ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record

Vol. 100 No. 2 £1 February 1 995

EDITORIAL E.P. THOMPSON: HEROIC PESSIMIST When the heroic Red Army reached Auschwitz 50 Peter Cadogan 3 years ago, only a few thousand prisoners remained to be liberated. The majority had been forced by their Nazi guards to march westwards, where most of MANAGING THE PUBLIC them perished (viz, the account in Night by eye- SECTOR - THE ART OF witness Elie Wiesel). For many years after the war, THE IMPOSSIBLE? most survivors did not talk about their experiences in Gerald Vinten 11 the camps; their friends were too reticent to ask, and some were incapable of expressing their horrific memories. Crucial documentary evidence of the BLATCHFORD, construction and purpose of Auschwitz, taken to THE CLARION, GOD Moscow in 1945 and kept secret by the communists, AND MY NEIGHBOUR has only recently become available to historians. We Peter Broks 15 and posterity require the terrible facts of the holo- caust to be a matter of public record. VIEWPOINTS 20 Prof Robert Schwarz has argued (in A Sociopathic Colin Mills; Frank Holmes View of Nazism, Ethical Record, Sept 93) that even when all the facts are in we may still lack insight into the psychological factors at work in the society which FUTURE EVENTS 24 conceived the Final Solution. Although Nazism itself is almost beyond the reach of rational argument, that cannot be said for the antisemitic tendencies, manifested in the very recent past, of some major forms of Marxism and Christianity. Here, one may demand that their doctrines be modified in the lurid light of the holocaust.

It was communist doctrine that Jews could have no authentic national aspiration; they were called 'hucksters' by Karl Marx and 'rootless cosmopolitans' by Stalin, and were destined to disappear in a future communist state. Zionism (a state for Jews) was loudly demonised along with capitalism and imperialism. An outcome of this policy was the UN's infamous (but since rescinded) proclamation that 'Zionism is racism'. The communists were always reluctant to acknowledge that Jews had been singled out by the Nazis for total destruction; they were discomfited when Yevtushenko bravely declaimed his poem Babi Yar (a place near Kiev where thousands of Jews were murdered).

Secularists, going back to Voltaire, have occasionally blundered in regard to Jews. Were they to be classified simply as religious, or were they an ethnic minority with rights to self-expression? Now Judaism as a religion must, along with all other religions and ideologies, be open to critical comment. However, if Jews were more accurately regarded as a large extended family with some religious/cultural features in common, living in a somewhat hostile society (eg parts of Europe in the last hundred years), then it is not incumbent on secularists to add to the hue and cry against them. Questions involving multiculturalism are difficult and defy generalisation. One therefore has to treat each issue on its merits and each person as a unique individual rather than a stereotype. continued on page 2 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY

Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723

Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Fleales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter. Officers Honorary Representative: Nicolas Walter. General Committee Chairman: Barbara Smoker. General Committee Vice-Chairman: Govind Deodhekar. Treasurer: Don Liversedge. Editor, The Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac. Librarian: Edwina Palmer. Registrar: Marion Granville. Secretary to the Society: Nina Khare. Tel: 071-831 7723 Fax: 071-430 1271 (The Secretary's office is on the 2nd Floor, Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald's Road) Hall Staff Manager: Stephen Norley. Tel: 071-2428032for Hall bookings.Head Caretaker David Wright. New Members Dr Bimal Prodhon, Donald Rooum, Mrs A. Walford.

Editorial continued from page I

Undoubtedly the major source of the stereotyping of Jews has been Christianity, for this first introduced into its doctrines the concept of a malignant people. It did so not least 143ithe very terminology of the New Testament. This refers to 'the Jews' in a way that makes it natural to transfer the responsibility for questioning Jesus's mission from particular persons (Jews or 'Pharisees' — itself an early example of group character assassination) to contemporary Jews. At Easter, Jewish children have been confronted with the accusation, "You killed Our Lord". Pope Pius XII prayed for the conversion of the 'perfidious' Jews even as some were being rounded up for transportation within earshot of the Vatican. (After the war, John XXIII amended that prayer).

During the war, numerous Christians acted on their own initiative and risked their lives to save Jews, but there was no lead from the top. Nor was any German soldier, with Gott mit Uns on his buckle, ever given reason to doubt the propriety of waging a total war, in which anything goes, against that Bolshevism which his church had so vilified. Mussolini, Hitler and Franco are just the most notorious of the Fascist leaders who found that however they treated the clergy, the hierarchy would never cease its servility, arising from its antipathy to the left. One may hope that appropriate lessons will be learnt by the faithful; freethinkers will reflect on the harm that can be wrought by religion.

The text of the Holyoake Commemorative Lecture Seeking a Full and Worthwile Life: Aspects of Humanist Education. Professor Sir Hermann Bondi KCB FRS, President of the British Humanist Association available from the Secretary, S.P.E.S. at £2

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

2 Ethical Record, February, 1995 E.P. THOMPSON: HEROIC PESSIMIST

Peter Cadogan General Secretary of the South Place Ethical Society from 1967-1980 Lecture to the Ethical Society, 15 January 1995

Talking about Thompson is like talking about England since 1945. Yet although he was too-English-to-be-true he also managed to be a great internationalist. The two things arc not incompatible. By nature of our very origins we are as a people European, imperial and Atlanticist; Edward was all those. His mother was American, the family background was inseparable from India and he pioneered the idea of a people's Europe as catalyst in the dissolution of the Cold War.

If I tend to speak of Edward Palmer Thompson (E.P.T.) in the first person it is because I first met him back in 1948 when he was 24 and I was 27. It was the year that he and Dorothy married. Our last communication was 45 years later when he wrote to me just before he died in August 1993. We met and wrote intermittently but I never got to know him personally — it was a matter of meetings, conferences, demonstrations and in the corridors of the movement. I abandoned Marxism and party politics in 1960 in favour of direct democracy and militant non-violence. He made no such switch. In practice we came to much the same conclusions by very different routes. There was a meeting of deeds but not of minds.

The Red Thread There was a red thread (a good but quite accidental pun) in the whole of Edward's adult life: what was he to make of Marxism and what were Marxists to make of him? He joined the Communist Party in 1942, aged 18, and when he died aged 69 he had never formally renounced the faith. But from 1979 he just moved on, in his empirical fashion, and left it behind. He had, of course, quit the Party back in 1956.

This is not a potted biography but the background to E.P.T.'s life was so extraordinary that a little personal detail is called for. There is already one biography in print: E.P.T: Objections and Oppositions by Bryan D. Palmer, a Canadian historian and one of Edward's friends. It is an entirely delightful book full of interesting detail and excellent documentation, but sans any critical assessment.'

The Family Background His father, Edward John Thompson read Classics and joined the Methodist ministry, going out to India in 1910 at the age of 24 as a teaching missionary. He was soon a Headmaster and an Assistant Principal of a University College. His mother Theodosia Jessup was from a vintage and distinguished New England family, who also went out to India as a Methodist missionary. She married Edward John in 1920. Of the six children, the first, Frank, was born in 1921.

E.J.T. became deeply involved in Indian culture, mastered Bengali and was the friend of Tagore and Nehru. He knew Gandhi too, but more at arms length, since not until 1939 was he committed to the Indian nationalist cause. His interest was the Anglo-Indian interface about which he had two important messages. He wrote a famous book on the Indian mutiny of 1867 and the horrific revenge taken by the British Army, with between 10,000/20,000 hanged and others blown apart at the canon's mouth. For this there had first to be atonement. He was no less hard on the Indian side, over communal differences, the caste system, male chauvinism (he produced a book on suttee)and endemic violence.

