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THE POLITICAL SAMARITAN
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THE POLITICAL SAMARITAN How power hijacked a parable
NICK SPENCER
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Nick Spencer, 2017 Nick Spencer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN:
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‘I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old.’ PSALM 78.2 (KJV)
‘It’s interesting that nowadays politicians want to talk about moral issues and bishops want to talk politics.’ SIR HUMPHREY APPLEBY, ‘THE BISHOP’S GAMBIT’ (YES, PRIME MINISTER)
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Contents
The parable of the Good Samaritan
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1 ‘He welcomed them and spoke to them’ 1 Talking God 1 Talking politics 6 The words we live by 15 A divine register 23 2 ‘They did not understand what this meant’ 31 Introducing the political Samaritan 31 The parliamentary Samaritan 45 The Thatcherite Samaritan 54 The Labour Samaritan 64 The contemporary Samaritan 76 Conclusion 81 3 ‘How do you read it?’ 83 Arriving at the parable 83 Enter the lawyer 86 The parable 93 A priest and a Levite were walking along a road . . . 101 Samaritans 109 The ‘Good’ Samaritan 115 vii
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So, you can see, the parable obviously means . . . Church interpretations Conclusion 4 ‘Go and do likewise’ Who’s right? Christianity in the UK Reasonable political language Politics Political rhetoric Postscript: Picking up a half-dead metaphor Acknowledgements Notes
121 126 138 139 139 146 150 155 160 164 167 169
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The Parable of the Good Samaritan
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On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ 26 ‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’ 27 He answered, ‘ “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ 28 ‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’ 29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ 30 In reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his ix
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wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.” 36 Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ 37 The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Luke 10.25–37
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ONE
‘He welcomed them and spoke to them’
TALKING GOD The British should make up their minds: do we or don’t we? Some points, at least, are clear. Britain is not America, a country in which any aspiring politician must, in theory, genuflect before Bible and altar, no matter how dissolute or godless a life they may have lived. The reality is slightly different. Bernie Sanders, for example, made it to within a whisper of the presidential campaign in 2016 despite not attending church or synagogue, rarely speaking about religion, and describing himself as ‘not particularly religious’.1 Contemporary America is not the cultural theocracy its critics imagine. Bernie Sanders notwithstanding, however, it is clear that, as a rule, Americans do. Nor, by contrast, is Britain France, with its fiercely policed laïcité, in which public expressions of
1
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religiosity are deemed not only inappropriate but somehow threatening to the values of the Republic. Again, this is in theory. Nicolas Sarkozy made Catholic noises during his presidency, and François Fillon looked to be heading to the Élysée Palace, partly on the strength of his own Catholicism and the traditional Catholic vote, before his campaign imploded.2 Nevertheless, however much God may lurk in the shadowy corners of French politics, it is clear that, by and large, the French don’t. The British, by contrast, drift somewhere between the two in the north Atlantic, quietly, culturally and constitutionally Christian and yet sensibly, shrewdly and soberly secular. For a generation now, Alastair Campbell’s best-known aphorism – ‘We don’t do God’ – has served as shorthand for Britain’s theo-political mentality: Tony Blair, British politicians en masse, indeed even the entire British public don’t, in principle, like to mix religion and politics. The reality is, once again, somewhat murkier. In the first instance, Campbell himself has often remarked that ‘We don’t do God’ is not only one of his ‘most reused’ soundbites but also one of his most ‘misunderstood’. He never intended the phrase to be a statement of principle, a pronouncement of secular orthodoxy made ex cathedra; rather, it was only ‘to stop a long interview with Tony Blair’.3 ‘We’re not getting on to God right now’ might be an accurate translation. 2
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In the second instance, the evidence suggests that British political leaders do ‘do God’ and have, if anything, become more religious over the post-war period.4 Prime ministers offer a litmus test. Clement Attlee claimed he was ‘incapable of religious experience’ and memorably remarked that he ‘believed in the ethics of Christianity [but] can’t believe in the mumbo-jumbo’.5 Churchill passed through ‘a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase’6 in his youth but regained a faith in Providence, if not in God or eternal life.7 Anthony Eden was much closer to his father’s atheism than his mother’s Anglicanism. Thereafter, however, there was Harold Macmillan, a lifelong and devout Anglo-Catholic, ‘who took the New Testament with him to the trenches’.8 And Alec DouglasHome, a Scottish Episcopalian, whose faith was sincere if private. And Harold Wilson, who was brought up a nonconformist, joined the evangelical Oxford Group at university, and claimed that his ‘religious beliefs . . . very much affected my political views’, a claim, like many of Wilson’s, that was distrusted by his colleagues.9 And Edward Heath, who was briefly news editor of the Church Times,10 cited the influence of Archbishop William Temple, and wrote in his autobiography that ‘my Christian faith provided foundations for my political beliefs’.11 And James Callaghan, who served as a Sunday school teacher, but drifted from his faith in later life only to reflect in his autobiography that he was never 3
