It Gets You Down

Paula, one of our pastoral assistants and a local councillor, sent me a link to a piece by former ‘grumpy Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral’ Fr Giles Fraser; I mean his status as canon is ‘former’, not his grumpiness, which seems in full flow on most of his contributions to ‘Thought for the Day’. They never fail to give me the impression that he’s telling me, personally, off. UnHerd.com is a refuge for people who feel that their voices are marginalised in current debates, which is ironic considering the exposure Radio 4 gives to both Fr Fraser and philosopher John Gray, at least. ‘I used to like Giles Fraser’, Paula mused in her email.

Fr Fraser’s article is an attack on liberalism, and a paean to Brexit, which he believes will put a spanner in the works of global capitalism and enable the UK to return to a state which values togetherness, community, tradition, and the warmth and humanity of the old working-class. It may mean we’re poorer economically, he argues, but poverty will be beneficial: we will be richer in better things.

Opening out of a story in which a silly, bewildered woman phones a GP surgery to get help to deal with her dementia-damaged father, Fr Fraser insists it’s her responsibility to ‘wipe his bottom’. I'm not going to get into his case in itself; but I see a connection between this and his adulation of what he thinks is the old working-class society whose poverty allowed a more human scale of value. There is in this something of the urge to abasement of the middle-class rebel (his old school has a cricket pavilion which is Grade-2 listed). Anyone who genuinely comes from the working class doesn’t wallow in poverty, I can tell you: we rather grip onto any material flotsam that passes by.

Also, like a lot of UnHerd’s contributors, Fr Fraser is an example of the clever person deluded into thinking that every phenomenon they see can be described by a single story. Everything is a reflection of everything else, and logic drags the commentator towards places they would once have found far from comfortable. This is what leads him to argue that Islam will save the world from capitalism, or that the metric system should be abandoned because it came out of the French Revolution and is ‘inhuman’. He goes to dinner with the extended family of the Muslim GP friend who told him the story about the woman and her father, and sees around him ‘the buzzy hub of a homogeneous society’ (is ‘homogeneity’ really a value to pursue?); he plays with the idea of establishing a new political party called ‘Home’. I’m not sure how much of this is a bit of a leg-pull; not as much as you might hope, I fear. Fr Fraser isn't an idiot: he must be aware of the resonances of a political party, even a pretend one, combining a 'socialist' respect for working-class values and a 'nationalist' view of identity.

It’s not really about him, and in critiquing his ideas by poking behind them to psychological motivations I, too, am guilty of trying to find a story that explains them in deeper, hidden terms. To be honest, I find myself conflicted between a residue of the liberalism in which I once believed and my recognition that much of it makes no sense.

It comes to a head in the field of sexual politics. I have a number of trans friends, and more who believe that the categories of maleness and femaleness don’t exist, or don’t apply to them. At the extreme end, I know people whose Facebook feeds are cascades of memes and images whose only real theme is the assertion of their right to self-determination, yet simultaneously hollowing out the content of any identity that they might choose: if (for instance) a trans man or trans woman can each present in appearance or behaviour as either a stereotypical male or female, then not only do the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ no longer mean anything, but ‘trans’ itself has no significance,  because there are no longer any conceptual boundaries to cross. Now, not only do I not think this will ultimately make anyone very happy, but since I gave up believing in liberal individualism I can’t see that an act of will can alter anything that is fundamental about who we are. Instead I concluded that what really constitutes our identity are, mainly, things we can’t control. Our individual selfhood results from negotiation between competing forces, not the discovery of something absolute inside us. Yet the old liberal in me insists that, even if my trans friends are mistaken in believing that their bodies and their pasts have no hold on their identity, nobody else has the right to tell them what they are, either. Work out your own salvation with diligence, the Buddha said.

Which brings us to kindness. What those Facebook feeds of desperate self-assertion signify is a struggle to be heard, to matter, to count, to undo hurt and damage, to plead for safety. And I so badly want to honour that. By arguing instead about what constitutes a ‘real’ man or woman we move away from practicalities and make the individual person a point in a debate rather than a soul. All those anxious UnHerd contributors squinting at the world to see the story behind it are doing the same: looking at people, each with their own stories and experiences, and seeing only moral exemplars, ideological cyphers, fuel for an argument. And you know what you do with fuel. UnHerd offers a Babel of competing narratives of the contemporary world, tethered only tenuously to what actually happens to real people; which may be why I prefer reading history - or economics, which is a form of contemporary history. In fact, I wonder whether the origins of liberalism lie less in the abstract speculations about human nature of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and more in the reluctance to damage each other humans have evolved - unless provoked by fear, an instinct which ideology organises and justifies.

Of course my argument is just such an example of an overarching explanatory device, like any other ideologue’s. And as a priest I am constrained to reach conclusions about particular areas where the demands and doings of wider society impact on the work God has given his Church to do, or vice versa. But it’s striking that Christian moral philosophy has always taken the view that seeking kindness, wet and unprincipled though it might be, is, in situations of doubt, preferable to seeking truth. The human mind is fallible and the heart deceitful: we do not always know what truth is. Kindness offers a better guide to what it might be.

(Sadly, advocating kindness-based ethics doesn't mean I am any better at it than anyone else ...)