Ethical Record, February, 1995 3 But he loved India and its culture took over from his Methodism. The family returned to England in 1923. E.J.T. resigned from the Methodist ministry and began an entirely new profession as a Research Fellow in Oxford — his subject was, of course, India. Besides being a scholar and a teacher he was a poet, a playwright and a novelist.

The family settled in Boars Hill, Oxford, where Edward was born in 1924. Their house became a focal point for Indian specialists and distinguished visitors from India. Frank went to Winchester and Oxford, Edward to his father's old boarding school, Kingswood School (a Wesley foundation) and to Corpus Christi, Cambridge.

The War It was the declaration of war itself that changed everything in the Thompson household. Chamberlain declared war on behalf of India without consulting the Indians. For Father Thompson this was the last straw. All doubts were now resolved — he joined the Indian nationalist cause immediately and produced two books both compounded of passionate commitment and exacting scholarship. The first was You Have Lived Through That (1939) and the second was Enlist India for Freedom (1942). He joined the small but powerful lobby in London that supported the Congress cause — namely Noel Brailsford, Kingsley Martin, Fenner Brockway, Harry Pollitt and Khrishna Menon of The India League. This meant association with the CP, the only Party to support the Indian cause in the wake of comparable support to the cause of Spain. Marxism and freedom seemed to be the same thing. Both boys joined the Party. E.J.T. did not live to see independence gained, unfortunately.

When the war broke out Edward was fifteen. He had time to finish his schooling, take Part One of his degree at Cambridge and then join. the Tank Corps, be commissioned, and at the age of twenty as a tank commander was in charge of a unit of three tanks in the Battle for Italy. In two essays in The Heavy Dancers (1985), The Liberation of Perugia a nd Overture to Cassino. Edward tells the truth about war in his comment: We, who are the survivors, have to live with the question: 'Why am I alive, when my friends are dead?' What price consumer values against that? And there is no way in which the betrayal of hard-won peace can be counterbalanced. That is not the sentiment of a pacifist, but of someone trained to kill, who got on with the job. Edward was a killer turned peacenik, like the rest of us.

Why Marxism? We need to pause at this question. Looking back from the 1920s one has to read oneself into the utterly different conditions that obtained between 1928 and 1948. In 1928 Stalin set his seal on the Soviet Union and the Third International. In 1948 the Cold War broke surface over the Berlin Air Lift and the Czechoslovakian Communist coup d'etat. (The Cold War actually began on the morrow of Stalingrad and El Alamein in 1942/43 when the allied armies, East and West, per force set up governments in the territory they occupied).

However, there were deeper matters at issue. Why did such a substantial section of the upper crust of Britain, at Oxford and Cambridge especially, join the CP, fellow-travel or become Soviet spies? Frank and Edward Thompson were not untypical. Stephen Spender, who went up to Oxford in 1928, describes much of the agonies of spirit and intellect through which his generation went, in his autobiography World Within World.

What were young idealistic men to believe in? God had clearly died with Strauss, Darwin, Huxley, Nietzsche, Croce and Schweitzer, also on the Somme in 1916. Who or

4 Ethical Record, February, 1995 what was to fill the vacuum? Enter Karl Marx and the new apocalypse of Communism, the testament of Das Capital, the historic role of the working class and a new vocation of 'intellectuals' as its leaders. Enter Lenin with the Party as the vanguard of the working class and a passionate commitment for those who would give their lives to the cause. Finally 1917, the Revolution itself, an island of socialism built in the sea of capitalism — hope for the workers of the world! It was a myth of immense power. People love myths and prefer to avert their eyes from the truth. The truth was that the ideas were dogmas and the organisation was an actual or an incipient tyranny. Marx and Lenin laid the foundations of totalitarianism — soon to be copied by Mussolini and Hitler and their 'vanguard' parties.

In face of wishful thinking and well-crafted propaganda, what chance did the truth have? Precious little. With the benefit of hindsight it is amazing that so many extremely bright people allowed themselves to be deceived. The theory of the class struggle which Marx formulated has no historical warrant whatsoever. All successful revolutions are made by complex class alliances with all classes on both sides. What determines their identity is the goal — usually the overthrow of a failed absolutism.' The labour theory of value (that work is the source of all value) excludes nature and has lethal anti-ecological implications as eco-devastation in the Soviet Union has been our witness. The dictatorship of the proletariat is an abstract mandate for terror.

The inversion of the Hegelian dialectic making materialism i.e. economics, primary, and all else mere 'superstructure' is to exclude the imagination, originality, creativity, genius itself. It is these things that define our humanity. Marx, like Bentham, dismissed them. In human terms Bentham's 'market' and Marx's 'class' amounted to the same thing. One led to the workhouse and solitary confinement, the other to the gulag; both were hells on earth.

To live with these gross errors one had to rationalise. Edward's way of doing it was unique to himself. He invented two Marxisms. Others moved in that direction.

The Two Marxisms In 1978 E.P.T. looked back over the whole period to date and in The Poverty of Theory wrote:

"I must therefore state without equivocation that I can no longer speak of a single common Marxist tradition. There are two traditions whose bifurcation and disengagement from each other has been slow and whose final declaration of irreconcilable antagonism was delayed — as an historical event — until 1956... Between theology and reason there can be no room left for negotiation."

I take it that he is using the word 'reason' here in its eighteenth century sense, that of 'intuitive apprehension', the 'Marxism of the heart'. This provides indispensable light on what happens between 1956 and 1979. The notion of two Marxisms could have been very fertile if he had chosen to develop it earlier, but by 1978/9 it was too late. And when pressed in his arguments with Althusser and Conor Cruise O'Brien, he fell back on Marxism as such, unitary, and gave away his own case. He had to find another way out and he located it empirically, in December 1979. But first a recap.

From the History Group to the New Left — 1946/1956 The History Group of the Communist Party was a significant part of the romantic dimension in the CP. Freedom rather than economics was its motif. Its members took the English story from the days of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (on which Rodney Hilton

Ethical Record, February, 1995 5 wrote the essential text), through the Lollards, to the radical wing of the Reformation; to the Seekers, Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers and Muggletonians; through Bunyan, Swift and Paine to the early trade unions and reformers; to the Chartists, early Socialists, Fabians, SDF, Great Dock Strike, ILP to the Labour Party of 1900; the Taff Vale Case and the Osborne Judgement. It can all be made to seem antecedent to 1917 and the birth of the Communist Party of Great Britain three years later. There is then the General Strike, the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Franco's Spain including the International Brigade and the Popular Front, concluding with the war-time alliance with the Soviet Union. With suitable touches on the historiographical tiller the story can be made to hang together.

A.L. Morton had done the groundwork in his Peoples' History of England (1938), the genius of Christopher Caudwell, killed in Spain, sparked the imagination and Christopher Hill's The English Revolution 1640 (1940) opened up a goldmine. And amongst us were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill himself and Edward Thompson. It was a remarkable collection of people from those at the top of their profession to first-year history students like myself. There were day-schools, week-end schools, the journal Past and Present. Even the main wall at the King Street party centre featured a great mural exemplifying 600 years of struggle. The thing had immense promise. It was all broken up in 1956, but there were ten good years.

It was in that context that Edward, in 1948, set out to write his magnum opus on William Morris. That same year he went to Leeds as a Tutor in the Extra-Mural Department of Leeds University. He stayed there for seventeen years until 1965. He never took a decision to be a historian. Time, place, circumstance and people edged him into it — from literature. William Morris appeared in 1955, published by Lawrence and Wishart, the Party's publisheil

Four years later he gave a lecture to the William Morris Society (published in 1965) in which he significantly revised his original estimate. He dealt with the incompatibility of Morris and Engels:

"...which, by various twists and turns of history, became perpetuated in the mainstream of the later Marxist tradition, and which made it incapable of absorbing the great enrichment of the ethical content of Communism which was Morris' unique contribution."

