Human Rights are often seen as a non or even anti–Christian development. But a new book explores quite how much the development of human rights – rhetorically, philosophically, legally, politically – owes to Christianity. Nick Spencer spoke to its author Samuel Moyn 

Human rights are seen by many people today as somehow an inherently secular enterprise. Where does that impression come from and do you think it’s fair?

They were originally associated with the French Revolution, a strongly anticlerical enterprise (though even the revolutionaries called the rights they proclaimed “sacred” and set up their own new religion). And in our day, since roughly the 1970s, human rights movements in the global north have generally attracted secular people, even if they too sometimes have a nearly religious investment in the principles. What my book tries to show is that in the 1940s, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was propounded, human rights were most often championed by Christians and often as an explicitly Christian project. Even an early human rights NGO like Amnesty International, founded by a fervent convert to Catholicism named Peter Benenson, hardly escaped Christian trappings in the beginning, with its votive candles lit for prisoners of conscience.

Your book starts with Pope Pius XII and focuses primarily on the influence of the Catholic Church and Catholic theology on ideas of human dignity, and rights. This will, I suspect surprise quite a few people.

I was surprised too, and in fact I wrote the book because I was puzzled by why it was the Pope, more than anyone else, who organized his thinking during World War II itself around human rights. Statesmen like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt sometimes mentioned the concept, but it figured far less substantially in their wartime rhetoric. Puzzles are often opportunities to revise our preconceptions, and I took this one as a reason to research just how Christian mid–century human rights really were.

What do you think brought about the Church’s change of mind here? For most of the previous 130 years it had tended to view rights as a rather regrettable offspring of French Revolution and wayward French philosophy, hadn’t it?

Exactly. But in the late 1930s, on the back of a much longer standing anticommunism, at least some Roman Catholics concluded that far right regimes were also threats. Sometimes utopias for Catholic social morality were possible to achieve, like in authoritarian Austria (before the Anschluss) as well as Portugal and Spain. But in spite of a history of overtures, some Catholics started to conclude that authoritarian states were as risky for the social morality they prized as the liberal states they had spurned and the communist states that always terrified them.

“Human rights” became a way, increasingly popular during and after the war, for saying that limited states deferring to local communities and religious authority would better protect not just individual freedom but the church’s mission to bring moral order. Spain and Portugal remained authoritarian till the mid–1970s, but much of the rest of Western Europe moved to embrace human rights in these conservative Christian terms.

Was this only a Catholic affair? You mention Protestants a bit in the book, especially the Oxford Conference of 1937, but generally they seem to be somewhat behind the Catholic curve on human rights.

Not at all. I structure the book starting with Catholics — and it is true that Protestants had no comparable figure like the Pope — but Protestants are central to the story. Given German Protestant investment in the Nazi project, however, it was really Anglo–American Protestants who take the lead, in companionship and dialogue with Catholic developments.

For example, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States propounded human rights as the basis of future world order during the war, and the World Council of Churches – which finally united many Protestant denominations in 1947 — also made human rights rhetorically central.

As I see it, however, Americans soon lost interest in the theme (John Foster Dulles, a key figure in the Federal Council, eventually disavowed human rights treaties as America’s Cold War secretary of state). And British Protestants probably never made the language central either. So my attention is drawn to the Continent, where the dominant Christian Democratic parties — in Germany an unprecedented common cause of Catholic and Protestant communities — did most to base their polities on human dignity, with a conservative interpretation of human rights principles.

The link between dignity and rights seems to be absolutely critical to the developments of human rights. Did the former necessarily lead on to the latter? Do you think we could even have got the latter without the former?

No — normally dignity has not implied rights. And conversely, from the French Revolution through the 1930s, rights were not premised (at least explicitly) on something called human dignity. Across Western history, most invocations of dignity – the word literally means “rank” – implied hierarchy among humans, and even 1930s Christian invocations of human dignity were rarely linked to the claim that individuals have God–given or natural rights.

As I show in the book, the first constitutions to made human dignity a leading principle were the conservative Irish in 1937 and the authoritarian Vichy in 1944 — long before the Christian Democratic constitutions after World War II, and the West German Basic Law of 1949. So what I try to do in the book is show what the steps were whereby our commonsense notion that human dignity is the basis of human rights came about.

Christian Human Rights is a book about politics and constitutional law more than philosophy or theology per se, and as such spends quite a bit of time talking about the dominance of Christian Democratic regimes in post–war Europe. This is a political tradition that, I think it’s fair to say, is almost completely foreign to Anglophone – or at least British – audiences. How would you characterise Christian Democracy and what was it about human rights that appealed to CD parties?

Christian Democracy was very progressive historically. On the continent, liberal democracy was a weak tradition, that had failed utterly before World War II, until developments in the politics of Christianity made a place for it (after American guns cleared the table of the other alternatives and first choices).

The price to pay for the role Christianity ended up playing for a great many West Europeans who had once vilified democracy was a very conservative variant of the regime that was supposed to provide safeguards against the feared anarchy that the very idea of “democracy” had long conjured up. The vision of human dignity and human rights that Christian Democrats embraced was one that limited the state (and ruled out the expansionist secular state) in the name of moral values.

In the long run, the risky Christian gambit to accommodate liberal democracy in conservative terms may ironically have played a critical role in the general obsolescence of Christianity in the region, though nobody could have predicted it at the time.

The most famous instantiation of human rights is, I guess, in the UN Declaration of 1948. The genesis of this has obviously been well studied and the role of key figures, especially Eleanor Roosevelt, long recognised. But you make the case for the significant influence of personalism and Catholic thought. How did that find its way in?

We must remember that only fifty–odd states voted on the Universal Declaration in December 1948, and only very few of these were home to majority non–Christian populations. It should not be surprising therefore that, though the document rejected mention of the divine, its rhetoric was redolent of specifically Christian human rights.

Its Lebanese Christian author Charles Malik – deeply influenced by Jacques Maritain, leading Christian personalist after World War II and indeed the most prominent philosopher until our own time to enthuse about human rights – introduced a communitarian vision of the principles. The “person,” unlike the individual, is all over the document, with the term intended to gesture towards a middle point between liberal atomism and communist and fascist totalitarianism. Further, specific articles like the one on the family consecrated a central plank of Christian social morality.

I want to end with a couple of questions that move beyond the timeframe of your book (although you do touch upon them in the conclusion). The first is, what specific effect do you think the Christian genesis of human rights in mid–century Europe had on human rights? You gesture towards this in what you say about Muslims in contemporary Europe but I either didn’t quite follow, or wasn’t wholly convinced by this.

In the long run, I want to suggest, the secular left — mainly working on socialism in the 1940s — took ownership over human rights after the 1970s, and made the concept its own. What is done in its name now bears little resemblance to what its earlier Christian founders had in mind.

I make a specific but narrow case in the last chapter of the book that the fear of threats to Christian democracy against enemies in the Cold War has been updated to apply to Muslims seen as threats to “secular” democracy — a strange legacy for secular proponents of human rights to assume.

Some today contend that there is far more holdover or hidden Christianity than this to contemporary human rights. I do want secular progressives to come away worried that in generally exchanging socialism for human rights they have taken on one of the slogans of their one–time enemies — nowhere more vividly than the United Kingdom where the European Convention was once a Tory project and Churchill said the point of human rights was to preserve Christendom against dissolution.

But I also think that the left has in the meantime made human rights its own, and Conservatives in their opposition to the Human Rights Act today inadvertently acknowledge this transfer in ownership. If there is a Christian legacy in contemporary human rights, it looks minor to me, rather than massive.

And secondly, going back to where we started, why is it do you think the this story of Christian genesis was lost so rapidly? How was it that the secular left managed to capture the story of human rights so completely that today they are seen almost like a non–religious faith position?

Because Christianity itself collapsed, at least in terms of formal membership and religious lifestyles. That is the really puzzling event, but it was too big a puzzle to take on compared to the one I set out to solve, and many people are working on it. Once we understand better how Christianity after 1945 could move so quickly from a golden age to a spectacular freefall, we will understand the conditions in which Christian human rights were forgotten (a few small circles aside), and another conception was built.

Christian Human Rights is published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Peter Harrison is a softly–spoken man in a very noisy field. Formerly Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, now Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, he is a careful and widely–respected scholar in a territory – some would call it a no–man’s land – where we have seen ignorant armies clashing by night and by day for many years now. When we met in London it was precisely to discuss that territory.

Harrison has just written a book on the territories of science and religion, reviewed here. Most people most of the time have a pretty good understanding of what they mean by science and what they mean by religion. And because we know what kind of thing science is and we know what kind of thing religion is, we can readily see how they interact (read: clash) with one another.

The trouble with this is that what I mean by science and religion is possibly not quite what you mean by science and religion; is probably not what a Francophone or German–speaker means by ‘la science’ or ‘Wissenschaft’ (or indeed religion); and is almost certainly not what our forebears meant by science, or scientia, or religion, or religio. In other words, we reify at our peril.

When we speak, Harrison makes the point through the example of biblical criticism. “In nineteenth century England, biblical criticism was regarded as a science, partly because I think they got it from the Germans.” When Victorians had the faith rocked by science, as some of the more articulate and vocal did, it was not necessarily geology, still less biology, that they had in mind, as the science of textual criticism.

This is not just a historical problem. “I’ve got a very short article on the concepts of science and religion that came out in the Journal of Religion,” Harrison tells me. “It was translated into German and we had a big headache with science and Wissenschaft”. The latter is the obvious German word for translation but it actually covers the natural sciences and the humanities in such a way as to obscure the very point that Harrison was making. Whereas the statement ‘science is a narrow category in contemporary discourse’ makes sense, saying the same thing of Wissenschaft does not.

This is not simply a narrow linguistic point. As Harrison says, “if you have a narrow definition of science, then scientism” – the belief that the method of the natural sciences is universally applicable, uniquely reliable and supremely authoritative across all intellectual fields – “becomes more a possibility than otherwise.” That certainly helps to explain why the science vs. religion debate has been so fierce in the Anglophone world, whilst would–be New Atheists from other milieux, Michael Onfray for example, have taken a different, less ‘scientistic’ tack.

This problem is not limited to the territory of science. Harrison’s book been translated into Chinese, and he tells me of some challenging exchanges with the Chinese translator. “We were trying to get on to ‘habit’. So what do you mean by habit? Is it the same as disposition? In the West there’s a whole lexicon of philosophical terms which, when you try to translate them, pose real difficulties. Conceptions of virtue, for example, are central to Territories, but when you try to translate them, when put that in the Chinese context, it’s hard to know how you can even get the argument right.”

Harrison’s intent with this analysis is not simply to deconstruct, to show us all how difficult it is to engage in this dialogue across, and even within, defined linguistic traditions. That science and religion debate has, at one level at least, been at times a dialogue of the wilfully deaf, as a depressing number of religious believers (and not just religious believers, as Theos’ Rescuing Darwin project showed) deny evolution, and a smaller, but no less depressing coterie of ‘scientists’ peddle an exhausted myth about the long–standing and on–going warfare between science and religion.

Harrison makes no disguise of how wearied he is by the state of affairs. It’s not surprising. Having spent a lifetime teasing apart the true nature of the relationship between these shifting territories, to hear people dismiss one or other out of hand, or to recycle long–discredited narratives about warfare must be depressing. “I was at a conference in America earlier this year about the ‘myth that would not die’.” The title is apt but sadly, he admits, “there’s only so much authors can do. After that, you just need good advertising.”

He’s probably right, but advertising is ultimately parasitic and without a good product it is empty air. Harrison has a number of other projects on the go, not least a forthcoming article which looks at the (in)famous Credo quia absurdum, usually translated “I believe because it is absurd”, attributed to Tertullian. This has long been cherished by anti–clericals (like Voltaire), agnostics (Darwin quoted it in his autobiography), and atheists (most recently Dawkins) as a gloriously frank example of Christianity’s wilful idiocy. Yet, Harrison’s work traces how the phrase was discovered, used, translated, and attributed in some tellingly different ways, in early modern Europe, from Thomas Browne, through Locke, through Voltaire and beyond. In so doing, he throws new and revealing light on what Tertullian meant versus how he has been interpreted and is understood by the polemicists.

It is precisely the kind of painstaking scholarly attention to detail that the public debate that rages over these shifting territories needs. Harrison may be right when he suggests that such work is not sufficient, and that the science and religion debate needs new narrators and new advertisers. But even if it is not sufficient, it is certainly necessary.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos 

Peter Harrison is Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. His book The Territories of Science and Religion is available here. 

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Image from wikimedia.org, available in the public domain.

Nick Spencer interviews Dr Eliza Filby on her recent book “God and Mrs Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul”. You can also read his book review here. 

Politicians today are chary about Doing God, but Margaret Thatcher wasn’t, was she? Was that because of who she was or when she was? 

I think in part it’s to do with when she was but also the time she was operating.  Back in the 1980s Britain was still assumed to be a Christian country. These were the days when the religious correspondent of the Times was in fact the Church of England correspondent; when the General Synod proceedings were reported verbatim in the newspapers, and when charities were fronted by churchmen, not celebrities. Bishop David Sheppard and Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool, for example, were asked to head up the Miners Hardship Fund for the families of the miners in 1985. 

Religion was understood in the media as Anglicanism and Christianity. Within the political sphere, it was considered perfectly normal for politicians to quote extensively from the Bible. If you search the Hansard database from the 1980s, for example, you will find that biblical language was very common, as was classical language and references back then. This is no longer the case. If a politician stood up and started quoting from The Aeneid now he would be dismissed as an eccentric. Similarly, if an MP now quoted extensively from the Bible, it is quite possible that half the Commons wouldn’t know even what he/she was talking about. This reflects a decline in biblical literacy amongst the political class and British society as a whole.
In her use of the Bible, Thatcher was therefore was reflecting her time.  But the meaning behind her statements was very personal to her and that’s what I try to document in the book. When people talk about Thatcher’s ‘Victorian values’ and her ‘conviction’ approach to politics, the source of all this (her politics, style and convictions) was in fact religious, specifically sourced from the Methodist tutelage she received as a child from her lay–preacher father, Alf Roberts. In the book, I go through his sermons which Margaret Thatcher herself kept, and you can see there in the sermon notes of a lay preacher in interwar Grantham – ideas about the Protestant work ethic, individual liberty, thrift and restraint – the origins of what would later become known as Thatcherism.
Thatcher had a theological approach to politics and her ideas had sincere biblical foundations which stemmed back to her early days in Grantham. As Margaret Thatcher herself said: ‘Economics is the method; the object is to change the soul’.

Did other people quote the Bible as much? I get the impression that even for her time she was at the more explicit end of the spectrum. 

Well it depends who you compare her to. In the 1980s the Labour party was going through a secular phrase, headed by two non–believer Michael Foot and subsequently Neil Kinnock, so compared to the left, Thatcher was very religious. But if you compare Thatcher to other Christian conservatives – Enoch Powell for example – she was not.

But in some respects I think you are right.  Thatcher started using the Bible precisely when it began to go out of fashion. The ‘80s was a crucial moment in the religious history of Britain in that it was the decade when Britain made the transition from a Protestant nation to a multi–faith, secular, plural society. Thatcher is the last politician, certainly the last Prime Minister, who was able to speak so explicitly about her faith and how it legitimised her political philosophy.
Tony Blair was famously advised not to ‘do God’. Certainly his aides were aware that it was inappropriate for him, (even though he was a sincere and fervent Christian), to harp on about his religion. What Alistair Campbell meant by ‘we don’t do God’ is that ‘we don’t want to offend or alienate secular liberals or non–Christians’. By the 1990s, the Labour party were more concerned not to offend the secular liberal left than to provide some sort of Christian basis for its politics. Thatcher on the other hand had no such concerns or sensibilities. 

Of course, the picture is muddied now by ‘religion’ as opposed to ‘Christianity’. I think many more people are offended by ‘religion’ per se. 

Yes, I agree. I think we’ve got a scenario now where there is declining religious literacy and confusion about faith and religion. This has been partly caused by the increasing prominence of what I would term fringe fundamentalism (of variant types Christianity, Islam, and Atheism); all of which have given religion a bad name. The secular media has fed the flames by giving these fringes the oxygen of publicity rather than providing a balanced representation of religion in all its varying shades. 

Going back to Margaret Thatcher’s beginnings: How much of her Grantham upbringing in mythologised? You give over a good 50 pages of your book to exploring what her childhood was like, and she, of course, kept on returning to it in her own speeches, but I was struck by the fact that she left more or less as soon as she could, never really went back much and, I think I’m right in saying, didn’t talk about its formative effect that much until she became Leader of the Opposition.

