The ' ISSN 0014-1690 Ethical Record Vol 92 No. 5 MAY 1987 GUEST EDITORIAL we were a charity (June 11, 1980) "Awe", "Sacred"— Judge Dillon declared (see the What Definitions? statements of objectives on the back page) (page numbers refer to (This month we offered the editorial the pages of the judgement): column to the Honorary Treasurer, "Ethical principles mean . the Victor Rose. But it is not about belief in the excellence of truth, finance that he writes . .) love and beauty, but not belief in WE HAVE BECOME ACQUAINTED BI anything supernatural" (p.2G). the world of abstract art with "Religion . is concerned with "black on black" and "white on man's relation with god and ethics are concerned with man's relation white"—but it is a new departure with man" (p.7G). in literature to stretch the English "Dissemination . includes the language to prove that black is fruits of study, and I have no doubt white and white is black! This that part of the objects satisfies the seems to be what PETER CADOGAN criterion of charity as being the is doing in his letter (Ethical advancement of education" (p.I6G). Record, April '87, page 14). "It seems to me that the objects The Oxford dictionary defines are objects which the court could control" (p.1711). the word "awe" as "reverential "I propose therefore to declare that fear or wonder". Since Humanists the objects of the society are charit- do not believe in a "god", we can able . but not for the advance- dispense with "reverential fear", ment of religion" (p.18B). and define the word "awe" as the "The history has been set out in reaction of our minds when we detail in the evidence . and it look upon the creations of nature, shows the gradual change, particu- covering the face of the earth. larly in the early and middle part of the last century" (p.2II-1). "Sacred—consecrated"—made holy "Protestant dissenters, which was by religious association—is the referred to in the trust deed has opposite to the word "secular", effectively been totally dissolved and which means concern with the ceased to exist" (p.23). affairs of this world; not sacred, I felt it useful to remind readers not monastic. and members of these definitions. In the legal case to establish that VICTOR ROSE CONTENTS Page Coming to Conway Hall: Rosalind Bain, Benny Green, Eric McGraw, Peter Hunot, Barbara Smoker, Nicolas Walter....• 2 Futures — The Ethical Range: Nicholas Hyman ... 3 Swinburne — Poetry, Religion and Freedom: T. F. Evans• 5 Frank and Fenner: Reports of Meetings.... 9 Viewpoints: Barbara Smoker, Colin Mills, Adrian Williams 14 The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society. PUBLISHED BY THE SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY CONWAY HALL, RED LION SQUARE, LONDON WC1R 4RL SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Appointed Lecturers: H. J. Blackham, Fenner Brockway, Richard Clements, OBE, T. F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, • Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter Trustees: Harold Blackham, Christine Bondi, Louise Booker, John Brown, Anthony Chapman, Frank Hawkins, Peter Heales, George Hutchinson, Ray Lovecy, Ian MacKillop, Victor Rose, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe Honorary Representative: Sam Beer Chairman General Committee: Barbara Smoker Deputy Chairman: Norman Bacrac Honorary Registrar: Bill Horsley Honorary Treasurer: Victor Rose Temporary Acting Secretary: Peter Hunot Hall Manager: Geoffrey Austin Temporary Honorary Librarian: Edwina Palmer Editor, The Ethical Record: Peter Hunot COMING TO CONWAY HALL Sunday Morning LECTURES at 11.00 am in the Library May 10. BARBARA SMOKER.Bio-Ethics: From Fertilised Egg to the Terminally Comatose. May 17. NICOLAS WALTER.Guy Aldred—The Guy All Dread. June 7. ERIC MCGRAW.Multiplying Millions: (The video The Human Race will be shown). Sunday Forums at 3.00 pm in the Library May 10. ROSALIND BAIN.Nicaragua—Threat of a Good Example. Sunday Social at 3.00 pm in the Library May 17. PETER HUNOT showsSlides and Pictures of People and Places. Alfred Adler Remembered The Adlerian Society of Great Britain is holding a commemorative evening in honour of ALFRED ADLER, the founder of Individual Psychology, to mark the 50th anniversary of his sudden death, in Aberdeen, on May 28 1937, towards the end of an intensive lecture tour in Europe and UK. JAMES HEMMING, PhD, who is well-known to the Society, will speak on The Insights of Alfred Adler: his place in psychology 50 years on at 7.30 pm on Thursday, May 28 1987, at The Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2 (Liverpool Street Underground). Wine and cheese, and other light refreshments will be served. All will be welcome. (Admission: ASGB Members, OAP's, etc, £1: Non-members £2). Sixty third Admission Free CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE Benny Green on Writers Who Voiced My Scepticism 6.30 pm, Thursday May 21 in the Large Hall Leaflets available—we want to fill the hall Don't .miss the Annual