More on the matter of Britain

                                             More Scottish elements in Arthurian legends...

An extended comment on my previous post from Aelianus deserves more than a combox reply:

I don't understand the statement "in Arthurian legend, Scotland is rather marginal". A great swathe of the major characters in the legend are from the part of Britain that would later become Scotland: Sir Gawain of Orkney and Lothian, his father King Lot (after whom Lothian is supposed to be named), his brothers Sir Agravain, Sir Gaheris, Sir Gareth and Sir Mordredhis their sister St Teneu and her son St Mungo founder of Glasgow. King Urien of Rheged and his son Sir Ywain. These are hardly marginal figures in the story. The earliest reference to Arthur is in Y Gododdin the oldest literary work deriving from the area of modern Scotland. What the Arthurian tales point to is that this territory is more fundamentally and originally British than it is Scottish just as they draw attention to the antecedent Britishness of Lloegyr. The evidence in that film that there was no Anglo-Saxon invasion proves no such thing. It simply points to the fact that Saxons had been raiding the province of Britannia for many centuries, that much of the territory was unprepared to resist and that they never (even after the conquest) made up more than a minority of the population (like any military aristocracy).

First, thanks for the response. One of the ways in which myths and deep stories about nations and landscapes work is by provoking discussion and disagreement: what we are doing here is in part a tribute to that depth and abding importance.

Turning to the specific points raised, I'll begin by repeating my (incomplete) reply in the combox:

You'll note that, in context, the 'statement' is not left unchallenged.

In addition to the points in the blog post, I'd add: 1) whatever the potential for developing the 'Scottish' elements within the Matter, my impression (and I accept that discerning the cultural force of narratives is a tricky business) is that generally this has not been done. The Arthurian cycle is predominantly felt as a Southern English narrative, probably centred in Winchester or Glastonbury. (The only quick evidence I can provide for this is that I've put into the blog: that reworkings that emphasise Scottish elements are presented as self consciously revisionist.)

In short, I don't think the Arthurian legends are as central to the Scottish mythos as they are to the English one. (I put aside the Welsh case simply because it has complexities which I'm simply not able to do justice to.) My main basis for that is simply a factual claim: when one thinks of the legends and stories that have been told and retold over the years, Scottish writers have tended not to concentrate on Arthur in the same way that English ones have. (As a factual claim, it is of course open to challenge and I'd be particularly interested if anyone could point me in the direction of scholarly literature on the use of the Matter of Britain in pre-modern Scotland.) Certainly, taking Professor Roberts' film as itself a reperformance of the Matter of Britain, that  didn't have much to say about Scotland. (And of the others I mentioned in the original blogpost, all have Scotland literally on the margins, as the stories are located in the Borders.)

Now if that empirical observation is true, then the next question is why that might be true? What might cause that lack of attention? That's quite a big discussion, but some elements spring to mind immediately. First, the struggle between Saxon and Briton is not even plausibly as central to Scottish narrative identity as it is to English. Moreover, that sense of two peoples' clashing is repeated again and again in English history in a way that it isn't in Scottish. (One thinks here especially of the clash between Norman and Saxon for which, I'd speculate, the Arthurian clash between Briton and Saxon often functions as a (safer) imaginative replacement.) For Scotland, the clash is between (at least) Irish, British, Pictish and Saxon identities, with nothing like the complete replacement of Brittonic by English until the relatively modern domination of English over Gaelic (and note then it is Goidelic Gaelic, not the Brittonic of Arthur). Secondly, the political centrality of the various tensions between the identities of British/French, Welsh/British and Romanitas/barbarian which are central to much of the Arthurian cycle are arguably less central to Scotland. For example, there is the absence of the Edward I's and the Tudor need to find a location for Welshness within the English vision of royal power. Finally, there is the availability of alternative, more powerful mythoi: that of the struggle of Scotland against England (The Brus/Braveheart); that of the struggle of Gael against Lowlander (Scott).

Now I don't know how much of that (speculation) would ultimately be defensible. But perhaps the biggest absence in the Arthurian cycle is of the tension between Gael and Saxon: as Aelianus points out, the 'Scottish' element in the cycle is confined mostly to Southern Scotland and the Kingdom of Strathclyde: as noted above, Scotland literally is marginal to the imaginary of the cycle as being predominantly confined to the Southern Borders. Moreover, as medieval Scotland viewed itself as Scottish (ie Goidelic), a narrative that marginalised that identity would be unlikely to have much purchase:

Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown.

They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous.

Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today.

The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since.

 

(From the Declaration of Arbroath 1320 here. Emphases mine.)

 

The key point of the original blogpost was this: Scotland (like all nations) needs an imaginative (mythic) engagement with its past. Certainly as performed in Roberts' programme, there was nothing that seemed able to contribute to that imaginative engagement except by way of absence. To point that our, as Angus MacNeil did, is simply fair comment.