It’s mythologised, it’s deliberate, it’s self–conscious, but it’s not entirely self–constructed. Margaret Thatcher, as I document in the book, only began to reference her father, her upbringing in Grantham and her Methodism when she bid for the leadership in 1975. It was politically motivated in that she deliberately drew upon quaint tales of Grantham (of living above the shop, of Grantham’s charities and philanthropists, of her family’s hard work) as a way of connecting with disaffected Conservative grassroots who were then disenchanted with the direction of the party under Edward Heath. The Conservatives had just suffered two election defeats, its worst result since the 1920s and were frustrated by Heath’s failure to quash the unions and control inflation. All Thatcher’s parables of working in the grocers shop and of the values of thrift, the Protestant work ethic and God–given liberty seemed the perfect antidote to a nation in crisis. It resonated with the Conservative party in 1975 and later in 1979, with the nation at large.

But they were her values before then, weren’t they?

Yes, they were. And it is important to remember that Thatcher’s upbringing had instilled a class and religious identity that was merely to be reawakened in the mid–1970s. As Alfred Sherman later said: ‘Grantham was embodied in her, waiting to emerge.’
This is also important in terms of her religiosity. Thatcher was a cradle Christian who maintained a strong Christian faith throughout her life. More importantly however, there was always a strong correlation between her religious beliefs, her class–consciousness, and her political convictions. Faith, politics and class were back then, (not just for Thatcher but for the whole of British society) an intertwining set of allegiances. It is therefore important that Thatcher was the daughter of a Nonconformist Liberal lay preacher; it is important that she was a Wesleyan Methodist and not a Primitive Methodist; it is significant that her father was a lower middle class grocer rather than a professional and feared the rise of the Co–op and the Labour party as a threat to his livelihood.  When people said to me, (as many of her former ministers did when interviewed), that Thatcher never talked about religion or her private faith; it is in many ways irrelevant. It points to our own secularism and lack of understanding about how religiosity and faith once worked in Britain.

It is clear from what you say that Thatcher was genuinely and sincerely Christian, not simply in her ethical stance, but in religious observation and even in reading the Bible and, occasionally it seems, theology too. But I wonder whether she ever learnt anything from it, by which I mean, she seems to me to be someone whose beliefs, outlook and values were firmly set at an early age, and thereafter simply confirmed by what she read. I supposed that happens to all of us as we get older, but more so with her? Did she ever change her mind, and in particular, she her Christianity ever change her mind?

There’s clear evidence that she had a very intense early religious instruction from her father, and her faith wasn’t challenged by any of the intellectual temptations at Oxford University. Methodism acts as an anchor when she first arrives at university – she joins the local chapel and in fact becomes preacher on the local circuit. It is in fact important to remember that Thatcher was a preacher before she was a politician.
By the time that she leaves Oxford however, she has transferred this missionary energy from religion to politics.
What is interesting about her intellectual journey is that throughout much of the 1950s/60s when she first arrives in Parliament is that she’s very much a ‘wet’ Conservative, in the Macmillan consensus politics camp. Interestingly, it is at this time that she becomes an Anglican. If you read some of her speeches from these years, she almost sounds like William Temple, heralding the spiritual nourishment of the welfare state.
1968 proves to be a turning point for her. At the Conservative party conference that year, she gives an important speech ‘What’s Wrong with Politics’, and I’d argue that that’s when Thatcher becomes ‘Thatcher’; it is when she utters the immortal line “the Good Samaritan could only have helped because he had money’. In preparation for the speech she had devoured the works of Karl Popper, Hayek and other right–wing thinkers, but it was to her Bible she looked to for legitimacy and as a way of popularising these ideas. 

When Thatcher assumed office, she gave two important speeches on the harmony between Biblical principles and the principles of the New Right. They were written for her of course, but you can see from her interventions in the drafting process, that she believed every word she eventually said. The political aim of these speeches of course, was to challenge the assumed link between socialism and virtue. It perhaps does not need adding here that the Church of England did not agree.
What does become increasingly important to her is the Jewish faith, partly because she was influenced by the spiritual champion of Thatcherism, the chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jacobovitz who publicly defends the government and attacks the Church of England for its out–dated and misguided compassionate belief in welfarism. Her understanding of Judaism is that it’s a religion of responsibility, community, work ethic – all the things that she understands Christianity to be – and so if there is an add–on in her thought, it’s that she starts talking about ‘Judeo–Christian values’.
Also important in this is evangelical capitalist Brian Griffiths who acts as head of her policy unit from 1986. Thatcher was particularly impressed with some lectures he had given on the morality of capitalism in the early eighties – he seemed to be saying what she wished the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie wasnt – that creating wealth was a moral endeavour and nothing to do with greed. She appointed Griffiths as her advisor in 1986 and he ended up drafting her infamous speech to the Church of Scotland in 1988, in which she crudely quoted St Paul ‘If man shall not work, he shall not eat’ as the biblical justification for enterprise culture.

Does she take on board any criticisms?

In 1988 Thatcher wrote in a letter to William Waldergrave: “the Church keeps complaining that we’re making everyone poor, and when we’re making everyone rich they complain that we’re making everyone materialistic”.  She didn’t like criticism from the Church; she was uncomfortable with it. She tried hard to convince them that her politics stemmed from sincere Christian beliefs even inviting a selection of Anglican bishops to Chequers. It was not a harmonious occasion, Thatcher proceeded to lecture them on the meaning of Christianity – that it was about freedom rather than love – which didn’t go down too well with the bishops.

For all she was a Christian Conservative, Thatcher wasn’t much of a conservative Christian, was she? By that I mean, while she was very happy to play friend to Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, she was never really ‘one of them’. Her voting record on issues of personal morality was hardly different from the kind of liberal or left wing parliamentarians she often tried to distinguish herself from.

Mrs Thatcher in the first instance was never moralistic in her faith or her politics. The Conservatives cosied up to Mary Whitehouse and the NVLA in the ‘70s when it suited them, but once in power, relations cooled. After initially enthusiastic and hopeful, Mary Whitehouse would be very disappointed with the legislation that went through under Margaret Thatcher’s government. Thatcher was also a disappointment to the anti–abortion lobby, and all those fighting against ‘the permissive age’.
The Conservative government rather than halting or reversing permissiveness actually accelerated it. The relaxed the divorce laws, legalised homosexuality in Scotland and did very little to reverse the all of the so–called ‘permissive’ legislation from the 1960s.
For example, the most liberal and effective response to the AIDs panic came from Britain. Margaret Thatcher may not have had much to do with the government AIDS campaign (it was the one thing she delegated) but her government’s liberal response is an important indication that Thatcher was not the moral authoritarian that the left thought she was.
In truth, Thatcher thought that sexual morality really didn’t have a place in parliament, and, like constitutional change, was a political minefield best avoided. It was a distraction from the main event, which was the economy.

The conclusion of your book fascinated me. I loved the Frank Field quote (Field once asked her of about her greatest regret in office, to which she replied “I cut taxes and I thought we would get a giving society and we haven’t”) and I was struck by your statement that she was uncomfortable with many of the visible excesses of capitalism and in private reportedly raged against excesses of bankers. How far do you think Thatcher disliked Thatcherism (or at least the cultural idea of what Thatcherism stood for?)

I don’t think Thatcher was one for a great deal of self–reflection or regret, but when I interviewed Frank Field I was struck by what he said; the fact that her biggest regret was that she thought she had created a giving society but that she had not. This was confirmed when I talked to Harvey Thomas (an evangelical Conservative, who had formerly worked for evangelist Billy Graham and later became the Tories’ PR man). Thomas confirmed that Thatcher wasn’t comfortable nor could she understand the culture that she created. In a sense, Peregrine Worsthorne put it correctly: ‘Thatcher came into Downing Street to recreate the values of her father and ended up creating the world of her son.’
Thatcher was a woman of principle, and when your principles don’t bear fruit, do you blame the principles or how they have been applied? My own view is that there was a fundamental flaw in Thatcher’s theology.  It is not that Mrs Thatcher did not believe in society (as the bishops’ criticised) but that she had too much faith in man. She put too much faith in the individual. She had forgotten the doctrine of original sin. When you are offered a mortgage that is five times the price you can afford, but you are also offered the house you’ve always dreamed of, man, being the sinful creature he is, takes it. And yes, Thatcherism is about the individual, but it’s also strangely at odds with conservative philosophy, which is rooted in the Fall. It is only in her positive view of man, do you realise that Thatcher was a Liberal rather than a Conservative. 

Thatcher as a Victorian liberal makes much more sense than Thatcher as a conservative, but there were things in her economic policy that would have horrified Victorian liberalism, particularly the Shops Act (deregulation of Sunday trading), and the successful deregulation of credit. I can imagine her forebears spinning in their graves. Was this driven by her anti–establishment sense? For example, with the deregulation of credit, it irked her that if you were rich enough, credit would never be a problem for you, but for the vast majority of people it wasn’t.

The Shops Act proposed in 1986 aimed at deregulating Sunday trading is a particularly illuminating example of her going against her Nonconformist roots. It upset many Conservatives as well as trade unions and church leaders and indeed this coalition ensured that the bill was eventually defeated. One Labour MP teasingly accused her in the Commons of going against her own father’s memory.  Thatcher was uncomfortable with such an accusation. When the Shops Act was defeated, she wisely abandoned it and never returned to it, and it was left to John Major to push it through under very tight regulations. I think that the Shops Act was a moment when Thatcher said to herself ‘hang on a minute – what am I about?…Do I believe completely in the deregulation of the market or the preservation of the social fabric of society? It was also an important moment when the debate about the economy changed from being about unemployment (which had dominated the early 1980s) to a discussion on the morality of wealth creation (which came to dominate the late 1980s). This was the time of the Big Bang, Yuppie culture and Loadsamoney. 

So that would be moment in her premiership when there was not so much a complete turn but a hand–brake turn?

Yes. And I think that’s the moment when she rediscovers her moral drive. In the next couple of years, Thatcher pushes through the 1988 Education Act which enshrines Christian education in schools, delivers her infamous speech to the Church of Scotland and she pledges her commitment to create a nation of ‘good Samaritans’ who have their own money and donate to worthwhile causes.
To put it bluntly, Thatcher does not want to be known as the woman who reinvents shopping.

Which is a bit ironic, really?

Yes, because that’s basically what the extension of credit means in the 1980s.  This is where Thatcher the woman differs from Thatcherism. Thatcher herself was always incredibly sensible with money and maintained her mother’s standards on thrift and waste. Even when she married the millionaire Denis, she recycled her wedding dress into a ball gown; remade curtains into coats for the twins. When it came to the ethic of thrift, Thatcher really did practise what she preached.
One need only compare her lifestyle and approach to money when she left office with Tony Blair’s. Thatcher ironically, was not a woman in pursuit of wealth nor a woman of excess or greed. She maintained the standards of her parents when it came to thrift, which meant that she could not understand why the extension of credit caused such irresponsible behaviour in people. She could not understand why people struggled with debt or ended up bankrupt. She believed that democratising credit (or debt) would mean greater opportunity for all – it did – but it also led to extreme fiscal irresponsibility and to the worrying situation we have now which is that Britain has the largest levels of personal debt in the developed world.

I suppose, as you do intimate in the book, because she lived her entire life in the shadow of the Cold War, a little debt at home didn’t seem like such a great crisis. It’s only 30 years on when we’re no longer living in the shadow of communism but we are living in the shadow of debt that it becomes a much bigger issue.

But I think where critics go wrong with Thatcher is they assume there was no moral underpinning, and absolutely there was. She would always maintain the moral superiority of her values and politics over practically everyone and anything else. But where her admirers go wrong is that they do not admit that there was a clear discrepancy between her aims and the actual outcomes.

Let’s bring Margaret Thatcher up to date: she was undoubtedly a conviction politician with vision. Do you think Britain could produce (and cope with!) a politician like Thatcher again, specifically one with her explicitly religious conviction and vision? Pundits are so often saying we need someone with conviction, rather than our more managerial politicians, but I doubt whether the more uncertain and plural culture of today could really cope with one. Do we really want another Thatcher?

What you see with Thatcher is someone who came from a very strict religious household and went into politics. I see her conviction politics as a product and legacy of Britain’s dying Nonconformist heritage. There were other politicians of her generation who had a religious background; Arthur Scargill, for example who had a communist father and a primitive Methodist mother. Religion has always been a solid training ground for politics. But with a declining religious culture, is that link broken? We could once again have conviction politician with a religious background but it is unlikely that they would be a Nonconformist they may not even be a Christian.

But what’s the cause of that? The political landscape 30 years ago was a rougher, tougher, more divided place. Now we have lots of people huddling round the centre, twiddling technocratic knobs. The population say ‘give us something to believe in’, but we seem very happy with this soggy middle.

The role of non–conformists in British society, from the time Margaret Thatcher was growing up, and when Arthur Scargill was growing up, has gone. We don’t have a Donald Soper. We don’t have those towering preachers. Perhaps it still exists in Northern Ireland, but we don’t have that religious culture filtering into our political culture like it continues to do in America. Where we do see that is in the evangelical black churches and some Muslim communities. That’s where you might get that connection between religion and politics – and it is one that Britain’s liberal electorate do not particularly favour.
The broader question is: do the British yearn for conviction politics? In the 1980s you did not have a neutral stance on politics, you had an opinion. There was so much drama, so much upheaval in the 80s, and yet there was something innately ‘unBritish’ about those extremes – on both the left and the right. IN the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher, I think the British people yearned for calm – a sort of soggy centrism, a ‘non–politics’. It’s only recently, in the last five years, that there has been some resurging in interest in politics particularly amongst the young who are asking bigger questions about its nature and place in society, and the failure of the political class to come up with some solid answers.

That’s part of the problem, isn’t it…that scepticism is blanket now? We can’t identify particular problems like ‘socialism’ or ‘commmunism’ or ‘Thatcherite conservatism’. You can turn to virtually every single institution and sector of British society and find elements of corruption.

The key question now I think is whether we are yearning for someone to take a lead, or whether people taking are taking a much more independent view of citizenship and asking much more of themselves? The forces of consumerism, globalisation and technology have ensured that people see politics within a much broader context than just debates within the Commons chamber. The world is much smaller and the issues seem much bigger and unsolvable within a purely domestic context. I think the most worrying thing is how the next generation have greater faith in their role as consumers than as voters, indeed they demonstrate a greater affinity and loyalty to their mobile phone tariff than to a political party. That, we may conclude, is the true legacy of Thatcherism.

Dr Eliza Filby is a Visting Research Fellow in Modern British History at King’s College London. Her book ‘God and Mrs Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul’ is published by Biteback Publishing. 

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Image by University of Salford Press Office from Wikimedia, available in the public domain.

Ben Ryan interviews Professor David Martin on his book Religion and Power: No Logos without Mythos.

You have been writing on issues of secularism, religion and power since the 1970s. What prompted you to write Religion and Power now?

The question of religion and power has returned to the political agenda, in part because of the way perceived problems relating to an expending Muslim presence are deployed behind a smoke–screen of fair–mindedness to launch an attack on any form of religious presence in the public realm. This attack revives the secularist theme of a return to the necessary privatisation of religion as an irrational and potentially violent addiction disturbing the proper rationality of public debate.

My view is that religion has never been privatised, not even in France, and that politics, far from being the rational calibration of technically efficient means to mundane ends, is dominated by myth. By myth I mean the staging of potent rituals to reinforce solidarity, the ritual cursing of opponents as evil doers, the exercise of the power of charismatic leadership, appeals to the adjudication of founding fathers, demands for martyrdom and mass sacrifice to defend sacred territory, and appeals to a visionary national ethos or an immanent purpose or telos which is the ordained destiny of the nation. (An egregious example of the latter is the political use of the concept ‘British values’ in political discourse.) That is what I mean by the sub–title of my book No Logos without Mythos. I mean that there is no form of political suasion or argument (Logos) that is not profoundly rooted in mythic thinking (Mythos).

In writing Religion and Power now I was shocked by the abysmal level and sheer ignorance and illiteracy characterising public comment. It lacks any social scientific perspective on religion. But Religion and Power also picked a theme I had from time to time returned to over the last fifty years: the genesis of pacifism in my book Pacifism (1965) and the relation of religion to violence in Does Christianity Cause War? (1997).

Several of the essays that make up the book refer to your earlier work, and particularly, of course, the debates over theories of secularisation. Have your ideas changed on this at all over the years?

I have carefully recorded the development of my thinking on secularisation in more than a dozen books and chapter 1 summarises my present position. What has changed is not my arguments, though I have developed them to take account on global developments, notably in regard to Pentecostalism, Latin America and Africa and the consequences of the fall of communism. The big change is that supporters of the universal secularisation theory, from having been dominant when I first began to work on the issue in the 1960s, now find themselves on the defensive. Incidentally, I do not support the ‘God is back’ thesis because my argument was that religion never went away even in the relatively secularised West, notably France, and was continuously active politically in the United States. I do specify the conditions under which secularist regimes, notably communism in Eastern Europe, succeeded in vastly reducing the role of religion. The sociologically interesting question is the difference between places where it reasserted itself after the fall of communism and places, such as East Germany, where it did not. (My discussion of the East German case is mostly in earlier books but is briefly summarised on pp 103–4, 112 and 195)

Across Europe, as austerity cuts have bitten there has been evidence of the churches taking back over welfare provision and other areas that had been thought to have been secularised. Does this change the picture on secularism today?

