Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 295

A Response to Professor Millican's Response

My responses to Professor Millican's contribution on an earlier thread are interleaved with that response below. The exchange begins with the Professor's opening words. My rippostes are marked with asterisks.

 

Dear Peter (or "Mr Hitchens" if you want to be formal), You're very thin-skinned! When I say that what you believe might - on your own principles - be of interest to a psychologist, but not to someone who wants to know the truth about God's existence, I'm just indicating the subject regarding which your belief - on those principles - provides relevant evidence (because you make belief a matter of choice). You respond that this is "just rude", but it isn't even the least bit insulting - I said "psychologist", not "psychiatrist", and there was no implication whatever that your wish for God to exist is irrational.

 

***No doubt, though Professor Millican did elsewhere suggest my position was irrational, and is about to do it again (see below) .  I don’t mind at all if the Professor wants to be rude. I am, as many contributors have cause to know, quite ready to be rude myself when I think the occasion justifies it, and I am happy to repeat my general rudeness to the God-haters who infest the comments slot here. They are boring, mainly because they assume a superiority they don’t possess, and so don’t respond to anything said by me or anyone else to whom they believe themselves to be superior.

 

In this case,  I just doubt whether it was very helpful to the Professor’s argument to make what looked suspiciously like a jibe.  I do wish people who don’t know me would stop calling me ‘thin-skinned’. If I suffered from any such problem I would have gone into hiding long ago.

 

The Professor continues ‘Indeed this is a psychological truth about me as well as you! Later, you suggest that an "accusation of irrationality ... is intended to be mildly abusive". Such sensitivity makes me wonder if a psychiatrist might be the appropriate recourse! (That's a joke - if you have a sense of humour.)

 

**It is famously well-known among my critics that I have absolutely no sense of humour, and that I am an imperialist racist fascist homophobic sexist bigot (have I forgotten anything here?).It would therefore obviously be best for the humorous Professor to proceed on this basis.

 

The Professor continues :’But for avoidance of doubt, I think that someone who forms their beliefs on the basis of wishful thinking is, indeed, *irrational*: if that's abusive, then live with it, because it's true.’

 

***Now, that’s talking. ‘You’re irrational. So there. Nah. It’s true’. I’ve always loved the way professors turn out to be just like schoolboys, once they get going. We popular journalists, of course, are all gentleman philosophers, deep down.

 

 

The professor again:’ For someone so sensitive to potential rudeness, you're surprisingly rude to others - calling them "boring God-hating fanatics". You also suggest - without any evidence - that those of us who are sceptical about God must be evil people motivated to evade justice.’

 

***I deal with the issue of rudeness above.  I feel it is time that the smug, self-satisfied attitude of the God-haters was countered with a bit more self-confidence by my side. When the recording of this debate is available, readers will be able to see , for instance, a childish mockery of Christian worship smirkingly performed by one of the anti-God speakers (not the Professor). I don’t think there is any reason why believers should put up with this sort of thing, or leave its authors without something to remember us by.  

 

 

 

I don’t think I use the expression ‘evil people’. That is the professor’s phrase. And his careless invention of a statement I haven’t made gives us a point by which we can enter his misunderstanding.

 

Christians do not believe that they are good, nor do they believe that non-believers are evil. They recognise that all human creatures are capable of good and evil, and that , except perhaps for a few saints, all humans who have lived any time at all have long catalogues of irrevocable wrongdoing behind them, much of it known only to them (and in the view of Christians, to God). The Christian (and this is why the jump from Deism to Christian theism is so common) is consoled by the extraordinary sacrifice of Christ himself, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation for the sins of the whole world. This can only be grasped by those who understand the nature of the world before Christ, and the habits of pagans (particularly their fondness for sacrifices, sometimes including sacrifices of their own children). Christianity ended sacrifice. That was one of the most important things about it, and the reason why the pagan religions (already demoralised and weary) were so thoroughly displaced by it.  There is an interesting essay to be written on the revival of something strangely like sacrifice and of idol-worship  in the modern Godless civilisation (the sacrifice of children for worldly gain , either through abortion or abandonment in nurseries is striking, as is the worship of the motor car and of celebrity).

 

But I’ll leave that for another time. The point is that the operation of Divine Grace allows the Christian to confess, acknowledge and if possible atone for his wrongs, and to seek and obtain forgiveness for them . There are disputes about the operation of this forgiveness, but it is essential to the Christian faith.

 

The unbeliever, often unschooled in Christianity, or even taught to be, or just resolved to be, contemptuous of the idea of vicarious redemption, just has his guilt and his conscience. Conscience, of course, is an awkward concept for the Godless. They have experienced it, but they cannot consistently believe that it reflects any absolute measure of good or evil, since no contortion of evolutionary theory can provide a convincing explanation of such a thing.

 

They are left only with a feeling that they do not wish at any stage to be presented with an account for the things whereof their consciences are afraid.

I will not here catalogue the myriad things which modern urban people do to unborn children, infants,  schoolmates, elderly parents, wives, girlfriends (I find the great majority of militant God-haters are male),  work colleagues, subordinates, shop assistants, fellow-passengers on public transport,  neighbours, other road-users, all the time. But there is a large burden of guilt, and if it cannot be lifted from their shoulders by Grace, then some other solution must be found. Often it takes the form of public virtue, aggressive left-wing self-righteousness about racism, the third world, Barack Obama, Yugoslavia, the middle east, you name it. But it doesn’t solve the problem, only pushes it away. The atheist has the same guilt as the Christian. He just has nowhere to put it. And the longer he lets it fester unacknowledged, the more he hates the idea that it might be important, let alone judged.

 

Just as the man who seeks justice for himself comes in time to realise that in this case he must expect justice to be done to him, the person who does not want justice done to him comes to dislike the idea of it in general. The lawbreaker comes to loathe the law.

Where the justice is divine, and resides in eternity, there is a simple solution to this. Abolish God and eternity. You can do so by declaring they don't exist. Nobody can prove you wrong.

 

 

Professor Millican says :’ You imply that you "perfectly well" know this accusation to be "accurate because it once applied to me", but his is ridiculous: even if you were as obnoxious as you said you were on Thursday night, that implies nothing whatever about the rest of us.’

 

*** Oh, I think we are all pretty similar, though I concede that I am probably worse than most people.

 

Professor Millican then says ‘It would also be extraordinarily arrogant to claim - just because you are unswayed by any evidence less than a proof (as you apparently admit) - that therefore your opponents are subject to the same limitation.

