‘That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me’ wrote C. S. Lewis of his conversion to Christianity in Surprised By Joy. ‘In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ Like most new Christians, Lewis converted because he had become convinced of the truth of the Scriptures and felt a connection with the God of the Bible. He went on to become the most famous Christian apologist of the twentieth century, always arguing in support of a literal, real and personal God.

In the twenty-first century, the God of the Christian Bible has found new defenders. Unlike Lewis, they do not argue that he is real. Rather, they argue that he is necessary. More specifically, that he provides our civilisation with its ethical foundations, and without him, we face nihilism. New Atheism ‘inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense,’ wrote Theo Hobson in Spectator. ‘It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots.’

‘Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war’ was Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s position in her article on her conversion to Christianity, published in November 2023 in UnHerd. Referring favourably to Tom Holland’s Dominion, she wrote that ‘all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.’ Ali does not mention accepting Christianity’s metaphysical claims in the article.

Perhaps no public figure has become more associated with this argument than Jordan Peterson. Peterson does not appear to believe in a literal supernatural being, but believes that the secular ethics of the modern west are based in Judeo-Christian values and it would be better if we acted as though the Christian God did exist. ‘What else do you have?’ he demanded of sceptical young men in his 2022 message to Christian churches. And, to those who might respond by saying that they do not believe in the doctrines of the Church, ‘who cares what you believe?’

This argument is made by conservatives and directed at a specific audience: non-religious people sceptical of modern progressivism. Christianity, they argue, provides a bulwark against geopolitical threats like Islamic fundamentalism and China, and against the extremes of ‘woke’ culture. I have not heard left-wing Christians argue that only Christian ethics provides a basis for demanding that the rich give away their wealth and care for the poor, although such an argument would be similar.

There are a few problems with this claim. Proving that Christianity is influential would not prove that its supernatural claims are true, and visa-versa. For this reason, atheists of different political opinions do not find the argument satisfactory. Secular humanist Matt Dillahunty had a lengthy debate with Peterson which left him, as he later told Douglas Murray, ‘confused and more than a little irritated.’

‘I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible,’ Dillahunty said, explaining that things were true or not based on whether they comported with reality. The usefulness of God is irrelevant to his existence.

It is also unsatisfactory to the conventionally religious, for similar reasons. ‘Contra Peterson, the story of Scripture was not written in philosophical abstracted metaphor, but in real time, space and blood,’ wrote Dani Trewek for Gospel Coalition, a gospel advocacy group based in Australia, in 2022. ‘It is not ultimately concerned with the earthly “optimisation” of created man, but the eternal glorification of the Son of Man.’ Again, God’s usefulness is irrelevant to his existence.

Even if the argument were sound, it is not clear what we would do about it. Christianity might, as Ed West put it in Spectator, ‘meme itself back into existence’ if we all go through the motions, but it is hard to see people being persuaded into accepting the supernatural for political reasons.

I want, though, to focus on a particular problem with the argument: that it overstates the continuity of Judeo-Christian ethics. According to Genesis, God created man in his image – yet the morality of the Bible is not humanist. The Ten Commandments condemn disbelief and sabbath-breaking before murder; Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with condemnations of ritual offences, but permit slavery and treat women as property.

Let us look at one specific case. Writing on heresy in Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas accepts that heretics should be put to death. He favourably quotes Saint Jerome verbatim on the way heretics should be treated: ‘cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock, burn, perish, rot, die.’ Aquinas’ position is consistent with Scripture. The God of the Bible collectively punishes societies for tolerating sin, floods the earth, rains down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, and allows the Babylonians to march the Israelites into captivity when they fail to self-police their morality. Aquinas’ position was uncontroversial in the medieval and early modern church.

Today, however, this position is repugnant to us, including among the devoutly religious. Morally, killing someone for their religious beliefs strikes us as murder. And practically, if we had kept the death penalty for heresy, we could never have achieved what we have in philosophy, science, literature and art. A society that burns heretics is doomed to stagnation. The idea of killing an individual to protect the morals of society as a whole is fundamentally incompatible with liberalism.  

In many ways, traditional Judeo-Christian ethics are as different from modern secular ethics as Sharia law is. This is not to condemn them for being unusually bad: most pre-modern ethical codes are based in similar principles. But it does ignore the massive break with the past represented by the Enlightenment, which saw the concomitant rise of liberalism and the creation of the modern concept of human rights. In practice, the advocates of the ‘necessary’ Christian God are dining at an ethical buffet, picking and choosing from the Scriptures and the writings of theologians according to taste.  

Ultimately, there is a false dichotomy between faith, or at least the appearance of faith, and nihilism. We can – and should – consider ideas on their own merits. Those for whom faith is real and personal will believe. But those who are not persuaded by metaphysical arguments will not be persuaded by political ones, and nor should they be. Voltaire was alleged to have quipped that he did not believe in God but hoped his servant did so she did not steal his silver; the modern argument for the ‘necessity’ of Christianity, when it is boiled down, looks similar. By comparison, I actually prefer C. S. Lewis’ straightforward and direct approach.

Anyone who appreciates the benefits of living in a modern Western country can look to the tested and proven principles of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, constitutional government and human rights. If someone wants to believe in the Christian God and in the values of the Bible, that is fine – but it is not necessary.

See also: What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

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The post Do we need God to defend civilisation? appeared first on The Freethinker.

What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

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The post Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

On 25 November, 2023, at the historic Conway Hall in London, I met Graham Smith, the CEO of the anti-monarchy campaigning group Republic—an organisation whose origin can be traced back through the pages of The Freethinker. Read more about that connection in ‘The Freethinker and early republicanism’. See also ‘Bring on the British republic’ for my review of Smith’s book Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will.

Smith was the guest speaker at the National Secular Society’s Members’ Day at Conway Hall, and I managed to talk to him in the foyer café before he went off to give his very well-received talk on the connections between monarchy and religion, and between secularism and republicanism. Below is an edited transcript of our short but illuminating conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: At the coronation of Charles III, you and several other anti-monarchy protesters were arrested [see links above for more]. Could you give us an update on how the case is going?

Graham Smith: There are no major updates. It has gone off to a judge for an application for judicial review. The assumption is that we will be granted the judicial review and then we will see what happens after that.

What are the historical links between secularism and republicanism?

If you look historically, you will very often see intellectual links between those arguing against the domination of established churches and those who opposed monarchy. There is an old quote, whose origin I cannot remember right now: ‘Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ [These are, in fact, the words of the 18^th-century Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.]

This is not something that I would condone! But the sentiment is that these things are very much linked and so the opposition to them is linked and always has been. And certainly, the National Secular Society and Republic have quite a lot of overlap in terms of our interests and members and so on, even though we have not really worked together. I think it is difficult to argue for a secular state without arguing for the abolition of the monarchy and vice versa.

Could you have a secular monarchy? 

No, I do not think you can. You can have a non-secular republic—in Ireland, God gets a mention in the constitution, and for many years the Irish constitution gave a privileged position to the Catholic Church. But I do not think that makes intellectual sense. You also have disestablishment in monarchies like Sweden and Norway, but that is a bit of a halfway house because the monarch is still a member of one church and is very much a churchgoer, and thus that church is privileged through that relationship even if it is technically, by law, not established. I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy. [For an alternative view, see Emma Park’s interview with Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer who introduced a disestablishment bill in the House of Lords on 6 December.]

