Read Peter Hitchens only in the Mail on Sunday
Various contributors were enthused by Steve Lewis's posting (8th November, 1052 am) on the thread about the Ross-Brand-BBC affair. In fact, Mr Lewis was responding to what I thought was an equally important (but largely neglected) point about the brainwashing power of TV. He argued that religious education of children was comparable to the conformist influence of TV, and then went on to make an attack on religion in general. I didn't think this was specially distinguished, but a number of others praised it, so I promised a response, on both matters. Here it is.
First, the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.
Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.
In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.
Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.
In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.
As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.
That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.
Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.
Then there is its universality. Soap operas in particular come to dominate the imaginations of whole generations. 'Friends' has influenced the attitudes and language of millions, as 'Neighbours' once did and 'Grange Hill ' did as well. Do any of their viewers know that they are being propagandised?
May I urge Mr Lewis to read my chapter 'Suburbs of the Mind' on the propaganda power of soap operas, in my book 'The Abolition of Britain' now at last available again from bookshops.
Mr Lewis may object to the minority of schools where individual teachers still try to spread the Christian gospel as received religion and truth, rather than as a curiosity to be studied alongside Jainism and Hinduism. But how he can possibly compare this tiny, individualised effort by mere human beings to the enormous glittering, mechanised brainwashing of TV, I do not know. Most of it is surely undone in seconds by the portrayal of one of Soap World's few acknowledged Christian characters as a wrinkled, unfashionable lonely and - worst of all, this - old and uncool person who also smokes in a deeply unsexy way. Actually, if TV used the methods against cigarettes that it uses against Christianity, young people would pretty much stop smoking in a couple of years.
Mr Lewis says : "I’m surprised that you can’t see any parallel between the input from TV into children’s brains and input from religious sources particularly as you go on to say “my objection to the power of TV is that it replaces the imagination and so prevents its development, and allows ideas to enter the mind unmediated”. Excuse me but isn’t that exactly what religion does – replaces imagination and allows (mythical) ideas to enter the mind unmediated? "
Well, I've dealt with the first part of this. And I'm really not sure what he means when he recycles my word 'unmediated' . Did he actually notice the word, or consider its meaning at all, or wonder why I had put it there? I mean that TV inserts ideas into the human mind when that mind doesn't even realise it is absorbing ideas, and without the normal agencies of human intercourse in which we judge the individual who is providing us with information or instruction, and treat what we are told accordingly. But if certain sentiments are presented as the views of an admired and glamorous TV character, while their audience is relaxing on a soft chair, under the impression she is being entertained, none of these safeguards are present.
He then goes on to say "what could be more preventative to the development of our children’s minds than to say to them “The Lord says this – and it’s not for discussion or debate?"
I don't know what sort of children he knows, or what sort of religious education he has recently experienced, but we owe to the atheist author Philip Pullman the very true statement that "Once upon a time" is far more effective than "Thou Shalt Not". Children don't necessarily accept bald statements of fact of this kind, and often either ignore them or reject them. What's more, I'd like to know of any school where Christianity is now taught in the way he describes.
Mr Lewis then seeks to define bigotry as "intolerance to other people's views". He includes this definition, without apparent irony, in a long posting in which he abuses the religious position as unworthy of respect and deserving of being excluded from schools.
A little news for Mr Lewis. Any parent can remove a child from religious classes, and has been able to for as long as I can recall. Churchgoing is nowhere compulsory. Non-Christian religions have their own schools and my impression is that in most British state schools you could spend 11 years without ever encountering Christianity presented as anything other than a belief system which some other people more or less inexplicably adopt. There are, it is true, specifically Anglican and Roman Catholic schools. But, a funny thing here, nobody is compelled to attend any of them and they advertise themselves openly as such. Many of the Anglican ones aren't particularly Anglican - I know of one (in an ordinary English suburb, not a Muslim area) where much of the religious education consisted of classes in how to design a mosque. My own view is that the state schools should abide by the law and provide daily acts of worship and instruction in the faith - provided that those who wish to can opt out. But generally this has been dumped by a largely anti-Christian teaching body, and nobody seriously tries to enforce it any more. So what is Mr Lewis really worried about?
Then we move into the tedious cliche section, atheism for dummies. Can he really do no better than this? Here we go :
"Christian society may tolerate dissent today but isn’t that only because it has to?"
Is it? Or is it because Christians have learned from experience that persecution of others is in fact unChristian. Does Mr Lewis think that if the empty churches of the C of E suddenly filled again, and it became as it once was the dominant religious group in the country that it would start burning and torturing those who disagreed with it? In fact, Anglicanism was always hesitant to do such things. The treatment of John Fisher and Thomas Campion, for example, is a blot on the Church's record, but in those times allegiance to the Roman Catholic church was often a question of national treason just as much as religious difference. Henry VIII, who murdered Fisher, regarded himself until death as a loyal son of the Holy Catholic Church. It was Fisher's loyalty to him (like that of Thomas More) that was the question. Campion, like most of the others persecuted under Elizabeth ( who did her best to leave ordinary Catholics alone) , actively chose his martyrdom. When the principled Anglican Bishop Thomas Ken made a similar defiance of Royal Authority in the late 17th century, he faced no such violence.