I have not studied this. It is Grace Davie‘s area of expertise. I note however, that the churches’ role in welfare provision has been pretty continuous, most obviously so in Germany.

One of the interesting changes since your earlier work is the prominence today of the so–called ‘New Atheists’. You are very critical of them and their method of critiquing religion – but why do you think they have arisen and been so popular in recent times? What do social scientists have to do to reclaim the field of analysing religion from the natural scientists who dominate the new atheist movement?

I have no particular interest in why the New Atheists have gained traction in the media, because I note that the majority of their arguments are at least 150 years old. I could write you an essay on the moral panic about ‘religion in general’, George Bush’s policies and rhetoric and Muslim migration to Europe but that would be a long and complicated exercise!

What social scientists have to do is exactly what I have done in chapters 2 to 5, to expose the false use of the prestige of natural science, the inappropriate discussion of violence and ‘religion in general’, which is methodologically inappropriate, and the absolute refusal to engage in a careful social scientific analysis of all the relevant factors in very different empirical cases, of which religion may merely be one and sometimes plays no role at all. All this represents gross intellectual irresponsibility, as I argue in the book.

In general are you surprised in some ways that the salience of religion has made such a  comeback? Until relatively recently the popular line was that religion was no longer relevant – now it is arguably seen as the problem in society.

Our dominant narratives prevented us from noticing what was there all the time until global population mobility and mass communication made it obvious from the Iranian Revolution and the election of the Polish Pope, both in 1979.

Another aspect of your earlier research was on Pentecostalism. At one point there were predictions that Pentecostalism would overtake Catholicism in Latin America – do you think that’s plausible? If it continues to grow do you think that will cause a serious change in the character of Latin American politics or identity?

There has been no plausible prediction of this kind. In the most dramatic case of Brazil, a mainly Pentecostal expansion of Protestantism has reached the startling figure of 22% and inaugurated a form of religious pluralism that did not exist before 1960. But Catholicism continues to define the cultural landscape throughout Latin America and maintain its old political alliance with elites. There is a built–in limit to the appeal of religious enthusiasm, especially given the tendency for people to fall out after they have fallen in. The ‘revolving door’ has not been adequately studied. Likewise the long term consequences of Iberian colonialism on the subaltern populations (blacks, indigenous peoples) in Latin America is only now being re–evaluated, both in relation to religion and political structures.

I was fascinated by your final chapter on Russia. The Orthodox revival that you discuss is of course still in its infancy since the end of the Cold War. How secure do you think it really is? If Putin were to lose power how severe a blow would it be for the Church there?

First of all let me say that my final chapter focuses primarily on comparisons between different kinds of centre and different kinds of periphery. The Russian mode of expansion from the centre to dominate the whole north Asian landmass is radically different from the British mode with its widely scattered global Empire and spread of the linguistic Anglosphere. However, the theme of de–secularisation is a major one and my answer to your question is as follows.

I think the demise of Communism as a faith left a vacuum with respect to Russian identity that was filled by the reinstatement of Orthodoxy as part of a renewed ‘sinfonia’ of Church and state distinctive of the Byzantine tradition. Nothing comparable exists in contemporary Western Europe. The Romanian Church managed something like a ‘sinfonia’ even in Communist times, at the price of hierarchs in the pockets of the state, and in contemporary Romania it enjoys a status like that of the Russian Church in Russia. In both countries the Church is identified with the nation and acts as the custodian of national memory as though that memory has been continuous.

But the Russian case is special because Russia is in a neo–imperialist phase and has a concept of the ‘near–abroad’ where the Church can act as a foreign policy auxiliary, and that is very much the case in Eastern Ukraine among Russian speakers. I do not think this situation depends on Putin, in part because Russian nationalism is independent of Putin. In any case, an Orthodox identity is now embraced by a large majority of Russians even though that is expressed in diffuse practices more than regular attendance at Church or adherence to Orthodox beliefs. There has been a genuine religious revival most evident an increase in monastic life. That coexists alongside scepticism about the Church as an institution among many people which is continuous with attitudes fostered in the Soviet era. The Church remains quite secure in its present political role and in its claims to some kind of religious hegemony expressed in a widespread feeling that alternative religious bodies are foreign.

David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. His book Religion and Power: No Logos without Mythos is published by Ashgate. 

Image from wikipedia, available in the public domain.

When I interviewed Rowan Williams last year about his book The Edge of Words, I suggested that his book was written to counter the idea that there are two ways of talking – literally and metaphorically. It seems to me that Unbelievable has a similarly simplistic dichotomy in its sights: the idea that there are people who believe, who have ‘faith’, and those who don’t, who are ‘rational’ (or who know things rather than believe them). Is that a fair assessment?

Yes I do have such people in sight. That seems such a reductive understanding of ‘belief’. 

I’ve been working for a number of years on a systematic theology. The first volume has just been finished. I’d come to a chapter in that project on defining theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ and I came to a full stop. What was faith? What was belief? Did they differ? How did they differ? And a book I had a sometime promised to write on believing suddenly became very important for finding answers that would enable me to go on with the systematics.

I took two and half years out of the larger project and set out trying to answer a question that came to me very abruptly following the attention Radical Orthodoxy received (a question phrased by the French theorist Michel de Certeau): ‘What Makes a Belief Believable?’

I increasingly came to see as I worked on it that we dwell within systems of belief, some of them we are conscious of and most of them we just assume in making sense of our experience of the world. Faith is a mode of this innate disposition that is even more than human, because it’s evident in varieties of pre–Homo sapien existence.

There are not believers and non–believers. That’s the point. We are creatures who, because we see the world as, inhabit a multiplicity of beliefs. Faith is the self–conscious acceptance of believing as a creaturely condition; the self–conscious entrustment that we are created to believe and search for an understanding of what and why we believe.

One of your prime targets is the idea that beliefs are purely cognitive, calculated ‘reasons for’ things. You write that they are “deeper, earlier and more primitive” than this.  What precisely do you mean by that?

I’m trying to get at the way beliefs have enormous power (like myths). Religious emotions are extremely powerful emotions and they form emotional communities with strong adhesive qualities. That power is not simply cognitive. Like myths, beliefs are resistant to argumentation. Beliefs are not changed by rational processes alone. Consciousness is a very small proportion of what goes on in our embodied minds. Beliefs are often not expressed, do not reach conscious articulation, and are frequently concealed from those who actually have been shaped by and act in accordance with them. I want to recognise beliefs as affect–heavy in ways that inform behaviour and cognitive choice–making. My precise target was certain philosophers and writers like Lewis Wolpert who hold to such reductive appreciations of ‘belief’. 

Your first part of the book, which asks what a belief actually is, makes a great deal of human physicality – our spatial orientation, our sense organs, our locomotion, the use of our hands. Can you explain how this might shape the idea of belief?

Part of what I am doing here is putting the body back into the equation. This links up with my examination of the diachronic changes with respect to the language of ‘belief’.

We are just emerging from a historical and cultural legacy in which belief as ‘weak opinion’ and knowledge as aspiring to ‘certainty’ held sway. It was also a time when a whole raft of dualisms were dominant, including the body/mind dualism. Much of the work done over the last thirty years in neuro– and cognitive science has been recognising the profound relation between embodiment and cognition, emotions and intelligence. This has frequently then swung the other way – towards the kind of reductive physicalism popularised by Daniel Dennett et. al., though I point to the way the mind/brain issue is still very much an open question.

I understand believing as a disposition like desire and hope. It is a pre–cognitive disposition, but unlike desire (specifically linked to certain endocrine discharges) it is associated with not just a continual, embodied reading of the environment, but also our making sense of that reading. There is a link between sensing and making sense.

As I said in the book, some philosophers of biology have wished to speak about a ‘proto mentality’ with respect even to the single cell. Certainly the language describing operations at a molecular cellular level between ‘ligands’ (receptor cells) and the way they block or allow communication with the environment to impact the activity within the cell, suggests a proto–mentality that goes deep within creation.

Our bodies are not machines; they are processing the environment and that processing involves an evolutionary adaption that runs both ways – what is frequently termed co–evolution. That is, as creatures change, so they change the environment that fostered that change, and that changed environment now fosters new changes. Encephalization, the increase in size and complexity of the brain through evolution, is a case in point here. I want to see our disposition to believe as an evolving somatic, affective and cognitive phenomenon – hence my appeal to human physicality.

You discuss Iain McGilchrist‘s work quite a bit in one of your chapters on what belief is and, in particular, his big contention, in the The Master and his Emissary, that modernity has prioritised the left–hemisphere’s tendency to engage with the world in a narrowly analytical and cognitive way, over the more creative and imaginative engagement of the right hemisphere. Do you agree with this and if so, do you think it is at the heart of our contemporary problems with ‘belief’?

I think belief is at the heart of our contemporary culture – hence the appeal to belief and believing in adverts etc. Whether that is a problem is a different sort of question. In many ways it draws attention to our creaturely status in ways that emphases upon ‘knowledge’ (with belief only as ‘opinion’) masks. My real debt to Iain’s work lies in his account of bicameralism,  the idea of the ‘two–chamberedness’ of the brain. His historical analyses (and he recognises this himself) are very general and open to endless caveats, modifications and contradictions. I’m even more wary of big concepts like ‘modernity’. I’ve used them in my earlier work in defining ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’, but history is so much more complex. Historians will often now refer to ‘modernities’, even ‘multiple modernities’.

Having said that, I spent six years at the University of Manchester in senior management and the managerial culture is certainly systems–based thinking that is cognitive and analytical. It’s as if institutions do work on linear logics and even call them scientific when people don’t function according to these logics. Even contemporary science doesn’t seem to me to accept these logics. Some of the best and most imaginative writing is by scientists explaining ‘emergence’ (in biology) or ‘parallel universes’ (in quantum physics). Look at the latest book coming out of New Scientist on Nothing. It’s free and imaginative thinking about possibilities and impossibilities, multiplicities and unpredictabilities. I see that most of the cognitive and narrowly analytical work is within institutions, their management and operations. And it points to two things: a desire for control (that’s what systems are all about) and fear (which is rationalised in terms of ‘risk’).

In the light of that, what can religious – and artistic – worldviews do in response?

In two words: be imaginative. I’ve come to see the power of the imagination (linked to what I say in the book about the power of myth) as crucial. It links the affective levels of our condition with the cognitive. In my book The Politics of Discipleship  I argued for the need to change the ‘cultural imaginary’ by opening up new Christian possibilities for conceiving transformation in the world. I would deepen that ‘opening up’ now through an appeal to not only the teachings of Christ, but the spirit of Christ. In short: the need to become enfolded within a Trinitarian operation that reads the ‘signs of the times’ and waits before God for creative and imaginative inspiration.

True imagination, as Coleridge understood it as distinct from fancy, is not wandering and arbitrary. It is attuning what some have called the ‘deep mind’ (pre–reflective, pre–cognitive) with Christian truth (in the Scriptures, in the Tradition, in liturgy). This is not unrelated to reading the ‘signs of the times’ because the living Christ is spoken of elsewhere, beyond the church, sometimes in wild but suggestive ways.

And this is where the artistic comes in: watch Bill Viola’s video installation ‘Emergence’ on Youtube, look at Damien Hirst’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ or read Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. These artists do not self–identify as Christians or even religious but each offer ways of imaginatively exploring how Christ is spoken of today outside the church.

The Christian Mythos is still strong, culturally, but we have to engage this Mythos. If Iain McGilchrist is right, then to ‘correct’ the predominance of left–hemisphere instrumentality we need to engage right–hemisphere nuance, ambiguity, tonality, empathy and caring. The brain is highly plastic. So Christian belief that is dogmatic, senatorial, proposition–heavy just capitulates to left–hemisphere dominance.

Similarly, the church has to take great care incorporating managerial structures and methods into its operations, for these too are left–hemisphere emphases. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless, but it does mean that they cannot dominate liturgical expression. Liturgy is a fabulous space for the imaginative – to allow the elemental symbols to ‘speak’ in creative ways; ‘speak’ salvation in creative ways. 

One of the key ideas within the book, at least as it seemed to me, was the idea that we perceive intentionally that “consciousness is always a seeing as”.   What does that mean, and in particular what does it mean for belief?

Yes, this is key. First we have to recognise that we do not just simply see an object or a person. We are involved in any number of complex relations with the world around us.

Some of the most sensitive areas of our brains and bodies, like the limbic area that handles sensing and emotions, are teeming with what are called ‘receptor cells’. And these cells do not just passively receive environmental communications. They are continually moving and shape–changing as they reach out into that environment. We are actively engaged with what is around us, continually reading and interpreting it.

When I speak of seeing as I’m trying to capture the complexity of that immersion in, response and adaption to, what is there. Most of this goes on pre–reflectively – 95%. Images emerge that give shape to consciousness – consciousness of what we believe, what we have come to see is a regularity. But, as such, seeing is intentional (certain things are not seen in actually seeing something). It is affect–heavy, freighted with interests, desires, hopes, suggestiveness that we are only minimally in control or even cognizant of. Recognising that we see as enables us to understand that we do not ‘see’ what is. We creatively engage in the creation of ‘what is’. We are borne along in our negotiations in the world upon tides of interpretation with strong emotional and somatic effects (that, in turn, impact upon the way we behave and experience the world).

I liked your line half way through the book in which you said “I’m far from sure that people are oriented towards attaining maximal logical consistency among their beliefs”. It seems to me a masterpiece of understatement, not least as you go on to chart the astonishing growth in the number of books about angels over recent years. I don’t recall reading the famous Chesterton quote – about people, when they stop believing in something, believing in anything rather than in nothing – in the book but it certainly came to my mind. Was he right?

Yes, Chesterton is right and his view is now shared by sociologists of religion like Grace Davie and social theorists like Charles Taylor. Both of these academics have pointed to how believing persists, it just finds different, even vicarious, objects. In A Secular Age Taylor talks about the supernova of believing that takes place following the great cultural disembedding and disenchantment ushered in by ‘modernity’. One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I sensed a major cultural change has taken place and believing and making believable are right at the centre of this shift.

Some cultural analyses want to talk about a ‘re–enchantment’ or a ‘post–secular’ culture. Religious piety can speak to this change. Indeed, it is frequently religious pieties that are used as resources for this new re–enchantment – seen clearly in James Cameron’s film Avatar. There is enormous potential for the development of good religious practices and transformation of the cultural imaginary when there is so much investment in the mythic imagination. But there is also enormous potential for what I sometimes call ‘pop transcendence’. A lot of the new re–enchantment is capital–led and feeds hyper–individual life–style choices.

One of our repeated messages at Theos is that there is no view from nowhere, including no spiritual view. Everyone holds certain beliefs, or at very least behaves as if they do, which are underdetermined by the evidence available. Judging by the claim you make several times in the book that “disbelief” or “unbelief” are also forms of belief, this is a view you would presumably agree with. But it’s also – we’ve discovered – a view that many atheists get very indignant about. How would you persuade them that they are wrong?

I have been asked to debate with atheists on a number of occasions. I persistently refuse because they are unable to hear anything other than their own creed. I’m most struck by the tone and style of much of the atheist writing from the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. The tone is visceral and polemical, riding rough–shod over facts with arguments and details not being registered, and with superficial analysis. So I’m more interested in that tone because it’s reactive, even defensive. It is the tone and style of their writing that has enabled the work to go viral. My real question to them is not about the content of their arguments or their ideas, but what is driving the affect that bears all before it. Put in psychological terms: just what are they frightened of or threatened by?

Do you think that Miguel Farias’ work, which you mention, purportedly showing that “there is nothing experiential distinguishing an atheist from a religious believer” would make a difference to them?

No, it wouldn’t. They cannot see that they are ‘radicalised’. They are prisoners of an ideology. Okay, no belief system is without its ideological elements. But it’s what’s going on behind the screen of their conscious ideas that interests me. Behind most religious pieties lies notions such as ‘peace’, ‘healing’ and ‘reconciliation’. Their polemics are wantonly aggressive and we know that aggression is, hormonally, adrenalin that suppresses empathy and issues out of perceived threat. They should look more into the evolutionary biology that is given rise to their agonistics and proclamations of war. They are profoundly attuned, to my mind, with the religious radicalisation that is going on elsewhere.

Taking what you say about belief in the book, would you care to make any predictions about religion in the 21^st century?

Goodness, that is a tall order! I tried both in the Introduction and Conclusion to point to a certain watershed, in part arising from McGilchrist’s analysis. Homo sapiens are still evolving. The plasticity of the brain means that this is continually being shaped in a certain direction. If we close down certain neural operations then those operations atrophy and this has evolutionary consequences. There’s a lot of research money going into projects about the ‘post–human’ condition at the moment. Although AI seems to have reached a certain impasse the cyborg may be just around the corner. The cyborg mythology is seductive because it is a left–hemisphere fantasy.

