Round about the time that the carols begin at King’s College chapel in Cambridge, I plan to disappear in to intensely private place that is Christmas, and I won’t be posting here until after Boxing Day (or St Stephen’s, if you prefer) is over.
There are now very few times when Britain is more or less united by a common feeling. Easter was overwhelmed by shopping years ago, and Good Friday is now a shocking and blasphemous occasion in which a minority try to observe its tremendous solemnity, while a heedless and indifferent world goes on all around them.
But Christmas somehow still manages to engage us, when all other Christian festivals from Lammas and Whitsun , to Candlemas and Michaelmas, let alone Lady Day and Martinmas, have been utterly forgotten and erased from the mental calendars of British people.
Why is this? I think Charles Dickens has a lot to do with it . People who have never read the Prayer Book’s glorious Collect, Epistle and Gospel for ‘The Nativity of Our Lord, or the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ (of which more later) are all familiar at first, second or third hand with the Gospel according To Charles, that great mixture of ghostly terror, moral examination, lush sentiment, grace and justice, called ‘A Christmas Carol’ and will have absorbed the sentiments spoken by Scrooge’s nephew that ‘I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut–up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow–passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.’
I have mentioned before this passion of Dickens for seeing life as a journey not in fact chosen by us, in which we were bound inexorably to meet people and events which we might well not welcome. There’s a sound like a great bell, dolorous and rather menacing, in some of the passages in which he expresses this.
As a child one shudders at the door-knocker which becomes a face, at Marley’s dreadful, dragging chain of cash-boxes and account books, commemorating decades of miserly meanness, and at the shrouded spirit pointing at Scrooge’s lonely and unvisited tomb. As an adult one recognises the grisly truth in the scene around the old man’s deathbed, as the unloved servants and tradesmen squabble over how to share out the unloved old man’s most intimate possessions. And there is also much truth in the moment at the Royal Exchange where his former business partners and rivals coldly observe his passing.
I can do without the later scenes of almost hysterical charity and forgiveness, myself. They are, alas, much less convincing than those in which Scrooge is warned, and in which Tiny Tim’s death is foreseen. Even so, it is in the partly sentimental hope that we might rediscover some part of our childhood faith in the inevitable triumph of goodness that we still embark on Christmas at all.
Mind you, I’ve noticed that a lot of people who make a very big performance out of the tree and the decorations, who give the best and most elaborate presents and have the most lavish Christmas feasts are precisely those who have absolutely no belief in the Christian gospel.
The festival survives in part because in the northern countries, there is an abiding desire for feasting and fellowship at this time of year, and Christmas meets it more than any other moment or ritual. So these dogged unbelievers are compelled to find the name of Christ, even if unwittingly, on their tongues for a moment or two. I am told that in Scotland, where 50 years ago the New Year was overwhelmingly more significant, Christmas has in recent years become much more of an event.
I’m not surprised. The New Year, which was also very much the prime celebration of the Soviet midwinter, has always seemed to me to be fundamentally bleak. Because it centres on the midnight turn of the clock, it is unfriendly to young children and has a lot more to do with drinking than it does with eating.
Also, what exactly is it about? Once you get beyond about 30, the passing of the years is at best a mixed blessing, another milestone on the path to the tomb. Whereas, as the great Gospel puts it, Christmas contains this claim: ‘That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto his own, and his own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God’. And the Epistle (itself quoting a much, much older piece of poetry) deals comfortingly with the cold, relentless passage of time in this way ’Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the Earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed; but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’ .
I’ll now turn briefly to some of the comments here and elsewhere on this week’s column (I intend to reply at a later date to Mrs (Vince) Cable’s enjoyable open letter to me which was published in the Mail on Sunday this week).
Of course I accept, and have in the past accepted here, the argument that the presence of guns in a society makes them more accessible, and so creates the greater possibility that they may be used in dreadful crimes. It’s undeniably true.
The question is whether it is a particularly important and helpful truth. The British prejudice on this subject is plainly that it is both important and helpful. This is combined with a belief that Americans are more less mad about guns, and their laws reflect this madness.
I set out to undermine this prejudice by showing that America’s gun laws originate in the English Bill of Rights, that Britain had very liberal gun laws without mayhem for many years, and that such countries as Switzerland have an armed populace - and it does not itself lead to gun massacres on an American scale. Further, I point out that countries with severe gun control suffer these massacres.
By the way, I am grateful to the reader who points out that I am wrong about current Swiss law, and I apologise for getting this wrong.
Since 2007, the old rule permitting the keeping of ammunition in Swiss homes has been revoked. Guns may be kept, but no ammunition. I didn’t know this, and should have. I don’t think this undermines my point unless there has in the past five years been a great diminution of gun crime in Switzerland – has there? Does anyone have information? Likewise, does anyone have information on whether existing stocks of ammunition were collected, or new ones just not issued, or any other details of the operation of this law . I just think it’s important to acknowledge and confess to errors or omissions of this kind.
Another reader also mentions ‘dementia praecox’ . I have discussed this briefly before. It’s been suggested to me that the original outbreak of this mysterious disease, an apparently serious and irreversible loss of reason, usually among the young, correlated with, and may have been connected with the widespread use of lead in food packaging, paint and plumbing towards the end of the 19th century. In other words, the ingestion of a chemical may have threatened their reason. This point will recur.
