Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 116 No. 1 £1.50 January 2011

R.G. Collingwood J.M. Keynes Richard Hoggart Tony Judt ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? see page 3

Leo Tolstoy see page 11

ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? Fred Inglis 3 RUSSIA, TOLSTOY AND UNIVERSAL VALUES Robert Gomme 11 VIEWPOINTS: John Edmondson, Jasper Tomlinson 15 HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY Purchases and donations Cathy Broad 19 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 20 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 Fax: 020 7242 8036 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk GC Officers elected at the SPES GC meeting on 1 December 2010: Chairman: Jim Herrick Hon. Rep.: Derek Lennard Vice-chairman: Ed McArthur Registrar: Andrew Copson Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] SPES Staff Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7242 8037 [email protected] Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7242 8034 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7242 8032 [email protected] Lettings Assistant: Marie Aubrechtova Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7242 8033 together with: Angelo Edrozo, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerna, Cagatay Ulker Maintenance Operative: Zia Hameed Sub-committee appointments (elected by the GC on 1 December 2010): Education & Arts Finance Hall Music Norman Bacrac Chris Bratcher Norman Bacrac Simon Callaghan Andrew Copson Jim Herrick John Edwards Giles Enders (Chair) John Edwards Marina Ingham Jim Herrick Derek Lennard Jim Herrick Derek Lennard Marina Ingham Terry Mullins Ed McArthur Don Langdown Alys Wynne-Jones Out with the old CEO and in with the new! We shall all miss our very efficient and always cheerful Chief Executive Officer Emma Stanford, who left at the end of December. Dr Jim Walsh has been appointed as the new CEO. He is expected to take up his post by mid-February. New Member We welcome Christine Seymour of Brentwood in Essex WINTER SOCIAL 12 December 2010 At the Society's Winter Social, members and friends were greeted with the offer of a glass of mulled wine (curtesy of Marina Ingham, who also arranged all the refreshments). They then heard a beautifully played piano recital from music teacher Sylvia Lee. Sylvia charmed the audience with her rendering of Mozart, Lizst and Chopin. Their wits were then exercised by a general knowledge quiz conducted this year by Norman Bacrac, the prize for top marks being won by veteran quiz-master Terry Mullins.

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £20 (£15 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65).

2 Ethical Record, January 2011 ENGLISHNESS AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA: SHOULD MORAL PHILOSOPHERS LEAD GOOD LIVES? Fred Inglis Lecture to the Ethical Society, 10 October 2010 In 1938 the great English philosopher, R G Collingwood, by that date having suffered the first of the small strokes which would kill him in January 1943, wrote of the pupils at Oxford who had studied under T H Green that they ‘went out into public life [carrying] with them the conviction that philosophy, and in particular the philosophy they had learned at Oxford, was an important thing, and that their vocation was to put it into practice’.1 It was that same conviction which impelled the many public-spirited, idealist (in both its technical and its domestic meanings) and strenuously agnostic men and women who founded the Ethical Society and by 1929 had completed Conway Hall to the design of Frederick Mansford. The moving spirits of the Society and, finally, of the building of its cathedral included Collingwood’s teacher, .the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet, his great ally, J H Muirhead, Arnold Toynbee, those mighty and only begetters of LSE’s intellectual proprieties, Sidney Webb, J A Hobson and R B S Haldane, and perhaps most important, the American, Stanton Coit,2 who ran for Parliament as a socialist in Wakefield, for Mayor in New York, and may be counted the senior prophet of our Ethical Churches and of old and new humanism. Lastly, in this brief shower of dropped names, I honour that of that admirable novelist, Mrs Humphrey Ward and her very good novel Robert Elsmere, in which she chronicles the passage of her hero from Christianity to the sort of ethical public- spiritedness he learned from T H Green. Making A Better Person I rehearse this corner of an intellectual history, which must indeed be familiar in these premises, in part out of a due and heartfelt sense of the honour done to me in the invitation to give this morning’s godless sermon. Naturally I wish to observe a proper piety towards our intellectual ancestors, heroes, saints and martyrs, but most of all to play on these names as swelling prologue to my imperial theme. That theme is to claim not only that the study of moral philosophy should indeed make you a better person, and that if it doesn’t then either you haven’t read the right books or else something is wrong in your moral constitution, but also to contend that a thinker’s thought is inextricable from the deep contexts of his or her life, that far from accepting the traditional separation of passion and reason, I prefer (with David Hume) to agree that ‘reason is and ought always to be slave to the passions’,3 but that inasmuch as the passions vary, and fluctuate between good and bad feelings, reason has plenty to do in ordering judgement to decide on those feelings which conduce to our best thoughts and actions, and those which don’t. I trust you will excuse the self-advertisement, but this preamble arises from the biography of R G Collingwood which I wrote recently. Collingwood will serve to illustrate the way in which thinking is performed in action, and to expand his own aphorism made in An Autobiography, that ‘the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought’4 in order to Ethical Record, January 2011 3 show how the thought was shaped by the life, or rather, how the thought which was his vocation was discovered by him and took the shape it did. The form of biography is crucial to any argument about the connection between the thinker’s life and the thoughts it produced. Obviously this is harder and harder to do the further we go back in the history of thought and of the human sciences, and we have more detail about some lives – Hobbes’s, say, or Spinoza’s – than about others, Socrates’s or Averroës’. So I am claiming that the study of moral philosophy is both intrinsically historical and intrinsically biographical: we question and interpret a philosopher’s thought as we would the man or the woman themselves. We read philosophy for the joy of it as well as in the hope of making ourselves – well! – better educated, better able to understand human conduct, better persons even.

