21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Read online

  It is not for me to judge whether my books help others or not, but that is at least my purpose in writing them, while at the same time trying to abide by the rules of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Confucius, the best guides I know to a virtuous life. I was gratified, however, when I was once described as a good Aristotelian. Might I wish the same for you?

  LETTER 4

  GOD OR WHAT?

  Do you believe in God, or a god, or in anything else? That is one of those personal questions that can only be answered by you. Let no one tell you what to believe about things that are beyond our understanding. They can only be matters of faith and faith is not subject to reason. Indeed, faith begins where reason runs out. It may help, however, if I describe my own journey through faith to the experience of living in comfortable doubt.

  It was Julian Barnes who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.’

  I know what he meant. I grew up in a rectory. God was ever-present in our lives. He, always He, was the gentle kindly God of the New Testament, not the vengeful, fierce God of the Old. It was nice in a way to think that there was this person watching over me, even if he was often disapproving. When my reason told me that this was a fanciful concoction, I felt very much alone in the world, left to my own devices, forced to work out for myself what was right and what was wrong.

  I also rather liked much of the trappings of religion: the rituals, the music, the architecture, the art. I decided that I could have the trappings without the faith. I started to call myself a cultural Christian. There are, I discovered, places that seem truly holy: chapels where good people have prayed for generations and seem to have left some traces of their goodness behind. I go to evensong on occasional Sunday evenings in cathedrals or chapels with good choirs and find it a great aid to meditative reflection.

  So am I a fraud? I don’t think so, because I believe that there is a difference between religion and holiness. You can have one without the other. Indeed, I have attended many religious occasions where any sense of holiness was distinctly lacking, while my most vivid experiences of something holy or numinous often had nothing to do with formal religion. These days many speak of being spiritual but not religious. I suspect that they are saying much the same as me. The fashion for mindfulness is another way of searching for some form of inner peace.

  At one time, seeking to reconcile my agnostic feelings with Christianity, I argued that the theory of incarnation, of God becoming man, really meant that ‘Godness’, whatever that was, was inside us, waiting to be found and made to work. This is not unlike what Quakers believe. I was once asked by the BBC to undertake a journey back through my life in a series of radio broadcasts that was rather grandly called In Search of God. To begin with I described it as a fruitless search; there was no God. However, I ended my journey in a lovely monastery chapel in southern Tuscany where I found a sort of holy stillness, with no one there, just me – and something else that I felt but could not describe. I said that if Godness was anywhere it was there for me in that moment, because I felt most true to my better self. I got a prize from Lambeth Palace for one of the best religious programmes of the year – ‘despite the dubious theology’, the citation said!

  I suspect that you will not be lumbered with my early Christian entanglements but I would not be surprised if you did not also wonder from time to time whether there was not something more than our dull earthly existence, some sense of the numinous or the spiritual that brought out the best in us. That, to me, is what prayer is: asking myself if I am yet in the fullness of my being. Wendell Berry, the wonderful farmer poet from Kentucky, puts it well at the end of one of his poems:

  And we pray, not

  for new earth or heaven, but to be

  quiet in heart, and in eye

  clear. What we need is here.

  Religion, of course, has another role, that of maintaining social order through moral guidance and prescription. Moses wasn’t the first to claim God’s backing for his ten commandments. The question that a secular society has to face is what happens if there is no universally accepted moral authority figure such as God? There are laws, of course, but acting legally only takes you so far. Laws define what you can and can’t do but don’t tell you what you should do. That is the sphere of ethics. A good society would be one in which there was a common understanding of what was right and proper in human relationships. In the Western world there is a sufficient residue of Christian thinking to provide some consensus of what is right and wrong, but newer generations such as yours are beginning to set out their own guidelines, spread through social media, a development that can lead to relativism and a divergent society, with different groups asserting different values and priorities.

  Christianity has also made a big contribution to our cultural heritage, whether we are believers or not. We (you) will make a huge mistake if we (you) ignore it. A friend who lived in Florence told me how he once heard two young American women talking as they came out of the Uffizi Gallery, which is full of Renaissance art. ‘Did you notice’, one said, ‘how in those mother and baby pictures the baby is always a boy!’ I hope that I don’t need to point out the gap in their understanding of Christian history. Without it they cannot have made any sense of anything they saw in Florence that day.

  If such a fluid society of mixed values emerges it becomes critical that each individual forms his or her own set of moral standards rather than going with the values of whatever gang or group attracts their loyalty. Here, once again, I go back to Aristotle. Aristotle thought that there were two overriding sets of virtues, intellectual and moral. The intellectual virtues, he claimed, were acquired by inheritance and education, the moral ones through the imitation of practice and habit of those held in high regard, normally one’s parents. The highest virtue, according to Aristotle, was intellectual contemplation. That, of course, was his speciality, so we can forgive him a little bias, but what I think he meant was that it was our first duty to work out for ourselves what a good human and a good life should be. In Aristotle’s view, we should all be philosophers. I agree. I also feel that the study of philosophical questions cannot start too young and should be considered part of everyone’s basic education. Young children are naturally curious and questioning, the necessary starting point for philosophical enquiry.

