About Friends.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) is much misunderstood today. His name is used to stand for lavish meals, heavy drinking, and indulgence in every pleasure. In fact he took a dim view of all of that, and was inclined to the simpler pleasures, one of the most important of which was sitting in his garden talking with his friends. And as he recommended drinking cold water, there would not have been any headaches the day after. For Epicurus, friends were the greatest pleasure and were not to be done without.

In Ancient Rome the rivals to the Epicureans were the Stoics. But in fact the Stoics too have been much misunderstood: Stoics and Epicureans had much in common. The Stoic philosopher Seneca liked to quote Epicurus approvingly when writing to his pupil Lucretius. And one of the things that they had in common was the importance of friends. Seneca compared a man without friends to a man without one of his hands. I've just had the pleasure of meeting up with two of my oldest friends, Gregory and Harry.

It all began in 1967 when I met Gregory in the King William IV in Hampstead. He was friendly, warm-hearted and funny. A tall man, frequently clad in a bright red sweater, he was inclined to hold court in the pub on a Saturday evening, telling stories, laughing and drinking a decent amount of Courage Director's.

Gregory is an organist, rather a fine one, certainly the best organist I have known personally, with the.possible exception of David Nield. We'd sometimes have a pint or two in the North Star in Finchley Road, then we'd go together to the church where he played. Sometimes I'd sit on the organ stool and turn the pages of his music for him, sometimes I'd lie on a pew in the dark and let the sounds of Gregory's music cascade round me. I'd grown up in a musical house, but one with rather conservative tastes. Gregory played Bach's organ music for sure, with which I was reasonably familiar already. But I had the delight of sitting on the stool turning while Gregory sent the dazzling notes of the Toccata from Widor's 5th Organ Symphony cascading round the dark and silent church. He introduced me to the wonderful music of Buxtehude and Rheinberger and others too. In the summer of the following year Gregory introduced me to someone who had a seemingly permanent smile, Harry.

One of the best memories of my entire life stems from Harry. He had contacts at Jodrell Bank and on the night of the moon landing we were there, with all the famous scientists, in front of an enormous screen, to watch the pictures from the moon and Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder.

But it wasn't all highbrow stuff. Many a Sunday night the three of us would cram into Harry's 2-seater sports car and drive across London to, sometimes, the Vauxhall Tavern, or more often the Union Tavern in Camberwell, to be entertained by the raucous comedy of London's drag scene – Lee Sutton, Alvis & Odell, Pussy & Beau and others. 

We had some adventures, we didn't always agree, but overall, the three years I was a regular in that pub with my two friends count, along with my days as a theology student when I lived in Streatham, as the happiest of my life. It's 42 years since we went our separate ways. Greg became a teacher, and now is still in demand to help youngsters struggling with A-level Physics. Harry's career in computing took him to the USA where he now lives. I continued to study, earning my living as best I could, because I cannot settle with unanswered questions in the field that most interest me.

Meeting again in the same bar, on more or less the same spot, having a few beers and talking to each other about the things that interest us somehow distilled the happiness of the late sixties into one afternoon of my late sixties with two people I treasure and whose company I enjoy even (maybe especially) when we're all expressing our views at the same time, and not always on the same topic.

It wasn't all fun. We had the fallings out one expects as well as the good times. We've all acquired the troubles of age:

Ollie: I'm interested in Richard Price
Harry: You'll have to speak up, I'm getting deaf
Gregory: (leaning forward and cupping his ear) Pardon?
And three rather elderly men fall about laughing at Gregory's weak joke.

But we continue to like each other, to enjoy each other's company, and to value what we each have to say, even when the other two are wrong. That's what friendship is about. Epicurus and Seneca were right. There is nothing more valuable in the world, no pleasure greater, than time spent with friends. I am so grateful for all my friends, and especially to Gregory & Harry for making the time to have a few beers together in the old familiar way and at an old familiar place.

Let's read Richard Price!

I am frequently struck by the applicability of Richard Price's insights to the modern world. Price was born in a Welsh village, the son of the Minister of the Chapel, in 1723. His talents were such that he went on to become not only a Dissenting Minister himself but also an adviser to the Government on finance, a mathematician deeply involved in putting Insurance on a sound footing, a moral philosopher and a nationally known political pamphleteer. Despite being a churchman he was against obscurantism and argued for liberty both politically and for free inquiry and free speech. He was convinced that the truth had nothing to fear from free rational debate and that a man's conscience could not be dictated to by anybody.

