Freethinking logic The Times of 12 November 1977 carried an interview with the op artist Peter Sedgley in which he stated that he was “formerly a member of the wholly unmilitant Socialist Party of Great Britain”. We asked him if he would like to contribute something to this issue on why he joined the SPGB and his attitude to it now.
I
was born in 1930 in Peckham, South London, son of Frank Sedgley and Violet, maiden name Dickey. Frank served in France in World War One and on demobilisation became trained as an electrical engineer in Southern Railway. I grew up with three elder brothers. My early years were very unremarkable leading up to the Second World War but quite a happy childhood living in stable working-class circumstances. The only political knowledge I had at that time was limited to the fact that my father paid his union subscriptions regularly every week to a man who came to collect them. My class-consciousness was slowly developed in the war observing how accessibility to food, goods and comforts varied with different sections of the community, privileges that seemed to be arbitrarily granted. The war increased this distinction where money and the black market flourished and benefited a privileged few in the community. Bombs were generally targeted on manufacturing and industrial plants where the density of the working population was much higher than in the rural areas. I had a Christian upbringing in the broadest sense and learned the basic ethics of Christianity at home and in school. Our family were not regular churchgoers, which seemed to be the preoccupation of the slightly better off people. I did however join the Boy Scouts, which was associated with the local Church. My mother spoke more about the ethics of living and, during the war, since she had three sons in the military, took comfort in associating with a spiritualists group who claimed to converse with the “other world” as they put it. Religion, philosophy, sex and politics are usually subjects that are raised in young people’s minds with a basic curiosity of what life is about and how one should orientate oneself to the conditions in which we live. So it was in my case. It wasn’t until after completing my military service in Egypt that I began thinking that there must be a logical relationship between philosophy and religion and politics, a sort of scientific view that would satisfy our quest for knowledge. For example where we came from and what progress can we expect to experience as we continue to follow our fate as humans. In 1954, I was working as an architectural assistant in Theobalds Road and lunchtimes were spent wandering in the charismatic quarter of the Inns of
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London, Fleet Street, Leather Lane, etc. It was here in Lincolns Inn Fields that I had my first experience of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and it was from their platform that new ideas began to invigorate my thirst for knowledge. A revelation in freethinking and analytical logic. I became a regular visitor to the platform and whenever I had an opportunity to hear the message and the teaching I would be present. One political orator that stands out in my mind was Tony Turner whose wit and sharp repertory was an inspiration. I am by nature fairly shy but on one occasion I plucked up enough courage to ask Turner more about the Party and its constitution. He invited me to go along to Clapham High Street on one of the meeting nights and introduce myself. That I decided to do and so transpired my first meeting at Clapham High Street. I had learnt that the Party was generally agnostic or atheistic and knew sufficient about the subject to argue the point. I was interested to join the party and as a result was required to answer some informal questions in the manner of a test as a noviciate. There were usual questions of my role in society as a wage slave and to whether I saw the contradictions in the society between those who work for a living but own nothing and those who possess the means by which the former are obliged to work. There were no problems for me here. Then came the burning question of whether I believed in God. I had at one time believed in the existence of god, that is until I began to question the evidence for such a belief. Already the answer is in the belief. What does God mean? Until one has a definitive description of it there is no way to measure this concept against our experience or to know whether God is likely to exist. Without it I could not logically declare my acceptance of such a concept as objective reality. The question surely should be whether I believe in god as an equation similar to that of the square root of minus one. An operator intended to act as a catalyst. I counted myself as an agnostic, the ‘not-knower’, the unbeliever, a principle which in general most people hold in many aspects of life applying caution until a principle is tried and found to function correctly and dependably. This was seen as a denial of the apriori conditions of atheism (not an easy option with life after death). One cannot apply the same tests. One unforeseen ally to my cause came in the form of an ageing gentleman who seemed to be a member of the Committee on the podium, who, I discovered later, was one of the members of the early Party. ‘Blind Mac’, I think his real name was McLaughlin. He interjected against the assertions held against me. Discussions in the Party were septic with marvellous debate some with so-called fellow
Socialist Standard June 2004