 

So my main plea is that both Unionists and Nationalists think more deeply about the stories they want to tell and the myths they would use. Perhaps the Matter of Britain can provide such basis: if so, please get on with it. (The general importance of good myth like the Matter of Britain is that it allows the interpenetration of many competing values and experiences: Arthur, for example, deals with personal tragedy (adultery), political tragedy (civil war) and the supernatural end of man (the Quest for the Grail). Braveheart on the whole just deals with thumping invaders over the head.) My suspicions remain that, for the various reasons adumbrated, the Matter of Britain is not up to that task of deepening the imaginative construction of Scotland.

 

But that leaves open the question of what is up to that task. And really, we have to do better than  'the UK is lovely and Nicola Sturgeon is a tosser' or 'The Tories eat babies and everything was awful in the past and will be great in the future'...

[On the issue of whether the Saxons invaded or came bringing trinkets and culture -I have no view.]

Walter Scott on mature love

                                               
                                                    Charlotte Scott (in 1810; died 1826)

I'm almost at the end of my reading through Walter Scott's Collected Works and am now into his 'Poems'. (So 93% through the Collected Works per my Kindle.)

Frankly, I'm unable to judge the poetic merits of the following: too fresh and it hit an emotional chord. ('August' is certainly coming metaphorically for me (and of course literally as well).) Anyway, hadn't seen it before and it's a feature of long enduring marriages that's too little celebrated:

Oh, say not, my love, with that mortified air,
That your spring-time of pleasure is flown,
Nor bid me to maids that are younger repair,
For those raptures that still are thine own.

Though April his temples may wreathe with the vine,
Its tendrils in infancy curl'd,
'Tis the ardor of August matures us the wine,
Whose life-blood enlivens the world.

Though thy form, that was fashioned as light as a fay's,
Has assumed a proportion more round,
And thy glance, that was bright as a falcon's at gaze,
Looks soberly now on the ground,--

Enough, after absence to meet me again,
Thy steps still with ecstasy move;
Enough, that those dear sober glances retain
For me the kind language of love.

Had I seen this poem at the time, it would have served as an excellent response to this typically grubby little Daily Mail piece which stuck in my mind at the time as displaying in its faux sympathetic prurience much of what is wrong with modern understandings of sex and explains why fewer of us seem to reach the sublimity of Scott's attitude. There is in any case a special place in Hell for (mostly) men who dump their wives in favour of younger versions. (Rather too common judging from my circle of acquaintance.)

If there's a general moral to be drawn from all this, it's perhaps that the ability of men and women to construct long term marriages is based on a complex web of attitudes and practices that our modern culture is doing its best to undermine. Instead of sex education, small children should be forced to rote learn the above so that, when August and the need for such an attitude arises, the words are already there.

[As I'm lazy, I googled the poem and cut and pasted it from the website here. It's a nice tribute to Scott and a good site for poetry in general.]

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk died on this day in 1994.

Wikipedia does a reasonable job of getting the basics right:


Russell Amos Kirk (October 19, 1918 in Plymouth, Michigan – April 29, 1994 in Mecosta, Michigan) was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was also considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism.

Reactions to Kirk seem to fall between idolatry from young men in five piece tweed suits and carrying what the suspicious might take to be a sword cane to having absolutely no idea who he is. (The latter I suspect is much the most common in Scotland.) So why do I think that it's worth taking him seriously everywhere but especially in Scotland? Here are some suggestions:

1. Suspicion of change.  The Scottish political scene is entirely dominated by self-styled 'progressives' including the Conservatives. (The Independent describing the Tory paper on tax reform:  "the word “progressive” features (a nod to mainstream political discourse in Scotland".) Whatever reality lies behind the narrative, the only game in town is one which talks of bright, shiny futures. The biggest lack in Scottish political discourse is anyone who is even talking along the following lines:

[T]he conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise. [Here.]

2. An emphasis on imagination and 'seeing as' rather than party political success. If all of Scotland is now progressive, we are also all now gripped in a political culture where all that matters is effectiveness. The stream (trickle?) of voters away from Labour to the Conservatives is purely about the most effective opposition party to the SNP. Such calculations are of course inevitable.But unless there are the beginnings of a richer political culture with a greater variety of views and a willingness first to explore the nature of homo politicus before entering into the Machiavellian cut and thrust of day to day politics, Scottish public life will wither.

“Imagination rules the world,” Russell Kirk used to say. He meant that imagination is a force that molds the clay of our sentiments and understanding. It is not chiefly through calculations, formulas, and syllogisms, but by means of images, myths, and stories that we comprehend our relation to God, to nature, to others, and to the self. That is why William Wordsworth referred to the imagination as “The mightiest lever known to the moral world.” And that is why Dr. Johnson, in an earthier definition, quipped that imagination is “The thing which prevents [a man] from being as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as in the arms of a duchess.” [Here.]

3. Kirk loved Scotland (and Scott) and his sensibilities are in many ways much closer to Scottish culture than a Conservatism dominated by the London establishment. (At the very least, it is a relief to read a small town republican conservative rather than a scion of the Bullingdon Club.)

4. An emphasis on the transcendent. Although Kirk expresses this differently over the years, a sense of an order, rhythm or simple presence that stands outside the everyday world is a constant, expressing itself variously in his conversion to Catholicism in 1964, his writingof gothic ghost stories, and his Burkean sense of an organic unity of a tradition. This stands, I think, in contrast to both the mechanical Christianity of much of the modern Right in America and to the cynical pragmatism of much of the Right in Britain.

