Christian truth and importance

On a visit to Cambridge, I had a flier pressed into my hand by a campaigner for a Christian evangelical organisation. 

It announced a series of lectures on the legacy of the novelist and outstanding Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, whose words it proudly quoted:

‘Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.’

This is a striking illustration of the notion that a statement needs only to be made sententiously to carry weight. If it is attributed to a man of recognised authority, its significance and profundity seem proved beyond challenge. But it equally demonstrates that however brilliant and authoritative you may be, you’re not proof against fallacy, especially a fallacy that seems to reinforce your preferred position.

C. S. Lewis:
proof that not even brilliance is a guarantee against fallacy

In this case, Lewis is indulging in an excluded middle. There are, after all, other possibilities than the two alternatives he presents. Just for the sake of argument, consider one of them.

What if Christianity happened to be false but was still followed by 3.3 billion people around the world? That’s the number who regard themselves as Christian and they would be, if the religion is false, victims of a major illusion. Now that may not make Christianity infinitely important, but the sheer number of believers in an error would mean we couldn’t regard it as unimportant either.

Perhaps we might toy with the idea that its importance lay somewhere between the two extremes Lewis offers us.

Might we in fact not think that, in these circumstances, Christianity was moderately important?

Whatever Mr Lewis might have to say on the matter. 

Brothers and neighbours

It was good to see my brother at the weekend, over from Paris with my sister-out-law, Danielle.

It feels like a good omen that she has the same name as my wife of thirty years. Good basis for an excellent relationship, I feel; certainly my Danielle has proved to have just the qualities I need to support me most the time and knock me into line some of the time.

Unfortunately our guest Danielle had her visit slightly spoiled on Saturday night by our neighbour from hell. She chose to have another of her all-night parties, starting with gaiety and Karaoke, and degenerating as the night gave way to the small hours into recrimination, anger and fighting. Par for the course for us, unfortunately, but a bit of a shock for our visitor.

The following morning the father of our neighbour’s child (as opposed to her present partner) turned up and had trouble getting any response to his repeated knocking on the door. He therefore resorted to his usual technique of yelling through the letterbox. My brother, unused to this endearing pattern of behaviour, opened our door to find out what was happening.

This being a family-oriented blog, I have subtly disguised some of the words in my record of the conversation, to avoid giving offence to more sensitive readers.

‘What the fudge do you want?’ said the shouter. ‘Shut the fudging door.’

My brother is completely unfazed by scintillating banter of this kind, and simply quipped back in kind.

‘I’ll shut the fudging door when I fudging feel like it.’

To everyone’s surprise, his interlocutor reacted with a beaming smile.

‘I like it,’ he said, ‘like your attitude.’

He all but offered his hand, perhaps put off at the last moment by my brother’s obvious disinclination to shake it.

Later that same day, Sunday, we travelled to see an old and recently-widowed friend. The visit went well, and in the course of it she told us about her new neighbours, millionaires from one of those sectors that do so much to bring joy into all our lives, such as financial services.

They had bought the house next door for the equivalent of about a quarter of a century’s income for anyone on normal earnings, and then spent a colossal amount more on major re-building. They would often clear off while the work was being done, and at one point the builders called on our friend.

‘Could we have some water?’ they asked. 

She assumed they must be wanting to brew up some tea or something, so she connected their hose to her tap, only mildly irritated by the fact that the neighbours had clearly turned their own water supply off before they left.

The following day she heard a cement mixer chugging away. She looked out of the window and saw the men using her water to mix their cement.

She disconnected the hose and offered it back to them.

‘But... how are we supposed to work without water?’ they asked.

Our friend gave them a polite reply because that’s her style. It’s a pity my brother wasn’t around; I suspect he would have said, ‘how the fudge is that my problem?’

Feed me, feed me! Who cares who's paying?

The neighbours did come round to apologise profusely, in time. They offered to pay for the water they’d taken. They also offered to pay for the damage the builders did to our friend’s fence, and to her electricity supply which they somehow managed to cut off. No payment and no repair work has been forthcoming so far.

It seems that a delightful insouciance towards to the concerns and comfort of others is not limited to a single class. Our neighbour, drifting along somewhere on the marginal fringes at the bottom of society, or our friend’s neighbours lording it over us from the top, share exactly the same indifference to the inconvenience they inflict on others.