It’s my view that individual madness in humans is quite rare, and individual madness unexplained by some external intervention, rarer still. (Mad crowds, whether actual or electronic, are quite common, by contrast) By external intervention I mean physical damage to the brain, either by blows or violent accidents, or by the ingestion of some sort of drug or poison; or through enormous stress or shock which may not be actually physical, but which is too much for the human mind to bear (one thinks of ‘shell shock’ or the overthrow of the minds who suffer terrible inconsolable grief).
My point about knife attacks in China, or the use of cars by murderous maniacs, which is not unknown, is not that the casualties are the same (though they easily could be, and the injuries are grievous and certainly not to minimised) is that the availability of weapons is not really the issue. As I pointed out, some such attacks in China involve explosives. I only mentioned the particular attack in China because it had happened almost at the same time as the Sandy Hook massacre.
I have also said here before, and say again, that I have absolutely no desire to own a gun myself, having seen at first hand and in detail what guns can do to the human body. My point is an appeal to reason, not a defence of gun ownership itself. My view of gun ownership is that an responsible adult should be trusted to own a gun in a free society, and that restrictions on such ownership are usually a sign of an unfree society. Having been trusted, he would in my view be wise to opt not to bother.
Also that, while gun ownership may *permit* such events as Sandy Hook to occur, it cannot be said to be the *cause* of them, and that those who misrepresent the facts to suggest this are being dishonest with themselves and with everyone else.
Now, in any democracy, there is a regular collaboration between people who want to deceive the population, and those who want to be deceived.
This is one of them. Some, who want to destroy the American right to bear arms because they think the liberal state should have a monopoly of firearms, want to deceive. Others, who yearn for a simple explanation for an appalling horror – which they fear will one day come to them – want to believe.
Modern liberals, because they recoil from moral absolutism, are opposed both to corporal punishment of naughty children, and to capital punishment of murderers. They think nobody has the right to do such things. Likewise they do not believe in parental authority over children, or in schools where a body of knowledge is taught in disciplined instruction by teachers who know more than their pupils. Parents, who no longer need to be married, are really no more than carers more or less licensed by the liberal state, and expected to surrender their children to collective ‘progressive’ care as early as possible. Teachers are facilitators, encouraging children in the independent discovery of knowledge, but without the tiresome bonds of authority or, heaven forfend, punishment and failure.
The consequences of this are that many more children behave badly. And so do many more adults, who never learned to behave as children. And also that homicidal violence (whose effects are disguised and diminished by advances in trauma care) becomes more common.
The liberal society also has another interesting feature, in which happiness is assumed as being a universal and attainable goal, and that those who fail to attain it can be medicated to help them be happy anyway (this has some of the same moral and philosophical roots as the other problems, but we won’t deal with them just now. The point is that this development leads to a particular policy, which is connected to the other two).
Yes, I’m coming to the point. Liberalism, which gibbers in horror at the idea of smacking little Barnaby when he misbehaves, is quite relaxed about drugging little Barnaby instead, to get his mind right and make sure he sits still in his tedious classroom, and paying Barnaby’s parents a large subsidy for permitting this. In the USA, Barnaby is often actually given amphetamines to control him. In Britain, he is given a drug which is remarkably similar to amphetamines – amphetamines having been banned by law for general use for many years because of their known harmful effects.
Later, in his teens, Barney, as he has now become, can graduate to ‘antidepressants’, as several massacre culprits have done. He may take these for many years.
I won’t go into the problems of these drugs again here (try the index).
We still don’t know if Adam Lanza was taking any such ‘medication’, because authority and the media aren’t interested in this. They are only interested in rubbing the National Rifle Association’s nose in the dirt, either because they are anti-gun liberals or because they are flock animals who like have the same opinion as everyone else has. We do have the statement of a neighbour, reported early on by the ‘Washington Post’ to suggest that he may have been taking something. And then there is the ever-present possibility, in the USA as in Britain, that any adolescent may well have been using cannabis, a feature that is now considered unremarkable by the US authorities. It simply didn’t interest them in the case of Jared Loughner, the Arizona mass killer, nor in the case of Rudy Eugene, the so-called Florida Causeway Cannibal who chewed the face off a homeless man, having first ripped off his clothes. One report said that toxicology experts found ‘only’ cannabis in his system. Marijuana’s brilliant PR campaign, in which it is misrepresented as ‘soft’ and ‘peaceful’, has successfully taken a lot of people in, hasn’t it?
Liberalism, which also loathes the death penalty, must even so be mightily relieved that the culprits of these mass killings almost invariably end their crimes by destroying themselves. For, if these killers really are acting out of their own will – rather than driven mad by chemical interventions – what possible just punishment available to the liberal state could match the crime they have committed?
It is far more likely that they are in fact unhinged. Loughner, who did survive, plainly long ago lost his reason, and the general lack of curiosity about how he can have gone so terrifyingly mad is deafening. I would say the same about the Norwegian killer Breivik (whose heavy use of Steroids and other drugs may have overthrown his mind, but has never been examined by the authorities) . He is so deeply unaware of the horror of his actions that he cannot possibly be sane.
If you don’t look, you won’t find. My criticism of ‘guns did it’ argument is not that it has no force at all. It has some. It is that it diverts us from discovering the real problem, and dealing with it.
On that glum note, I shall wish you all a Happy, Peaceful and Blessed Christmas, a great light shining in the darkness which would otherwise encompass and overwhelm us.