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able to shake off a sense of guilt at having wandered from Christianity.12 Since Callaghan, British PMs have, if anything, become more religious still. Thatcher’s fierce lateVictorian Methodism was foundational to her politics. Major’s faith was rather more tepid and hesitant. Blair was an adult convert, his communitarian thinking of the 1990s grounded in the personalism of Christian philosopher John Macmurray, filtered through the Rev Peter Thompson at Oxford. Gordon Brown was a son of the manse, albeit one more comfortable talking about his father’s religion than his own, more cultural, Presbyterianism. David Cameron’s Anglicanism was similarly cultural and undogmatic, famously coming and going like Magic FM in the Chilterns. And Theresa May is a clergyman’s daughter, a practising Anglican and someone who claims Christianity as foundational to her political worldview. All in all, this is not a list of politicians unaware of or indifferent to God, or keen to exclude him from their political considerations. In this regard, British politics – or, at least, those who reach its summit – clearly do ‘do God’. And yet, the popular understanding of Alastair Campbell’s maxim is also right. However pious they may be, British political leaders do seem to have difficulty talking about God. Unlike the people who God berates through the prophet Isaiah, British politicians 4
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fail to honour me with their lips, even if their hearts are close to me. This is not uniformly the case: Thatcher delivered several theo-political lectures; Cameron said a surprising amount about his and his country’s Christianity; Brown was unashamed about the formative role faith played in his politics, and May adopts the same approach. Nevertheless, apart from such occasional rhetoric and personal asides, Tony Blair’s post-office remark that ‘it’s difficult [to] talk about religious faith in our political system . . . [because if you do] frankly, people do think you’re a nutter’ is pretty much on the mark. Talking God, Bible or religion sets people thinking that you are somehow subverting the proper processes of liberal democracy; in Blair’s words: that you like to ‘go off and sit in the corner . . . commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say “right, I’ve been told the answer”’.13 Worse still, it can sounds like ‘preaching’, in the more colloquial sense of that word, ‘imposing’ your ‘private’ views on the public, or ‘disrespecting’ other members of the electorate who don’t share your faith. How far people really do think this is questionable. There are good reasons to believe that the British public is less nervous about ‘doing God’ than we imagine, not least as a majority of them still choose some form of Christian affiliation when asked. There are equally good reasons to think that the blockage in fact lies with a 5
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media-class that is woefully unrepresentative of the religious make-up and identity of the nation.14 Be that as it may, the British position seems to be that however much politicians might do God in their hearts and minds, they shouldn’t talk about him in public. For all that, however, ‘God-talk’ and ‘Bible-bashing’, or at least Bible-tapping, remains. This book is about one particular Bible story that remains completely immune to the unwritten guidelines about doing God in public. It is a parable that, in spite of its extremely demanding ethical message – one might even say its preachy tone – remains astonishingly popular; a parable that, despite its rather disputed meaning, is seized – one might even say hijacked – by politicians across the spectrum for a bewildering range of purposes; and a parable that retains its power to inspire, in spite, or perhaps because, of the state of our public discourse today. TALKING POLITICS That state is not a happy one. Writing in the Telegraph in 2008, Andrew Roberts lamented the absence of electrifying parliamentarians.15 ‘Why is reading Hansard akin to ingesting a company’s report and accounts, when in earlier periods of our history it read like life-enhancing literature?’ he asked. His impression, if rhetorically a bit rich, is not an isolated one, nor one that is isolated to parliament. By many 6