 

***It is not a question of being ‘swayed’. This isn’t about being swayed. It is about a decisive allegiance to an immensely potent and influential view of the world and of life. But at the same time it concerns an issue where proof is not available. I cannot think of any matter of comparable importance where the crucial decision cannot be taken on the basis of knowledge, and/or of probability measured by an assessment of objectively-measurable facts. I should hope anyone would be subject to the same limitation. There’s also the point of what on earth evidence is in this case. The professor barely touches on this decisive  question (below). If you prefer belief, you will find evidence of God’s existence everywhere from dung beetles to DNA. If you don’t, you will find evidence for His non-existence in the same places.

 

The Professor again:’ To come to the intellectual content of what you say, I fully agree that: 1. there can be disagreement about what constitutes evidence. 2. the force of evidence is impossible to quantify. 3. "evidence is not a synonym for proof". But I disagree when you say that because I consider traditional theism to be "very unlikely" rather than "utterly impossible", I should be counted as "agnostic". If so, I should be counted as "agnostic" about whether there are invisible aliens on Mars, and many other things I consider vanishingly unlikely (but not "utterly impossible").

 

***Oh dear, he does disappoint me. This is such teenage stuff.  It’ll be Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy next. Professors are supposed to do better than this. The existence or non-existence of invisible aliens on Mars would explain nothing currently unexplained. An eternal creator outside time, by contrast, answers the deepest questions of the universe, though not necessarily in a way the professor finds pleasing. Surely he knows that many notable scientists ( I think especially of Professor Polkinghorne, an ordained minister of the Church) are religious believers. John Lennox explained rather eloquently the other night how compatible belief is with science. Leave me aside. I'm just a jobbing scribbler.  Shouldn’t learned people show more respect for each other than to argue in this tickle-minded way? It is the explanatory power of the idea of God that has made it so influential, among many people far more learned than the Professor.  Can’t he just acknowledge this and drop the giggling, 19th century smugness?

 

The Professor writes ‘ You seem to be saying - please explain if I have this wrong - that there are essentially three assessments that could be made regarding any proposition: (a) It's certain; (b) It's certainly false; (c) It's a matter of choice. This seems to me to betray a lack of grasp of probability: that it's possible for something to be very or even *overwhelmingly unlikely* without being certain.’

***Wrong, not of ‘any’ proposition. Only of any proposition where proof is impossible, but where a choice, if not absolutely essential, is pressing, important and influential over every aspect of our lives. I cannot at the moment think of any proposition which answers to this description, apart from the one we were discussing at the Oxford Union the other night. I’m not saying there isn’t one, just that I can’t think of one.  

The Professor :'This seems to me to betray a lack of grasp of probability: that it's possible for something to be very or even *overwhelmingly unlikely* without being certain.'

***As I keep saying, his view of what is 'overwhelmingly unlikely' is subjective and not measurable in any independent, objective way. I don't share his view, because I am inclined towards belief. He doesn't share mine, because he is not inclined towards belief. This is quite a boring fafct. The interesting matter for discussion, as I keep saying, is why we differ.

If Professor Millican needs more than 500 words to rebut this, he can of course be exempted from the limit.

 

 

  

A Response to Mr Millican

I know I'll regret this, as it will only produce a new wave of boring God-hating fanatics, each wrongly convinced they have something new to say, eager to beat their heads against this blog like moths besieging a light-bulb. But I post below a point-by-point response to a contribution (on the Dinner Jacket thread) from Peter Millican, one of my opponents in the Oxford debate. It opens with his words. My replies are marked **

 

'Dear Peter, Since you standardly give arguments for your positions, I take it you agree that arguments should be taken seriously: they're not (or shouldn't be) just hot air and bluster. So you are not an irrationalist who thinks "This is my view, and I don't care what reasons there may be for or against it!" If you *were* such an irrationalist, then I would simply ask why anybody else should care about your view? Certainly, anybody who wants their beliefs to be *reasonable*, or to reflect the way things really are, would then have good grounds for dismissing what you say. Personally, I do want my beliefs to be reasonable, and to reflect the way things really are. Obviously I don't have infallible insight into how they are, so I have to go on the basis of fallible evidence, looking at the weight of the arguments etc. How strong those arguments are *manifestly* isn't a question of mere choice, is it? If you think it is, then I'd be interested to see how you would argue for that claim (rather than resorting to blunt, dogmatic assertion). You have said: "How do I choose to believe? Simple. I prefer the implications of a created and law-governed universe, and welcome the obligations this places upon me. I really can't see any difficulty here." Is this right - you "really can't see any difficulty here"?? Isn't it *patently obvious* that, in general, preferring situation X to situation Y is a completely useless criterion for deciding which of them is actually true?

 

**Well, yes it would be in any area in which proof were available. The whole point about God is that there is no proof that He exists, and none that He doesn’t. What’s more, there isn’t ever going to be.

 

Mr Millican:  'Don't we (and you amongst us) castigate politicians for cynically filling their manifestos with incredible claims and promises that they themselves don't believe (even though they would certainly *choose* to believe them, if that were open to their choice)? Quite generally, if I were to discover that someone formed their beliefs on the basis of choice, rather than attempting to assess the relevant evidence objectively, that would completely undermine any confidence I might have in their reliability.'

 

**Perfectly true, in earthly matters. But on the question of God, not.  It is unique, in being a  question of great importance on which we have to admit that we lack the most important datum. Political claims (which as it happens are increasingly carefully costed because of growing public scepticism and the Internet’s nasty way of turning up long-forgotten speeches at inconvenient moments) can easily be tested by experience and research. They bear no resemblance to the promises offered by the God in whom I believe, and in whom you say you don’t believe.

 

 

If your beliefs about God are primarily a matter of what you *want* to be true, then I'm afraid you lose any legitimate pretension to being any sort of reliable authority on the matter:

 

***That suits me.  You mistake and hugely overestimate my ambitions. I have no desire to be regarded as an authority on a matter which I regard as one of personal choice. What sort of authority could that possibly be? The whole idea of authority is absent from this discussion, as I see it.

 

I have no hope of persuading (for instance) Peter Millican of the rightness of my beliefs.  Nor do I have any great desire to try. All I wish to do is to point out to him that his beliefs are as much a choice as mine, that he holds them because he wants to, and the most interesting thing about them is the question ‘why does he *want* to believe that?’.

