That’s the way to do it — a bishop gives the lead on evangelism

In his book Reorienting a Church for Accelerated Growth, Bishop Samson Mwaluda makes the point that denominational church growth in Anglicanism depends on the bishop being the chief evangelist and teacher of the diocese, upholding the apostolic doctrine and giving the lead in the proclamation of the gospel.

Yesterday, I actually saw for the first time with my own eyes an English bishop doing the latter.

And here’s an interesting thing. What I was going to write next was that the Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell, took time out of his busy schedule to visit the Saffron Walden Deanery Mission Planning Group to lead an afternoon on local evangelism — which just shows how indoctrinated I’ve become by a lifetime of not seeing this happen.

Because, of course, in Stephen Cottrell’s case this is not ‘time out of his schedule’. This evidently is his schedule.

One of the points I have made in my own A Strategy that Changes the Denomination is that despite evangelicals being appointed to senior office in the Church of England, the denomination has not become a more evangelizing body. That has been true, in my experience not just nationally but at the diocesan level, where evangelical bishops have direct influence.

I have heard it said, and seen it written, that there is only so much a bishop can do — that he does not have the authority to dictate, perhaps, or that he must be ‘bishop to the whole diocese, not just the evangelicals’.

What yesterday demonstrated is that a bishop does not need any more authority than he already possesses. Nor does he need to compromise his beliefs in any way. Apparently — for as I say, I saw it with my own eyes — he just needs to have the willingness to prioritize one thing above another. When a bishop says, “I have put a line through my diary for your mission weekend”, he has ruled out — literally — doing other things. Such is life. But he has therefore written in what was surely our Lord’s priority: “Let us go somewhere else ... so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” (Mk 1:38).

Now there will doubtless be those who will say, “But Cottrell is a Liberal Catholic. He belongs to Affirming Catholicism, and you don’t like those sorts of people.”

And that is true, insofar as he is (as far as I know) a member of AffCath. But I have often said that the best bishop I have served under (until now) was Hugh Montefiore in Birmingham, who was a bit of a Liberal Catholic himself, but who had vision and determination when it came to his diocese.

Moreover, if any bishop is prepared to stand up and give a personal lead on evangelism (especially if he quotes in his powerpoint presentation the definition used by Towards the Conversion of England and quoted in A Strategy that Changes the Denomination), I will give that man all the support I can and urge others to do the same.

As I said to someone yesterday, I have waited since 1983, when I arrived in this diocese, for this moment. It is a very exciting time.

John Richardson
28 November 2011

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Correction to previous article on care

Please note a correction in the previous posting about care and human rights, the original report concerns 'home care provision' not provision in 'care homes'. I have made a correction, but if you were going to use this in a magazine you ought to note this.


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Human Rights and Human Neighbours

NB a correction in the first line: care homes should be 'home care'.
 

Here's another article which might be useful to church or parish magazine editors. Feel free to use it, provided you attribute it and put at the end "From the Ugley Vicar blog".

******************************

In a shocking exposure of our current social failings, a recent inquiry has suggested that the neglect of the elderly in some English home care provision amounts to a breach of their human rights.

Yet although some of the reported abuses were indeed dreadful and although people certainly ought to receive humane treatment, nevertheless I would suggest that from a Christian point of view the human rights approach to this particular problem is fundamentally wrong.

One of Jesus’ most famous parables concerned the ‘good Samaritan’. The story tells of a man attacked by thieves and left for dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. When a Jewish priest came that way, rather than stop to help, he passed by on the opposite side. Similarly, an assistant priest did the same thing. But then a Samaritan found the man, stopped to help, bandaged his wounds and took the man to an inn, where he paid for his care.

The twist in this ‘tale of the unexpected’ is that at the time Jews and Samaritans hated one another. The idea of a ‘good’ Samaritan was unthinkable to Jesus’ audience!

Jesus told the story, however, in answer to a question put to him by an expert in Jewish law: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus’ reply was an affirmation of the two fundamental principles of the Law of Moses: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.”

“Do this,” Jesus said, “And you will live.”

But Jesus was talking to a lawyer! So his next question to Jesus was this: “Who is my neighbour?”

Armed with a definition of ‘neighbour’, he would know where his obligations lay under the law and whom, therefore, he had to love ‘as himself’.

