Nostalgia, Progress and Virtue - a Response to Mr Charles

However many times I rebut the charge of nostalgia, people repeat it, when they cannot be bothered to argue with me properly. The latest such accusation comes from Mr Christopher Charles, who wrote as follows in response to my article on ‘The Lost Past of the Church of England’:

 

‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.

 

He has little time for human progress. Sadly for him progress isn’t that bothered.

He [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.

 

I share a lot of PH's sadness at what has been lost. I don't share his perpetual need to bang on about it. Life is only happening now. Engage with it, argue with it by all means. But fighting yesterday's battles is what elderly generals do over glasses of port. Better to engage with now.’

 

Let us take this lazy and rather ill-mannered intervention piece by piece. I cannot tell what my ‘myrmidons’ will do, and didn’t know I had any. ( I understand that they were a warlike people inhabiting ancient Thessaly when first mentioned in Homer, and no doubt I would rather have them on my side than against me).

 

1.  Mr Charles asserts : ‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.’

 

I reply: **On what written or spoken words of mine does he base this mighty assertion? Could it perhaps be based on my repeated statements,  here repeated yet again,  that I do not believe there was ever a golden age; that the past is dead and that we cannot return to it even if we wish; that my main concern is about the future, and about the fact that we are currently choosing the wrong future?

 

As for fixed points, I know only too well that virtue, unless constantly nurtured and encouraged, decays. In this world one has to run as fast as one can just to stay in the same place. Those beautiful cathedrals (to employ a metaphor)  have remained beautiful not through neglect or complacency but through constant loving and respectful renewal, based upon an understanding of, and a love for their original design and intent. Not a decade passes when they are not clothed in scaffolding.   Yet the virtues they proclaim have remained the same.

 

What is actually contained in this baseless assertion is Mr Charles’ s own implied belief that his opinions are the epitome of goodness and correctness, and that all developments tending towards them are axiomatically good.  This is implied so heavily in Mr Charles’s language that it is almost explicit. His view is that , for this country to have retained and renewed the Christian morals of circa 1955, people would have had to have ‘stopped thinking’ , ‘stopped enquiring’ , ‘stifled the human instinct to explore’ and ‘become resigned to the way things are’.

 

Does he really think that the proponents of lifelong monogamous marriage are unaware of the alternatives? Or that there is anything new about sexual licence? The whole of the 1549 marriage service, more or less identical to the 1662 service which is still valid in law, though largely despised and avoided by modern Anglican bishops and ministers  is in essence an argument against the worldly view on the matter. Any social historian, especially a liberal one, will go on at length about how the unmarried state was extremely common in pre-Edwardian England – and correctly so. The triumph of monogamy and virtue came only after the great evangelising campaigns of Wesley and others, which  formed the world we live in and are now losing, or - in my view - actively throwing away.

 

Mr Charles, in another breathtaking assumption that his view is somehow the only virtuous one, denigrates the opinion that  lifelong faithful marriage should be sustained against pressure for easy divorce. That  pressure, as he would know if he read my book as cited in the original article, was great and is now greater.  He states that to hold my opinion (in favour of lifelong monogamy) involves ceasing to think, and becoming ‘resigned’ to the way things are. Well,  this just prejudges the issue. To be ‘resigned’ is to accept reluctantly and unwillingly. I can see why people might initially be reluctant to accept lifelong monogamy, which places heavy loads on patience, self-control, cheerfulness in adversity, generosity and other human virtues which are all undoubtedly hard to maintain. But I can also see why, even so, it would be worth their while to do so. And I can, further, see why a rational morally-educated person might regard such virtue as one of the  glories of human existence.

 

 

2. Next, Mr Charles informs us : ‘He (me)has little time for human progress.’

**I have never understood how an otherwise intelligent person could deploy this non-argument without embarrassment. What is this ‘progress’ of which he speaks? What measuring device does he possess which can show objectively that the movement he observes is forwards or backwards?  Generally there will be a price paid for any ‘improvement’. Is it worth it? Are we even fully aware of the price we will pay at the time we accept the change? How – and when - do we judge?  Was the 20th century, for instance, an era of shining improvement or one of the darkest nights of human depravity? Both could be argued.  When and how will we be able to be sure which it was? It is clear, as soon as we consider this, that a different set of tools is necessary, one which divides good from bad and right from wrong.

 

And what we then find is that we are back at the old religious quarrel, which is itself an argument about whether man is basically good or basically sinful; and also about man’s sovereignty over himself, and whether (if it exists at all) it owes any duties to any higher law.  This measure will tell you whether mass legal abortion, for instance, is good or bad. It will tell you whether lifelong faithful marriage is a fortress of virtue or a repressive prison. These are not new things. Over the recorded centuries, men have taken different views of them. The passage of time has not decided which is right and which is wrong, nor can it.  That discovery will always lie elsewhere. For me, it is to be found in eternity. For my opponents it is to be found in immediate practicality.