5. Finally, he is (as much as he presents) a 'patchwork' (to borrow Davila's phrase)  or (to borrow mine) a landscape of the mind. His affinities to post-modernism have been noted in that he created less a body of doctrine to be followed but a landscape to be inhabited. Moreover, it is a landscape that is in many ways highly individualistic: the landscape we inhabit in modernity is no longer a village that we can simply be born into, but one that has to be crafted by each of us as a bohemian:

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regu­larity of organization; what I sought was vari­ety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle. [Here.]

Walter Scott on 'Enlightenment values' and David Hume

                                                       Henry Mackenize (by Raeburn)

Those who have been reading this blog for a while may have wondered where I was in my reading of Sir Walter Scott's complete works. The short answer is that I am roughly 80% through and now in the middle of his journals...

In my last post, I commented on Nick Cohen's problematic use of 'Enlightenment values'. Scott touches on the Scottish Enlightenment a number of times in his works (I'm particularly tempted to write something on the Burkean principles of his essays on improving woodland) but I recently came across this in his review of MacKenzie's biography of John Home (writer of the Douglas):

Neither is it only to Scotland that these annals are interesting. There were men of literature in Edinburgh before she was renowned for romances, reviews, and magazines--

    "Vixerunt fortes ante Agamemnona;" [Brave men have lived before Agamemnon]

and a single glance at the authors and men of science who dignified the last generation, will serve to show that, in those days, there were giants in the North. The names of Hume, Robertson, Fergusson, stand high in the list of British historians. Adam Smith was the father of the economical system in Britain, and his standard work will long continue the text-book of that science. Dr. Black, as a chemist, opened that path of discovery which has since been prosecuted with such splendid success. Of metaphysicians, Scotland boasted, perhaps, but too many: to Hume and Fergusson we must add Reid, and, though younger, yet of the same school, Mr. Dugald Stewart. In natural philosophy, Scotland could present Professor Robison, James Watt, whose inventions have led the way to the triumphs of human skill over the elements, and Clerk, of Eldin, who taught the British seaman the road to assured conquest. Others we could mention; but these form a phalanx, whose reputation was neither confined to their narrow, poor, and rugged native country, nor to England and the British dominions, but known and respected wherever learning, philosophy, and science were honoured.

[From Minor Prose Works]


It's worth noting a few points here. First, nowhere is the term 'Scottish Enlightenment' or even 'Enlightenment' mentioned. This is to be expected as Wikipedia notes:

The term "Enlightenment" emerged in English in the later part of the 19th century, with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of the French term 'Lumières' (used first by Dubos in 1733 and already well established by 1751). From Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" ("Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?") the German term became 'Aufklärung' (aufklären = to illuminate; sich aufklären = to clear up). However, scholars have never agreed on a definition of the Enlightenment, or on its chronological or geographical extent. Terms like "les Lumières" (French), "illuminismo" (Italian), "ilustración" (Spanish) and "Aufklärung" (German) referred to partly overlapping movements. Not until the late nineteenth century did English scholars agree they were talking about "the Enlightenment."

Secondly, Scott conceptualizes 'the Enlightenment' in personal ('the authors and men of science who dignified the last generation') and local terms ('their narrow, poor, and rugged native country'). In other words, it is a circle of very talented and different individuals who were in regular and friendly intercourse with each other despite (or even because of) their great differences. (That impression in only reinforced by the extended anecdotes especially about David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Fergusson taken from Home's biography which are quoted in the rest of the review.)

Thirdly, the 'Enlightenment' is centred on effectiveness and practicality (' who taught the British seaman the road to assured conquest') rather than abstract ideas ("Of metaphysicians, Scotland boasted, perhaps, but too many").

I doubt whether any of this is a surprise to anyone who has read anything about 'the Scottish Enlightenment'. But there are far too many who are willing to convert 'the Enlightenment' into a banner under which (eg) unrestrained free speech of the coarsest variety can be justified. Whatever the merits of such a view, it is not the same as the culture of a circle of talented men 'known and respected wherever learning, philosophy, and science were honoured'. Although I'm thinking here particularly of secularist blowhards such as Nick Cohen, you will also find a tendency to essentialize (and reject) Enlightenment values in conservative Catholic circles (ie mine). I'm certainly not suggesting that the views of lightly sceptical Scottish Protestants will ever fit neatly into a Catholic world view, but, equally, I certain that it is intellectual suicide to hand over uncontested to the secularists an important part of the intellectual history of modernity.

Free and cordial communication of sentiments, the natural play of fancy and good-humour, which prevailed among the circle of men whom I have described. It was very different from that display of learning -that prize fighting of wit, which distinguished a literary circle of our sister country...