The Tradition-demolishers There are innumerable tradition-demolishers, Marxism and managerialism among them. The question now to be put is whether an English tradition of philosophising on behalf of the academy and of plain persons is still capable of connecting moral thought to good lives, of making a living polity out of old books and dead authors. One keen difficulty with answering the question is the old ruling class insolence with which Scottish philosophers, Irish poets and Welsh preacher-socialists have been casually lumped together under the English title. While firmly repudiating the class and chauvinist arrogance, it is part of my purpose to ask of our philosophers whether there remains an honest and honourable tradition of jointly English, Scots, Welsh and Irish philosophising; whether it merits patriotic esteem; whether it can be more handsomely accommodating to a great and generous imagining of a benevolently powerful European Union; whether it can teach us ordinary language moralists to do right and live well. (This is sermonising, all right.) Our topic is the necessary connection between moral thought and moral action. We look for that connection whether in the lives of professional philosophers and moralists (as we shall see in a minute, these are terms to be used with some elasticity), or in the lives of the plain people who, as Oliver Edwards said in the 18th century, “have tried in [their] time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness [is] always breaking in”. For a longish season – let us say, since managerialism offered to run the world after the beginning of the Cold War, and long after its end – academic philosophy has been quite unable to affect the life of the polity. This state of affairs leaves such stout-hearted declarations of intent as Collingwood’s tragically unself-aware. No-one can fail to be stirred to the heart by his conclusion in An Autobiography. He speaks a malediction over the corrupting of the public mind by a venal, mendacious and trivial press, specifically The Daily Mail, although naturally he could not foresee the present filthy degradation of the yellow press, its sale of lies and its traffic in prejudice, the destruction of a moral tradition at the hands of the Murdoch family and the Barclay brothers. Then Collingwood ends his book in this rousing way: I am writing a description of the way in which [recent political events] impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional

4 Ethical Record, January 2011 thinker … I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight.5

Since 1939 a change in consciousness has made more visible the political nature of people’s struggle with their idea of the good life and their identification of the forces of darkness. One way of leading a philosophical life is to fight in the daylight. Any good philosopher or philosophising plain person must needs have plenty of fight in him or her. So I turn to a trio of philosophising intellectuals from the past seventy years or so – since the death of Collingwood say – whose philosophy counts as such in virtue of its being an account of thought in action, certainly, but also as entailing reflection on the common good, on the meaning of meaning, and on the ends of life. John Maynard Keynes Collingwood saw the necessity of making history queen of the sciences for the sake of his nation’s self-knowledge, but he didn’t know whom to tell. John Maynard Keynes, seeing the same truth, had the genius, the opportunity and the sheer good luck to demonstrate in practical action and to universal benefit the significance of his discoveries, his permanent alteration of the constellations of ideas. Since it cannot be doubted that he was killed by overwork, his heart taxed beyond the limit by criss-crossing the Atlantic in bitterly cold, ponderous old transporter aircraft in order to bring to birth the new world economic order of 1945 and to do so while rescuing his beloved country from bankruptcy, Keynes provides a striking example of the philosopher indeed living an exemplary life. His economics is philosophy in action, and his practice of his subject resoundingly admirable. In the advice he gave to the Treasury in 1914 when, at the age of 31, he was called in to save the economic day, he urged the government not to rescue the very discount houses holding at the time a substantial amount of his own investments. He saw then what the present Chancellor cannot see now, that only a huge expansion of government spending in infrastructure (which duly happened – on artillery, uniforms, ambulances, field kitchens, bullets) would rescue at the price of rocketing inflation the damned banks, then as now the origin of catastrophe, then as now relieved of its obligation at the expense of the taxpayer and citizen.6 Keynes was, however, far more than an economic first aid doctor. He was a philosopher (and of course a genius) in the sense that he sought to adapt the entire productive system of society to fit a vision of a democratically participative and good society. The end of economics was to be found in good lives, fulfilled, cultivated, pleasurable. Rejecting Christianity, doubtful of socialism, unsanctimonious about capitalism, he took economics as the usable science with which to save, to feed and to fructify good lives. Thus he wrote the blueprint for the great 1945 Labour government to fund and found the Arts Council and put great art at the disposal of a whole people and, with the attentiveness and capacity for lethal overwork of the public-spirited seigneur which he also was, effected many of the purchases which make the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge the sanctum of British art which it remains.

Ethical Record, January 2011 5 Keynes was a moralist in his generous grasp upon the necessity for living freedoms (rather in the same sense as Amartya Sen’s definition of ‘capabilities’) as the virtuous ground of good lives. He was a philosopher in his endless meditation upon the certainty of uncertainty in all human matters, especially money matters, and even more tellingly in his caustic way with human stupidity and ‘mob psychology’,7 in the extraordinary leaps of his imagination which conceptualised (with the help of R F Kahn) the multiplier as well as understanding how unstable a measure it was and is. The multiplier established the precise relationship ‘given the propensity to consume, between aggregate employment and income and the rate of investment’,8 the latter always liable to seize up when liquidity seems at risk. Richard Hoggart The figure in the next generation of such figures is by the same token moralist of everyday life, philosophic critic of those ideas and judgements of that life which he found to be wrong and at times crass, and above all for our purposes embodiment of his own best thoughts in his conduct as practical politician and responsible diplomat. He is Richard Hoggart, born in 1918, thirty-five years after Keynes. His greatest book, The Uses of Literacy, has been continuously in print for fifty-three years. When Hoggart sent the manuscript to Chatto, the publishers let it lie for a long time, decided to publish, were told by the lawyers that it was dangerously libellous and predicted that when it finally came out it would prove to be a steady enough back-shelf seller. It instantly became a succès d’estime and a scandal. What sort of thing, after all, was it? Was it sociology? No, not enough numbers. Was it autobiography? No, too much generalisation. If it was about working-class history where were the unions, the blackened faces and hobnailed boots; where was the General Strike? Was it literary criticism? Well, perhaps, but then who on earth would write criticism of sex-and-violence thrillers or agony columns? Like all great works, The Uses of Literacy created for itself a quite new form. Hoggart had found the historical theory latent in the teaching of English literature he studied at University at once compellingly confident, and wrong. It taught that the old self-explanatory decorum and sacred rhythms of an agrarian culture were gone, and that mass commercial and subhuman forms of popular art had replaced them. It was and is a powerful story; single-handedly, Hoggart rebutted it. He brought F R Leavis’s Scrutiny’s practical criticism to bear on the moralising saws and dicta of his class (‘landscape with figures’), on the great but living archetype of the working-class mother, on the goodness of ‘a good table’, its ‘tasty’ black puddings and tinned salmon, on the great swell of feeling accompanying the songs at the club, on ‘the close-ribbed streets’ (in Larkin’s words) ‘like a great sigh out of the last century’. There he found not a lost proletariat but a mighty continuity, a strong living, and active culture, carried by the old big words, for sure – solidarity, neighbourliness, community – but also by its jokes, its tiny gestures, its biking excursions and seaside outings, its