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accounts, the accuracy, tone, depth, intent and style of wider political, and public, language is worse still, even before we get to the nadir of ‘post-truth’ politics. Mark Thompson, former Director General of the BBC and currently Chief Executive of the New York Times, wrote a whole book in 2016, sub-titled What’s Gone Wrong With the Language of Politics. The book bears the hallmarks of its year of publication. Political language – not just the language of politicians but language about our shared social and political goods – Thompson argues, is scarred by rage, incomprehension, exaggeration and aggression, an arms race of lurid claims and counter-claims, a powerful rhetoric of anti-rhetoric, a much-thinned-out common vocabulary, a much-ignored set of rules for communication, and an endemic lack of trust in one another, indeed a presupposition of untruth. Even if one demurs from Thompson’s slightly apocalyptic register, his picture of the public language-scape is a recognisable one. Political speeches weren’t necessarily better in the past, but political speech is surely more difficult today. There are lots of possible reasons for this, but Thompson (among others) highlights the particular impact of public distrust and fragmentation. True communication is ultimately dependent on trust, and trust is predicated on the sense that the other is for me or with me, rather than indifferent to or against me. Good communication needs the faith of the audience. For 7
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reasons that go to the heart of national, indeed Western, unease today, trust has been at something of a premium for decades, and trust in institutions or in those in positions of power even lower. In a self-consciously liberal society, where the only proper authority resides with the sovereign, individual agency, any exercise of power over said individual is questionable, and all structures designed to legitimise that exercise of power, thereby rendering it as authoritative rather than simply powerful, are highly questionable. If public speech merits suspicion, political speech deserves cynicism. The Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren’s famous advice to journalists interviewing politicians – ‘Ask yourself “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”’ – was, in fact, specific to those journalists talking to politicians who were deliberately speaking to them off the record. But the fact that this detail is not widely known, and not missed, is indicative. ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ describes well the omni-scepticism that pervades our public speech today. This is not necessarily a disaster. No one (sane) hankers after the obsequiousness of, say, the BBC’s Leslie Mitchell’s 1951 grilling of Anthony Eden, which began, ‘I would just like to say that, as an interviewer, and as what I hope you will believe to be an unbiased member of the electorate, I’m most grateful to [my interviewee] for inviting me to cross-question him on the 8
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present political issues.’16 That recognised, a return to such toadying seems as unlikely as that of the presses to Fleet Street. Rather more probable is the continued decay of the healthy scepticism to which we all claim to aspire, towards a carcinogenic cynicism that spreads throughout the body politic. We need civility rather than servility. Identifying who is to blame for this omni-scepticism has become something of a middle-class dinner party game, a not-so-trivial pursuit served up with the coffee and petit fours. The answer, of course, is journalists. Omnipresent, omnivorous, intense, competitive, ‘urgent to the point of brutality’ in Thompson’s words,17 a ‘feral beast’ in Tony Blair’s, journalistic coverage of politics is restless and relentless, motivated by the desire ‘to expose and to embarrass’,18 driven by a ceaseless demand for attention and ratings, spiced with the need to entertain as well or instead of informing or educating the public, ‘spleen without purpose . . . a snuff movie for politicians . . . [intended] to leave a miasma of bad faith hanging about politics – never wholly said, and thus never in the realm where it must be convincingly denied’.19 In such an atmosphere, survival is an achievement, rhetorical flights or inspiring oratory a dream. And the answer, of course, is also the so-called ‘commentariat’, unknown in the 1950s but ubiquitous today, explaining to the rest of us how epically wrong or stupid or corrupt or spineless our politicians 9
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are, and how it is palpably obvious what they should have said or done, which is what follows in this column that I am writing. And the answer is also social media, once welcomed by childlike technophiles as heralding precisely the kind of decentralisation, democratisation and diffusion of information that would allow ideas to clash openly, and disinterested truth and beauty to flourish, but now responsible for fragmented audiences, accelerating digits to faster than the speed of thought, amplifying voices to a cacophony in the echo chamber of public opinion so that we hear and heed no one we dislike, and providing an infinite habitat of dark nooks in which trolls can lurk and strike to their black hearts’ content. And the answer is also our politicians themselves and their host of malevolent spin-doctors, publicists and public relations gurus, with their hyper-tight media management, leaking and briefing, blowing their dog whistles, and slavishly following a message, endlessly repeated until it is as meaningless as it is unforgettable, all the time keeping leads chokingly short, smothering individual creativity and passion, and exiling to the back benches or beyond those who dare to deviate. And the answer is also the public itself, self-righteous and bone idle, warped by consumerism into the conviction that they needn’t pay, with money, time or effort, for truth or facts, heeding only those views that confirm 10