Which is a sort of comfort, when you think about it. Wouldn’t it have been depressing to discover that only the poor behaved badly? It’s much more reassuring to confirm, as if confirmation were needed, that arrant selfishness exists across all social boundaries. That accounts for much of the behaviour of government, for example: it’s made up of people who accurately reflect the society they ostensibly lead, or at least its lowest common denominator.

Come to think of it, that also helps explain quite a lot of the puzzling awfulness one so often meets out there.

In praise of Blair the Peacemaker

What a disappointment it would be to meet one of the great figures of our time and find they didn’t live up to their reputation.

Imagine meeting George W. Bush (Bush the lesser, that is, or perhaps I should say, even lesser) and find him suave, witty, insightful?

Meeting Robert Mugabe and finding him gentle, cordial and sensitive?

Meeting Maggie Thatcher and finding her self-effacing, diffident and open to the ideas of others?

Equally, it would be horrible to discover a Tony Blair unafraid to admit his errors, happy to share credit for his achievements and prepared to atone for, or at least admit to, his untruths.

Tony Blair showing how foreign self-satisfaction is to him

So it was wonderful to see Blair writing in the Guardian about his ‘pain, passion and empathy’ and what he’s learned about peacemaking. His article is a fine tribute to his efforts as a peacemaker, making it quite unnecessary for me to sing his praises. It is also a glorious example of the use of the truth to deceive. 

It’s true that the Good Friday agreement which brought a measure of peace to Northern Ireland, was Tony Blair’s greatest achievement. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t celebrate it, and in this article he does little else. It’s also true that he speaks highly of the Irish players in the drama, including the then Prime Minister of the Republic, Bertie Ahern. He even gives credit to the Americans, Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, but then he never suffered from any failure to behave obsequiously towards leaders from the United States.

What he doesn’t mention is any of the British involved in the process. Mo Mowlam, for instance, gets no mention, but then she was an independent-minded woman not unwilling to tell Blair when she disagreed with him. Nor does he mention John Major, his predecessor as Prime Minister.

Now I don’t think anyone can accuse me of knowingly giving a Conservative credit for anything unless I absolutely have to, but the Good Friday agreement didn’t leap from Blair’s brain fully-fledged, like Pallas Athene springing fully-armed from the head of Zeus. It took years of careful preparation, rather longer than the eleven months Blair had between his election and the signing ceremony.

After years of mishandling of the province by Margaret Thatcher, descending to its most ludicrous when she had actors voicing over the words of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in TV interviews (so we weren’t hiding his words, just his voice), John Major put in some serious spadework. It involved both judicious use of intelligence operations and early, secret negotiations. It prepared the ground for Blair’s triumph.

See what I mean? Blair’s right to claim the success, wrong to hide the contribution of others to making his breakthrough possible.

But, of course, Blair’s worst silence in the article doesn’t concern Northern Ireland at all.

When we think of Blair, what is the first issue that comes to mind? Is it really Northern Ireland? Is it indeed peacemaking?

Surely the name of Blair will be forever associated with a another part of the world, and with war far more than with peace. And not any old war: a probably illegal war, waged in Iraq for no better reason than one of the worst American presidents of all time, Dubya, wanted to. It was a war, furthermore, which threw the region into even worse turmoil than before while costing an obscene number of lives.

That’s Blair’s real legacy. And it has given him the reputation for duplicity that haunts him still – deservedly: we’ve discovered from the Snowden revelations that the intelligence services know a great deal more than they should, not a great deal less. A secondary effect of those disclosures must be that they had a good idea there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and so Blair was either unforgivably ignorant of the truth, or recklessly economical with it.

Yet of that he had nothing to say in his article.

Perhaps a second article, a sequel, in which he admits his lying and his errors. Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change? Perhaps a shock though, as completely out of character.

And I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

Vigilantes, such a source of innocent fun

The attraction of fantasy depends on our accepting at least one complete fallacy after which we can accept that the rest of the story’s plausible.

You know, going along with the idea that vampires exist, or that someone in Nigeria’s burning with desire to give us money, or that if you vote for the Conservatives long enough they’ll eventually give you an even break.

