A Cold Wind Blowing for Liberals

It’s not an easy time to be a liberal. Wherever I look, I keep coming across a seemingly endless stream of writers, preachers, commentators and pundits who want to impose their particular philosophy, theology, politics or opinion on the rest of the world.  Being of liberal persuasion, of course, I must accept that this is their choice and I do not want to diminish that choice or their freedom to express it in any way, but frankly, it is depressing.

In the midst of them proclaiming their call to others to toe the line, there is often an implicit (or explicit) criticism of anyone who advocates a more open-minded approach.  It is OK to ‘agree to differ’ in principle, but in practice, attempts are made to bludgeon others into submission by appeals to authority, interpretations of sacred texts, tribal identity or fear. As a Christian, for instance, I find it particularly dismaying to find other Christians highlighting the sufferings of our ‘tribe’ to the exclusion or marginalisation of the sufferings of others.

What wars and atrocities have been perpetrated by individuals advocating and embracing a ‘live and let live’ attitude to life?  I can’t think of many, while a queue quickly forms in my mind of the limitless suffering caused by religious, political and nationalist zealots who have insisted that they, or their tribe, must hold sway.

Nothing, it would appear, escapes the vision of those scanning the horizon for areas to control: what jokes we can tell, what understanding of God we can have, what doubts we can harbour, who we can be intimate with. Even the recent fundraising fad of the ‘ice-bucket’ challenge has attracted the ire of those who would like to tell us how, when and for whom we ought to raise charitable funds. As for having a bit of fun along the way….God forbid!

I must, however, shoulder my liberal burden, set my face against the prevailing winds and accept that everyone who tries to tell me how I ought to live has got a right to do so and, with as much courtesy as I can muster, I shall listen to what they have to say. And then, having weighed their words of counsel, I shall make up my own mind and go my own way

What’s that I hear? Ah yes, a rumble of discontent, muttering that I am simply trying to impose my liberal approach on others in the same way as other try to impose their illiberal approach on me. Not so; I am not telling anyone to be or to do anything. I am merely stating what is on my mind. Go ahead, follow in the footsteps of Hitler, Stalin, the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Clan if you want to; just saying……

Christians In Glass Houses Still Throw Stones

Persecution of religious minorities, beheadings, ‘heretics’ being burned alive, repeated incidents of mutilation and torture: not the despicable actions of IS/ISIS but the stock in trade of the Christian Church in its various guises down through the centuries.

Of course the Church has also done many positive things, notably in the fields of health and education. That track-record is besmirched, however, by the existence of too many heartless institutions dominated by callous, even sadistic, individuals.  If the Church were to be given an ‘end of year’ report it might suggest that, historically, it has done quite well in the areas of health and education, inconsistently in the area of social welfare and appallingly in the field of individual liberty.

Those of us who are Christians cannot divorce ourselves from the unsavoury history of Christendom and its ongoing legacy.  There is no ‘statute of limitations’ for the horrors committed, falsely, in the name of Christ. Those who are not Christians are quite right not to let us off the hook, as if an apology or two could wipe out the misery inflicted upon countless people over centuries.

It is true that very few Christians today would wish to see the Church return to its violent and repressive ways, but our ‘enlightened’ approach owes much to the freedoms won through the progress of liberal thinking born out of the eighteenth century movement known as ‘The Enlightenment’. Initially opposed by many Christians and still bemoaned by some, it has been this largely (though not exclusively) secular movement that taught the Church to rediscover some of the attitudes that ought always to have lain at its heart. The truth is that the Church has too frequently opposed social reform, only to accept it hesitantly, eventually, and somewhat paradoxically, becoming a champion of the new status quo. Often a not-so-subtle rewriting of history is required to cover the tracks of this volte-face.

It is, therefore, with some degree of annoyance that I read and listen to statements from Christians, condemning the violent tactics of IS/ISIS, AL Qaeda and the Taliban.

Of course, what these groups have done, and continue to do, is appalling and has no place within any society.  Of course, their influence and development ought to be opposed.  What Christians have no right to do, however, is to leap on their moral high horses, claiming the ethical high ground as if the tactics of IS/ISIS and others are strangers to their own religious history and culture.