[Mackenzie quoted in Scott's review]

So let's celebrate some of the values of the Scottish Enlightenment: to honour substantive learning, philosophy and science rather than the ill tempered shallowpate; to be sceptical of dogmatic political fashions and prize the conservatism born of a deep reading in history; to celebrate conviviality, friendship, religion and national pride, rather than deracinated rage of pure subjectivity. Oh, and reticence and tact as well:

The celebrated David Hume, the philosopher and historian, was certainly the most distinguished person in the cycle [sic]. That he was most unhappy in permitting the acuteness of his talents, and the pride arising from the consciousness of possessing them, to involve him in a maze of sceptical illusions, is most undeniable; as well as that he was highly culpable in giving to the world the miserable results of his leisure. Mr Mackenzie states, in mitigation, not in exculpation, that the great Pyrrhonist--

"had, in the language which the Grecian historian applies to an illustrious Roman, two minds, one which indulged in the metaphysical scepticism which his genius could invent, but which it could not always disentangle; another, simple, natural, and playful, which made his conversation delightful to his friends, and even frequently conciliated men who principles of belief, his philosophical doubts if they had not power to shake, had grieved and offended. Duirng the latter period of his lfe, I was frequently in his company amidst persons of genuine piety, and I never heard him venture a remark at which such men, or ladies -still more susceptible than men -could take offence. His good-nature and benevolence prevented such an injury to his hearers: it was unfortunate that he often forgot what injury some of his writings might do to his readers."

[Update: (20/1/16)

The excellent @IrishPhilosophy added the following information:

https://twitter.com/IrishPhilosophy/status/689843303790067712

and

https://twitter.com/IrishPhilosophy/status/689844147231002624

The WR Scott book was published in 1900 -which put the first use of the 'Scottish Enlightenment' even later than I suggested above. ]

Traitors and sympathy

                                                 'This is how we punish traitors.'


One of the things I've rabbited on about fairly continually over the lifetime of this blog is the need for a layer of politics that takes a longer, less ad hoc approach to how we live in the polis. Instead of politics being simply the hurly burly knockabout of Ed's failure to eat bacon sandwiches properly, or Nigel's discovery that another one of his candidates is a former member of a Waffen SS re-enactment group, there needs to be a continual effort to create institutions and to act individually in ways that promote longer term, more rational reflection as well as the inevitable day to day scraps. (I'm not a naive purist about politics: they've always had more of a touch of the dirty and irrational and always will. And that's not totally a bad thing. But the current balance is wrong. Which I'm happy to admit often includes my current balance as well.)

As I mentioned a while back, I prepared for the Scottish referendum by reading my way through Sir Walter Scott. I am still reading my way through Sir Walter Scott (67% through per Kindle). Anyway, apart from the growing horror that modern Scotland simply isn't recognizing the genius of the man with anything like sufficient fervour (perhaps regular feasting on oxen, celebratory riots in the Grassmarket, the occasional sack of a minor English Border town?), Scott's work is a continual reminder of just how much British society (and even conservative British society) has changed. I was brought up short by the following passage from Tales of a Grandfather (Scott's history of Scotland for children) on the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion:

Treason upon political accounts, though one of the highest crimes that can be committed against a state, does not necessarily infer anything like the detestation which attends offences of much less general guilt and danger. He who engages in conspiracy or rebellion is very often, as an individual, not only free from reproach, but highly estimable in his private character...The sense of such men's purity of principles and intention, though not to be admitted in defence, ought, both morally and politically, to have limited the proceedings against them within the narrowest bounds consistent with the ends of public justice, and the purpose of intimidating others from such desperate courses.

There is a typically Scott move here: a practical determination uninfluenced by anything other than realism (the need to punish to intimidate others) coupled with an understanding of and even sympathy with the individuals and their motivations. (I won't pursue this just now, but it's in part a linguistic richness we seem to have lost. Instead of morally 'thick' concepts such as 'treason' (or as I read in Burke recently, a lack of 'chivalry' as a criticism of the failure of the French to defend the woman Marie Antoinette), we're simply reduced to the yah! boo! of the modern tabloid or commentator.) The contrast struck me during the referendum campaign. It's currently striking me in the way that much of the media is treating ISIS and Muslims. Any attempt to understand let alone sympathize with the motivations of those who might support ISIS or commit acts of terror is branded as defending them. To suggest the need for understanding and explanation is, it's claimed, to introduce a 'but' into the condemnation and thus to forsake any moral standing.

And so, when CAGE tried to claim that 'Jihadi John' has been, at least in part, driven into the hands of ISIS by British security services, those of us who remember the effects of the sus laws or the effects of internment in Northern Ireland might suspect there probably is an issue here. (The issue might simply be that any effective security measures have occasional unfortunate consequences, but if so, that needs to be acknowledged.) In Scott's terms, understanding is 'not to be admitted in defence', but is still necessary, if for no other reason than to produce an effective counter-terrorism strategy. Moreover, to understand why young men and women might be attracted to a clear apocalyptic vision of the world, to fighting, to the creation of a utopia based on violence is surely not that difficult for anyone who has studied twentieth century history, let alone earlier centuries.