He then goes on to quote one of Morris's last lectures, in 1895, in which he defines communism as "the system of neighbourly common sense." Shades of the Sage of Highgate! Edward then adds his own gloss: "The history of class struggle is at the same time a history of human morality." This, Marx and Lenin never said: right and wrong were but aspects of class relations. The divide had become an abyss.

1956 — Annus Mirabilis On 25th February 1956 Nikita Khruschev, the General Secretary of the CPSU made his famous secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Party, denouncing Stalin in the strongest terms and blaming it all on 'the cult of the individual'; which, of course, let everyone else off the hook. After more than thirty years of absolute adulation and totalitarianism it was a profound shock to Communism worldwide. But, being secret, its impact was delayed, except in Great Britain alone.

6 Ethical Record. February, 1995 All delegates, including those of fraternal parties elsewhere, obtained copies of the speech. A Polish delegate dispatched his immediately to the Editor of The Observer in London, who promptly scrapped the whole of the next issue of the paper (apart from the Sports Section) and published the speech in full. In a later version, published by The Guardian, it occupied thirty pages of small print.

A storm broke out in the 30,000 strong CPGB. The Executive Committee, to ride that storm, set up The Commission on Inner Party Democracy to consider the internal situation in the British Party in the light of the revelations about Stalin. The Commission had fifteen members and eleven of them were full-time Party staff! I was one of the remaining four. The Report of the Commission was, predictably, a whitewash but the Minority Report signed by Christopher Hill, Malcom MacEwen and myself said: "Communism's greatest strength is, or ought to be, the truth" and much more to that effect — a foretaste of Gorbachov's message in 1985. After nine Friday evening meetings the Hungarian Revolution broke out, which I proceeded to defend in The University Church in Cambridge (with Mervyn Stockwood and Malcolm Muggeridge) and in the columns of The News Chronicle. I was promptly suspended for three months by my own District Committee at Luton.

Up in Yorkshire Edward Thompson and John Saville launched The Reasoner, a 32-page duplicated journal written by dissenters for dissenters within the CP; there were three issues. They were instructed by the Party to cease publication and refused. Edward then resigned and replaced The Reasoner by The New Reasoner which lasted for ten issues.

In Oxford it was different. There, a group of individual undergraduates round Stuart Hall and Ralph Samuel launched The Universities and Left Review, the terms of reference of which were much wider than the CP — the new word was 'commitment'.

The struggle for the soul of the Party went on until the 25th (Special) Congress of April 19th-22nd 1957, at Hammersmith Town Hall. In the meantime Kommunist, the theoretical organ of the CPSU, had declared Christopher Hill, Malcolm MacEwen and myself 'main enemies of the Soviet Union'.

At the Easter Congress, Dutt and Gollan drove through a hard Stalinist line and steam-rollered the opposition. Little did they know it but they were killing the Party. In 1956/57 some 10,000 of the best members left by expulsion, resignation or lapse. At the same Easter I resigned from the Party and joined the Cambridge Labour Party the same day. Edward joined the Labour Party some years later and kept his card to the end. I was the Cambridge Delegate to Conference in 1958 and was the Organising Secretary of the first nuclear base demo in Britain that same year — the Thor base at Mepal near Ely. I was expelled in 1959 for being a member of a proscribed organisation — The Socialist Labour League. In 1962 Bertrand Russell tore up his Labour Party card on camera. The issue of Labour Party membership was to become critical in the case of EPT. At the end of the day does one look to Westminster and Whitehall or to the truth and people power? The new and difficult path led through the Direct Action Committee (1957), the Committee of 100 (1960), the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1962), the feminism of the 'seventies up to The Greenhorn Common Peace Camp of 1981. It involved direct action, direct democracy and civil disobedience. It was the path that Edward never took.

The New Left of 1956 moved into the academic sidelines when Perry Anderson in 1962 took over the editorial chair of The New Left Review, formed by the merger of the Yorkshire and Oxford journals. Edward was busy writing his next great work, The

Ethical Record, February, 1995 7 Making of the English Working Class, that came out in 1963. It was commissioned originally as a would-be standard text for teaching purposes, but Edward fed into it all that he was learning from his Yorkshire students and original research. It took on a new and dynamic dimension and a cause i.e. to rescue the story of the people "from the enormous condescension of posterity". The book has had vast influence. There are those who say that he over-egged the pudding, overlooking the fact for instance tha t Chartism, that ultimate working class association, was very substantially led by the best elements from the middle classes — Fergus O'Connor, an Irish landlord; George Julian Harney, a journalist; Lovett, a self-employed artisan; Ernest Jones, a barrister; O'Brien, a teacher; and J.R. Stephens, of the cloth. The great campaigns for the Reform Bill 1830/32 were led by National Unions of the Middle and Working Classes. But he changed the balance of historiography. There is something to be said for swinging the pendulum. No history is ever definitive.

Class and Edward Thompson His pre-occupation with class invites the question: what was his own class position in English society? A most difficult and delicate question. We are today living in the dying days of deference society. That is not the society in which Edward was brought up, and which made him what he was. To put it boldly, bluntly and crudely, in language that is now being lost to us: Edward Thompson was brought up to be an officer and gentleman and that is what he was. He is not to be seen in any other way.

It is all to do with Walter Scott and his Waverley novels. He and his kind wrote the rules of the nineteenth century's neo-chivalry. It was about muscular Christianity, the Public Schools, Oxford and Cambridge, the Army, the Navy, India and the Colonial Office. There was a lot of looting and self-interest but there was also disinterested scholarship and service in an atmosphere of immense self-confidence, brutally arrogant at its worst and sublime at its best. Edward Thompson Snr. was made in Oxford and India. Frank and Edward Jnr. Made themselves very much in his image. Three million British graves are its witness and Frank's, in Bulgaria, is one of them.

The aristocracy and landed gentry have always had their scholarly dnd radical wing. They didn't have to have titles. Some did, some didn't. They were born and bred to rule and took their vocation for granted. The residue is still with us, but fading fast. Edward disliked towns and loved big houses in the country. He lived in one, Wick Episcopi, in Worcestershire — the one-time manor of a Bishop. He disliked large conferences; for him it was the study, the tutorial, the seminar and the small class. He saw himself in relation to the people who, with his help, wouid inherit the earth or at least aspire to do so.

But the world has changed. It is not like that any more. Maybe, deep down, he knew that too. It is one explanation of his profound pessimism and of the sweeping doubts that assailed him from time to time. At the beginning of December 1979 he wrote:

"I can see no reason why we should be able to bear (the) foul storm out. I doubt whether we can pass our liberties on and I am not even confident that there will be a posterity to enjoy them, l am full of doubt. All I can say is that, since we have had the kind of history that we have had, it would be contemptible in us not to play out our old roles to the end." Writing by Candlelight p.256.

He expected World War III. He expected the destruction of Western civilisation. He expected to lose. In his only novel The Sykaos Papersthe heroine. Helena, standing on the moon, watches the Earth blow up in nuclear war between the super-powers. She is the

8 Ethical Record, February, 1995 only living human being. She ma kes her will and dies:

"I go out through the gate of my flesh, carrying with me, like a basket of flowers, my memories of love and friendships and natural joys. Accepting the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Sorry that the Good lost out (it was a near thing). RENOUNCING MY CONSCIOUSNESS NOT AT ALL. REFUSING THE LEAST TRIBUTE TO THE RULE OF NIHIL. I leave life of my own free will.

That was Edward speaking, the voice of tragedy, the defeat and death of nobility.

The Double Epitaph But not yet... The best is still to come. He had yet to write two triumphant epitaphs European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and Witness Against the Beast.

