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Michaelmas 2019
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The Headmaster’s Address Speech delivered to the School on 28th October 2019 ome years ago I listened to a documentary on religious fundementalism. One of the interviewees was the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Sacks, who had just then published a compelling book entitled: The Dignity of Difference. His words have remained with me for many years – he said:
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“Fundamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world. And what really lies behind it is fear. Fear – a feeling that you have when you meet someone who’s not like you or who doesn’t agree with you, that that challenges your very being. This can lead to anger and aggression. Aggression is often a sign of insecurity.” Now this mindset isn’t the exclusive preserve of the religious outlook. Many is the time in these heady, octane-fuelled weeks of political dispute that we are witnessing in the United Kingdom and the United States – their worlds seems to be fractured – so much so that the Archbishop of Canterbury warned British politicians of their language. It is through the past months that Lord Sack’s words have hovered in my mind. He wasn’t by any means the first to warn about fractious division and reducing your opponents to two dimensional cardboard cutouts. St Paul in his letter to the Galatians, warned against this tendency to demonise and dehumanize. St Paul said in Chapter 5 of Galatians “If you bite and devour each other,” he said, “watch out, or you will be destroyed by each other.”
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December Any person who does not stop to ponder how the world must look from the vantage point of another lacks empathy. There is a saying in the English language that goes “a self-made man, yes, and one who certainly worships his creator.” It has been used many times by many people and towards many people. It can be suggested that somebody who lacks empathy is a “self made creature who worships his creator” – that is they worship themselves with little or any thought of those others in their world. At the moment – in a world divided across political, economic and, at times, religious ideas, we are in a dangerous mind set where people believe that they have the truth and the others have none. I am right and damn the rest of you. Occasionally I see – even here – attitudes that suggest that not only am I right but how dare you question my faith, my understanding, my view or my position. It can quickly become a world that is reduced to my vain and self-serving outlook. It is a world, as the poet W.B Yeats said in his famous poem The Second Coming, “The best can lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats is describing a world on the brink of demanding change – a revelation – he is describing a world where the good lack any sense of direction whilst the bad are angrily arguing their point and ignoring those around them. Let us work towards, here in our community, a better sense of purpose. Let us have tongues and voices that practise the discourse of love and respect; and that, when needed, choose the precious gift of silence that listens.
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