Tesco – A Greater Institution than the C of E?

The Church of England has been engaged in a frenzy of navel-gazing of late. Week by week attendance shrinks. It doesn't seem to care. Some of those engaged in the women bishops debate are manifestly more concerned with Political Correctness than with Evangelism.

The Church of England is not the only denomination wherein secular ideology holds sway. The United Reform Church might be characterised as the Green Party (or the LibDems) at prayer. The Church of Rome is my refuge, not because it is perfect (no human institution is), but because it has remained more faithful to its Founder than its modernising sisters. More faithful in its Christology and in the centrality of the sacraments.

The Roman Church does not ask what the Culture teaches. Catholics ask what Scripture and the Tradition teach. Some of you will think that this means that Catholics have stopped thinking. Nothing could be less true. I have mentioned Father Robert Barron more than once in these posts. He is brilliant and not alone among Catholic thinkers in applying his intellect to matters of faith and morals.

There are many great Anglicans. C S Lewis, Peter Hitchens, John Lennox and Keith Ward are among them. There are many great Evangelicals. But when it comes to institutional faithfulness, The Church of Rome has proved itself again and again. One test (to me an important one) is to ask which of the traditions is the most demonised by the bien pensant elites. Materialists, Progressives and Socialists hate the Catholic Church more than they hate other “denominations”. Evidence of this is to be seen in the glee with they seek to humiliate the Church by insisting that in matters of conscience Catholics should be dictated to by secular ideology. We have seen this repeatedly when it comes to adoption, contraception and abortion. Devoted and effective foster parents have been told that they do not even have the right to silence in respect of same-sex relationships.

What has Tesco to with this? Not much, to tell the truth.

A new branch opened in Stretford today. The choice and quality are outstanding, the staff are extraordinarily helpful and courteous and prices are reasonable. Why? Because the directors and shareholders of Tesco are faithful to their mission – to make money. And because they understand well that the only way to do so is to serve consumers, their fellow men and women, they expend enormous effort to keep quality high and to keep prices to a minimum. What is more, they serve me well. “Service” is a word with religious connotations. I’d prefer them to provide me with healthcare and my grandchildren with an education than the state-run organisations now entrusted with these services.

A failing supermarket chain goes bankrupt; its assets are acquired by entrepreneurs who can run it better. A state school or hospital is seen to be failing; the state shovels money into it.

Is Tesco “better” than the C of E? Superficially a stupid question. Tesco is successful in fulfilling its mission, the C of E is decreasingly successful in fulfilling its.

As to the question of whether women should be consecrated as bishops, I am not going to intrude into a private grief. I am, after all a refugee from the Church of England. May I observe, however, that the Nicean Creed mentions two humans (apart from Our Lord): Mary and Pontius Pilate. We pray to the triune God and we say the Ave Maria. Female saints figure very largely in Catholic devotions. Is it better to be a bishop or a saint – no brainer!

The Most Unsuccessful Blog of All Time – Not

I wish there were thousands out there, clicking the link, hoping for an update. It seems that there are not.

I do this self-indulgently. Like you, I have lots of opinions. Some of my posts start out as not much more than expressions of my instinctive reactions. Should prisoners vote? Of course not!

If I blog on the subject, doing so forces me to do more than to simply react.

On this particular subject, it would lead me to wonder whether we have too many (or too few) banged up behind bars. Then I would be obliged to discuss whether or not incarceration is, in itself, a justification for denying the incarcerated a vote.

In practical terms, I’m not sure that it has any relevance. Are we going to have a single prison constituency? I don’t think so. If the prisoners are distributed between all existing constituencies, will they be significant? I don’t think so.

Why do I do this? I like thinking. I like listening to others think. I would do this if I knew that nobody ever read the blog. But there is a tiny clique which bothers to respond. God bless them. They ice my cake!

My beloved cousin, Geoff, takes me to task on factual matters – thanks, Geoff.

My beautiful (more so than you can even imagine) niece takes me to task from time to time. Elisa doesn’t just compensate for the fact that I have only sons not daughters – she makes it OK. Suppose I had a daughter and Elisa were more beautiful and brainier – bloody hell! Not gonna happen.

She is kind enough to read this stuff. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and to respond - reason enough to carry on.

Writing makes you think. There are lots of writers who, in my opinion, think badly, or scarcely at all. But, blogging makes me think. I read my blogs (obsessively and critically). It’s good for me.

It’s fun. Is it blasphemous to suppose the God created the Universe for fun?