6 Ethical Record, January 2011 downright bloodymindedness before the facts of political life. At the halfway mark the book changes tone. ‘Unbending the springs of action’ tells us of the softening of old resilience and uncovers on the page a new literacy of reflex . Hoggart takes a grim but minutely careful rollcall of an imaginative class life nourished by a corrupt and phoney matiness in its daily and weekly papers, and distracted from boredom by the deathly fantasies of brutal punchups and panting, pointless sexual sadism. Accused of indiscipline, the book created a new discipline of itself. Cultural Studies sprang autochthonously alive at Birmingham. Worldwide it became a new sort of multicultural and industrial anthropology. Ignorant of good philosophy the subject is nowadays liable to doses of moral hypochondria, sanctimony and dreadful prose, but it keeps alive Hoggart’s originary vision of the moral evaluation of ordinary life, the cherishing and the sharp criticism of, in the master’s later title, ‘the way we live now’. Hoggart teaches by example how to shape and hold the defining philosophic practice of the human sciences. In his great book, we see and feel, as I have already put it, how judicious objectivity and loving kindness become synonyms, and feel directly how keen moral sympathy dissolves into historical understanding. The life of the scholar and the public role of the intellectual has, over the past 70 years or so, been accorded a more general respect, given greater public visibility, had bestowed upon it far more substantial rewards and amiable recognition in the forms and roles of civil society than was ever the case within the highly insulated enclaves of Collingwood’s Oxford in the 1930s. The scholars presenting on television their view of art, of politics or history, of climatology, evolution or God, can do so with freedom, fluency, a permissible degree of vulgarisation, a sufficiency of personal charm, all bound together by a clear sense on the part of the individual concerned, the programme makers, and the audience that the virtues essential to the vocation - the virtues of impartiality, high seriousness, personal , necessary , ardent commitment to the truth about the subject-matter in hand – are here displayed and celebrated for their own sake and as contributing to the common good of society, its keeping alive the great trinity of truth, goodness and beauty. Seen like this, the scholar-intellectual is a source of edification to the society.

Hoggart Not Elected It has been our extraordinary good fortune that Richard Hoggart also became an international bureaucrat with power in his hands, and therefore can not only tell us directly how that world is (and explain to us thereby how we are ourselves governed, by him as well as others) but also how it ought to be (conspicuous as he is for incarnating the best principles of such a powerful position). In his plain, straight, pawky (his word) way, he is utterly at odds with the more usual incarnations of power. In the academic canon autobiographies tend to be slighted as not a strictly intellectual achievement. Evidence for this opinion is to be found perhaps in the disgraceful fact that Hoggart has never been elected to the British Academy; knighthoods and so forth he has of course declined. But presumably the

Ethical Record, January 2011 7 omission would be justified because his work cannot be classified as a body of objective scholarship contrived in the idiom of an acknowledged discipline. That, however, is my point. There can be no distance set between this man’s life and his work. As he walks through the landscape of his life, Hoggart stops from time to time and looks for his readers to make sure they are following him: So the main currents of my interests have been the right of wider access to higher education, the need for wider access to the arts … and as a support to all this, the best uses of mass communications.9 Tony Judt We stand if not on the precipitous edge of an epoch, at least at a moment when something new by way of human direction is struggling to be born; and as Antonio Gramsci said of a comparable moment in 1921, in such an interregnum there is bound to be a variety of morbid symptoms. After the crash of 2008 and the consequent tidal waves sure to be spreading unpredictably outwards for at least a decade, capitalism will have to change, however certain it is that the established political formations will fight to the end to re-establish the failed order, moving deeper all the time in an impossible attempt to regain a familiar world.10 Even huger waves of a literal kind will roll in upon the back of the economic ones, thrusting them to fearful heights, as the patterns of climate change darken and extend, and the fumes of carbon and methane unroll their hot blanket over the air of the earth. So, the words of Mercury after the Songs of Apollo. If I now claim Tony Judt for an English tradition of moral philosophy, I do so to acknowledge that a working class Jewish boy, born of immigrant mid- European parents in 1947, brought up in London’s East End and postwar austerity, vastly intelligent, educated by the 1944 Butler Act and King’s College Cambridge, long resident in America and dying horribly stifled just last August of an abominable strain of motor neurone disease, may richly incarnate the Englishness of English philosophy, and turn it to the good of plain persons. In an eloquent series of reminiscences, published in The New York Review over the last six months of his life, dictated as first his limbs and then his voice and respiration slowed and stopped, Judt wrote of the Jewishness which had taught him sardonic self-questioning and the keen pleasure of uttering uncomfortable truth (sharply uncomfortable to Jews and to Israel moreover). He recalled the thrilling fulfilments of attending the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1970, when its special dispensations were at their height, and Sartre, Derrida, Bourdieu and Raymond Aron were daily visitors. Out of those days, Judt was to make his great political-philosophic history, Postwar, to which he attached an epigraph from Mann’s Zauberberg: ‘Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’

