Apologies, but we need to talk about death

With various things, Covid hassles being one of them, I have not blogged for a while. But the last few months have led me to reflect on some things a bit more, and a specific consequence of that is a return to writing. Here goes….

One of the problems that society in the UK has in dealing with the Covid pandemic is shared by many developed countries.

We seem unable to talk about death in any sort of mature way. It induces panic in politicians and a feeding frenzy from the media. It leads to lousy decision making.

Right at the beginning (Lockdown number 1), Boris did briefly – and impressively – spell it out: “But at present there are just no easy options. The way ahead is hard, and it is still true that many lives will sadly be lost.”

Which is what we genuinely needed to hear.

Shortly after, the UK had a sombre mood, whatever the haters claimed otherwise on Twitter etc, as the PM teetered on the edge of a potentially terminal decline. In its way, that was probably good for the nation. Seven months later, the same individual, who is 99.999% sure of having an adequate immune response to Covid, is pathetically self-isolating, with the connivance of a cadre of bafflingly insecure SAGE advisers. This isn’t science, and nor is it a sign of a deeper thinking national culture, who can face and discuss the big topics.

Everyone knows that death could be just around the corner, Covid or no Covid. But we shove the thought out of brains again ASAP. And not all deaths are tragic. Back when life expectancy was measured in a few decades such an observation was unexceptional, but not any more.

It coincides, if not entirely correlates, with the decline in religious practice. In a secular age such an observation seems cringing and unfashionable, but it’s true.

What can religion teach us about death, in this era when mortality looms in all the media, in politics, in the loss of everyday pursuits? Well, without getting too metaphysical, theological or eschatological, here is a careful piece by an English monk and scholar, Aelred Watkin, a man of great literary skill and erudition.

You may scoff, be bored, or shake your head in disbelief, but it’s worth reading. I think we’ve all been there:

We do not care to think about our own death. In fact, the modern world does everything it can to conceal the onset of it. We employ euphemisms when speaking of death to hide its reality. We condemn thinking about it as morbid and unhealthy. We shrink from any discussion of it. Death is regarded as the pursuer which is slowly gaining and we do not want to listen to the stealthy tread of its footfalls. Moreover, we have become accustomed to living. We have up to the present always survived the dangerous illness, have always emerged alive from the nearly fatal disaster. We know we are not immortal, but we regard our own death as something that will take place in the indefinite future. That death is a real alternative to living at any given moment we can hardly bring ourselves to realise. We do not deny the certainty of death, but to us it is always ‘then’ and never ‘now’.     Let us look at this a little more closely. It is true that some people, perhaps suffering from an incurable mortal disease, may be able to predict with reasonable certainty when they will die, but for most of us the fact is that we shall never be more aware of our death than we are at this moment. It is hard to grasp this truth, for it is easy to compose pleasing little fantasies of our death-beds at a ripe old age. We picture ourselves lying there, the things of time fading from our vision and the things of eternity dawning brightly before our eyes. It is a pleasing portrait, but we may wonder how far it is true to life.     Most deaths are either sudden, as in an accident, or are at the end of an illness. A sudden death is one which by definition makes it impossible for us to know exactly what is happening. Nor, indeed, at the present moment can we usually bring ourselves to believe that we may die suddenly. This is something that happens to others, not to ourselves. And if we are involved in an accident that could have been fatal we say in a rather shaken voice ‘that was a near thing’, but we cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that it really might have been the end of us. We are too accustomed to survival.     Most people, however, die after an illness. Here again, if we look at such deaths, we can see that usually it is equally difficult to take in the fact of dying. Illness does not give such clarity. When we fall ill we are not usually aware of any seriousness at first. We feel unwell. We tell ourselves that we are in for a bad cold or some such ailment. We take to our bed in the confident expectation that we shall soon be about again. At this point, the last thing we realise is that we shall in fact never go down those stairs again, never again see other than what lies within the walls of a sickroom, that we have already left behind us for ever almost the totality of the human experience we have known. Nor are we helped to a sense of the reality of eternal truths by the course of our illness. The rising temperature, the fever, the long periods of semi-somnolence, the effects of powerful drugs, the growing inability to notice what is going on around us, the difficulty of articulation, all stand between us and a sense of this reality. There is usually no sudden insight into the transience of created things or the immediacy of the eternal. We are but ill, weary and bemused and thus the world passes from us.     Never, then, at any point in our illness were we really able to take in the fact that we were dying. In the early stages no one thought of death, least of all ourselves, and in the later ones we were not able to take it in fully or vividly. It is a peaceful and a merciful end, but it is one which is largely unprepared. Death has been in fact unexpected. It will be seen, therefore, that, as a general rule, we shall not have a more vivid awareness of our own death than we do at this present moment….