Does one or the other—republicanism or secularism—have to come first?

It is hard to say. I think it may well be that the monarchy goes first because it is the bigger, more potent symbol of everything that has to change in Britain. I do not think there is the same appetite for disestablishment in the way that there is an appetite for abolishing the monarchy. It is interesting that over the last 25 years, we have seen a lot of pressure to get rid of the House of Lords, the monarchy, and the established church. Hopefully, the Lords will go in the next one or two years. And these three things are all connected.  I think we will see them all unravelling—one will go, then another, then another. Though in which order it will happen, who knows?

How was your anti-monarchy book received?

On the whole, it has gone down well. I got a couple of annoying reviews from monarchists, which is a good sign. One of the reasons I wrote it is because there is not enough literature about the monarchy and why it should be abolished. Most books about the royals are just inane nonsense.

Even though the history books talk about many of the monarchs being thugs and murderers, there is always this undertone—‘Oh, isn’t the monarchy so great and interesting? And don’t worry, they’re not like this anymore!’. But that history is one of the reasons we should get rid of them—not because they are still doing things like that, but because it is a celebration of that history, which is not a reason to celebrate.

Have you had any thoughtful reviews from monarchists?

Yes. Surprisingly, The Telegraph’s review was the most interesting. The reviewer described herself as a ‘soft monarchist’, which is a term I use in the book, and she really engaged with my arguments. She thought monarchists should be worried because there are lots of cracks in their armour and lots of weaknesses in their position, and they should be alert to that.

What is the strongest argument for the monarchy in your view? I have always thought it was the superficially convincing one made by, among others, George Orwell: that it is a check on political extremism because it diverts extreme emotion away from politicians. In other words, it prevents tyranny.

Yes. The fact that Orwell, a respected writer, made it, means that it is an argument that is taken seriously. Churchill said something similar—that if they had kept the Kaiser, Germany would not have had Hitler. But these claims are completely ahistorical. Two of the Axis powers were monarchies. The Italian king Victor Emmanuel III put Mussolini in power and sat there for 20 years and let him get on with it. And the Kaiser was keen to put his family back on the throne under or with Hitler. So, if anything, the Orwellian argument shows the weakness of monarchy.

And, of course, Emperor Hirohito was not just a monarch, but apparently a divine being.

Indeed! The problem is that that stifles critical thinking and it stifles opposition, and those things are very important if you want to avoid things like imperial conflicts.

How do you think Charles III is doing as king?

That is like asking how a chair is doing as a chair. It just sits there and is a chair, and he just sits there and is a king. He does not have to do anything. He just is. And people judge them [monarchs and royals] by their own standards, so if they go around waving and allowing their acolytes to say good things on their behalf, then that is judged to be fine, so long as there is not some huge scandal. The bar is set incredibly low.

But Charles is a man who is accused of exchanging honours for cash. He is accused of handling millions of pounds of cash from Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, a Qatari businessman and former Prime Minister of Qatar accused of having links with al-Qaeda. He is accused of lobbying behind the scenes for all sorts of things. He is not a good head of state. Anybody could be a good king because being a monarch is about biological descent alone, but to be a good head of state is to be someone who is principled, eloquent, accountable and accessible, and on all these scores Charles is dreadful.

In terms of religion, Charles was never going to be genuinely ecumenical or for all faiths, and certainly not for those who do not have a faith. The royals pay lip service to ecumenicism, and I think some people were really surprised by how much Charles doubled down on all the feudal religious nonsense during the coronation—but it was because he believed all that nonsense!

One of the problems is that you do not get to ask Charles questions directly and challenge him about these issues. So it is all about reading the tea leaves and believing people like Jonathan Dimbleby when it comes to the true beliefs of the royals.

Have you ever met Charles? Or been in the same room as him and tried to ask him a question?

I have been within shouting distance! I have been almost as close to him as I am to you now, calling out questions, but obviously, he just blanks me. That is the one thing the royals are good at, blanking people. They just blank people they do not want to acknowledge, including their own staff.

What would a British republic with a written constitution look like?

It would look like a modern, grown-up democracy where we would have a fully elected parliament. We would still have a prime minister but they would not have the same power, derived from the Crown, that they have now. We would have clearly defined limits to that power and these limits would be policed and monitored by an elected head of state. The head of state would be there to be our ambassador but also to guard our constitution. So a republic would just take all the nonsense out of it. And if we want pageantry and ceremony, we can do that. Other republics, like France and Greece, do it quite well.

Having a republic would ultimately mean that our constitution and our politics would be done in a serious, intelligent, accountable way.

What is the single, essential thing that makes the monarchy and our political or constitutional system rotten, in your view?

The fact that we still have the same system we had after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-1689. All that has happened since then is that there have been compromises between those in Parliament and those in the Palace. There has never been a serious democratic evolution that shifts power to the people in this country. Instead, we have had the centralisation of power propped up and disguised by all the trappings of the monarchy—that is the big problem.

Is it anti-British to be anti-monarchy?

I would say it is very pro-British to be anti-monarchy. Being against anything bad is being in favour of where you live. One of the things that annoys me the most about monarchists is when they say that we would not be anything without the monarchy. I think that is the least patriotic thing you could say. To rubbish this amazing country of 65 million people by saying that it would not be much without this very, very tedious and ordinary family—that is a weird and unpatriotic thing to say.

And, of course, there is also the great British tradition of republicanism and radicalism, which is just as much a part of our patriotic heritage as the monarchy.

Yes. History is written by the victors, by those in power, and we do not get to hear about the radicals. And when we do hear about them, they are dismissed as fringe people, while everyone else is just getting on with their lives as serfs and plebs.

Yet the anti-slavery movement was one of the largest, if not the largest, working-class movements in British history. You do not hear about that. You only hear about William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery MPs.

We have a long history in this country of fighting against the things that monarchy represents, and we just have to continue until it is gone.

What is the future of British republicanism?

We will win. I think that the monarchy will come to an end. I think that people have realised in the last twelve months that that is quite likely. There is no longer this sense of an immovable object. I think that republicans will continue to see the polling shift in our favour. Support for the monarchy has dropped significantly over the years. Once support for the monarchy drops below 50 per cent, we will see things unravel in quite good order.

Would you care to venture a prediction as to when exactly the monarchy will go?

No. I suppose I would say that there is a reasonable chance that Prince William will become king, but I think the chance of his son George becoming king is quite small.

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Further reading on secularism and republicanism:

Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s study after his death, by Walter Sickert, by Bob Forder

Introducing ‘Paine: A Fantastical Visual Biography’, by Polyp, by Paul Fitzgerald

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Freethought in the 21st century – interview of The Freethinker editor Emma Park by Christoph De Spiegeleer

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith appeared first on The Freethinker.

Quebec holds a cultural distinction in the framework of the Canadian Federation that should be better understood and appreciated. The Quebecois know what it means to take pride, collectively, in what they have fought for. Yet too often and by too many, Quebec is harshly and wrongly called racist for its pride in preserving its secularist, pluralist culture. This culture is the very same one that endless numbers of new Canadians—immigrants and refugees—freely choose to adopt by coming to Quebec to create new lives for themselves.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québéçois, made this point during a press conference before he met with Amira Elghawaby, the federally-appointed anti-Islamophobia adviser, earlier this year. Elghawaby had written in 2019 that ‘the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment.’ This was in response to public support for Bill 21, a Quebec law placing limits on the wearing of religious clothing by several types of public sector workers. Blanchet’s response to her was: ‘Someone who says Quebec is racist needs to know more about Quebec.’ I agree with him on this point. Unless you study Quebec’s history, you will have little understanding of the sociocultural and sociopolitical transformations that the province underwent after 1960, during the period of la Révolution Tranquille (‘the Quiet Revolution’).

