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What happens to the Kingdom of Heaven when God is killed?
A book that I, along with tens of thousands of children and other adults, have been waiting for with great impatience for three years, has just appeared. I have it on my desk; the fact that I have been able to get hold of it a little before its publication next week is one of the few ways in which I have been able to impress my 13-year-old son.
It is called The Amber Spyglass, and is the final volume of a trilogy by Philip Pullman, called His Dark Materials. The first two books were called Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife.
Supposedly children's books, they have a cult following among adults as well as children. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the (to me inexplicable) Harry Potter phenomenon, I feel sure they would also have had a mass following. Even so, Northern Lights has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in Britain and The Subtle Knife nearly 100,000.
These days, there is very little new fiction that I find myself really longing to read, and there are still fewer children's books that captivate me. Harry Potter has left me cold - and my son, too. The Philosopher's Stone, with its schools for young witches and wizards, seemed narrow, out-of-date and snobbish, and written largely in cliche.
Philip Pullman's writing is of an entirely different kind. It is both powerful and subtle. His range of ideas, of plot, of place and of sensation is quite dazzling. He conjures up universes of enchantment and strangeness; there are parallel worlds, mysterious atomic particles, powerful witch queens, armoured bears, stray children, strange experiments, shamans, explorers, ravenous ghosts, waterbound clans of Gyptians, ordinary people in recognisable suburbs and oddly old-fashioned scholars in a not-quite-recognisable Oxford.
Everywhere there are archetypal figures, such as the wounded healer, the reluctant bearer of an all-powerful weapon, the child chosen to choose a pre-destined fate, and borrowings and reworkings of all the great myths, including a radical reinterpretation of the biblical story of the Fall. Everything is disorientating and strange, yet there is an underlying familiarity. It is a remarkable achievement.
I came to know these books simply through reading them aloud to my son. So it comes as a great surprise to discover that they have been controversial, and to realise that this new book will be the most controversial of all. I failed to understand, being godless myself, that they would be seen as a serious attack on organised religion in general, and on Christianity in particular. I did not see the repressive, Church-like magisterium of the first two books in such a literal way.
However, an article in the Catholic Herald recently described the first two volumes as "far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry [Potter]" and "a million times more sinister". If the moderate Catholic Herald says that, I shouldn't be at all surprised if there weren't bonfires in preparation across the Bible Belt in the United States.
This isn't just a knee-jerk Christian objection to nasty fairground booths, Ouija boards or the I Ching. It is entirely reasonable: Philip Pullman is genuinely, deeply opposed to organised religion and has said that he "would be happy to be denounced from pulpits across the land".
He believes that religious organisations and churches pervert or ossify the original teachings of religious leaders, and that organised religion means the Inquisition, witch trials, burning of heretics and the evils of religious fundamentalism generally - including, no doubt, the Catholic Herald's little reference to burning his books.
In the third book, God is killed, rather ignominiously. What interests Pullman, and he has made this explicit elsewhere, is what happens to the Kingdom of Heaven when the King dies, when God is dead. The challenge, he thinks, is to reclaim a vision of Heaven from the wreck of religion, while accepting that we are the products of evolution, that evolution is blind and that the universe is indifferent to our presence.
I entirely agree with him, as a godless scientific materialist. How does one find meaning, and all that goes with a sense of meaning, in our material world? Its exotic beauty and mystery are not quite meaning enough. But I don't think Pullman's answer is quite meaning enough either. He wants to substitute for the old, repressive, hierarchical Kingdom of Heaven a new Republic of Heaven.
That might be intellectually interesting, but the idea does not work very well artistically in the novel. The heroine, after all her astonishingly brave adventures, after her great-spirited sacrifice and after all the mysteries she has seen uncovered, is left saying: "We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we've got to study and think, and work hard . . . and then we'll build . . . the Republic of Heaven". The End.
This third book is frostbitten in parts by the freezing fingers of didacticism; overt didacticism is death to art; the magic of stories is too elusive for moralising. All the same, there is no one anywhere near as good as Philip Pullman in this genre; this was well worth waiting for.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 21, 2000 | Comments (0)
The Indignation Industry has no interest in righting wrongs
The famous cry of the legendary Dr Heinz Kiosk: "We are all guilty!", needs updating. We were all guilty, of course, as Peter Simple's wonderful comic creation pointed out so long ago, and we are all guilty still, but we are now something else as well. We are all indignant! Surrounded on all sides by sexism, racism, ageism, species-ism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia and arachnophobia, as well as all sorts of other thought crimes too numberless to mention, but of which we are all most guilty when we least admit it, how can we be anything but deeply indignant?