I'm not sure why public discourse has generally become so dumb. Perhaps it's simply that the moronic, through the availability and influence of social media, has simply become more visible. I suspect, however, it's more than that. I'd suggest three things in particular. First, there is the absence of historical understanding. In a world where a scientific paradigm has become increasingly the sole measure of knowledge, the breadth of human sympathy that arises simply from an acquaintance with a range of humanity over different times and different cultures is replaced by a shrill certainty that what passes for truth in twenty-first century Western European elites is blindingly obviously true. Secondly, there is emotivism in morality. If you think that there are no objective standards of right and wrong, then the temptation is to replace calm, patient reflection by agonistic displays of emotion, which work, not just to win the contest, but also to provide a surrogate for personal integrity: the more strongly I feel, the better a person I am. Thirdly, there is the decline in religion. Scott viewed people as souls on a journey towards God, not just lumps of flesh to be steered by whips and carrots onto the right path. That there are times for such physical means, for the hangman and the soldier (or the blackmail to turn an enemy) is a matter of cold realism. But it is also a matter of regret that, instead of always seeing and treating all people as images of God, the needs of public safety and good government do occasionally require force alongside understanding and even sympathy.

Can the West learn to love militarism again? (And should it?)

                                                  We all love a parade...?

Having recently done the Kindle equivalent of bingeing on boxed sets with the complete works of Chesterton, the one thing about them that unsettled me most was the fierceness of some of his writings around the First World War. Work after work denounced the Germans and urged a war to defend civilization against them. I'm not sure what I conclude from that. That contra the 'Oh What a Lovely War!' and Wilfred Owen syndrome, the struggle against the Kaiser's Germany was as much a fight for light as the Second? That there is a danger of the Chestertonian sliding into a sentimental love of fighting? Frankly, I'm still not sure...

It does, however, represent a problem that the modern West -and particularly Christianity- needs to face up to more squarely. Watching the First World War commemoration on Sunday in Edinburgh, I struggled between the pathos of the occasion and the irritation at a dead ritualism. Time after time, the commentators explained in hushed terms the meaning of constructing a drumhead (a heap of drums) and the importance of the military standards (and, most important, on the need to distinguish Ensigns from Standards...) It was the arcane ritual of an armed service clumsily imagined for a  modern TV audience: a construction needing the continual explanation of historical re-enactors. (When, for example, was the last period in which a heap of drums would be found conveniently in the front line of a British battalion on active service?) It jarred on me slightly, in part because I couldn't help wondering what would be the equivalent in an Independent 'progressive' Scotland: a parade of juggling drag queens on tricycles? It was well intentioned I'm sure, but it didn't emerge naturally from modern Scottish culture: it was clearly an artifice of heritage.

How a society strikes a balance between how to defend itself and how to pursue human flourishing is perhaps the central question of both Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. In the former, the question is how to create a military caste whilst preventing them from running the country. In the latter, the question is how to create a process of formation for citizens that imitates the single minded effectiveness of Crete and Sparta without producing military thugs. The modern equivalent of this is perhaps how to finance and morally support an effective fighting force while civilian society continues to embrace a feminist, individualist suspicion of collectively planned and executed violence.

Christians are even in more of a bind. With a growing suspicion at the end of the twentieth century among theologians of both Christendom (the close linking of Christianity with society and the state) and the taking of life, the sort of ready acceptance of the military life found earlier in Western culture has become increasingly difficult.

Now, it is of course possible that all this simply represents progress: that an unwillingness to kill and be killed is the result of a growing moral sensitivity. That might be true whilst it is also true that it renders the West in fact incapable of sustained military action. (Unless you are a consequentialist, there is absolutely no guarantee that an improved morality will produce better -or even survivable- consequences.) It might also be true that there is an alternative model of military effectiveness which does not buy into the sort of Imperial Militarism that military parades in the UK generally try to represent. (I suspect this is what 'progressive' Nationalism would like a Scottish Defence Force to be. Whether such a thing could exist and whether it would ever be capable of projecting force against a long term enemy (say) in the Middle East strikes me as rather less clear.)

The remaining alternative is a return to the sort of acceptance and even celebration of the military that existed until comparatively recently in Western European (certainly British) life. Any child brought up on Walter Scott, for example, would have absolutely no sense of a clash between the military life and the life of a gentleman and Christian. Whilst that attitude certainly does still exist, particularly in families and schools which have a military tradition, it's certainly not one that is common in the media dominated by a 'progressive intelligentsia' let alone a Christianity which has gone a bit hippy over the years. As a result, you tend in Britain at least to get the distancing involved in Sunday's celebrations: the military life as heritage spectacle rather than as a celebration of a living necessity. (But looking at the Bastille Day picture above, I wonder if that is so true of the French?)

Anyway, has the West become militarily ineffectual in its culture? Is that a good thing? (It seems from current events especially in the Middle East that it may be a very painful thing.) And if it isn't, can it be remedied or are the habits which have undermined it too deeply embedded now to be extracted?

Trojan Horse schools: a reader comments....

This is response to a combox comment on my last post on the Trojan Horse schools. As it's gone on too long for a combox, I've posted it instead!


=================================================================
Dear Simon

Thanks for engaging on this. Given the current events in the Middle East, I think that it’s extremely important that we don’t get distracted from the central problem here in the UK which is simply about how we educate minority cultures and groups. (Of which Catholics are one.) There’s a tendency –particularly among conservative Christians- to resort to the general line that Islam is bad and therefore to give an inch to it is naively setting up problems for the future. Whatever the merits of such a position, it doesn’t really address the reality that Islam is a living presence in the UK and is the deeply held religion of millions of our fellow citizens. Moreover, if I were a Muslim, I’d end up by being pretty hacked off by being discussed as a problem and as if I weren’t British, and end up by being pretty alienated.

