Month: February 2022

Go out amongst the land

Isolated for two years: it is not healthy, and you lose track of those usual social interactions that tell you what the neighbours’ are thinking; what their needs and worries are. Isolated in a Downing Street echo-chamber it is even worse. Boris needs to get out, to meet people.

He always used to be star value on the street – I have met people who had encountered him and who babbled enthusiastically about everything he did and said – he was a rockstar. That of course was before he had to take responsibility for things, and before we felt the lash of government in his name.

The Spads have been hurled out and replaced by doorstep politicians – good. The Number 10 machine is taking back control – good. There is red meat – aye but with some festering corners, and those taxes are still Labour-level crippling. Now the big reconnect is needed.

Others now in place can hammer at the priorities of efficiency and the opportunities of Brexit, of the Culture War in Whitehall, of combating Chinese state subversion, and of stopping the world blowing itself up on the steppe.  That is all within Whitehall.  The Prime Minister needs to eave it, and find out how the rest of us are getting on.

Open the gates at the end of Downing Street, step into the street, walk across Green Park and out into normal London, and then the rest of the work.  The nation does not live in that clustered officeworld behind, but in the terraced streets of Lancashire and the old mill towns of Nottinghamshire, and the back alleys of Glasgow and Belfast, and the lost-behind villages of the countryside. Here the mandarins do not make our priorities nor curb our dreams, or our worries.  Here we see what happens when politicians have bright ideas and try them out on us, and we have the scars and bankruptcies to prove it.

Reconnecting is vital to governing, and votes to be frank. As I wrote before, the ordinary people once adored and trusted Boris, and if they feel like a spurned lover, now is an opportunity for him to listen, to learn again what their doorstep concerns are, their worries, their aspirations, their petty jealousies and to remember from his far-back memory what once made him an icon of hope. There is hope, and we want to feel it again.

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Books

 

Catching the Parson

Church politics can be as vicious as secular politics. In the lifetime of Thomas Hobbes it inspired a civil war. One churchman may be criticised as “Too heavenly minded to be any earthly use”, or another as abandoning his calling to follow wrongheaded political ideas. The two digressions may be the same, simply differently expressed.

With an opening chapter entitled “That the Hobbian Principles are destructive to Christianity and all Religion”, Dr Bramhall’s book required a response. The quarrel showed up something deeper in how the church was going.

Leviathan was published during Cromwell’s time (and resulted in Hobbes fleeing the exiled King’s court). At the Restoration the book entered the mainstream of debate and reactions to this radical examination of philosophy and of political and ecclesiastical assumptions was virulent. The Bishop of Derry, Dr Bramhall, led the established church’s charge against Hobbes, accusing him of the deadly charge of atheism, and Hobbes struck back in style.

You would expect the Bishop of Londonderry, in the Church of Ireland, a forceful champion of Protestantism in a land still given over to impious superstitions, would uphold the simple Reformation on which the church had been refounded, but his arguments show a drift away into intellectual spirituality.

The reformed church was a restoration of the Christian faith to its ground-level  simplicity.  It was a cool, smooth pond where the faithful could find rest and refreshment. A hundred years later the ministers given charge of the pond had begun to feel themselves lords, bubbling over the surface as a lukewarm froth.

The bishop spoke intellectual abstraction; Hobbes retorts with plain sense and scripture.

The Gospels and the Books of the Prophets before them are founded on earth, amongst real people. Their teachings are applied to real, earthly conduct and concern the actions of men and women. I once lent a New Testament to a curious Hindu, who brought it back a week later puzzled that “It’s like a story”. Indeed it is: an account of Jesus in a particular place at a particular time, speaking to actual people about daily life. Heathens may have books of abstractions and spiritual speculations: we have prophets with dust on their feet.

To become too spiritual therefore is not in the nature of the Gospel, although missing the spiritual truth behind the earthly words is also to miss the truth of the Gospel.

Bramhall upbraids Hobbes for suggesting that coveting is not always sinful – Hobbes responds that if men did not covet that which they do not already possess then the world would be unpeopled:

“What man was there ever whose imagination of any thing he thought would please him, whe not some delight? Or what sin is there, where there is not so much as an intention to do injustice? But his Lordship would not distinguish between delight and purpose, nor between a Wish and a Will. This was venome. I believe, that his Lordship himself even before he was Married took some delight in the thought of it, and yet the Woman then was not his own. All love is delight, but all love is not sin. Without this love of that which is not yet a mans own, the World had not been Peopled.”

So it goes on, the Bishop positing abstractions and Hobbes practicality, the Bishop concepts devised only in schoolrooms, and Hobbes the plain words of Scripture.

Clinging to abstraction is a way to avoid earthly responsibilities, but the role of a pastor is to be shepherd to those in his care. His role is inevitably on earth. He must be spiritual to praise God and be held by His hand to his duties – if though he goes into abstractions, he steps out of the hand of God into his own concepts. It is understandable: looking into the face of the divine is terrifying.

Spiritual abstractions are one escape: political abstractions are another. They both serve the same purpose.

 

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Books

 

Counsellours

Another Businesse of the Soveraign, is to choose good Counsellours; I mean such, whose advice he is to take in the Government of the Common-wealth. For this word Counsell, Consilium, corrupted from Considium, is a large signification, and comprehendeth all Assemblies of men that sit together, not onely to deliberate what is to be done hereafter, but also to judge of Facts past, and of Law for the present. I take it here in the first sense onely: And in this sense, there is no choyce of Counsell, neither in a Democracy, nor Aristocracy; because the persons Counselling are members of the person Counselled.

The choyce of Counsellours therefore is to Monarchy; In which, the Soveraign that endeavoureth not to make choyce of those, that in every kind are the most able, dischargeth not his Office as he ought to do.