One particularly alluring form of fantasy is based on the sense that, ultimately, we all know who the real criminals are, and if all those stupid limitations the law imposes could just be lifted, it would be possible to mete out quick, exemplary and summary justice to them. Indeed, the main effect of the law is to provide a plethora of loopholes that allows vile specimens of guilty humanity to dodge punishment on technicalities, where they haven’t already got away with murder (or worse) because of the flat-footed ineptitude of a police force unable to catch them.

In those circumstances, what we really need is someone who won’t be hampered by all those hidebound, conventional restraints but will act as an avenging angel towrads the obviously guilty, on behalf of all of us.

That’s the fundamental premise of much immensely entertaining TV, such as the series Dexter. Dexter Morgan, the eponymous hero, has to be the first thoroughly likable serial killer I’ve ever come across, a quality not entirely unrelated to the fact that he’s a fiction.

Dexter: proving mass murder can be funny.
In fiction

What makes him most attractive is, of course, that he only kills bad people: brutal killers just like him, but who make the mistake of inflicting their evil ways on the innocent.

So that’s OK then.

In Britain, we can also enjoy a series called By any means, built around a shadowy group, neither spooks nor cops (whenever one of the group is asked who they are, the reply is ‘it’s a grey area’). Its mission is to do what it takes to inflict appropriate punishment on villains the law is unable to bring to justice. By any means, of course, as the title implies, though when they occasionally step over the line into downright illegality, it can lead to acute embarrassment.

Again, though, they only act against the clearly bad. 

So that’s OK, too, then.

By any means. Fun on screen.
Less amusing in reality, where call it police corruption

The inconvenient reality over which we’re asked to suspend belief for this kind of fantasy, is that it’s practically impossible to be sure of anyone’s guilt. And, what’s more, even the guilty aren’t necessarily evil: they may have many redeeming qualities which should at least give them the chance of rehabilitation.

That’s why we have a rather slow and ponderous legal system designed to test the guilt of people we believe to be responsible for crimes, and then to determine a reasonable punishment for them. It’s hopelessly flawed and makes a great many mistakes, but to paraphrase Churchill’s neat epigram on democracy, it’s the worst form of justice, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Certainly, I wouldn’t want to live in a society in which an individual vigilante, convinced of his own infallibility, can wander around with impunity dishing out death penalties in cases in which he acts as judge, jury and executioner. And the idea of a group in the penumbra of the security service doling out rough justice without accountability or constraint of law – why that’s the kind of thing Britain’s had a great deal too much of in the police, locking up and occasionally shooting people they regard as dangerous, though often they’re merely guilty of having been incorrigibly Irish or Black.

Even so, the fantasy of swift and unerring justice is still attractive. Many of the world’s great religions believe it can be dispensed by God. As for the rest of us, we can at least enjoy it in skilfully-crafted TV series with a nice line in black humour.

Still, we need to guard against ever letting us believing any of this stuff. That would make it unhealthy.

Like any fantasy, really.

Exercise: it's just a gamble

There’s something wonderful about being in a swimming pool at 7:00 in the morning.

At least, I’m assured there is. I haven’t actually found the wonder yet, and I’ve been looking for some weeks now. Compared to an alternative, like say a warm bed, or even a real bath – the kind you don’t have to swim in – the wonderful aspect isn’t always immediately obvious.

Wow. Such a long way. And so wet. Particularly daunting at 7:00.

It leaves you feeling good all day, they tell me. There’s probably some truth in that, though I find it also leaves me smelling of chlorine. I’ve even taken to showering twice but that smell, it just clings.

In any case, what’s the good of saying it feels better afterwards? You think that’s convincing? Isn’t it what they say about banging your head against a brick wall? Feels great when you stop?

There must be something else. It occurs to me that it may just be one of those age-old traditions, practised by flagellant monks or pilgrims whipping themselves on the way to Kerbala: mortifying the flesh to exalt the spirit. It works too: having spent a while in the pool at silly o’clock certainly leaves me filled with that emotion, right up there with the most glorious we enjoy, self-righteousness.

I imagine those monks and pilgrims inflicting pain on themselves feel just the same.

Of course, the reality is that we don’t do this terrible violence to bodies that would far rather be pampered, for the sake of our souls. We do it for the sake of the bodies themselves. I realise that on the face of it, that doesn’t seem to make much sense: you just have to realise it’s a gamble.