I’ve been impressed recently when reading Walter Scott as to how he deals with irreconcilable hostility. Profound disagreement (between Jacobite and Hanoverian; between Saracen and Crusader; between Jew and Christian etc etc) isn’t glossed over, but lived with. I don’t think all views are equal, but I don’t expect others to think my views are equal or superior to their own. Scott’s ingredients for living with hostility are not about seeking agreement, but allowing people to arrange their own private lives (including the bringing up of their children) according to their own lights; a respect for the humanity of others; a calm confidence in one’s own position which doesn’t need the acknowledgement of others; and, finally, a certain physical and moral bravery that, if things go wrong, one should face physical risk and death with equanimity. There’s clearly much more to be said here, but, on the whole, I think that’s a better recipe for a solution to our current social difficulties than pretending that, if we just get the right argument or social arrangement, we can convince everyone of our rightness.

I turn now to a detailed response. First, I reproduce your comment with added numbering of the paragraphs:

1) "Lobbing", eh? I realised that I was laying myself open to such criticism as I cut down my piece to its conclusion. But I found it difficult adequately to explain my own journey from imagining "islamic" replaced by "catholic" (20-odd years or so ago: I thought I was being "fair") to my current position: that I consider such an approach worse than merely misguided, and to fall for the secularist error of considering all religions equal, and to abdicate responsibility for judging what might be good in islam, and what is not. (Difficult, I mean, to do so charitably and, as I am posting under my own name and as I live and work among large numbers of mohammedans, responsibly.)

2) Yes, I have read Geoffrey's posts. I've never commented there, and I shan't do so now, but I will say here that I thought both of them rather poor and, yes, naive.

3) Yes, of course some of Peter Clarke's premises would not be shared by faithful catholics, and I agree that the evidence from the online forum is poorly presented (it reads - I hope the simile is not ill-judged - like telling tales in school). And I do agree that he is wrong - naive - to think that the opinions expressed there are not also held by parents. I think they are typical of opinions held by young Pakistani men (I mean, English-born Pakistanis). Certainly, the cadences are familiar to me, and the opinions are not a surprise. But I do think that he is right to highlight those opinions.

4) I think that the report does clearly show evidence of a conspiracy, based on the local presence of a majority of Pakistani muslims, surreptitiously to gain control of schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, encouraging children in racial and religious hatred and to despise the culture and nation that have welcomed their families. 

5) One last thing: you disparage the report as "anecdotal". What do you mean by that, and why do you consider it a Bad Thing? Evidence of various kinds is described, and much of it is inevitably anecdotal. Evidence often is. For good or ill, the report is not intended to be a balanced presentation of conflicting evidence, but a set of recommendations informed by a large body of evidence and illustrated by examples. Like it or not, and without being, er, naive, we have to accept its author's integrity. His role is not analogous to that of a prosecutor as you imply, but of an investigating magistrate (I think that's what they're called).

6) I agree that it's not an easy read.


Let's take your six paragraphs one by one:

1) I don't think all religions/philosophies/beliefs are equal. I do not, for example, think that Islam's attitude to marriage is correct. (Eg: polygamy and divorce.) But to note that is not to settle the question of what one then does about that falseness. There are two aspects here: the practical and the principled.

In terms of the practical -what we can do about it- we have large communities of people who are in error: that's not just Muslims, that's secularists and everyone who's not a Catholic. (And many who are!) But to focus just on Islam:

a) much of the effect of the report would be to substitute great errors for little ones. (For example, it is clear that Clarke is suspicious of religion and fully signed up to the modern liberal sexual agenda. Why is it a good thing to force Muslims who believe and worship God to be discouraged from that belief? Why is it a good thing for Muslims who have overstrict notions of male and female modesty, to abandon these for the licentiousness of modern secular standards?)

b) there is a naïve optimism behind much of this that, by changing the school, you will change the community. I think it is much more likely that, by changing the school, you will lose all the academic advantages that have apparently been obtained, and simply alienate the Muslim community further from British society.

c) the establishment of a principle in UK politics that parents should not be allowed to control their children’s education, and that ‘hardline’ religious views on (eg) sexual ethics should be forbidden will undoubtedly be extended to Catholics and other groups.

I conclude that, simply in terms of what’s likely to work, what’s practical, it is much better that we allow Muslim ethos schools than not.

Turning to principles, even if (and I assume this is what’s behind your general train of thought) there were bad consequences from allowing Muslim ethos schools (say, in terms of social cohesion) it would still be right to allow them. (In broad terms, even if the exercise of some rights produces harms, those rights may still be acknowledged.) There are a number of different ways this might be argued for. Based on the Church’s teaching, I’d talk about the parents as primary educators of children and the right to religious freedom. Based on Mill’s liberalism, I’d argue for the importance of experiments in living and the competition for ideas that results. Based on MacIntyre’s understanding of the role of traditions, I’d argue for the importance of encouraging the deep exploration of particular traditions and for an education based on the integrity of a particular tradition.

