An Instinct For Kindness

As I have written on Facebook, An Instinct For Kindness is a first class piece of dramatic writing, brilliantly performed, and should be nominated for an Olivier award. It's not a barrel of laughs, although there are some, but it makes the main point brilliantly. It's going to have a week's run in London - take advantage and see it if you missed it. It is a challenging and worthwhile evening. The details can be found at the web site, http://www.festivalhighlights.com/theatre/aninstinctforkindness.

The management at Royal & Derngate organised a debate after the show and I was privileged to be on the platform, along with the author and performer, Chris Larner, the Archdeacon of Northampton, Christine Allsopp, and a member of Leicester Secular Society, Harry Perry.

Harry's position is described on his blog, http://secsoc.blogspot.co.uk/ - in short he thinks that assisted suicide should be available, not to the terminally ill, as advocated by Dignity in Dying, but to anyone who is a) suicidal and b) so incapacitated they cannot kill themselves. It seems to me that one of the main arguments for not changing the law is that it would make it more likely that people going through a crisis, may be deeply but temporarily depressed, more likely to make a wrong decision. So I was surprised that he went so far as to undermine the point made by Chris Larner that what is needed is compassion and dignity for someone who is suffering extremely and terminally ill. It was an own goal against our side.

And indeed, that was the line Christine Allsopp took, very gently and carefully. She didn't mention Divine Authority or the Sanctity of Life, she expressed her concern for vulnerable people who might be adversely effected if we legalise assisted suicide, and she told of someone who had been seriously depressed, tried to kill himself but failed, and was now alive and glad to be so.

My approach was to indicate the three headings under which a decision needed to me made:

1. Autonomy – do we have the right and responsibility of making our own ethical decisions or do we have to defer to a higher authority?

2. Compassion – how do we best help those who are terminally ill and seriously suffering?

3. Safety – whatever legal framework emerges, what precautions are needed against abuse?

I then went on to say that the present situation amounts to cruelty to people like the one described by Chris Larner. It is unreasonable and unkind to defer giving help to them in favour of protection for a hypothetically threatened group, especially as experience where assisted suicide is legal has shown that these fears are unfounded.

The legal position was, up to 1961, that committing suicide was illegal. If you made an attempt and failed you could be sent to prison, which, as Chris Larner says in the show, “obviously helps”. The law was changed 50 years ago, but instead it is now a crime to help someone to do something that is not a crime, even if the non-criminal act happens abroad and therefore outside our jurisdiction, which makes no sense at all. The Director of Public Prosecutions in the last government made a clarification of the legal position to the effect that someone acting out of compassion and not for financial gain would be unlikely to be prosecuted. Sadly this puts a serious obstacle in the way of someone wanting to go to Dignitas. One of the things they insist on is a legal document confirming who you are and where you live, which has to be provided by a Notary Public, who normally charges a fee for their services. So the Notary's professional body has advised its members against giving this service as it is technically illegal. And the same applies to any other professional services needed such as an independent doctor, a travel agent, or a taxi to the airport.

And that's just one obstacle. Chris Larner put the total cost of going to Switzerland to die at about £14,000, way beyond the reach of many people who need it. There are some other interesting statistics: for example over 70% of those who take the first step towards an assisted suicide never take the second one. Having a potential safety net seems to be enough.

One lady in the audience was herself terminally ill and had the idea of going to Dignitas in mind. She had two friends along to support her. I felt that they were addressing what certain Christians often say publicly and hanging the attendant feelings on Christine Allsopp. That wasn't really fair, as she had shown nothing but sympathy and not voiced the usual line at all. None the less, it is true, as Chris Larner pointed out, we do live in an environment where a fairly authoritarian religion is part of the backdrop of life. In fact, I thought that Harry Perry was put out, or at least discomforted, by Christine failing to use the Sanctity of Life argument so often trotted out. He actually asked why she hadn't, and then rather erected a straw man to attack. In fact Christine had said that she believed in using her brain. (She is a former research chemist and her husband is a biologist.) My experience is that most religious people in this country take a similarly intelligent, tolerant and sympathetic view, but they are hidden by others of more extreme positions. I offered, as a summary of Christine Allsopp's view, that preaching at people is both arrogant and a waste of breath. I happen to think that is true whether the preacher is religious or not. Fundamentalism is not a good mark for a cause, and there are fundamentalist atheists as well as fundamentalist believers.

It's a truism that we all need to bear in mind that no matter how strong a person's convictions are on any issue other than matters of fact, that strength does not amount to being right. In an emotive issue such as this all parties need to keep that in the front of their minds and listen to other people's actual arguments sensitively and respond with equally good arguments, not just emotively. They also need to listen to the disputants' emotions and respond on that level too.