 

No-one is making him do it. No logic compels him to do so. No facts compel him to do so. No evidence is conclusive upon the point. Nor will it ever be. He doesn’t even have to choose. He could be an agnostic, who at least didn’t make silly demeaning jokes about religious believers, and sneer at them for being irrational, when his own reason is so obscured by partisanship has failed to follow their arguments. But then of course he would still have the choice as to whether to live his life as if God exists, or as if He doesn’t.

 

He continues :’What you believe might then be of interest to a psychologist,’

 

***This is just rude, and unworthy of a serious person.

 

And goes on‘...  but not to someone who genuinely wants to know the truth about the relevant claims.’

 

***There he goes again, confusing knowledge with belief, an error I warned him against when I stood up in the debate to raise a point of information during his speech. We shall all *know* the truth when, or at some point after,  we die, or alternatively, if he is right, we shall not exist and shall know nothing and care less. In the meantime, we must choose on the basis of preference, there being no other grounds on which we can choose any of the available positions. We cannot know. Therefore we can only believe. And the basis for belief is our preference.

 

Mr Millican proceeds :’But I suspect you're not actually such an irrationalist, because you then go on to say: "Human knowledge and reason don't exclude the possibility that there is such a universe, there is a great deal of evidence that there is such a universe (though there is no conclusive proof). I am free to choose one of three things - active belief, active disbelief or agnosticism." Please could you come clean and be quite explicit? Do you think you are free to choose in this case *only* because "there is a great deal of evidence" in favour of your view? Or would you be free to choose belief even if the vast majority of the evidence were against it?’

 

***That’s another thing about this issue. You can even disagree about what constitutes evidence. The religious believer sees an endless daily parade of evidence for his belief in a designed and purposeful universe. The non-believer is unmoved by such things   . It would be difficult to quantify such evidence, even into ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Personally, if there were so much as a tiny, tattered, trampled scrap of evidence suggesting that God exists, I would seize upon it as enough, so very much do I wish there to be a God and to see His face.

 

Evidence is not a synonym for proof. Likewise I would acquit an accused person, were I on a jury, if there were the smallest scrap of reasonable doubt, so strongly do I desire justice and so much do I treasure justice's essential companion, the presumption of innocence. A ‘majority’ of evidence, in any case a strange concept,  is of no significance in arriving at proof. It may simply be that you have not discovered the rest of the evidence on the other side, or it has been kept from you. Certainly anyone sitting on a Jury would be wise to take that view. In both cases, interestingly, we cannot *know* for certain. In both cases, a desire for justice will motivate us to prefer a particular verdict.

 

 

Mr Millican continues :’If the former, then despite all that you have said you need to address the arguments on the other side - the arguments that suggest there is very poor evidence for theism.’

 

**No I don’t particularly. These arguments are limitlessly self-serving and unpersuasive to me, just as mine are self serving, and unpersuasive to the God-haters. Though i admit it, and they don't. The dispute lies elsewhere, in our hearts, where it has been since the beginning of this very old argument. This point is so simple, and so modest, and demands so little from my opponents – an acknowledgement that either of us might be right – that I used to be endlessly baffled by the unwillingness of my opponents and my allies to accept it. But I understand the problem now. My allies, whose faith is far stronger than mine, see it as too modest and too feeble. They ‘know’ or believe they ‘know’ there is a God. Some of them ‘know’ they are ‘saved’. They are not impressed by my view that I know no such thing.

 

My opponents correctly see in it a rather nasty reproach – one I know perfectly well is accurate because it once applied to me. The reproach is ‘ you very much hope that there is no God, and you have good reasons to hope that. And this is because of God’s characteristic as the embodiment of justice and judgement.’ Of course you’re not going to admit that in public, are you? Well, I admit openly that I used to think that, in the long years when I believed (and chose to believe)that there was no God. And I go further. It was my principal reason for choosing that belief. But I wouldn’t have said so then, either. It would never do for it to get out. What if everyone had been like me? The idea was intolerable. 

 

 

Mr Millican again: ‘ If the latter, then again your view is completely irrationalist, and I see no reason whatever to take it seriously if what I want is to discover the truth (and I, and I think most people, do). By the way, it is extremely unfair to suggest that your opponents have closed minds in relation to theism. I would not suggest that traditional theism is utterly impossible, but just very unlikely - on the basis of arguments that I have considered seriously and deeply for many years.’

 

***Well in that case you put yourself in the agnostic class. But do you live as an atheist, or do you live as a theist?
Do you live as if there is justice woven into the universe through all eternity, or as if there isn’t? Only you know the answer to that. But if the former, then why are you arguing against belief in such justice?

 

As for the accusation of irrationality, which I suspect is intended to be mildly abusive, it is actually an obtuse misunderstanding of my position. My whole point is that reason cannot take either of us a thousandth of an inch beyond agnosticism.  Nor can facts. Both sides have the same difficulty. The choice of belief or disbelief is necessarily beyond reason. How then do we take it? We choose what we prefer.   

 

And he concludes:  ‘It is far more closed-minded to say: "I don't care about the arguments: I'm just going to believe what I prefer to believe, regardless of the weight of evidence!"’

 

Once again, where is the objective machine that weighs this evidence? Where can I see it? Against what absolute standard is it calibrated?

 

As for closing our minds, I think, by changing mine on this subject twice in my life, I have rather proved that this is not a problem from which I suffer. I just wish he would grasp my point, that the only interesting thing about this argument, and the only one which will yield any increase of knowledge or understanding, is the recognition that we cannot know if there is a God or not, that we have motives for our beliefs, and that the honest admission that this is so allows us to discuss the matter intelligently.    

Struggling into the Old Dinner Jacket Again

On Thursday night I struggled into my ancient dinner jacket (no, I refuse to call it a tuxedo) for a debate at the Oxford Union. It was, alas, about belief in God. I had agreed to do it because it seemed a sort of duty, but really I was redundant, because of the presence there of that giant of Christian advocacy, the mighty John Lennox.

 

Professor Lennox, a man of great breadth and depth of knowledge and experience of life, who holds the chair of Mathematics at Oxford University, can easily dispose of the silly and very common default belief of uneducated moderns that science and faith are incompatible,  which lies at the heart of much lazy modern atheism. He is also much nicer than I am, as is the other member of my side in this discussion Dr Joanna Collicutt.  