 

3. Then Mr Charles attempts to be witty, giggling ‘ Sadly for him (me) progress isn’t that bothered.’

**Not funny. But even so, it is an interesting giveaway that Mr Charles gives ‘progress’ a personality. To many who hold his beliefs ‘Progress’  is a sort of deity, and I’m sure I’ve seen 19th-century sculptures trying to represent it, the usual clear-eyed, stern young woman on her plinth, eyes fixed on the golden future, torch in her upraised hand. Funny how those who seem actually to believe in such a golden future, and to justify their actions by asserting that they are done in the cause of ‘progress’  are always falsely accusing me of believing in a  golden past.

 

To which I might reply ‘How can you think that? It’s 2013 ,for goodness’ sake!’ .

 

Except that this statement, stripped of the tones of contempt in which it usually uttered, is completely meaningless. I could say it as scornfully as Mr Charles could. But it still wouldn’t alter the fact that I had not actually made any rational point at all.  The date has no bearing on whether an action is just or unjust. Its nature will persist throughout all time.

 

It is not ‘progress’ that dismisses my arguments with a sneer, but the moral, political and social left, which prefers to write off its opponents as babbling nostalgists, fossils and bigots than to argue with them. This is why leftist utopians, either socialist or racialist ones, so often end up killing those who oppose them. By opposing the ‘progressive’ (ie axiomatically good and correct) Left, we conservatives become axiomatically bad and incorrect people, not fully human. The modern use of the word ‘bigot’ (to mean ‘person who does not agree with the leftist agenda’)  seems to me to have this demoting dehumanising character. I fear it, and suspect it will one day put me in prison or even kill me, if I live long enough.

 

This view is often first expressed by the claim to be on the side of  ‘progress’, which is, I say it again, an arrogation of rightness. These people would be justifiably too embarrassed to say ‘I am right because I say I am right’. But they are not embarrassed to say  the same thing, in the formula : ‘I am on the side of progress’  or even ‘I am on the side of history’ . They can get away with this  partly because very few in the audience will realise what this statement really means, and how repellent, totalitarian and intolerant it is. We have discussed elsewhere the New Atheism and its growing tendency to characterise religious believers as ‘child abusers’ who do not deserve to be considered as fully human and so can safely be silenced and censored. It is the same thing.

 

 

Mr Charles continues : ‘He (me) [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.’

 

**No, I’m happy to cede the claims of progress to Mr Charles (who has blundered into an inconsistency here by conceding that change brings both good and bad, which if true rather explodes the concept of ‘progress). I don’t make any claims to be progressive.  I seek to discover the Good, and to pursue it in my own life. Where I engage in political activity, I seek mainly to deter the state from actively discouraging the Good, as it so often does, and actively encouraging the Bad, as it so often does. But I recognise as I do this that the former Christian consensus about what is Good and Bad has been destroyed. This is why this weblog is repeatedly thrown back into discussions of virtue, its nature and origins.

 

It’s also why I spend so much effort discussing the past  - where it is easier to make out what actually happened than it is when discussing the present.  Likewise it is why I devote so much space to literature, which has a huge moral effect on the reader and is often the scripture of our time.

 

One contributor recently complained that there was too much history and too much religion here and too little discussion of current affairs. But actually I find I have less and less to say about current affairs, because the debates on politics are conducted at such an ignorant,  unhistorical, ill-read level that one just turns away in despair. How can anyone take seriously the fake outrage of the Left against non-existent ‘cuts’ , and its claims of abject poverty in a country so rich? How can one be bothered even to mention the latest stunts and gimmicks in the world of state education, where the great issue of selection cannot even be discussed?  How can one even listen to the lies of the major parties about the European Union, immigration and crime? How can one stomach David Cameron’s attacks on Labour’s indebtedness to the unions, when his own party is wholly-owned by millionaire contributors, and its candidate selection is under the thumb of an unaccountable clique as bad as anything the unions can come up with ? And so on.

 

And then look at Egypt . What is missing from that country (and from most countries all over the world, with a very small number of exceptions)  is the level of private virtue and personal restraint and responsibility needed to sustain a free, law-governed society. So when liberty is granted it is swiftly squandered, and the country  (apparently willingly) places itself once again under the rule of generals. And they hold a firework display to celebrate this happy submission to the familiar yoke.

 

There is a lesson in this for us, but we are too busy enjoying ourselves to learn it , so that when we too, find we have sunk willingly under the rule of strong men, we will be too indebted, sated, drunk or drugged to care.

 

There are different opinions on virtue and restraint.  I am willing to accept (as was Whittaker Chambers long ago) that I am on the losing side in this era of human history. In that, though not ‘resigned’, I am certainly pessimistic. It saddens me to say so. But that does not make me wrong, and it doesn’t mean that the ideas of my opponents are correct, or that thought, enquiry and exploration lead inevitably and invariably to whatever Mr Charles happens to think this morning.