For myself, Chris' performance made me more aware than before of the extreme suffering and frustration that some people go through. The main character in the show, Chris' ex-wife Alison, said on the morning of her suicide, “I don't want to die. But I don't want to live any more like this.” And it was compassion for her terrible situation that moved him, and through him, the audience. To delay a change in the law seems to me to be cruelty, even if that delay is for the laudable reason of protecting apparently vulnerable people. Laudable but mistaken, I think, as experience is that these fears have not been fulfilled in practice in places where assisted suicide in strictly limited circumstances has been permitted. Cruelty is not acceptable and a way has to be found to bring relief to sufferers but with safeguards for people who feel or may be threatened by the change.

Goodbye, old friends

I need space for my growing collection of philosophy books. There is no way I will play chess again, and I've found a new home for my chess books. Now I want to find one for my computer books, because I haven't got the time or the interest any more. There may be some more, older, ones up in the loft, but I've not been to look. There is only one I'm keeping, the one on OpenOffice, because I use it heavily and having a reference book will probably be handy.

Books are like friends, and it's sad to part with them, but there just isn't the space in my tiny study.

I remember when I bought most of them - for example the XHTML book, the big thick one, was bought when I was kindly invited by friends for Christmas when my marriage had come to an end and I thought the world was coming to an end too. The book fired an interest and was a big help in getting my feet back on the ground. Then on the left of that shelf there is one that contributed to my study of server-side issues in web development when I was doing an Open University course. At more or less the same time dear old Laddie came to live with us and was such a big time sink that the course fell by the wayside.

All the VBA books were to do with work, and while I enjoyed automating processes and passing on the skills to others those days are happily long behind me. I'm now happy in the shadow of an academic world I passed by when an opportunity first arose, and studying the Hellenistic philosophy schools, refreshing my long-forgotten Greek, whilst addressing some of the questions about life that first bothered me in my teens.

Are you sure?

I think I always know when I have not understood something. For example, I went to a symposium last year where one of the lecturers left me wondering what on earth his talk had all been about. Pinning him down afterwards it was evident that he was vastly knowledgeable in his topic, and in conversation was well able to deal with the questions I raised clearly, and very fully. But when he came to put a lot of his knowledge together to deliver in an hour's lecture to a group of people, the clarity with which he spoke disappeared, and I knew I had not understood what he was saying, in common, I suspect, with quite a few others.

But the obverse is not equally true. When I have partially understood, or misunderstood, I am probably confident that I have got the message, when in fact I have only got a bit of it, or got the whole thing totally wrong. But I don't know that. The greatest chance of being wrong is when you think you've got it right.

One of the joys of my retirement has been discovering the wonderful podcasts at www.historyofphilosophy.net where Peter Adamson's lucid delivery leaves me feeling I have learned something every time. Probably I have, but the question remains “how much of what was contained in the podcast have I grasped, and how accurately?” I follow up on some of the recommended reading and I have become gripped by the Stoics, with whom share an interest – the Art of Living, it has been called, and from whom I have learned a lot. I've even been stimulated to refresh my Greek. But even if I have grasped some of what the Stoic writers and modern commentators are saying, I know there is a lot more – well that's progress: realising that there is a (not too distant) boundary to knowledge beyond which lies an infinity of ignorance is in itself a good thing.

Among my growing collection of downloaded podcasts is a much larger one, not part of the main series, Podcast Live, a lecture delivered last year as part of the Arts & Humanities Festival at Kings College, London by Peter Adamson. He called it “A Brief History of Nothing”, the Nothing in question being the concept of Void or Emptiness which is prominent in the work of ancient philosophers. I have lost count of the number of times I have listened to it again. I do tend, it has to be admitted, to listen with my headphones on while lying in bed, and once or twice I have dropped off part way through. This is due to the lateness of the hour and the greatness of my comfort, not the lecturer's style. Now I think I have mined it fully, but even so, I find that I have to go and listen again to the podcast on Plato's Timeus, which has not lodged properly in my head.

Heavens, I'm 68 years old, nearly. I need more time to read, and to think more. It was Plato who first explored the important distinction between belief (of which an important sub-category is true belief) and knowledge. And still we haven't got it right. Just recently there was an item on the BBC about those experts one hears making predictions about the future of economics, sport, art, the weather, you name it. Well, one thing is for certain, about the future we have no knowledge. A study of these expert predictions revealed that the most compelling listening, most favoured by the public, is strongly associated with the confidence of the speaker. And the more confident the speaker the more likely he was to be wrong! Those experts who hedged their remarks with such phrases as “we can't be certain” and “there are several unknown factors” and “I don't want to be definite” and “all in all it seems to me that the greatest probability is...” were the ones hardest to listen too, and the least regarded by the public, and the most likely to be right.