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their own, and lending to public affairs their perilously short attention spans that flit like ash in a high wind. Is it any wonder editors dumb down difficult ideas beyond the point of recognition, piling simplification on to sensationalism? Hyperbole aside, the reasons for our culture of omniscepticism are as wide-ranging as they are deep; where you locate cause and effect says as much about you as it does about cause and effect. It doesn’t really matter. Wherever you start, the cumulative effect is cynical, combative, toxic; the ability of a politician to generate a shared ethos with her audience is eviscerated, and the trust necessary for stirring speech drastically reduced.20 Hand in hand with distrust, indeed one of the reasons for it, is fragmentation. Effective speech rests on understanding; the idea that you and I speak the same language, share the same lexicon, a similar framework and comparable ideas. Sharing does not necessarily mean agreeing, though it is much easier when it does (hence the comparative ease of whipping up the passion of a crowd of your supporters); but it does at least mean mutually recognising. My communication to you is going to be more effective, the more we share the same milieu. ‘You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his’, wrote Kenneth Burke in A Rhetoric of Motives.21 11
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The contemporary parliamentarian cannot assume commonality. Large-scale plural, liberal democracies tilt the balance of power away from the politician towards the public and those who mediate, and then analyse and evaluate, political communication. Shared frameworks still exist – indeed, it is hard to envisage a successful democracy or peaceful nation without any kind of shared framework – but they are weaker today than even in the recent past. In Mark Thompson’s words: what is missing, what is almost impossible to bring back to life knowing what we now know, is the felt context of the moment. In particular, it is the sense of a shared musical key, a dynamic harmony between speaker and crowd which explains how these remote figures were able to reduce thousands to tears or rage, or to instil calm and confidence in place of fear.22
Politicians today are less sure that their audience will get references and allusions. Indeed, with some of the audience in the room, some watching the news, some reading of them in the paper, some scanning social media, and many more hearing by word of mouth, politicians aren’t clear who is their audience at all. These problems of distrust and fragmentation breed several kinds of response. One is the communications grid, a long-established marketing technique latterly adopted 12
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by politicians. This involves the rigorous segmentation of audiences by strategists, first along demographic or economic lines, then socio-cultural one (Worcester women, soccer mums), and now at an even more granular level. In Mark Thompson’s words: ‘from now on, there would be a comms strategy and a grid – a chart plotting everyone’s speaking calendars so that they could be compared and co-ordinated. Every political message, whether offensive or defensive, would be conceived and refined to further the government’s overall strategy.’23 The circumference of public speech became increasingly narrow as the speakers sought to address and persuade an ever-tighter segment of the public. A second is recourse to demotic, focus-group speech, the use of those words and phrases that are as familiar as they are safe. Endless testing of political language in focus groups, latterly aided by instant polling, allowed communicators to reflect back to voters (or at least a particular segment of them) their particular concerns, their worldview, their interests. The most satisfactory, the most legitimate form of political discourse was that which replicated and affirmed the words, phrases and ideas of the public (or, again, a small segmentation thereof) and not the kind of rhetoric that is self-consciously ‘other’ – different, defiant, surprising. Such an approach could certainly turn a fine phrase – ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was the most inspired of New 13
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Labour’s many – but it was rhetoric as a mirror rather than as a window. A third approach, particularly noticeable of late, and in defiance of the communications grid and the focus group, is the rhetoric of ‘populism’. In one regard, this is not so far away from the focus-group approach, being itself a self-conscious utilisation of popular messages and patterns of speech. In Mark Thompson’s words: ‘across the West, politicians began to abandon the formality and restraint of traditional political rhetoric and to experiment with styles which were much closer to everyday language, more direct, often more pungent, but less capable of sophisticated expression’.24 Where populism is different is precisely in its pugnacity and simplicity. Populist rhetoric abrasively eschews the anaemic strategised language of the communications grid or the focus group, in favour of alleged take-it-orleave- it, tell- it- like- it- is, if- you- don’t- like- it- lump- it honesty. It rejects discourses of moderation and nuance and draws on emotive terms to shake the establishment, with its polished phrases, processes and people, to the ground. In effect, it deploys the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric to smack authority in the gob. So it is then that, for all that there are still fine political speeches and speechmakers today, political communication is a perilous affair. Just as Václav Havel, 14
