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Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 109 No. 8 £1.50 October 2004 ETHICAL SOCIETY VISITS THETFORD Golden Statue of Thomas Paine, Thetford. Norfolk, Saturday 3 July 2004 Ethical Society Members and Friends gather round to hear about Thomas Paine from Chad Goodwin, Chair of the T.P. Society (full report in JulylAug ER). ART SOIREE 2004: 2 PLAQUE TO JEREMY BENTHAM UNVEILED Philip Schofield 3 GILBERT & SULLIVAN EXCERPTS FOR CONWAY HALL'S 75TH Terry Mullins 5 HOW CAN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY COPE WITH RELIGION? David McLellan 6 REVIEW OF RICHARD NORMAN'S 'ON HUMANISM' Chris Bratcher 8 CARTOON OF CONWAY HALL'S 75th Martin Rowson 12 NEW EXHIBITION AT WOMEN'S LIBRARY Jennifer Jeynes 17 ANNUAL REUNION AND THE HUMANIST PEACE FORUM Diana Rookledge 18 THE INDEXING OF THE SOCIETY'S PUBLIC TALKS Tom Rubens 19 VIEWPOINT: Mental Violence in Cartoons Ben Rosten 20 MIRIAM ELTON 1934-2004 David Morris 21 RICHARD JOHN CADMAN HALL 1942-2004 B Smoker, Alex Hill et al. 22 • ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC I R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 7242 8036 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk [email protected] Officers Chairman of the GC: Terry Mullins. Hon. Representative of the GC: Don Liversedge. Vice Chairman: John Rayner. Registrar: Edmund McArthur. Editor, Ethical Record: Norman I3acrac SPES Staff Administrative Secretary to the Society: Marina Ingham Tel: 020 7242 8034 Librarian/Programme Coordinator: Jennifer Jeynes M.Sc. Tel: 020 7242 8037 Hull Manager: Peter Vlachos MA. For Hall bookings: Tel: 020 7242 8032 Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova, Shaip Bullaku, David Wright Tel: 020 7242 8033 Administrative/Clerical Staff: Carina Kelsey, Victoria Le Fevre, Nanu Patel New Members Sydney Adair Butchins, a cosmologist, Swiss Cottage, London. Tony Novissimo, Richmond, London. Obituary We regret to report the death of Richard Hall of London (joined 1965), formerly a member of the General committee, who died on 27 September 2004. (Obituary on p22) SPES AGM This year's AGM will be held on 21 November 2004 at 1430, registration from 1400 THE ETHICAL SOCIETY'S ART SOIREE 2004 1930Friday 19 November FIRST LOVES AND HOW I DISCOVERED ART illustrated talk by Richard Cork, the well-known Art Critic, Art Historian and Broadcaster, Writer on Art for The Times and the New Statesman, Author, 4 recent paperbacks of Critical Writing on Modern Art, Yale University Press 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, 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 renowned.South Place Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society's journal, Ethical Record, is issued ten times a year. Funerals and Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £18 (£12 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65). Ethical Record, October, 2004 PLAQUE TO JEREMY BENTHAM UNVEILED Speech of Philip Schofield on the occasion of the ceremony at the Home Office, Queen Anne's Gate Tuesday, 12 October 2004 Had we been here 200 years ago, on the 12th of October 1804, we would have been standing in Queen Square, as Queen Anne's Gate was then called, and we would have seen a narrow passage leading away from where we are standing. At the end of that passage would have been the two houses which constituted Queen Square Place, and the larger of the houses would have belonged to Jeremy Bentham. We might have tried to gain admittance to Mr Bentham's house. We might not have been successful in our attempt, for many who would have liked to have met him, did not enjoy the privilege. For instance, Madame de Stael, who once said that the two most important men of the age were Napoleon and Bentham, was refused an audience with Bentham—she presumably reassessed her view of Bentham as a consequence of what she considered to be a snub. Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, only got as far as Bentham's garden. The garden, however, was no doubt worth seeing, given Bentham's lifelong interest in botany, and the trade in exotic seeds in which he engaged. It was also an enormous garden, for the greater part of what is now the site of the Home Office was the site of Bentham's house and garden. Bentham very much revelled in his reclusiveness. He called himself the Hermit of Queen Square Place. Indeed, on the day after our imagined visit, he wrote to his brother: 'I see scarce any body than L can help seeing, yet when I do, it is with good humour, chattering freely upon all sorts of subjects'. Assuming we did gain entry into his house, we would probably have found Bentham in his study, working on the subject of judicial evidence, which would, twenty years and more