Before the Quiet Revolution swept across the province, Quebec was a largely rural and conservative society dominated and maintained by the Catholic Church, which promoted traditional social hierarchies. During the first half of the 19th century, the Catholic Church wielded significant power in the cultural, religious and political spheres, especially in higher education. In fact, the province set up a Ministry of Public Instruction in 1868 but abolished it in 1875 due to pressure from the Church. Catholic religious leaders combined nationalism with anti-secular Ultramontane ideas to further their interests and increase their authority.

Conservative Catholic domination of Quebec reached its apogee in la Grande Noirceur (‘the Great Darkness’), the period during which Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis’ Union Nationale party held power (from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959). Duplessis viewed Quebec as a Catholic province and ran it with an iron fist, as if it were his own private Catholic corporation. He championed values aligned with the Church and allowed Catholic leaders to directly participate in education, health services, and social assistance, thus affirming the idea of a Quebec that was distinctively and exclusively Catholic. The Duplessis era was the culmination of centuries of Catholic domination of the social and cultural framework of the province.

By the 1960s, the people of Quebec were no longer willing to remain subservient to the clergy and its political backers. ‘Things have to change,’ was one of the slogans of Quebec’s Liberal Party, led by Jean Lesage, during the 1960 election campaign. The victory of Lesage in that year was the beginning of a period of nearly 20 years of dramatic modernisation. New, progressive approaches were adopted in the social and political realms.

Notably, the Liberal government set up a Ministry of Education which created a state-controlled education system and gave women the same rights to higher education as men. It also effectively secularised Quebec by decoupling Church and state and limiting religious influence in public institutions. Since the 1960s, Quebec’s identity has been rooted in the ideal of secular governance; it is seen by Quebecois as a place where all people are represented fairly, rather than one governed by ecclesiastical power in which the clergy dominates the people.   

This brings us back to Bill 21 and Quebecois secularism today. Should accommodations for religious minorities be granted? If so, how should they be implemented and what are the limitations on such accommodations?

There are justified criticisms of Bill 21 but there is also much misunderstanding about it. These misunderstandings often stem from two different traditions and interpretations of secularism. In the English-speaking world, secularism focuses on individual freedom of religion whereas in the French-speaking world, laïcité focuses on the collective freedom from religion. This is because the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds have had different historical experiences with religion. In general, the French sought freedom from the dominance of the Catholic Church and the English fought for the individual’s freedom to worship according to their conscience.

Bill 21 is in the spirit of the secularism of the French Republic, which has also been accused of racism because of its enforcement of laïcité for religious minorities. Such accusations are misplaced, however. Bill 21 makes no distinction, for example, between the types of religious symbols worn or displayed. All religions are removed from the public sphere, and this is seen as an equaliser for the benefit of all Quebecois citizens.

‘Est Québécois qui veut l’être’ (‘Whoever wants to be a Quebecer is one’), said René Lévesque during his victory speech after the 1976 Quebec election. The ethical importance of that statement is that the social criteria for being Quebecois are not centred on ethnicity or allegiance to any religion but instead are founded in the upholding, understanding and embracing of the immemorial values of Quebec society. These values are the values of the Enlightenment, as well as liberalism and democracy.

Opponents of Bill 21 see it as a ‘racist’ ban on religious symbols. They see it as an assault on religious minorities in Quebec and argue that it misapplies the principle of religious neutrality as understood in Canadian law. This Canadian principle, which is an interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada, holds that governments must remain neutral on questions of religion by neither favouring nor disfavouring any particular belief. This implies that although the Canadian government cannot be explicitly religious, it also cannot be explicitly anti-religious: the state must treat religious groups equally.

The problem created by treating religious groups equally is that it opens the door to limitless demands from all religious groups, including illiberal ones. These groups would have criticism of religion designated as hate speech. They would have illiberal and bigoted practices—such as the imposition of Sharia family courts—be not just tolerated but approved of. Treating religious groups equally is mistaken because it falsely assumes that they consist of a homogenous community that can be represented by one or a few loud (usually conservative and male) voices. It thus disregards the repressive treatment that minorities within these minorities often face and it sets up bigoted, misogynistic interpretations of religious doctrine as the one true version that must be respected and accommodated.

Bill 21 does not misapply religious neutrality. It understands and applies it through a French lens. This differs from the English lens that interprets religious neutrality on the federal level. This is perhaps why Anglophone Quebecois were more upset with the bill than their Francophone fellows—indeed, English-language school boards were exempted from the law by Canada’s Supreme Court. It is important to recall that the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution, which was invoked by Quebec’s National Assembly in passing Bill 21, was intended precisely so that unreasonable court decisions could be rejected by Parliament and provincial legislatures. In 1981, Justice Minister Jean Chrétien stated clearly that the clause would allow legislatures to quickly ‘correct absurd situations’ resulting from court decisions. ‘We needed to have the supremacy of the legislature over the courts,’ Peter Lougheed, then the Alberta premier, who suggested the clause in the final negotiations on the Constitution in the early 1980s, explained. ‘We did not [want] to be in a position where public policy was being dictated or determined by non-elected people.’

The question, then, is this: What kind, or rather kinds, of religious beliefs will be accommodated, permitted and tolerated? Quebec more than perhaps the rest of Canada at present has an excellent chance of strengthening its vigorously pluralistic society. But for this to happen, religious groups need to be compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are incompatible with Quebec’s open liberal democratic society—and should certainly not be allowed to undermine Quebecois secularism.

‘A nation is judged by how it treats its minorities,’ Lévesque once said. Must we now shy away from treating religious minorities with the same maturity as we would any other religious group? Why should we not have the same expectations of minority groups as with any others? Should they not be expected to assimilate and to be open to justified criticism of their practices and beliefs? Is it not insulting to give special protections to their feelings of offence?

The domestication of religion is one of the unremitting responsibilities, as well as one of the hallmarks, of civilisation. Those who, inspired by nebulous notions of diversity, equity and inclusion, would cast aside liberal and Enlightenment values, must understand that they would be throwing away the very things that make liberal democracy a system worth having in the first place. Quebec’s Bill 21 is an assertion of liberalism in the spirit of the Quiet Revolution, not a negation of it, and the values of laïcité are among the most precious—and hard-won—that Quebec has.

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Further reading:

The Catholic Church in Canada

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

Varieties of secularism

How laïcité can save secularism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post Quebec’s French-style secularism: history and enduring value appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.

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The post ‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman appeared first on The Freethinker.