But that is where the parable is relevant to our care of the elderly. When we look at an elderly person in need, should our first question be, in effect, “Is this person my neighbour?” The trouble with a ‘human rights’ approach is that how they are treated will ultimately be governed by their legally-defined entitlement.

The parable of the good Samaritan, however, reverses the question, for it didn’t just end with the example of a ‘villain’ turning out to be the ‘good guy’. The lawyer had asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus asked him, “Who do you think was a neighbour to the man who was robbed?”

In other words, it is the attitude of the person giving the love, not the status of the person receiving it, that really counts.

We ought not to have to say to care workers — or to anyone else — “Here is someone who has legal rights which oblige you to treat them in a certain way.” That is the lawyer’s approach, seeking to define “Who is my neighbour?”

Rather, our question should be, “Am I acting as neighbour to this person in need?” How they are treated should depend not on them and their having sufficient ‘rights’, but on us and on our understanding of our love for God and for them.

Jesus finally asked the lawyer to define who was the neighbour to the injured man and the lawyer grudgingly answered, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” Surely we need no further instructions?

John Richardson
November 25, 2011

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If the couple who prayed with Stephen Lawrence had been ambulance crew, would they have been disciplined?

A couple giving evidence at the Stephen Lawrence trial have stated that they prayed quietly for him as they waited for the ambulance crew to arrive.

I can't help speculating whether, had they been members of the ambulance crew, they would today have faced disciplinary action for this. The prevailing mood seems to be that such an action would be 'unprofessional' and an imposition of your beliefs on others. Yet surely if you believe in God, to pray with someone you believe may be dying is not an 'imposition' on them but an act of humanity? And at that stage, what matters more - so-called professionalism or a personal approach?

On the other hand, I wonder if we are seeing where the modern interpretation of 'professionalism' gets us when we read that a rigid adherence to operational guidelines may have contributed to the death of a woman whom the emergency services took over five hours to remove from the well she had fallen down.
 
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God's judgement and economic justice

Most days these days I get round to reading the set Psalms from the Prayer Book Psalter. It is just a way of tuning in to God and giving my wandering mind something on which to focus. As with the Prayer Book lectionary generally, it also makes sure you read the bits of Scripture you might otherwise overlook, and whilst that may be uncomfortable, it is always good for the soul.

Yesterday, therefore, I was powerfully struck by the opening lines of Psalm 82:

God standeth in the congregation of princes: he is a Judge among gods.
How long will ye give wrong judgement: and accept the persons of the ungodly?
Defend the poor and fatherless: see that such as are in need and necessity have right.
Deliver the outcast and poor: save them from the hand of the ungodly.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for this blog on the St Paul’s occupation and the protests about the financial system that sparked it off.

People have understandably noted that protestors on such occassions tend to be a rag-tag bunch, bringing together what many of us would regard as unrelated issues.

Nevertheless, it would be hard to dispute that in this particular case they have a point. As I observed in my article, the financial system may be almost incomprehensible to the layperson, but the principles on which it ought to operate are quite straightforward — honesty, integrity and (especially from a Christian viewpoint) the service of the ‘least’ by the ‘greatest’.

Unfortunately, such principles have been in short supply. Parcelling up with more sound loans the mortgage debts of those who clearly either can’t pay or won’t pay (whether now or in the future) and giving them a ‘Triple A’ rating requires at very least a certain disingenuousness. But then selling a mortgage to someone who would be better advised not to bother is itself an act of personal dishonesty, as is encouraging them to misrepresent their own financial situation to themselves and to others.

The voice of the church in this has been somewhat muted and, though I hate to say it, the voice of conservative evangelicals has been almost entirely silent.

One friend of mine, Andy Hatropp, has written a substantial volume on the subject of economicjustice, but his is a voice crying in the wilderness, not so much because there is nothing to say, but because no one else is joining in.

Yet, as yesterday’s reading of the psalms revealed, you only have to open the Bible and you are falling over injunctions concerning such matters.

As a conservative evangelical myself, I belong to a constituency which rightly emphasizes God’s judgement. But sometimes it seems we forget what it is he judges. Moreover, we should surely be aware, as Psalm 82 observes, that the God who judges expects right judgement from his people. And what is right judgement? To defend the poor and fatherless, to see that such as are in need and necessity have right, to deliver the outcast and poor and to save them from the hand of the ungodly.