Religions, and the cultures they spawn, can be (not always) one of the resistors to such a mythology. They turn the human condition from such Promethean dreams and return it an assessment of its mystery and potential, while not shying away from its frailty, its vulnerability, its limitations, its finitude. Religion is one of the resources for readjusting the dialectic between the master and the emissary such that we might recognise certain values as sacred.

I certainly think religion will not disappear. In fact, it will gain in prominence while the heterogeneities of specific traditions will become increasingly evident. Beyond that I’m not sure. I’m not apocalyptic. And I’m not pessimistic. But choices will have to be made, collective choices, in the face of dwindling resources and climate changes. Those choices could well involve deeper forms of religious piety that usher is new, more ascetic lifestyles. That may be utopian, but my utopianism is part of a critical strategy to transform the cultural imaginary: there are alternative ways of seeing as. 

Stepping back from the substance of the book, Unbelievable struck me as a good example of how theology can interact with other disciplines – not only philosophy, literature and cultural studies, but also archaeology, psychology and sociology. I wonder if that’s how you see Christian thought best engaging in the world of ideas today.

I’ve just finished a year of reading theologians from across the country as a panel member of the REF and I’m preparing a paper to deliver at Cambridge on the ‘Future of Christian Theology’. It is evident from what several of us saw about current research that inter–disciplinarity is very much an aspect of theology today. To treat the complexity of our human condition, its immersion in the environment, and its adaptations to that environment, we need complex, flexible and hybrid approaches to exploring and examining – especially when it comes to faith seeking understanding.

We live, for example, with multiple forms of invisibility (from thought and gravity to the bacteria in our gastrointestinal system). To make these entities visible requires complex technology; to examine and reflect upon these entities also requires intellectual tools that cannot be found in any one discipline. How much more is this the case with religious studies? We’re at last returning to older models of doing theology; when theology was not some glass–bead game.

Hugh of St. Victor in the twelfth century was already telling his students that you should not approach reading the Scriptures, never mind doing theology, without a grounding first in the liberal arts. And he was generous in how wide he considered those arts to be. When Aquinas came to write the open question of the Summa Theologicae and define theological study, he too recognised it drew upon all the sciences and was both theoretical and practical.

This approach to doing theology changed – the late 16^th century with Phillip Melanchthon’s late dogmatics is a good indication of the change: cerebral, concerned with tight definitions and clearly formulated propositions that referred to nothing else than other theological concepts. Dead end!

As I said, I’m just preparing a paper for Cambridge on the future of Christian theology and what I find myself saying is that the inter–disciplinarity of theological enquiry is going to get radical. What do I mean by that? Well, the REF demonstrated that much of the interdisciplinary approach related theology to what loosely might be termed ‘cognate disciplines’: literature, philosophy, politics, sociology – discourse–based subjects.

‘Radical’ interdisciplinary is crossing faculties – medicine, law, engineering, physics, chemistry etc. I’m not talking religion and science. There are already projects being conceived in which theology and hydrology are speaking to each other (see Christiana Z. Peppard’s book Just Water, for example) or theology and the study of crystal formation. Nothing is out of bounds and nothing should be if we view creation as just that: created by God. Interdisciplinary theology only provides what the cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geerzt, called ‘thick descriptions’.

Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford.

Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t is published by I.B. Tauris

Image from wikimedia, available in the public domain.

There is a nervousness bordering on terror among some people today concerning the use of the Bible in politics but from your book, Exodus and Liberation, that seems to be a modern and anomalous phenomenon. The Bible – in particular the story of the Exodus – has done some heavy political lifting over the last 500 years. Tell me how it started. Why wasn’t Exodus seen as a political text before the Reformation and how did it become one in the 16th century?

Christian readers have usually spiritualized the Old Testament – including the Exodus story. It was read as a foreshadowing of Christ and the Christian life. The Children of Israel were a type of the Church, Egypt represented bondage to sin, Pharaoh stood for Satan, and the Passover symbolised the Lamb of God slain for our sins. According to this reading, the Crossing of the Red Sea was a picture of salvation, Wilderness Wanderings taught the Christian what to expect in this earthly pilgrimage, and crossing the River Jordan into the Land of Canaan typified passing from this life to heavenly rest.We can see the broad outlines of this interpretation in the New Testament and it was powerfully articulated by early exegetes like Origen. Throughout Christian history, it has been embedded in liturgy and hymnology.

Exodus was occasionally used as a political text before the 16th century – in the fourth century, Eusebius of Ceasarea pioneered the political reading of the Old Testament among Christians, depicting the Emperor Constantine as a new Moses who had delivered the new Israel from persecution under the Emperor Diocletian – but it was the Reformation that undoubtedly intensified its politicisation. The Reformers saw themselves as liberating the Church from ‘popish bondage’. Calvinists, in particular, often found themselves as a persecuted minority in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Britain, and they came to identify very closely with the oppressed children of Israel.

Exodus (and the Old Testament more generally) played a part in the formation of Protestant national identities. Calvinist nations depicted themselves as ‘new Israels’. In 1560, the title page of the Geneva Bible bore a picture of the Israelites at the Red Sea with the Egyptian army in hot pursuit. That is how Protestants had seen themselves during the reign of Mary I. The Elizabethan (and Scottish) Reformation were experienced as an Exodus, a deliverance.

Why is the Exodus narrative particularly powerful, do you think? There are lots of other scriptural moments – creation, the story of the kings of Israel, Jesus’ ministry – that could have equal political potential, but Exodus appears to have been a perennial favourite.

Exodus is the most spectacular of biblical epics and the foundational narrative of the Jewish people and although it has often been spiritualised, the politics are hard to avoid. 

It concerns a massive power struggle between Yahweh and the Egyptian gods over the fate of an oppressed minority, one subjected to forced labour and escalating state violence. Wherever the biblical text is read in the context of oppression (or perceived oppression), Christians and Jews turn to Exodus. They invoke the power of God against new Pharaohs.

The fact that it’s an unfolding story is also vital. Readers have been able to insert themselves into the biblical narrative at different points, identifying with the Hebrews in bondage, crossing the Red Sea, wandering in the Wilderness, or entering the Promised Land. The story speaks to different moments in spiritual and political experience, and provides a narrative frame through which to interpret contemporary events.

It’s also among the most familiar of biblical narratives. A preacher like Martin Luther King Jr. could conjure it up in an instant and know that his audience was transported with him as he imagined himself at the Red Sea or on Mount Pisgah overlooking the Promised Land.

It would be wrong to imagine that there was unanimity regarding how to interpret the Exodus narrative, wouldn’t it? How have people read it differently and what impact has that had on their politics?

One of the things I emphasise in the book is that Exodus has been hotly contested, certainly since the Reformation. Protestants deployed it more intensively than Catholics, but not exclusively. Parliamentarians relied on it more than royalists, but in 1660 Charles II was depicted as Moses returning to deliver his people from Cromwellian taskmasters.

In recent American politics, it has been drawn on by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. That suggests that different sides have co–opted Exodus for their own purposes, but I argue that it also carried one of the big ideas in Anglo–American political culture – the idea of deliverance (or liberation).

Initially this meant deliverance from ecclesiastical or political bondage, but in time it came to mean liberation from physical slavery. David Brion Davis, the preeminent, historian of slavery and emancipation observes that Exodus “has conveyed the astounding message that in the past God actually heard the cries of the oppressed and was willing to free slaves from their masters.”

There’s a darker side to the narrative that we should acknowledge. After the Exodus and the desert and the crossing the Jordan, there’re the grim commands effectively to commit genocide. Has the story been used to enslave as well as liberate?

The conquest texts were cited in both Spanish and British America to justify colonialism and the subjugation of native peoples. One Native American theologian has noted that Yahweh the Liberator became Yahweh the Conqueror.

It’s important for Christians to acknowledge that biblical texts can become ‘texts of terror’ (to use Phyllis Trible’s famous phrase). Recognising this forces us to be self–critical about the ways in which we wield scripture against others. The violence of the Joshua story troubled early Christian commentators like Origen, who resolved the problem by reading Joshua as a book about spiritual warfare.

Since 9/11, Old Testament religious violence and the conquest narratives have become a hot topic, and numerous authors have been addressing the issues in more or less helpful ways. It’s important to remember that in the biblical narrative the Israelites are a vulnerable migrant people overawed by the giants and fortresses of the Canaanites. The God of Exodus and Joshua sides with the weak against the mighty, so it’s not surprising that both books have had a potent appeal to the oppressed. African Americans dreamt and sang about the conquest of Canaan – ‘Joshua fought the battle of Jericho’ – and it was invoked in slave revolts in both the British Caribbean, in Demerara, and in Virginia, in Nat Turner’s rising. 

One of the things that most struck me about your analysis is the way in which you show that the Exodus narrative gained its own life. “By deploying the language of deliverance, mainstream Puritan preachers had unleashed a vocabulary they could not longer control.” Can you explain what you mean by this?

In the English Revolution of the 1640s, Puritan preachers described the Civil War years as an Exodus from political and ecclesiastical bondage. That idea captured the imagination of Parliamentarians, but it had all sorts of unforeseen consequences. The Puritan clergy sought religious uniformity and the preservation of monarchy, but the idea of ‘deliverance’ from slavery was used to justify religious liberty and republicanism, alongside other radical ideas.

In later centuries, missionaries like John Smith of Demerara would read Exodus to enslaved congregations, only to find that some of their hearers found in the text inspiration for revolt. The key turning point in my narrative is the American Revolution in the 1770s. When the revolutionaries used the biblical and classical rhetoric of slavery and liberation to justify their rebellion against British rule, they unintentionally threw the spotlight on American slaveholding. From that point on, Exodus increasingly became the property of African Americans.

I was amused by the fact that some characters – Cromwell and Lincoln for example – were interpreted by some contemporaries as being the Moses of their time, and by some as being the Pharaoh. Are there rules or restrictions for how people used (and use!) Exodus politically? There’s a danger, isn’t there, of the narrative and characters being used simply as weapons against whomever they dislike at that moment.

At times it does look as if Exodus was simply being twisted like a nose of wax to suit pre–existing agendas. Many African Americans hailed Lincoln as Moses because of his Emancipation Proclamation; Southern Confederates denounced him as Pharaoh because he would not let the southern states go free!

In the book’s conclusion, however, I argue that we need to acknowledge both the power of readers and the power of texts. Readers (including pious ones) often manipulate texts for their own advantage, but texts also shape readers. It’s interesting to speculate on whether our ideas about slavery, for example, would be different if the Bible contained no Exodus story, or no Jubilee command to ‘break every yoke’ and ‘proclaim liberty throughout the land’. These were very important texts for antislavery activists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and without them, the cause would have been weakened. Of course, the Bible was also used to defend slavery, but the point is that the actual contents of the biblical text made a difference to what readers could do.

Your story has a number of high points, the most recent of which was Martin Luther King. Do you think we have seen the end of deliverance politics?

The seventeenth century has been called ‘the biblical century’, but what’s intriguing is the resurgence of Exodus politics in the wake of the Enlightenment, at least in Britain and America, where Exodus helped to inspire nineteenth–century abolitionists and African Americans. Wilberforce and his fellow activists fused an Enlightenment belief in human betterment with the biblical conviction that God hears the cries of the oppressed.

The 1960s saw another major surge of Exodus politics, through the Civil Rights Movement in North America and liberation theology in South America. As recently as 2007, Barack Obama pictured himself and ‘the Joshua Generation’ as heirs to ‘the Moses generation’ of the 1960s. So in biblically literate cultures, the text still resonates.

In post–Christian societies, it’s a different matter. It’s significant that Exodus: Gods and Kings is being released by a director who is avowedly secular, while the leading actor has described Moses as ‘barbaric’ and ‘schizophrenic’. In Christian cultures, readers were far more reverential and deferential towards the scriptural text, and it carried great weight as God’s Word. In parts of the global south, that’s still true on a large scale, so it’s very unlikely that we’ll see the end of deliverance politics. Even in the West, Christians inspired by biblical narrative are often at the forefront of campaigns against people trafficking.

What do you think Christians today engaged in politics have to learn from the way those in the past have done it? Should they ‘do God’ – as the cliché has it – and if so, how?

As an historian, I provide an account of the political reading of Exodus since the Reformation, and leave readers to draw their own conclusions. As a Christian, I can’t dodge the normative questions so easily. Elsewhere, I have argued that Christians need to develop a holistic biblical theology of liberation. 

I’m convinced that learning how Scripture was read by previous generations can make us better readers of Scripture today. ‘Reading the Bible with the dead’ (as John Thompson puts it) is sobering, illuminating, and provocative. We can see how the dead commandeered Scripture to serve their own interests, how they wrestled with the same issues as we do, and how they learned from the Bible that God is the God of the Oppressed. Whether we like it or not, Christians in politics are going to ‘do God’. The question is, how will they do so, and will they act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?

John Coffey’s book Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr is published by OUP

The film Exodus: Gods and Kings is relased on December 26th 

Image from wikimedia, available in the public domain.

It seems to me that the default position in the contemporary mind is often that there are two ways of talking – the literal (which deals with serious stuff) and the metaphorical (dealing with the eccentric, metaphysical or the largely unimportant). You take issue with both of those elements in The Edge of Words. Let’s start with the literal. When can and should we speak literally? Is there such a thing as ‘normal’, literal speech?

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that there is such a thing as straightforward, literal speech. Obviously, for lots of practical purposes, we use nouns conventionally to refer to recognisable objects that we all know about. We’re not going to spend huge amounts of metaphysical energy saying ‘how do I know that this is a chair?’

But as soon as we get anywhere beyond that very basic level of labelling, we realise that our language, whether it’s in the sciences or the humanities, is far more complex. In order to respond fully to the challenge that reality puts to us, which is to speak truthfully – to represent truthfully and adequately – we need a wide range of resources. It’s not an eccentricity of poetry or religion, but it’s right across the board, and that’s one of the things I’m trying to underline.

If we accept that the range of “literal speech” is inherently limited, and that the vast majority of what we say requires a vast range of resources, does that mean that religious speech is pretty much like any other discourse, or is there something fundamentally different about religious speech?

I think on that you are almost walking a tightrope. I feel it is important to say that in some very central respects religious speech is not as unique as all that. It’s certainly not more unique just because it’s more metaphorical. Its uniqueness has to do with the completely uncontrollable or uncontainable character of its ultimate subject. In other words, no language is ever going to be good enough for God. And you might therefore expect to see in religious speech a very particular or very intensified reaching around for a wealth of metaphor, and a very intensified use of silence.

We’ll come on to silence at the end, because the book concludes there, but I was struck in your second chapter by the George Steiner quote that we’re “a mammal who can bear false witness.” As you acknowledge in the book, it’s a slightly shocking sentiment. Can you unpack a bit how it is precisely our capacity to negate ‘that which is the case’ that is central not just to our habits of language but to our very human nature?

The short answer is that it has something to do with being creatures who exercise reflective freedom. Our responses to the world are not constrained, and that means that the awareness of the world that our speech is not controlled by the world. It’s responsible to the world, but to say responsible is also to say that I can be irresponsible. Dostoevsky, in Notes From Underground famously says that it is the distinctly human thing that, when irrefutable evidence is presented to you that two and two equal four, you have a little niggling thing that says “yes, but why not five?” That, in once sense absurd or unreasonable element of the uncontrollable in us, is part of why it is important to recognise that our speech is capable of lying as well as truth telling, and why truth telling becomes a proper moral and spiritual exercise, not just an automatic response.

Is that capacity to bear false witness, particularly relevant, or does it take on particular import, when it comes to religious discourse?

Could you say a bit more?

Well, the fundamental question of our attitude to God is more central to who we are and what our identity is, than our attitude towards other people, and certainly to other material objects, and therefore it seems that our ability to bear false witness – to deny God effectively – is crucial to us.

Yes, and this comes back to the old theological testament about God creating us with the ability to say no to him. Another Russian writer, Vladimir Lossky (about whom I did my research years ago), in relation to the old scholastic question about whether God can make a stone too heavy for him to lift, said ‘yes he can, and it’s the human heart.’

In so far as our truth telling about God is connected with our trust and love of God, that’s what can’t be compelled. So, to use Terry Eagleton’s famous example in which one day a great voice was heard from heaven saying “I’m up here you idiots,” that wouldn’t necessarily oblige truth and love.