I first encountered Eliza Flower (1803-46) in an online search for women composers from Essex during the 2020 lockdowns. My search was part of a ‘Women in Music and Science’ project with Chelmsford Theatre, called ‘Echoes from Essex’. I found only one piece of a capella choral music, ‘Now Pray We for our Country’, but it was exactly what I needed for the project. It was by a composer called Eliza Flower, whom I had never come across before. In the spirit of those strange times, we made a virtual recording of it: the choir consisted of just six members of our Electric Voice Theatre singers, who recorded several parts each in their homes and sent them to us for assembly. The result of this early foray into virtual singing transformed what had been an intriguing score into a moving hymn with qualities quite unlike any I had heard from this era. (Recording by Electric Voice Theatre here.)

Here was something quite remarkable: a piece of sacred English choral music written in the 1820’s which displayed many of the traits of secular European romanticism. The latter movement would not become widespread in the UK for some time – at least not among male composers. Flower called for sharply contrasting dynamics and tempi. The rich and dramatic harmony she deployed, coupled with her use of contrasting chorus and soloist ensembles, suggested that this work was written for no ordinary church choir.

This was just one hymn. However, as I would discover later from a letter written by Eliza herself to Novello, it was a hymn that Felix Mendelssohn was ‘most pleased’ with.

Where had all these ideas, packed into one short piece, come from? Was there more? There had to be more!

The words Flower had set to music, although adapted from those of an American preacher, were patriotic and almost jingoistic in their fervour towards England. They were almost patriotic enough to have deterred this fervent Scot from looking further – but the quality and innovation of the music kept nagging at me. I was impatient to discover more.

We were, however, still locked in: a feeling that was, I suspect, familiar to many women in England during Eliza’s lifetime, who were either hemmed in by societies’ expectations or forced to work, and legally dependent on their male relatives, with no prospect of freedom.

In time, I would discover that Eliza was not constrained in these ways, but was set on a different path. Unlike most women of her time, she was encouraged and educated by her radical parents to think for herself and to seek to fulfil her potential. My initial idea of her, constrained in a drawing room, encased in stays and stiff brocades, would turn out to be far from the truth.

Once normal life resumed in 2022, I investigated further at the British Library in London. There was more music!

The staff handed me a published pot-pourri of Flower’s vocal music, a large manuscript book bound with others from the same period. As I opened it, I was taken aback by the full-page drawing of Eliza. She certainly did not have the look of a starched Victorian lady, but instead of a gentle, bohemian soul, with her hair in soft curls on her shoulders and a face which shone with love. The artist, Eliza Bridell-Fox, had made the portrait in recollection of the composer after her death. Little did I know how important these names would be to Eliza Flower’s story in different ways.

On the opposite page was the index, which pointed to 182 pages of music. This page was full of clues to Flower’s character and outlook on life, but at this point I just wanted to read the music and listen to it in my head – since singing out loud in the British Library Reading Rooms is unfortunately not permitted. I could not take it all away with me, but I copied as much as I could and, when I returned home, began to sing and play the music, and to share it with my colleagues in Electric Voice Theatre. This was the beginning of an adventure that would lead us to Conway Hall in London, and to a performance based on that index page and the variety of work that it represented.

As I explored the music, I found unexpected harmony and structures; wonderful melodies, hymns, songs and ballads; and a strong and clear voice for the rights of men and women at all levels of society.

But who was this woman, creating music at one minute for Christian services, at another for the salon, and at the next for workers protesting in the street?

Thanks to the Conway Hall Ethical Society, at the invitation of Dr Jim Walsh, and to the efforts of researcher Carl Harrison and librarian Olwen Terris, my understanding of Flower’s music and ideas began to grow. When Holly Elson, Conway Hall’s Head of Programmes, introduced me to Oskar Jensen, a music historian, a new world opened up.

Oskar’s wide knowledge of Flower and of the musical and political history of the nineteenth century began to fill in some of the many gaps in her story. As we brought our own pieces of this fascinating jigsaw puzzle together, a fuller picture of Eliza Flower began to emerge as a highly regarded, prolific composer and radical feminist. Alongside her sister, the poet Sarah Flower Adams, she had exerted a profound influence on the move from Unitarianism at South Place Chapel in Finsbury towards humanism and the creation of the Conway Hall Ethical Society. The sisters’ contributions to the cultural and political life of the period were so important that when the chapel closed down, their portraits and archive were moved to Conway Hall, where they still hang in pride of place in the library, flanking a much bigger painting of the man usually credited with this move, William Johnson Fox. It seems this was, like so many other important historic events, a team effort. Yet gender bias eventually erased Eliza, and to some extent Sarah, from their shared history.

The beautiful drawing of Eliza discussed above holds the key to her story. When Eliza Fox, who became Mrs. Bridell-Fox and an artist, was only 11 years old, she was taken away from her mother by her father, William J. Fox, to live with him and Eliza Flower. They set up house together in the face of deep societal disapproval.

The courage this must have taken for Eliza to take up such a precarious position, totally reliant on Fox’s continued regard for her, can scarce be imagined.

Little Eliza Fox (the artist-to-be) went willingly to this new household. She loved and admired Eliza Flower, who, along with Flower’s sister, Sarah, had been part of the Fox household since their father’s death, with the then Reverend Fox as their guardian (after the break from his wife in 1834, he would eventually be removed from the Unitarian ministry). Reverend Fox, at the time minister of the congregation at the South Place Chapel, worked closely with Eliza Flower on his speeches, sermons and publications, and on the chapel’s political, spiritual, and musical direction. They grew closer, both spiritually and, apparently, in other ways, until in 1834 the break was made with Mrs Fox, who lost not only her husband, but her children too.

Not all of Fox’s congregation were happy about this arrangement, nor were some of the couple’s friends. For Eliza Flower, who by this time was a published and well-known composer, there was also the prospect that her music might be rejected by an outraged public. As a composer, her music fell into three distinct categories, each connected by her profound belief in equality and justice. I will now look at each of these categories in turn.

1. Sacred Choral Music

The hymn of Eliza’s that I first discovered turned out to be part of a book of ‘150 Hymns and Anthems’, published by Reverend Fox in 1841. Unusually, most are settings of poetry by the many freethinkers in Flower’s circle of friends – people like her sister Sarah (author of ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ with exquisite music by Eliza) and Harriet Martineau. These free thinkers expressed their ideas about morality with less emphasis on God than you might have imagined. 

Take Hymn 139, ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter’. Its lyrics are a poem by the Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliott (1781 – 1849), containing a moral that is still relevant today (recording here):

But Babylon and Memphis

Are letters traced in dust:

Read them, earth’s tyrants! Ponder well

The might in which ye trust!

…

They fell, because on fraud and force

Their corner-stones were founded.

Eliza’s setting has more in common with the drama of a Bach Passion or Handelian cantata than a hymn fit for congregational singing. As reported by South Place Magazine in September 1897,

‘South Place was at this time (1833) like other Unitarian chapels, until Miss Flower… commenced a reformation in the musical part of the services, which rivalled the attraction to the chapel of its excellent Minister. Miss Flower’s musical genius, knowledge, and feeling enabled her to exercise a kindly influence over the choir… which would not even have come into existence without her.’

Eliza was one of the first people to champion the move away from the use of music as part of a religious service in the Unitarian denomination towards secular chamber music, as she began to include art songs in her repertoire (see below). This legacy continues to this day in the Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall.

2. Art Songs

These beautiful songs often brush on the themes of love and nature, but some present a quite different approach.

