Thoughts at the Year’s Close

Long, long ago,

Oh!  so long ago,

Christ was born in Bethlehem 

To heal the world’s woe.

These have now been nearly two rather difficult years.  The hardship of the pandemic continues, menacing us not only in the obvious ways, with sickness and the threat of sickness, but also by disorientation and incertitude.  So much about it seems so hard to read, so impossible to predict; even with reliable statistics, it is often a struggle to work out what such figures actually mean for our lives.  Hard information is not enough by itself to arbitrate between imperatives; for that, something different is needed: the gift of wisdom.

Many of the strands of hope I thought I perceived at the onset of the pandemic — greater local feeling, a sense of unity, a new awareness of the sanctity of life — seemed to fade with the receding of the first wave of the virus.  The blessed quietness of the roads lasted only a few weeks here in mid-suburban south London before the traffic came surging back, if anything heavier and more aggressive than before (though I have been surprised this past month by a distinct lessening in comparison to December last year.  The mood on the roads often seems a useful barometer for the public mood in general).  Even during the first wave, certain things marred the solidarity: I did not like the police helicopters on the lookout for gatherings on the nearby Common — a huge expenditure of resources supposedly too scarce to provide basic foot patrols in ordinary times — nor the Government’s almost immediate resort to the law to enforce the ‘lockdowns’, even though the great majority of people clearly understood the seriousness of the diesease and were already taking heed of the unfolding crisis.  As for a pro-life revival, its seeds are evidently yet to spring; only this past autumn the House of Lords was debating yet another motion for assisted suicide.  There is much to be grateful for in the development of the vaccines, and some aspects of the good things I hoped for have come about — but overall it has been an uncertain, unsettling time.

Then there is the new gear into which the dictatorship of relativism has shifted, the breathtaking speed with which that nameless thing, the ideological movement that is all around us, has conquered so completely the mainstream of our culture.  Identity politics, imported wholesale from the United States, is one way to describe it, or radical-secularist-progressivist-post-modernism; I do not really think we yet have an adequate word for it.  But it is frightening and dangerous.  In Britain for the first time in something like a century it is once again fashionable and respectable to judge people not by their character but by their arbitrary and immutable characteristics.  Meanwhile, in the highest and most venerable institutions, simplistic or ideological readings of history go unchallenged, extreme conclusions are drawn, and guilty verdicts are passed on our forbears.  All high principles, all traditional distinctions are undermined and torn down.  

If, as the claim runs, there is no truth, merely power, no wonder the dictatorship of relativism wants that power for itself, however stridently it proclaims its good intentions.  Such is the strength of this thing that even the pandemic itself has been relativised before it, and never more clearly than at that dizzying moment when the mass protests and disorder of summer 2020 actually found favour with respectable public opinion.  That episode, to me, was more alarming even than the first wave of the pandemic: to see the three months’ solidarity evaporate not for weddings, not for funerals, not even for the national memorial of V. E. Day, but for contentious street protests inspired by events in a different country and advocating a hostile and revolutionary ideology; and then to witness the behaviour of supposedly serious and grown-up public bodies — even the most cherished and trusted public institutions in the land — suddenly issuing startlingly, embarrassingly politicised ‘statements’ in support of these protests.  One feels the ground moving under one’s feet in noticing the kinds of remarks, however outrageous, that because they are politically approved one can get away with saying in public, by comparison to those that one cannot say: the plain common sense, the eternal verities even.  A radical and narrow-minded agenda is taking advantage of a general crisis of leadership to flourish in our institutions, and it is an agenda that is growing ever more overtly hostile to common decency, to fair-mindedness, to traditional Britain and ultimately to the Christian faith and imagination.

The whole movement is a caustic solvent, dissolving memories, restraints and all kinds of proper boundaries, notably those between the political and the personal, and between the political and the religious.  In many circles it is increasingly difficult to demur, to reserve judgement on a matter, to remain apolitical, let alone to make one’s own mind up about a particular issue (no sooner does a newsworthy event occur than one particular interpretation of it emerges and is pressed home).  Many people feel considerable misgivings about it all, even as they experience the not inconsiderable pressure to give in and go along with it.

The cultural upheaval has, on the other hand, brought certain grounds for hope, such as the possibility of interesting and fruitful alliances between, say, us inveterate churchgoers, who are well used to life on Progressivism’s list of enemies, and those newer to troublemaker status, such as those of a ‘secular liberal’ persuasion who recognise and reject the authoritarian streak in identity politics.  Only a few years ago we might have considered each other opponents; now, though, there is an opportunity to find some common cause, an unexpected way to put into practice Pope Francis’s ‘culture of encounter’, and a chance to remind the world — and perhaps ourselves as well — that the Church is always keen to take part in exciting conversations, wherever they are happening and whomever between, and willing to make its contribution to the public forum.  The New Evangelisation has some interesting new dialogues to enter, and I think some surprises await us.

All the same, ordinary life is undoubtedly growing more difficult for those of us who wish simply to live a quiet life in accordance with the wisdom of our forbears; increasingly, it will take actual grit.  The lines that began this post were composed by the writer and ornithologist John Buxton on Christmas Eve in 1941 while a prisoner-of-war at Laufen camp in Salzburg.  Our situation is obviously very different from his, but I think we can still profit from the wisdom of his approach.  Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads: we, like Buxton, in that ingenuous style reminiscent of a medieval carol, might find ourselves reciting simple truths in defiance of the world’s madnesses:

His mother in the stable

Watched him where he lay,

And knew, for all his frailty,

He was the world’s stay.

Now of course this is Christmastide, when it is proper to feast and make merry, and I should not really be striking such a minor key here.  (In truth I had originally intended this post for the end of Advent; New Year’s Eve seemed the next most thoughtful moment!)  This is a precious time of year, one of the few seasons when we can return properly into the real world of our homes and families, and precious not only because the celebrations of Christmas will give us the strength to face the year to come, but because they are good and glorious at the present moment, for their own sake.  And in any case, they do not only give us strength for the future; ultimately they are the future; they are a foretaste of the chord into which all things, the world’s woe and all, shall resolve.

For he should be the Saviour,

Making wars to cease,

Who gives joy to all men,

And brings them peace.

Wishing all readers good health and much happiness in the New Year. 

Herbert Howells’ haunting setting of John Buxton’s carol ‘Long, long ago’.  Sung by I Fagiolini, 24th December 2020.