We must, by all means, oppose the horrors that are unfolding daily, but it behoves us to do so with an attitude of repentance for our own history. Truly, ‘there, but for the grace of God….’

How Much Reality is Too Much?

In the wake of explicit footage showing atrocities committed by ISIS/The Islamic State, I have been pondering the question: how much reality ought news media broadcast?

Mainstream TV channels seldom, if ever, show individual deaths or extreme personal violence in news reports, even though distant explosions from deadly air-strikes are deemed to be acceptable for broadcasting.  The same channels will also sometimes air extremely graphic images late at night in news-based documentaries. The rationale appears to be that most adults find viewing extreme violence objectionable or harmful and ought not to be exposed to it; those who do not have such objections can search it out either in ‘special’ programmes or on the internet.

There are many concerns involved in broadcasting graphic violence: respect for victims and their families, fear of glorifying violence or desensitising people to it, distaste of giving publicity to violent groups or encouraging voyeurism; none of which ought to be readily dismissed.

At the same time, I have a nagging worry that those of us who live in ‘the West’ are too easily shielded from the harsh realities of life and death that millions of people face every day; we know little of the direct consequences of war and inter-communal conflict. We have had our share of war and barbarism in the past, of course, but for the greater part our current exposure to violence comes from films and TV dramas. Paradoxically, the more graphic the violence is in these media, the less realistic it is likely to be.

One of the most shocking things about real violence is its banality: people are not flung back by the impact of bullets; most often they just slump to the ground, their lives over. People do not often go nobly and defiantly to their deaths at the hands of their executioners; the reality is so much more genuinely pathetic than that.

There are some acts that are so vile that to view them can only be damaging and I accept that identifying such a threshold is, to some extent, a matter for every individual. Nevertheless, wherever we set the threshold, to try to hide from the reality of conflict and war or to shield ourselves from it is a luxury that I think we ought not to afford ourselves.

This does not mean that we ought to chase down every graphic image; it does suggest, however, that we ought to expose ourselves to enough of the reality of violence to enable us to EXPERIENCE its horror. That way, we might be motivated to do more about countering it and alleviating the suffering it causes others, however distant they might seem when viewed on our TV screens.

WW1 + 100: What is There to Commemorate?

I have found almost everything to do with World War One intriguing ever since, as a child, I first saw my grandfather’s campaign medals.  Like many Irish men he fought in the British Army during the First World War, receiving medals that he never wore: on his return home, he promptly fought against men clothed in the very uniform he had been wearing a few months previously.

As a keen amateur historian, I have been looking forward for some time to the various centenaries that will fall between today and 11^th November 2018 in the expectation that there will be many fine new books to read and DVDs to watch. The nature of my interest in the period has changed over the years, however, from schoolboy fascination to adult disquiet, prompting me to ask, what exactly is it that we are commemorating?

Few wars have been romanticised quite like the First World War.  The very things that made the war horrific: trenches, machine guns and poison gas have been turned into literary and cinematic backdrops for tales of valour, despair, loss and glory.  All of this, of course, began even before the first shots were fired and continued throughout the war in the writings of poets and diarists.

Seldom have perception and reality been further apart than during the years leading to the conflict. From poet-officers to colliery-soldiers, war was welcomed as some form of ritual national-cleansing: an opportunity to escape mundane life in order to follow and to achieve greater things. In the end all that was achieved were millions of casualties and an ill-conceived ‘peace’ that laid the foundations for the emergence of totalitarian fascist and communist regimes across Europe culminating in the even greater horrors of the Second World War. Further afield, it set in motion the cynical carving-up of the Middle East, the ramifications of which are being felt today by millions of victims of violence in Palestine, Syria and Iraq.

Ultimately, what we are commemorating today is a terrible historic catastrophe created by a mixture of idealism, nationalism and commercial greed that was every bit as noxious as the gas that poured over no-man’s land. Evocative as thoughts of ‘a lost generation’ might be, there ought not to be any attempt to paint the war as being noble.  It was nasty, wretched and deadly, causing untold misery; just like all wars.

If a lesson is to be learned from 1914 it ought to be that we will never again allow politicians, the media and rampant nationalism to lead us over the brink into war…. yeah, sure!