Over 17 days in 1845, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden held their extraordinary Bazaar. A musical score entitled ‘Free Trade Songs of the Seasons’, with music by Flower, was published by Novello to support the Anti-Corn-Law League at this event. The texts, by Flower’s sister Sarah, combine the familiar art song trope with the struggles of poverty-stricken labourers.

These songs were also intended for the drawing room, a place where ladies could pass on their clear message to their menfolk, who had the political power to change things. The Free Trade Songs were a very particular form of protest song, full of trills and turns, recitative, melismatic passages, harmonic surprises and strong melodic lines. The final Winter song moves in a choral march towards the last category of Flower’s work: the protest songs.

3. Protest Songs

Flower wrote many of these with Harriet Martineau, a feminist author and influential campaigner against slavery. Together, Martineau and Flower formed what Oskar Jensen has described as probably the most powerful protest-song partnership of the nineteenth century in the UK. Many of their songs became popular anthems, sung by thousands of protesting workers in the streets – most of whom would have had no idea that their voices were carrying the words and music of two young ladies.

William Fox, too, provided some of the texts, my favourite being ‘The Barons Bold, On Runnymede’, which, written in 1832, has the feel of a jolly Gilbert and Sullivan patter song avant la lettre. The words encourage us to ‘join hand in hand’ and stand up against the power of kings and state, so that ‘our wrongs shall soon be righted’.

Fox continued their work after Flower’s early death in 1846, but distanced himself from her memory. It is not clear why he did this, but it may have been partly in order to avoid scandal: he was intermittently a Member of Parliament between 1847-62. He stopped promoting Flower’s music, compounding the deeply ingrained bias faced by all female composers. This is demonstrated by research recently published by Donne, an organisation promoting women in music, which shows that 88 per cent of music played worldwide in major orchestral seasons is by dead white men. In the Victorian era, composition was seen as an abstract intellectual activity, more suitable for men than women. Eliza Flower was considered an exception during her lifetime. Unlike her contemporaries, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, she was not required to subvert her talent in favour of a musical husband or brother, but was free to express herself as a progressive composer, determined to leave her own musical mark. Yet this same memory was deliberately ignored after her death by the man to whom she had devoted her life. As John Stuart Mill wrote in a review of Flower’s music in 1831,

‘There are not only indications of genius as indisputable as could have been displayed in the highest works of art, but there is also a new ascent gained, a new prospect opened, in the art itself, which we welcome as a pledge of its keeping pace with the progress of society.’

As Robert Browning wrote to Eliza about her music, ‘I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.’

Yet like many women today, impostor syndrome loomed over Flower’s life. In a letter to Vincent Novello, she tells of her meeting with ‘Mendelssohn the grand, great as his music, as great an artist, (but not so good a man)’.  Mr. Novello had encouraged her ‘to send those sacred songs to him, but I shrunk… They were however shewn to him – (not with my consent). His praise was worse than censure. I did not want opinion, but help. He said I had genius…’ However, Mendelssohn also implied that her musical ideas were irregular and would not be popular. Despite Mendelssohn, Flower was popular in her lifetime. With our project to revive her music, we hope she will be again.

Frances Lynch and the Electric Voice Theatre, together with Oskar Jensen, will be performing in Conway Hall’s historic library, Red Lion Square, London, at 19.00 on 27 October 2023. For more information and to book tickets, click here.

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In June 1643, amidst the furnace heat of civil war, Parliament issued a prohibition of unlicensed publications. This Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing rescinded freedoms that had existed since the abolition of the Star Chamber, a judicial court notorious for its abuses of power, in 1641. For two years, the unlicensed presses had churned opinion, controversy and fringe views, uninhibited by government censorship. ‘Licence’ is a complex word that points to the difficult relationship between individual and collective freedoms. It derives from the Latin licentia, which in turn is related to licet, ‘it is permitted’, but also licens, meaning ‘bold’ and ‘unrestrained’. When we drive with a licence, we are permitted a freedom by law. But if we drive licentiously, or without due restraint, we may find our freedoms legitimately encroached upon. Some liberties are granted for obedience, others are assumed by the individual regardless of established legal or social norms. In 1643, individual liberty of expression was curbed as State concern about licence in the public sphere led to the return of licensing. Those who printed without permission, or without giving an author’s name, risked having their books burnt and being sent to prison. Admittedly, this was preferable to being burnt as well as your books, which could happen under the Inquisition, and did, in some Catholic countries, through to the nineteenth century.

John Milton, now best known as the poet of Paradise Lost – itself a profound meditation on obedience and its limits – objected to the return of licensing. Why, he asked, fight to overthrow the tyranny of unrestrained monarchy and drain the cesspit of the Star Chamber, if only to usher back its spirit of control? This is the question that motivates his great prose work Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament [sic] of England, which was published towards the end of 1644, when he was 36 and already a well-known writer. True to his principles, and characteristically defiant, Milton gave his name, but published without a licence. He spoke with his actions as well as his words. Laws, he believed, could be defied where they conflicted with a strictly examined conscience. In Milton’s double revolutionary context, the importance of this cannot be overstated. The Protestant Reformation hinged on the belief that God’s light shone from within; it was not received via the external authority of Popes and bishops. Milton was also at war, in words at least, with a monarchy that, in his view, aped popish ceremony and dictatorial presumption. Absolute authority, Milton believed, exists only in heaven. Disobedience may have been disastrous for Satan and his fallen angels, and it did not work out well for Adam and Eve, but it was very much on the table for the freethinker in seventeenth-century England.

Milton had also published, the previous year, anonymously and without a licence, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Restor’d to the Good of Both Sexes, From the Bondage of Canon Law, a radical (for the time) argument that divorce, then allowed only in very limited circumstances, should be possible simply on the basis of incompatibility between man and wife. This outraged the clergy, who saw it as promoting sexual licence. Milton’s tract was first published on 1st August 1643; the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing had come into force in June. His tract was mentioned with disgust in Parliament by those arguing for censorship. Herbert Palmer, a Puritan clergyman, read a sermon to Parliament in 1644, stating that Milton deserved to be burnt for this tract.

If Milton broke actual laws by publishing Areopagitica, there is also something unruly about the form and manner of his work. He calls it a ‘speech’, addressed ‘to the Parlament of England’. But Areopagitica is not a speech – it is too long and rhetorically demanding for such purposes – and it was not given in Parliament, a forum where Milton had no licence to speak. Areopagitica first appeared in the more lowly form of a pamphlet – a transitory, rough and ready articulation, another bundle of pages in a Babel of public print.

Milton was provoking questions about the right to be heard but also, crucially, about authority. At this point, he had little licensed authority himself and was viewed in some quarters as a crackpot. His authority is thus assumed, with a verve that borders on arrogance; it is grounded in his deep learning, in the evident power of his intellect, and in the brilliance of his literary skills. He also possessed a deep conviction that truth was on his side and that truth, in the end, would shine through.

Any revolutionary power base, the thing Parliament was becoming, begins as a challenge to existing authority, in this case, to the ‘divine right’ assumed by Charles I. The very logic of such a power base, that of dissent, entails the prospect of its own undoing at the hands of the next stage of the revolution. This is the toothpaste that Edmund Burke tried to put back in the tube after 1688, arguing for a monarchical reset based on limited powers and a flavour of mystique. Arguing from the French revolutionaries’ descent to government by guillotine, he proposed a pragmatic status quo based on an aesthetically pleasing but disempowered hereditary monarch. Authority is necessary, but it cannot operate without a foundation or generally accepted centre. Burke believed that the jewels, golden coaches, and ceremony of monarchy provided exactly this.