This is the polyglot Anglo-European-Jewish-American who summons in particular his two home countries to use the tradition of their best selves, whose dying gift is his hymn of praise to the rights of care and human welfare and of

8 Ethical Record, January 2011 liberty established and defended by the state in the England of his childhood and young manhood, so opposed and defended by the contraries of American political argument, so convincing a monument as well as a living institution throughout the first member nations of the European Union. Contrasting, as philosophers should and plain people do, how things are with how they ought to be, Judt speaks a straight and, these days, little-heard malediction over the revolting surge of money worship which was released and encouraged by Ronald Reagan’s and Mrs Thatcher’s deadly politics. At the same time he mounts, in a lowering and unresponsive climate, a ringing defence of the benignant state and its essential social democratic architecture and dynamics. Judt says roundly that ‘something is profoundly wrong with the way we live now’. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self- interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.11

CEOs Paid 900 times Average Employee Judt speaks up in defence of Keynes, names for what it was ‘the irresponsible grandstanding of the Left over past decades’ and gives the huge and hateful numbers which take the measure of present inequality and the monstrous injustices, the costs of civic trust which flow from them. In 1968 the CEO of General Motors took home 66 times the average wage of the typical car worker. In 2010 the CEO of Wal-Mart, which manufactures nothing, is paid 900 times the wage of his average employee. The gap in Britain isn’t 900:1, it is, for exployees in Tesco, in Boots, in Thompsons travel agency, and in certain hospitals (excluding private practice) only 300:1.12 It is worth recollecting that in his classic Equality, published in 1931, R H Tawney asked, “do the English really prefer to be governed by Old Etonians?” and concluded that, in the good society, no-one would be paid more than ten times the pay of anyone else. Judt’s timely and stirring polemic is, I would guess, unanswerably true for most people in Conway Hall this morning. But there is also the circumambient and piercing question, what difference can such a book make at a time when government has become strictly the domain of a licensed oligarchy of very rich men? Nothing could be more fatuous than the Chancellor’s rhetoric, ‘We are all in this together’. But who is to tell him so such that he would listen? Not, by structural definition, the Leader of the Opposition, and we have heard from Collingwood how, even 70 years ago, the public mind was so corrupted by being taught to prefer tittle-tattle to news by the organs of the democratic press. Unless, however, the still living sentiments of social democracy can rejoin a plain-spoken moral philosophy to the practical rationality of an active citizenry, the future looks almost as sombre as it did in 1939.

Ethical Record, January 2011 9 Philip Larkin ends one of his most mournful poems, Our children will not know it’s a different country All we can hope to leave them now is money.

In the new circumstances, there won’t be the money to leave for plenty of people. So what’s the best we can leave them? Well, the best is still the best. There is plenty of life left in the good old words: trust, equality, solidarity, loving-kindness, let alone the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace … the quotation completes itself. So the task in hand is, as always, one of political language. The guardians of the word – philosophers, teachers, politicians, journalists, plain people – must rediscover the words. Moral exhortation won’t do the job. Only the force of circumstance will bring out the best and, of course, the worst in people and a people.

References 1 R G Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, p17. 2 I am greatly indebted in this fragment of intellectual history to my late, much missed friend, Ian MacKillop and his little classic, The British Ethical Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, ‘Scepticism with regard to reason’ (1739). 4 Collingwood (1939), preface np. 5 Collingwood (1939) p167. 6 I take this example from Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: the return of the master, London: Allen Lane, 2009, pp61-2. 7 J M Keynes, A Treatise on Money, London: Macmillan, 1923, p323. 8 J M Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan (first edition 1936), 1973, p113. 9 Hoggart (1992) p26. 10 I am using phrases here from Raymond Williams’s novel The Fight for Manod, London: Chatto and Windus, 1979, p187. 11 ‘Ill Fares the Land’, New York Review, 29 April 2010. Judt’s book of that title, Ill Fares the Land, was published in London and New York at the same time by the Penguin Press. 12 Figures taken by Judt and by me from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s classic, London: Allen Lane, 2009.

Economic Reform and a Liberal Culture And Other Essays on Social and Cultural Topics A new book by Tom Rubens. ISBN 9781845401870 RRP £8.95 Imprint Academic 128 pages The present book is divided into three main sections. The first deals with social, economic and cultural issues; the second with topics which are essentially philosophical; and the third with themes which are chiefly literary. Throughout, the viewpoint expressed is that of secular humanism.

To receive regular news and programme updates from SPES via email, please contact Ben Partridge at [email protected]. Similarly, if you have any suggestions for speakers or event ideas, or would like to convene a Sunday afternoon informal, get in touch with Ben on 020 7242 8034.