The great thing about indignation is that, unlike guilt, it is pleasurable. It provides intoxicating floods of righteous excitement, even (oddly enough) when it is directed at oneself. That was one of the great insights of George Orwell's Animal Farm: people seem to enjoy castigating themselves for thought crimes that they hardly knew existed and of which they never imagined themselves guilty.
Indignation also provides the dubious pleasure of tribalism; it divides the world into the righteous and the unrighteous, into Them and Us; I can't help smiling at the deeply discriminatory attitudes struck, with sublime self-contradiction, by the anti-discrimination lobbies.
Indignation does not only provide pleasure, however; it also provides employment. This country is in the grip of a huge and growing Indignation Industry; there is an immense army of commissions and quangos and workshops and quality assurance teams and guidelines committees and interdisciplinary evaluation groups and re-evaluation advisory bodies and joint consultative boards, all in hot and indignant pursuit of an "ism" of some kind - heterosexism, racism, handicapism, anything.
The time and public money wasted on travelling to and from quite unnecessary talkfests, to share largely meaningless jargon with networks of colleagues, is shocking. The explanation lies in a hidden, and perhaps a barely conscious, agenda. These pointless groupuscules have one thing in common; they appear to want to right wrongs (real or imaginary), but what they are really looking after are their own jobs and their own futures. This industry feeds on itself; it can have no real interest in seeing an end to the wrongs it is employed to detect and denounce.
That is the only conclusion one can draw from this week's ludicrous report from the Runnymede Trust. Offensive and absurd though it may be, however, it is only the most recent in a long series of idiotic proposals put out by the Indignation Industry; many of them have already been put in place.
The Parekh report advocates, among other things, elaborate new legislation; an inter-departmental advisory forum on race relations and cultural diversity; citizenship education, stressing understanding of "equality difference"; a national cultural policy (whatever that might be); and requirements on broadcasters and political parties to audit ethnic staff and to have quotas. There is only one thing that cannot be denied by anyone - it would create masses of new jobs.
That strikes me everywhere I look in the public sector. There seems to be an absolute frenzy of expensive, time-consuming self-examination, followed by even more expensive and time-consuming guidelines and monitoring. At a simple level, it is very inhibiting; it stops people doing their jobs.
The recent police guidelines on language added 16 pages to the terrible mountain of paperwork that divides our officers from our criminals. The general idea was that almost anything a policeman might say is probably offensive to somebody, including the questions "Are you married?" or "Do you have a girlfriend?" - supposedly offensive to homosexual men.
I should have thought the whole thing was deeply offensive to the police, but then they are Them, not Us, in Indignation Industry terms, and institutionally guilty, too. I don't know how many people were employed in producing this absurd document, or how many thousands more will be needed to make sure it is observed; I do know that 18 different organisations contributed to it, no doubt at public expense.
I feel positively weighed down, sometimes, by the desperate stupidity of it all. It is rampant in the social services culture, in my direct experience. Examples litter my desk. One is from the Sun of last November, when Islington council's magazine Women's News printed the following announcement: "OLDER LESBIANS: A conference is being organised about housing for older lesbians on 4 December." Preposterous images abound of council employees sitting "inclusively" over mugs of coffee, in heated and carpeted council offices, discussing non-existent "issues" at the direct expense of the poor and the needy outside in the cold.
The disability lobby is constantly trying to rewrite English in the name of righteous indignation - a trick that the Indignation Industry always tries to play (as with the linguistic nonsense of "institutionalised racism") - and to bully newspapers into using its illiterate and politically loaded terminology.