Suddenly he found a way to cut loose from the past. It was 12 December 1979. Over the previous two years he had had a messy, even self-degrading exchange with Althusser, Kolakowski and Conor Cruise O'Brien. He should have known better. He was wasting his substance on marxism-as-a-ventilated-corpse. Overnight he just dropped it. He didn't renounce it; he just moved on and left it behind. He was a free man again. It was NATO that dug him out of despair: the decision to make and deploy land-based Cruise missiles if the Russians refused to evacuate their SS 20s. The deployment would take place by December 1983.

On 24 December 1979, the Red Army occupied Afghanistan. Edward sprang into action — a prophet re-armed. This time there was no repeating the shallow mistake of CND of the 'sixties in campaigning for single-nation unilateral action against a mere weapon. He went for the jugular — the Cold War itself.

The Government in its weird unwisdom had just published a Civil Defence leaflet on what to do in the event of nuclear war. It was Sandbags against the Bomb! It was called Protect and Survive. In Protest and Survive (selling 50,000 copies) and in the END Appeal that followed it in May Edward said:

"We must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West' but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state."

It was an idea with ancient roots, Stoic and Christian, but it was new in relation to an immediate physical objective within our reach -- the Cold War. European Nuclear Disarmament leapt into being in fanfares of publicity. Working Groups crossed the Iron Curtain. Ken Coates (today an MEP) from Nottingham's END set up the great international Conventions that started in 1981. The Kremlin and the Pentagon joined in reviling the name of Edward Thompson. Could there have been a greater compliment? In September 1981 the March of the Women (supported by men for the first four months) left South Wales for Greenham Common and became the famous Peace Camp at the eight gates.

In the summer of 1980 Gdansk rose. We were pushing at an open door, but it was not all sweetness and light. 1983 was seriously anti-climactic. The separatists had taken a firm grip at the Yellow Gate at Greenham Common and refused to allow CND to organise a

Ethical Record, February, 1995 9 major demo in their support. When the missiles were flown into the base, on the Monday morning after Armistice Sundary 1983, there was barely a whimper. But the message had gone about and soon the zero-zero agreement put an end to both Cruise and SS 20s. Today Greenham Common is a relic of modem archaeology. The Cold War died in 1989 and the Kremlin was lost to Communism in 1991.

On to Blake Edward's book on Blake was one of the four put to one side in December 1979. By 1986, after 600 meetings, spending two days a week at home, he had damaged his health and, suffering from exhaustion, called a halt to his peace work (it was mostly done anyway) and went back to the books. Edward's devotion to Blake and Morris dated back to the 'forties. It is a poetic verdict on his life that his first book was on one and his last on the other.

Witness Against the Beastis not about politics; it is about Blake's subject, the nature of the human psyche and what is impeding its wholeness and creativity. High on the list of impediments is The Beast i.e. the power of Church and State to make fixed moral laws that enchain the human spirit. Blake's life and work was witness against that Beast.

Blake was the climactic expression of antinomianism. Nomos is the Law and the law is enacted through the head and behind the head is the whip and the sword. Over against them all is the heart, the poetic genius, authentic humanity. We are all divided selves and our worst chains are between our own ears because our culture has been imposed upon us from without. We can only free ourselves from within. This does not rule out political and economic action but puts them in their place. Humanity and the arts have been subordinated to science, technology and the making of money. Our culture, our very way of life, is upside down.

'Life is made for joy and woe And when that you rightly know, Then through life you safely go.'

So simple, yet consumer society cannot see it! Edward goes back to the earlier part of the seventeenth century to examine the tradition of antinomianism — amongst the Diggers and the teachings of Winstanley, through the Ranters, the Quakers, the Muggletonians and the Universalists, in search of the red thrcad that gives all this continuous meaning. Then, tnirabile dictu. he actually, physically, locates England's very last Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, a fruit farmer in Kent, goes to see him and persuades him to leave his eighty applc-boxes of archives to the British Library where they are now housed.

On the last page of Edward's last book we read:

"Blake's vision had not been into the rational government of man but into the liberation of an unrealised potential, an alternative nature, within man: a nature masked by circumstance, repressed by the Moral Law, concealed by Mystery and self-defeated by the other nature of 'self-love'. Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast."

Amen to that!

1 Palmer. RD. EP. Thompson: Objections anti Oppositions (1994) pb. verso. The notes of this book constitute a very comprehensive Bibliography. 2 Rather than criticise Edward directly I have included some references to my own contemporary thinking and action to indicate that there were other paths that he might have taken but did not. ci

10 Ethical Record. February. 1995 MANAGING THE PUBLIC SECTOR THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE?

Gerald Vinten Professor of Management Policy, Luton Unkersity. Lecture to the Ethical Society, 8 January 1995

With the various strategies adopted by government over the past decade to infiltrate the public sector with private sector management approaches, it is not surprising that some convergence between the two sectors should take place. This will never amount to total identity, since there are distinctive needs and traditions in the public sector, and there is also much that the public sector can contribute to improvement in the workings of the private sector, It does, however, add to the complexity of managing the public sector to the extent of risking it becoming the art of the impossible. To introduce some order to the perennial debate about the nature of the two sectors, a six-fold classification is suggested as suitable for pursuing the discussion:

DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR I. Scale, complexity, society-wide basis. Consistency and conformity more significant. The political element. The immeasurability of certain public sector work. The concept of accountability. Hierarchical, bureaucratic life-time career, with relatively inflexible pay & promotion.

1. Scale, complexity, society-wide basis The public sector is big business. It is a major employer of labour. In some local government areas the local authority is the largest employer, and the local labour market therefore depends heavily on it. It can certainly be compared with the largest of companies. It is also highly complex. The representative company is small, with owner- managers, little working or share capital, and 'a single product or very small product range. Even large companies sometimes find advantage in divesting themselves of some of their products or subsidiaries in the interests of simplicity, market concentration and increased profitability.

The public sector can afford no such luxury. It continually has new responsibilities added to existing ones, and the interrelations of these responsibilities are highly complex. This is particularly so since the UK's entry into the European Community and with the need to adopt a world perspective, for example in relation to trade policy and the preservation of public health. The public sector deals with society across the board. It cannot choose to opt out, as can a company opt out of operating in a particular type of market. The range of issues is vast, from housing the homeless, waste collection, inner- city policy, fire-fighting, to running diplomatic missions abroad, encouraging free trade, providing education and social services, and safeguarding the consumer interest. It is possible to avoid the products of an individual company, except in the few monopoly cases; it is not possible to avoid the output of the public sector, which touches everbody's life.

The average public sector manager does not, of course, have to cope with all this complexity personally. He or she wilt have a discrete and manageable segment of it to cope with, and this is similar to those in either public or private sectors.

Ethical Record, February, 1995 11 Consistency and conformity more significant There is less scope for individual creativity and initiative in the public sector. Risk-taking in a commercial sense is often outlawed. This was plain from the Fay Committee report on the Crown Agents in 1977. The Crown Agents had indulged in some speculative investments which then went bad. Although this was due to incompetence rather than to misconduct, it was considered unwise for the Crown Agents to have attempted to operate as financiers on their own account. Equally Clive Holtham, when Director of Finance at the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, was criticised for serious managerial failure in the way he indulged in interest rate swaps (subsequently shown to be illegal) as a means of 'creative' financial management. The public sector is more likely to be governed by the rule-book and procedural manuals, with a standard means of communication being the memorandum and the report, successively altered by layers of. higher management, sometimes on purely stylistic grounds rather than for reasons of content.

