Two recent visits to Cambridge

It’s late. I’ve undone my bow tie, worn out what was left of my voice arguing with students in the Cambridge Union bar, and I’m heading to my hotel, my mind already on the column I’m going to have to write in the morning.  It’s been a long evening. As I always try to do when I’m asked to debate at Cambridge, I’ve got to the town early and attended Evensong in King’s Chapel, the single most intense and concentrated experience of thought, scripture, music and architecture that is readily available in England. The choir-screen alone, dark with Tudor history and rightly described as one of the greatest artefacts in northern Europe, is enough to silence the mind with its age and power.

 

I almost always end up near the back of the queue, so sit far from the lectern and (thanks to acoustics designed more for music than speech)can barely hear the lessons being read (for once, as they should be in all such places,  from the Authorized Version of the Bible). But my ancient education kicks in. Catching on the air such phrases ‘ What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?’ and ‘The desert shall blossom as the rose’, I can more or less reconstruct the bits I cannot hear. I have often thought that, as the senses fail, the repetition of the familiar and the lodging of such things in the heart will make up for what I would otherwise miss. And in the long centuries before glasses and hearing aids were available, I suspect that is exactly what happened. The ancient toothless old wrecks hunched at the back didn’t really need to hear the service. It was in their heads anyway, and in their hearts when they died as well.

 

Anyway, the debate has been about Vladimir Putin and his alleged threat to global security. A vote taken in advance showed 61% in favour of this motion before we’d even begun and 19% against. The vote afterwards showed the noes had increased to 27% and the vote in favour dropped to 59% (I think I have this right. I’ve been unable to trace figures on abstentions).

 

So those of us arguing against it were a bit like the cyclist who’s nearly been killed by a driver, catches up with him, suggests he might be more considerate in future,  and is then told by the driver that ‘You don’t pay road tax’. Before you can even begin to discuss the driver’s atrocious behaviour, you have to explain that there is no such thing as ‘road tax’, that many cyclists pay more tax (towards roads and everything else) than do car drivers, and that even if they didn’t, they have as much freedom to use the road, and are as entitled to as much consideration, as anyone else.  There’s never enough time.

 

In the case of the Putin terror, one has to overcome a similar mountain-range of universally-held misconceptions.  Readers here will know how long my posts have been on this issue, because of what I saw as the need to present a factual rebuttal of the absurdly misleading ‘Totally Evil Russia, Utterly Noble Ukraine’ narrative universally accepted by mainstream media.

 

In a brief Cambridge Union speech, it’s not really possible to do this. The more I list the points I hope to make, the day before the debate, the more I see that there are too many of them. Then, by my own strong desire, I am the last speaker, and it’s necessary to respond to arguments made by the other side (one of whom is Luke Harding of the Guardian, who – quite reasonably - appears before these students in a sort of golden glow because of his involvement in the Snowden affair. Whereas I carry about with me the dark shadow of Mordor, thanks to my association with what they all call ‘The Mail’, which all hate but few read).

 

So I am dissatisfied. So when, in the entrance hall of the Victorian Building,  I meet one of my opponents (not Mr Harding) and some of his friends, I’m unwisely willing to be drawn into a rematch. One of these friends, an American woman,  accuses me of having given wrong information in my speech. I challenge her to back this up. Rather than do so, she begins swearing at me. She also quite likes shouting, I quickly learn. We calm down a bit after that (staff are for some reason constantly carrying bits of heavy furniture out of the debating chamber, so interrupting our flow as we have to stand put of the way), but quite quickly it’s clear that I’m wasting my time by discussing Adam Tooze’s book ‘The Deluge’, the significance of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, the century-old German policy of undermining the Russian Empire by promoting nationalism in its dominions,  or the significance of Brest-Litovsk, or the nature of the European Union’s foreign policy. They’re just not interested. They start calling me ‘mental’. I realise that, even though this is Cambridge, we are not immune here from the fierce intolerance of dissent which cramps so much modern debate.  With a brief comment on the poor psychiatric qualifications of one of my attackers, I go off into the night, even more dissatisfied, and – unusually for me after such an occasion –  more discontented than I was at the beginning of the evening.

 

But by great good fortune, I am due back in Cambridge the following Monday. This time it’s for a panel discussion of the morality of foreign intervention, organized (very well, I might say) by the King’s Politics Society. Interest in this tricky subject turns out to be much greater than expected, and the venue is moved to a much larger hall, which then gratifyingly fills.

The line-up is:

LINDSEY GERMAN - Convenor of Stop the War and organiser of the anti-Iraq War demonstration of 2003

DARREN MURPHY - Former political communications adviser to Tony Blair and strategist for a number of political leaders worldwide

NIGEL BIGGAR - Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford University and author of 'In Defence of War'

RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR - journalist and former Security Editor for the Guardian

DAVID BLUNT - Fellow at Corpus Christi, International Relations lecturer, and expert on the ethics of political violence.

 

This is a pretty good collection of people qualified to talk about this.

 

Now normally I prefer a debate with sides and a motion, as at the Cambridge Union. I’ve often said that a debate with a vote is like tennis without a net. But at this debate there was enough tension and interest in the room to make me wrong on this occasion. I think everyone managed to say pretty much what he or she needed to. I was also able to confuse a lot of those who had come with prejudices against me, and found that – on this issue – my position was much closer to theirs than they had thought. Anomalies of this kind make people think, which is my main aim.

 

Afterwards, the discussions were entirely amicable. And the next morning, it being my day off, I was able to walk for miles through Cambridge in perfect autumn sunshine (this is the best weather in which to see either of our ancient universities).

 

I’m glad of both experiences, which keep the mind alive. Writing a lot, as I do, forms thought. But arguing with opponents in front of a critical audience, doesn’t just form though, but sharpens it.