 

Against us ( and I believe this occasion was being recorded for YouTube purposes so you can eventually check up for yourselves) were Dan Barker, , Co-President of the (American) Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dr Michael Shermer, founder of the (American) Skeptics Society and Professor Peter Millican, a nice old fashioned enthusiast for David Hume and a distinguished philosopher.(He would later disappoint me by being a lot too much like his debating partners than he needed to be, though he didn’t suffer from their self-satisfied assumption of superiority, presumably knowing that John Lennox is a man worthy of respect. Richard Dawkins, who didn’t speak,  was sitting looking terribly handsome just behind the atheist advocates).  

 

It fell to me to speak fifth , last f my side, and after Mr Barker and Mr Shermer. I had been irritated by their smug, self-satisfied raillery against faith, their tedious ‘they can’t all be right’ and ‘all religions share the same myths’ non-arguments familiar to any sixth-former and unpersuasive to the maturer person. They laughed at each other’s jokes, rather loudly (a good deal more loudly, I thought,  than anyone else in the full-to-capacity hall) .

 

So I decided that I would abandon any pretence at being Mr Nice Guy. I said they reminded me of the most obnoxious, irritating, person I had ever met – namely my own adolescent self. And I treated them to a dramatic reading of the great passage from Book of Job (chapter 38)  in which God speaks from the Whirlwind:

‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding.

 

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?’.

 

I love that bit about ‘who hath stretched the line upon it?’, so obviously written by someone who had done some actual building.

 

The answer, of course, is that they have no idea, and neither do I.  Hence what followed. The question before us was ‘This House believes in God’ ,’believes in…’, not ‘knows that there is a… ‘.  I think Mr Carter had said that he ‘knew’ there was no God. I made my usual point, familiar to readers here, that belief is a matter of choice. Why would anyone want the universe to be a pointless chaos, where our actions could be judged only by their immediate observable effects, a universe utterly without the hope of justice, where death was the end and the deaths of those we loved extinguished them irrevocably. Well, the question, once asked, rather answers itself, doesn’t it?

 

I can only say in my defence that I got the impression (pleasing to me) that the other lot didn’t much like it, as presumably they are more used to dishing out mockery and scorn in the general direction of the gentle faithful, before wildly cheering crowds.  Well, as Conan Doyle’s unjustly forgotten creation,  Brigadier Etienne Gerard,  said, ‘I’m all in favour of forgiving my enemies, but it seems only fair to give them something to forgive me for too.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Story of the Chinese Executioner

The endlessly obtuse Mr Barnes writes ‘a telling orf from PH , is similar to six of the best with a feather duster.’ I generally prefer not to respond to this person’s strange off-subject ramblings, but is this the same Mr Barnes who pleaded with me to allow him back here after he was so justly excluded (greatly to the relief of many who found and find his contributions both yawn-inducing and exasperating, though these faults are not , of course, justification for sending him away again)? Perhaps so.

Anyway, his contribution reminds me ( and I wonder if he will understand what I am driving at) of the story of the Chinese Executioner, told long ago by Claud Cockburn. I think it may even be in ‘I’ Claud’, one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century. It runs thus.

 

There was once, in old China, an executioner of such immense skill and delicacy that he was famed throughout the land and called upon from afar to behead condemned miscreants so that witnesses could marvel at his handiwork.

 

One condemned man, a thief and murderer , was told that he must wait for the arrival of this executioner, because the local authorities had decided they wanted to see this master at work. The appointed day came, the criminal was seated , bound, on a stool in front of a carefully-invited audience, all agog.

 

The executioner, smiling gently, advanced towards him, delicately holding an exquisitely-crafted and softly gleaming sword. Playfully, the executioner made a few passes in the air in front of the murderer. He kept up this performance for perhaps two minutes until the malefactor, irritated, cried out ‘I really don’t know what all the fuss is about. What’s so special about you? Can’t you just get on with it, and get it over with?’

 

The executioner bowed, smiled again and said softly ‘ Kindly nod, please’.

Notice of a Debate and a Speaking Engagement

Once again I draw readers’ attention to some engagements. One is a debate on cannabis, in central London, in which I will argue the case against legalisation with Tim Wilkinson as my opponent. There are still a few tickets left (I do not profit in any way by the sale of these) .

 

Details can be found at

http://surelysomemistake.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-long-march-forum-presents-peter.html

 

The previous evening I’m speaking to Warwick University Tories at 6.00 pm (I’m not yet sure of the exact location) hoping to persuade them to abandon their awful, anti-British party.

 

 

"I'm on the Train!" , State-Sponsored Underage Sex, and Other Follies

Mr Armstrong responds to my complaint about people shouting ‘I’m on the train’ into mobile phones, in designated quiet carriages, with the bizarre retort :

'So, Hitchens doesn't like the way us 'common folks' talk eh'? He don't like folks saying '‘I’m on the train!'. What a plonker! Where else would the person be if not *on* the train - on the platform?’.

 

I have no idea where he gets the idea that I am attacking ‘common folks’. Usually, in my experience,  the culprit is a florid , fruity-voiced businessperson, who becomes empurpled with resentment and rage when it is gently pointed out to him that he is in a quiet carriage.

 

I am told by someone who wishes to be known as ‘E’ that ‘Skyfall’ is ‘just a film. Well, yes, I know that. But what does he mean ‘just’.  Does this ‘E’ imagine that fiction has no effect on those who read and watch it? I should say the fictions of Dickens had more impact ( and continue to have more impact) on the thinking of people than great masses of factual material produced in the same era. As Philip Pullman rightly points out, if you wish to influence people, ‘Once Upon a Time…’ is a far more persuasive beginning than 'Thou Shalt Not..’. I am always struck by how much supposedly classic fiction is about loss of religious faith or adultery, described sympathetically. These are the scriptures of the century of the self, and they have a huge effect on the way people think about such things.

 

Good authors make the reader want to emulate, or desire the approval, of the characters in them. Films, by reaching direct into the watcher’s brain, have an even more powerful effect. A concept, presented sympathetically in a film,  will take root where a speech or an article would not. Many people will come out of ‘Skyfall’ more sympathetic to the idea of a large and well-funded secret service than they were before. I am amazed at the flat, mechanical thinking of anyone who seriously imagines that such things don’t influence minds, and that because something is ‘just’ fiction it has no cultural or moral significance.

 

That’s like saying that tower block estates are ‘just’ architecture. Indeed they are, but they have changed the way that millions of people live, and much for the worse. The arts are important.

 

The same person (so confident of his or her case that he or she cannot reveal his or her real name)  lectures me thus : ‘“Underage girls” are not being given contraceptives so they can be abused and taken advantage of by older men like Jimmy Savile,  they are being “offered” contraception so they don’t become pregnant as a result of consensual sex, (in most cases), with their peers.’