The political element It is certainly true that there are board politics in companies, and in the multi-national company there may be many similarities to what goes on in Parliament, Whitehall and the Town Hall. Nevertheless, the operating situation is different, with a distinction between members (MPs and councillors) and officers (civil servants and local government professional officers). This can lead to a fudging of responsibility and a resistance to action on both sides. Many or most company board members will be executive directors, and thereby top managers in their own right, able directly to compel adherence to their directives, and not needing to overcome resistance from a civil servant or local government officer who will likely be more knowledgable and better briefed than they are.

The immeasurability of certain public sector work It is easier to measure the output of a car factory than that of a social services department or the police service. Ultimately, output generally, whether of public or private sector, needs to be measured in terms of consumer satisfaction, and this probably presents equal problems to both. There are problems of defining effectiveness in the public sector. Many of the claims that effectiveness has been defined, measured and assessed, turn out to be false, or only the easy-to-measure options have been looked at. Additionally one respect in which the public sector is quite different from the private sector is that it is extraordinarily difficult to keep campaigns for efficiency away from politics, and this an additional complication in making sensible evaluations.

The concept of accountability Accountability involves the fulfilment of a formal obligation to disclose periodically, in adequate detail and consistent form, to all those who are directly and indirectly responsible or properly interested, the: purposes; principles; procedures; relationships; results; income and expenditure that are involved in any activity so that evaluation and decisions can be made. Briefly, it is an obligation to reveal, explain and justify what one does or how one discharges one's responsibilities.

Since tax-payers are captive subscribers, there is a need to be more fully accountable to them. This does involve a higher cost, as does the political process, but it is seen as being vital to the nature of democracy. The National Audit Office, the external auditor for central government, owes accountability to Parliament, and this leads to only an indirect relationship with the taxpayers, and a style of public report which may be less than fully informative to the taxpayer, especially since heads of government or related departments may forbid the printing of certain detail. By way of contrast, the Audit Commission, as

12 Ethical Record, February, 1995 the external auditor for local government and the National Health Service, has a direct relationship with the local government electorate which can raise detailed questions and objections to items of expenditure. The leads to detailed reports 'in the public interest' as well as guides to good managerial practice and general value for money reports, a handful being researched each year.

The difference in public and private sector accountability may be seen in how far it is possible to push a consumer complaint. Civil servants, local government officers and other public sector workers whose work brings them in contact with the public, will recall huge files relating to one or two of their 'customers', the size of whose complaint is only exceeded by their ability to enter into incessant correspondence with everyone from the Pope to the Prime Minister. The private sector would not be so resilient in dealing with such awkward matters, however justified in themselves.

The demands imposed by procedures for accountability are elaborate and time- consuming. The local government tax payer has a right to question items of local authority expenditure through the Audit Commission auditors, and even to see invoices substantiating expenditure and to raise issues of value for money. Pressure groups, such as those representing the commercial tax payers, can put local authorities to a lot of time and effort by making lengthy investigations, with results reported back to relevant committees before a final report can be compiled. In central government, departments paying welfare benefits or collecting taxes have quasi-judicial tribunals of appeal, and there is always the report that must be made on the outcome to the M.P., Minister or Ombudsman. Nationalised industries, a half-way stage between public and private sectors, were automatically provided with a consumer consultative committee on the grounds that they were monopolies or near monopolies, and control by market forces could not be presumed. After privatisation this arrangement has been continued, for example with gas and telecommunications, since the number of market entrants providing effective competition remains extremely low.

The private sector has its own institution of accountability, such as a statutory ombudsman for building societies, and a voluntary scheme for banking and insurance. In the mainstream financial institutions, consumer complaints can be pushed as far as in the public sector, and there are also the various Self-Regulatory Organisations (SR0s) under the Securities and Investment Board. Elsewhere there are voluntary codes of practice in a number of consumer areas, encouraged by the Office of Fair Trading. Just as the aggrieved public sector consumer can challthge a perceived ministerial failure to implement a statutory duty through the process of judical review, so the private sector consumer may seek redress through the law courts.

6. Hierarchical, bureaucratic, life-time career, with inflexible pay and promotion Most parts of the public sector may be considered as hierarchical and bureaucratic, but then much of the private sector is not so different, unless we include worker co-operatives, and even these display some bureaucratic tendencies. Bureaucracy will be more or less present according to the needs of the situation. However the public sector may be considered to have a leaning towards the bureaucratic as compared with the private sector. At one time the inflexibility could be almost total. For example, the civil service and National Health Service for a long time resisted recruiting staff anywhere other than at the lowest incremental point on the salary range. The NHS actually needed approval from the Department of Health and Social Security to depart from this rule, and it was let known that this would not ordinarily be granted. The result was that unsuspecting short-listed candidates would arrive at interview, at the end of which starting salary was

Ethical Record, February, 1995 13 discussed, and sin: e their existing salary might well be above the new salary minimum, they then discovered they needed to take a cut. This wasted their time and led to inefficient recruitment. Such procedures largely belong to a past era, although one does still find occasional instances that have survived the wide-ranging reforms in public admin- istration in the 1980s.

The civil service was forced into less restricted recruitment criteria when it was found guilty of sex discrimination by specifying upper age limits of 32 for certain executive officer and related posts, which was held to be unfair to women applicants. As often happens, this legal finding was of immense benefit to men also.

Job advertisements show just how much the culture has changed in the public sector. A chief executive position at Westminster City Council can be advertised as 'managing: director'. The Head of Education Management Services at the London Borough of Southwark has "to provide Business Management expertise to enable the Department to operate efficiently, economically and effectively and to provide professional advice on Business Management matters to the Director". Internal management consultants are increasingly being sought. Leased cars and other perquisites may be offered as an inducement for senior posts, and performance-related pay is very much the order of the day. It is also considered perfectly appropriate to talk of entrepreneurs in government. Public sector bosses do matter, although so do structures, missions and settings, since these alter over time. The following six facets of the entrepreneurial executive can all be found nowadays in the public sector: I. identify new missions and programmes for their organisations; develop and nourish external constituencies to support the new goals and programmes, and to support the organisation generally, while neutralising existing and potential opposition; create internal constituencies that support the new goals (while eliminating opposition), through changes in organisational structures, in recruitment systems and key appointments, and in reward and penalty systems; enhance the organisation's technical expertise (through recruitment of skilled personnel and addition of new equipment) in order to improve its capacity to identify and develop promising policy options, and to implement new goals and programmes; motivate and provide training for members of the organisAtion so that they have the skills to work efficiently in both old and new programme areas and the desire to extend their efforts beyond standard or accepted levels of performance; and systematically scan organisational routines, and points of internal and external pressure, in order to identify areas of vulnerability (to mismanagement and corruption and to loss of the leaders own power and position), followed by remedial action.

In conclusion, it can be seen that there is much by way of common language and practice between the two sectors. Equally, there is a distinctiveness about the public sector which requires a distinctive managerial approach. Failure to realise this can lead to chaos and inappropriate models of management being introduced. Think on and add to the six-fold classification. It should contribute to the debate on the boundaries of the State and the role of the public sector, and minimise decisions being made on narrow political ideology where the public interest should suggest otherwise.

Professor Gerald Vinten is the editor of "Whistleblowing - Subversion or Corporate Citizenship?" published by Paul Chapman, London in 1994, ISBN 1 85396 2384.

