Democratic Ventriloquy

Somebody – of course I can’t recall who – once remarked that one of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s great abilities was ventriloquy, the ability to speak in the voices of others. When he found himself, for instance, in the position of interlocutor between two opposed viewpoints, +Rowan would typically listen to one side, then say something like ‘So what I think you’re saying is …’ and the party would hear their position described back to them, but in a deeper, richer and more nuanced form than they would have thought of themselves. ‘Yes – yes, that is what I think’, they’d conclude, flattered, and, once this process had been repeated for their opponents, everyone would emerge from the conference having reached some sort of common position, but not sure quite how it had happened.

There was an echo of that in Dr Williams’s Reith Lecture on ‘Freedom of Worship’, delivered a couple of months ago but which I listened to last night. His case is that ‘freedom of worship’ can’t simply refer to ritual practice, but the ability to shape your life after the religious convictions that those practices imply – ‘the integrity of actual physical witness to belief’ – and this is where negotation is required with a secular society in which such practice is marginal and open to misunderstanding and perhaps hostility. Behind conflicts over particular demands by religious people to behave in a specific way, or to be exempted from acts which may be legal but which go against a conscience informed by a religious imperative (a doctor wanting not to be involved in abortions, for instance) – is, +Rowan insists, a reference to a rationale for moral action which is neither just individual choice nor the will of the majority, and it is only this sense of a transcendent value-judgement (whether based in religious belief or not) which has the power to challenge society and move it forward.

This is where the ventriloquy comes in. Dr Williams takes the viewpoint of stroppy believers, whether conservative or progressive, and translates it into a general form a secular world might understand:

when the religious believer says: “I claim the right to dissent because I claim the right to shape my life according to convictions that show me how things really are,” such a person is in effect saying to the majority or consensus view: “Give me some arguments to justify your view that go beyond the sheer weight of numbers and what most of you happen to feel.” The power of numbers and of shared feeling may guarantee that something becomes and remains technically lawful, but if lawfulness itself is no more than what the majority happens to be happy with, there will never be a rationale for criticism and resistance, there will never be a process of further learning.

Religious belief may very uncomfortable, and not progressive at all, but its existence and licensing by a society which does not, and arguably never has, lived by its deep convictions, ‘guards against absolutizing the status quo’. Even ‘mere’ worship, worship in its familiar sense, suggests Dr Williams, is of use precisely because it serves no obvious, rational purpose and opens the believer to possibility and imagination. ‘The freedom of the contemplative Carmelite nun to gaze in silence at the altar for an hour’ turns out to be the core of liberty itself – he argues.

Once the audience had shaken itself clear of the spell the wizard had cast, several members tried to tie him in to their agendas. They wanted more, something more specific, more concrete. An Evangelical Christian woman wanted a harder line on the ability of Christians to worship where they are a minority, not hearing Dr Williams say exactly that; a journalist argued that most of the world’s problems were ‘non-negotiable’ and wanted to know what the bishop thought we should actually do? You fight, basically, he answered: Ukraine is right to resist invasion. Evil should not be 'indulged, included, or yielded to'. No ambiuguity about that. For my part, I’m convinced the ability to ventriloquise, at least in the imagination, is central to democracy, if you see that form of social organisation as a conversation aiming at solving problems of communal management, and not just a battle that one side can win or lose. A little more talk and a little less action: then the action we take might be less damaging.