R. H.Tawney was an expert on Tudor-Stuart history and he saw parallels with the crises of the age of totalitarianism, the twentieth century (Fascism and Soviet Communism especially). He said:

“The alternative to religion is rarely irreligion; it is a counter-religion…. The apostasies waiting to succeed are legion; but the most popular claimants to the political throne have commonly been two. They are the worship of riches, and the worship of power”.

Western capitalism epitomised the first, totalitarianism the second. Democracy was under threat from both.

[The Western Political Tradition]

Tawney was a prominent figure in English socialism in the early twentieth century. His Christian Socialism, and critique of capitalism, rested on a view of each person’s equality in the eyes of God. What humans shared in common was vastly more important than differences between them (such as genetic, intellectual or artistic differences or abilities).

In Tawney’s words, it is “the truth that it is absurd and degrading for humans to make much of their intellectual and moral superiority to each other, and still more of their superiority in the arts which bring wealth and power, because, judged by their place in any universal scheme, they are all infinitely great or infinitely small”.

A recent loss in my life prompts me to quote this from Howard Jacobson:

“I know what I want from a funeral. I want desolation. Howl, howl. If it truly doesn’t matter whom we burn or bury next – for we are but a mote in Creation’s eye – then that is all the more terrible for the dead and all the more desolating for those of us still standing. The end of a life, if we believe a life has meaning, is a dreadful event. The end of a life, if we believe a life has no meaning, is a more dreadful event still. Twist it how you like, death is neither decorous nor rational nor humane….

At last, if we have been allowed to feel the enormity of a single lost life, there may follow a conviction of the grandeur of all lives. But nothing follows if we don’t first find word for the magnitude of our despair.

And for this you need the psalms and liturgies of the great religions”.

[Whatever It Is, I don’t Like It, Bloomsbury, 2011m pp.206-7].

I have been reading about the English historian and well known Labour thinker of the early 20th century R. H. Tawney (his most famous work was Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926). I like this comment on Tawney by Adam Seligman:

“The whole idea of society as composed of individuals who came to be conceived of as the profit-maximising individuals of current exchange theory was abhorrent to Tawney’s view of society and of the individual as well. For Tawney’s view of society was primarily as a moral community, united by…a shared vocabulary of worth and value”.

As Seligman points out, Tawney found the moral authority for ethical conduct in his Christian faith, “in its call…to obey God and not worldly power where the demands of conscience and … power collided”. This was based on  Christian belief in human equality before God. People were not equally clever or virtuous, but were “of equal value”.

[Adam B. Seligman, “R. H. Tawney and Scholarship”, Society, 35, 1998, p.64].

Over the years I have often imagined death in relation to the cosmos. There is a sort of science fiction feel, perhaps a TV documentary on space, the stars, galaxies (Brian Cox sort of thing).

I envisage an imaginary observer travelling through the great rush of stars, planets that is part of the dynamic expanding universe after the Big Bang, coming towards us here on earth, then heading off away from us towards the outer edges of space and into infinity (or whatever is beyond the knowable universe, or knowable so far – we keep learning more and more about it all the time).

I have a vision of our spirits, as we age then die, travelling out with that outgoing rush of stars, until we finally become mere dots on outer space, then fade completely away. It’s a vivid feeling, and perhaps not so strange when we think that our atoms, the atoms of everything, are indestructible ultimately, and are just rearranged in the endless mutations and transformations of the universe. Have any of you had similar feelings?

See new post under Writings for an extended analysis of John Middleton Murry’s views on British society and the church in the twentieth century. One quote from Murry:

When democracy “spews the coal out of its mouth” it becomes not only barbaric but “something new…a Christian society which has reverted, and bears the mark of its apostasy upon it”.