I really enjoy thinking. I hope you do. If I make you think, I’m doing you a favour – and vice versa.

Or, in Other Words...

I posted bitterly yesterday about corruption in the West. We have been smug and complacent about our institutions: our incorruptible civil servants and our legislatures, full of selfless, disinterested men and women, eager to use their talents only in the service of their fellow men. We have contrasted our rulers with those of benighted times past and societies distant.

I, myself, believed, for most of my life, that, to a degree, our aspiration was to imitate Our Lord, who presented himself as the servant of his friends, whose feet he washed. I knew, of course, that this aspiration was not more than an aspiration, which I and all the human beings I had ever met fell short of the ideal.

Our faith in Democracy could be justified negatively, to paraphrase C S Lewis: We embraced it, not because the majority are so virtuous that they deserve to rule, but because we could never trust any fallen human being with authority over us. This makes a lot of sense. Pretty well everything which emanates from Christian theology does. We recognised that Democracy was untidy, that it required endless compromise. We smiled with knowing self-satisfaction at Churchill’s characterisation of Democracy as the worst form of government apart all the others that have ever been tried. He may have been right. All those other forms have been tyrannies of one sort or another, including (perhaps especially) those which based their legitimacy on egalitarianism.

I am an admirer of Rudolph Rummel, the brilliant Hawaiian historian. His, not quite unique, insight is that no two democracies have ever been to war with each other. I have an earlier post on this great man. The facts that he presents are strongly supportive of Democracy. Given the choice between North Korea and Sweden, there is no contest.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the Constitution’s framers had constructed, he replied, “A Republic, if you will keep it”.

He and his heroic fellows did indeed construct a sublime document. He, and they, lived in an era in which “moral sentiments” were closer to the surface of every day discourse than in the 21^st century. We suffer from a sort of moral illiteracy. We live in an era in which the Sunday Times could poll its readers with the following question: Is marital infidelity a sin or a temptation? You do get it, I hope. This is a morally illiterate question. Forgive me for belabouring the point. To ask it, you must not know the meaning of “sin” or “temptation” in English. If they had asked whether marital infidelity was a big deal there would have been intelligible responses, including: Yes, No or Compared with what?

I am very depressed to conclude that Democracy has slid into Corruption. The US founding fathers recognised that for their constitution to work the electorate required a moral compass, that people needed to be moral, not to be saints (saints are regrettably rare) but that Right and Wrong should figure as poles.

Corruption is a disease and one which spreads easily in democratic societies. We electors infect our rulers. Focus groups tell them what we would like. They infect us. They promise to favour our group if we vote for them.

Are we doomed? Perhaps. Are there alternative outcomes? Perhaps.

Hans Herman Hoppe is an “Austrian” thinker who has exposed the Democratic Dilemma. We should pay attention. There are smart people in the Libertarian movement who think that we can and should allow/encourage institutions to arise from the market, to emerge from the endless transactions between individuals, independently of what tyrannical governments mandate.

The bigger the political entity the more likely it is to be corrupt. The government of the US has this century trampled on the constitution. You do not need an IQ to see that Income Tax and Obamacare are violations of the Constitution, just a pulse. You do not need a degree in international law to notice that Greece’s admission to the Eurozone was contrary to the instruments which brought the Euro into being.

CORRUPTION

This is perhaps the bitterest post ever.

We in the West (particularly in the UK) have been smug and complacent about corruption in the political class and among public officials. Corruption (we suppose) bedevils the Third World. Poor bloody blacks in Africa live in kleptocracies. South American governments have habitually preyed upon their peoples by bribery and corruption. Who you know determines your influence. There is a lot of truth in these suppositions. To start a business in Peru requires yards of forms to be filled in and years of palm greasing. All this is true.

An anecdote is relevant here. When I was on the point of moving to Brazil in the 1970s, Post Office and other officials bent over backwards to ease the issues of “exporting” our meagre belongings. They were on my side.

On the other side of the Atlantic things were different. I was lucky enough to have an intelligent and sophisticated friend to accompany me when I went to “liberate” my imported property. We went to Office No 1. The guy sent us to Office No 2. From there we went to Office No 3 and eventually back to Office No 1. When my Brazilian friend explained the situation to the official we had originally encountered, he casually opened a drawer and handed me the necessary form. This smug Brit (me) then (mentally, already smart enough not to do so aloud) poured vituperation on this sad, corrupt twat. He was not on my side. His only objective was to keep his colleagues in Offices 2 – 3 (or 4 or 5) in jobs.

