There’s no secret

Posted on 13th December 2022 by Ian

‘You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything,’ says G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown in the 1924 tale The Miracle of Moon Crescent.

Chesterton seems to have possesses an extraordinary prescience of times a century later, some people who would regard themselves as ‘hard-shelled’ seem to have come to believe almost anything

There seems a compulsion to believe conspiracy theories, that there are principles and, sometimes, people at work who are controlling things and if you could gain access to their knowledge or be admitted to their circle, then you too could be powerful/rich/influential/attractive (delete as applicable).

It is not easy to persuade people that there is no such knowledge.

The central character in Umbert Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum faces death because he knows there to be no secret. The problem is that those pursuing him cannot believe this to be true; perhaps it is that they cannot allow this to be true, their whole world has no meaning without the secret. They believe that he must know, but that he will not tell.

In Christian history, from the First Century onwards, there were groups who believed they possessed special knowledge – the Gnostics (from ‘gnosis’ the Greek for knowledge) were judged to be heretics by the early church, but that has never stopped groups down through the centuries from believing that special knowledge was there to be found. From the writings of Joanna Southcott to the secrets of Fatima, there are supposed secrets of world-changing importance.

Not only are there secrets, but there are perceived to be possessors of secrets.

Once, I was asked if a group were some sort of ‘illuminati’, I was so stunned by the comment that I cannot now remember to which group the question referred (I wish I could, perhaps they know something that I don’t!).

The Freemasons’ rebranded themselves not as a secret society, but as a society with secrets suggesting they have some esoteric knowledge. As a fraternal secret society they had some attraction to even the sceptic; as merely a society with secrets, they are in danger of appealing to only those susceptible to belief in the esoteric.

Perhaps a belief in possessors of special knowledge, a belief in secret elites, a belief in conspiracies, has become a meta-narrative with which to explain all in life that is bewildering or frustrating. Without a God to whom to turn, an explanation is sought elsewhere.

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ABE

Posted on 10th December 2022 by Ian

There were celebrations in bars around Dublin this evening as Harry Kane’s penalty kick flew high over the French goal. The cheers at the final whistle were loud.

This evening’s World Cup quarter=final result recalled and apocryphal story I heard some twenty years ago.

According to the story, there was a man from Cork who was coming out of Twickenham Stadium looking delighted because England had been beaten by France.

The man is spotted by a BBC reporter, and is asked whether he would support any team, whoever they were, against England.

The Corkman is definite in his response, he said he would.

‘Well’, says the BBC reporter, ‘can you think of any circumstances at all where you would support England?’

The Corkman scratched his head and, after a few moments of reflection, said, ‘Well, I suppose if they were playing Tipperary’.

The story is hardly an exaggeration.

Prior to attending Ireland’s match against Australia at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium last month, a friend and I went to neraby pub to watch the closing stages of the match at Twickenham between England and the All Blacks.

Ireland recorded their first ever series win against the All Blacks in New Zealand during the summer, and there was a suspicion that the present New Zealand side might not be as strong as their predecessors.

When we arrived at the pub, the All Blacks were winning 25-6 and there were barely more than ten minutes of the match left. Weakened by the sin binning of one of their prominent backs, New Zealand were on the back foot. England ran in three tries in the closing eight minutes.

Each England score was greeted by jeers from the crowd that crammed into the pub. Not one person seemed prepared to that a great deal of speed, strength and skill contributed to the 25-25 final score. The final whistle prompted a further burst of jeers and catcalls.

A Manchester United supporting friend used to complain of people he called ‘ABUs’, ‘Anyone But United’.  It was he who introduced me to the term ‘ABE’, Anyone But England.

It is an attitude that has its roots in the persistent attitude of condescension towards Ireland which is found among some English people. Wilfully ignore other people’s history, treat them as though they are inferior, and assume one’s own ideas are shared by everyone, and it is not long before a pool of resentment builds up – and people cheer for the opposition.

 

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Australia

Posted on 7th December 2022 by Ian

A friend is going home to Australia for Christmas. To someone for whom Australia is a land in the imagination, it seems something from a childhood dream.

Ideas of Australia had come from a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps it had come as a Christmas present. Unlike most jigsaw puzzles, it was not square or rectangular, but was the shape of Australia itself.

For a primary school-aged boy, the shape made the puzzle more interesting, putting in the pieces that formed the outline of the Australian coast. The puzzle was very visual, there were pictures of Australian wildlife: koalas, kangaroos, and other creatures that seemed very exotic to a child in 1960s England, together with important landmarks, like the Sydney Opera House.

The puzzle’s most intriguing place of all was called “Woomera.”

The picture beside the placename was of a rocket blasting off and I was told that it was the base for Britain’s space programme. When the news seemed full of stories about the United States’ Apollo missions and when Mission Control Houston and the Cape Canaveral launch site, the thought that Britain might have its own spacecraft caught the imagination of a young boy.

Of course, Britain’s space programme was not the stuff of boyhood speculation, Woomera was more a missile testing range than a rocket base, there would be no British spaceships heading for the Moon.

There had lingered in the thoughts of a schoolboy the idea that his country was still a major power. It had only been a generation before that Winston Churchill has boasted of the country having five million men in the armed forces. It had only been a generation before that a quarter of the map of the world had been coloured pink. It had only been a decade before that Britain had still celebrated an annual Empire Day.