hence, be edited by John Stuart Mill, and appear as Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Many people did, of course, gain entrance, and a procession of statesmen, politicians (including at least two Home Secretaries), lawyers, and intellectuals made that same journey down the narrow passage as we have just imagined ourselves to do, unless they knew about the entrance to Bentham's garden and house which passed through a gate on Bird Cage Walk. Visitors to his house included Henry Brougham, the Lord Chancellor and law reformer, Francis Burdett, the radical MP for Westminster, Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross, Samuel Romilly, the law reformer, not to mention Bernardino Rivadavia, later the first President of the Argentine Republic, Prince Adam Czartoryski, Russian statesman and Polish patriot, and John Quincy Adams, later President of the United States of America. The Hermit of Queen Square Place Bentham might have been, but he also described himself as 'a citizen of the world'. He was very proud of the fact that Jose del Valle, the Guatemalan statesman, addressed him as 'legislator of the world'. Ethical Record, October, 2004 3 The Founder Of Utilitarianism But why did such a recluse enjoy such a world-wide reputation? Bentham was the founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism—by his insistence that actions be judged by their consequences in terms of happiness, he did more than anyone perhaps to lay the foundations for a tolerant, equitable, rational, and secular society. Here lies a further link with organizations such as the Home Office—he was the first theorist of bureaucracy, and in his magisterial Constitutional Code laid down detailed principles for the construction of a government administration, characterized by the injunction to maximize official aptitude and minimize expense. These were the two main ends of government. Public examination and public accountability lay at the centre of Bentham's thinking—and these principles applied to ministers just as much as they did to any other official. Bentham altered the course of British politics with his utilitarian justification of democracy, summed up in his principle that everyone is to count for one, and no one for more than one. In economics, cost-benefit analysis can be seen to have its origin in Bentham's utilitarian methodology. Bentham is the father of modern jurisprudence, having been the first to define clearly the main issues which legal philosophers are still debating today. Bentham is the inventor of the modern concept of surveillance. He provides a plausible justification of identity cards—should anyone be in need of such a justification—by linking security with civil liberty, and thereby showing the fallacy of the arguments of those who claim that civil liberties are necessarily infringed by an increase in regulation. Human Rights A Stratagem Bentham would, however, be disappointed with the current emphasis on human rights in our political and legal discourse. He would probably see it, as he did many things, as a stratagem employed by lawyers to increase their earning potential. Bentham developed a profound critique of such rights, albeit in the guise of natural rights, in the process of which he coined the memorable saying that talk of natural rights is simple nonsense, while talk of natural and imprescriptible rights is nonsense upon stilts. Bentham still has much of relevance and importance to say to us, beyond his obvious historical importance. However, there is no complete and accurate edition of his works. Hence the Bentham Project has been established in order to produce an authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Twenty-five volumes have been published to date, and there will be sixty-eight or so altogether. With good progress currently being made thanks to the support of University College London and of other funding bodies—the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Wellcome Trust, and the British Academy—when complete the edition will be a monument to scholarship. Professor Brian Barry, the eminent political theorist, once said that if Bentham had been French or German, an edition of his works would have been fully funded and completed long ago. It was, however, Bentham's misfortune to be British, to be English, to be a Cockney even, and we perhaps do not cherish as we should our great intellectual tradition. 4 Ethical Record, October, 2004 At least today's unveiling of this plaque to Bentham goes some way towards recognizing Bentham, and on behalf of the Bentham Project I would like to thank Westminster City Council, the Home Office, and University College London, for responding with such enthusiasm and goodwill to our suggestion that the plaque be erected.