We Brits, I said to myself, would not put up with crap like this. I felt superior.

Corruption is now endemic in the West. I was listening today to Burt Folsom. He quoted FDR’s friends. Roosevelt openly used federal money to buy votes for the Democratic Party.

Mitt Romney, not a hero of mine, pointed out that close to 50% of the electorate had a vested interest in keeping entitlements high. Obama didn’t point this out – Hopey, Changey, don’t you know. But that is how he got elected.

The European Union is another case in point. There are net contributors and net recipients. We and Germany are net contributors. We are not members of the Euro. Germany is. Germany benefits (short-sightedly) from a weak currency; it is a manufacturing country. Recipient countries are very keen to increase the contributions of contributor countries. Surprising?

We are now faced with the new seven year EU budget. The EU has failed for the 17^th year to have its accounts signed off. You and I (as businessmen) would be in prison for such dereliction.

Corruption Rules. Schmucks like me have no cause to be smug and complacent about our supposed superiority over third world countries.

There are two groups of workers in society, to oversimplify. Once upon a time there were private sector workers, who characteristically earned a bit more than those in the public sector; but the public sector workers were compensated by inflation-proofed pensions and other benefits. Now the public sector lot have not only inflation-proofed pensions and other benefits, but higher salaries as well. Gordon Brown deliberately engineered this situation. He calculated that an inflated public sector would vote for New Labour. He wasn’t wrong. This is corruption on a massive scale. Yes, of course, I feel superior to those who exploit their fellow men with the connivance of the state.

Britain, the EU and the USA are as corrupt as the states of South America and the kleptocracies of Africa. In Britain we may be a bit better off than Zimbabwe, for the time being. Once upon a time, we in the Christian West might have hoped that the moral intuition of our fellow men would protect us. Our intellectuals have sabotaged our moral intuition.

C S Lewis, John F Kennedy & Aldous Huxley

Yesterday was the anniversary of the deaths of these three men. Of course, JFK’s death eclipsed those of the other two. Famously, we are supposed to remember where and when we heard the news – and I do. I can picture the corridor I was walking along on my way to supper.

I was at boarding school. We had just emerged from a Film Society event at which we had seen Ashes and Diamonds, a film about political assassination.

We wondered whether WWIII was about to erupt. The ripples caused by this event are still disturbing the water.

I had been a fan of Kennedy and I retain some my youthful admiration.

I thought Brave New World was great. I still do, although the particular dystopia of which it warned has not come to pass.

C S Lewis has been among my heroes since my mother first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to me and my sister, within, I think, a year of its publication (1957). I have read it many times since – and all the other Chronicles.

I loved the “science fiction”: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, which has proven more prophetic than Huxley’s book. It is illustrative of the gruesome truth that when conservative moralists warn about “slippery slopes”, they almost always prove to be horribly right.

The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast are also brilliant and morally instructive. Interestingly, Lewis says that of all his books these were the ones he least enjoyed writing.

Then there are his essays, everyone a gem.

But, of all his writing Mere Christianity is the one which I would most strongly recommend. It is lucid and persuasive and as good an exposition of the Christian faith as I have encountered. He does not duck the difficult teachings of the Church. Read it.

Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of these deaths.

Question Time: Israel and the Palestinians

Once more a BBC programme which generated more heat than light.

The Ottoman Empire made the serious error of siding with Germany in WWI. Germany and the Ottomans were defeated. Britain assumed control of much of the Arab lands previously under Ottoman hegemony, including the “Mandate”, also known as Palestine. The name derives from the Latin version of “Philistine”. The Jewish nation was destroyed by the Romans and so began the Diaspora, which eventually proved (in some ways) to be a blessing for Europe, although Europeans were for centuries too stupid to perceive the advantages which accrued to them from having a population of educated and hardworking Jews in their midst. To the shame of the mediaeval church, Jews were persecuted and excluded.

Not all Jews left the Holy Land. Many thousands remained in the territory which for millennia had been the Jewish homeland.

From the end of WWI to 1948 Britain ruled Palestine and its mixed population of Arabs, Jews and others. The Jews of Palestine had been joined by many thousands of European and Asian Jews in a kind of reverse Diaspora. This was inspired by the ideology of Zionism and started in the nineteenth century. Naturally, it gained impetus from the Holocaust. Native Jews and their returning bretheren were instrumental in creating a vibrant and increasingly prosperous region in the midst of what had been for centuries the moribund Ottoman Empire. The technological and economic brilliance of the Jews made Palestine, particularly the part which corresponded to the ancient Holy Land, an agricultural cornucopia with other nascent industries which attracted Arabs and others to participate in the prosperity.

