The Age of Unreason
Dick’s Toolbox cont.
.. been blind-sided by A V Jennings.
I realise that we are rather recently evolved creatures of imperfect knowledge,
but I think that we should be able to do better in our beliefs than be extended
versions of the followers of Joanna Southcott. This worthy lady passed away
in 1814 after announcing that she was to give birth to a divine human being
named Siloh. She was over 50 and was pronounced with child although, as it
turned out, it was just an hysterical pregnancy and no divine child emerged.
Perhaps the passing of holy wind occurred, but it passed unrecorded .
Undeterred by this and her death, a loyal band of followers kept her faith
alive until at least 1994, which is the edition date of the encyclopaedia
I am quoting. Before her death she handed to her followers a number of locked
and sealed boxes, which contained amongst other things the secret of the universe.
These were to be opened 100 years after her death and only then in the presence
of 12 bishops.
In 1927 one of these boxes turned up and was opened with some ceremony in
Caxton Hall, but only in the presence of one bishop, all others being unaccountable
busy. Miss Southcott’s marvellous box contained a few rare coins, a
horse pistol, a woman’s embroidered cap and a slightly improper novel.
How charmingly harmless, we all say. But in reality, the capacity of people
to believe in this and other similar nonsense is what leads people to become
convinced that sacrificing themselves and others to their particular cause
is a great and good thing. And these beliefs are not all religious, though
religions with their general concept of love, fellowship and goodwill seem
the more hypocritical when persuading people to do harm in order to do good
– the heavenly version of the Vietnam War statement, “We had to destroy
the village in order to save it”.
People are so easily moved to belief. The regrettable thing is that most people,
regardless of intelligence and education, can be made to believe the most
dangerous twaddle. It may help to be as thick as two short planks and with
the moral compass of an amoeba, but the Germany which swallowed Nazism was
otherwise a representative, advanced European society. Addled by the Versailles
Treaty no doubt, but still not the Belgian Congo. They were not alone in their
ability to cheerfully swallow these obnoxious beliefs, for there were strong
Fascist movements in England with Mosley as well as the United States. The
USA had Charles Lindbergh, who had piloted the single engined monoplane the
Spirit of St Louis across the Atlantic, as a proponent of the ideals of the
new modern disciplined Germany. Incidentally Linbergh’s fame is actually
a good example of public hysteria, for when he returned to America after his
historic flight, (which ignored the fact that he was the 20th person to fly
across the Atlantic), the parade in his honour produced more ticker tape than
when the troops returned from WWI. The New York Stock Exchange closed and
his mother needed an escort of 25 policemen to go to the hairdresser, the
latter striking me as a misplaced enthusiasm.
A sad parallel to these times are the anarchists who sacrificed themselves
and six heads of state in the 20 years before 1914. Barbara Tuchman elegantly
describes the anarchist movement in her book “The Proud Tower”.
“It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest,
who loved humanity. It also had its tools, the little men whose misfortune
and despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible
to The Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act. “
“The anarchist believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil
eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature
would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The role
of the state would be replaced by voluntary cooperation among individuals
and the role of law by the supreme law of general welfare. To this end no
reform of existing social evils through vote or reason was of any use, for
the ruling class would never give up its property or the powers or the laws
which protected ownership of property. Therefore the necessity of violence.”
There are familiar rings in this from all points of the religious and political
compass ; it is useful as it still illuminates many mainstream contemporary
positions.
The fear of anarchism is demonstrated in Conrad’s book “ The Secret
Agent” where Conrad sees life in literary terms as the moral struggle
between good and evil at its most direct. The Anarchist is an abomination,
without morality or redeeming attributes, effectively non-human. In this he
reflects the times in which he wrote and lived, for the random madness of
the anarchist movement was at odds with the general view of the orderliness
of society. Whilst some assassinations might have seemed to have some political
purpose, many occurred because of the lure to unsound minds of heroic notoriety.
We change so little – old men still send young men out to die
What may come as no surprise is the response to what was a statistically a
minor threat to life and limb was political repression and general loss of
liberty. But before I digress too far, let me express another viewpoint.
The universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old and inordinately large.
The earth is rather a small, sweet planet in the outer rim of one of several
billion galaxies that we either know or guess about. Homo Sapiens has been
around for around 2 million years, but a leap into what we call civilisation
and modern man is rather recent occurring perhaps 6,000 years or so.
I think that this makes us a rather recent and probably imperfect galactic
excrescence in this place, at this time.
The fact that we know so much of where we are is not the result of religious
or political belief, rather the opposite, for both religious and political
discourse are apt to resent anything that will challenge their authority.
The vast wonder of existence from the macroscopic to the microscopic is the
result of an ever enquiring human ‘scientific’ intelligence, one
that says that there is nothing fixed, but only mutable ideas that we test,
reject and then test again against other hypotheses.
In terms of knowing about the reasons or meaning of existence we are still
at an incredibly imperfect embryonic stage. That anyone should think that
we have the faintest clue about anything, that we were so certain about life,
death and the universe that we should be prepared to sacrifice our lives and
others for an imperfect certainty is grotesque.
We are innocents abroad; let us demonstrate some humility and maybe think
that in a few million years we might just have a faint glimmering of what
it’s all about. But now, I doubt it?
Therefore to go and worship, to prostrate oneself before either man or possible
deity, to have a real or imaginary foot upon one’s neck, is to say that
one lives in the past and denies the possibilities of an infinite future.
And consequently lose one’s freedom to be an intelligent self-defining
and very imperfect individual amongst others, hopefully as curious about the
wonder of life and humanity as you should be.
Four thoughts:
1. Faith is belief without reason
2. Anything worth dying for is worth living for
3. Everywhere you go you can see you
4. It’s all worth it even if it doesn’t make any difference