Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

… I can’t think of a better encomium. What characterized him and made him so precious in twentieth-century England was that, although he was a modern, he believed in reason … [He] rejected authority, mistrusted intuition. That is why his loss is so irreparable … If you said to him “This must be right, all the experts say so … Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,” he would reply in effect, “Well. I wonder. Let’s see.” He would see and he would make you see. You would come away realizing that an influential opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe … Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.