The Zionists did not relish British rule and in some cases resorted to unsavoury tactics to gain independence. In 1948 the United Nations voted to create the state of Israel by partitioning Palestine. The biggest portion became Jordan, ruled by a royal family who had been British clients in the struggle against the Ottoman Turks.

On the day after partition, new-born Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbours; but in the tradition of King David and the Maccabees, it astonishingly prevailed. The Jews had added military prowess to their agricultural, technological and economic genius. In spite of a clumsy electoral system which made the creation of effective governments difficult, the Israelis have created (with the support of some in the West, notably the USA) the only democracy in the Middle East, with civil rights and a free press. Non-Jewish Israelis enjoy unparalleled economic prosperity and political liberty. Non-Jewish Israeli members of parliament are free to rail against Zionism.

In the 1960s there came into being the PLO, led by the odious, mendacious and corrupt terrorist, Yasser Arafat. He received the support of all the nasty regimes on the planet. His successors are Hamas (an openly terrorist group, which calls in its charter for the destruction of Israel) and the so-called Palestinian Authority. They hate and murder one another, but are united in their hatred of Israel. Hamas, most of whose members are (nominally, at least) Sunni Muslims, receives support from Shiite Iran. This is curious because many violent deaths of Muslims around the world are the result of Sunni/Shiite mutual excommunication and loathing.

Israel has continued, in the course of six Arab wars, to maintain its democratic existence. It has made concession after concession to the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Lebanese. It is committed in principle to a “two state solution” – ie the division of the Holy Land into a Palestinian State and the Jewish State. I use inverted commas because, in my view, there are already two states: Israel and Jordan. The so-called Palestinians are ethnically indistinguishable from the Jordanians. Their flags are almost the same. Nevertheless, most Israelis are prepared to countenance a third entity comprising Gaza and the West Bank, largely controlled respectively by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis’ problem is this: how do you come to an accommodation with people whose avowed aim is the destruction of your nation? It has been rightly said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. David Horowitz confronts a Palestinian supporter who calls for all the Jews in the world to come to Israel so that the Arabs can the more easily exterminate them.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves. Of late, Hamas has been lobbing thousands of rockets at Tel Aviv and Ashkelon. Their declared aim is to kill and demoralise Jewish civilians. Relatively few Israelis have been killed because of the Israeli policy of building shelters and their high-tech missile defences – the Iron Dome.

Israeli intelligence is very effective. They know the habits, names and addresses of the most prominent terrorists, aka “fighters” or “militants”. They go after them with precision weapons and have killed a substantial number. Heartbreakingly, there have been civilian casualties, largely because the terrorists site their launchers in civilian areas. They regard the death of every little girl, every little boy and every grandma as a propaganda victory for themselves. Truly do they say, “We love Death!”

Many of those who comment on these issues preface their remarks by saying that there are faults on both sides, implying that there is a moral equivalence between Israel and her enemies. Not me! Yes, there have been times when Israelis and Israel’s government have behaved badly and unwisely. But it seems to me that there is no moral equivalence.

I am nervous about posting this because I know that some who have read this blog will disagree with my sentiments and analysis. If you are one of them, please comment. If you think my facts need correcting, please say so. I shall do my best to respond in a civilised manner. Your civility will be much appreciated.

Alhamdulillah

I have many problems with Islam; but I respect many of its adherents. There are many aspects of Islamic culture which cause me disquiet – and worse. But here is something I admire. When you ask a pious Muslim how he is, he is likely to reply, “Alhamdulillah”: Thanks be to God. Arabic discourse is suffused with references to the Almighty. Any reference to the future is accompanied by a pious, “Inshallah”, “If God wills it”. This used to be common enough in English discourse: “DV”, “Deo Volente” or “God willing”. In Portuguese, Si Deus quiser (future subjunctive).

Daniel Hannan, lamenting Europeans’ lack of enthusiasm for having babies, describes how in Turkey adults of either sex, encountering a young child, are likely to pick it up and exclaim, “Alhamdulillah!”. Wonderful, pious and life-affirming!

Well, I have every reason to be exclaiming “Alhamdulillah!” repeatedly. I spoke yesterday evening to my youngest, the first time since his ghastly experience (see Evil Predators post). He suffered no more than a chemical assault and is recovering from the shock. What is more his bank has recognised that the withdrawals from his account were a form of fraud and have agreed to indemnify him. Alhamdulillah!