It seems to me that we have a similar problem with the present, and sweeping assertions are highly likely to be wrong. When we are right, as my hero Karl Popper said, we are so by accident, and we can never be sure that we are right.

But even if I cannot be sure that I have properly and fully understood Peter Adamson's podcasts, the boundary of ignorance has been pushed a little further back and understanding has increased and most important of all, I may have made a slight improvement in the art of living.

The greatest disability?

An MP is in the news – it seems that there was a scuffle in a bar in the House of Commons involving several MPs, people were pushed, someone was head-butted, punches were thrown and one MP, Eric Joyce, has been arrested and charged with assault. He has been suspended from the parliamentary party and there has been discussion on the radio at least about what happens if he gets jailed, under what circumstances he would lose his seat and an election be called, who'd win the election (which is rather getting ahead of things) and so on. Members of Parliament are not supposed to be involved in scuffles, although there is in fact a history. The then Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, famously punched someone who had thrown eggs at him when campaigning. Anyway, the general atmosphere is misbehaviour and punishment. That's what we do with criminals and suchlike, isn't it?

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55-135 CE) had a different view. I'm only just beginning to read his work, but already I have encountered this alternative several times. For example, in Book 1 of The Discourses, chapter 18 discusses his observation that we should not be angry with those who fall into error. Briefly, his argument goes like this: no-one deliberately does something he knows to be wrong, to his disadvantage. So if they do something wrong, this is due to some error on their part, because at the time they thought it was right. There is something the matter with their faculty for making judgements. Thus, thieves and robbers, for example, have gone astray in matters of good and evil, their critical faculty has led them down the wrong path.

So, asks Epictetus, should such criminals be put to death? (Punishments were on a different scale to those we currently consider appropriate in the days of the Roman Emperors, and Epictetus lived under Nero.) By no means, says Epictetus, and instead wants to rephrase the question. Look at it this way, he says. This man errs in things of great importance, right and wrong. It is not that he is blinded, or defective in sight, and cannot tell white from black. It's similar, but much worse. If you look at it that way you see at once how inhuman the suggestion of capital punishment is. The greatest harm a man can suffer is to be blinded in matters of good and evil. Just like any other disabled person what someone in that position needs is help, support and therapy.

If the reports are to be believed, someone who had been a successful MP for years “lost it” as we say, when our emotions run away with us and we do or say something totally non-rational. Seneca, writing on anger, describes an angry person as someone taken over by something other than his rational self. So Epectetus' view is that he should be helped to find it, rather than punished for his serious misfortune.

It's a point of view worth considering.

Considerations...

I can't help wondering how things might have been... The Stoics (who I am currently reading) were materialists and determinists, so we start with something in common. And their ethics appeal to me, being not dissimilar in some ways to Immanuel Kant.

Taking the determinist view without question for now, I've had reason of late to reflect on the Headmaster of my Grammar School, Dr W. No-one gets a Ph.D without academic ability, a lot of work, and without gaining a lot of knowledge. Yet at school I was one of many who found it hard to take him seriously and in later years I was very critical of him indeed. I shall never forget the morning of my 'O' Level Religious Knowledge paper. I turned the paper over, and found that the first two questions were in Greek – a long Greek passage and then a question about that passage. It had been part of the course syllabus that we learn New Testament Greek, and Dr W was supposed to teach us. Two of us boys were scheduled two lessons a week. At the start of the first of these the deputy head gave us our text books, Wenham's Greek Grammar and a Greek New Testament, and left the room. We waited for Dr W. He did not come to a single lesson in 2 years.

On another occasion I was accused by one of the masters of a minor misdemeanor, quite wrongly. He exaggerated the alleged – indeed fictitious - crime out of all proportion, and hauled me before the Head. Dr W refused even to let me speak in my defence, and issued a significant punishment. I have always had a fierce sense of justice, and I was deeply angered and offended by such treatment. As he was also a Justice of the Peace I became deeply sceptical of our criminal justice system, unfairly on the strength of one example, but that's schoolboys for you. I have nursed these criticisms for years.