There’s a novel by Bruce Marshall called Father Malachy’s Miracle, about a Roman Catholic Priest in Scotland who gets into an argument with a liberal Anglican, and volunteers to prove God. So he prays for a rather scandalous dance hall to be moved from opposite the parish church to the Bass rock. And it happens! Silently, gracefully, the dance hall lifts up and moves itself to the Bass rock, and sits down in the middle of the Firth and Forth. But does that settle any arguments? No it doesn’t, rather it stimulates a whole lot more. The liberal Anglican and his colleagues talk about mass hypnotism, the Catholic bishop is very disturbed that the ordinary course of things should have been upset. A cardinal is sent from Rome to sort it out, someone offers to make a film of the proceedings, and finally the manager of the Bass rock threatens to sue the diocese for lost earnings. And eventually, Father Malachy says his prayers again and the dance hall comes back, and everyone says ‘oh we’ll say it never happened’. And that’s a very good example of the freedom of bearing false witness.

You repeat throughout the book your antipathy to the idea that language merely denotes reality. You quote Merleau–Ponty in effect saying “words are fundamentally not objects designed somehow to depict other objects, but practices”. How are words practices?

Speaking is something we do. We can isolate it from the rest of what we do, but the fact is, speaking is one of the ways in which we are interacting with the world. It’s in some respects the most resourceful, the most surprising, the most generative of all the ways in which we interact with the world. But if you think that when a child learns language, he or she also learns gesture – coding and decoding gesture and facial expression. You couldn’t learn language without that.

So when I say, with Merleau–Ponty, that words are practices, it’s reiterated to remind us that language is, after all, a way of interacting with the environment, not just a labelling process which would have no connection at all with the business of finding your way around. As I learn a language, I learn not only to identify objects, I learn how to interact with another speaker. We all know what happens when people don’t learn that, when they speak without a sense of the codes that are operating – the tone, the timbre, etc.

I suppose that’s what panics people about, let’s say, a primary school teacher wearing the face veil. As a matter of fact I think that’s largely a misplaced anxiety, but I can see where it comes from. I’ve actually been in public discussions in Pakistan with women wearing full face veil, and you learn to read differently, it’s not that those codes don’t happen… but there’s a cultural obstacle to overcome.

So would all that make you a Wittgensteinian in the later sense? Everything you’re talking about – the embodiment of language in forms and practices – seems to point that way.

Yes, Wittgenstein, I suppose, is one of the biggest influences on my thinking over the years. Reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a third year undergraduate made me think, ‘wow, now I see some things…’

But almost equally important is Merleau–Ponty, the Phenomenology of Perception, which I read in my early twenties, because it was Merleau–Ponty who really made me see, for the first time, how complicated apparently simple acts of perception really are. I see what some philosophers would describe as a simple set of sense properties, but I can only make them into objects in my mind by imagining their depth, their density. I don’t in fact register just a flat surface or an immediate diorama of the sense impressions.

I know that you have a back to your head, without looking at it, and I also know that I have a back to my head, because you know that I have a back to my head. It’s all that complex putting things together. So both Wittgenstein in terms of embedding language in practice, and Merleau–Ponty in terms of showing you the richness of simple acts of perception, have been very significant for me over the years.

Does that give you difficulties when it comes to talking about truth? I guess this is one of the objections people are always laying at the door of this argument – that at least descriptive language is, in simplified terms, falsifiable or verifiable.

I don’t see this nearly as much of a problem as some do here. Once again, we have practices for sorting out what is reliable and what’s not reliable, what we can share in our perception and what we can’t. We have ways of doing this, and part of Wittgenstein’s contribution is simply to remind us that we don’t need hugely complicated philosophical theories to account for the perfectly routine ways in which we recognise or don’t recognise one another.

So I don’t think there’s a huge problem, especially if you begin with the assumption that all that you say is going to be worked out with others – it’s never just up to you and your private preferences. You are always answerable to another’s perception and another’s presence, so you’re certainly not locked in solipsism.

What this approach would generally lead to is not to say that we don’t know any truth, but that we know all kind of true things, that we can make all sorts of true propositions. We simply need to bear in mind that the truth we are able to articulate is also an ongoing discovery. The really significant test or sign of truth telling is that a true statement is one that can generate new questions and new discoveries, precisely because it locks on to something that isn’t me – it’s bigger than me. So when I say something is true, I have locked on to something that is not me, but if it’s not me then I haven’t yet got to the bottom of it.

So to say something interestingly true is to prod me to a little more exploration, a little more reflection, and supremely of course when we say anything true about God. If I say, as I do with complete conviction, that I believe the Nicene Creed to be a set of true statements, I don’t mean that when you’ve said the Nicene Creed, you put it aside and think ‘okay, I’ve done God’. To call God the Father of Jesus Christ, to say that the second person of the Trinity is consubstantial with the Father, these are prods, these are things to think further about.

One of your key points is that human beings “live in an environment where intelligible communication is ubiquitous – where there is ‘sense’ before we make sense”.  Can you expand on that?

Yes, I think I quote Connor Cunningham in his wonderful book on Darwin, in which he says that it’s “intelligence all the way down”. To recognise intelligible pattern in the world around us, is to recognise that there is an order, a coherence, in what comes to us, that calls out to be made sense of. That’s putting it metaphorically of course, but why not?!

That the trajectory of evolution is, it seems, towards intelligence – you don’t get mindless stuff in the sense of absolute, inactive, disordered matter. Wherever you look, something is developing intelligible shape and reaching out as something that can be conceptualised and imagined. In a sense that’s what the evolutionary doctrine is all about. The bizarre thing about Darwinism, and this is Connor Cunningham’s point again, is that it leaves you with a material order which is suffused with intelligible patterns, and that at least ought to make us pause. We do sometimes assume that there’s dead stuff out there, and there’s live mind in here. Well where is this dead stuff? More and more we appreciate that continuities of pattern and action go right through.

Do you know Simon Conway Morris’ book, Life Solution? I found that very helpful, the idea of the inherence being pervasive throughout all creation.

Yes, and that of course relates to the so–called mind–brain debate, which can again be so bizarrely configured as if it were about whether the mind and the brain are two kinds of stuff. Whereas to say that the mind is the material brain in action – well of course! What else would it be?

We ought to go back to Wittgenstein, when you talk about the expression on a face. You look at a human face, and of course you recognise an expression. Tension, boredom, delight, happiness… but where’s the expression? It’s the face, but when you describe the components of a face have you described an expression? No, you haven’t even begun to. Which of course, to add another footnote, relates to the Iain McGilchrist stuff about the healthiness of the brain. There’s a particular kind of lesion of the brain that does allow you to recognise the component parts of a face, but leave you unable to recognise expression.

Let’s talk about God. At one point you say that “God is never a candidate for description as a member of the field of objects I encounter, how do I presume to represent God?” If the resources that we need to talk about “the field of objects I encounter,” particularly the human person, are pretty extensive and demanding, is it even possible to talk about God?

Well, the remarkable thing is that people do, of course. And they do it in a number of interrelated ways. First of all, I think that God is witnessed to, and in that sense spoken of and communicated by lives that in their practice continually refer to him – lives that looks toward God for renewal and repentance, adoration.

You could say that you can read off from certain kinds of life what God they believe in. Watch what they’re doing, they’re kneeling, they’re silent, they praise, they intercede. And then there’s largely arising out of that, the formulations we come to on the basis of a particular kind of history or reflection on God – events that prod us to think more deeply about God – and eventually these crystallize themselves in what I think of as holding operations, heuristic formulae.

Now given all that, probably the best thing we can say is, in the New Testament, “We have lived through the record of the experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the expansion of the community, gifts of the spirit. It looks as if the sort of thing that we’re going to have to say about the God who is involved in all this is…” And that’s how the early church works. Not cataloguing elements of the essence of God, which nobody thinks they can do. But if we track the way the divine reality impinges on us, then this is the kind of thing we’re going to have to say. If we track the way that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus impinges on us, we end up saying something like the definition of the council of Chalcedon – that this is one who is perfect in what belongs to him, perfect in what belongs to us, the two natures of divinity and humanity woven together, without confusion, without separation, without change, etc. All very technical, anorak stuff, but coming out of that moment of “I suppose what we’re going to have to say is…” And also, responding to other kinds of talk – heretical talk, where if you say that, then you’re letting this bit drop off the table, that bit drop off the table, and what we’re trying to do in an adequate doctrinal statement is to keep the maximum amount of stuff on the table.

I wonder whether one of the besetting sins of Christianity is to lose sight of that initial life to which we are responding, and then arguing profoundly over these statements as if they’re analytic statements as opposed to responsive and discursive ones.

Yes, somebody said years ago that maybe we ought to sing the creed more often than we say it. Now I don’t think that’s a covert way of saying ‘and that means we don’t have to believe it’, but it does tell us that the creed is that kind of thing.

I still think you’re making claims when you sing, but singing it just reminds you where it belongs. I made an argument some years ago about the origins of the creed, that certainly some creedal forms that we find in the fourth century are a direct transcription from elements in the Eucharistic prayer, because you can see in some of the ancient Eucharistic prayers in the near east, that at the beginning of the great prayer of thanksgiving, you spell out what God has done. After “the Lord be with you” dialogue – “and it is right to give thanks and praise”, and you say “it is right to give you thanks and praise” – “creator of all things, visible and invisible, without cause and without generation, without antecedent, whom from your abundance brought forth your only begotten son, who for our salvation became human, who was crucified and raised and again and through whom you poured out your spirit.” You spell out the grammar of God. And I think that in some of these texts there are just enough parallels with some of the fourth century creedal texts, actually not the Nicene creed as much as some others, but where it does look as if there’s this crossover between the act of praise and the Eucharist – naming the God you’re addressing – and a creed that then abstracts from that.

I wonder whether the fact of the incarnation legitimises forms of habitual language about God that otherwise aren’t… does it legitimise a degree of concreteness?

That’s a very important point actually. Clearly if we believe that the act of God has taken this tangible form in this human life, then what is said by this person and what is generated by the experience of this person must be something that can respond truthfully to the act of God. So yes, just as the incarnation has often been prayed in aid when people think about the legitimacy of Christian art, controversy about icons for example, so I think, very generally with Christian speech, if this is an event in which the action of God is uniquely transparent, uniquely focused, then yes, the speech that emerges out of that, with its concreteness, with its relational and personal quality, does have its own privilege.

Which is why, at the end of the day, calling God Father for example, is just one of those things that Christians are going to go on doing I suspect. When all is said and done about the difficulties of managing the language of patriarchy and so forth, there’s something you are driven back to there.

When we do talk about God, we should expect to ourselves to reach some point of silence. But not one that is an excuse for vagueness, nor one that you say we should take refuge in too soon.  Can you expand on that?

One philosophical friend of mine, years ago, used to talk about what she called ‘tight–corner apophaticism’, that is turning to negative theology or language about mystery whenever things get difficult. That really won’t do. If you look at the really great figures of Christian thinking, like Augustine or Aquinas, or indeed Richard Hooker, you see them racking their brains over solutions and saying, ‘yes, this may be nearly it’, and ‘we need to say something like that’, and ‘okay, there’s a bit of unfinished business there’, but really that’s about as far as we can go. We’ve stretched every muscle, we’ve strained every resource, we have seen just a glimpse of how it might all fit together, but at that point we really do have to acknowledge that it is God we’re talking about, and therefore we don’t expect to have it tied up.

So Aquinas famously, in his old age – well, middle age, he did have a stroke – says ‘everything I’ve written looks like straw’. He just sort of broke. And Augustine can speak in his commentary on the Psalms about how our language is stretched out, pulled out, stretched like a string on an instrument, as tight as you can get, and then God touches it. Richard Hooker says, right at the beginning of his Ecclesiastical Polity, that ‘our safest eloquence is silence’. Although we have received revelation of course, although we can have confidence that we’re not talking nonsense, we just need that reminder that it is God we are talking about. Therefore whatever we say, more than in most cases of speaking truth, it has to have that extra dimension of openness.

There’s a nice tension there, isn’t there,  in the sense that speech is that which in one sense ennobles and that marks us out as different in the way we are, and yet, unless we retain that proper humility, we’re going to get speech wrong, particularly speech about that which we cannot fathom.

E.M. Forster famously coined the phrase ‘poor little talkative Christianity’.

That’s withering.

Isn’t it! That was partly in the context of writing about the Hindu world – he was doing a kind of reverse cultural snobbery really, saying that these profound, mystical Hindus, they don’t natter away. Well I think Hindus natter away as well, and so do Buddhists for that matter – it’s not that any religious tradition just shuts up, but possibly Forster was only familiar with a kind of Christianity that didn’t know its limits, or that was unduly talkative. But it’s good to have these phrases in your mind from time to time.

Rowan Williams’ new book The Edge of Words: God and the habits of language is published by Bloomsbury.

Image by Theos

Clifford, I remember waking up to the Today programme one day in September 2008 and to hear the seven o’clock news headlines say something along the lines of “Only one news story today – will the entire system of Western capitalism last the next 24 hours”. It seems we have forgotten how close to the brink we came just five years ago and are rapidly returning to the status quo ante. Why do you think that is?

It isn’t quite the same, Nick, because we now know for sure that western governments, with their theoretically unlimited capacity to create new money, now stand as the ultimate guarantor, as rescuer of last resort, for any financial enterprise – or at least those “too big to fail” – which behaves with the sort of recklessness we saw prior to 2008. Pure free market theory insists governments should get out of the way, not offer a gigantic expensive ambulance service when things go pear–shaped. 

But this new role for governments – I would call this the post–neoliberal era – means that financial risk, and therefore loss, is no longer borne just by shareholders but by the entire community. As someone said, we’ve nationalised risks but privatised profits. That is an unfair and immoral situation and it cannot be stable, but it is unstable in a different way from before 2008. It’s also a long way from pure free market theory. To make the state the central pillar of the capitalist system isn’t free market capitalism at all. You could almost call it State Socialism. 

Why do you say it is immoral? 

The financial crash dumped an enormous amount of debt on all of us, as governments financed the bailing out of the financial sector. To repay that deficit we’ve had to endure several years of austerity, including massive cuts to social services, with several more years to come. Poor people have of course come off worse: they always do. A relatively small number of people at the top have done rather well out of it. And the risk of a repeat of 2008 is still with us. Some commentators even say it is inevitable. The too–big–to–fail problem has not been solved. 

Why hasn’t there been a proper political debate about all this? 

There is a political hiatus, actually. It is not in the interests of Labour to explain it this way, because the mismanagement of the financial sector happened under a Labour government; and it is not in the interests of the Tories either, who don’t want to admit that the financial system they’re most closely associated with let us all down. So they would rather blame Labour’s public spending “extravagance.” 

Let me read you a quote from Charles Moore, a high Tory if ever there was one, who recently wrote in the Daily Telegraph, the paper he used to edit, as follows: “For six or seven years now, voters in the West have realised that capitalism was disastrously captured by those who operated it, so that it stopped benefiting the rest of us. No leader, of Left or Right, has yet worked out what to do about this. In Britain, both main parties have tacitly agreed not to discuss it at the next election.”

So the fundamental problems still haven’t been addressed? 

Neither party has been prepared to challenge the fundamental assumptions of neoliberalism, which are still regarded as a kind of untouchable Holy Writ. And as Charles Moore says, it is still the case that nobody seems to know what to put in its place. That baffles me because we used to know. We used to think business existed to serve the community, to serve the common good. But that has been obscured, and in place of it we now think business exists just to make a profit, as big as possible and as fast as possible. It recognises the claims of only one stakeholder, the shareholder, ignoring all those others – including the planet itself – who have a stake in the business because they are affected by the way it is conducted. Our entire financial culture has become fixated on short–term results, the maximisation of shareholder value. And there is an underlying assumption that, to quote Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” – that neoliberalism is the only option. 

So what is the alternative? 

It is to have proper regard to the common good, and not just the financial bottom line – to rebalance the forces in play; to balance short term against long term; shareholder interests against employee interests; the need for economic growth against the need to protect the environment; the interests of shareholders and employees against the interests of customers and suppliers; and so on. Those decisions require judgements which have a high ethical content, so they need to be made by people who are ethically aware and responsible, people we can trust – in short people who understand the demands of the common good. I’m afraid that means introducing an unpopular word into the argument – virtue. 

Neoliberalism does not require virtuous business and financial operators, because even a computer can work out which of two numbers is the larger, ie which gives the better profit. But we can see where throwing virtue out of the window has got us. I’ve noticed that business leaders are rather ahead of economists in realising this. They are looking for ways to rebuild trust – which incidentally neoliberalism says doesn’t matter – because they sense that business is unsustainable without it. Catholic Social Teaching could be their greatest ally, precisely because it is not anti–business but in favour of better business, business rooted in age–old moral values like justice and prudence, integrity, moral courage, moderation, and trust. Catholicism didn’t invent those values – but it has acted as a carrier wave, bringing them to our attention just when we need them most.  

Your critics will say that neoliberalism has done more than any other economic system to deliver economic growth over the last 70 years. Are they not right?

People who say that are confusing two things. As the predominant theory among Western economists, politicians and business leaders, neoliberalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. It replaced Keynesianism as the dominant idea in the 1970s and 80s. Keynesian capitalism had been remarkable successful on pulling economies out of the trough of the Second World War. But it seemed not to have answers to the problems of rampant inflation.