Milton would have hated any such idea as a very real hell on earth, as a sagging and cynical crypto-papist State. He believed that authority must rest on the consent of individual reason as it works towards the discovery of truth. And golden coaches were of no use for this journey. To him, all people were part of God’s creation, endued with a conscience and a reasoning capacity to distinguish right from wrong. They were able to make their own decisions about how they should be ruled. They were not sheep to be tricked into the fold, distracted by glittering gewgaws. To the Christian fundamentalist, the answer was simple: to hold up the Bible as the answer to all questions. But Milton was too well-educated to think of Scripture as a set of rules. He knew it for what it is, a linguistic and textual smorgasbord, full of symbols, allegories, parables and poetry. It required educated and judicious interpretation, and it is this process, rather than static diktat, on which true authority must be based. A ruler justifies his authority, writes Milton, when his ‘prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking’. The key phrase here is ‘what quarter soever’; we must be ready to hear all rational voices, to plunge into the ocean of opinion in order to become expert swimmers. Those who write with evil intent, to promote popery and undermine the commonwealth, must be identified and stopped; complete freedom of speech has never been entertained by the wise. But those who are simply misguided, or plain wrong, must be allowed their say, even where – especially where – it conflicts with current official views. This is not some TalkRadio idea of ‘free speech’: ignorant people should not be taken seriously on subjects where their authority is based on nothing more than easily swayed emotion. It is to recognise that, in our fallen world, it requires great skill to extract truth from the vast deserts of error and evil that surround us. Licensing, Milton argues, will blunt our capacity for critical thought, leaving us vulnerable to seductive but dangerous words. Censorship, he writes,

‘will be primely to the discouragement of all learning and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.’

Given that some parliamentarians had been mutilated for expressing their beliefs (William Prynne, for example, had his ears ‘cropped’), Milton’s language could not be more immediate. For him, a lack of ears symbolised an urgent duty to listen. Authority should not be hereditary; it must be earned through hard work, and that work is the work of the mind, of knowing the world, and of knowing the minds of others through their words. Not the abstractions of the ivory tower, but working things through while embattled on all sides by contending voices:  

‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.’

The price of free thought for Milton was a moral obligation to go to war amidst words, to be a soldier in the cause of truth and collective prosperity. Those who silence voices will never keep the world pure. Their licence to remove the liberty of others will simply cheapen virtue by attaching it to the dubious privilege of an unexamined and unenquiring life.

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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The post Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing appeared first on The Freethinker.

One of the curious facts of history, especially since the Second World War, is how (to the presumptive embarrass­ment of Fundamentalists) “houses divided” (several nation states and famous families) have managed not only to stand up, but often do so with considerable success. For this reason I have chosen the above title for an article on the structure of the Humanist/Rationalist¹ movement in Britain. Before going any further I must apologise firstly for excluding the Irish movement from this essay, for reasons of simplicity (Ireland is a “special case”); and secondly for the long list of footnotes, which I have ap­pended separately to avoid too many digressions in the main text.

Many newcomers to this movement are at first be­wildered by the mystical trinity of abbreviations — BHA, NSS and RPA — into which it is divided at the national level. He or she eventually finds out that these are the names of the main national organisations, the British Humanist Association,² National Secular Society³ and Rationalist Press Association Ltd.⁴ Later on, the newcomer will come across another London-based body of quasi-national im­portance, South Place Ethical Society,⁵ known as SPES or “South Place” (or sometimes “Conway Hall”). Having worked out what all the abbreviations stand for, one can sympathise with the new member for asking, “Why so many organisations for the same thing? Why on earth don’t they all unite or something?”

I must confess that, in my own case, I was never much bothered by this phenomenon of division when I first joined the movement (around 1963), perhaps be­cause I have a sense of history and suspected that the various organisations had arisen as a result of different circumstances in the past; but the fact still remains that many new members do wonder why there is not now just one national Humanist society, and not only newcomers: in the last few years a number of leading Humanists have advocated a unified movement at the national level. For this reason, in particular, I venture into print in order to represent the opposing case; I contend that the present arrangement serves the cause of Rationalism as a whole (at least potentially) far better than a single monolithic structure.

To begin with, unity is not practicable for legal reasons as the law now stands. A few years ago the RPA had to break off its affaire du coeur with the old Ethical Union as the RPA had become an educational charity (which precluded it from political campaigning) and a court ruled that the Ethical Union’s aims and objects were not charit­able in law. The two bodies had jointly “floated” the British Humanist Association (as the word “Humanism” had suddenly come into vogue in the late 1950s) with a view to eventual merger if the “trial marriage” had worked out. When the RPA was forced to retire from the BHA the Ethical Union changed its name to British Humanist Association and decided, quite rightly in my view, to re­main non-charitable in order to campaign for law reforms. The National Secular Society has always been a non-charitable reform society, and therefore it, too, could not merge with the RPA.⁶

Secondly, a single Humanist national organisation simply would not work out: It would tend to be unstable, and once its leading members started quarrelling — as being human they would do — there would always be the tempta­tion for a dissatisfied faction to secede and set up a society of its own; “back to square one” again! Humanism is essentially a compromise term for a wide spectrum of ideas, including Freethought, Rationalism, Secularism,⁷ Ethicism (even Deism perhaps); it is not a monolithic, detailed ideology and for this reason people of different tem­peraments and outlook have their own interpretations of what Humanism means to them. The three national bodies, together with South Place, at present cater for nearly all tastes within the “spectrum”, and for those of us whose philosophy is more elastic membership is available in all four bodies, if we can afford it.

The existence of several national bodies provides an additional safeguard for the movement at large; it ensures that, in the event of one of the organisations “going off the rails” and making a fool of itself in the eyes of the general public, the movement as a whole can (at least partially) be redeemed by the other bodies publicly dis­senting from the actions of the first. This argument also holds good if one of the societies falls into the hands of incompetent officers or a lazy committee. Another advant­age lies in the field of political campaigning and law re­form, where sometimes two voices raised in unison sound more impressive than one, as in the case of Abortion Law reform, supported by both the BHA and NSS.⁸

Excluding for the moment South Place and the RPA, it is still feasible to suggest that the BHA and NSS, both non-charitable, politically minded bodies should merge. In fact this has already been suggested (by the BHA) and turned down (by the NSS Executive Committee). Whilst a measure of co-operation between these two organisations is essen­tial, for instance in running the Humanist Parliamentary Group, I would submit that there are a number of ob­stacles — some trivial, others more important — to their complete union.

The obvious problem is that of name: the NSS is by far the oldest⁹ of the two organisations and has a great pride in its history, and would be reluctant to abandon its title. The BHA, on the other hand, would be anxious to keep the word “Humanist” in the name of a combined body and could advance the claim of having the larger member­ship for this.¹⁰

Before dealing with the other problems I think it is necessary to examine them in the light of a number of rumours (and veiled personality disputes) that have crept in over the years. For an ideology traditionally devoted to debunking myths the Humanist movement has acquired a surprising number of its own, and I would like, if I can, to try to “lay” a few of them.