Price would be horrified by our sound-bite culture, and by the encouragement that wilful ignorance gets from religion. In his book "Review of the Principal Questions in Morals" first published when he was 35, Price argues in one place from the then recent scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton to make his case. He was a friend of Joseph Priestly, another Dissenting Minister and the discoverer of Oxygen, concurrently with and independently of Lavoisier. It was Price who published the notes of Joshua Bayes, the discoverer of Bayes' Theorem, the foundation of mathematical probability that still underlies Insurance and much else. Bayes too was a Dissenting Minister, although of a different persuasion to Price. But it is typical of Price that the differences of opinion that he had with both Bayes and Priestly did not dim his admiration of their scientific work. For Price, reason and rationality were extremely important. All three of these churchmen were elected members of the Royal Society for their contributions to science. Hard to imagine today, isn't it?

But back to our sound-bite culture in which politicians and celebrities are encouraged to give their opinions on everything under the sun on television. Price was scathing on speaking with neither thought nor knowledge. Price, a man who was never shy to think, and think hard, says, in Chapter 1 of the book mentioned above "There are hardly any subjects so plain, as not to require care and attention to form a competent judgment of them." He continued "What then must we think of those whom we continually see readily delivering their sentiments concerning points they have never considered; and deciding peremptorily, without thought or study, on the most difficult questions? If such are ever right it can only be by chance. They speak and think entirely at random, and therefore deserve no regard." I get the feeling he had a television! He then goes on to make the point that arriving at the truth of any matter is not easy. "The more we know of men, the more we find that they are governed, in forming and maintaining their opinions, by their tempers, by interest, by humour and passion, and a thousand nameless causes and particular turns and casts of mind, which cannot but produce the greatest diversity of sentiments among them and make it impossible for them not to err. There are in truth none who are possessed of that cool and dispassionate temper, that freedom from all wrong byasses (sic), that habit of attention and patience of thought, and, also, that penetration and sagacity of mind, which are proper securities against error. How much then do modesty and diffidence become us? how open ought we be to conviction, and how candid to those of different sentiments?"

The word "candid" was used differently in 1785 (two years before the 3rd edition of Price's "Review") to our use of it. In his ground breaking dictionary published in that year, Dr Johnson gives "Candid … Free from malice; not desirous to find faults; open; ingenuous" and "Candidness … Openness of temper; purity of mind" and he includes for candour "sweetness of temper". So when Price says that we should be "candid to those of different sentiments" he means that we should listen open-mindedly, without rancour and ill-will or ill-humour and give their arguments the weight they are worth and discuss differences reasonably and rationally.

Price's model, forged in the 1750s, is much needed today.

Greek Referendum

Everyone seems to be surprised, angered, struck dumb, by the decision to hold a referendum in Greece. I am personally a believer in representative government. I think it achieves the aims described by Richard Price (1723-1791) in that it will “collect into it most of the knowledge and experience of the community, and at the same time carry it into execution with most dispatch and vigour”¹. So long as the elected representatives are free men, freely chosen by the whole community, are elected for short terms and can be held to account by the electors Price thinks this is the best way to arrange for the will of the people to be carried out. To which I would add that it avoids the worst effects of short-sighted and emotive or uninformed responses to events. But in the case of the Greek decision I can appreciate the argument for a referendum as well.

Excuse me quoting Price, but I am doing some work on him at the moment and am familiar with, as well as in admiration of, his writings. Price warned that “Civil governors see themselves not as servants but as masters”². And so, it seems do foreign Politicians, Bankers and Captains of Industry who all object to consulting the Greek people and putting the deal at risk. Their fear or assumption appears to be that these people will reject the deal reached by their betters for reasons of short-sighted self interest. They don't want austerity and they don't want to pay taxes.

Price also wrote that “All civil governors are trustees for the people governed, and when they abuse their trust they forfeit their authority”³. The possible abuse of trust in question here is falsely representing the state of the Greek economy in order to join the ECU and get the benefit of Community handouts. Another possible abuse of trust is the actions of those whose mismanagement of the economy got Greece, and indeed the rest of Europe, into this state to start with. And in that event another of Price's sayings comes to mind. “Without all doubt, it is the choice of the people that makes civil governors. The people are the spring of all civil power and they have a right to modify it as they please.”⁴

A Greek commentator on the BBC this evening said something to the effect that the Greek people were not the ones who lied about the economy to get into the ECU and the Greek people are the ones who are being asked to pay for it. Everything I know about Price's thoughts on civil government indicates that he would have had the utmost sympathy with their objection to being ridden over by their political and financial masters.