10 Ethical Record, January 2011 RUSSIA, TOLSTOY AND UNIVERSAL VALUES Robert Gomme Lecture to a joint meeting of the PER*group and the Ethical Society, 18 November 2010 *PER = Philosophy for Education Renewal

In the 19th century Russia was not seen in the west as wholly part of the west. Its form of religion was Orthodox, a survival from the eastern Roman Empire. It was priest-ridden and at the same time barbarous. Socially it was a time bomb – a minority with huge wealth living in vast palaces and estates with the majority as serfs until their emancipation in 1861, but the majority remaining labourers until the 20th century. The growth of a middle class was slow, especially in the first part of the 19th century. Russia was also seen as mysterious and, in the first part of the century, remote. To travel was a major task. It was a huge country, which included present-day Poland and Finland, and therefore had frontiers with Prussia and Austria. To the outside world, especially to the British, it was also seen as expansionist, to the east and the south. In the British view a threat to Turkey could give Russia an outlet to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles, and any incursion in Persia might lead to a route to India. In spite of the defeat of Napoleon after his invasion in 1812, which promoted a feeling of national pride, there was a feeling in Russia of national inferiority, even though its size suggested to itself that it had a destiny. But these feelings were undeveloped and unfocused. Some thought that in Russia the lessons of Western Europe’ s rapid industrialisation and growth of democracy should be followed. Others sought to build upon its sense of nationality and Slavic tradition. Politically, news of western ideas and achievements spread slowly. The country was ruled by a succession of reactionary monarchs, advised by an often corrupt Court. The intelligentsia tried to address this, but there was a strong censorship. In a famous exchange Pushkin had his texts censored by the Czar personally. After the demise of Emperor Alexander I in 1824, there were attempts by reformers, ‘ The Decembrists’ , to secure greater freedoms but these failed and signalled the beginning of further repression. Herzen And Bakunin Alexander’ s successor, Nicholas I (1825-1855), was a firm believer in autocracy and a determined enemy of liberalism. There were wars with Persia and Turkey in 1830 and 1831 and abortive attempts by nationalist Poles to gain independence. Some famous socialist figures lived abroad, including Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin. Their lives were typical of such figures. Alexander Herzen (1812-70), an illegitimate son of a nobleman, was imprisoned for his revolutionary socialism and was exiled to the provinces. In 1851 he settled in England where he propagated revolutionary ideas aimed at Russia. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) was also of aristocratic descent. He was sent to Siberia in 1855 but escaped and fled to England in 1861. He was a leader of Anarchism and an opponent of Marx. He firmly believed that it was necessary to bring about the withering of the state to make any progress. I mention these two as notable figures of protest in contrast to Tolstoy, who was in his way

Ethical Record, January 2011 11 equally rebellious yet remained in Russia and, as we shall see, made his own rebellious way. The reign of Alexander II (1855-81) saw some reforms, notably the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, although progress was slow. His successor, Alexander III (1881-94), was another reactionary, but again there were expansionary aspirations in the east and south of Russia. We should also mention Nicholas II (1894-1918), another repressive figure, who was famously assassinated by the Communists in 1918. He comes across as a stupid and stubborn figure who threw away opportunities to allow reform without revolution. He was cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Edward VII in Britain, both descending from Queen Victoria. In 1905 there was Bloody Sunday, when a huge crowd walked to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to the Czar. Troops and armed police opened fire and some two hundred protesters were killed and many wounded. From 1906, there were various attempts to introduce moderate, perhaps guided, democracy, but it too largely failed. Tepid reforms, with yet further assassinations, proved unsatisfactory and there was continuous political and social unrest. In spite of the backward nature of much of life in Russia, which continued throughout the 19th century, there was sustained economic growth and selective prosperity in the later years of the century, helped by the growth of railways. There was, for example, a colony of British businessmen living there. Aylmer Maude, the author of the authoritative biography of Tolstoy, was a successful trader before he became a friend of the great man and took to translation and authorship. I shall end this brief introduction to remind us all that in spite of political reaction from above, there was an enormous outburst of creative energy and achievement in music, ballet and literature in the 19th century. The list includes Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky and of course Tchaikovsky in music and in literature as well as Tolstoy, we have Pushkin, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky to name but a few.

Tolstoy’ s Life Tolstoy was a phenomenon. His range of interests and causes was unlimited. Instinctively he was a psychologist before such a name came into use. Like mother Russia herself he was big in all senses. He gambled away a fortune and had to sell much of his estate to pay for it. He learnt four or five languages and created a worldview. He thought about great issues and played out these in his novels, often as a sustained metaphor. His literary output was enormous. Tolstoy lived from 1828 to 1910, a rare age for his time. We think perhaps of Gladstone in this context. Tolstoy lived long enough to see great change in art, politics and social affairs. Born into the upper-middle of the aristocracy (he was a count, not a prince) there was nevertheless always a colouring, so to speak, in his attitude towards life. A sort of Eton and Christchurch, one might say, which breeds self-confidence. People remembered him for his manners. He would write directly to the Czar, for example, and expect to obtain a reply.