Neoliberals like Milton Friedman and Sir Keith Joseph said inflation was caused primarily by governments. But this quickly became a wider attack on the whole idea that governments should intervene in the economy, and instead insisted they should withdraw and let market forces take charge. Yes there was growth under neoliberalism, but quite a lot of it was driven by a credit boom, borrowed money, and by the great explosion in financial services after they were deregulated under Margaret Thatcher.

I think we now see that that was fundamentally unsound growth, in fact very dangerous to the world economy, as the 2008 crash demonstrated. It wasn’t about the creation of real wealth. In 2008, neoliberalism turned into a colossal engine of wealth destruction. It cost the world economy something like 30 trillion dollars. 

But what about places like China, where capitalism has delivered huge increases in living standards and lifted millions out of poverty? 

Capitalism comes in many shapes and sizes, and it is the neoliberal form that has done so much damage. China is an interesting case, but no–one would call the Chinese economy neoliberal. The government watches it very closely, and has no ideological objection to intervening if necessary. The state is the dominant factor in the Chinese economy, and the market is subservient to the state. Their problem is that their economy is not orientated towards serving the common good but towards serving the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. That is bound to lead to corruption. It privileges one interest group above all others. 

We also need to remember that once you subtract from the remarkable Chinese GDP growth figures the costs Chinese industry imposes on the rest of the community – a figure called the Green GDP – in damage to the environment, the figures start to look very different. That reckoning will have to be faced sooner or later. Some experts have suggested that environmental damage due to Chinese industrial expansion has cost 200,000 lives so far, with people still dying every day. 

Does neoliberalism have anything going for it in your mind? Rare is a system – political or economic – with no redeeming features.

Neoliberalism has the great virtue of teaching us how not to run a market economy. It is based on a false anthropology, a false account of what human life is like and what human life is for.  It says we are all self–interested individuals who take no heed of the interests of others. That is palpably not true – humans are social animals. Unfortunately neoliberalism doesn’t just mean a system which harnesses self interest to serve the common good, creating a dynamic force that drives forward the economy. It makes the unfounded assumption that pursuit of self interest will necessarily and inevitably do that by itself, without the need to apply any outside corrective factors or set any other goals. Previous versions of capitalism, going right back to Adam Smith in the late 18th century, took the common good so much for granted as the ethical basis of capitalism that they didn’t even have a word for it. It was too obvious to need stating. I think it is the arrival of neoliberalism that has made the vocabulary of the common good necessary, as a kind of conceptual antidote. 

There will be many non–Christians – I have spoken to one or two just recently – who will be deeply surprised to hear that Catholicism has anything meaningful to say to something as modern and “secular” as economic theory? Indeed, I daresay that there are a number of Christians, even Catholics themselves, who feel the same way. What would you say to them?

In 1889 Cardinal Manning of Westminster intervened to try to solve the London dock strike, because he felt it was intolerable for dock workers to try to support their families on such meagre wages and for them never to know where the next day’s work was coming from. He regarded such treatment as unworthy of the dignity of individuals made in the image and likeness of God, and redeemed by Christ.

The dock owners, of course, said they were simply obeying market forces. Catholics who don’t like the Church being involved in such issues – and there have always been some – only need to read one of the Church’s many official teaching documents in this area to see the close link between following Christ and working to make the world a better and fairer place. In most matters, Cardinal Manning was deeply conservative. The same is true of Pope St John Paul II, who did an immense amount to update Catholic Social Teaching and make it relevant to the modern age.

I would say to the Catholics you mentioned – to repudiate Pope John Paul II’s work in this area would be virtually to repudiate his entire papacy. Are you willing to do that? And the same applies to all the other Popes since 1891, when Pope Leo XIII wrote his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum (partly inspired, incidentally, by Cardinal Manning’s role in settling the London dock strike). I don’t think you can call yourself a Catholic and reject Catholic Social Teaching.

But they sense perhaps that Catholic Social Teaching is anti–business, anti–enterprise, and perhaps just a bit Marxist? That makes them very uncomfortable.

They needn’t be. Catholic Social Teaching is pro–business, pro–wealth creation, pro–markets, pro–just rewards for enterprise. None of those things is incompatible with being pro the common good. You could almost say it was a requirement. In fact, the evidence is that a system following the guidelines of Catholic Social Teaching would be even more efficient and more profitable than one based purely on neoliberalism, and in the long term fairer, more sustainable and more stable.

It is true Catholic Social Teaching has kept the workings of capitalism under close scrutiny, always insisting that the economy was made for Man and not Man for the economy and that the ultimate goal of economic activity should be to serve the common good. But it also insists that a market economy can serve the common good – it doesn’t have to obsess about maximising shareholder value come what may. Nor does it demand masses of government regulation; on the contrary, it applies the well know principle that too much regulation drives out virtue. People don’t need to be good if all they have to do is follow the rules. On the contrary, Catholic Social Teaching empowers people at all levels to take responsibility for what they do and how well they do it. Instead of business regarding virtue – moral character – as irrelevant, business is better seen as a school of virtue. I think an increasing number of business leader understand that. Certainly the regulators do. 

There are many serious and deeply faithful Catholics, saying working for the Institute for Economic Affairs or the Acton Institute in American, who will take issue with your view of the current economic system, and justify their own stance on the basis of Catholic thought. How would you respond to them?

You say “my view “of the current economic system. This isn’t just my view: I am entirely mainstream in terms of Catholic Social Teaching. I have studied it closely for many years. I just take the plain meaning of the words in the page. There is a neo–conservative take on Catholic Social Teaching that tries to make it more sympathetic than it is, to the America free market model. They don’t much like the expression “the common good” for instance, which is at the heart of it.

Of course you can just quote every sentence you like and leave out every sentence you don’t like, and produce something more congenial to your prejudices. I’ve seen that done. But there are numerous quotations from papal documents in my report for Theos that they would have to explain away. And of course, Pope Francis has been unambiguous about the failings of the free market system. Right wing Catholics who distort the plain meaning of Catholic Social Teaching for their own ideological purposes are standing on increasingly thin ice, and I think they know it. 

Your Theos essay is entitled Just Money, which has an obvious echo with Just War theory. Can you spell out how you see the parallels between the two?

There are very significant parallels but also significant differences. Just War theory evolved in reaction to the horror of all–out war waged simply to enrich or reward those fighting it. Rather than go to the extreme alternative – out–and–out pacifism – Just War recognises that there are circumstances when the Christian command to love your neighbour requires protecting your neighbour from harm, by force if necessary. So it establishes principles according to which war may be waged justly.

Similarly, making money regardless of everyone else’s interests can mean impoverishing some to benefit others, usually by exploiting disparities of powers between them. Making money – wealth creation – in order to benefit the whole of society, including oneself, is right and good – it is cooperating with and perfecting God’s creation of the world. We need clear moral principles to distinguish the two cases. Hence Just Money theory has similar moral roots to Just War theory in the command to loves one’s neighbor as oneself. But while one prefers peace to war, one doesn’t prefer poverty to wealth (provided it is at the service of everyone) and therein lays an important difference. 

One of the real strengths of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly Catholic Social Teaching on the economy, is that although it is authentically Catholic and informed by deep scriptural roots, it also has a profound appeal beyond Catholics, indeed beyond Christians, to those with no religious faith and even those hostile to it. Perhaps CST is – to coin a phrase – a broad economic church? What should the church, think tanks like Theos, and indeed ordinary Christians do to give this oxygen?

How do you change the intellectual weather; how do you change the philosophical climate in which neoliberalism is still being taught in university departments and business schools as the only truth? This approach is meeting increasing resistance from students, by the way. One way is to create a critical mass of dissenting opinion that can no longer be ignored.

One reason I wanted to write this report was to give ammunition to those who instinctively feel neoliberalism is barking up the wrong tree, doesn’t do justice to human nature, and isn’t delivering the goods. They don’t have the time and the facilities to do the necessary spade work, and I did… I hope they are not put off by the label Catholic. I can’t say enough times; you don’t have to be a Catholic to find these ideas appealing. You just have to have a sense that there is something terribly wrong with neoliberalism which you haven’t yet been able to put your finger on.

I think the post–neoliberal era has already begun – in fact it began in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers crashed – and we have to think through what this means. Because they live in such a closed world, I suspect politicians will be the last people to notice – though some of them do seem to be awake to what has happened, thank goodness. I include people like the Labour MP Jon Cruddas and the Conservative MP Jesse Norman among the enlightened ones. That is the direction in which politics has to go.

I want to ask about direction. One of the phenomena – it’s the only suitable word – of the last year of so has been Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital – a 600–page economics best–seller! I sense that even though his is the most prominent example, there is a flood of books – and indeed a widespread concern – about inequality, as well as what our economic system threatens to do to our shared natural world (Naomi Klein’s recent book comes to mind here). How do you see things changing over the next 10–20 years?

Well Nick, the next chapter hasn’t been written yet. I agree there are plenty of people pointing out where things have gone wrong, but precious few suggesting what we can do about it. Diagnosis without prescription, you might say. My feeling is that neoliberalism as a system, an ideology, is just about burnt out, though there are some people – and I’m thinking of a whole generation of politicians who did their PPE at Oxbridge or wherever when neoliberalism was at the height of intellectual fashion – who will go treating it as the last word because they don’t know any better. Gradually, hopefully, these ideas will die out.

At the moment, sadly, they are still held by the people in charge. If you recall my quote from Charles Moore – “For six or seven years now, voters in the West have realised that capitalism was disastrously captured by those who operated it, so that it stopped benefiting the rest of us.” Those people – voters in the West – must sooner or later be listened to. The prize is great for any politician who can offer them a way forward. I strongly suspect that the solution lies in the direction indicated by Catholic Social Teaching.

Image by Chris Isherwood from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.

What did you inherit from your parents in terms of attitudes and values?

My father was an officer in the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards and I spent the first 10, 12 years of my life, you know, living in places like Münster and Detmold with the British Army of the Rhine. They were a very particular kind of people, because they were driven by a set of values which were to do with service.

Was there a particular notion of Britishness?

Yes, very much. A notion that Britain was about tolerance, and decency. Virtually everything I write now, I think, is guided by my parents in that way. There is some thing much more enduring than political parties or TV or… I’m not putting this very well, but Britain is a sort of collective identity: whoever we are, wherever we come from, no matter what our background or colour, we are all British. And I was taught that in the whole history of this island the greatest moment was World War 2, when we came together to fight the madness of Nazism and money didn’t matter at all and it was simply a matter of serving your country.
Actually, I’ve just been out with my father’s regiment to the beach where they landed on D–Day…

Would the man you are today be recognisable to the person you were 40 years ago?

I think so. We all go on various journeys in life and try to assimilate things and become a different type of person and so on; but I think that at some point one tends to return to the values one got from one’s parents.

You read history at university. Did that study confirm or erode the idea of Britishness you’d grown up with?

History as taught at Cambridge in the 1970s was basically a destructive thing: you were meant to analyse, in a very sceptical way, the various propositions that guided… They were taught simply to be myths, almost, or fabrications. So, it was quite difficult to cope with.
And in any case I was trying very earnestly to be a Marxist at the time!

Was that just a student affectation?

Well… At the age of 16 or 17 in the mid 1970s you looked at society and – it was half–baked, indeed it was rather conformist, but you thought that the world was unjust and you had to change it. I remember vividly that I was searching for the truth and I felt that Marxism was a key to unlock it. I read virtually all of Das Kapital.

That’s impressive!

It was almost unreadable, most of it. I also read a lot of incomprehensible French philosophers like [Louis] Althusser, who has now completely gone out of fashion, and Sartre.

Did you take anything lasting from it, do you think?

It was an enormous waste of time and effort, I think. Funnily enough, thanks to reading books like Francis Wheen’s wonderful book on Marx,1 I sort of get the point now: that Marx was really a very good journalist. The Communist Manifesto is brilliantly written – I mean, sensational.

After Cambridge, you attempted to write a novel…

So embarrassing! I started a PhD. I hung around doing research, and actually at that stage I really felt that I had some great historical work inside me. I still do, to some extent… I still do. But it was quite clear I wasn’t going to go down that academic route and so I gave that up and went into the City. But it was quite clear that I was wildly unsuited to that, too.

Because?

I think I have too general a mind, really. What I was no good at – or just not interested enough in – is that deep attention to legal or accounting detail.
What I did come away with, though – I think it is very important to say this – is a sense of the great integrity of City institutions. I worked for NM Rothschild & Sons in a very junior sort of capacity on an offer–for–sale document (which is to sell stocks and shares) and, you know, the sense was that you really couldn’t tell lies of any kind, or make any statement that was even misleading. All of the people who worked there were of exceptionally high calibre – in fact, I met my wife there – and people of very high personal integrity.

I mean, compare an offer–for–sale document in the City and Tony Blair’s dossier of September 2002, which was to sell the need for an invasion of Iraq.2 The dossier was so shoddy – and if it had been a City offer–for–sale document, the chairman of the company would have gone to jail, [and so would] the directors, the finance director and the PR people.

Perhaps that difference in standards is less between the City and the political world than between Britain in the early 1980s, say, and Britain in the early 2000s.

I think there’s an element of that; but I think also there is a difference in approach between banking, in which contracts have to be adhered to, and politics, in which on the whole they are there to be broken.

I wrote my book The Rise of Political Lying3 because I was so appalled… There was a now–forgotten Cabinet minister called Stephen Byers who lied [on national television in 2001].4 I was expecting Blair to sack him, instead of which he protected him. And I was so angry about that – actually, I was in church and a light bulb went off on my head and I said: I’m going to write a book about this!

After what I’d been brought up to believe about politics and how it was done, to arrive in Westminster and hear people lie, all the time…

Is that culture of lying genuinely new or was it merely hidden 30 years ago?

I think it’s new, and I think it’s a result of several things. One is the emergence of postmodernism. [Jacques] Derrida and [Michel] Foucault argued that truth was just something you played with, a manifestation of power; and you can see that attitude towards truth echoed in the language of people like [Peter] Mandelson (and, to some extent, Blair). The intelligent New Labour people talked about ‘creating the truth’.

I think that some of it came from the United States of America, and some of it was Marxism, where the end justifies the means and so it’s OK to lie, to cheat… There’s a very good book by Thomas Sowell, the American philosopher, called A Conflict of Visions,5 which sets out very beautifully, actually, this distinction between what he calls ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ thought. The ‘conservatives’ are suspicious of grand schemes to change society because they take a humble view of what human beings can do, they don’t believe we are Godlike, they understand that attempts at sweeping radical social change tend to go wrong; whereas ‘progressive’ thinking prioritises, you know, these grand visions and is contemptuous, really, of what Marx called the ‘bourgeois’ virtues.

That’s why, as a general rule, left–wing figures are more likely to become monstrous…

Let’s park that idea. What political label would you be comfortable with yourself? 

Well, I think I’m a conservative; but I’ve noticed that I get more and more left–wing as I get older.

Go on…

Well, I – certainly in terms of foreign policy, I get more and more sceptical of the British state. Before ‘9/11’ and Iraq, I trusted the state and the security apparatus and I thought they were good people, doing patriotic things; but as a result of Iraq and what followed – the dossier business, the complicity in torture and terrible abuses of human rights, and our inability to come to terms with any of it, I no longer regard the British state as benign.

So, was Iraq an epiphany for you?

Very much. Politically, it changed me profoundly, because I suddenly found myself agreeing with the Stop the War Coalition about quite a lot of things. Their foreign policy judgements have been far wiser than those of the main political parties or the Foreign Office or the intelligence services or whatever.

In a recent blog for the Daily Telegraph, you argued that George Osborne’s tax policy ‘make[s] the rich richer at the same time as making the poor poorer’ and you said this was ‘squalid, immoral and disgusting’.6 Some people might see you as a rather unconventional Conservative.

I’d say I was reasonably in the mainstream conservative tradition of [the 18th–century political philosopher and Whig politician] Edmund Burke, a tradition of thought that values community and is very suspicious of both the state and the market. Burke was also very sound on overseas involvement.

Conservatism, you know, is the idea that ‘we’re all in it together.’ That’s a brilliant phrase. And ‘the Big Society’ – I really, really like that. And Cameron’s early Demos speech,7 which basically said we have to build up civil society… But one of the things that has happened while he’s been in power is that the rich have got an awful lot richer, and it’s very dangerous – you know, that ultimately is the way societies collapse. In London, there really are two separate populations.

I wouldn’t call Osborne a conservative at all – I’d call him a free–marketeer. Actually, his intellectual formation appears to be very American, very Republican – and America is a different country with a fundamentally different sense of values, and Republicanism is a totally different kettle of fish to British Conservatism.

How did you find yourself becoming a journalist in 1985?