….Yet, however hard we find it to realise the possibility of death ‘now’, it is not difficult to know the certainty of death ‘then’. Death is always before us, at least subconsciously, rather in the way that some inevitable event lies ahead of us. It is in the indefinable future, but it is there. We may ignore it. We may assure ourselves that its onset is too distant for us to accommodate our way of life to it; yet, at the back of our minds, it remains. We would like to pretend that there is no death; this as reasonable beings we cannot do; we try to forget about death, this we can do for a time, even for a long time, but something happens sooner or later to remind us of its inevitability. Then, in default of forgetting, we employ our last card, that of disregarding death. The very fact that ‘we know not the day nor the hour’ encourages us to consign the inevitable event to a remoteness well beyond the present.     Further, we back up our disregard by a series of excellent arguments, all of which contain more than a measure of truth. ‘If we are always thinking of death,’ we say, ‘we shall merely inhibit our powers of action. We shall think that nothing is worth doing, nothing worth having. We shall become morbid and gloomy. A man cannot lead a useful and happy life if all he sees is dissolution, all he reads, an epitaph.’ This, of course, is only too true. But it can mean two quite different things. In the first place it can mean that ‘though I am aware of death, I do not think about it as an end but as a beginning; though in the order of appearances all will die, nevertheless there is an ultimate meaning and fulfilment which death cannot touch because they reach out to a world beyond death. For me there is no death in the sense that all ends: what we call death is but the beginning of new life.’ Or it can mean: ‘I will not think of death because to me it is nothing but an end, a mortgage foreclosed upon human activity. If I let myself think that every step is taking me nearer to the grave it will be a bewilderment and a torment. Such thinking would inhibit action, destroy initiative and kill hope.’     Such are the possible and reasonable attitudes to death. Death is either a beginning, if a mysterious one, of a new life in which the values of the old find their fulfilment or it is an end to all life, activity and hope. Nevertheless, whether death be a beginning or an end, it is a fact, and it is a fact that must be faced. We cannot evade the consciousness of it save by doing violence to our own intelligence. Age is relentless in its approach, the past has gone beyond recall, the sole certainty of the future is that we shall die, that we shall leave our friends, our family, our home and will no longer see with human eyes what has so long been familiar to us.    

So what? It’s all a bit repetitive and obvious, is it not?

Well, perhaps, but having set the scene it would be unfair to Dom Aelred not to point out that his only solution is a religious one (or a rational one, as writers like Frank Sheed might say):

It is the Salvation of God that enables us to face this certainty not only without misgiving but with hope; that enables us to know that intimations of immortality are not mere mirages in a desert of dust, that what has gone is not lost and that ‘behold, I make all things new’ is a sure and certain promise whose fulfilment we shall actually experience.

This is not to proselytise via a blog, far from it, but we do need to talk more, about death…

*

Racism in 2019

The two groups in our society today who enjoy racism – I know that’s an odd way of phrasing it – are actual racists, who when they’re in a group/mob seem to thrive on the toxic atmosphere, and all those commentators/politicians/idiots who casually go around accusing people of racism on the basis of zip. There are quite a lot of these latter group, for whom identity politics is both a way of life and often a source of income. There are literally thousands of examples of this deeply disturbing phenomenon. This recent  Spiked! piece, reflecting the UK’s fevered pre-election state provides a brilliant insight. Alternatively, just go on Twitter.

