My debt to dissent.

Last Friday I greatly enjoyed Evensong at King's College, Cambridge. Next Saturday I am attending a Symposium at Dr Williams' Library. How are these related?

I grew up in a home that attended the local Congregational Church, and of course I went too. The Congregationalists (now the United Reformed Church) are inheritors of the Dissenting tradition that was prominent in English religious and political life from the late 16th to the early 18th Centuries. They separated themselves from the worship of the Church of England; their opposition was focused around the Act of Uniformity of 1662. Generally they became known as Non-Conformists.

Dissenters objected to prescribed forms of worship and church government. They asserted that no statute could over rule an individual's conscience. However the precedence given to conscience could not but lead to further division. I remember being somewhat aghast, in my late teens, to discover that the local Church Meeting, in the Congregational Church in my home town, was supreme – if it didn't like the message that the Minister they had appointed was preaching, they could simply dismiss him. Doctrine, it seemed to me, was decided at the whim of the Church Meeting, while I had grown up to love and revere the saintly-seeming men whose task it was to interpret scripture to us, for task which they had been uniquely trained. Surely, I thought, what the bible taught could only be one thing, and advanced study would reveal what that was.

Looking back from 50 years on, it isn't hard to see how later I gravitated to the Church of England, where doctrine filtered down from above and the people learned what they clergy had to teach them.

My interest these last few years has been grabbed by certain philosophical ideas: liberty, free speech, rights and ethics. These come together in political philosophy, and I went back to Thomas Hobbes, the father of English political philosophy, and read quite a lot of philosophical authors and a fair bit of history as one cannot understand an idea without understanding the circumstances in which it grew. Some figures jumped out at me, as I worked to understand how the values that we now take for granted were originally expressed and developed. Hobbes himself, John Milton, John Locke, Richard Price, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill were the most prominent among these. And a surprisingly large number of them were part of, or derived from, or owed something to, the dissenting tradition. That isn't to say that there were no Anglicans who made an important contribution to the development of new ideas. Bishop Edward Stillingfleet played a prominent role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, for example. But it was the Dissent that provided the soil in which the radically democratic ideas of Richard Price, the minimal government beloved of William Godwin, the thrust against censorship of John Milton all put down their roots.

Locke's background was Puritan, as indeed was Milton's, while Paine, Wollstonecraft, Bentham and Mill's rejection of Anglicanism went further until it was a rejection of religion per se.

For an old Anglican, who still loves the ritual and music of the great Anglican churches, this was a bit of a shock, until I started to think about it. Take for example the day when, as a young curate, I found that we were celebrating Mass on the Feast of Charles, King and Martyr. What's that? I wasn't in a position to question it at the moment, but I felt a jolt. Charles I was rather far from being a Saint who died for his faith. He was the ultimate autocrat, a believer in his own divine right to rule and to require obedience. He fought bitterly to maintain his superiority and to deny popular rights, such as government by elected representatives, which we take for granted. The God he worshipped and the religion he valued were the things that underwrote his power. Yet for several years I regularly kept the Feast of Charles, King and Martyr.

Or take something more recent – the incredible surroundings of King's College Chapel, wonderful singing, that amazing roof, candle light... and the collect of the day. This time it was the Feast of St Simon and St Jude. The prayer of the day asks that we be “joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee”. Which is to say that the dogma these men may have promulgated (and apart from the Epistle of St Jude, itself of very doubtful provenance, there is no evidence of anything they may have said or done or taught) about 2000 years ago, in superstitious ignorance of everything we have since discovered, should be the basis of our common belief and practice today.

Listening to the collect of the day in King's I was strongly reminded of the thrust of dissent, claiming freedom of conscience and the liberty to do as we believed right, opposed to the claim for unyielding authority demanded by the dead hand of Anglican teaching.

There is nothing to be gained from yielding to authority, especially when it is not based on the least shred of evidence, and everything to be gained from exploring where new ideas lead. It is that dissent which has brought us to the values and privileges we enjoy today and against the loss, and the misuse, of which we must be for ever on our guard.

Claude's Progress

This weekend it will be 7 months since Claude moved in. There have been lots of issues, but overall he is a healthier, more confident and more relaxed dog. Leaving the living room (apart from going out the back way to the garden or for his walks) has remained a problem for him. He clearly had conflicts, and without making them worse we tried to show him it was okay to step over the threshold into the hall.

Yesterday Bonnie came home and found him relaxing on a rug in the hall. It's hard to believe it's taken him 7 months to take the chance. I think he knows now that he is not likely to get into trouble for passing doorways. We feel the Little Man is making progress, and learning to trust us.

This evening he was more than usually playful in the park. He ran, he came to me to be scratched, he greeted his friends. The timid, thin, shy, dog that moved in with us seemed to be a totally different animal to confident playful Claude.

So we came home and I went to my computer to attend to some stuff. When I came down, Claude was nowhere to be seen: not on his mat, not lying in his favourite spot, and not in the hall. It took me a moment or two to spot him.

Having not shown the least interest in the last 7 months, Claude was dozing on the sofa. He has finally, we think, decided that he's at home, and may as well enjoy all the benefits. We fussed him, so he knows he's not in trouble, then we suggested he'd probably be better somewhere else, as we needed the sofa, and he went. I paraphrase - that was the outcome, though some cross words were spoken by both sides in the process. The point we want to get to is that he feels free to use the sofa - the cover was made for Laddie after all - but that he knows he has to give it up if we want it.

He's rather a handsome dog these days, and since today, also for the first time, he licked my ear, I guess we may be friends one day after all.

Freedom to advise?