It really is not rocket science.

John Richardson
17 November 2011

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A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday

We had a very full church for our Remembrance Sunday service this morning (though in fairness we have quite a small building). The following are the notes for the sermon I preached, which several people afterwards said they’d appreciated. (Bear in mind  the notes do not precisely equal the full sermon.)

Romans 5:1-11

I wonder what you think when you hear the word ‘euthanasia’. Do you think of your own circumstances at the end of your life? Of someone else’s? Does the word fill you with fear, or a sense of comfort?

As things go, it is highly likely that euthanasia will be made legal in this country, just as it is already legal in Holland or Switzerland, so it is not just a theoretical question.

The word euthanasia comes from the Greek, and is sometimes translated to mean ‘an easy death’.

Literally, though, it means ‘a good death’. And if you think about it, a good death may not quite be the same thing as an easy death.

But can any death be a ‘good’ death? Surely death is always a bad thing? Well, not necessarily.

The Romans, for example, had one view about a ‘good death’ made famous in a line from a poem by Horace:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ...

“It is a sweet and right thing to die for one’s country.”

Yet of course, this was the line that so angered the First World War poet Wilfred Owen that he used it as a title for a poem of his own which ends like this:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie; ‘Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori’.

Horace thought it was a virtue, Owen called it a lie. And it has to be admitted that most people today would sympathize with the latter view. They may not know the writings of Wilfrid Owen, but they know the words of Edwin Starr: “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.”

Yet unlike Wilfrid Owen’s anti-war sentiments, this widespread distaste for war doesn’t arise out of an experience of war. Most of us, thank God, have had no direct experience of combat.

No. It is not just that people see war as wrong — as good for nothing — increasingly they see the idea of dying for your country as fundamentally mistaken. It just not worth it.

What is worth preserving is your own individual life within your network of family and friends — the people who like you and whom you like. And it is the loss of this which makes death the ultimate disaster.

This is why we had those scenes of grieving at Wootton Bassett every time a coffin came home from Iraq or Afghanistan. The grief, the flowers and the tears focused on the loss of a loved one.

And the question in people’s minds throughout these campaigns has been not “Are we winning?” but “How many have been killed?” But that, of course, is a hopeless way to assess the success or failure of a military campaign.

If the ultimate value is the preservation of my life and the relationships I have with those closest to me, then death in combat is the ultimate loss. And this raises the question of whether there is anything worth dying for. Certainly if the idea of dying for your own country is a lie, it is completely pointless dying for someone else’s.

The Christian author and broadcaster C S Lewis called this the ‘debunking’ of values. On what grounds, he asked, might someone be urged to die?

Every appeal to pride, honour, shame or love is excluded [...] [T]hese would be to return to sentiment and the ... task is, having cut all that away, to explain to men, in terms of pure reasoning, why they will be well advised to die that others may live. (The Abolition of Man, 23)

And that presents us with a problem.

Let us take the obvious most recent example. From 1939 to 1945, this country fought against two of the worst regimes in human history — Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Few people today would dispute that defeating those regimes was a good thing.

But for that to happen, some people had to die. And the problem is, who’s is it going to be? Because you see, death is a very personal thing. Nazism was an ideology. The Japanese Imperial cult was an ideology. And democracy and human freedom are ideologies.

We naturally think that democracy and freedom are better ideologies than Nazism or Imperialism. But when it comes to dying for democracy or dying for freedom, or dying to defeat Nazism, that’s personal. And the question is, who should it be?

Today, we look back with gratitude on those who gave their lives to win that war. But as we do so, we need to take a close look at ourselves.

One of the things we traditionally read at such ceremonies is the so-called ‘Kohima’ ode — the epitaph on the British cemetery that reads,

When you go home,
Tell them of us and say,
For their tomorrow,
We gave our today.

What do we feel when we hear those words? Are we just glad it was them and not us? Are we just glad that we live in a world of peace, not war? Or do we feel that in some sense their deaths were right and good?

That, I think, is a real challenge. But if I am glad that I have benefited from someone else’s death, yet I regard the reasons for their death as pointless, then really I am just be being selfish.