A sorry state of affairs.

As a white Catholic male of Irish heritage I do tick a few minority boxes, but I’ve never been victimised in any of those categories, although anticatholicism (1, 2, 3, 4) is on the rise worldwide, for sure.

It’s easy for me to say that I don’t think the UK is a particularly racist society, I know, but it is what I think, especially having visited plenty of countries that are far worse in this respect. In terms of endemic bigotry, including race, we do have Corbyn and his chums with their quite blatant Jew hatred – and the Jews are the archetypal race, as opposed to categorising people by colour or other visible features – and of course the Scottish Nationalists, with their longstanding  careful nurturing of anti-English sentiment, to which they never admit. Both groups are shamefully part of the establishment, but the people are slowly fighting back, in my view. The imminent election may demonstrate that.

If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about, what with my privilege and all that, just ask an academic sociologist instead: “In the media turmoil surrounding Brexit, many pundits have seized on the prejudice angle, but these data demonstrate that is not actually what makes the UK different from the Continent. Prejudice against immigrant workers or minority ethnic and religious groups is rare in the UK, perhaps even slightly rarer than in equivalently developed EU countries”. Well, who would have thought it?

My take on why the UK is a pretty well integrated society in terms of race – and improving all the time – is quite specific. There are five main factors, but first a brief history of the useful input from politicians on this topic (in living memory):

1965 The Race Relations Act – outlawed discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins” in public places in Great Britain … It also prompted the creation of the Race Relations Board in 1966

1968 The Race Relations Act – made it illegal to refuse housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins in Great Britain, and also created the Community Relations Commission to promote ‘harmonious community relations’.

…so two significant pieces of legislation, followed by…

1976 The Race Relations Act which combined the two earlier pieces to prevent discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, nationality, ethnic and national origin in the fields of employment, the provision of goods and services, education and public functions. The Act also established the Commission for Racial Equality with a view to review the legislation, which was put in place to make sure the Act rules were followed.

All good, but then came the Race Relations Amendment Act of 2000, which modified things a bit, but was much less of a landmark, and the Equality Act of 2010, which actually created a few problems for some (non-bigoted people). My point being the main pieces of legislation, particularly regarding race (as opposed to gender etc), were done and dusted by 1976, which was 43 years ago.

Despite that admirable work, the current 2019 number one talking point for many politicians, is racism, because they believe that they can use it to batter opponents with, often diminishing the significance of real racism issues in the process – if everyone is a racist, nobody is.

You see it every day, on Twitter, on the news, and magnified one hundredfold when there’s an election coming up. It takes a bit of creative licence to brand Brexit as a race issue, but that’s exactly what many Remainers have been trying for the past 4 years.

So here are the five main factors promoting racial harmony in the UK, none of which are to the credit of any politician – they came about organically, if you like:

1. The NHS (in which I work) – where patients and staff come from everywhere. I’ve had colleagues from the Philippines to Paraguay, and all points in between, Interestingly, EU membership works against this, by favouring EU citizens for jobs over those from further afield, which, given the ethnicities, certainly looks like racism to me. It screwed up medical recruitment from India, Pakistan and the Middle East in particular, all areas with which we’ve long had excellent historical ties.
2. Professional sport, not just football – just watch the TV sport for 5 minutes. I go back to supertough Remi Moses being a legend for Manchester United. There is no more likeable a public figure than Anthony Joshua.
3. Popular culture, in particular reality TV, Talent shows and soaps – speaks for itself
4. The churches, especially the Catholic church – try going to Sunday mass in Clapham to see what I mean
5. Higher education, which has been a true melting pot since the start of the 20th century (here’s one brilliant example)

Why did I write this?

Because I am heartily sick of the politicisation of this societal issue, for cynical reasons unconnected with ending actual discrimination. And also to point out that the citizens of the UK, without the input of politicians, do a very good job of racial integration themselves, without fuss. The emphasis on alleged racism plausibly harms efforts to tackle real racism.