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in one of the greatest political speeches of the twentieth century, spoke of the ‘contaminated moral atmosphere’ that he and his fellow Czech citizens inhabited, so the rhetorical milieu in which the parable of the Good Samaritan is deployed feels like a contaminated moral atmosphere – importunate, insistent, distrustful, aggressively sceptical, divided and divisive, myopic, self-righteously partisan. We become trapped between the communications grid, the focus group and populist anger, political speech being acceptable if it is a mirror but suspect if it tries to be a window on a different world, on something new, particularly if its elevation is too high. THE WORDS WE LIVE BY To understand better why this matters, and why it makes the political deployment of the Good Samaritan so remarkable, we need to think a little about language itself and how it works.25 One simple, indeed simplistic, view of language is that it describes things. This is common sense. You tell me the name of something. When I see it again, I use that name. We see children acquire language and that appears to be what’s going on. Words stick to things, feelings and thoughts that are already there. St Augustine appeared to think so and said as much when describing his own childhood in his autobiographical Confessions. Having grown up, 15
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he remarked, he had since observed how he learned to speak: When [my elders] named some object and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out . . .Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified.26
The towering, eccentric twentieth-century philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, began his great posthumous work, Philosophical Investigations, by quoting Augustine, before observing that: These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the words in language name objects – sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.27
Despite Augustine being one of the few philosophers he read and admired, this was precisely the view against which Wittgenstein dedicated the last 20 years of his life, the idea of ‘logical atomism’, that the world is comprised 16
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of indivisible logical facts or particles that could themselves be made apparent in linguistic atoms. The job of language was to describe what was already there; words standing for pre-existing objects and meanings, such as Wittgenstein detected in Augustine’s reflection.28 Although this understanding of language reached its apotheosis in the early twentieth century, it had a long prehistory, stretching back into the seventeenth, when it was first deployed as a weapon against the posturing of theologians and philosophers whose elaborate pronouncements were as incomprehensible as they were meaningless, at least according to Thomas Hobbes.29 Others, some less antagonistic to religion and philosophy,30 some more,31 voiced a similar view, which, by the early twentieth century, appeared to be sweeping all before it. Contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor calls this idea an ‘enframing theory’ of language, by which he means (slightly confusingly) that language is seen as emerging from within ‘the framework of a picture of a human life, behaviour, purposes or mental functioning’.32 In other words, the life creates the language that then operates within those given parameters. We live and what we say then reflects how we live. There is, however, a rather different view of language, favoured by Wittgenstein,33 which Taylor (more helpfully) calls a ‘constitutive’ view. This recognises that speech is, of course, expressive of what exists, whether 17
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that is material objects or human thoughts, but it also contends that language ‘isn’t simply an outer clothing for what could [otherwise] exist independently’.34 In place of Augustine’s vision of language being appropriated from within an already complete system of understanding, in which the child is inducted by elders into a system of meanings that pre-exist, this understanding of language sees it as coming into existence through exchange and mutuality. Language is acquired through developing affinity, through person-to-person interaction.35 In effect, communion precedes speech. Accordingly, in place of the logical and linguistic atomism of the ‘enframing theory’, this concept insists that words cannot be understood on their own merit but only in their position within a sentence, or a lexicon, or an entire ‘form of life’. ‘Language can’t be built up one word at a time . . . because each word supposes a whole of language to give it its full force as a word . . . A word only has meaning within a lexicon and a context of language practices, which are ultimately embedded in a form of life.’36 This more ‘situated’ understanding of language sees the words we use as part of our being human, not just some kind of appendix to our pre-existing humanity and meaning. It is not simply ‘explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language’.37 On the contrary, language somehow makes us. It ‘makes possible new purposes, new levels of behaviour, new 18