Either I take the view that there is very little worth dying for — and certainly not the uncertain future of other people I don’t know and will never meet — or I acknowledge that there are some things which are worth dying for on principle.

The trouble is, as we know, people have been willing to die for bad causes as well as good. We may question the attitude of the kamikaze pilot, but we can’t question his commitment. So how do we judge what is worth dying for?

As Christians, we actually have an answer, though it one that has been very imperfectly understood and applied. In Romans 5, we heard this:

⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

It is this that sets both death and life in context.

Today, we widely act as if the only that matters is my own, and the only value worth preserving is the relationships of my family and friends.

In former times, it was believed that the same was true for a wider circle of people and values — our fellow countrymen and our nation.

But in Christ, God turned the whole thing on its head: “when we were God’s enemies,” v 10 says, “we were reconciled to him through the death of his son”.

We might die, says v 7, for a good man. God’s son died for sinners. We might give our lives for those who value us most of all. God’s son gave his life for those who valued him least of all.

And that fundamental principle, applied in the lives of Christians, has been able to transform the world.

Today we honour those who died a good death — not because they felt like it or because they wanted to, but because they were willing to do it and because they did it to achieve a greater good.

The choice we face is not the same, but it is just as challenging — to live our lives not for ourselves but for others, and not just others we love and who love us, but for everyone. This is the example of Christ. And his was surely the best death of all.

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Not quite 'faith in the city' ...

A friend put me on to this series of cartoons - Alex and Clive having lunch with a certain Archbishop.

Follow the rest here.


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Some things you just have to post ...

It's got nothing to do with Anglicanism or Christianity or me come to that, but some things you have to post:

Aussies routed for 47 by South Africa as 23 wickets fall

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For parish magazines - shortened article on the St Paul's protests

It occurred to me that some people might find a shortened version of the article I posted earlier useful for parish magazines, etc. I've pasted this below. Feel free to use it - and even to shorten it further or change the title if that would help.

JPR

***********

Christianity, Capitalism and the St Paul’s protestors — what might have been said

What’s wrong with the world’s financial markets is not rocket science, though the technical issues involved may look like it.

In April 2007, an English financier named Henry Maxey wrote an article titled ‘Cracking the Credit Market Code’, which explained precisely why we were heading then for where we are now. To the novice, however, his account of ‘credit’ and ‘leverage’, ‘liquidity’ and ‘collateralized debt obligations’ is completely baffling.

Maxey likened the global financial system to Willy Wonka’s gobstoppers: “You can suck ‘em and suck ‘em and suck ‘em, and they’ll never get any smaller.” The market in loans would keep on making profit for everyone indefinitely.

The trouble was, most people couldn’t see the fallacy. The credit bubble, Maxey wrote, “was the financial world’s own perpetual motion machine, yet the ridicule was reserved for those who ... warned about the absurdity of the output.”*

So if even the experts couldn’t see (or wouldn’t admit to) the problems, how could the crash have been avoided?

Cue the Church of England, which was briefly pushed into the limelight when the grounds of St Paul’s cathedral were occupied recently by protestors. Unfortunately, instead of coming out with their lines, the clergy suffered a collective bout of stage-fright!

As a result, a great opportunity was lost. The best thing the Church seemed to be able to come up with was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s support for a new ‘Robin Hood’ tax — in other words, another financial instrument to add to the pile. But what might have been a better response, given the complexity of the issues involved?

The first answer in any realm of public responsibility lies in the model Jesus Christ set before his followers, as the Lord of all who nevertheless came “not to be served, but to serve”.

I remember a lecturer many years ago who argued that this ought to be the guiding principle of Christians in the arts. The first goal of the artist, he said, should not be self-expression but service of others. The answer to the question, “What should I paint or sculpt or design?” should be, “What could I paint or sculpt or design that would be of benefit to someone else?”

Yet this can apply to financiers as much as to artists. The guiding principle here should be not “How much money can we make?” but, “How can I best be of service?” In every occupation and relationship, those who claim to follow Christ should follow his example of being “the servant of all”.

After that, there are the basic principles of honesty and integrity, which should not be confined to private life. “By justice a king gives a country stability,” says the book of Proverbs, “but one who is greedy for bribes tears it down” (29:4). In the end, bribery, corruption and greed destroy businesses and communities.