  Aristotle went on to list twelve subsidiary virtues:

  1) Courage – bravery and the willingness to stand up for what you think is right

  2) Temperance – self-control and restraint

  3) Liberality – kindness, charity and generosity

  4) Magnificence – radiance, joie de vivre

  5) Pride – satisfaction in achievement

  6) Honour – respect, reverence, admiration

  7) Good Temper – equanimity, level-headedness

  8) Friendliness – conviviality and sociability

  9) Truthfulness – straightforwardness, frankness and candour

  10) Wit – sense of humour

  11) Friendship – camaraderie and companionship

  12) Justice – impartiality and fairness

  Aristotle also believed in the golden mean, neither too much nor too little, and applied it to his list of virtues. Too much courage becomes arrogance, too little is timidity. Too much pride becomes boasting, too little is self-demeaning, and so on.

  We can add to Aristotle’s list the universal commandment to behave towards others as you would wish them to behave to you, or as Confucius put it, do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. Add on Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative that what you think is right for you must then be considered right for everyone else, add in a bit of Utilitarianism, that the greatest good for the greatest number must be the right thing, stir it all up and you have a recipe for ethical behaviour.

  Not that anyone will actually go through all that process before acting. You might, however, like to score yourself against Aristotle’s list from time to time. Many of them now are combined in the new concept
of emotional intelligence. This is promoted as an important set of social skills but I would also class it as a virtue, as the sort of behaviour one would expect from a civilized person. Aristotle insisted, like John Donne, that no one is an island ‘entire of itself’. We are all members of the civil society, so should be civilised. It is more important to remember Aristotle’s belief that we learn most of the virtues by imitating our elders and, hopefully, betters. Something to bear in mind when you yourself become one of those, as a parent.

  Crucially, however, one should remember Aristotle’s view that the highest virtue was intellectual contemplation turned into practice. Life should be something worked out and acted on. Hence his emphasis on eudaimonia or self-fulfilment with virtue, or, in my version, doing the best with what you are best at. Only you will know what that is, although, as I said in another letter, others can often know you better than you know yourself. It is, I believe, one of the responsibilities of parents, teachers and bosses to seek to identify your specialness, or what I called your golden seed, and then help you to let it grow. Education should be about bringing things out of you as well as putting stuff in.

  I started this letter with God. I ended it with You. I think they are the same. God is shorthand for the Goodness in You, or, if you want to get theological, God was made man, the theory of the incarnation. Religion was a way to help you identify that goodness in you and put it to use. Religions turned into hierarchies and bureaucracies and lost their way. We therefore have to do it for ourselves. In that lifelong task I wish you well.

  LETTER 5

  EVERYONE CAN BE WRONG

  I grew up in a world of certainty. Parents knew best, that was clear. Good children did what they were told. Parents knew the answers to everything. That was so even when the answer to my question was ‘Because that’s the way it is’, meaning, I assumed, either that I was too young to understand or that they were too busy right then to explain it. It took me a long time to realise that this was often how one’s elders said ‘I don’t know’.

  It was the same when I started school. The teachers knew all the answers. Of course, it helped that they had a crib. Their textbooks had the answers in the back; ours didn’t. The understanding seemed to be that our job as pupils was to try to learn and remember what they, the teachers, knew, or pretended to know, and then to repeat it back to them when the examinations came around. What that meant to my young mind was that all the problems in the world had already been answered and those answers were known to someone somewhere. These days, of course, you turn to Google to find the answers. In our home back then we had two shelves holding all the volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a fascinating storehouse of information that contained everything you needed to know about the world.

  Or so I thought. Unfortunately, neither my teachers nor the encyclopaedia could tell me how to ride a bicycle, or what to do when I left school. Some problems, I soon discovered, don’t have answers that can be found in a textbook. Most of the time, in fact, you have to work out the answers for yourself. Should I take this job, marry this girl, live in another country? Big questions, but no obvious answer or any textbook or expert to tell me what to do, which didn’t stop other interfering people from trying. Later on, in work, I faced other questions, such as: Can I trust this person? Is this the right price? Is this idea morally justifiable? The questions got bigger as I grew older: what is a good life, what is the point of it all, do the ends ever justify the means? Philosophers have argued about these bigger problems forever without agreeing on an answer. That is because any answer ultimately depends on us, on our priorities, our circumstances, our willingness to take risks and to decide our own future.