Perhaps this silliness is sincere, perhaps not. But the real point, at the bottom of it all, is that there is lots of paid employment in all this Ministry of Truth gobbledegook. Tragically, it doesn't only create employment for them, but it also inflames unnecessary bitterness and misunderstanding among the rest of us. If the next government wants to cut back divisive, needless waste, the Indignation Industry is the place to start.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 14, 2000 | Comments (0)
A true Tory wants less government - not more
Want a police record? Vote Conservative! We'll make sure we help you get one! These are hardly election-winning slogans, but they are the unmistakable message of the drugs policies Ann Widdecombe proposed at the Conservative Party conference this week - and sticks to in her interview with this newspaper today. Her cry for zero tolerance of drugs, and automatic fines (and automatic police records) for possession of even the tiniest amount of cannabis, would make offenders of half of us, particularly of the young and ethnic minorities that the Tories are trying so hard to reach. A quarter of the entire adult population, and nearly half of those between 16 and 21, have tried cannabis, quite apart from those who like something a little stronger. If I were William Hague, I would be beside myself with fury at what she has done.
I myself, as a mere Conservative fellow traveller, feel both enraged and embarrassed. It is impossible to defend this kind of ignorant, authoritarian nonsense to civilised people; it makes one ashamed of the party and of the word Conservative. Just when it looked as though the Tories were finally emerging from the mists of obscurity and confusion, just when Mr Hague's dazzling performance on Tuesday had made him seem not only very clever but also, at long last, charismatic, Miss Widdecombe suddenly reintroduced "something of the night". The party is very lucky that the media's attention has been temporarily distracted by more important matters in Belgrade and Jerusalem, but this is not going to go away. This will make the Conservatives unelectable; something will have to be done.
It may be that something is already being done; the day after her outburst, Miss Widdecombe looked miserable on the platform at Bournemouth. She also received a powerful rebuke from the police, who quite rightly said they couldn't be doing with such a policy. She must go. The irony is that Miss Widdecombe appears to be an exceptionally honest and honourable person, especially for a politician. That may be why she's so popular. And some of her other law and order policies are perfectly reasonable. But in what she said about the possession of drugs, she displayed the truly unacceptable face of authoritarian Conservatism.
It seems to me that Conservatism should be about less government, less intrusion, and not more; and, after all, that's what they've been saying at Bournemouth all week. Conservatism is about personal freedom and personal responsibility. It is not for a Conservative government to permit, however unwillingly, a reluctant PC Plod and his sniffer dogs to burst into our houses in search of a relatively harmless weed - a weed, incidentally, that is very much less harmful than tobacco.
Besides, what has the degree of risk got to do with the government anyway? Is Miss Widdecombe the kind of Conservative, or would she be the kind of Home Secretary, who would like to keep all risky substances out of our private hands, including paint stripper and glue? Would she like to control our sex lives, because of the risks of sexually transmitted diseases? Would she, like poor misguided Virginia Bottomley, like to control the number and size of the potatoes we eat?
It is one of the most striking things about authoritarians that they mislead people - or are themselves misled - about risk. A certain kind of controlling temperament likes to eliminate risk, and that includes, of course, preventing other people from taking risks, if necessary by exaggerating them. So the anti-drugs authoritarians tend, against all the evidence, to suggest that all drugs are equally awful. Anyone with any knowledge of the subject knows that isn't true. I know lots and lots of people who have taken not only cannabis, but amphetamines, cocaine and even heroin for fun for years, and without becoming addicted; today they are pillars of society, educated people, responsible middle-aged citizens, still "turning on" occasionally. The truth is that drugs are not equally awful, and that they affect different people very differently.
My generation learnt that people were lying to us; teenagers today, in their turn, also know that people are lying about the risks of drugs; they're told that ecstasy will kill them, but they know the risks are infinitesimally small, because they know that millions of tabs are downed every weekend and hardly anybody ever dies. As the excellent Runciman report on drugs pointed out earlier this year, cannabis, though not harmless - of course - "is less harmful to the individual and society than any of the other major illicit drugs, or than alcohol and tobacco".
Runciman also pointed out that the most dangerous message is that all drugs are equally dangerous. "When young people know from their own experience that part of the message is either exaggerated or untrue, they will discount all of the rest." The wider point here, for the Conservative Party, is that what applies to drugs applies to politics generally; when young people know that part of the message is either exaggerated or untrue, they will discount all the rest. So will large numbers of other, older people who, unlike Miss Widdecombe, know something about drugs. The rest of Conservatism will be widely discounted along with Ann Widdecombe's uninformed, unworkable and un-Conservative proposals. Is anybody listening?
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, October 07, 2000 | Comments (0)