But someone will say, “This is impossible — it’s a dog eat dog world.” To this, we can only reply, do you want to live like an animal, or like a human being made in the image of God? Do you want to follow the herd, or follow the Master? If people ask what the Christian ‘take’ is on something as profound as global finance, they must not complain if the answer turns out to be simple to define but hard to apply. Maybe that’s life.

Rev John Richardson is Associate Minister to the parishes of Henham, Elsenham and Ugley. He blogs as 'The Ugley Vicar'.

*In Jonathan Ruffer, Babel: The Breaking of the Banks (Hindringham: JJG Publishers, 2009), 184

[597 words total]

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What St Paul's staff might have said - the Christian answer to the financial crisis

(Update: a shortened version of this, suitable for parish magazines, has now been posted.)

What’s wrong with the world’s financial markets is not rocket science, but the technical issues involved may look like it.

In April 2007, a young English financier named Henry Maxey published an article titled ‘Cracking the Credit Market Code’* which explained precisely why we were heading then for where we are now. To the outsider, however, his account of ‘credit’ and ‘leverage’, ‘liquidity’ and (above all) ‘collateralized debt obligations’ is completely baffling.

But take heart! It is not just the outsider who fails to understand the problems. In an explanatory note, Maxey likened the global system to a perpetual motion machine. Such machines are impossible, yet hundreds have been designed. (Indeed as a schoolboy I worked out that if a water wheel pumped water into a pond that then fed back to the water wheel, it would keep turning forever!)

The problem with debunking such inventions lies in working out exactly where the energy loss occurs (there always is one). In the same way, Maxey argued there was a slight ‘skew’ in the various cogs of newly-emerged financial markets which was hard to detect, but which meant the whole thing was bound, eventually, to run out of steam.

The market in collateralized debt, Maxey said, looked for all the world like Willy Wonka’s gobstoppers: “You can suck ‘em and suck ‘em and suck ‘em, and they’ll never get any smaller” (202). The money would keep on making profit. The trouble was, most people couldn’t see the fallacy. The credit bubble, “was the financial world’s own perpetual motion machine, yet the ridicule was reserved for those who questioned the legitimacy of ‘almost rational’ components and warned about the absurdity of the output.” (184)

So if mere mortals couldn’t understand it and the experts couldn’t see (or wouldn’t admit to) the problem, how could it have been avoided?

Cue the Church of England, which was briefly pushed into the limelight when the grounds of St Paul’s cathedral were occupied by people protesting at the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, instead of coming out with their lines, the clergy suffered a collective bout of stage-fright!

As a result, a great opportunity was lost to declare a clear and unequivocal Christian response. But what, you might ask, should such a response look like, given the complexity of the issues outlined above? As it happened, the cathedral had been about to publish its own survey of business ethics, but all this was lost sight of in a welter of resignations and recriminations. The best thing it seemed to be able to come up with was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s support for a new ‘Robin Hood’ tax — in other words, another financial instrument to add to the pile.

Yet what would be a specifically Christian response to the crisis? The first answer in any realm of public responsibility surely lies in the model Jesus Christ set before his followers, of the Son of Man “who came not to be served, but to serve”.

I always remember a lecturer many years ago who argued that this ought to be the guiding principle of Christians involved in the arts. The first goal of the artist, he said, should not be self-expression but service of others. Yet this can apply to financiers as much as to artists. The guiding principle should always be not “How can I serve my own ambitions (for money, fame, fulfilment or whatever)?” but, “How can I best serve others?” In every occupation and relationship, those who claim to follow Christ should follow his example and command of being “the servant of all”.

After that, there are the basic principles of honesty and integrity. And this is not just a matter of personal or private morality. “By justice a king gives a country stability,” says the book of Proverbs, “but one who is greedy for bribes tears it down” (29:4). In the end, bribery and corruption destroy businesses and communities.

But someone will say, “This is impossible — in the hard world of business, it’s dog eat dog.” To this, we can only reply, do you want to live like an animal, or like a human being made in the image of God? Do you want to follow the herd, or follow the Master? If people ask what the Christian ‘take’ is on something as profound as global finance, they must not complain if the answer turns out to be simple to define but hard to apply. Maybe that’s life.

