In his short story The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self suggested that
there was, at any time, always exactly the same amount of lunacy around, it
was just constantly being redistributed. As one individual slipped into
madness, so another swam back into full control of his faculties.
Acknowledging my total intellectual indebtedness to Will, can I try another
couple of theories on you, which I have, over the years, come to believe are
undeniably true, empirically rooted and intellectually robust? The first is
the Quantity Theory of Stigma. In any society, however advanced it may think
itself, there is always just as much stigma, shame and social
marginalisation of aberrant behaviour as ever there was. Of course we’re
much more tolerant today, in the liberal West, of sexual difference,
cultural diversity, bedroom innovation and female tattoos than, say, our
Victorian forebears. And generally a good thing, too. But we’re also
significantly less tolerant than we used to be of, among other things,
asserting the superiority of one race or culture over another, taxidermy,
bare-knuckle boxing, smoking in restaurants, beating disobedient children,
states that practise capital punishment and being ruled by dukes. Again,
most of us consider these changes progress.
Although I do have a soft spot for those Victorian glass cases with stuffed
stoats posed to make it look as though they’re bare-knuckle boxing. And no
duke ever undermined the banking security of half the nation.
But, just because the stigma society now applies to certain actions is better
directed doesn’t mean that there’s any less of it about. Quite the opposite.
My second, and related, proposition is the Quantity Theory of Religious
Passion. In any society, however sophisticated its inhabitants may consider
themselves, there is always just as much religious feeling as there ever was.
Even though some of the fixed quota of stigma felt in contemporary Britain has
been allocated to conventional, “organised” religion, with even former prime
ministers unable to confess to reading the Bible without fearing they’ll be
branded a “nutter”, the pull of religion is just as strong as ever.
In times past some were drawn to religion as a way of asserting their moral
and intellectual superiority, as a means of indulging their persecuting
zeal. Preferment in the Church offered a particular type of authoritarian
mind the chance to punish error, expose heresy and assert the virtues of a
pure, unsullied and transcendent truth. This temptation, the temptation
which seduced the most sectarian Calvinists of the early Scots Church and
the officers of the Holy Inquisition, is the same temptation that has
claimed those, in our own time, such as Professor Richard Dawkins, whose
determination to extirpate the error of religious thinking recalls those who
wished to eliminate error in religious thinking.
But the reemergence of heresy-hunting in the shape of militant atheism is not
the only evidence of the persistence of religious feeling in new forms in
our own times. The desire for ritual, the need to submit to an external
authority that prescribes reformed behaviour, the pursuit of virtue through
regular attendance at a specially consecrated place where we join with
others on the same quest . . . all these impulses are answered by those who
practise yoga, go to the gym or are members of any antiaddiction or therapy
group.
Certain types of political activity, whether virtuous or not, clearly echo
religious commitment. Even those of us who believe in the urgent need to do
something about climate change can acknowledge that the environmentalism of
the deepest greens, with their reverence for Mother Earth and their
predictions of imminent apocalypse, recalls the shape of a religion.
Michael Burleigh, the brilliant historian of the Third Reich, has written
recently about the role of religion in our intellectual history over the
past three centuries. He points out that the religious impulse has changed,
“me-tabolised” in a sense, over the years but has always been there. From
the French Revolution’s attempt to replace the superstition and priestcraft
of Ancien Régime Catholicism, which led only to the creation of a new
religious cult of “Reason”, to the “political religions” of Nazism and
Communism, which themselves persecuted traditional faiths, because they saw
them as competitors, transcendent belief systems have had a perpetual hold
on the human imagination.
In that context, there is a great deal to be said for the simple faith of the
“nutter” who led us for the past ten years. Given how much religious feeling
finds expression in belief systems that have none of the moral durability of
Christianity, given how central Christianity has been to the virtues we
associate with our civilisation, given how respectful Christian nations,
Churches and clergymen are of individual conscience, there are worse things
to worry about in our rulers than a weekly churchgoing habit.
It says something about the intellectual impoverishment of Christianity’s
critics that they think a prime minister who believes in the Church’s
teachings is one who “takes his orders from God”. Far from imbuing its
believers with certainty about the wisdom, or morality, of their actions,
Christianity invites its followers to scrutinise their consciences,
recognise all the time that their motives may be mixed, their unaided reason
faulty, their enterprises fallible. By guarding mankind against the
temptations of a totally utilitarian world view, Christianity ensures that
an alternative ethical tradition survives, which guarantees real pluralism
in any major moral debate of our times.
The real nuttiness in our society is that an open commitment from a public
figure to organised Christian religion is now seen as shameful, while every
sort of faulty moral reasoning from other sources is accorded grave respect.
It doesn’t need a prodigious level of sanity to see we’d be mad to make
Christianity even more marginal than it is today.
Where to find the next England coach
Perhaps I should add another Theory. The Quantity Theory of Inanity. Which
holds that whoever happens to be England manager will utter precisely the
same amount of tosh about his fate, and England’s, whatever the result.
The now-departed Steve McClaren certainly shared with Sven-Göran Eriksson a
talent for banality of utterance that made Alan Partridge appear like Isaiah
Berlin. But now they’ve both gone, can I ask for an end to inanity at the
FA? I claim no special knowledge of, or insight into, football. A few
scattered Saturdays at Pittodrie don’t equip you to compete alongside Oliver
Kay or Matt Dickinson. But I knew, and wrote here, that Steve McClaren would
prove useless as England’s manager, and the FA was emphasising its own
inadequacy in appointing him. And so it came to pass.
Why we don’t simply pay the next England manager by results, with a minimal
salary bolstered by a big bonus for every victory, and a handsome sum for
qualification, is beyond me. But the biggest puzzle in my mind is why
there’s no acknowledgement that the two best managers in British football –
Alex Ferguson and Alex McLeish – are Scots. Of course I’m biased, but the
facts show that they are, respectively, our best club and our best national
coach. Maybe it’s time England got proper leadership at last – from north of
the border.
Touch of evil
Returning to theology before I go, I just wanted to ask readers if I’m right
to consider the following evil. While I was window-shopping the other day, a
grown man tried to feed my dog his lit cigarette for amusement, laughing
when I looked down to discover that he was not petting Mars but shoving a
smouldering butt towards his mouth. What else is such casual cruelty but
evil? Evil in a minor key, yes, but still the purest malice . . . or am I
wrong? Whatever it was, the memory of it leaves me inexpressibly saddened .
. .
— Michael Gove is MP for Surrey Heath