12 Ethical Record, January 2011 His parents died young and he was left an orphan. He led a loose adolescence. In the 1840s he was at Kazan University, had problems with the authorities and left without a degree. In 1849, aged 21, he took over the family estate and dabbled in farming. In 1851 he joined the Army as an artilleryman and took part in a number of campaigns including the Crimean War against France and Britain in the defence of Sebastopol. His experience of war was to be a seminal experience for him. In his great novel War and Peace, for example, the graphic insights into the thought processes of participants are shocking. As death crept up on the apparently fatally wounded Prince Andrew we share his anguish. I cannot think of anything in English prose to match it. Similarly, the innocently minded civilian, Pierre, the surrogate for people at large, seeks a good position, as if it were a stage play, to watch the forthcoming battle of Borodino outside Moscow in 1812. He cannot cope and he runs away, his mental state in tatters in a nervous breakdown as he sees the effects of artillery and grapeshot on vulnerable human beings. A Novelist Of The Realist School At the end of the Crimean War, Tolstoy resigned from the army to pursue his writing. It is worth noting at this point that in a regime of strict censorship, writers often showed their concerns in thinly disguised actual events and Tolstoy’ s fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. The Cossacks (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. Anna Karenina (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society. Can there be more famous opening lines than “All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. In parenthesis it is worth noting that Tolstoy wondered why so much English fiction ended with marriage. He thought that it was a beginning. His output is enormous. Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school of writing and saw fiction as a framework to examine social and political issues. Either in fiction or in direct forms he became a carrier of messages for mankind. His beliefs crystallised as he grew older and he propounded doctrines of love, reason, peace, work, purity and sacrifice as an alternative to a society based on violence, greed, war, property and luxury. His writings from the 1880s also turned towards religious matters, and the ascetic life that he preached had a profound effect on many throughout Europe and beyond. He brought coherence to the peace movement internationally. He was a strong influence on Ghandi, for example, and one sees a link with later non- violent resisters such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and now Aung San Suu Kyi. He lived throughout his life on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, about 100 miles south of Moscow. He loved walking in the woods and fields, come winter or summer. He felt the need to be able to think alone and the countryside provided this opportunity. This may of course have been part of his weakness, that he may not at times have mixed sufficiently with others to test and defend his opinions. He held strong views about art for example, which he considered chiefly to be a moral instrument, ‘ a means of union among men’ with no acceptance of pleasure. And he was very dogmatic about music and certain

Ethical Record, January 2011 13 composers. He also considered that Shakespeare was a bad dramatist. His self- searching led him to believe that everybody’ s lives are interesting and that there was much to be learned from peasants. From middle age he wore nothing but peasant garments to show sympathy with the peasants. They had to face economic and social reality and in Tolstoy’ s opinion were a source of wisdom. He had no belief in ‘ great men’ ; he thought that history was more likely to be made by anonymous forces beyond the scope of any leader. His example here was clearly the battles that he read about, particularly the Napoleonic wars, as well as what he saw in the Crimea. People, he argued, have moral choices and can act freely. But to act freely one needed to be educated, which was one of the driving forces in his belief that in order to lead the sort of life he outlines, education becomes essential. He returns time and time again to the subject.

The Co-operative Colonies At the high point of his influence from the 1880s people were persuaded by Tolstoy’ s message to give up conventional life to devote their energies to communal enterprises and a simpler way of life. In England, for example, a number of co-operative and so-called colonies were established in Essex, Oxfordshire and elsewhere. In spite of Czarism’ s oppressive measures there were also colonies established in Russia, which survived into the 1920s in spite of opposition by the Communist authorities, who in the immediate follow up to the revolution were divided – there was a certain camaraderie with the Bolsheviks. Numbers of enthusiasts made the long journey to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’ s country home, and those who could not go themselves wrote to the great man instead. We get a flavour from a letter written by my wife’ s grandfather, George Herbert Perris, the subject of my book, dated January 1st 1897.* It begins:

“Dear Sir, and if I may say so, beloved teacher, …when I first started earning my living as a Radical journalist…my father (who is a Unitarian Minister) had inspired me with this triple hunger: to help in bettering the lives of the common people; to help in spreading among them the spirit of rational religion; to help in spreading the idea of international brotherhood and peace. …I have had the growing desire to write a little book in which I should attempt to tell the uninstructed Englishman…something of the life of their author, especially in relation to the life of his people to indicate its consistent development, and to bring into clear prominence some of the principles for which it stands. There is no guidance of this kind before the English reader just at the time when it is most wanted – when your works are becoming widely read and debated here”. On August 9th 1898 he was to write again: “…The book is now finished and published and I am sending a copy, with the request that you will accept it as the unworthy offering of a truth-, and will forgive all blunders and inadequacies…”

*A few years ago, Robert Gomme gave a talk to the Society on G.H. Perris.{Ed.}

14 Ethical Record, January 2011 By the 1890s, English translations of Tolstoy’ s work became available. Constance Garnett was one of those who visited Tolstoy, was influenced by him and having learned Russian went on from 1893 to translate a number of his works. Aylmer and Louise Maude had lived in Russia and knew Tolstoy well and also translated some of his works. Aylmer Maude went on to write the first life of Tolstoy in English, in two volumes published in 1908 and 1910. For Tolstoy’ s 80th birthday on 28 August 1908 an international committee was set up in Paris to arrange publication of cheap translations of his works.

“Until Religion Took Possession Of His Mind” Tolstoy died on 20 November 1910 but owing to confusion in news gathering The Times carried a long valedictory leading article on 17 November, while Tolstoy was still alive. “Until religion took possession of his mind”, the leader writer wrote, “he was a European author, the greatest of his time, the chief of realists, with a mystical purpose not yet clear to himself which only served to give significance to his realism…In his later years he may seem to have been much concerned with politics; but he intervened always to insist that the world could only be bettered by a change in the heart of men”. In his later years of greatest influence there were two elements that can be discerned in Tolstoy’ s mind – the need to educate by personal example, hence the simple life; and to propagate values essential to civilised society. Without those values knowledge would be just unrelated material, with no over-arching coherence and driving force. Such judgements continue to be ignored. As recent events show, we remain at the mercy of uncontrolled and unfocused ways of living.

VIEWPOINTS Encouraging Freedom Of Thought I felt that the two articles (Ethical Record Nov 2010) Darwin’s Religious Journey by John Hedley Brook and The Appropriate Limits of Free Expression by Terri M Murray are particularly relevant to the cause of humanism today and that we have much to learn from them. I might have expected to find that Charles Darwin underwent a review of his original religious position and like many decided bit by bit that the old theological position was incompatible with new scientific understanding, particularly his own. He found the freedom of mind to change his views as he wished. Many do not exercise that freedom and some, perhaps Darwin’s own wife among them, see little reason to do so. But Darwin himself expressed a sea change that has become increasingly powerful and continues today. People increasingly feel able to question authority and to create their own beliefs. But there was a bill to be paid. Not everyone would finish up thinking the same way. Individualism threatened disintegration and with it the fear of political chaos. The current back-lash of dogmatic ideologies both religious and political is one of the main consequences.