There are problems, there probably always will be, but they will not be solved by the shrill ranting of our political classes and their hangers on**, ***, **** for reasons mainly concerned with personal and political gain.

The citizens don’t need their advice on this one.

 

Lily can’t hold back the tears

**This post went out just before Boris’ remarkable win in the general election. As night follows day, up pops a ludicrous ‘serious’ celebrity (Lily Allen), to blame it all on racism.

They have no idea what their own country and its citizens are actually like. They have no faith in human beings to broadly do the right thing.

 

 

 

 

***then along comes absurd luvvie John Hannah, to, guess what, tell us that: “This whole Brexit cluster -f*** is really about 1 thing. Immigration ! Like it or not turns out we’re a country of racists and Brexit/EU scepticism is the cover. It’s all about English nationalism. Shameful!”

Which gives him the added pleasure as a Scot – despite living in London and the US – of pulling Sturgeon’s trick of accusing the English of that which she is guilty of herself, bigotry.

Awful, stupid, malignant people, with zero ability to relate to the average citizen. Who will of course be racist.

Hannah looking down on the racist plebs

**** and here comes trendy but thick attention-seeking multimillionaire Stormzy, to add his predictable tuppenceworth

Nuns

Homeless in Manhattan

Today being Sunday it seems reasonable to post some pretty basic upfront religious stuff. The sort of thing that makes people uncomfortable, allegedly, although I’m not convinced of that.

Nuns get a mixed press, ranging from pity through bafflement to admiration. I understand all three on different levels, but the reality is that they vary hugely in the nature of their work and vocations, and they are certainly not wimps. They’ve chosen a tough path in life. It was typical of Obama that he completely failed to understand this particular group of voters, and assumed that they would be easy targets. How wrong he was (1, 2, 3).

Here is an extract from a book by the well known Cardinal Dolan (one of the many societal differences between here and the US, he doesn’t shy away from getting stuck in), courtesy of Kathryn Jean Lopez. If you’ve spent time with the wretched, the incurably ill, the violent drug addicts and the dying, you’ll see that this rings entirely true. He was visiting the Missionaries of Charity on Good Friday – Mother Teresa’s order – in New York, where I think their base is up by Harlem:

As I went from bed to bed, I noticed one emaciated man in the corner who seemed agitated, and kept beckoning to me to come to him. As I began in turn to approach his bed, the sister halted me, warning that this man was unusually violent, hateful to all, and had actually attempted to bite the attending sisters a number of times. Of course, you realize the consequences being bitten by one with AIDS. However, the poor man kept signaling for me to come near. What was I to do? What would any priest do? Slowly, cautiously, I approached, and carefully extended the crucifix, which he grasped and kissed — not the feet, I remember so vividly — but the crucified Lord. He then lay back down, exhausted. The next day, Holy Saturday, the sisters called to tell me that the same man had asked to see me. I went, and, again, in company with two of the sisters as “bodyguards,” approached him. As I got nearer he whispered, “I want to be baptized!” I moved a few inches closer, and expressing satisfaction, asked if he could explain to me why he desired to enter the Church. “I know nothing about Christianity or the Catholic Church,” he said, with the little bit of strength he had left. “In fact, I have hated religion all my life. All I do know is that for three months I have been here dying. These sisters are always happy! When I curse them, they look at me with compassion in their eyes. All I know is that they have joy and I don’t. When I ask them in desperation why they are so happy, all they answer is ‘Jesus.’ I want this Jesus. Baptize me and give me this Jesus! Give me joy!” Never as a priest has it brought me more satisfaction to baptize, anoint, and give first Holy Communion to someone. He died at 3:15 on Easter morning. It’s sanctity that that man saw in the sisters. They radiated holy joy.

He has a point

Metaphor, Trump and the antlike Antifa

…Antifa, sundry mad lefties etc…

One thing is true about contemporary politics in the UK, the EU and the USA – it’s not boring. Not only the facts, the events, the personalities, but also the conversations. The internet has liberated all of us, and for every crank theory there is an intelligent analysis that you won’t get in the mainstream media. It’s brilliant. A lot of it is also very funny/entertaining, though hardly ever emanating from the more left inclined end of the spectrum, where humour is suspect.