The assumption is that we’re in for pain, one way or another.

One option is that we get it now in small doses, out there running across rough country to get to places we’re not interested in reaching; in a gym lifting stupidly heavy weights off the ground only to put them down again (or even worse, driving a rowing machine: it’s bad enough in a boat, but the machines don’t even move, and would sink if you tried to get them to); or indulging in the form of exercise I now seem to have adopted, ploughing up and down a pool, only to reach the other end and discover it looks pretty well the same as the one you’ve just left, and exactly the same as it looked when you were there two lengths ago.

The other option is that we let the old joints and arteries go and get all our pain in a much bigger dose in a few years time.

So the bet is that all the little bits of pain now will add up to less than all the terrible pain we might avoid – or at least push back – later. It’s the gamble I’m taking.

But, I tell you what: if in a few years I find myself dying of some ghastly condition all this exercise should have prevented, I shall be most put out. And thinking, all the way to grave, ‘what the hell! Why didn’t I lie in late a bit more often – and eat more chocolate?’

Who'd be a teacher? At least, in a nation of shopkeepers?

It was Napoleon who said that England was a nation of shopkeepers.

He wasn’t being complimentary. It seems unfair to hardworking shopkeepers, but a nation made up of them? Nah. An idea we’d treat with scorn. 

That even includes many of the English. Which is odd, because when it comes down to it, it isn’t commerce that attracts most contempt from a large part of the English public. It's the public sector.

Take teachers, for instance. Those long holidays – they’re clearly underworked. And at the end of their career, the most valued teachers may be on nearly two and half times median earnings, so they’re clearly overpaid. And they’re all infected with a sad, sixties-hippy radicalism, that somehow contrives to be ineffective but also dangerous – don’t they teach arithmetic by phonetics, and leave all the important battles out of geography?

On the other hand, you can go a long way if you stick to commerce. Consider Tony Hayward. He was Chief Executive of BP and being paid a little over a million a year (only a little over: £45,000 over the million mark, not even two median salaries).

Tony Hayward. Role model of the leader who steps up,
accepts the buck and takes the bullet 

Of course, he couldn’t possibly have got by on that amount, so shares and bonuses eked out his basic to a more comfortable £4 million. It’s not a bad salary; I’m sure teachers would regard it as reasonably generous. 

It’s not just handed out to any old guy, though: you have to be supremely competent and prepared to take responsibility if things go wrong. So when the BP Gulf oil spill took place in 2010, it fell to him to describe the incident as ‘relatively tiny’, an inspired choice of words for what turned out to be the worst ever man-made marine oil disaster.

Faced with a lot of ill-spirited criticism from the States, Hayward followed up with the heartfelt, ‘I want my life back.’ Well, who wouldn’t?

Still, responsibility is a demanding master. Hayward had to give up his job and lower his sights. Like a teacher who has been disciplined, his career was shot. These days, he holds a couple of corporate directorships (Corus Group and Tata Steel), has merged a company into Turkish oil firm Gemel Energy to pursue opportunities in Northern Iraq, and is interim chairman at Glencore International, the world’s twelfth largest company. The rumours have it that the position may become permanent.

You can imagine that he may well be struggling to get his income anywhere seriously into the seven-figure range. What teacher would want to face that fate?

And Hayward isn’t alone in showing how we value most highly those who serve the public most gladly. As long as they do it the world of commerce.

Sam Laidlaw is the Chief Executive of the energy conglomerate Centrica. He takes, or to use the courteous if misleading term, earns, well under £5m a year.

Well, not that far under.

It’s only reasonable to expect some pretty remarkable stuff from the guy, and boy did he deliver this week: 10% increases in energy prices from the old British Gas, now a Centrica subsidiary. That’s just over three times the rate of inflation.

Sam Laidlaw.
Also understands that high rewards come with an obligation to serve

To be able to pull off that kind of stunt and keep a straight face takes the kind of talent you just can’t buy. Well, actually, you can buy it and Centrica have. And it clearly doesn’t come cheap.

You have to remember that Laidlaw achieved this stunning success in a highly competitive environment. Six companies control 98% of the market. Imagine just how difficult it is, with six suppliers, to rig things so as to allow all the companies to make the same excessive price increases and pull in the same obscene levels of profits.