Of course, these arguments would have to be developed (although I’m confident, time allowing, I could do this) and, given the nature of philosophical disagreement, the discussion isn’t likely to be a short one. But I’d note that, particularly from a Catholic point of view, given the Church’s principles on this and the support (from a different direction) of the Catholic philosopher, MacIntyre, I’d expect it to be particularly difficult for a Catholic to reject the conclusion that Muslim ethos schools should be allowed.

 2) OK! I’d simply say I’d disagree with your assessment here.

3) I think we’d agree here except perhaps in the wisdom of highlighting the Muslim opinions. He is highlighting simply fragments of positions and claiming that they are examples of atypical opinions held by extremists. If he thinks they are typical of the community, he should say so and alter his argument accordingly.

4) Evidence? I explained in my earlier post why I thought the report’s evidential base was flawed. Why do you disagree?

Another aspect to this is that a number of prominent public voices who a) are not Muslim and b) have personal experience of the schools disagree with the findings. For example, Lee Donaghy has consistently rejected the analysis of an Islamicist takeover which, as assistant principal of Park View, he’d be well placed to recognize. Father Oliver Cross –an Anglican Priest- is a governor of  Regent’s Park school. Again, he has been vocal in his opposition to the analysis of an Islamist takeover. There is simply no testing the evidence by voices such as these.

5) By ‘anecdotal evidence’ I simply mean the use of personal stories as evidence. The problem with such evidence –particularly as used in the report- is that it is not critically tested. In particular: a) anecdotes need to be tested for truth and b) they need to be tested for typicality.

For example. Here’s an anecdote about smoking: ‘My father smoked all his life and never had a problem with it. So smoking’s fine.’ a) It’s false. My father died of heart disease doubtless in part due to smoking. b) Even if it were true, it would prove nothing about general tendencies: my father could have been fine even if every other smoker dropped dead of smoking.

There is a lack of critical testing of these anecdotes in the report. There are alternative anecdotes that are not really considered. There is no attempt to find more reliable evidence (such as parental surveys). There are conceptual problems with the report (ie a lack of precision about the meaning of ‘Islamist’).

You say we have to trust the integrity of Clarke. You say that ‘the report is not intended to be a balanced presentation of conflicting evidence, but a set of recommendations informed by a large body of evidence and illustrated by examples’. The evidence I’ve argued (and to a large part you’ve accepted) is flawed. If it is just to be taken as a set of judgments illustrated (but not evidenced) by anecdote, I see no reason to accept it on trust: as Catholics, we should be extremely sensitive to the way that unsympathetic and ignorant outsiders are treating our religion, and I see strong reasons for thinking that much the same is going on here.

6) Not much hangs on this, but I’d say that it’s not so much a difficult read as a badly argued one. It’s clear but not convincing.

------------------

As a general point, as I’ve argued above, for both reasons of practicality and principle, I think we should be allowing (even encouraging) Muslim ethos schools. If such schools existed, I’d expect them to be much like the sort of schools under review. So I think the real question here is not so much has there been anything underhand about how the schools were established, but rather are they the sort of schools that should be established. That’s the long term question here, and Clarke and his report are singularly ill-equipped to tackle it.

Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre: Jihadists and Social Cohesion

Marlborough has left for the war / Nobody knows when he will come back.

He will come back at Easter / Or on Trinity Sunday.

Trinity Sunday goes by. / Marlborough does not return.

My lady climbs up her tower / As high as she can climb.

She sees her page coming / All clothed in black.

"Good page, my good page / What news do you bring?"

"At the news that I bring / Your pretty eyes will start crying!

"Take off your pink clothing / and your embroidered satins!

"My lord Marlborough is dead; / he is dead and buried.

"I have seen him borne to the grave / by four officers.

"One of them carried his breastplate / another his shield.

"Another carried his great sabre / and the last carried nothing.

"On his tomb was planted / a beautiful flowering rosebush.

"When the ceremony was over / Everyone went to bed. [From Wikipedia.]

As I've mentioned previously, I'm currently buried ('mongst other square, papery (but digitalized) things) in the works of Sir Walter Scott (42% through according to my Kindle).

One of the things that immersing yourself in a different sensibility can bring is a bringing to the foreground of consciousness facts that we in our age tend to overlook and that other ages faced up to squarely. I'm pretty much convinced that one (if not the) central theme of Scott is social cohesion: how groups (especially the Jacobites and the Hanoverians) can live together in social peace whilst loathing each other and whilst having each other's blood on their hands. I'll probably come back to this in the future, but the answer certainly isn't the imposition of a common loyalty: instead, and briefly, it's much more to do with a recognition of common humanity, deliberate avoidance of certain issues, having a 'flexible' attitude to law and authority, and the aestheticization of violence. Not a very modern mix, of course, but probably all the better for that and possibly one from which we can still learn.