John Richardson
8 November 2011

* In J Ruffer, Babel: The Breaking of the Banks, A Chronicle of the Markets 1998-2009 (Hindringham: JJG Publishing, 2009), 184-247

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If no one minds, does animal 'suffering' matter?

Someone somewhere must have done some work on this one, but I was discussing the meaning of animal suffering yesterday and the suggestion came up that if there was no-one (e.g. ourselves) to feel disturbed by that suffering it would, by definition, not be a ‘problem’.

The thought experiment this involves is a little tricky, since it involves thinking about a situation where there is no thought. However, that is essentially a key component of the view of the universe taken by many armchair philosophers today. (Is there any other kind of philosopher?)

The universe, on the popular model, is posited to be impersonal in its origins and workings. Cognitive and contemplative persons turn up as a result of those workings, but they turn up some way down the track. Indeed, since such persons are a relatively recent arrival (even assuming there are other persons on other planets, if life follows the same pattern as on our own, they are a late, not early ,development), for much of planetary history we have a universe (or at least worlds) where there literally is no one to think about anything.

Now extend the experiment just a little further, to a situation where persons not only haven’t emerged, but never emerge. (This must, incidentally, also be the only universe for the sake of the experiment, since in a multiverse scenario you could have persons in other universes worrying about this one.)

In the absolute (i.e. ‘eternal’) absence of any person ever, such that nothing and no one ever actually exists to give a thought to the behaviour of animals, is there still a real ‘problem of animal suffering’?

JPR

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Crime - it's a 'black thing'

Yesterday I posted an article on what I called the stupidity of basing morality on a ‘Darwinistic’ or evolutionary foundation. My point was not that the evolutionary case cannot be made — it can be and is increasingly being made — but that it is not how we operate in real life.

In real life, we do not simply rationalize about the evolutionary ‘causes’ of behaviours and assess them according to ‘Darwinian’ principles. Rather, we get steamed up about things we feel to be wrong and passionate about what we feel to be right. I doubt that anyone currently camped around St Paul’s cathedral, for example, is there on evolutionary grounds.

In real life, we operate on common-sense assumptions about morality.

But like I said, there are plenty of people who are arguing that this is naive and, ultimately, illusory. And an anonymous correspondent posted a link to the Human Biological Diversity site, devoted to research and reading material which takes exactly this point of view.

The outcome, however, is striking, not least when it comes to the subject of Crime and HBD because, you see, basically, “it’s a black thing”.

‘The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States’? It’s a black thing. ‘The Color of Crime’? I think you can guess. ‘Sweden Tops European Rape League — But Why?’ No prizes for the right answer.

The really interesting thing about the site, however, is that when you look at the main articles under ‘Ethnocentrism & Ethnic Genetic Interests’, they seem scientifically impeccable: Axelrod, Robert, R. A. Hammond & A. Grafen. ‘Altruism via kin-selection strategies that rely on arbitrarytags with which they coevolve’, Evolution 58, no. 8 (2004). Hamilton, W.D. Narrow Roads of Gene Land: The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton Volume 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour, (Oxford University Press, 1998). The list is long and redolent of bibliographies in scientific journals.

Now it may well be that the ‘respectable’ people in the latter section (if such they are) would very much like to distance themselves from the ‘dubious’ people in the former. But it isn’t so easy when both are using the same methodology and paradigm.

Moreover, there is no obvious reason, at least in terms of the fundamental assumptions of research, why any distancing should be required or necessary. I am old enough to recall the outrage caused by the publication of H J Eysenck’s Race, Intelligence and Education, in 1971. Indeed, I had to read and review it for my psychology degree.

Eysenck was perhaps the most influential behavioural psychologist in his generation and certainly neither a fool nor a charlatan. Unfortunately for him, his reading of the statistical evidence suggested a genetic component to intelligence which basically meant some races are smarter than others and he published the results in a deliberately ‘popular’ format. Instead of a dispassionate examination of the evidence, however, Eysenck was personally vilified and attacked.