 

 

 

‘Before you start ranting on that “underage girls” and boys are not able, by definition, of giving consent the age of consent is itself an arbitrary figure and varies from country to country and from time to time. In Spain, (a catholic country) it is 13, Germany 14, Japan 13, in the Cameroon it is 21. No one is forcing these young people to have sex unless it is peer pressure that is doing so’

 

***To which I respond that I could just as easily dismiss this person as ‘ranting on’, but I prefer to argue in a civil way, dealing properly with the facts and logic.

 

Underage girls are being given contraceptive injections and implants, without the knowledge of their parents, because that is how our state and laws respond to the collapse of sexual morality. Rather than trying to re-establish moral rules about chastity which protected the young from themselves , and from exploitation, we take the brothel-keepers’ view that the principal risk of sexual intercourse is a) pregnancy and b) venereal disease.

 

Actually, I think it is quite widely understood by thoughtful person that the intimacy of sexual relations is an important part of human integrity, that the young, and especially girls, are often badly wounded in the heart by casual sexual flings, and that the more civilised a society it is, the higher it sets the age limit for consent. Whatever the limit may be in the Cameroon, the laws of this country set it at 16. Maybe there is a case for lowering it. I myself doubt it. But it has not been successfully made or enacted, and the law remains as it is.

 

Yet  these contraceptive implants and injections are provided in schools, to girls who cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse,  by the lawfully constituted authorities. How can it then be that they – whose funds are raised through taxes, which it is illegal to evade or refuse to pay, whose very existence depends on the law, who can and do obtain prosecutions of parents for keeping their children away from school – can simultaneously aid and abet the breach of the law on consent?   

 

Who, by the way, is to say how these children will act once they have been assured that they are sterile and can have sex without ‘risk’ of pregnancy? Can the writer be sure that their only encounters (damaging and dispiriting as these will almost certainly be) will be with other teenagers? Is it not possible that this sterilisation will make them readier victims for older men and other exploiters?  And what if they come from homes which still believe in the sanctity of marriage and try to teach their children Christian sexual morality? The power of the state, using money raised by compulsory taxes, is being used to make it easier not just for these girls to break the law of the land, but also to defy and overthrow the authority and desires of their own families. Surely any liberty-loving person would object to such monstrous interference in private life by the state? But not the totalitarian ‘E’.

 

‘E’ continues, ‘and how much more cruel would it be to force a teenage girl to have a baby at a time in her life when she is not emotionally or financially ready for that responsibility?’

 

**What is this ‘forcing’? There is another,(separate) debate about rape and abortion (in which as it happens I take a difficult and unpopular line because I am so appalled by the deliberate murder of innocent and defenceless babies). But even if the law reached a different view, and permitted the abortion of the children resulting from rape( as it does, and has since 1938) these girls are not for the most part being raped, or expecting to be raped. They are choosing whether to have sexual intercourse. In my view they should be educated to choose not to do so outside marriage, for their own good, for the good of all of us, and for the good of any children they may eventually have.  The fact that some will always break such moral rules does not mean the state should intervene, with secrecy , money and chemicals, to assume that all will do so and equip them for the morally unsatisfactory and unhappy lives which will result from it.

 

‘E’ again ‘Offering girls at the age of 16 contraception is a pragmatic response to what is happening now.’

 

**What does  ‘pragmatic, a notoriously shifty word, mean in this context? Actually the policy of amoral sex instruction, combined with the ready provision of contraceptive devices and pills to the young, has until very recently been followed by a steady increase in unwanted pregnancy. Finally, probably because of the widespread introduction of the freely-distributed ‘morning  after pill’ (developed by vets for use in pedigree bitches who strayed into bad company, and morally as questionable as abortion itself) , the totals are at last beginning to drop. But the bloody price for this drop is huge, and those of us who believe in sexual restraint would argue that on any calculus, the previous arrangements led to far , far less death, while also restraining promiscuity, which people like me regard as bad in itself, and  damaging to those who take part in it. In simple practical terms, as well as in absolute moral terms, the new policy is inferior to the old.

 

 ‘E’ continues:’  If you want to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and so the need for contraception then the answer is education, education and more education, giving these young people, especially girls, the confidence to say no and control what happens to their bodies rather than a return to the sort of Edwardian values and standards you seem to favour.’

 

**This is simply an assertion of what ‘E’ believes, followed by an assertion that ‘E’ is right. ‘E’, apparently having no absolute moral code, cannot appeal to any authority other than his or her own will and desire for such an assertion.  . There is of course a choice. For me, it is decided by my Christian belief, but as so often happens, the Christian response to any such question often also turns out to have major utilitarian advantages, in my view in the same way that you will be better able to maintain and repair something if you refer to the maker’s manual than if you do not.

 

 I don’t, despite silly misrepresentations, desire an ‘Edwardian’ society. The past is gone.  I want a 21st century Christian society, which can distinguish between genuine progress and its various counterfeits, using a timeless moral calculus.  I merely date our current moral decline from 1914. The question about ‘education’ is invariably ‘what are you teaching?’ If you teach debauchery, you will get debauchery. Myself, I prefer not to return to Babylon, or even to ancient Rome. Both these pre-Christian societies were very cruel indeed, and cruellest of all to women. Our current society, likewise, is increasingly cruel to women, hence the grotesque epidemic of plastic surgery, Botox and the rest, as women without the protection of lifelong marriage strive to remain saleable, for sex or toil,  in our great liberated meat market.

 

 

 

‘E’ continues :’ I don’t know the exact numbers or ages of young women being offered contraception, without parental consent, (do you get in such a lather at the thought that underage boys may be sold condoms without the knowledge or consent of their parents ?), but to do so is not a subversion of parental authority if the individual concerned is able to give informed consent ,which many 16 and 15 year olds can.’

 

**N Once again this is no more than assertion. ‘E’ is right because ‘E’ says ‘E’ is right,. This way lies madness, made worse by such claims as the one that 16 and 15 year olds can give ‘informed consent’. I suspect that ‘E’ is childless, and not very old or experienced in life. I5 and 16 year olds know almost nothing about such things, and are intensely vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation.  That is why we have laws to protect them. The fact is that these things are deliberately kept secret from parents. This is an abuse of state power, and totalitarian in effect.

What is this ‘lather’ in which I am?

 

 

 ‘E’ concludes  ‘What was considered morally wrong in your day was every bit a shifting boundary then as what is considered “inappropriate behaviour” now.’