The first myth I would like to mention is one that I used to hear about five years ago from vociferous, but ill-informed, members of certain NSS branches. It was to the effect that the societies outside the NSS orbit were full of half-hearted agnostic quislings who did not have the cour­age to stand up and be counted or practice militancy. If anyone still believes this I would remind them that in the past (before the BHA existed) South Place, and particularly its leaders, never failed to speak up when it came to “the crunch”, e.g. Bradlaugh’s Parliamentary struggle; G. W. Foote’s imprisonment; discrimination against Annie Besant; slavery and the Corn Laws; not to mention RI in schools!¹¹ It is easy to poke fun at parodies of baptism, such as the SPES “Naming Ceremony of Welcome”,¹² but it should not be forgotten that under the influence of Annie Besant in the 1870s the NSS held similar “naming cere­monies” until Bradlaugh put a stop to them; and if the singing of Ethical Hymns (now discontinued) sounds ludicrous to the twentieth-century Freethinker, the Secular Songs that once filled the Hall of Science would be just as excruciating!¹³ South Place is still, of course, famous for its Sunday concerts.

The other myth is characteristic of new, often BHA-oriented members of, particularly, local Humanist groups; I have also heard it from people who should know better: the story is put around that the NSS is a pack of bigoted atheistical “Paisleyites” dedicated solely to attacking or­ganised religions, “bishop baiting”, or episcopophagy,¹⁴to use Sir Alfred Ayer’s colourful term. The simple fact is, of course, that the NSS has campaigned ever since its in­ception, on a whole host of issues, particularly birth control, Irish and Indian home rule, woman suffrage, re­form of the Sunday Observance laws, freedom of the press and against dictatorship.¹⁵ Anyone who actually reads some of the old NSS religious debates will find them fairly free of what the average Humanist understands by bigotry, and whilst I cannot say that I have never encountered bigotry in the NSS I have come across far more outside in the form of Secularist-baiting.¹⁶ I very much hope that since the NSS has wound up its branches and encouraged their members to join local Humanist groups the old ani­mosities will die down; this seems to be the case as about 75 per cent¹⁷ of the active local groups are now affiliated to the NSS as well as the BHA.

Another obstacle to NSS-BHA unification is a recent change in policy being undertaken by the BHA. The latter has decided to concentrate its policies and activity upon the advocacy of the concept known as the Open Society, and at the same time to play down as far as possible former disagreements with the churches — the “sour old tunes” of “old-fashioned Rationalists”. Let me say quite clearly that I am entirely in favour of the Open Society¹⁸ concept as an improvement upon the present situation or the Dutch “confessional” system, but I question the bury­ing of the “old tunes”. I am no prophet of the future, and for all I know the BHA may acquire a booming member­ship by attracting people to its ranks who have in the past been put off by its former attitude to religion. On the other hand, by making its more or less sole aim the Open Society the BHA may well find itself to a very large extent duplicating the aims and policies of the National Council for Civil Liberties, so splitting the “mar­ket” for both bodies, and itself breathing very thin air as far as members go. We must wait and see.

In any event, if the BHA does go ahead with its change of policy, the NSS will be left “holding the baby” as far as anti-ecclesiastical campaigning is concerned. There is, of course, a possibility that the Society could as a result of this become obsessively anti-clerical, but from my know­ledge of the officers and general membership I feel pretty certain that the NSS will continue to carry out a balanced programme of activities without going to either extreme. Christianity may be dying, but its political and financial power in this country is still a force to be reckoned with; and I feel that those of us who believe that religion is an illusion have a moral and emotional duty to say so, if only in homage to the millions who have suffered, directly or indirectly, because a lie was foisted upon Europe two thousand years ago.

Speaking for myself, I am a shameless “old fashioned Rationalist”. I believe it was Marx who said that “nothing makes sense apart from its history”, and I think this certainly holds true of Rationalism (of which Marx had rather a dim view). I do not propose that we should live entirely in the past, dwelling endlessly upon the “dear dead days beyond recall”, but the past, if good, can serve as an in­spiration to future action, and never did any movement have less cause to be ashamed of its heritage. To us has been passed the mantle (or iconoclast’s hammer!) of Paine, Carlile, Conway and Mill; Bradlaugh, Garibaldi, Robertson, and Ferrer; McCabe, Bruno, Bertrand Russell and many others — let us wear it with pride! To me the “old tunes” are the Rationalist’s Marseillaise, but let us offer the hand of co-operation and friendship (so long as it is reciprocated) to those who find them “sour”, even if we pity them their tone-deafness!

. . .  How sour sweet music is

When time is broke and no proportion kept!

So it is in the music of men’s lives! ¹⁹

1    I use the terms “Humanist” and “Rationalist” more or less as synonyms here. Like Bertrand Russell, I regret the latter’s pass­ing out of fashion.

2   BHA, 13 Prince of Wales Terrace, London, W8.

3   NSS, 103 Borough High Street, London, SE1.

4   RPA, 88 Islington High Street, London, Nl.

5   SPES, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

6   The RPA now provides a book service for its members, many of them overseas; it also holds annual conferences and is the wealthiest of the national bodies.

7   I use the term Secularism here as it is applied to the NSS; it should be distinguished from so-called Neo-secularism, the ephemeral brainchild of W. S. Ross (1844 – 1906, “Saladin”), a “respectable” agnostic with a grudge against Bradlaugh, the NSS, and contraception. This may explain why NSS members tend to speak of themselves as “Freethinkers” rather than “Secularists”.

8   Very few members of either body opposed abortion law reform; exceptions were Baroness Wootton and Leo Abse MP (who resigned from the BHA over this issue). Many of the active reformers were also Humanists.

9   Founded 1866, by Charles Bradlaugh.

10 The Executive Committee has shown a virginal modesty about revealing the NSS membership figures; however, I am reasonably certain that the BHA has the larger membership.

11 See Ratcliffe, S. K., 1955. The Story of South Place (London) or any biography of Moncure Conway or William J. Fox.

12 Harry Knight (former SPES General Secretary) tells me that this practice is now virtually redundant.

13 For some people even South Place was not ritualistic enough at one time; Stanton Coit left it to form his own Ethical Church,  now no longer in existence.

14 Literally, “bishop-eating”. Ayer has rarely missed a public opportunity of embarrassing the NSS.

15 See Tribe, D. H., 1967. 100 Years of Freethought (London).

16 The persistence over the years, and in the face of all evidence, of anti-NSS prejudice is quite remarkable. Soon after joining a local group a few years ago I attended a social evening at which it was mentioned that I was an NSS Committee member; a young lady sitting next to me was quite horrified that someone so apparently normal could be even vaguely associated with “that lot”. Last year the lady in question joined the NSS! Free­thinker readers will remember David Tribe’s recent review of Essex Forum No. 1 in which he claimed that the editorial had slighted the NSS. The editor replied to the effect that his re­marks were directed only to certain individuals in local Essex groups who were “putting off” potential new members. The editorial was so worded as to be capable of this interpretation, but it seems extraordinary to me to commence a “prestige” magazine of this type by “washing one’s dirty linen in public” — hardly a good advertising technique!

17 Fide William McIlroy, General Secretary, NSS.

18 The term Open Society is recent (1945, see Popper, K. R. [4th edn., 1962] The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. London) but the ideas it embodies go back at least to the Chartists and Victorian radicals, including the Freethinkers.