As the descendant of English Nonconformists, I can testify to Anglicanism's high-handed treatment of dissenters, and also to the Puritan Commonwealth's nasty suppression of Anglicanism when Calvinism held the sword of state, but these weren't matters of beheadings or of bonfires at Smithfield.
There's a great tendency, among the cheap-edition atheists, to attribute persecutions and other clashes, which were fundamentally about other things, to religion. This is specially so in references to Northern Ireland, where the conflict was tribal, not doctrinal. The IRA did not blow people up because they refused to believe in the Real Presence, nor did the UVF slit anyone's throat because he rejected justification by faith alone.
I am pleased that Mr Lewis has discovered that the Roman state embraced Christianity, and that Christmas, like many other Christian festivals, is a Christianisation of an old pagan celebration. But I am not really sure what these facts prove about anything about the validity of Christianity.
As for this passage :"And lastly “ignorance”. With a large chunk of the population of the USA believing that the earth was formed only 4000 years ago, the Roman Catholic Church only admitting in the 1990s that Galileo was right, religions all over the world teaching that centuries old ‘sacred’ scripts are to be accepted without question and with religious people believing in something/someone for which there isn’t a shred of evidence – that sounds a lot like ignorance to me."
There are many strange beliefs abroad. If you wish to argue with those who hold them, please do so. It can be quite enjoyable and will compel you to re-examine and fortify many of your own assumptions (which we often take on without fully understanding or checking) in a way that can only be good.
Many to this day imagine that there is such an organisation as 'Al Qaeda' because they have read it in the papers, and I think Mr Lewis's statement about the RC Church and Galileo is actually misleading (has he checked it?), and perhaps meant to be.
But it is false to suggest that all or even most Christians are 'Young-Earth' believers, or that Roman Catholics have only just stopped persecuting Galilean science. In any case, weird misconceptions about science and the cosmos, or indeed anything else, are not confined to religious believers. Our Godless age has seen a huge growth of 'Age of Aquarius' bunkum and of horoscopes. From the 9/11 'truth' campaigners and the 'Elvis lives' mob, to the alien abduction lot, there are plenty of people without religious affiliation who believe weird things, not to mention the countless millions who (for instance) think the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are superb musicians. Most of the British intellectual classes believed for decades that Stalin's USSR was a new civilisation which deserved to be defended. And entire populations, only a few years ago, were easily fooled by their governments into believing in Iraqi WMD.
As for there being not a shred of evidence for the existence of God, there's quite a lot of circumstantial stuff suggesting somebody or something resembling God may have been busy round these parts. But even if you don't accept that, there is, equally, not a shred of evidence for non-existence of God either.
The idea that science and religion are opposed is and always has been false, as many Christians who are also distinguished scientists have many times attested. See the recent debate between Richard Dawkins and Professor John Lennox, in which Dr Lennox landed several quite heavy blows on his adversary (Dawkins was made to look a fool about the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, and seemed interestingly vague about the origins of the Laws of Physics, for instance. One observer claims that Dawkins accepted that the existence of God was a scientifically plausible concept, though I tend to think he only said this for the sake of argument) .Yet atheists continue to act as if it were an axiomatic truth that scientific knowledge expels God from the universe. Science ( as David Berlinsky potently points out in "The Devil's Delusion") has precisely nothing to say about the existence of God. Knowledge and understanding of the genuine and indisputable discoveries of the sciences is not in any way incompatible with a Theistic belief. Atheists, often not scientifically educated themselves, often fancy that science forms a complete belief system which explains the nature and origins of the world and all that therein is, and that it has settled many more questions than it has actually settled. Actual scientists know this isn't so.
He goes on "I can’t stop you thinking of my atheistic views as bigoted and full of hatred if you wish".
He doesn't have to stop me. I've expressed no such view. I suspect he would prefer it if I had, because that would fit his image of the religious person, violently enraged by opposition. Wait for the riposte before anticipating what it will be. I've said many times publicly that I enjoy the company of atheists and am glad they are around because at least they take religion seriously. Most of them, in my view, are people who will eventually accept religion. This is why they feel the need to construct giant verbal barricades against it. If they weren't intellectually perturbed by the claims of religion, why do they need to worry about it so much?
But they are too personally proud to admit their doubt in public. "What, me? just like all those drab old ladies arranging the flowers in church? How deeply unfashionable and blush-makingly embarrassing. Next I'll be living in a semi-detached house in a suburb, and mowing the lawn. Aaaaargh."
The confident ambitious man, educated out of his background, wishes above all to declare his independence from the narrow suburban world from which he came. A noisy rejection of the faith of his fathers is a good way of doing this. The trouble is that this often involves the public burning of bridges and boats, and the prospect of the long, cold, swim back - when mature reflection kicks in - is unenticing and rather humiliating.