 

Not so. Christian marriage is an absolute standard, and remains so. Also, decrepit as I am, this is still ‘my day’ . I live in it, so must my own children. I have at least as much right to have a say in it as ‘E’, and in my view more so, since I have seen so much and lived so long that my opinion is likely to be worth more.

 

‘E’ again :’ The terminology may have changed but the fact has not. Edward I married his first bride when he was 14 and she just 13, how do you like those for changing values? ‘

 

I regard our boundaries in such matters as a significant advance upon the Middle Ages, obtained through the growing strength of Christian thought and morals especially in the Reformation and what followed it.  ‘E’ appears to wish to go back to those Middle Ages, if not way beyond them. Progressives, eh?

 

 

Unoriginal Thinking, and Why it is Annoying

Waking at 5.30 to hear a BBC voice referring to ‘President Obama’s Victory’ , I congratulated myself on having successfully slept through the whole, predictable non-event. Imagine how much effort I could have wasted on caring.  Soon afterwards I was treated to Mr Obama’s victory speech in which he actually said ‘The Best is Yet to Come’.

 

He actually said that. ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’. Well, you might forgive this from some semi-literate, TV-reared, uneducated oaf. But in the mouth of a well-educated, obviously well-read and intelligent man (as I have never doubted that Barack Obama is) , this was a shocking expression. It makes the heart sink, as it does when people you have previously thought to be sensible suddenly blurt out ‘I kid you not’ or, ‘going forward’; or when they start talking about ‘rolling out’ something.

 

It is at moments like this you realise just how many people aren’t paying attention – it’s much the same when someone , sitting in the quiet carriage on a train, yelps ‘I’m on the train!’ into his mobile phone. How can they not know that this is a) stupid and b) wrong?

 

Mr Obama’s dreadful cliche made me think of two entertainments I had seen during the past few days. The second was a play with the profoundly unoriginal title of ‘Rough Justice’ which I had gone to see just because I like to encourage my local theatre. It stars Tom Conti, who I believe is off the TV, as (PLOT SPOILER WARNING) a liberal celebrity (I think he’s supposed to be a newspaper columnist) on trial for suffocating his disastrously brain-damaged baby son.

 

He says it’s manslaughter. They say it’s murder. There’s a lot more to it than that, which I won’t reveal. But I had the strong impression throughout that we were being manipulated into liking Mr Conti (him off the TV) and disliking the actress who had been cast as a Roman Catholic (!) married (!) barrister, cruelly prosecuting that nice Mr Conti (him off the TV) for only doing what every reasonable person would have done in modern liberal Britain, i.e. smothered the baby.

 

Again, I won’t tell you exactly why I felt *so* manipulated, in case the play goes national. But I will say that I ended up feeling much more sympathy for (and preferring the performance of) the actress/barrister, and for the man playing the judge, than I had for Mr Conti. And it was largely because I had such a strong feeling that I was being told what to think in a rather blatant way. Is this just something  I get from my stroppy forebears? Or is it something all British people had before TV softened their brains, and I still keep mainly because I don’t watch TV much?

 

I don’t think that my other evening out, a German film called ‘Barbara’ is likely to have a big national release any time soon, though it does in fact feature some parachutists, a creepily sinister woman secret police officer with a face so nasty that it could kill a charging rhinoceros at a mile’s range,  and a daring escape.

 

It’s being touted as being in the same league as ‘the Lives of Others’. But it isn’t anything like as slick or neat, and lacks the effortless dramatic zing provided by being set in East Berlin. In ‘Barbara’, by contrast, East Berlin is off stage,  a glamorous and enviable showplace from which the main characters have all, for one reason or another, been exiled.   It is set in a unnamed (and apparently very windy)  East German town near the Baltic and (yet another plot spoiler follows)  describes the adventures of an attractive woman doctor who’s been banished from the capital, and from a good job in the country’s best hospital,  for daring to apply to emigrate. Now she must toil in a small, ill-equipped hospital and live in a nasty, shabby apartment with dangerous wiring, an out-of-tune piano and frequent visits from the Secret Police, anxious to search her cupboards and (this is much dwelt on) her body cavities.

 

It’s set in 1980, when the Cold War seemed doomed to last for many, many years.

 

What interested me about it (though the East Germany it portrayed didn’t seem to me to be anything like as dingy and crumbling as the one I used to visit) was how ambiguous it was. It seemed to me (I may possibly have missed the point, but I don't think I was being crudely shoved or bullied into this conclusion)  to suggest that there was a sort of life available in the East, despite the crudity of the authorities, the austerity and the surveillance, and that an honourable person might make a life of sorts for himself or herself without too many moral compromises, though there would certainly be some. There’s a particular moment when a rather horrible secret policeman is humanised, which I found very troubling.

 

Actually I think this idea that East Germany offered a reasonable life to those who were prepared to keep their doubts to themselves, and who took its promises of equality, medical care and education at face value,  was only true if it never came to an end. As soon as the secrets of the Stasi were revealed, and everyone knew who had been spying on whom, and knew this for certain, and in detail,  that the whole fake civilisation had been based on the most awful treachery and lies, the outrage and betrayal would just be unbearable. As I think it proved. But see it if you can. One great advantage is that Tom Conti isn’t in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Very British Review - Chris Mullin reviews my book on drugs

I reproduce here a review of my book 'The War We Never Fought' published in yesterday's (3rd November 2012) Mail on Sunday. The author, Chris Mullin, is the best sort of politician, independent-minded, literate, uninterested in either power or wealth for their own sake. His expenses claims were famously minimal. Until recently he still had a black-and-white TV set. He is perhaps best known for his campaign against the convictions of the 'Birmingham' Six', for his thriller 'A Very British Coup', and for his two volumes of entertaining, self-critical and indiscreet political diaries. He was chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee when it produced a report on drugs which I attack at length in my book. While I disagree with Mr Mullin about almost everything - including the drugs issue - it is interesting to contrast his review with those in the 'Guardian' and 'The Observer' .

 

It appeared under the headline : 'A lonely fighter in a war that has no end' 

By Chris Mullin

There are few more emotive subjects than drugs. Some years ago I chaired a parliamentary inquiry into the Government's drugs policy only to discover vast differences of opinion between experts of every relevant profession - doctors, police, social workers. These opinions, all advanced with equal passion, ranged from the argument that prohibition has failed and should therefore be abandoned, to the one that all drugs are harmful and that existing bans should be maintained and, indeed, tightened.