19 Shakespeare, W. King Richard II, Act 5.

See also:

The Freethinker on the British Humanist Association, 1967

‘Possessed by Not-Quite-Holy-Spirit’

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The post From the archive: ‘A House Divided’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Life

Readers of this journal, particularly the older generation, will be saddened to learn of the death of Jim Herrick in Cambridge at the age of 78.

Herrick read history and English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked for several years as a schoolteacher before emerging as a stalwart of the freethought, secularist and humanist movement and an important personality in all its organisations. He contributed as speaker, as manager, organiser and campaigner and, most of all, as writer and editor.

Over 30 years, Herrick wrote numerous pieces for the Freethinker and New Humanist, including book, theatre and cinema reviews. He also published five books: Aspiring to the Truth: Two Hundred Years of the South Place Ethical Society (2016); Humanism: An Introduction (2003); Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to David Attenborough (1995); Against the Faith: Some Deists, Skeptics and Atheists (1985); and Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The Freethinker (1982).

Against the Faith reveals the depth of Herrick’s understanding of the freethinking intellectual tradition and its roots. In his introduction, he noted the wide range of backgrounds of those who have contributed to freethought, ranging from fiery activists and politicians, like Paine and Bradlaugh, through poets, historians, scientists and philosophers (including Shelley, Gibbon, TH Huxley, and JS Mill), to polymaths like Bertrand Russell. In his review, Harold Blackham (Freethinker, June 1985) wrote:

‘Jim Herrick shows himself learned and acquainted with the ideas of his selected representatives, and is direct in expression… His temper throughout is cool and fair, and his material is controlled by judicious and perceptive comment.’

After leaving the teaching profession, Herrick’s first employment was as Assistant General Secretary of the BHA. In June 1977, he became General Secretary of the NSS, serving until August 1979. 

Herrick was assistant editor of the Freethinker from October 1975 until he took over as editor in January 1977, a post he held until to August 1981. In 1982, he published Vision and Realism, his centenary history of the magazine. In 1984, he became editor of New Humanist, and then, in 2002, literary editor, until his retirement in 2005; he also served as editor of International Humanist News.

Herrick’s association with the NSS, begun in the 1970s, continued until 2009, when he stepped down from the Council of Management.  He also served as one of the society’s vice-presidents. He was a long-term member of the Board of Secular Society and GW Foote & Co. (publishers of the Freethinker) and served as Chair of both; he was also a trustee of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist. In 1996 he received the Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and in 2022 he was the recipient of the International Rationalist Award. Herrick was a founder member of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association as well as acting as its Chair.

Herrick and the Freethinker 

According to the authors of The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain (2023, p. 239), a book recently published with the support of Humanists UK (HUK), Herrick told the research assistant Jessica Douthwaite in a 2018 interview that he left the Freethinker because he was ‘tired of all the anti-religious stuff…bashing the church’. In the concluding pages of Vision and Realism, published the year after he left the Freethinker, he recorded some of the ‘ill-feeling’ and verbal slights that had passed between some members of the National Secular Society (NSS) and the Freethinker on the one hand, and of the British Humanist Association (BHA, now HUK) on the other. The secularists spoke bitterly of ‘narcissistically Intellectual Humanists … disinclined to fraternise with working-class people.’ The humanists responded with pointed remarks about the ‘essential sterility of secularism’.

Yet in the same book Herrick also emphasised the ‘diversity’ within both the BHA and the NSS, and the fact that ‘there was overlap of membership and activists’. He characterised the purpose of secularism as ‘criticising religion and propounding social reform’. In the May 1981 issue of the Freethinker, he seemed more positive about the role of secularism, freethought and even the magazine itself than his later comments in The Humanist Movement might suggest. As he put it:

‘The major issues of our time such as disarmament, race relations, unemployment and equable sharing of the world’s resources of food and energy, do not allow us to look to the future with easy optimism. Freethought – the “best of causes” – will continue to clear the ground by exposing religions where they obscure issues and cloud thought. The secular humanist outlook… will continue to provide an essential ingredient of civilisation. Long may the Freethinker flourish.’

Herrick and humanism

Denis Cobell, NSS President from 1997 to 2006, knew Herrick for over 40 years, and regarded him as a friend. In his words:

‘Jim was not a self-publicist and was quietly spoken at meetings when matters of dispute arose. He displayed patience, kindness and objectivity. He was committed to what was once known as “the best of causes” and always went well beyond his duty.’

Herrick’s own view of humanism was poignantly encapsulated in a letter to the Guardian (24 August 2002), in response to claims by the indefatigable Giles Fraser that ‘the humanist agenda is almost entirely parasitic upon religious belief itself’. Not true, said Herrick:

‘The “unspeakable” may be experienced by humanists listening to a string quartet, or touching the depths of love, or acknowledging the puniness of self in the face of the vastness of the universe. There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’.

Further obituaries of Jim Herrick: Humanists UK

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The post ‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim Herrick (1944–2023) appeared first on The Freethinker.

The above image is of page 190 of the Freethinker, vol. 102, no. 12, December 1982. It includes a letter by Albert E. Standley, which led to the formation of Republic, the anti-monarchy campaign group. The current CEO of Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested for protesting against the coronation on 6th May 2023.

Standley’s letter was one of several published in the Freethinker on the abolition question. The meeting which it inspired is described by Smith in Abolish the Monarchy, p. 194, as follows:

‘It was on the Queen’s birthday, 21 April 1983, that a small band of republicans met in London in response to a letter in the Freethinker magazine from librarian Albert Standley. The letter proposed the formation of a society that would advocate republican ideals and promote the alternative to the monarchy.’

The text of Standley’s original letter is reproduced below:

‘ALTERNATIVES TO MONARCHY

‘Philip Harding, commenting (October) on Julia Atkinson’s article on the monarchy (August) admits that the British so-called constitutional monarchy (we don’t have a constitution!) is imperfect, but falls back upon two well-worn and unsupported assertions: “it works well enough” and “there’s nothing better to replace it”.

‘I should like to see a Republican Association formed, among whose members would surely be such rationalists as those who support the NSS and even pragmatists of Mr Harding’s mould, which would work to put forward logical and viable alternatives. It would also publicise the view that the Head of any truly democratic State must be chosen by, accountable to and removable by its people. Would anyone like to join me in launching such a body?

A. E. STANLEY

55A Netley Road, Barkingside, Ilford, Essex’

Note: Standley’s surname is printed as ‘Stanley’ in the above issue of the Freethinker. However, this appears to be an error: he is referred to as ‘Standley’ both by Smith and elsewhere, including in an article by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian, published on 28 March 1994 (‘Down the Royals! Up the Republic!’). Greenslade discusses a recent pro-republican dinner in the Cholmondeley Room in the House of Lords that was

‘organised by Republic, a little-known pressure group founded 11 years ago by Albert Standley, a librarian from Colchester, and Terry Liddle, then a second-hand book salesman from south London. Like-minded Labour party supporters and humanists, both found they also agreed that the British monarchy was not only an anachronism but a barrier to a genuinely classless and egalitarian society. So, one foggy night at London Bridge station, they decided to set up Republic.’

See also:

• Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed by Daniel James Sharp.
• Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

With thanks to Dan Bye for research into Standley’s name.

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The post The Freethinker and early republicanism: from the archive appeared first on The Freethinker.