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meanings . . . [it] enables us to relate to things in new ways . . . [it] transforms our world . . . introduces new meanings in our world’.38 This is evident in a range of different ways. At a fundamental level, it has been recognised for over half a century now, since J. L. Austin delivered his lectures that were subsequently published as the book How to Do Things with Words, arguing that language – if delivered in the right way, by the right person, on the right occasion – can transform the material content of a situation. So-called ‘performative’ language is not a tool to describe reality but a tool to change it. Nine times out of ten, when someone says ‘I am sorry’, they are not simply making a statement of fact, a proposition about the content of their mind, but are rather attempting to bring about reconciliation. ‘I’m sorry’ is not primarily a description, but rather a ‘performance’, a way of reforming reality. Life is full of such ‘performative utterances’, their power often dependent on pre-existing structures of authority – the policeman who says ‘You are under arrest’, the boss who says ‘You’re fired’, the court clerk who says ‘the court is in session’ – or on the nature of the ceremony in which the words are uttered, such as the wife who says ‘I will’ in the marriage ceremony. Either way, such examples constitute the most basic way in which language can shape reality. 19
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The power of language to make possible new purposes and transform our world is not limited to performative utterances of this nature, however. At an intimate and personal level, we see this power in what is meant by ‘talking things through’. Putting into words the details and nuances of a situation need not change the situation itself, but it can often transform our understanding of it, ordering, re-evaluating, systematising the details in such a way as to enable us to cope with them or respond more fruitfully. ‘Our feelings and emotions . . . are sometimes transformed when we find a more penetrating or insightful language to describe them.’39 Nor is this power necessarily solipsistic. Samuel Johnson once remarked of Alexander Pope that his work exhibited ‘the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.’40 Such is the aesthetic potential of language, bringing newness into our conceptualisation of the world, whether that is the human world or, as Robert Macfarlane remarks in his book Landmarks, the natural one: Language is fundamental to the possibility of rewonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it. The contours and colour of words are inseparable from the feelings we create in relation to situations, to others and to places. Language carries a formative as well as an informative impulse.41
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In the political realm, all these transformative capacities of language are apparent. The performative element is fundamental to what politics is. When Neville Chamberlain took to the airwaves at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, he began with a resolutely descriptive statement: ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’ However, he slipped, seemingly remaining in the same register, into a performative one. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ The phrase ‘we are at war’, if spoken by the right person, actually brings about a state of war. In a similar, if happier, vein, the US Constitution ‘can be seen as a long performative [utterance] in which a collective subject, identified in the beginning as “We, the people of the United States”, declares the Constitution in effect’.42 This is the point at which we can return to the potential of political speech, for it is precisely the object and challenge of good political oratory to enable the people to whom it is addressed to see the world in a different way, and thereby to respond differently. Words can make, or at least remake, worlds. The traffic here need not necessarily all be one way, from politician to public. Writing of the 21
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fall of communism, Timothy Garton Ash once observed that ‘there is a real sense in which these regimes lived by the word and perished by the word’: For what, after all, happened? A few thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands went on to the streets. They spoke a few words, ‘Resign,’ they said. ‘No more shall we be slaves!’ ‘Free elections.’ ‘Freedom!’ And the walls of Jericho fell. And with the walls, the communist parties simply crumbled.43
The fall of communism was exceptional, however. More often and more familiarly, the direction of travel is from ruler to ruled, with good political oratory helping to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit, by refreshing our vision, re-grounding our sense of value, restoring our moral compass, reestablishing our commitment and reviving our energies. To do that, however, requires a degree of trust from the audience, or at very least a suspension of instinctive distrust. Political speech of that nature is promissory, not reflecting back to an audience what it already knows, but mapping out what it doesn’t, and then inviting them to believe in it. An omni-sceptical atmosphere strangles such political faith at birth. Moreover, such speech also requires – or, at least, is greatly aided by – authoritative alternative visions of reality. Convincing an audience that 22