The same division of opinion is reflected internationally. Countries such as Sweden maintain a hard line against all forms of drug abuse, while those like Switzerland and Portugal place the emphasis less on law enforcement and more on regulation and harm reduction. All three countries claim that their policy is working.

Peter Hitchens is very firmly in the zero-tolerance camp. He has written a passionate assault on the liberal Establishment, which he believes sold the pass many years ago.

The rot set in, he argues, with the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971, which for the first time sought to distinguish between so-called hard and soft drugs, based upon their alleged harmfulness. Cannabis, with which Mr Hitchens is mainly concerned, was placed in Category B, which still provided for some pretty stiff penalties. These, however, are rarely, if ever, imposed.

The 1971 Act was swiftly followed by a circular to magistrates from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham (no liberal he) suggesting that no one should be jailed for possession of cannabis.

Since then, says Hitchens, it has been downhill all the way: the impression has been created that cannabis is relatively harmless, the police have lost interest in prosecuting and it is only a question of time until drugs in general are decriminalised.

From the outset, Hitchens leaves us in no doubt where he is coming from: 'I believe that self-stupefaction is absolutely, morally wrong.' Nor does he accept that there is such a thing as drug addiction - at least none that can't be cured by stiff penalties and a rigorous bout of cold turkey. Cannabis, far from being harmless, is 'a powerful mind-altering drug' whose prolonged use can result in mental illness.

He has no truck with the libertarian view that people should be allowed to go to hell in their own handcart providing they don't harm others, arguing that even so-called soft drugs eventually end up imposing a burden on friends, family and taxpayers.

Hitchens is not a man who acknowledges the existence of the centre ground. Much of the book is a magnificent - and well-researched - rant against Establishment 'appeasers', who, he believes, have opened the door to perdition.

Names are named. Indeed, many of the alleged culprits feature on the clever front cover, modelled on The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album. They are a motley collection, ranging from Lord Hailsham, successive Home Secretaries, a clutch of judges and senior police officers through to that most prolific of columnists, Sir Simon Jenkins, and David Cameron.

Hitchens may well be right that cannabis is more harmful than anyone once believed, not least because new, more virulent varieties have come on the market in recent years.

However, he is wrong to imagine that locking up all (or even most) drugs users is the solution. Not least because, despite the best efforts of those in charge, many of our prisons are awash with drugs and some users acquired the habit in jail.

Second, about 60 per cent of acquisitive crime is done to feed a drug habit (mainly heroin), so it makes sense to help the most chaotic users stabilise their lives. Once their lives are stable, you may just be able to wean them off drugs.

Third, it was the enlightened policy of needle exchanges (the provision of needles by the NHS and safe disposal of used ones), pioneered by the Thatcher Government, that hindered the spread of Aids. Repression would have had the opposite effect.

The good news is that illegal drug use appears to be falling anyway. So civilisation as we know it may yet survive.

A Louse versus a Flea. Who really cares about the US Presidential Election?

You can decide which is which. It's about the only thing in doubt.  My interest in US politics has been fading ever since I lived there, and saw it at first hand. But it sank to near-zero during the last Presidential election, when the Obama campaign became a showbusiness frenzy, devoid of reason and much more like the early, screaming years of the Beatles than like a bid for office. Yes, we can what, exactly?

I actually felt slightly sorry for Mr Obama. I had first heard of him during the previous election, in 2004, while on a visit to the pleasant town of Normal, Illinois. There was some talk, in the Illinois media, of him as a possible future star.

He had sounded modest and humorous, acknowledging that, in the age of Osama bin Laden, the name ‘Barack Obama’ might be a handicap. I thought of getting in touch with him, as one sometimes does, but put the idea to one side and never did anything about it. I doubt if anyone would have been much interested.

It was of course possible that he might become President. Actually, it's possible that almost anyone might (Boris Johnson is elegible).

As Clarence Darrow, the brilliant liberal lawyer, once said ‘I was told as small boy that anybody could become President of the United States. As I grew older, I realised that this was absolutely true’. I once heard this quotation voiced by Henry Fonda in a rather good one-man show he did, impersonating Darrow on a London stage (I think it was the Aldwych, but cannot now be sure). And the expression he put into ‘absolutely true’ had the entire theatre convulsed with laughter. The statement turned out to mean the opposite of what it had been intended to mean. Instead of being a message of hope and opportunity, it was a warning that hucksters and political pros could elevate all kinds of no-hopers and empty suits into the White House.

Later, I read Robert Penn Warren’s matchless ‘ All the King’s Men’, one of the best books ever written about politics, anywhere, ever, which should cure the aspirant politician of any remaining trace of idealism;  and then I read John O’Hara’s ‘Ten, North Frederick’, much of which is about a man who thinks he might become President, and is cruelly used and tricked by the men who really hold the power.

And then I read Allen Drury’s ‘Advise and Consent’, which seems to me to contain the nastiest (though fictional) account of Franklin D. Roosevelt that I have ever seen, showing that a ‘great’ President is also very likely to be an extremely nasty and unscrupulous man. Roosevelt is not named in the book, and the manner of his death is slightly different from the real story (though not that different) but it is plain that he is the target, and that Drury had a pretty good idea, from the first hand accounts of contacts,  of what sort of man he was.

And then I moved across the Atlantic, rented a smallish house in Bethesda, Maryland, and spent my days and nights attempting to report on the goings on in the White House and the Capitol and the Supreme Court, those lovely white sepulchres of hope, in the glorious, basking metropolis that is the District of Columbia, all lazy smiles, cold beers, and the romantic swish of the cicadas rising and falling through the hot sub-tropical nights.

It didn’t take long to learn that the place was as seamy as it was lovely, or to work out why so many honest Americans, working hard for a living out in the Mid-West, loathed and despised Washington as we dislike Brussels, and saw it as much the same sort of thing. I also discovered that the supposedly courageous American press wasn’t quite as portrayed in ‘All the President’s Men’, the crusading journalist’s favourite motion picture. I remember ringing up a man who had written a book about a major political figure, and who revealed in the footnotes that he had known damaging things about this figure at a time when British papers had been sneered at in DC, for suggesting such things. But he hadn’t reported them for hs own paper. I asked him why on earth not. ‘I was on sabbatical leave at the time’, he replied. I ask you.

Then I watched my own country being ploughed under by the Irish America lobby, and the utter, cold ruthlessness with which it was done. And I came home, and saw DC from a distance as a place I didn't really have much time for.