14 Ethical Record, February, 1995 BLATCHFORD, THE CLARION, GOD AND MY NEIGHBOUR

Dr. Peter Broks Unisersity of the West of England. Bristol. Lecture to Me Ethical Society, 15 January 1995

There is a very curious feature about the portrayal of scientists in popular magazines at the turn of the century. The most fulsome praise is to be found in the more religious publications. What, then, of any supposed conflict between science and religion? Courage, patience, modesty, selflessness, the moral efficacy of scientific practice made scientists ideal material for that genre of moralistic literature that had been so common earlier in the nineteenth century. More than this, the religious imagery with which science is depicted is as evident in the religious magazines as it is in the secular ones, perhaps even more so. In the religious magazine Good Words we can read of how, on approaching the telescope at the Yerke's observatory, "we stand at last, wondering and awe stricken, in the dim religious light of the very Holy of Holies of this Western temple". While from another contributor we have Darwin's Down house described as a 'silent, solitary shrine' which had been 'consecrated' by the genius of Darwin, "one of the noblest and yet humblest of the high priests of inductive science". When the trappings of religion are bestowed upon science by a religious magazine, and the last example comes from the pen of a clergyman, it may be small wonder that others, like Mona Caird at the Clarion, should borrow one of Spencer's terms and warn of the dangers of 'scientific Popery'.

Now here we have a further twist to the problem. Some of the fiercest attacks on science came from a magazine which also published some of the fiercest attacks on religion. Characteristically, it was the Clarion that gave prominent support to the anti-vivisection movement. In 1894 the magazine provided a good deal of editorial space for anti- vivisectionists to air their views. For example, Edward Carpenter urged the magazine's readers to protect animals from exploitation in the same way as the labour movement protected men. Edith Carrington feared the "modern craze for playing at physiological experiments" would demoralise the young, and argued that nothing could be learned about humans by torturing animals. At the same time Mona Caird protested that animal vivisection was licensed cruelty and was but one step from human vivisection: "the vivisectors most often come straight from the torture-trough of some mangled animal to the bedside of the patient. Is it surprising that sometimes the experiments commenced in the laboratory are tested in the hospital wards-7

These tirades, perhaps, show not so much a concewrn for animal welfare, as an attempt to arouse "the basic moral instincts of laymen against an arrogant coalition of scientists, medical men, and legislators'. Likewise, it was the Clarion that was most sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement.

The Clarion is of further interest when we examine the 'conflict' between science and religion. From her study of the reasons for unbelief among members of the secular movement, Susan Budd concluded that, "the revolution in scientific and theological thinking seems largely irrelevant". The loss of faith, she argued, was not an intellectual but a moral matter. Of 150 biographical accounts in her survey, only two mention having read Darwin or Huxley. As causes of unbelief, much more influential books were the Bible, Paine's "The Age of Reason", & Robert Blatchford's, "God and My Neighbour". But there is something which Budd does not mention and which brings a twist to our tale — Blatchford's book was in fact based upon a series of articles that appeared in the Clarion in 1903 under the heading "Religion and Science". However sympathetic

Ethical Record, February, 1995 15 Blatchford may have been to those voices of 'anti-science', it was still science that was his main weapon in attacking organised religion.

Blatchford's formative years were spent in the army, a period of his life which he was to look back on with great fondness, largely for the feelings of comradeship which were felt with his fellow soldiers. Leaving as a sergeant, he then worked as a timekeeper and clerk before turning his hand to journalism, first on BelPs Life and later on the Chronicle. In 1891 he left the Chronicle following a disagreement over his views on socialism. He took with him his brother Montague, the humorist E.F. Fay and drama critic, Alex Thompson. Together they set up the Clarion, and although they worked as an editorial team, it was very much Robert Blatchford who was in charge. In 1912 Blatchford told his readers that the founders of the paper had started the Clarion "In order to get that freedom to advocate Socialism, which was denied to them by other newspapers". The paper's first leading article, under Blatchford's old Chronicle pen-name of `Nunquam', declared that the policy of the Clarion was "a policy of humanity, a policy not of party, sect, or creed; but of justice, of reason and mercy".

It was, however, an idiosyncratic brand of socialism that Blatchford peddled. "We were out for socialism and nothing but socialism", he wrote in his autobiography, but added "we were Britons first and Socialists next". This 'imperial socialism' did not find favour with many within the labour movement, and the Clarion was to lose face (and readers) over its support for the war in South Africa and Blatchford's anti-German jingoism prior to the Great War. In 1910 following its attacks on Free Trade, its warnings about Germany, and its support for compulsory military service, the paper was boycotted by the Labour Party.

Nevertheless, the Clarion did call itself a 'labour paper' but it aimed for a wider appeal than this term might allow, and as the paper often lamented, 'labour' did not support it:

"More than half our readers are not working men at all. And if we made the mistake which other labour papers have made, and devoted our columns entirely to labour questions, we would be ruined in three months". The answer to why a socialist paper could not thrive was, according to Blatchford, quite simple — there were not enough socialists. "Moral: make more socialists".

This 'educationalist' strategy of Blatchford's formed the intellectual, moral and political stance of the Clarion. The paradox for an educationalist paper, however, is that once the readers become educated they move on to read other things. "Within the longest term perspective", Logie Barrow has written, "the Clarion's width of readership may possibly be seen as marking the convergence of some respectable, with plebeian, intellectual dissent'. Evidence from correspondence to the paper suggests that the readership may have been predominantly upper-working and lower-middle class, letters being written by clerks, shop assistants, and servants, especially women servants. Barrow speculates that they may also have been young, lonely and vaguely intellectual.

Circulation figures indicate that the readership was far from loyal. Starting off at 30-40,000 in the early 1890s, sales rose to 60,000 following the publication of the penny edition of Blatchford's "Merrie England", but dropped with the paper's support for the South African War. After the 1906 general election had returned 29 Labour MPs, the circulation was regularly above 50,000 and reached a peak of 82,000 in 1908 before Blatchford's jingoism alienated his readers, whose numbers plummeted to around 10,000 with the outbreak of war in Europe. Nevertheless, the paper became a movement in itself,

16 Ethical Record, February, 1995 and Harrison's opinion that "the Clarion movement was always bigger and better than its admired but vain and immature leader", seems to me to be a fair assessment°. Around missionary vans, cycling clubs, 'Cinderella clubs', Clarion choirs, handicraft guilds, field clubs and holiday camps, "a nationwide society of hopeful people came together in the name of human fellowship".

This then was the Clarion, a focus for socialist debate and activity, but where did it stand on the subject of science and religion?

In his history of the Victorian church, Owen Chadwick has noted that, "in 1900 men talked as though the conflict was over'. We can see this in a series of features on the Marquis of Salisbury which appeared in Good Words in 1902 and which included an article on "Religious belief — scientific research". It explained:

"Not so many years ago it appeared as though the breach between science and religion was past all healing. This state of things has passed away, and thoughtful men rejoice to believe that the revelations of these two great forces are by no means inconsistent one with the other".

Similarly, a 'Sunday Reading' of 1897 dismissed the possible conflict between Genesis and science by commenting that "the time is past for such controversies". We have learned, it said, "that it is a misuse of scriptures to treat it as if it were a text-book and primer of Natural History".

The staff at the Clarion thought differently. In 1910 A.E. Fletcher wrote: "science and christianity as taught in the churches are hopelessly irreconcilable. Every sttempt to harmonise them has failed". In 1904, Robert Blatchford complained of how a recent speech by Sir Oliver Lodge had been misrepresented by apologists:

"Christian apologists, grown humble in adversity, have lately made a good deal of capital — more than it is worth, by far — out of the occasional statements of some leading scientists that there is no antagonism between science and religion".

Lodge's 'God', said Blatchford, was not necessarily the Christian God, and besides, he added, Lodge did not know what he was talking about!