General Meeting 2.30, Sunday May 31 in the Library All members* welcome—Share in the Society's Decisions *Paid-up—send your subscription NOW if it is due 2 Ethical Record, May 1987 Futures-an Ethical Range The Lecture delivered Sunday, March 8, 1987 to the South Place Ethical Society NICHOLAS HYMAN THOMAS CARLYLE, SAGE OF ECCLEFICHAN INTO CHELSEA, knew that prophets need a good memory. In appraising futures present on our resilient yet already envenomed planet, 1 cannot deny my own memory and evolving ideology. I would love to imagine that "my" ideology is a worldview univer- salisable and reaching for pure objectivity. In fact, it was stocked well after Sarajevo and Munich, each favourite more or less bogus analogies for politicos from the decade of the Suez war and Hola camp to that of Iran- gate and renewed mass unemployment in late capitalist societies. That nose for straws of hope, as well as for the narcissistic decay locked into such myths as "stability" and "maturity", may delight in mass reverence for a banally imagined and vampiric living museum of uniformed waxwork- still sentries hailing Ruritanian dukes' weddings. Mythic cushions keep a dreamworld from the difficult and occasionally rewarding realities recog- nsed in Stockholm, Canberra, Accra and Gorbachov's Moscow. The courts as well as the mass media celebrate Britain's very own victories, over a century after Waterloo station—triumphalism in the Gilberto- Wagnerian Falklands war (with nuclear knobs on), and the obverse side to the national family of the sacrificed outcast, personified by imprisoned trade unionist and "peace women" dissidents. Even in television advertisements for butter, Heine's "Frankenstein's island" cultivates fictitious traditions of healthy deference in unpolluted rural dreamtime. A realtime deindustrialising society is attracted to a technical fix, as the videoshops outnumber the book- shops and "defence" technology and its twin nuclear power compensate for the irrevocable loss of an industrial and socially responsible scientific base. Ethical Lag More Tangible Than Technical Backwardness The ethical lag is more tangible, for now, than the technical backward- ness. Cut the accents with a butterknife, count the family breakdowns and even suicides of the statistically unemployed. To illustrate a range of futures, remember what has happened and is occluded. There is rejected knowledge of lost futures: the memory of nuclear war, crowning a shared victory over racist fascism by governments and peoples of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, self-perceived as the United Nations. Revived and personally devaluing caste pretensions are sealed by the rein- troduction of hereditary peerages, the mooting of a poll-tax and obsessive secretiveness of the Zirconian sort. In the lost future of 1945, a radical consensus was steeled for collective short-term sacrifice for accountable ends. A climate of planning by consent for a measure of redistributive social justice as well as prosperity was indicated. Towards the xxist century, peace and prosperity is more than a new year tag. Given planetary and human loyalties, rather than parochially class- and gender-bound as well as vulgarly "Mafficking" nationalist badges of identity, there is a countervailing ethos. An attractive and accessible •world without fixed heirarchies, and with equal appreciation of Gaelic or Samoan litera- ture, takes for granted a sense of global solidarity. The "one self" shares liberating values tangibly expressed in some of our century's art and archi- tecture, music, philosophy and fiction (including science fiction). Less improbable than peace and prosperity as the next stage, perhaps, is a reworked fascism. As a subtext, political parties enter a coalition of per- Ethical Record, May 1987 3 manence. Instead .of the promise, of. full employment, which in the Macmillan epoch made Robert Morley's bloated property developer in Cliff Richards' The Young Ones a benevolent achiever, the oil prices fall and the rainbow eoalition of scapegoats is named without euphemism. A land fit for spivs and bouncers and' camp guards, unhealthy, miseducated to suspect such independent transnational institutions as trade unions and established churches, comes about through constitutional channels. A future Without further transitions is the nuclear winter. No living thing, not as the depiction of hell in medieval parish churches, but humanity's last technical word. The twilight of a class is generally confused with the end of all things. But this projection is accurate, unlike much cinema and specu- lative fiction centred on the nuclear fate, with its comforting ghost of a chance of survival. Nevil Shute's On The Beach had it right, though the scientists took a generation to catch up with the insights of novel and film. Games, Survival and the Apocalypse Television, in The War Game and Threads, spread understanding of a likely expectation, yet perpetuated the notion that a few can survive.