And then, just over four years ago, I went to Chicago and, with some useful help from American-based colleagues, set out to find out a bit about Barack Obama. It wasn’t devastating. I failed to uncover the full truth about Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, being more interested in his apparent friendship with William Ayers, the former ‘Weatherman’ . I found that Obama was very much part of the unlovely Daly machine in Chicago, that his voting record in the Illinois State Senate was far from courageous, and basically that we wasn’t a very distinguished or experienced person.

It was pointless. The marketing men, and the machine men had got hold of him by then, offered him all the kingdoms of the world and swept him up into the world of bright TV lights where ( as so many otherwise unqualified people do) he glowed with a sort of electronic virtue. I think he is an intelligent person with some self-knowledge, and I do sometimes wonder if he ever regrets allowing himself to be turned into a brand and a star. But if so, it is too late. How can anyone, transformed in this way ever come back to the status of ordinary husband, father, colleague and friend? They go off as human beings to the nominating convention, or wherever the key moment is, and they never come back again.

But by then there was no audience for critical stuff. John McCain was obviously a loser, and himself not that attractive. I wouldn’t have minded if it had just been a rational decision to go for the younger, more modern guy. I wished that skin colour didn’t matter. But as the election approached I found I just didn’t care very much if he won or not. I just knew, when he did so, that his victory was a victory for multiculturalism and its allies, but so waht? This only confirmed the direction the Republic had taken under Clinton, and which George W. Bush had done nothing to reverse, while he busied himself with idiotic foreign wars.

For a proper conservative, American national politics is a desert. You can choose between declared liberals and neo-conservatives who are liberal on all important issues. And that’s it. Or there’s dear old Ron Paul, who is another sort of liberal, really.  But he’s not important anyway. There’s nobody who is really socially conservative, above all nobody who will act( it’s decades too late anyway) to end the lax immigration politics which have revolutionised the country and will render it unrecognisable within 30 years. There’s nobody who will rescue the married family, or protect and recreate manufacturing industry so that ordinary people have proper honest work to do again, or reform the schools, or devise a foreign policy that actually makes the country safer.

What absolutely amazes me about this election is the way that leftish commentators try to build up Mitt Romney as some kind of conservative monster. If only he were. But his own record shows otherwise (and I might add, his running mate, whose name I can never remember, is a keen student of Miss Ayn Rand, another liberal) . It’s as absurd as dear Polly Toynbee’s ludicrous belief that David Cameron is somehow a reborn Thatcher. Polly is normally more astute than this, and I can only imagine she has invented this claim to make her allegiance to Labour more bearable.  Likewise, the ‘Romney is a raging conservative’ claim must be an effort to make a dull contest between two mediocrities, for an over-rated office that isn’t really all that powerful,  appear more interesting than it is.

I shan’t be waiting up for the results. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Yorkshire, England and the Ridings

I know perfectly well that there can be no agreement about which of our counties is the most English. I was startled by the passionate objections of some contributors, when I said I felt that Yorkshire was the most English of all. And I have since been told off for preferring the East and North Ridings to the West.

 

Well, I can’t help this. Thanks to my father’s naval duties, and to my family’s wanderings after he retired from the service, not to mention long periods at boarding schools, I have no proper home county. My adopted home is Oxford, where I spent a significant part of my childhood and teens  and which is, even now, one of the loveliest places on the planet,  surrounded by quiet,  unwrecked countryside which is not spectacular, but provides solace.

But, having been born in Malta, I have lived in Fife, Devon ( several times) , Sussex, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Warwickshire and London, not to mention Moscow and Bethesda, Maryland.

 

My father’s home was definitely Portsmouth, poor bombed and redeveloped old Pompey, now eviscerated thanks to the slow destruction of the Royal Navy by a succession of treacherous , short-sighted, history-despising governments of all parties.  Though so far as I know my family comes originally from Cornwall, via Avebury in Wiltshire. My mother’s complicated ancestry and chaotic childhood (the details were hidden from me during my own childhood, and I have been able to piece only a few of them together) left her more or less rootless. It was  as if her life had begun when she joined the Wrens in 1940.

 

And it is to Portsmouth, in a paradoxical way, that I owe my liking for Yorkshire. My grandfather, and one of my uncles, both spoke with a strong Hampshire burr. (My father had abandoned his, because naval officers in those days all spoke like characters in ‘in Which We Serve’).

 

 If you remember Jim Callaghan, when he was angry or excited, you will have experienced flashes of this rich, expressive and musical Saxon accent (you can get hints of it in the speech of some of the characters in Conan Doyle’s historical romances, many of them set in this part of the world. It is impossible to get the full value out of the insult ‘Thou Lummocky Lurden’ , which features, I think, in ‘The White Company’, unless you can imagine it in a Hampshire burr). If you haven’t heard it,  it is faintly similar to an Irish accent, but not at all the same.

 

Now it has almost entirely disappeared. Like most of the accents of Southern England, it has been obliterated, presumably by internal migration across the South East, and by the influence of TV.  If I walk through the streets of Cosham or Havant, the outlying parts of Portsmouth in which I once lived, I don’t hear Hampshire voices, but variations on Estuary . In fact I suspect that anyone who turned up in these parts, speaking broad Hampshire, would be met with strange looks.

 

But in Yorkshire, the local voice is still strong, and tom my ear far more English than any Southern voice. A good test is to hear the Authorised Version of the Bible read out loud.  In any English rural accent, its rhythms immediately feel at home . In Yorkshire, where the second person singular is still just about surviving, the effect is better still, a perfect match of instrument and music.

 

To me, there’s also something about the darkness of the stone, the smallness of the villages and the feeling of  permanence, reasonable reserve,  and slowness to change, which I find particularly appealing. I don’t expect anyone else to share it, I found it when I first set eyes on the North York Moors at the age of 15, and it redoubled when I lived in York as a student in the early 1970s, and I have never lost it. It doesn’t necessarily mean I am home there. The local magic is so strong that I often feel very strongly that I am an outsider. It is just that the sense of place, and of being in an English place, is very powerful.

 

As for my choice of Ridings, it is again a matter of personal taste. I like the mysterious, empty and enfolded country of the Wolds, and am particularly fond of Beverley and its Minster. And the high moors round Helmsley appeal to me because of the openness, and the nearness of the sea, more than the darker, gloomier and more enclosed beauties of the Dales . It is just so. I can’t really explain it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for disagreeing with me. Only a fool would dislike any of it. It’s just a question of liking some of it more.