Yet from a strictly scientific point of view, his was an unexceptionable conclusion. There is no a priori reason why genes should not be a determinant of intellectual ability. Moreover, if that’s where the evidence goes, that is where we must follow if we are real scientists. Four years earlier, Desmond Morris had published, in a similarly popular format, The Naked Ape, subtitled A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, and it went on to be a best-seller. Why was Eysenck treated any differently?

The trouble is, when it comes to specifically racial differences, we’ve been there before and we’ve seen where it leads, and few people want to go there again.

And this is the problem. Part of us wants to go with the ‘evolutionist’ paradigm, not least because it seems to provide a neat ‘explanation’ of human altruism: you don’t have to be religious to be good — it’s in our genes. (See, e.g., Dawkins passim for an elaboration of this.)

But when others want to apply that same evolutionary paradigm in ‘unsavoury’ ways, something else kicks in. Like the Apostle Peter in John’s Gospel, we feel someone leading us where we do not want to go.

The question is, are we right at this point, or are we simply being irrational? Is the person who fears the social implications of such an approach unenlightened, or are those who want to follow wherever it may go at whatever the price darkened in their understanding?

John Richardson
3 November 2011

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It's the morality, stupid.

On Sunday morning I was driving round the M25 to ‘a church not near you’ when I happened to find myself listening to Radio 4 in the interval between the morning service and the news that used to be occupied by the late Alastair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’.

With the possible exception of Clive James, the products of the current occupants of this slot simply reveal the greatness of the man himself, whose gentle tones and deceptively wandering style never failed to fascinate. Sad to say, last Sunday was no exception, although it was, in its own way, quite gripping.

The broadcast was a diatribe against the arms trade in general and British involvement in particular. Nothing particularly wrong with that, as far as I’m concerned. Armaments are, I believe, a necessity, but as far as possible they ought not to be a commodity.

The problem lay not so much in the speaker’s case as in the way it was made. His words were eloquent in the extreme, but laced with that bitterness which characterizes the cultural self-loathing of the typical left-of-centre Western intellectual. Taken to its extreme (and the speaker’s subject matter had clearly driven him pretty close to that point) it produces the kind of thing one expects to hear from the children of rich parents, as they pass through an adolescent love-affair with Socialism. Truly it belonged in the sixth-form debating society, not on Radio 4.

It was at the point, however, where the speaker got on to the subject of cluster bombs, “or child-killers, to give them their proper name”, that the thought occurred to me with complete clarity that no one except the monumentally stupid or obtuse could seriously maintain that morals can be given a ‘Darwinian’ or evolutionary basis.

Suppose this had been not a radio broadcast but an after-dinner conversation, and suppose I had said to the speaker, “Whoah — have you considered two things: first, the important question may not be who dies but who survives, and secondly, the feelings you have about unknown young humans in far off places are simply the misallocation of protective instincts which originally served to promote the survival of your herd?”

My suspicion is this would not have played well.

Now there may be some who would object that the timing was bad — that the analysis is potentially correct in principle, but that people sometimes have to get things of their chests.

Yet arguably, if we are being led into a ‘brave new world’ of a rational and fact-based approach to existence, the timing would have been pretty well spot-on, for it is surely when we are ‘getting things off our chests’ and the like that we are being less than completely rational.

Furthermore there was surely a danger, in this instance, that the speaker’s own emotions, and his intended emotional impact on others, could have the effect of leading him and them into irrational, and therefore potentially destructive, choices.

Of course, someone may come back and object that, on the contrary, the speaker’s case is entirely favourable to human survival, and therefore is entirely rational (and very ‘Darwinian’).

But the point is this: that wasn’t his case.

He was not at all saying, “As I can demonstrate, an arms industry which involves bribery would threaten the propagation of human genes and affect the overall utilitarian balance between human happiness and misery, therefore bribery is to be eschewed for its deleterious impact in these areas.”

Rather, he simply observed that bribery had (probably) taken place and assumed that both he and we would agree that bribery is wrong.

Now it may be that he, and we, are actually mistaken. And certainly defining the nature of morality and concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is frustratingly difficult. All I am saying is that one has to admit the self-evident stupidity of pursuing the alternative.

There are those who still insist it is correct. I think the Australian ethicist Peter Singer is one of them, but if you follow the logic of his thought you wind up having sex with an orangutan — should the mood take you. And if that’s where you want to go, then good luck with combatting the international arms trade.

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