Blatchford's antagonism towards religion, and more especially towards the Church, was uncompromising. His most sustained attack came in 1903 with a series of articles later compiled as a book, "God and My Neighbour", the book which Budd has argued was so influential as a cause of unbelief. It began in the Clarion of 23 January 1903 with a review of a cheap edition of Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe". It is a masterly book, said Blatchford, which "demolishes the entire structure upon which the religions of the world are built". The following week the Clarion printed a number of letters in defence of the Christian faith. Blatchford responded with invective:

"Our sun is but a speck in the universe. Our earth is but a speck in the solar system. Are we to believe that the God who created all this boundless universe got so angry with the children of the apes that He sent them all to Hell for a score of centuries, and then could only appease His rage by sending His son to be nailed upon a cross? Do you believe that? Can you believe that?

Ethical Record, February, 1995 17 -- No, as I said before, if the theory of evolution be true, there was nothing to atone for, and nobody to atone. Man has never sinned against God.In fact the whole fabric of the Christian faith is a mass of error. There was no creation. There was no fall. There was no atonement. There was no Adam, and no Eve, and no Eden, and no devil, and no hell". Fearful of estranging thousands of their supporters, Alex Thompson, the ma naging editor of the Clarion, implored Blatchford not to embark on a campaign against orthodox religion. "I can't help it", Blatchford is reported as replying, "it has to be said. It may smash us, but I've got to say it".

On February 13 the Clarion published the first of Blatchford's papers on the subject under the heading "Science and Religion". Science, he argued, had not proved that there was no God, but had made it impossible for any reasonable man to accept the account of God, and of God's relations to man, given in any religion of which he had ever heard. He stated his position:

"Science and common sense seem to me to render untenable the Mosaic account of the creation, the doctrines of the fall and the atonement, the doctrines of the divinity and resurrection of Christ, the belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the personal interferences of Providence in earthly affairs, and the theory of everlasting punishments and rewards .... any religion teaching any of these things is a delusion".

All the advantages in knowledge, and all the improvements in the Christian religion, he said, were due to scientists and sceptics. Neither Christ nor His Church had made any contribution to our better knowledge of the origin and nature of the universe or of man:

"Step by step, the superstition, the ignorance, and the arrogance of the Christian Churches have been driven back. Step by step, the Christian Churches have retreated, cursing, fighting, and hating. And the retreat continues".

Week by week Blatchford replied to criticism and elaborated upon his case. By the end of March the arguments were more specifically about religious doctrine rather than about religion and science, but the debate about revelation, the Bible, and the resurrection of Christ continued into July.

Not surprisingly, the vehemence of Blatchford's attack did not go unanswered. Some correspondents argued that Blatchford's criticisms could only be applied to dogmatic mediaevalism in Christianity and not to present-day beliefs. To which the reply was, that if this were so then why not change the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer? Many wished to point out that the theory of evolution was accepted by most clergy and educated Christians. "Of what use is it", countered Blatchford, "to say that the bulk of educated Christians accept the theory of evolution, if the whole of the Christian Churches continues to teach the theory of the Creation"? A theological student added that far from being a hindrance, the theory of evolution was a help to religious belief. Blatchford, however failed to see how this could be, since Christianity was based upon the ideas of the Fall and Atonement. When was the Fall, he wondered, when man was a monkey? One correspondent ventured to write of the infinite goodness of God shown in directive evolution. Blatchford, however, had an old argument to hand: "what of the infinite goodness of God in teaching the cholera microbe to feed on man", or, he continued, sharks to eat swimmers, or greyhounds to catch hares? Indeed, there was little that was new in any of Blatchford's arguments, and much that was reminiscent of Bradlaugh's

18 Ethical Record, February, 1995 attacks thirty years previously.

Unlike Bradlaugh's polemic, however, evolutionary arguments were at the vanguard of Blatchford's attack, and such arguments have a prominent place in the late nineteenth century socialist thought. In 1875 in a public debate between Bradlaugh and Brewin Grant, six nights of disputation on Christianity and human progress brought hardly a mention of evolution and no mention at all of Darwin. By the end of the century the story was quite different. For example, an examination of mechanics' institutes shows that they were helping to spread an evolutionary socialist ideology far from the middle class ideals of their founding fathers. From his study of institutes in Yorkshire, John Laurent concludes that by the 1880s and '90s working class people "had had considerable exposure and access to ideas which might serve as the basis for evolutionary arguments for socialism"h. The preeminence given to Darwin in the socialist hagiography is conveniently highlighted by the Clarion. In the early months of 1907 the Clarion carried out a poll of its readers to find "Britain's Greatest Benefactor". Darwin emerged as clear favourite in the poll, pushing Caxton and Cromwell into a poor second and third place. (Single votes were also cast for-Guy Fawkes and Keir Hardie's mother).

Despite the popularity of Darwin among socialists, the evolutionary strand in radical thought was neither new nor Darwinian. Adrian Desmond has shown that in the radical street literature of the early nineteenth century, progressive transmutation provided a naturalistic analogy for the moral and economic progress attending political trans- formation — an atheistic blueprint for social change. "Lamarckian environmental determinism ", says Desmond, "drove out the deity and legitimated the republican struggle by providing a model of ascent power-driven from below'. Similarly. Laurent finds end of the century socialists rejecting individualism and competition, and arguing instead for organicism and co-operation from their evolutionary science. (Op cit.)

Clarion socialists were part of this continuing tradition. One correspondent to the 'Benefactor' poll supported Darwin for having replaced a "supine, looking-to-God attitude" with what amounted to a quasi-La marckian substitute: "man as a creature of heredity and environment, whose material salvation depends upon his own exertions". A second correspondent preferred simply to vote for Kropotkin. The theory of evolution, she believed, had given rise to a view of life that was harsh and devoid of pity, "excusing the excesses of that rabid licentious 'individualism', which came in with the factory system". Kropotkin, however, "afforded humanity a glimpse of what might be accomplished by the application of man's rirr knowledge and intelligence". Likewise, Harry Lowerison (a regular contributor on na iural history) urged readers to study nature for "you will find mutual aid here as well as rivalry", and in reviewing Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid" Blatchford argued that it was "partly an amplification, and partly a correction, of the Darwinian theory".

It was Darwin's emphasis upon environment and evolution that was important for socialists, not his mechanism of natural selectidn. Indeed, because it stopped the weeding out of the unfit, socialism was seen by its opponents as going against natural selection, so threatening to bring racial detcrioration and an end to progress. Significantly, when R.B. Suthers (another regular contributor) replied to his objection he did so, not by reaffirming the importance of selection, but by turning to the role of the environment. It was social conditions, he said, which produced the problem of the unfit, and it was the purpose of socialism not to stop the weeding process, but by changing the environment, to make it unnecessary. Thus, a good case might be made for seeing late ninetenth-century socialist environmentalism not as a recently reworked Darwinism, but as the continuation of older

Ethical Record. February, 1995 19 Owenite traditions. Certainly, Blatchford's (and the Clarion's) educationalist strategy was characteristic of an Owenite perspective, and Logie Barrow has agreed that the Owenite mix of rationalism and millenialism was transmitted to the 'new socialism' of the 1880s, '90s and 1900s by plebeian spiritualism'. Although the Clarion left the matter open to debate, it did lend a sympathetic ear to spiritualism, much more so than many other periodicals, and shared a number of contributors with the spiritualist magazine Two Worlds. It also seems that plebeian spiritualism was strongest in the areas of highest prestige for the Clarion. Blatchford wrote of respect for spiritualism after discovering the extent of support given to it by A.R. Wallace (socialist and co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection). Wallace for his part admired Blatchford's "Merry England" (a vision of a socialist future), was a Clarion reader from its early days and also contributed articles.

It is with this mix of socialism, evolutionary theory and spiritualism in mind that I want to leave you with a final image: in the 1920s, Blatchford, vociferous socialist and scourge of organised religion, attending seances and voting Conservative.