He then says " but I’m only intolerant to your views when they are forced on a young or innocent mind"
Which is an interesting comment. He attacks intolerance with some vigour, then confesses to being intolerant himself. But it's all right, you see, because of the condition. Or is it?
He describes religious education as the forcing of views on a young and innocent mind. Let us pause a moment here. The teaching of any view to the young can be so described. Would Mr Lewis accept that teaching a world view which assumed the non-existence of God would also be the "forcing of views on a young and innocent mind"? Probably not, but that is because he is given to unconsciously self-serving arguments and wouldn't spot this one, any more than he is aware of the others he uses. But never mind. Whether he accepts it or not, it would be so. This is one of the great questions confronting humanity. It remains a matter of opinion, not being capable of resolution by facts or logic. To be indifferent to it is in fact to take sides. To teach a Godless cosmos is also to take sides.
The decision we really have to take is whether we prefer one or the other. My view is that religious belief enhances our understanding of the universe in which we live, enables us to recognise the promptings of conscience as what they are, and to educate our consciences in the divine law which underpins the universe, so that we become free and knowledgeable actors in that universe, whose actions have the consequences which we and God intend them to have. This is in my view and undoubtedly good thing.
I would urge any parent to ensure his children have a proper religious education, and schools to make it readily available and competently, thoroughly taught. But I would not impose it on anyone against his will. Whereas I strongly suspect Mr Lewis would like to ban religious education altogether, a view that Professor Dawkins and my brother seem to share. Perhaps Mr Lewis might say. By the way, the idea that by educating children in religious truth you turn them into clones is a bit far-fetched. Does he really think the young are so pliant and subservient?
In my experience, children - who have not had their natural curiosity leeched out of them by the National Curriculum, workaday concerns and thought-obliterating entertainment - are profoundly and naturally curious about the huge questions which religion answers and atheism bypasses, or imagines not to be important.
What is the origin of authority and law? How was the world made? Why are we here? Who decides what is good, and what is bad, what actions are right and what is wrong? What happens when we die? Where were we before we were born? Why do bad people so often prosper, while the good suffer? And so on. A sound religious education provides coherent answers to these and many other questions, as well as connecting the child properly with the great traditions of literature, music, architecture and painting which underlie our far-from-accidental civilisation. It also gives the child the understanding that this is a rational, purposeful universe, capable of being understood -which is the basis of the scientific quest and without which there would be no science.
To deny it to a child is at least as bad as to deny that child exercise, fresh air or natural daylight. What harm has been done by providing it? On reaching adulthood, he or she is quite free to reject what he has been taught ( many do, myself included) but at least he or she will know what is being rejected, and will have, until the moment of death, the chance of embracing it again. But what of those who have nothing but a blank space, and can look (say) on the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, be vaguely moved and perhaps even troubled by its astonishing aesthetic power, but do not even know what a Cathedral is for? Aren't they deprived of something they ought to have?
Mr Lewis adds "being atheistic doesn’t involve hatred towards people with different views"
Good. He should speak to his co-atheist Professor Dawkins, whose contemptuous remarks about religious believers suggest that he holds a different view.
And then "As to ignorance – I’ve certainly much to learn about many things in the world but at least I’m prepared to alter my view when new facts and evidence surface and I have tried to form my views based on facts and evidence and not from mythology or faith."
Good. But where are these 'facts' on which he bases his apparently prescriptive, doubt-free atheism? And wouldn't it be better if he accepted it for what it is, a mere matter of subjective opinion, chosen because it suits him just now? I repeat. There is no scientific or other factual evidence for the non-existence of God in which he appears to have such faith (see below). And what does he have against myth or faith? Myths are not necessarily false, but often stories containing profound truths, and we are better off for them. Leave aside the religious validity and significance of the Bible, and of how it is to be read or understood, a subject too vast for a web posting. In these stories we see the human condition examined and explained as nowhere else. Anybody who has no knowledge of the Norse or Greek myths , of the Odyssey and the Iliad, is hugely the poorer for it. Likewise the Bible.
As for faith, we all require it in some things, or we should never get through the day. From breakfast to bedtime, we act of necessity on the basis that we must trust in many things and events which we cannot see or wholly understand and whose outcomes we cannot know. Yet we form intentions and plans on the basis of what is, in effect, faith based on what we have seen or can see . Without that basic faith, we should spend each day cowering under our quilts unable to move. How then are we expected to get through life in the absence of any faith explaining the astonishing world in which we live, and giving us some reason to remain there doing the tasks which have fallen to us?
It takes quite a nerve for us to claim we are fighting terror and promoting civilisation in Afghanistan, when we have been beaten hollow by the IRA in Ulster, when we cannot prevent deaths like that of ‘Baby P’, and our own poorer zones are lawless wastelands of disorder and violence, guns and knives, long abandoned by authority.
I have just forced myself to see a James Bond film for the first time in years.
