William Morris provided a “secular religion for idealists” Dora Russell “got on to dualism in the 1920s” THE: NEW POLITICS SoF needs a vocation, argues veteran humanist activist Peter Cadogan. It’s not enough to take leave of God...
Time to get Post-Party Political! ack in the seventies I read Don Bow: Taking Leave of God when it first appeared. I was much taken by it, but just a little uneasy at the same time. I thought, “Haven’t we been here before?” At that time I was General Secretary of the South Place Ethical Society at Conway Hall in London. The Society dates from 1793 when it was founded as the Universalist Chapel. Universalism was a denomination that later merged with the Unitarians but has survived in the US and Canada. Universalism in that sense [and not to be confused with today’s Quaker Universalism - Ed.] was based on the belief that since God is love there has to be ultimate forgiveness - thus the rejection of eternal hell-fire.
Within ten years the Society had rejected hell itself. But if you reject hell, what price heaven?
In the 1830s the Society’s minister, W.J. Fox, abandoned communion. In the 1860s his successor, the American Unitarian Moncure Conway, came to the committee and said: “I can no longer pray”. Prayer was abandoned. Later the hymnbook was rewritten to retain the sacred but to remove a God-up-there.
The congregation and the Christian ethic remained.
At the same time, Darwin dented received Christianity, and the born-again socialism of the eighties, from the Fabians through William Morris to Keir Hardie, provided a kind of secular religion for idealists. Then the Somme, in the summer of 1916, laid churchChristianity low. It never recovered.
But the dream of South Place to provide “a rational religious sentiment” to replace revelation was never realised.
Taking leave of God was not enough, but neither was its proposed substitute.
Conway’s answer turned out to be good enough for sixty years, till the 1920s: the sacred was the thing, that which is set apart, infinite and eternal: truth, beauty, goodness, love, brotherhood, compassion, forgiveness. But eventually even that broke down. Other forms of “humanism” took over that had no use for the sacred: secularism (atheism), rationalism (science), and Marxism (historical materialism). And there was something more significant than all those put together: self-centred individualism.
We are all the products of an individualistic culture. It has a great history, born of the Renaissance, bred of conscience, the Good Book in the vernacular and “the priesthood of all believers”. Its power defeated tyranny, dogma and superstition. People fought and died for it. It yielded Puritanism, dissent. Then, two hundred years later, it was overtaken by the American, French and industrial revolutions and was turned into laisser faire individualism, entrepreneurship, self-help. That too was a huge world-transforming success, underwritten by the energy revolution in steam, gas, electricity and oil.
This double-barrelled individualism launched huge empires, bred great wars, devised vast technologies and landed us with Central Government and The City - massive power-complexes where the individual counts for nothing.
Individualism ends up destroying individuality. We have ceased to be agents positively deciding our own future and have become consumers, victims, spectators. “There is no such thing as society”. The competitive ethic makes it extremely difficult for us to do anything together. For that we need a common religion/philosophy. We don’t have one, just the residues of yesterday. The key question, then, is: Can we devise a new third form of individualism that is not self-centred? That means living and working in teams? All of which is commonplace in the arts, sport, science and business - but not in politics. And there’s the rub.
We are now close to the end of the road. We are not just individualists, we are also dualists, conditioned from birth to separate mind from body, heart from head, science from the arts and religion, theory from practice. Although we are plainly single, whole persons, we think and act as though we were divided down the middle. We divide people into “activists” and “arm-chair theorists” and put out of our minds that we should all be both.
Man must measure; and measurement, served by mathematics and statistics, is the yardstick of truth.
The aesthetic and the spiritual, since they cannot be measured, are beyond the pale of serious natural philosophy and suitably discounted. The arts produce entertainment and decoration. Religion has its place on Sundays and as a way of keeping the lower orders in their place in the great chain of being. Science, of course, produces technology, industry, trade and immense wealth. The endproduct is modern materialism cut off from the human spirit and quite unable to understand itself.
Because we have been brought up as dualists, our worst enemy is between our own ears. We do not have the critical apparatus with which to understand and take charge of our own dilemmas. A few, of course, break through. William Blake was one of the first, with his mythological understanding of the divided personality. Dora Russell got on to dualism in the 1920s; her husband, Bertrand, did not. Jung came to the same conclusion as Blake over the fourfold nature of the psyche. D H Lawrence restored the significance of the body.
John Macmurray gave us “I act, therefore I am” and put Descartes in his place - because actions contain ideas, not the reverse. We are agents (testing out ideas in practice) or we are shadows, victims, non-persons.
South Place never discovered these things. They await the attention of Sea of Faith.
One bottom line at least remains. To identify it we need to go back to classical Athens. The first philosophers THE NEW POLITICS “Can we separate the word “politics” from the word “party”? 350 years ago we had an unfinished revolution... When the personal is the political we shall have arrived”. (Thales, Anaximander et al) and the founders of Greek democracy (Solon to Cleisthenes) were all products of the sixth century BCE. The culture was holistic, all of a piece. Philosophy, worship, politics, military service, law, the arts, were all parts of citizenship in a city-state that was God, personalised as Athene. Thus Socrates’ unquestioning acceptance of his death sentence.
Citizens were civic polymaths. That position was qualified, but not undone, by male chauvinism and slavery. It was greed, militarism, hubris that was to be their undoing hundreds of years later.
To us today, politics is a dirty word. To the Athenians it was not only clean, it was divine. It was their bottom line, the ultimate test. Yet our vocabulary of the nineties includes words like community, neighbourhood, regionalism, face-to-face relationships, forums. Something new is coming through. It all turns on the rediscovery of personal responsibility in a shared context. It is still tentative.
Can we separate the word “politics” from the word “party”? 350 years ago we had an unfinished revolution. For some years we became citizens and then fell back into being subjects, which we still are. The American Constitution begins “We the people...” In Britain we have no such mandate, but we can take it if we are of a mind to do so. It will not be given to us. The necessary but (for some) uncomfortable conclusion is that a new authentic religious/ philosophical position needs to have a properly articulated post-party political dimension. When the personal is the political we shall have arrived.
Is this the vocation of the Sea of Faith? @ Peter Cadogan was an Extra-Mural Tutor in the History of Ideas at Birbeck College, London, before his retirement. His involvements include the Gandhi Foundation’s Northern Ireland Project, and he is Chair of the London Alliance which is promoting independent candidates for the Greater London Authority elections in May 2000. His South Place paper “William Morris, E P Thompson and the Third Way” is available from 3 Hinchinbrook House, Greville Road, London NW6 5UP Jung agreed with Blake about the “fourfold nature of the human psyche” Descartes, “put in his place” by John Macmurray Lawrence “restored the significance of the body”. _ REVIEWS dited by Alison Webster REVIEWS: BOOKS getting on for forty years ago, but I can remember every word of our conversation.