Ethical Record, January 2011 15 The other consequence today is a renewed humanism of the sort able to tolerate and enable communication between people with varying perspectives. Perhaps we should be patient while people travel their own spiritual journey and avoid any premature desire to expect a sudden conversion to an out and out atheism. Most importantly however there is a need to point up what people have in common. This is where I feel the second article helps. It recognises that the things we value most will evolve in a world in which there is a freedom of the intellect. While people are willing to accept this for most adults there is a tendency to become more cautious where children and other vulnerable groups like prisoners and the mentally disabled are concerned. To a surprising extent this might also include those early in college life as many otherwise intelligent and freethinking young adults find themselves flooded with the anxiety of not knowing and its resulting fear of uncertainty and anarchy leaving them open to the risk of proselytization by those who come with the promise of all the answers. Yet I have come to feel that the answer is not to set up protective systems as some have suggested but rather to encourage children from an early age to feel that they have the ability to think things through for themselves and to give them the machinery to do so. Like Darwin people are evolving their ideas all the time and we need to support each other, particularly the vulnerable, in this process.

Individual Freedom And Wearing a Crucifix I must write delicately. I recently attended a professional meeting in which there was criticism of the decision by one employing authority to disallow a nurse to wear a crucifix on her uniform. Other examples of such petty tyrannies were quoted. I gather that a Christian Legal Centre is now handling these problems. I was concerned however that this was laid at the door of ‘aggressive secularism’ and I had the vision of secularists and humanists being framed for all this sort of thing. As it was an open meeting I was able to say - and was listened to - that humanists and secularists are also the victim of petty injustices based on their beliefs. The parents of children who have not been baptised have had to pay school transport costs on buses primarily intended for ‘children of faith’, and I know one humanist who is a member of the local SACRE {Local Authority Council for Religious Education} who cannot vote because of his beliefs. I am sure there are other examples. However the Pope and the religious world generally (it came up at the recent Lambeth Conference) are putting up the argument that they are the vanguard of freedom and that it is the secularists who are undermining this. This of course isn’t true. I feel that it is an urgent matter that the humanist/secular world should tackle and formulate its response. I have not as yet joined the BHA and the NSS but as I have been a member of South Place for some time I thought that you were the obvious contact point. I have recently become a member of Leicester Secular Society and they will almost certainly take this up. John Edmondson - Louth, Lincolnshire

16 Ethical Record, January 2011 Nuclear Technology’s Vital Role Marek Kohn (Climate Change, Democracy and Human Nature, ER Dec 2010) quotes Richard Gephardt’s description of a transformation of the world’s energy economy as ‘the single most difficult political transaction in the history of mankind’. This may indeed represent a political reality. However, as is argued below, transforming the energy economy presents a really rather easy transaction in terms of existing nuclear technology. And even without a change of political mindset it might be largely resolved perhaps by the ‘invisible hand of the market’ alone, if the market place were not dominated by some very determined heavyweight players with a vested interest in nothing other than ‘more of the same’. A very well focussed science and engineering effort during the 2nd world war resulted in harnessing the astonishing energy released by nuclear fission to make the world’s most formidable weapons. By the end of the war, the military – particularly in the USA – had a shopping list, namely high powered compact reactors for nuclear submarines, plutonium for bombs, and a nuclear power unit for aircraft propulsion. The first item on this list became the USS Nautilus, authorised by the US Navy in 1951 and launched in 1954. The second item was incorporated in the Shippingport reactor – designed and built in just 32 months – which was the first full-scale nuclear Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) in the . Both projects were delivered under the leadership of the formidably effective Admiral Rickover. Improved PWRs, after improvements and widespread use, are now available as Generation III reactors. The third item in the list was provided by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s in the shape of the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). This latter option, although very successfully demonstrated in the 1960s with an operating reactor, was sidelined in the 1970s by Nixon’s focus on the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor that was expected to generate more plutonium than it consumed. Molten Salt Reactor projects in the USA were officially terminated in 1976. They are now a Generation IV option, but the established nuclear industry pays them as little attention as possible in order to protect their established business interests.

A Most Efficient Energy Source Molten Salt Reactor technology - if properly supported - could be back within as soon as two or three years. It would be seen to be the most efficient well- developed energy source known, whether measured by cost per kWh, capital cost, social and environmental costs or weapons proliferation risk. What, then, is it that makes an MSR so much better than a PWR? The apparently insoluble problems of the uranium/plutonium PWR fuel cycle are associated with inevitable neutron damage to solid fuel elements. After about 3% burn up, fuel rods have to be removed from the reactors and either disposed of or reprocessed. In either case, there is no good outcome and much expense (and shareholder profit!). However, if fuel is in a molten rather than solid state, neutron damage turns out not to be a problem. In the MSR, molten

