense of belonging that inspires a mass at its best, even though no one’s ever documented the conversion of a biscuit and a chalice of wine into flesh and blood. Or indeed, the atmosphere at a meeting of Corbynistas, encouraging each other to further acts of faith, even though no Opposition leader in history has ever won an election from a base of unpopularity as dire as their guru’s.

That’s a double misfortune for me. In the first place, because I can’t enjoy the simple comfort of the believer drawn from the mere fact of belief. There must be joy in the fervour of the Corbynist who can, like Tertullian, convince himself of the truth of an absurd notion, such as John McDonnell’s that Corbyn can turn the poll position around in twelve months. I can’t share in it.

Then there’s the second misfortune. A child whose parents are sufficiently indulgent, and sufficiently well-heeled, will wake up in the morning to find that a coin has replaced the tooth she placed under the pillow on going to bed. Unless the parents are exceptionally indulgent, an adult who does the same with a lost tooth is likely to suffer acute disappointment. Generally, indeed, we expect adults to grow out of such childish beliefs.

In the case of Corbynist fancy, not growing out of it has serious consequences for everyone in Britain: clinging to the belief that Corbyn can defeat the Tories prevents us replacing him by someone who might make some progress against them. That simply ensures continued Tory rule. The results are all about us to see: hospitals offering doctors nearly £1000 to do a shift in A&E to prevent complete collapse into unsafe service, kids from poor backgrounds far less likely to attend good schools, families of dying invalids deprived of basic support.

Unlike the Peter Pan claim, in the Corbyn fantasy, it isn’t lack of belief that kills. On the contrary, it’s belief itself. The longer we cling on to that absurd faith, we ensure the suffering, even death, of more people – not fairies, let me stress, but people.

Personally, I can’t believe that fairies exist and depend on the belief of children to assure their own survival.

I can’t believe that the universe is run by a God who took human form to suffer and die to redeem humankind from a fate to which he’d condemned it in the first place.

And I can’t believe that the least popular Opposition leader in my lifetime has the slightest chance of winning a general election.

Well, it would be absurd, wouldn’t it?

Trump, Corbyn and the power of faith

“Credo quia absurdum”, “I believe because it is absurd”, may sound like nonsense but it’s a powerful statement of faith.

Attributed to Tertullian, one of the earliest Christian authors, the phrase means that there’s no need for faith when it comes to the rational. I don’t need to believe that an unsupported weight will fall if I release it, because I can see it happen each time and have no reason to imagine that the next time the weight will hover or rise.

When it comes to the virgin birth, on the other hand, or the resurrection of the crucified Christ, I am dealing with events for which there is no rational explanation. Accepting them as true does require faith because I have no evidence for them. In terms day-to-day existence, they are absurd and therefore can only be believed or rejected, not proven or disproved.

That’s a perfectly legitimate stance, though it doesn’t happen to be mine. “I believe what can only be accepted by belief” sounds fine for anyone so inclined, but it works less well for those who prefer to know than to believe, and therefore seek evidence rather than faith. In any case, what I find essential is to limit belief to religious matters and not let it interfere with other domains where it can only be damaging. In particular, complete separation of faith from politics seems to me the only way to keep our forms of government sane.

That’s why I find it worrying that faith is entering our politics once more. That's the case in the US, for example. A huge minority – and I hope it remains a minority – seems convinced that Donald Trump is the way forward. They believe that it’s possible to build a 2000-mile wall and make it formidable enough to keep immigrants out; they even seem to believe that they can persuade the country just outside that wall, Mexico, to pay for it. They believe it, I presume, because it is absurd.

Essentially, at the back of Trump-mania is a specific form of belief: the worship of the messianic man, the providential figure without whom nothing can be achieved. Curiously, we have the same phenomenon in Britain, though not on the right of the political spectrum, but on the left. Here, the article of faith concerns Jeremy Corbyn, apparently believed by a great many Labour Party members – at least the new ones – to be the indispensable key to success. “If Jeremy can’t do it, no one can do it,” I saw on a poster at one of his rallies.

The venerable Corbyn
But is the veneration political or devout?

This is a belief based wholly on absurdity. There is simply no evidence at all that Corbyn is well-placed to realise any kind of Labour programme in office. In fact, all the evidence points the other way: he’s most unlikely ever to form a government.

His supporters regularly tell me about the by-elections Labour has won, with increased majorities, since he has been leader. They simply ignore that Ed Milliband, the previous leader, had exactly the same track record: actually, one more such by-election win (five rather than four), lulling the party into a false sense of confidence, shattered when we were badly defeated in the 2015 General Election. It is absurd to believe that with the same track record in opposition, the new leader will achieve anything more. Unless we simply believe because it is absurd.

The true believers claim is that Corbyn’s dire poll figures are not to be accepted. It’s true that polls are often misleading, but sadly the evidence (if evidence is what you like) is that their error is to overstate Labour support. But, I have been assured on Twitter that’s simply not the point:

“Polls don't reflect public opinion, they try to influence it. The sooner you eejits realise that, the Labour Party will do ok.”

What doesn’t fit the pattern of belief is rejected as untrue (and only believed by eejits). So, for instance, when Corbyn put out film of himself sitting on the floor of a “ram-packed” train because he couldn’t find a seat, that made an important point about the state of our (privatised) railways. When the railway company, Virgin, released film of him walking past empty seats, we were told that was a distortion of reality, that the true situation wasn’t as the film seemed to suggest.

For a while, I lived in what today is called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At one time, there was a rebellion by a movement that called itself Simba. Its priests assured the young men of the movement that if they simply ran at guns, looking neither right nor left, shouting “Mai! Mai!”, “Water! Water!”, any bullets fired at them would simply turn to water. Sadly, some of these young men were killed by bullets, but that didn’t invalidate the priests’ beliefs: clearly, the victims had looked right or left and brought death upon themselves.

Similarly, if Corbyn tries to make a valid point about privatised rail companies, but does it in a cack-handed way, stage-managing the setting for his statement so poorly that he’s quickly exposed, that isn’t evidence of his ineptitude, it’s evidence of how biased the media are against him. Just as when the parliamentary Labour party loses confidence in him, by a 4:1 majority, that doesn’t prove he can’t win his colleagues’ support, it only proves their base, treacherous plotting.

If Corbyn is re-elected leader, as seems likely, and goes on to take the party to a historically catastrophic defeat, which seems just as probable, the fault won’t be his. It will be down to the traitors in the parliamentary party or the jackals of the right-wing media. The fact that previous Labour leaders have faced the same obstacles but managed to overcome them will not be a consideration.

Because what we’re up against isn’t reason. It’s faith. It doesn’t matter how irrational it is, we believe it precisely because it is absurd.

Credo quia absurdum.


Postscript H L Mencken once wrote, “Tertullian is credited with the motto ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – ‘I believe because it is impossible’. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer.”

Mencken’s remark isn’t really relevant to my argument, but I just like it.