The most able Counsellours, are they that have least hope of benefit by giving evill Counsell, and most knowledge of those things that conduce to the Peace, and Defence of the Common-wealth. It is a hard matter to know who expecteth benefit from publique troubles; but the signes that guide to a just suspicion, is the soothing of the people in their unreasonable, or irremediable grievances, by men whose estates are not sufficient to discharge their accustomed expences, and may easily be observed by any one whom it concerns to know it.

But to know, who has most knowledge of the Publique affaires, is yet harder; and they that know them, need them a great deale the lesse. For to know, who knowes the Rules almost of any Art, is a great degree of the knowledge of the same Art; because no man can be assured of the truth of anothers Rules, but he that is first taught to understand them. But the best signes of Knowledge of any Art, are, much conversing in it, and constant good effects of it. Good Counsell comes not by Lot, nor by Inheritance; and therefore there is no more reason to expect good Advice from the rich, or noble, in matter of State, than in delineating the dimensions of a fortresse; unlesse we shall think there needs no method in the study of the Politiques, (as there does in the study of Geometry,) but onely to be lookers on; which is not so. For the Politiques is the harder study of the two. Whereas in these parts of Europe, it hath been taken for a Right of certain persons, to have place in the highest Councell of State by Inheritance; it is derived from the Conquests of the antient Germans; wherein many absolute Lords joyning together to conquer other Nations, would not enter in to the Confederacy, without such Priviledges, as might be marks of difference in time following, between their Posterity, and the posterity of their Subjects; which Priviledges being inconsistent with the Soveraign Power, by the favour of the Soveraign, they may seem to keep; but contending for them as their Right, they must needs by degrees let them go, and have at last no further honour, than adhaereth naturally to their abilities.

And how able soever be the Counsellours in any affaire, the benefit of their Counsell is greater, when they give every one his Advice, and reasons of it apart, than when they do it in an Assembly, by way of Orations; and when they have praemeditated, than when they speak on the sudden; both because they have more time, to survey the consequences of action; and are lesse subject to be carried away to contradiction, through Envy, Emulation, or other Passions arising from the difference of opinion.

The best Counsell, in those things that concern not other Nations, but onely the ease, and benefit the Subjects may enjoy, by Lawes that look onely inward, is to be taken from the generall informations, and complaints of the people of each Province, who are best acquainted with their own wants, and ought therefore, when they demand nothing in derogation of the essentiall Rights of Soveraignty, to be diligently taken notice of.

For without those Essentiall Rights, (as I have often before said,) the Common-wealth cannot at all subsist.

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Books

The Russian Enigma

No one understands Russia apart from the Russians, if even they do. It is a land and nation many have tried to explain, but I cannot tell if they fail because there is too much to explain, or too little.

I have an old map of the world on my wall, and on it Russia (or rather the Soviet Union at that time) stretches almost half the width of the world, and almost half the height of the map, from the Oxus River to the Arctic – much of that enormity is the distortion of the Mercator projection, but it has impact.  In all that space strewn across the map though, what and who are there, and how does this affect the world outside those millions of square miles? Must there really be a war over places we do not understand?

Russia has been described as being not so much a country as an archipelago; it is made up of towns and cities separated by vast, empty forest and steppe much like tiny islands dotted across a hostile sea. Its has a unique culture, not always a pleasant one, forged by the forest and steppe, the ice, Byzantine priests, Viking princes and Mongol khans; Asiatic, separate from Europe, the latter a very different culture swelling against them to the west.

If Russians see their soul in the empty wastes, there is no forgetting that the people are mainly in the western towns, closer to the influence of urban, European culture. Any Russian could be forgiven for a determination to draw a line of separation – or they might become no more than Poles.

In the south-west corner of the Russian-speaking landmass is the Ukraine. It seems small fry, but it has a population almost a third of that of vast Russia. Target or not, it is another place little understood. The very name ‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderland’, and that may be how it is thought of.

The Borderland only became independent by accident thirty years ago, and its separateness stands as an affront to resurgent Russian national ideology. It was always thought of as Russian and indeed Kiev was once the capital of Russia. The arguments for a distinction between Russian and the Ukraine seem odd for those of us brought up when the Ukraine was thought just a part of Russia not Europe . However there is no edge, no sharp line where Europe ends and Russia begins.  Lvov in the west was once called Lemberg, and was in Austria. Perhaps parts of that land are indeed European.

Thirty years – that is a generation – and as each new day passes it seems more and more normal, and more Ukrainians grow up thinking their separation is normal, and each of those days the Russians know it will be harder to convince them it has been a regretful, unnatural, temporary separation. The whisper grows louder in the head that something must be done before it is too late.

As to Ukrainians looking west, it aims to seal a separation. Lemberg is an Austrian city anyway, in temperament perhaps, and was the first to rebel against Kiev when a Russian-favoured president was elected there. To get close to the enemy-culture of Europe and to seal a separation is to invite Russia to leap in before it is too late, just as they did in Georgia to stop it joining NATO.

The reason for separation may be habit, or inertia, resisting mechanically just because that is what you do, the way the princes of Tver or Suzdal shed others’ blood to resist being unified with Muscovy.

There is another reason though for Kiev to resist Moscow: who would want to be ruled by Vladimir Putin?

If the Ukraine can grow into a liberal version of Russia, making the best of the shared culture without the stifling tyranny, that would be an enlightening sight and a promise of prosperity. Ultimately it is a part of Russian culture and discarding that for western symbols would tear out the soul of the people. It needs an accommodation, not pretending to be  separate from the great culture of the Russian people but finding a way for that culture to flower, to develop and be Rus’ who are better that those who still live in the oppressive lands to the north of them. I begin to doubt though that they will have a chance.

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Books