Price wrote: “I am very sensible that civil government, as it actually exists in the world, by no means answers to the account I have given of it. Instead of being an institution for guarding the weak against the strong, we find an institution which makes the strong yet stronger and gives them a systematical power of oppressing. Instead of promoting virtue and restraining vice, establishing liberty, and protecting alike all peaceable persons in the enjoyment of their civil and religious rights, we see a savage despotism, under its name, laying waste the earth, unreasonably elevating some and depressing others and trampling upon every human right.”⁵ I cannot help but feel that the Greek people are the ones who are paying for the misuse of power by others, and would be an excellent example of the situation that Price had in mind 200 years ago.

Just maybe George Papandreou had in mind that “Civil government is an expedient for collecting the wisdom and force of a community or confederacy in order to preserve its peace and liberty against every hostile invasion, whether from within or from without.”⁶ Maybe he thought that it was right to collect the wisdom and force of the Greek people, faced as they are with such an awful prospect, that he is their servant, not their master so he should get their authority, and maybe he also thinks that when the case is put before them they will act honourably and with responsibility and support his deal and as a result bring some social and political peace to the ravaged nation.

Notes:
1. Two Tracts, in Price Political Writings, Ed D.O.Thomas 1991, p80
2. Op cit p89
3. A Fast Sermon in Thomas Op cit p106
4. Two Tracts Op cit p88
5. Two Tracts Op cit p89
6. On the Importance of the American Revolution in Thomas Op cit p122

Eating Out

With all the visitors we've had lately we've tried a few restaurants and I thought people might be interested in the results.

First a place that isn't really a restaurant, but of which Bonnie is very fond and all our American visitors have loved: The Old Forge at Cranford (http://theoldforgecranford.com/). It's what it says, an old forge, restored into a tea-shop. The food is very pleasant,  the helpings more than adequate, and the welcome warm. If the weather is nice, it is pleasant to sit outside. It's a very pleasant place for a late breakfast, a not-so-lite lunch, or afternoon tea.

Now for the restaurants. The Red Lion at East Haddon (http://www.redlioneasthaddon.co.uk/) has an enviable reputation, and has recently opened a cookery school. We've been twice lately, and each time the food was excellent. But on the second occasion the service was in melt-down. Bonnie had to send her steak back as it was not cooked to her specification, the two people at the table opposite got their main courses at a wide interval, and the party on the table next to me had a nightmare experience. The usual Head Waiter was on duty and was properly apologetic, but it seemed to me that the rest of the staff were under-trained short-notice stand-ins. That can happen. Who knows what had caused the regular staff to be absent. The first time we were there it was excellent all round, so I hope this was a one off. The food is so good we're bound to go back for another try in the not too distant future.

I've long enjoyed The Samuel Pepys at Slipton (http://www.samuel-pepys.com/). Once again the food was wonderful – we had a table full of American guests who were all full of praise for it. Sadly here too there was a service issue. Once the full party had arrived no-one appeared to take our order or even look to our need for drinks. After 10-15 minutes I button-holed the passing manager who took our order with a scowling visage and made no attempt to make us feel welcome or to express his regret at the lack of service so far. However, once the normal waiting staff took over, everything went like clockwork and the young man who seemed to be responsible for our table was charm and efficiency rolled into one.

Next, an unqualified success – The Cock at Hemingford Grey (http://www.thecockhemingford.co.uk/) – a little further than we normally go, but easy enough on the A14 and the extra standard they achieve more than repays the effort. They won the National Dining Pub of the Year last year and won the regional stage again this year. I'd very much like to see somewhere that can beat them. The menu is very interesting, the wine list likewise, the food is excellent, and the service as good as I have had at Michelin Starred restaurants. It is impossible to imagine the kind of cock-up described in the two pubs above happening here. I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending them warmly to my friends.

I'll be eating at The Falcon at Fotheringhay (http://www.thefalcon-inn.co.uk/) and The Plough at Bolnhurst (http://www.bolnhurst.com/)soon. Watch for my assessments!

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.