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there are different, better ways of seeing and of being is not easy. ‘The way things are’ has a powerful gravity; indeed, it often seems as if ‘the way things are’ is actually also ‘the way things must be’. To move from one to another, to change the public lens and enable auditors to overcome their sense of reality in favour of something new, often requires a vision with its own powerful gravity and authority. A DIVINE REGISTER Authorities, and authoritative texts, come in many different shapes and hues. Many are founding, or quasifounding documents. An appeal to Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, or the UN Declaration of Human Rights carries with it powerful rhetorical authority that is almost independent of any ongoing legal authority of these documents. To call upon one of these texts in political speech is to offer the audience a kind of socio-political creation myth, a vision of how things were intended to be, and rally listeners back to the original vision of the public good they represent. Texts of authority needn’t be historical. In its own way, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto was such a text, not because of its historical import but because its vision was grounded in what was understood to be an authoritative description of the way the world is. The Manifesto set out the true nature of class and capital with icy logic and 23
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explained the historical inevitability of revolution. Its power lay not only in its intense phrasing, but also in the confidence with which it described the true nature of things, to which our impoverished reality was slowly but inexorably gravitating. Liberals have less recourse, and less inclination, towards such texts, for obvious reasons, although there are moments in which Locke, Voltaire and John Stuart Mill have been deployed to similar effect, their vision of the liberated human individual lacking Marx’s eschatological authority but nonetheless laying claim to a definitive understanding of the true human good. Without a doubt, however, the text that in Western political rhetoric has been deployed most widely for its authority is not primarily constitutional, historical or political, but religious. The reasons for this are pretty obvious. Up until quite recently most Westerners believed the Bible to be authoritative. Many of them read it, certainly many more than ever read Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence. It is compelling: as the novelist Sebastian Faulks once remarked, ‘of the 100 greatest stories ever told, 99 are probably in the Old Testament and the other is in Homer’. It is, and remains, rhetorically powerful; no matter what you think of them, Moses, Joshua, David, Jesus and St Paul knew how to win a crowd. And, perhaps most obviously, you don’t get much more of an authority figure than God. If you wanted to persuade an attentive 24
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public that a new way was possible, the Bible was an invaluable tool. And so it came to pass. The US Founding Fathers had constant recourse to it, even if some of them were distinctly agnostic about its authority.44 Sometimes their use was ‘merely’ rhetorical, drawing on allusions, expressions, figures of speech, proverbs and aphorisms to colour and enrich a speech. More often, however, there was weight to their usage. Whether ‘arousing a righteous passion, solemnifying a discourse, projecting an aura of transcendence and truth, emphasising the gravity of an idea or argument, and/or underscoring an argument’s moral implications or sacred connotations’, or indeed whether summoning ‘normative standards and transcendent rules to order and judge public life’, or invoking Providence, destiny and ‘illuminat[ing] God’s historic and unfolding involvement in the affairs of men and nations’, the Founding Fathers turned to the Bible. And not just the Founding Fathers: whether it is FDR’s unscrupulous money changers, his belief that our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, his dedication of his nation ‘to the policy of the good neighbour’, or his conviction that ‘when there is no vision the people perish’; or J. F. Kennedy’s ‘belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God’, or his invocation to ‘let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth 25
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the command of Isaiah – to undo the heavy burdens . . . [and] let the oppressed go free’; or more recently Barack Obama’s frequent returning to the question of whether we are ‘my brother’s keeper’, his invocation of the Exodus narrative or his naming of ‘the Joshua generation’45; or whether it is Churchill’s advice to ‘arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour’, his invocation of the United Kingdom as a ‘City of Refuge’, his threat that the Coventry bombers ‘shall reap the whirlwind’, or his fear of the coming ‘dark and deadly valley’; or Margaret Thatcher’s widow’s mite, her Pauline advice that ‘if a man will not work he shall not eat’, and her emphasis on the ‘love of money’; or Gordon Brown’s invocation of the prophets Isaiah and Amos when talking about debt relief, poverty reduction and economic development; or even Colonel Tim Collins’ widely reported words on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, with its talk of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham, and the mark of Cain46 – the Bible has been a rhetorical mainstay of public and political discourse even in the secularising climates of the twentieth century. Of course, some of its use has been ‘merely’ rhetorical in the sense of adding colour and freshness to familiar ideas. But more often it is there to add depth, weight and gravity to the speech in such a way – to change the metaphorical key – as will illuminate and inspire commitment to a new vision of the way things can be. At its most 26