Well, when I left Rothschild’s I realised that I’d made a complete balls–up of my twenties – and actually I’d always wanted to be a journalist really. I don’t know why I hadn’t sort of done it straight away, actually.

I used the fact that I knew about finance to get into financial journalism and I turned out to be very good at writing newspaper articles. I remember my first day at the Financial Weekly, sitting in front of this typewriter and feeling entirely at home…

And how did you find yourself in political journalism?

I had enormous fun at the Financial Weekly and then I went to the Evening Standard, and one day in 1992 the [then] editor, Mr Paul Dacre, asked me if I’d go into the Lobby, which I did. I was not very well equipped for it and I owe the political editor of the Standard an enormous debt, because he tolerated me being very bad at writing news. I really owe my career to a lot of people.

Journalism has a reputation for being as cut–throat as politics, but that has not been your experience, has it?

I’m not sure that politics is that cut–throat, to be honest. Is journalism cut–throat? It’s quite cosy, quite a lot of it. The Lobby, once it accepts you, looks after you.

You’ve talked about the change you’ve observed in the culture of British politics. Have you seen a similar change in the culture of political journalism?

Well, there have been three phases, actually. I went into political journalism when we were just coming to the end of the Thatcher period, when [relations with the media] were quite disciplined. And then came Major, when it was free rein. After Black Wednesday,8 the view was that Major was a contemptible, weak man, a figure of fun. It was outrageous. He’d actually just won an election with the biggest popular vote in our history – 14.1 million. It was an enormous achievement, yet the press became completely out of control. You had endless sex scandals, endless… Many of them were very cruel. It was the nastiest period of British journalism.

Some people kept away from it, but I’m ashamed to say that I joined in. The trouble was that if you wanted to get a story in the paper, you had to kind of jump onto that narrative, that the Government had been ‘plunged into another sleaze scandal’ or ‘a fresh economic crisis’. If you could find a sleaze scandal, there you were, you were away!

I’m being slightly – There are some things I’m quite proud of that I did during that time, too. But there’s no question at all that I was, you know, a junior member of John Major’s media firing squad.

If the press was, in your words, nasty and completely out of control, perhaps that accounts for what you call New Labour’s ‘mendacity’ towards it?

I definitely think there’s truth in that. In the Eighties, the senior figures around Thatcher and her ministers, the close advisers and handlers, tended to be civil servants, not media people. Major suddenly becomes the victim of the media, and then Blair surrounds himself with people like Alastair Campbell, who’d worked for [the Daily Mirror], and Peter Mandelson, who’d been at London Weekend TV. They were both formed in the media – protecting Neil Kinnock, actually, against the Tory press – and they felt that the media were so contemptible that you could do or say anything to them and it was justified, because you were protecting Blair.

When Blair won power in 1997, were you caught up in the euphoria?

Oh, definitely – I very nearly, you know… Blair was a very appealing proposition – you know, the idea that he was neither right nor left, he was somewhere in the middle, he took on the left, you know, he was going to change Britain. I definitely fell for it. Partly because I wanted to.

Though I found Gordon Brown a more attractive figure than Blair…

Why so?

He just struck me as having a more broadly–based personal morality to him.

So, when did it all turn sour for you?

What was the key…? When did it start to fall to bits for me? It was partly that the press was so sycophantic to New Labour – it literally couldn’t do anything wrong. There was a period from about ‘96 to ‘99, or even 2000, when you couldn’t get an anti–Labour story into the newspapers. The press was pathetic. Grovelling. From ‘97 to 2003, it was quite like – I mean, it wasn’t, but it was quite like being in a one–party state in some ways.

I wrote my book about Alastair Campbell9 because I wanted to understand how that government worked – he was then the second most powerful person in the country, quite a lot of people thought. And as a result of writing that, I did understand how it worked – and I understood things that did not become apparent until years later, like [the conflict between] Blair and Brown, like the centralisation, the way Labour sought to politicise… The idea of the British state is that huge parts of it are neutral: the Civil Service, the armed forces… You know, huge parts of the British polity can work equally well with right or left. New Labour set out very carefully to create a society in which the civil servants had to be New Labour, the generals had to be New Labour, the spooks – this terrible moment when the Secret Intelligence Service became New Labour – the leaders of all the charities, I regret to say, and (I think I’m right in saying this) the church.

The judges held out – I mean, [Lord] Bingham held out. I think the greatest figure in British public life for the last 20 years has been Bingham.

I know that your wife is a priest in the Church of England. Are you a practising Christian?

I go to church, yes.

What influence has that had on you?

The Church of England is very attractive. I think that the beauty of the language and the beauty of the buildings, the way it has been constructed, as I understand it, to enable people to live together – you know, it’s a compromise between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation, so there’s something very tolerant about it…

So, your attachment is more cultural than doctrinal?

Very much. I understand that there are various factions within the Church of England. They bore me to death.

Do the doctrines not matter?

I believe that Jesus Christ existed. I read the Gospels and I study his life. I think he’s a fantastic… You can learn so much from studying Jesus – the willingness to walk alone, the willingness to take on establishments, the determination to speak the truth, the readiness in the end to go to the cross… So, yeah… We all should…

Many of the things you write must anger a lot of people. For example, you have denounced the pro–Israel lobby…

We’re actually incredibly lucky in this country. I mean, I’ve travelled a lot in countries where journalists get tortured or killed for writing the sort of things I do. Here what you get is, you might not get invited to a drinks party. Or you might not be given a briefing – or maybe, in certain extreme circumstances, an attempt is made to dislodge you from your job. That’s as far as it goes. I mean, when you’ve seen what courageous journalists face elsewhere, it really is nothing. It’s nothing.

Still, you are publicly vilified. Do you just shrug that off?

I think you should be prepared to be publicly vilified – and I don’t think that any of us are prepared enough to be, because obviously it can affect your living, and your family perhaps. I think that in order to [face] that, you have to have thought through what you’re saying.

I’ll give you an example. When the Syrian [civil war broke out], it was reported as an evil dictator waging single–handed war against his own people, and the opposition were represented on the whole as virtuous liberals being gunned down in the streets. I’d never been to Syria but I could see that that was not an entirely accurate representation and I wondered whether I should write a piece saying: Stick with Assad. I wish I had now. It’s not that he hasn’t got terrible crimes on his record, but it’s perfectly obvious that the people against him are, if anything, worse. Now you’ve got great tracts of that part of the world in which Isis are enforcing their dark, nihilistic perversion of Islam. And it was all predictable.

The reason I didn’t have the courage to write that piece is, I didn’t know enough about it. To have written it, I’d have had to spend six weeks in Syria, so that I was comfortable going on Newsnight; because if you write such a piece you have got to be prepared to take on all comers and defend it.

Would you say you enjoy a fight?

Yes, I think I do enjoy a fight.

Who do you admire among your fellow journalists?

I think Nick Davies of the Guardian is an astonishingly admirable figure. He did the research that [opened up] the phone–hacking scandal, and he did it by just working away, using proper journalistic methods. Before that, he wrote Flat Earth News10 and he did extraordinary work on the health service.11 Obviously, we’re all formed by [George] Orwell…

And among politicians?

Well, I greatly admire Iain Duncan Smith because of the way he coped with the humiliation of losing the leadership [of the Conservative Party], and then the work he did on welfare in opposition. I think that was extraordinary. You know, he’s worked out a different way to look at the welfare state, which under Labour, I think, had become too much a way to keep people on the dole, leading lives of dependency, unable to realise their potential. It may not be working perfectly, but…

I very much admire the way Ed Miliband has led the Labour Party, though he’s got all kinds of problems.

I think David Cameron is transforming Britain, on the domestic front. The reason he has been successful is that, first, he really prepared in opposition and, second, he has got great reforming ministers who he doesn’t try to interfere with too much: Duncan Smith, Michael Gove, to some extent [Jeremy] Hunt now, definitely (to some extent) [Theresa] May. I think he’s restoring the style of government we had before Thatcher. I think it was Jim Callaghan who said: The easiest job in the Cabinet is being Prime Minister, because you don’t actually have to do anything, you just let your ministers get on with it – whereas Thatcher and, above all, Blair took a view that they do what you tell them.

I really admire this government. I mean, obviously there are certain things I criticise Cameron for – I think his foreign policy is hopeless. I think that’s one thing we [need] to see in Britain: a politician at the top level who can step away from the United States of America.

You seem to be very critical of the US.

Internationally, America has become an embarrassment. Its contempt for international law, its refusal to join the [International Criminal Court], the apparently targeted assassinations, the random killing of foreigners in Pakistan, and Yemen, with no court of law, nothing – America is a real menace to world peace. And it’s troubling for a proud country like Britain – our history of tolerance and decency and the rule of law is tarnished by some things, but that’s what we stand for – to be joined at the hip with a rogue state. And also with its social values – you know, the worship of money.

I think the next great British politician will be the man or woman who goes back to what Britain stands for and doesn’t try to mimic the United States of America. I mean, the other day Cameron was asked a question and he said: ‘I’m going to take the Fifth Amendment.’ I mean, did you hear that? What’s that all about? You’re not President of the United States, you’re Prime Minister, you know? We’re Britain, not America, yeah?

I think that we need to go back to the basic insights about what it is to be British.

What do you think your contribution to that should be?

Well, I think that I have to spell out – and I do try to do this – a system of ideas, and expose structures which – which need exposing.

To be honest, I’m lucky: I’m 56 and for the first time in my life I don’t have an overdraft. I have a column a week to write, and that’s not much; and I couldn’t give a damn if no politician ever spoke to me again. I’d actually be happier if they didn’t, in many ways. And so I have no excuse not to go out and tell the truth as I see it, in the time I have left.

This interviewed was conducted for Third Way magazine Image courtesy of Third Way and Andrew Firth.

Image by Theos

1  Karl Marx: A life (Fourth Estate, 1999)
2  ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The assessment of the British Government’ asserted that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and had revived its nuclear weapons programme. The foreword by Tony Blair declared: ‘The document discloses that [Saddam Hussein’s] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them’ – enabling the Sun to announce: ‘Brits 45mins from Doom’.
3  The Rise of Political Lying (The Free Press, 2005)
4  See eg bit.ly/1kFriTl.
5  A Conflict of Visions: Ideological origins of political struggles (William Morrow & Co, 1987; rev’d 2007)
6  bit.ly/1dIeS9k
7  bit.ly/1lmpLaE
8  The day Britain was forced to leave the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM), on September 16, 1992
9  Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the rise of the media class (Aurum Press, 1999)
10  Flat Earth News: An award–winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media (Chatto & Windus, 2008)
11  Murder on Ward Four (Chatto & Windus, 1993)
 

Larry Siedentop’s doctoral thesis, written over fifty years ago, was on Joseph de Maistre and Maine de Biran. De Maistre is reasonably well known as, in Siedentop’s words, an “intransigent, anti–revolutionary and ultra–Catholic”. De Biran is rather less well known, best described as a “cautious liberal conservative”. The pairing of these figures gives an indication of the breadth (as well as the depth) of Siedentop’s mind.

Both breadth and depth are in evidence in his new book, Inventing the Individual, which traces the roots of Western liberalism and is discussed at length here. The book traces the emergence of the individual as a free and equal person from the ancient world though late antiquity, the growth of monasticism, the chaotic Merovingian world and Carolingian renaissance, Papal reformation and the ensuing canonist movement, all the way to the nominalism of late mediaeval Europe and the Renaissance. It is an extraordinarily sure footed performance, striking not only for its range but also its argument.

Siedentop makes a powerful case for Christian basis for those political virtues we either take for granted or ascribe wholeheartedly and without reflection to the Enlightenment. I put it to him when we meet in central London that he is swimming against some powerful intellectual currents in putting forward this narrative. He agrees without hesitation.

“Yes, I think that is fair. Some of it is just a hangover from anticlericalism (which was justified very often). But the thing was, in forming a position to limit the legitimate claims of the church these thinkers were themselves the product of a tradition. They drew on moral traditions that had been generated by Christianity and what they did in effect was turn them against certain claims of the church.”

The sentiment captures not only the spirit of Inventing the Individual – recognising the unnoticed grounds on which so many intellectual movements stand unaware – but of its author – critiquing those movements, gently and persistently, from the inside, rather than attacking them from without.

Siedentop was educated at a liberal arts college run by Dutch Reformed Church – “there was chapel every morning” – and then at Harvard, before his supervisor decided that “Isaiah Berlin was the man for me”, and he went to Oxford on a Marshall scholarship.

A summer in France, in 1956, when he first became interested in French thought, and a natural breadth of mind – “I’ve always found it very hard to judge between philosophy and history so in as far as possible I’ve tried to combined the two” – led to his doctoral studies and thereafter French political thought of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This was a period when it was “dominated by Protestants”, intellectuals who were keen to defend and articulate the idea of a Christian Europe without simply resting on the traditions of the ancien regime – and in whose steps Siedentop feels he treads. “I began to explore new ways of defending and understanding the Christian formation of Europe and I supposed in a way that’s what I’ve tried to continue.”

I am curious to examine the philosophical side of this coin also. Is he simply making a historical case or a normative one also? Christianity may have provided the foundations for Western liberalism but does that mean Western liberalism needs Christianity to survive?

“That’s a very good question,” he answers laughing. “I wish I knew the answer.” Tentatively, he offers one. “The risk is that if liberalism loses these metaphysical foundations, you get not liberal democracy as an outcome but populist democracy; you get equality with much less liberty.”

Siedentop is in no way apocalyptic but he has concerns that too many liberals have for too long been deaf to. “To what extent the social order rests on shared beliefs?” he asks. The question is neither rhetorical nor simple, and modern liberals have been avoiding it for too long, living as they do in the seemingly interminable shadow of societies that once demanded “complete conformity of belief”. We are afraid of shared belief because we have seen what enforced belief can do and have yet to see what the other end of the spectrum heralds.

We have loosened the ties that bind us to a dangerous degree, he suggests. “There is a great temptation to take a quasi–Marxist view and say that if a society is sufficiently prosperous… that will do the trick. I don’t agree with that.” The absence of what he sees as traditional identity markers – religion, family, constitution – poses a real problem to Europe and its constituent countries. British politicians’ eagerness to define precisely what Britishness entails is “a symptom of our plight”.

Does that mean that ‘Europe’ as an idea (and possibly as a project) cannot survive without Christianity? It would be “very fragile”, he responds, underlining again the need not necessarily for Christianity per se but for the sense of deep shared identity that Europe has, for so long, taken for granted and which unprecedented levels of migration are now calling into question.

He casts doubt over another sacred liberal object towards the end of our interview: human rights. The “inflation of the language of rights in last few decades is not doing a service to liberalism”, he says. There is a temptation to “redescribe all sorts of wants or preferences as rights”, a temptation that we seem too weak to resist but one that ultimately devalues the notion of a right.

No one could possibly question Siedentop’s liberal credentials. He may have written his thesis on de Maistre but he is not his political child. He critiques from the inside precisely because he thinks the democratic liberalism of the West is such a good system.

His critique, however, is marked by a recognition that democratic liberalism does not simply float in the air like some kind of political Laputa, the flying island Gulliver encounters in his travels. Equality and freedom do not come naturally to human beings. Inventing the Individual shows how they were achieved in Europe through Christian commitments that were slowly and sometimes accidentally instituted and embedded across the continent.

Out of sheer curiosity – I have not often spoken to political philosophers who are so alert and sympathetic to the formative influence of Christianity on Western politics – I ask him whether he is a Christian himself. He answers with another laugh and choosing his words carefully again, as he has through the entire interview, says, “Let’s say I’m a fellow traveller”.

Inventing the Indvidual: The Origins of Western Liberalism is published by Allen Lane

Your family history is quite exotic – you were born on the Pacific coast of what is now north–east China. Can you tell us a little about your background?

I’m very interested in my family history. My parents started in the west of Russia – my father’s family was Jewish and lived in the old Jewish Pale [of Settlement] and then they went east and made a lot of money on the way, partly by building a bit of the Trans–Siberian Railway, and ended up as a big family firm in Vladivostok. My mother’s family were Russian Orthodox farmers and they, too, were part of the opening–up of the east in the 19th century, which was really the Russian equivalent of the Wild West.

So, they were both established in Siberia by the time the Revolution came along in 1917, and they went across the border to Harbin, which had become a great centre of émigré Russian life in Manchuria. My parents met because their families ended up in the same place.

Were you conscious of any clash of cultures?

Not really, because my father… After the Revolution, his mother settled in Paris and sent him to boarding school at Brighton College and he became very English in his outlook and appearance, so I never got a Jewish flavour from him, really – except that he enjoyed Jewish jokes a lot. From my mother, I got a very strong sense of Russianness – she spoke English always with an accent, unlike my father. But religious influences were not particularly strong. I was quite eclectic: when I was eight or nine in Tianjin I used to go to the Russian Orthodox church with my granny, but I was educated at a Catholic school and I was an altar boy in the Church of England, so I had a very ecumenical background.