In this nation of shopkeepers, Laidlaw’s is the kind of talent that’s really appreciated.

It’s not the same everywhere. In Finland, for instance, teaching is seen as one of the most desirable professions. Only if your degree is among the top 10% will you be considered for appointment to teaching, and even then you need a minimum of a Master’s degree.

Curiously, pay isn’t all that much higher than in England. At the top of the scale, allowing adjusted for purchasing power, Finland’s only about 4% above England. Sounds like the only really substantial difference is in the public perception of teaching and its prestige.

The impact, however, seems significant. Finland comes top of evaluation after evaluation of educational systems. The OECD, as I mentioned recently, finds that England is right down there among the also-rans when it comes to literacy and numeracy levels. 

England’s answer to this kind of difficulty? Under the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove, it is to launch ‘free schools’, free of irritating constraints like having to use qualified staff as teachers. Finland succeeds and demands a Master’s degree as a minimum; England fails and is pioneering unqualified teaching.

You want to understand our admiration for men like Hayward and Laidlaw, our contempt for the profession of teaching? Perhaps you need look no further than the OECD’s findings. I like the American expression, ‘go figure’, but the OECD found levels of numeracy which suggests that those who most need to do the figuring probably can’t. 

Lack of education feeds the undermining of education. And that perpetuates the forelock-tugging to our elite of high-earning mediocrities.

Too many electors cling to their comfort zone, content to live in a nation of shopkeepers. When what they really need is to build a land of talent. For which it would be a good start to learn a lesson from Finland.

The curious effect of a dog in a night garden

It seemed so empty, so mind-blowingly banal, the older person’s dogged determination to follow a dull routine through to completion, each and every day.

That was how I saw my grandparents’ generation, as a child. Or worse than a child: as that most awful of creatures, an adolescent. 

I’d see those old people, each night, turning off lights, putting things away in the fridge, carefully turning lock after lock on their doors. Painful.

‘God preserve me from ever becoming that dull,’ was my unspoken prayer.

I’m not at all convinced that one of these old people I watched with such a sense of superiority was my maternal grandfather, but for some reason when I remember those times, it’s him I think of. And I have those memories most days.

That’s because each night, any time after 10:00, my dog Janka gets her last trip of the day to the garden. She likes gardens. She likes to be among plants and flowers. So she likes that final visit of the day.

Janka feeling comfortable

It’s a peaceful moment, a sort of cadence to the day. And the ritual has clearly defined rules. The other day I tried to take her out at 9:30, but got an incredulous look.

‘What game are you playing?’ she seemed to be saying, as she refused to leave her place of comfort on the sofa. ‘This is much too early. Try again in an hour or so. Half an hour if you’re really too knackered to last any longer.’

But some time after 10:00, right up to 1:00 in the morning (that’s the deadline before the barking starts), she’s fine and ready to head out. Just as long as I come with her. I don’t have to do anything, or even be that close to her. Just stand a way back on the path while she pees, tell her she’s a good girl when she’s finished, and then follow her back into the house.

It’s slightly odd because for the first pee of the day she needs nobody. Open the door and out she goes. But in the evening she needs a more companionable moment, so I provide a little company.

Then we get back indoors. First thing, to ensure I don’t forget, I turn the garden light off (did I fail to mention that Janka feels a little light is an essential ingredient of a comfortable garden visit at night?) Then there’s the back door. For reasons that escape me, it has three locks. I’m sure there’s no need for all of them, but if there are three, I’ll lock three.

That’s when the memories hit me. As I doggedly turn the locks, and carefully check that I’ve done everything, back comes the image of those old guys doing their banal daily duty. And I’m invaded by the chastening feeling that my prayer, like most prayers, went unheeded. I’ve turned into just the kind of person I hoped I’d never become. 

Not a particularly gratifying sensation.

But, hold it, what the heck. I’ve just had a moment of sociable peace with my dog. And funnily enough, when I think of my grandfather, it isn’t obsessive evening rituals that come to mind, but his smile, his strength, the things he cared about passionately and the things he didn't care for at all. Welcome memories. Thirty years ofter his death. 

That's got to be worth a moment of mild self-deprecation.

In any case, got to get the door locked. After all, who wants to offer an easy opportunity to burglars?