I have often wondered how Dr W, who must have had a serious enthusiasm for and knowledge of Greece and the ancient world, came to miss the chance to pass it on to another generation. I found, in one of the books on Stoicism that I am currently reading, a reference to a work of his from 1931. The author of that work plainly took Dr W's scholarship seriously enough. His obituary in The Times speaks of his love of and enthusiasm for Greece and the classical period. He had, apparently, a detailed knowledge of the same Stoics that I am studying now. If he had seized that opportunity maybe I'd have discovered them over 50 years earlier – my temperament hasn't changed that much, so I think I would have been attracted. In those days I was a serious Christian believer, and I'd have seen even then the issues between Stoicism and Christianity. What kind of difference might that have made to my life path? Who knows? An academic career in the Classics in some way? Who can tell?

And then again, my indignation at Dr W's dereliction of his teaching responsibilities worked in my favour. When I was studying to become a clergyman I leapt at the chance to do a year of Greek on top of the curriculum requirements that no doubt greatly aided my New Testament studies and lead to some quite good results. And now, more or less 40 years on from those days, what remains of my Greek has helped me to get to grips with the Stoics, and motivated me to take a second go at learning Classical Greek now, to enrich this new opportunity. I can thank him for that then.

The Stoic teacher Epictetus would probably chide me on my attitude to Dr W. There was little in those events that was, in his phrase, “up to me”. What Epictetus would say I am in fact responsible for is my attitude, my decisions – all the rest was out of my control. Indeed, that's how it felt when I was a schoolboy, out of my control.

And the same is true of Dr W too. He would not have chosen to be headmaster of a North London Grammar School I'm sure. His vocation was to be an academic and to enjoy his enthusiasm for Ancient Greece. I have no idea why things worked out differently for him. A book he published in 1971 when he was retired was reissued as a paperback 20 years later, and a reviewer on Amazon gives it 5 stars. No doubt he regarded us as hopeless and helpless and no doubt he could not bring himself to waste his time and knowledge on us. Not, I think, the right decision, but given who he was, the assumptions he held about life, and so on, it is hard to see how he could have done differently, even if one can justly say that he should. No matter what brought him to being scheduled to give two Greek lessons a week to two North London kids he didn't have any regard for, his knowledge of the Stoics could have shown him a different path of action. I can imagine him looking at the timetable – he didn't normally teach at all – and groaning in anticipation of casting his beloved pearls before us swine.

I can no longer hold all that against him. What he did was not “up to me”. I am responsible now for my attitude and how I make my decisions – at least that's what Epictetus would say. And there are benefits. I am greatly enjoying my present study of the Stoics, I have learned some important lessons from them and the important thing is to make the most of these current opportunities, and not to regret past ones.

Syria

I heard the Syrian town of Idlib mentioned on the news today, for the second time in a few weeks. Previously I'd not heard of the place for 50 years – but I was actually there, passing through, on my way to Jerusalem in 1961.

We were on a Lambretta 175 that had somehow got us overland from London, and went on to see us home too. We'd left the south east corner of Turkey and entered Syria and headed south and went towards Hama and Homs and on to Damascus. I was on the back with the map, my friend Colin was driving. We came to a junction and Colin asked “Which way?”. The junction was not on our map, so I decided that left headed broadly towards the desert, and the right headed broadly towards the sea, and that was the safer option.

Shortly we came to a small town and decided we needed a closer look at our map. We stopped and were, as usual, surrounded at once by a crowd of small children. After a while I looked up and said quietly to Colin “There are soldiers all round us”. And so there were, a ring of them, carrying their weapons. We folded our map and smiled as broadly as we knew how, and one of the soldiers came over and asked where we were heading. I said “Damascus”. He pointed the way we had come - “That way”. “But we've just come that way, it must be that way,” I said, pointing in the other direction. The soldier frowned. “Where is your pam?” he demanded. “What?” “Your pam! You must have pam!” He sounded belligerent. In one of those rare flashes of genius I have been known to have from time to time, I realised he was an Arab, and was mentally reading the word from right to left. He was asking for our map!

It was soon clear that we were off the map and off the road to Damascus. The guy who had first approached us then asked us to the café – we were on some kind of Army post. We were brought food and drink, and then the phone behind the counter rang. The man of the shop answered it, brought the phone over to us and said “It's for you”. “It can't be, no-one knows we're here!” But it was, it was the officer in charge who offered us accommodation for the night. All in all we were made incredibly welcome, fed, watered and accommodated at no charge, and in the morning after breakfast sent on our way with directions to Damascus.

On our way home from Jerusalem we stopped for about 3 weeks in Damascus and got to know the city quite well. Locals made friends in the café, helped us sort out our visas when we were in danger of overstaying, and were generally welcoming and hospitable. We loved the place.

And now I hear about the violence in that leafy historic City, where we walked down the Street Called Straight, which appears in the bible, among those friendly people. It is heart-breaking, utterly heart-breaking.

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.