Whether or not we’re currently getting good government, we’re certainly benefiting from the theme of John von Kannon‘s wonderful quote “If you can’t have good government, at least have entertaining government.”

….army ants

A rising star in 2017 is Thomas Wictor, whose biography is pretty extraordinary, and who has a dedicated bunch of followers on Twitter, waiting for the next in his series of long threads, centring around government, lefties, war, the military, pictorial analysis and flamethrowers. Yes, flamethrowers.  In fact, with respect to the latter, read the genius thread starting here.

He’s an erudite man, and a terrific writer. Here is his series of tweets creating the ‘Trump is Leiningen’ meme. A sheer delight. You don’t have to be a Trumpkin to enjoy the point.

A story.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants,” by Carl Stephenson (1893-1954). A plantation owner versus army ants.

Leiningen is a middle-aged man who refuses to give up. He enemies are the ants–robotic, vicious, inhuman.

My father’s most inspired quote: “Can you reason with a wasp?”

Of course not. Leiningen tries everything to save his plantation.

The ants won’t be stopped. They want what they want, and they’ll get it by any means necessary.

When all seems lost, Leiningen realizes that there’s one last chance, but someone will have to run through two miles of ants.

So Leiningen tells his men what will happen:

“I’m not going to let you try it; if I did I’d be worse than one of those ants.”

“No, I called the tune, and now I’m going to pay the piper.” Middle-aged Leiningen will run through two miles of ants.

How many people know that those who call the tune must pay the piper?

President Trump knows. He pays the piper daily, without complaint. That’s why Trump is winning and will be completely successful.

Army ants–no matter how many there are–can’t think. Last night I was told by THIS person that leftism will win.

Delusional army ants. That’s what Trump and his supporters face.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” has one of my favorite lines ever:

“They had been delivered into the annihilation that was their god.”

Watch it happen. And celebrate.

…and Tom goes on to provide a handy CNN video. Hilarious

Praise the Lord (of explosives)

..also, moustaches are back, take it from me…

Not all figures in public life are venal and self-interested:

During the entire four war years Lord Moulton worked a ten-hour day and took less than ten days holiday

…that was John Fletcher Moulton, who at the outbreak of the First World War became “Director-General of the Explosives Department”. A terrific job title. He’s interesting too because despite being an extremely distinguished legal brain, he was also a very high powered Cambridge mathematician. The man had a hinterland.

Anyway, I owe this post entirely to the polymathic genius of the very funny and very wise Mark Steyn, who in examining the absurd vicissitudes and mores of our decadent 21st century West, noted:

85 years ago English judge Lord Moulton, said that human action can be divided into three domains. At one end is the law at the other is free choice and between them is the realm of manners. In this realm Lord Moulton said, “lies a domain in which our actions are not determined by law but in which we are not free to behave in any way we choose. In this domain we act with greater or lesser freedom from constraint, on a continuum that extends from a consciousness of duty through a sense of what is required by public spirit, to good form appropriate in a given situation”.

That was from 2016. Steyn returned to it a few days ago, in looking at the current NFL shenanigans in the States. It seems such an obvious concept, but there’s a kind of genius in defining it so elegantly.

I think we can all recognise abuse of this precious and ordinarily fairly accepted aspect of human behaviour, which relies on personal integrity and a degree of trust. The new modus operandi is “what can I get away with?”.  In hospitals I would identify the increasing trend to not come and see a patient when you’re asked to, at the bedside. You probably will get away with it, but it’s a drop in standards, and every now and then, someone will suffer unnecessarily. It’s a genuinely bad development, because attitudes have changed, and nobody is able – in the NHS – to enforce things, it seems. It’s almost an argument for payment according to work done, as in the US and Canada, where you bill for a ‘bedside consult’. Money talks, even if your conscience is staying quiet.

The domain of manners. Look around you.