But a subsidiary theme is that of the violence of young males. Duels are fought. Most of the old have spent their youth on some battlefield or other. The solution to life's problems of going abroad as a soldier exists as a constant possibility. Even if we haven't been reading Scott, we ought to be familiar with such a vista. The male members of the two previous generations of my family fought in the army. (I pass over my own exalted -if brief- service in a school CCF troop.) I've worked with several former soldiers and we're all familiar with the young men who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (And rather closer in time and space, there is the  'Armed Struggle' in Northern Ireland.) Idealism and a tendency to violence are characteristics of young men. If channelled correctly, they form part of the social mix, the activity of the young balancing the resignation of the old etc.

So I'm not really sure why 'we' are surprised at young men going off to fight for ISIS. It seems perfectly reasonable to worry about what effects this will have on UK society: whilst I've no doubt that most will probably not come back to take up an armed struggle here, it seems implausible that none will. And certainly an attitude of mind forged in an armed struggle is unlikely to accept an easy cultural integration into modern British ways. So it's certainly reasonable to worry about (eg) security implications and to act accordingly. But constantly using the language of indoctrination and manipulation of these men is silly:


Using the hash tag #AllEyesOnIsis, extremist fighters flooded the social media site with propaganda, luring vulnerable people to join them in Iraq. [Here.]

The media attitude to ISIS, quite apart from a core, commonsense worry about national and international security, demonstrates many modern failings. It decorporealizes minds: instead of acknowledging that the young and the old, male and female, have a different biology and different characteristics, it regards all as disembodied reasoners with only one rational path. It undervalues religion: the intensity of religion's pursuit of justice surprises those whose lives lack commitment or transcendent values. It invents rational expertise: last week's pundit who knew everything about Putin's Russia now knows everything about the Middle East. It is orientalist in creating a landscape of the Other populated neatly with homogeneous and docile 'communities' (ie tribes) led by community leaders. And so on.

There probably isn't an answer. Some of us will probably die in the long run as a result of terrorist actions. The Middle East sounds like it's on its way to becoming a Hell for a time, especially for Christians. What can be done in terms of security precautions should be done, but without destroying the normal business of society. But on the specific problem of angry young men, and particularly angry young Muslim men, the only answer (and it's a partial one) is to do what societies have always done: find a way of channelling their energies into the wider society through the institutions of the family, civil society and the State. At the moment, the family is being deliberately undermined, the economic crisis of the West is destroying business and employment, and politics is closed to those who cannot mouth the secularized platitudes of consumerist liberalism.

 In the video, he says: "Are you willing to sacrifice the fat job you've got, the big car you've got, the family you have?

"Are you willing to sacrifice this for the sake of Allah? Definitely! If you sacrifice something for Allah, Allah will give you 700 times more than this."

Later in the video, he says: "All my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel.

"When I used to live there, in the heart you feel depressed. The cure for the depression is Jihad." [Here.]


Perhaps, in the end, it's about death: the Jihadists have retained a sense of the inevitability of death and killing that the modern West has lost. In that case, perhaps the true resistance is to face our own death well, even matter of factly. If so, please note that I will not be dying for 'British values' but for Catholic ones.

On reading Walter Scott...

 
                                                    All in the best possible taste.


As most Scots, I shall be spending the months leading up to the Independence referendum reading Sir Walter Scott. (Certainly the novels and may branch out.)

I'm only about half a dozen in so far, so I reserve final judgment. Having read a scattering of them before, I've found that a concerted effort pays off: you need to get into his rhythm and popping in and out over a number of years doesn't make this easy.

My main reasons for even attempting this are fairly straightforward. Scott is one of the seminal figures of European culture and, in particular, romanticism. He is clearly one of the central figures of Scottish literary culture. He offers an imaginative engagement with the past, particularly Scotland's past, when we are told, by our nation's new clerisy, that our past is merely a 'dark place'. Moreover, now that all that is worthwhile in Anglicanism has been received into the Catholic Church as part of the Ordinariate's patrimony, it is probably worthwhile grappling with Scott as part of that Episcopalian tradition which itself grappled with the Catholic heritage of the Middle Ages.

Anyway, apart from that broader concern to engage imaginatively with the past, a couple of more specific issues have quickly emerged from starting on the novels. First, there is Scott's multiplying of perspectives: fictitious introductions, notes pointing his divergence from historical accuracy, Lowlanders looking at Highlanders etc. A key aspect of this is what A N Wilson notes as Scott's double perspective:

Two voices seem to be heard: that of an eighteenth-century Tory rationalist, and that of a timeless lover of romance, marvels and chivalry. 

In addition -again noted by Wilson- there is the emphasis on the possibility of the life of private virtue, in particular, within the household, as opposed to the life of the state, but without abandoning an involvement in that public life: there is due respect here paid to the family, civil society and the state, but without the modern tendency, all too prominent in modern Scotland, to reduce everything to the state.

If I were sticking on my cultural nationalist bonnet, it's hard to resist the initial thought that, through the lack of an education in Scottish history and culture (let alone religious history and culture) in our schools, we have raised up a generation that, even though laying claim to a national identity, cares little about the historical specifics of that identity: modern nationalism as a creature of the emaciation of culture rather than as a reaction to that emaciation. (And we might entertain similar thoughts about the rest of the UK and, indeed, the Catholic Church: is the failure to engage adequately with the past the single greatest cultural failing of our age?)

More, no doubt, in due course...