A report on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14406818) suggests that there is a small but rising incidence of HIV sufferers being persuaded by Christian Pastors to give up their drug treatment and rely on prayer. Some people have died as a result.

As far as I can see, there is a very large and growing number of actual clinical cases where people have received drug treatment and been enabled to live many years and enjoy a reasonable quality of life too. But on the other hand there is not a single authenticated case of cure through prayer, and meanwhile those people who do not take the drugs to control HIV die of AIDS.

Therefore even if you believe, counter to the evidence, that prayer will be efficacious, stopping drug treatment is uninformed to say the least, stupid maybe. To deliberately convince someone to stop drug treatment and rely on prayer instead is not merely uninformed, it is playing with people's lives and indirectly hastening their death.

I suggested on Facebook that a Pastor who persuades one of his followers to take this course should be prosecuted. Well, I suppose that's a bit wild. As far as I know there is no law against talking someone into risking their life in that way. One of my friends suggested that even if there was no-one would be prosecuted because the Human Rights Act would defend their choice to live by their culture. I'm not so sure there is a Human Right to persuade someone to behave in such a way, but it is true that main-stream churches have gotten away with hiding and harbouring criminal child abusers, so one doubts that talking someone out of taking beneficial drugs would incur the law's wrath.

As so often is the case, my mind turned to John Stuart Mill, whose work “On Liberty” ought to be read much wider, and much more attentively, than it is. Mill thought that liberty, in thought, speech and action, was an essential condition for human growth; that no-one could reach their full potential without it. If your liberty is circumscribed, so is your growth. There ought only be, Mill thought, one check on liberty, and that was causing harm to others. The problem, of course, is that it all depends on how you understand causing harm. Does getting allowing your child to get hooked on smoking tobacco by not showing him the error of his ways and a good example? After all, the habit will, very likely, shorten his life. Or what about feeding one's child hard drugs? In that case the harm is even more certain. Or what if the person affected is not a child but an adult with the right and ability to make their own decisions on the subject?

Pastors are almost always persuasive speakers, and they have been vested with great authority. It seems to be the case that once someone has chosen to follow a particular pastor, they have in some sense handed over their decision-making capacities to him. He can then persuade and convince them into all sorts of courses of action, some benign or helpful and others potentially malignant and harmful, both to the individual and to society at large. So in the kind of cases quoted by the BBC, it seems to me that their actions, their use of words, falls well within the definition of causing harm, and not so far short of manslaughter.
I did wonder whether if we were starting again with the criminal code crime could be defined simply as causing harm to another, with a range of punishments according to the degree of harm caused – a black eye might attract a lesser penalty, and causing death, whether by crazy driving, pushing drugs, deliberate murder, or recklessly lethal advice from a position of power, a more severe one.

But we're not starting again, and people with high status will be enabled to get away with recklessly endangering others as they have been to date. What a shame.

Thomas Malthus

There are two sorts of reasons that everyone should study Malthus: reasons to do with argument and style, and reasons to do with his arguments, and the way society should be organised – basically, politics and ethics with a good helping of sociology.

Malthus' most famous work, An Essay On The Principle of Population, is much maligned. His solution to the problem he foresaw was to withdraw the support provided by the parishes of his time (the book was written in 1798) under the Poor Law for the relief of those who could not provide for themselves. He thought that the only effective way to control population was to encourage people not to have families that they could not support, and the way to do this was to leave them to their own devices. Poor relief only encouraged families in those that could not afford them. The problem he saw was that population tends to increase geometrically, and left to its own devices would tend to double every 25 years, while the increase in the food supply is arithmetic, and therefore will soon be outstripped by the number of mouths to feed. For reasons he could never have foreseen, it now seems that he might have had a point in seeing the problem, but his proposed solution was at best naïve and at worst downright callous and cruel. I'm pretty sure he didn't see it that way. He was a Church of England clergyman, good natured, and well meaning. He was also concerned with the truth of the matter, as opposed to what he regarded as his adversaries unfounded speculation. It's just that he could see no other way to provide for the number of mouths that would soon populate the planet.

The book discusses the issues in detail. He examines population growth from the best statistics then available, and he explains in detail why it is that agricultural output cannot keep up. He uses the example of America, where at the time there was a vast surplus of resource over requirement, as well as Europe and beyond. He discusses human nature as well as he is able. And he puts forward his solution to the problem.

Malthus was inspired by the work of William Godwin and others who believed that humanity and society was progressing inexorably towards perfection. The 2nd edition of Godwin's major work “An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice” had been published in 1796. Malthus was a mathematician, he believed as we do that policy should be based on observed facts, and what he saw around him convinced him that what Godwin said just wasn't so. So he picked up his pen.

Anyone who has an interest in social science would do well to study Malthus' case carefully. He leaves no stone unturned, and it is educational just to follow his train of thought critically and see if you agree with him, and if not, why not. A discussion group would be almost certain to be enlivened by the controversies arising from Malthus' case. It would soon range into politics, and into ethics, and into social anthropology.

Apart from this, Malthus, uncommonly for his age, writes with great clarity. His English is precise and clear. He writes to defend a case without being carried away by his feelings. He states his position politely and considers his opponent's counter-arguments in the same vein. And he is persuasive; his argument develops step by step and carries the reader along with it. It is an object lesson in how to create a case, how to argue for a cause, how to set out the facts revealed by research. It is no accident that Malthus met his adversary Godwin and that they discussed the question together on numerous occasions, dining together and disagreeing without falling out, for a number of years. Students of written English can also learn from him.

Kindle users at least have no excuse for not getting a copy – you can download it from Amazon starting from £1.73 or from www.gutenberg.org for free.