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sustained and sophisticated, this is impressive indeed. Not surprisingly, Martin Luther King Jr drew heavily on biblical motifs, quoting liberally from Hebrew prophets like Amos and Isaiah, in his quest for ‘justice and righteousness’, to ‘level mountains’ and ‘make crooked places straight’. His best-known motif, however, was the Exodus, a narrative of emancipation and liberation to which he repeatedly returned. By framing and re-narrating the Civil Rights movement through the Exodus story, King was able to educe unity, co-operation, confidence, discipline, peacefulness, perseverance and hope in a movement that was under severe pressure to abandon them all. There are no counterfactuals here but it seems as if King’s biblically saturated rhetoric did precisely the kind of thing that Wittgenstein, Taylor, Austin and others were speaking of: doing things with words, or, more biblically, making things new through the Word. ‘By symbolically framing their experiences within a deeply held religious myth – one that had been traditionally used to create expectations for social change – he could offer a theological justification for engaging in collective action.’47 It needn’t always be such a positive venture, of course. There be dragons in those rhetorical seas and little to prevent unscrupulous leaders from indulging a kind of God-whistle politics. Take President Trump’s inaugural address in January 2017. Whatever else he is, Donald Trump is not reputed for his deep piety, 27
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doctrinal orthodoxy or fondness for scripture. So it is that when he informed his audience that ‘the Bible tells us, “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity”’, after a campaign that had been somewhat short on pleasantness and unity, one can be excused for thinking that the reference was inserted primarily for those with ears to hear, reassuring and stroking his (should-be) core base that he was one of them. For such reasons, and with somewhat greater sophistication, liberal political philosophers have articulated a powerful and influential understanding of public reasoning that contends that narrowly religious arguments and texts (of Trump’s variety, but perhaps also of King’s) have no place in a democracy that purports to respect and honour the true equality of its citizens. To introduce such biblically tinged reasoning is to risk alienating and subtly disenfranchising citizens who do not share its foundations or logic. This argument comes in many forms. For some, the real issue is not public speech so much as justification used by elected representatives in political debate. Others, like the most famous advocate of this position, John Rawls, who somewhat softened his stance in his later years, came to argue that ‘comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious’ – Rawlsian for talking God in politics – were admissible with the proviso that ‘in due course’ those 28
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who introduced them also gave ‘properly public reasons to support the principles and policies [that] comprehensive doctrine is said to support’.48 In other words, you could do your God-talk but only on the basis that it was chaperoned by more familiar, and more secular, public reasons. Putting aside whether such familiar, secular talk is, in fact, publicly ‘reasonable’ (in the sense of appealing to political principles that are available to all reasonable citizens), such a proviso risks limiting precisely the kind of horizon-expanding impact that biblical rhetoric – indeed, that appeals to any ‘authoritative’ text – offers public discourse. It draws the teeth of political talk that might just have real bite to it. We shall return to this in our final chapter. However generous or not such provisos are, and however much the pendulum might have swung away from the more exclusivist positions in the realm of liberal political philosophy,49 the view that we are best to keep God-talk out of our politics, in the UK at least, seems to have taken hold. Whether it be for fear of legitimising Trump-like God-whistle politics, or for sophisticated reasons about the proper nature of public discourse, or simply because so few people know or read the Bible today, or because media reports of political God-talk simplify and exaggerate the content out of all recognition, the ground is tilted away from one of those authoritative texts (not, it should be emphasised 29
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the only one) that might lend particular gravity, or particular vision, to political discourse. Politicians still do reference it, of course; but, at least since Margaret Thatcher, they do so somewhat tentatively. Tony Blair battened down the hatches firmly, David Cameron usually restricted his pronouncements to religious outings, Theresa May is circumspect on all matters of faith apart from growing up in a vicarage, and Gordon Brown wondered pointedly after leaving office why, in spite of the massive involvement of faith groups ‘in great moral movement for political change’, is ‘liberal secularism’ the ‘conventional orthodoxy “of the ‘public square”’, whereby ‘religious belief is, at best, [kept] at arms-length’.50 Whatever the answer to Brown’s question might be, the kind of biblical rhetoric so common in the past, and so often deployed to reframe, deepen and inspire a political situation, is neither particularly common nor particularly welcome today. With one exception.
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An extract from
The Political Samaritan by NICK SPENCER
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