I did have a religious period in my life – I think in my teens, when I was at Brighton College. I got confirmed, and then it sort of faded away, really.

Your family lost its wealth as a result of the Revolution and then the Crash of 1929 and then the Second World War, is that right?

Yeah. It really got screwed by both systems.

Do you think that may have made you cautious about all forms of economic ideology?

Yeah. I don’t think I’ve even been an economic ideologist. I suppose the nearest I came to it was in the Eighties, when I was quite supportive of Thatcher though I never became a Thatcherite. I admired her courage and I thought she was doing some of the things that were necessary; but I think I was always very much, in economic terms, a kind of middle–wayer. I think I’ve always rejected any form of extremism in economics.

You came to this country for good in 1950. Did your upbringing give you an outsider’s perspective on British life, and perhaps on Britain’s intellectual traditions?

Sure. I’ve always thought of myself as an outsider.

And has that proved to be a positive thing for you?

Well, I think I’ve tended to have a contrarian streak, and to be very suspicious of what’s called ‘conventional wisdom’. I think my basic instincts are quite subversive, really. I’m very aware that most people don’t think much outside the particular box in which they find themselves. I’m also struck by peculiarities of civilisations – perhaps I see them a bit more clearly, having a view from the side rather than the centre. I’ve always felt myself to be in an ambivalent relationship with the English – and it’s rather astonishing to me that somehow I have eventually found myself within the English establishment, but not really feeling part of it.

You studied history at Jesus College, Oxford and you’ve said that you ‘picked up some economics’.

Yes. I’m really an economically literate historian – that would be my preferred description.

Did you find yourself operating in the economic world by accident or design?

It was accidental in a way. One of my friends at Oxford – and he remains a very good friend – was Max Mosley and I became interested in his father through knowing him. When I got my degree I had a choice, to go into the BBC or to take the academic route and go to Nuffield College, and I decided to do a DPhil on the Labour government [of 1929–31], in which Oswald Mosley had been a leading advocate of Keynesian economic policy.

And you went on to write a biography of him.

Yeah. It is my most controversial book by far, because I portrayed him as a sort of misunderstood Keynesian, essentially, who went off the political rails because he couldn’t get a proper unemployment policy. I mean, he had personal flaws as well – and I came to the conclusion that he was too young to resist the temptation to hubris – he was an extraordinarily brave and dynamic person who thought he could do anything.

I think people thought I was too sympathetic to him. I wrote the book when he’d stopped being in active politics, but people felt that there might be a Fascist comeback and that I was pumping some wind into these sails, long deflated, by making him into an interesting figure. But I don’t regret the book. I think there were things I did wrong, but I think it was courageous.

You are most celebrated for your very extensive writings about Keynes. He was not originally an economist, while Adam Smith himself was actually a moral philosopher. One of the themes that run through your work is that economics has lost that kind of setting in a larger system of thought.

I think it’s become completely technical. It has become simply a concern with efficiency, and behaviour that maximises people’s efficiency, without asking questions about the ends of economic activity. Making a living is obviously essential to survival, but, further to that, it’s a means to live a decent life – a good life, I mean. If you lose a sense of that, you’re just on a treadmill.

I think economics was very, very important from the time of Smith onwards, when wealth was starting to explode and people started asking questions about how the wealth of nations was increasing, and why, and what it meant for the human condition. Until then, economies had been completely static and it had been assumed that the poor would stay poor: the small minority of rich people would be either benevolent or exploitative, but there was no possibility that the human race might solve the problem of poverty.

As soon as that possibility opened up, then obviously people got interested in to what use they’d put their wealth. But it’s exactly at that point that economics lost its bearing, I think, because it became so obsessed with the efficiency of production that it lost any sense of what the purposes of production were. It also took as its unit of analysis the self–interested individual. Smith has huge problems in reconciling self–interest and sympathy (which is a way in which the individual connects to other people). And as time went on, economists lost any real sense of that connection; and now all economic models simply start with the idea of a selfish individual ‘maximising their utilities’.

Economics as a discipline emerged in 18th–century England and Scotland, very much in the shadow of the Newtonian revolution in physics. Do you think that envy of physics was built into it from the start – manifested in the way it conceives people almost as atoms and wants to systematise, and mathematise, their behaviour?

I think that there was a desire to make economics as scientific as physics, and as much of a natural science as possible. I mean, physics was the epitome of science and the way to the future. It was the opposite of theology, and if you wanted to emancipate yourself from theological views of human beings you went over to physics. Self–interest is a basic concept of economics that maximises the analogue of an atom.

Do you think, then, that economics is inherently opposed to theological thinking?

Yes, I do. I mean, it’s perfectly possible for economists to be religious people, but economics, because it’s a science of means and not ends, takes your ends as something for the individual to make up their mind about. What economics is about is: what’s the most efficient way of achieving whatever goals you have? I mean, if your goal is salvation, I dare say an economist will tell you how best to use your time in order to attain it. And efficiency is rooted in the idea of scarcity: time is scarce and so you have to use it properly or you’re not going to achieve your goals. Economics cannot really cope with the notion of abundance.

The other thing that I think was intrinsic to economics right from its inception was the idea of maximising your benefits over time. There you have a very interesting religious root, because in religion you have this idea of eternal bliss and that people should act in such a way as to secure their immortal souls, but now you cut out the immortal bit and you are left with the idea that people should act in such a way as to secure their long–run utility. The timespan is truncated to this life, but that is what enlightened self–interest is. You don’t just spend all your money now in riotous living but you save. And so the idea of postponing satisfaction and saving does have quite a strong theological root; but it’s been completely cut off from any end purpose for the human species.

Let’s turn to your political career. You have belonged to three major political parties and in the House of Lords you now sit on the cross benches.

Yes, that’s true. I was quite active in the Oxford University Labour Club in the Sixties, but in the Seventies I began to think that Labour was hopelessly trapped by its commitment to Clause IV,² and that was stopping it developing into a really radical alternative. It should have been more of a liberal party, like the historic Liberal Party. And when finally Labour seemed to lurch to the left, I joined the [Social Democratic Party in 1981], which I thought was what the Labour Party should really be like. The SDP accepted quite a lot of Thatcherism, but not the attack on the National Health Service and not her divisiveness – it would have tried to unite the country more. (I was always critical of Thatcher but I do now see that I gave her too much of the benefit of the doubt at the time.) 

But then in 1992 you moved to the Conservative Party after the SDP was finally dissolved…

I took the Conservative whip in the Lords, but I never joined the party. It’s one of these strange conventions that you don’t have to to take the whip.

You weren’t tempted by the Liberal Democrats?

No. I suppose I was influenced by [my close friend, and co–founder of the SDP,] David Owen in that. I mean, he was so hostile to them!

I was still mildly ambitious for a political career, maybe, and I thought I’d perhaps get a chance of being a minister [with the Conservatives]. And I would have been a minister quite easily – I mean, I was a rather able recruit – but I was too independent–minded, I think.

So independent–minded that you ended up being sacked in 1999 for publicly opposing Nato’s bombing of Kosovo.

Yeah. I was a Treasury spokesman and that was taken from me by that great leader of the Conservative Party at the time, William Hague. For about a year I still took the whip as a backbencher, and then I went to the cross benches – mainly because I was very out of sympathy with the hysterical anti–Europeanism that had come to dominate Conservative politics in the 1990s.

How come Tony Blair couldn’t tempt you back to Labour?

I would have thought that the noises he was making at the time, about making the capitalist system work for everyone and not just the few, would have appealed to you strongly.

Well, first of all I thought that you can’t go on moving parties the whole time and I’d found a place that, you know, probably suited me best. But, secondly, I didn’t want to accept the obligations of active membership of the Labour Party in the Lords. I was writing the third volume of Keynes³ and it was absorbing practically all of my energy, and I suppose at the back of my mind there was the thought that actually this is my work and not the ephemera of politics.

What was it about Keynes that first so attracted you?

I think he was just incredibly intelligent. I don’t mean just in the clever–clever sense – he was very clever but he actually had some really profound ideas about the human condition, and the condition of society: the impact of the loss of religious belief (which he had lived through himself), the threat of revolution and descent into barbarism and how that can best be averted, and [the prospect of] a utopia in which the economic problem would be solved and we’d become like the lilies of the field.

You see, although he was of the non–believing generation, he was very influenced by religion – his categories were essentially religious, not economic. A lot of his imagery was biblical, actually. (He had close connections, and very interesting correspondence, with people like Archbishop Temple and TS Eliot. He was very aware of the value of religion; he just couldn’t believe the dogma.)

The skill with which he navigated economics, from a position of being a non–believer in it, really, to imposing himself on [the discipline] – I mean, it was an unbelievable undertaking. His innovations, which had been made in the language of economics and looked like economics, were actually attacking the foundations of the subject: the self–interested individual, always rational, always maximising [their own utility] with perfect information – and with perfect markets as well – which is how they’d built their subject up. And when the scales fell from their eyes, quite a long time after he died, and they realised what he was really on about, they spewed most of it out.

I thought all that was such a colossal achievement. It was something I both felt in awe of and wanted to explain to the present generation.

How is it that economists can end up disagreeing so vehemently about certain key concepts? I wonder whether to some extent they tailor their theories – though ‘tailor’ is too strong a word – to suit their own predispositions and commitments.

I don’t think they do disagree about key concepts, actually; but I think they disagree about the implications of some of those concepts. Take the idea that the economy is like a Newtonian system – it may sort of oscillate a little but it’s always more or less in equilibrium (which means that there are never any crashes or crises of the kind we’ve just experienced) and it’s just a question of how you allocate resources most efficiently within that equilibrium to get maximum growth and that kind of stuff. Now, virtually everyone accepts this – but then they also accept the fact that this perfect picture is not realised in real life. I think all the disagreements really arise about what those imperfections are and how serious they are and what should be done about them, and whether doing something about them isn’t going to make things worse than they would otherwise be.

The idea that economists differ is not so surprising if you think of them as would–be physicists, because they’re trying to do something in economics that can’t be done because the subject is human behaviour. You wouldn’t be surprised if sociologists disagreed, I think, or historians; but it’s disguised in economics because all the stuff that is really like sociology or history is in that box labelled ‘Imperfections’, whereas the basic model floats free above that.

I think Keynes would have said: Don’t start with that perfect model, because it’s not connected to anything in the real world. Start with something messier and then develop models that are more realistic and relevant to the real world. And there wouldn’t be one supermodel: there’d be lots of models that would be appropriate to different contexts.

In How Much is Enough?,⁴ which you wrote with your son Edward Skidelsky, you seem to argue that we need some normative framework in order to live well (if I can put it that way). We need to know how much is enough. Do you think that such a framework is possible outside of religion? Can a secular society say: ‘This is enough, we don’t need any more – and our wanting more is not a sufficient reason for having it’?

Well… Is environmentalism a secular belief–system or a religious one? You see, I think religious belief is associated in our society with organised religion, but that doesn’t exhaust what people mean when they talk about a religious view of life. It’s more to do with something sacred and not to be tampered with just for the sake of expediency or ‘getting on’. Certain kinds of exploitation that are in your power you don’t do because you’re too aware of the wonder of the way the universe works and… A religious sense is a sense of wonder. So, there are lots of these attitudes that we have got to have if we are to avoid, ultimately, self–destruction which I think can be called ‘religious’.

Whether the churches as they’ve existed can be the carrier of contemporary religion again, I’m not so sure. Possibly they can. But they can only become so, I think, if a really great disaster overtakes our civilisation, and that’s what one’s really trying to avoid! So, in a way the question needs to be rephrased: Is there religion beyond Christianity for our society?

It’s sometimes said that Christianity is a religion of scarcity and it has most difficulty in winning people’s hearts and minds in conditions of plenty – which is a nice parallel with what you said earlier about economics.

You ended How Much is Enough? with the statement: ‘Could a society entirely devoid of the religious impulse stir itself in pursuit of the common good? We doubt it.’ But where does that impulse ground itself if not in one of those organised religions that have, for better or worse, provided us with stability for centuries?

Well, it’ll be a grounding that will draw on them but not be identical to them. After all, Christianity drew on Judaism and other Middle Eastern religions in forming its own foundations, and Islam did the same. I don’t think religions should be regarded as [something carved] in stone which are just there and you either worship them or you don’t. I think they change – they have got to, because, after all, the world hasn’t been static for the last two thousand years.

You could interpret the question ‘Are we due for a religious revival?’ as: Are we due for another religion? I think that’s probably what that thought at the end of the book leads to. Which is not to say that one wouldn’t draw a huge amount from the old religions. The real issue is, I think, the question of the church, because you can have a kind of unchurched religion but that’s sort of wishy–washy – you don’t really have to believe anything in particular, and because you don’t really have to believe anything in particular it makes no claims on how you live your life.

And any belief system has to make sufficiently strong claims on your life to deny your ‘I want’ statements?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And, of course, the organisation is part of the community of the church, isn’t it? I mean, basically people are kept religious – or kept in the religious community – by worship. It may be that one of the seeds of the revival of religion lies in this communitarian sense that, you know, at least you’re in connection with your fellow human beings.

You told the Observer recently: ‘I am not religious, but would like to be.’⁵ Can you imagine returning to the fold?

If I were to embrace organised religion, I think I would become a Catholic, rather than an Anglican…

Because of the tradition of Catholic social thought?

Yeah, I think it’s a broader… And it’s a non–state religion. There’s too much compromise with the state in the Church of England, and I think religion must be independent, otherwise [it loses] its critical edge… Admittedly, Catholicism has made shameful compromises with the secular power as well, but in principle it’s got some independent standpoint. A religious standpoint is not the same as a secular standpoint, and the bishops are good in Parliament, quite often, and when they’re coming from one place and the Government is coming from a different one, they don’t hesitate to say so. And yet they do hesitate to say so, because they say it in a way that keeps one foot inside… You see, they’re part of the establishment and that’s a compromised position.

Of course, there have been great Anglican clergymen and statesmen. I’m a huge admirer of Rowan Williams (I don’t know enough about Justin Welby, really – yet). I mean, Williams was remarkable…

You wrote in New Statesman the other day that ‘economics contaminates all our motives.’⁶ It strikes me that the apostle Paul’s famous (but usually misquoted) dictum that ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’⁷ is one you would wholeheartedly countersign.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – and it’s something Keynes would have countersigned as well. He says three things, really, to which my philosophy points. He says that first of all you’ve got to get the current economic problem out of the way – you can’t go on having economies crashing in the way they do, so you have to get investment flowing until the point at which there are no longer any returns from it. As you move beyond that stage, you ‘equalise consumption’; and, finally, you work less. Those are the three stages he envisaged.

And we have not equalised consumption, and so our investment is always in crisis, because we’re always having to think up ways of keeping it going; and we don’t work much less, either, so we’re not enjoying the fruits of our labours. Wealth and income are very unequally – hugely unequally – divided, and have become more so over the last 30 or 40 years.

Do you think there is something in human nature that militates against us moving on in the way we should?

Yeah, I think we’re very flawed.

Would you accept the word ‘sin’ to describe it, or is that too narrowly Christian a concept?

No, I think original sin is a good metaphor. I think we are terribly flawed. And, time and time again, you see that people react to things so irrationally. Who has ever understood human nature, really? I mean, people who can be extraordinarily kind and thoughtful and empathetic to those immediately around them become hate–filled when they’re confronted with something new or unfamiliar.

The optimist, or the rationalist, says: ‘It’s a matter of education. You spread education and gradually human behaviour will become more equable and will no longer descend to those barbarities to which it’s prone.’ But I’m unconvinced by that. There’s a level at which everything is reasonable and then you dig just a little deeper, you frack a bit, and, you know, horrible stuff gushes out – which has all been there from the beginning, maybe rooted in our hunting ancestry or something. And so, if you’re looking really very far ahead, there may have to be a new species to carry on life.

The horrible thought is that as we find out more and more about how the human brain works, we may be able to expunge original sin [along with] everything else that makes us human – because original sin is part of the human condition – and we end up as placid robots.

I imagine you wearing a ‘WWKD’ bracelet. What do you think Keynes would have us do today?

I don’t think he’d ever give up on full employment. It may be that there’s not really enough work any longer for everyone to do the 40 or 50 hours a week they used to do in factories and coal mines, and maybe that degree of fullness of employment has gone. But he would have said: OK, let’s turn that into increased leisure – but not at the expense of income. He certainly wouldn’t have sanctioned creating a whole population of people in subnormal jobs and occupations at very low incomes.

After all that happened in the 20th century, he wouldn’t have sanctioned the re–emergence of a servant class based on huge inequalities.

I mean, we are reproducing Downton Abbey but in a different form, and he wouldn’t have sanctioned that. He would have been a redistributor.

This interview was conducted on January 13, 2014 and first appeared in Third Way magazine. 

Photograph from Andrew Firth from firthphoto.com under the Creative Commons Licence.