Ethical Record, January 2011 17 fuel is 97% burned up, leaving very little waste and very little problem in disposal. There are several other significant advantages of Molten Salt Reactors over Pressurized Water Reactors: MSRs operate at atmospheric pressure; there is no risk of meltdown and they fail safe; energy output is at very high temperature for thermodynamic efficiency and follows load; they work very well with thorium which is easier to obtain and is used without isotope separation or enrichment; MSR operation does not risk nuclear weapon proliferation; there is little cost benefit of scale with the MSR so rather small ones can be used, if required. PWRs present insoluble mechanical engineering problems because of unavoidable neutron damage to solid fuel components. In the MSR – where fuel is molten – neutron interactions with the fuel create a more-or-less routine and manageable task for chemical engineering. Marek Kohn proposes that freedom ‘... typically conceived in terms of freedom to use energy how, when and as much as one wishes… must certainly be limited in order to curb climate change’ but this proposition may be profoundly mistaken if sustainable and affordable well proven technology is implemented. Taking the opposite view, as briefly discussed below, may lead to much better outcomes. If global population estimates for the last 2,000 years – which start at about 200 million and end at over 6 billion – are compared with CO2 estimates for the same period it is reasonable to conclude that global population above a few hundred million leads to increases in atmospheric CO2 and both have shown runaway growth in the last century or two. Both a 100-year and a 1000-year horizon need to address the (politically incorrect) issue of world population levels if probable global warming is to be addressed successfully. Robert Hargraves, teaches a course called Aim High! at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. From his website: http://sites.google.com/site/rethinkingnuclearpower/aimhigh, slides can be downloaded showing relationships that link fertility, and therefore population growth, to energy availability. The slides also give much of the science and technology discussed above. A reasonable conclusion from the material presented by Hargraves is that making as much energy – in terms of electricity and synthesized fossil fuels – available as can be justified by demand is the best way forward. It is also clearly a fairer programme than telling the poor to go on living poorly as a duty to the survival of the planet. Hargraves, together with Ralph Moir, has published a lively paper which spells out how, what and when this can all be done (available from the same Aim High! website given above, by clicking on ‘Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors in Jul/Aug 2010 American Scientist’). Jasper Tomlinson - London SE1

The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society.

18 Ethical Record, January 2011 HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY Purchases and donations November 2010 Beckley, Colin Who holds the moral high ground? 2008 Dixon, B.A. Animals, emotions and morality 2008 Eagleton, Terry Reason, faith and morality 2010 Fetzer, James H. Render unto Darwin 2007 Garvey, James The ethics of climate change 2008 Harris, Sam The end of faith 2006 Haught, John God and the new atheism 2008 Lane, Nick Life ascending 2009 Le Poidevin, Robin Agnosticism 2010 Long, D. Stephen Christian ethics 2010 Lowe, Scott C. Christmas: philosophy for everyone 2010 Rodin, David War and self-defense 2002 Rosenberg, Alexander Darwinism in philosophy, social science and policy 2000 Scrase, Leslie An unbeliever’s guide to the Bible 2010 Shook, John The God debates 2010 Singer, Peter Writings on an ethical life 2002 Tillson, John Ethics on a post Religious Education curriculum 2010 Weeks, John Tom Paine Bicentenary Papers 2010 Wells, Spencer Pandora’s seed 2010

Purchases and donations December 2010 Bartley, Alan Far from the fashionable crowd 2010 Brown, Paul Global warning: last chance to change 2006 Niblett, Bryan Dare to stand alone 2011 Lovelock, James Ages of Gaia 2000 Reay, Dave Climate change begins at home 2006 Silvertown, Jonathan Fragile web 2010 Cathy Broad, Librarian THE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Humanist Reference Library is open for members and researchers on Mondays to Fridays from 0930 - 1730. Please let the Librarian, Catherine Broad, know of your intention to visit. The Library has an extensive collection of new and historic freethought material. Tel: 020 7242 8037. Email: [email protected]

L VIRGINIA WOOLF AND MADNESS: CA HI TRAUMA NARRATIVE IN MRS. DALLOWAY ET TY N W IE IO E OC AT by Suzette A. Henke N S IC BL PU A monograph based on the Virginia Clark Memorial Lecture delivered on 9 July 2008 to the Ethical Society. £5 post free from the Society.

Ethical Record, January 2011 19 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8031/4 Registered Charity No. 251396 For programme updates, email: [email protected] Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk No charge unless stated Sunday meetings are held in the Brockway Room. JANUARY 2011 Sunday 9 1100 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE – conservation or sustainable development? Sandy Knapp, Botany Dept, Natural History Museum, London Sunday16 1100 WHY HUMANISTS FORGOT THE FUTURE Shiv Malik, author of Jilted Generation Wednesday 19 BOOK LAUNCH: 1830 DARE TO STAND ALONE – THE STORY OF CHARLES BRADLAUGH A new biography by Bryan Niblett. Wine. All welcome Sunday 23 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND 1100 THE FLOODGATES OF IMPARTIALITY John Tillson Sunday 30 VARIETIES OF IRRELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: 1100 ATHEISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Jonathan Ree FEBRUARY Sunday 6 THE MORAL MIND 1100 Henry Haslam, author Wednesday 9 BHA/SPES Joint Event: DARWIN DAY LECTURE: 1900 MUTANTS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM Professor Armand Marie Leroi, Imperial College London Sunday 13 DARWIN’S SACRED CAUSE 1100 James Moore, author and Open University lecturer Sunday 20 SCIENCE, HUMANITIES, RELIGION: HOW MANY CONFLICTS? 1100 Richard Baron SPES’s CONWAY HALL SUNDAY CONCERTS 2011 JANUARY 9 Fibonacci Sequence: Schubert, Rossini, Mozart, Schubert 16 Cosima Quintet & Evelina Puzaite piano: Haydn, Elgar, Puzaite, Shostakovitch 23 Piatti Quartet: Schubert, Mozart, Debussy 30 Bacchus Piano Trio: Mozart, Schumann, Schoenberg FEBRUARY 6 Maggini Quartet: Beethoven, Bridge, Mendelssohn 13 Navarra Quartet: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven 20 Sitkovetsky Trio: Haydn, Smetana, Mendelssohn 6.30pm Tickets £8; under 18 £4 Full details on: www.conwayhallsundayconcerts.org.uk

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