Rather than inspiring a false confidence, Woomera should have been an indicator of the way in which Britain’s place in the world had changed. No longer was there an area shaded pink that might provide the location for a rocket base, instead there was a dependence upon a friendly dominion.

To a schoolboy, it seemed baffling that a country that had won two world wars should have become so weak; no-one explained that it was the winning of the wars that had brought the weakness, draining the country of its reserves. Even if the realities of the post-war world had been explained, such economic niceties would have been lost on the boy making the jigsaw puzzle.

Woomera remains a word that is evocative of Dan Dare and the space travellers of the comics, a place significant in the imagination, of a place which did not belong to the world beyond the living room where the jigsaw was made.

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England’s premier railway line!

Posted on 1st December 2022 by Ian

In childhood years, we thought the railway line that passed by my grandfather’s farm at Pibsbury was the most important line in the country.

As a teenager,  I remember someone from elsewhere challenging my description of the railway as “the Taunton to Paddington line.”

‘No, it’s not,” I was told, “it’s the Penzance line.”

Undoubtedly, there were times when the train ran non-stop from Paddington to Taunton before going on to other places, but it became hard to imagine that there was once an express service from London to Somerset; hard to imagine thar Taunton station once required a multiplicity of platforms.

I remember a train journey that must have been long after that era, for the train had stopped at Castle Cary in east Somerset on its journey from the capital.  It must have been winter time, for beyond the carriage windows there was darkness. Pulling out from the lights of Castle Cary, the British Rail diesel locomotive gathered speed as it rolled westward.

In former times, the progress along the line would have been monitored by the stations passed. There would have been the halt at Alford and the stations at Keinton Mandeville and Charlton Mackrell. In the daylight, the crossing of Somerton Viaduct would have been obvious, before passing the town’s station and going into the long tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel there would have been the little station serving Long Sutton and Pitney, then Langport East station, before Langport Viaduct and the flat moorland leading to Athelney. The cuttings after Athelney would have been passed before the train ran beside the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal, reaching Creech Saint Michael and then arriving in the county town.

Such a possible marking of the journey was long past, no station remained between Castle Cary and Taunton. The only certain landmark was the tunnel at Somerton; the noise of the train reverberating from the walls. Beyond that point, progress was hard to judge.

Not wearing a watch in those days and finding the passing of time hard to judge, there was a feeling that it was time to move my book-filled suitcase to the door. The 1970s British Rail carriage was sparsely filled; it was not as though there was a crowd to  negotiate, but there was always an irrational fear of still being aboard the train when it pulled out of the destination station.

Clearly, judgement of time and distance was awry, for having slid back the door from the seating area to reach the open area at the carriage doors, there seemed an interminable wait before Taunton was reached. Feeling faintly ridiculous at having moved so early, and fearing that someone might wonder what had prompted such strange behaviour, I stared earnestly out into the impenetrable darkness, as if knowing something unknown to anyone else on the train.

Opening a 1922 edition of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, recalled that journey, recalled the places passed in the darkness, and, confirmed what I knew as a child, being the first page of Bradshaw, our line was undoubtedly the premier line.

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A beautiful solution to crime

Posted on 28th November 2022 by Ian

There was an instinctive sense of beauty in childhood years.

The countryside in mid-Somerset is not classic picture postcard stuff, but there are sights and landscapes that have a special quality.  Every village and every town has at least a handful of medieval buildings.  Daily life is lived in a direct encounter with nature.  Music and art and literature, the conventional channels for the conveyance of beauty, are often superfluous on spring and summer days when flowers and trees are a riot of colour and shapes.

How important is such beauty in creating a society that is safe to live in?

Crime rates were, and remain, low.  It is not that rural England is especially privileged: during the 1981 riots over poverty and alienation  in English cities, the unemployment rate in parts of Cornwall was over 20%. It is more that life is lived in a different context.  The brutal ugliness of many urban landscapes has no sense of timelessness, no sense that life is more than a banal existence.

Dostoevsky’s character Prince Myshkin is mocked for his belief that beauty can save people from the worst:

Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! The prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such playful ideas because he’s in love!

Myshkin’s concern with the reality of the Russia in which he lived and his hopes of transforming that world threaten his relationships:

If I hear you talking about capital punishment, or the economical condition of Russia, or about Beauty redeeming the world, or anything of that sort, I’ll–well, of course I shall laugh and seem very pleased, but I warn you beforehand, don’t look me in the face again! I’m serious now, mind, this time I am really serious.” She certainly did say this very seriously, so much so, that she looked quite different from what she usually was, and the prince could not help noticing the fact. She did not seem to be joking in the slightest degree.

Myshkin, The Idiot of the book’s title is naive in his understanding; the world is quite simply not the place he imagined it might be, but is he so wrong in his hopes?  Doesn’t the encounter with beauty change people for the better?

For generations working people organised to allow beauty to be accessible to all – the national parks movement in England from the 1930s, the reading rooms, the educational associations, the libraries, the summer camps, the ramblers’ groups, the choirs, the brass bands – yet having achieved the goals, it seems almost as though the struggle was given up.  Reality television and tabloid stories now fill the hours which were once taken with companionship and culture.

Would the world be a better place with a little less government policy and a little more beauty? Or is that just plain idiotic?

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