  My early education did not equip me to deal with these ‘open’ problems. If it addressed them at all it treated them as ‘closed’ problems, ones with what my teachers or some other authority figure saw as correct answers. The world seemed to me then to be full of commandments and rules of one sort or another, with awful consequences if you broke any of them. Some of them seemed frankly silly. The senior boys at my school were allowed to walk around the central green clockwise. The rest of us had to go counter-clockwise. Only the masters could walk across the green. There was no reason to it except to make us junior boys feel inferior and then allow us, when we became seniors, to flaunt our new status by walking around that wretched patch as often as we could. In later life I worked in an organisation where the central green was replaced by a series of restaurants or ‘messes’, some more senior than others – blatant evidence of inequality as I saw it.

  These systems and others like them are all gone now. They were there to emphasise authority, the right of those at the top to tell the rest what was right or necessary and to correct them if they disobeyed. If this is life, I thought, I don’t think that I am going to enjoy it. And it got worse. If school was frustrating, religion was worse. They, the religious authorities, really did think they had their answers to my bigger questions. They also wanted me to believe half a dozen unlikely things before lunch, or rather breakfast in my case. My father was an archdeacon and the rector of a small country parish in Ireland. We had family prayers every morning around the breakfast table, when my father read out a passage of scripture and led us in a couple of prayers. The Bible was the word of God and had to be believed. We went to the local church every Sunday where we turned to face the altar at one point in the service and recited the creed, which started with the words ‘I believe’; I asked my mother what would happen if I didn’t believe some of what I was supposed to say. The question was so unfamiliar to her, I think, that she did not know how to respond, but she suggested that belief would come in time if I just had faith.

  Faith seemed to me, at the time, to be a big cop-out. If you don’t understand it, or if you doubt it, just trust others to be right and go along with them. Meantime, if you just trusted the priests, all the answers to my big questions were there. There were, I knew, ten main commandments, or instructions, and many other pieces of advice and words of warning in the big book, the Bible. Religion, I came to see, was another sort of school, with its own teachers and prefects making sure that you did what they thought was right and proper. The answer to the good life was to do what you were told. In my teenage years I became intellectually frivolous and started to reinterpret some of the Bible stories. Mary and Joseph, I suggested, were just teenagers. She got pregnant by mistake; Joseph said it was nothing to do with him, must be a miracle. Like teenagers everywhere they arrived late at the census and had to make do in the barn. The baby turned into a radical teacher who threatened the religious authorities; they had him put down and, as a result, made a martyr of him that turned into a cult that later generations developed into a global religion.

  I was secretly very pleased with myself but I never mentioned my revisionary theory to my father, or to anyone else. It was only much later that I discovered my ideas were not all that new, that others had suggested them before. No matter. It was my idea then; so what if it was not original? It was my first rebellion even if it was only in my mind. Perhaps, I said to myself, the priests and theologians are all wrong. Then I got nervous. How could I challenge the collective wisdom of two millennia of scholars and clerics? Surely all the wonderful buildings and amazing choral and artistic works were proof that the stories were true, that there was a God, someone worthy of celebration, or what they called worship. Or was that word itself, along with the buildings and the art, just a way of underlining the authority of the priesthood? Was religion, like education, a form of social control?

  These were worrying thoughts for a boy and I kept them to myself, but they allowed me a sort of private freedom of the mind. I didn’t have to accept everything I was told just because the people telling me had more authority than me. Oliver Cromwell, I read, had once addressed the stubborn elders of the Church of Scotland: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’ It was the sort of remark that I often wanted to make but di
dn’t dare. Creative thinking by itself is not enough, I realised; you also need the courage to do something about it; like those two gentlemen of the Renaissance, Copernicus and Galileo. They lived in two different times, a century apart, but they both had the intellectual audacity to believe the evidence of their eyes over the authority of the Bible and the hierarchy of the Church. Moreover, not only did they think differently, they published their radical views and, in Galileo’s case, stood up to be counted and suffered for it. Both of them flouted the Church authorities who effectively ruled Europe at the time, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Both of them insisted that the earth went round the sun, the heliocentric theory as it was called, whereas the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible clearly states that the sun rises and sets and returns to its position every day. Courageous and self-confident, Copernicus and Galileo trusted their own observations rather than the established theory handed down and subscribed to for centuries. They believed that those in power could be wrong and, crucially, they did something about it.

  In 1543 Copernicus was shown the first proofs of his great work, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, on his deathbed, looked at them, lay back and died. One hundred years later Galileo was not so lucky: he was forced to recant officially and was imprisoned in his house until he died. Legend has it that he carved four defiant words in the wall of his room: ‘E pur si muove’ (‘But still it moves’). Unsurprisingly, these two men were my heroes; they encouraged me to think for myself even if it went against what most people thought. They also reminded me, however, that thinking for oneself does have consequences, as Galileo discovered. You may have to suffer for what you believe. Should you therefore keep your thoughts to yourself? It depends on the subject and the context. A proper caution is not cowardice but only common sense.