Notes to Secondary Sources

I. Richard D. French, "Anti-vivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society", (London, 1975). Susan Budd, "The Loss of Faith: reasons for unbelief among members of the secular in England, 1850-1950, in "Past and Present" vol.36 (1967). Logic Barrow. "The Socialism of Robert Blatchford and the Clarion 1898-1918", (PhD. thesis, University of London, 1975). Stanley Harrison, "Poor Men's Guardians: a record of the struggles for a democratic newspaper press, 1763-1973. (London. 1974). Owen Chadwick, "The Victorian Church". (London, 1966). John Laurent, "Science, Society and Politics in late nineteenth century England. a further look at Mechanics' Institutes". in "Social Studies of Science", vol.14 (1984) Adrian Desmond, "Artisan Resistance and Evolution in Britain, 1819-1848", in "Oriris" (1987). Logic Barrow, "Independent Spirits; spiritualism and English plebeians. 1850-1910". (London, 1986).

VIEWPOINTS

David Ibry writes (How humanism skirted, ER December 1994, pp18-22) that some humanists may not have very clear ideas about the original meaning of the word humanism. He refers to one of its dictionary definitions, and remarks "surely there is much more than that to it!"

Yes, there is a great deal more than that to it. It is not very useful — if at all — to discuss words in terms of their original meaning; their meaning changes, and words can have several meanings.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition, 1933) gives altogether seven meanings of humanism. Humanism is defined as first, belief in the mere humanity of Christ; second, the quality of being human, devotion to human interest; third, any system of thought or action which is concerned with merely human interests, or with those of the human race in general; the Religion of Humanity [Comtism or Positivism]; fourth, devotion to those studies which promote human culture; literary culture; especially the system of the Humanists.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has: a theory of man in the world as a responsible being behaving independently of any revelation or of preternatural powers. This definition is better than others, especially from the Green viewpoint, as it claerly

20 Ethical Record, February, 1995 rejects revelation and the supernatural and is also not anthropocentric.

Humanist is defined as first, a student of human affairs, or of human nature; second, one versed in the humanities; a classical scholar, especially a Latinist; third, one of the scholars who, at the Renaissance, devoted themselves to the study of Roman, and afterwards of Greek, antiquity; hence applied also to later disciples of the same culture.

Today, humanism has two basic meanings: first, an ideology which rejects or disregards the supernatural or superhuman (the third meaning of humanism above); and second,therat: hurnaniores(the third definition of humanism, and the last two definitions of humanist). Socinianism (one form of religious humanism) corresponds to the first meaning of humanism above, which is different in meaning from both the senses just listed.

Discussion of what humanism is, and how humanism originated, has been bedevilled by using the several different definitions of humanism and humanist as though they covered a set of ideas which shared a common origin or a common core. The medizval Humanists, of whom Francesco Petrarco and Giovanni Boccaccio are examples, were as Ibry quite correctly points out, Christians. They did not reject the superhuman or the supernatural; the atheistic or agnostic humanism of today may well have roots in mediwval Europe or ancient Greece. but to apply the modern term to medneval scholars or ancient Greek philosophers imputes to them ideas which they would have rejected, and might not even have understood.

Peter Fleales' article The British Hegelians (ER, December 1994, pp10-16) touches on another subject covered in the current issue of New Humanist (NH, November 1994, passim): the life, work and ideas of Karl Popper, who is regarded by some as the official philosopher and ideologue of the Humanist movement. For me, humanism and socialism are linked; however, my efforts to persuade other humanists of this link, to which David Ibry alludes, seem now to have been largely misdirected effort. I should point out, for the record, that this was not part of a socialist or Marxist takeover bid for the humanist movement. However, many of those who objected to such activities seem quite happy with Karl Popper as idealogue of the Humanist movement, and the Open Society as a core principle of humanism. I suggest that the Humanist movement would be much more coherent and united if atheistic humanists focussed on their shared values rather than views held only by some humanists. Anything other than humanism's core values is up for discussion. For instance, the late Jim Addison spoke about other philosophies of science than that of Popper. Colin Mills — Amersham, Bucks

The Way Forward for Humanists?

The universal dissemination of knowledge, especially of the subjects of astronomy, geology, physiology, and the origin of species, has, in most civilised countries, led to the complete rejection of the "flat earth" theory and that of the "sepa rate creation" is not far behind, along with many other religious myths and legends which arc no longer credible. The result has been that many thinking people have lost faith in religion, and have become more or less inclined towards a secular point of view. Consequently, there has been a great falling off in church attendance and many churches are in grave financial difficulties. Nevertheless, only a very few "non-churchgoers" and "non-believers" in Britain have become identified with the "Humanist Movement", and many have continued to give nominal support to their original churches for "social" reasons, especially "hatches,

Ethical Record, February, 1995 21 matches and dispatches". The question arises, — WHY?

Perhaps it would help by considering the situation in some other countries. For example, Norway, a country with a population of just over four millions, has many thousands of registered "Humanists", compared with Britain, which has a population of more than fifty-six million, of whom only a few thousands are members of the various Humanist movements. (The exact number is not readily available as we have no united corporate identity). There must be a reason for this disparity. Unlike Britain, Norway is a purely democratic secular state. In Norway, religious bodies have no direct voice in the government and hence cannot, in this way, influence policy to their own advantage. In Britain, on the other hand, the "Upper House" of Parliament, the "House of Lords", is not democratically elected but consists of the descendants of a hereditary aristocracy, in which the governing members of the Church of England are entitled to sit by virtue of their office. It could be argued that they do not make the laws. These are made by the democratically elected 'House of Commons" and require to be signed by the Queen. But the Queen is the Head of the Anglican Church, which is a part of the State and subsidised by the Government in which it has a vested interest. The result is that the State Church has a unique advantage over all other religious and social bodies, when it comes to allocating taxes for purposes of State, Social and Cultural institutions.

The situation in Norway is entirely different. As in Britain, proportions of the taxes are allocated to various Cultural and Social institutions, including Religious bodies, but it is recognised that it would be unfair to allocate funds to the latter from taxes paid by those who have no interest in, and derive no benefit from, the services of the religions concerned.

The Norwegian government therefore, has arranged to compensate those people who have no church connection in proportion to their total number in the comniunity. They have also made it conditional that this group will undertake to provide social services similar to those traditionally provided by the churches, employing adequately trained and qualified officiants to perform such services where necessary, including institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons and social and public welfare fields in general.

It follows therefore, that non-believers and non-churchgoers in Norway have a personal interest in uniting to form a corporate body, in order tc arrange to meet such statutory requirements. In the absence of such a legal situation in Britain, where can we go from here?

It seems to me that.pending the time when the increasing number of people who are now campaigning for "Separation of Church and State" (including Humanists), achieve their aims, we should concentrate on several feasible objectives of our own. It is obvious that we need a larger representative organisation, with a much larger total membership than we have now, but there is no incentive, at present, for anyone to join the Humanist movement other than for mutual support or social companionship. The average person does not feel any need for moral support for having lost interest in religion and can probably find more socially attractive company elsewhere.

I therefore propose the following objectives:-

I. To unite to form a corporate organisation with a distinctive Title and Logo, representing all existing "Humanist" bodies in Britain, (with the possible exception

22 Ethical Record, February. 1995 of any who may be using the term "Humanist" to promote ideas incompatible with logical reasoning.) This would immediately enhance the value in the media of any "Humanist" viewpoint, if only by the total number of people represented.

2 That this unified association of Humanists should concentrate on providing, voluntarily, and in accordance with their means, at least some of the social services such as our Norwegian counterparts are required to provide to meet their statutory obligations. Payment for such services, could reasonably be expected provided these are rendered by suitably trained and qualified persons. This would not only greatly enhance our own public status, but could possibly attract some charitably minded people to participate. (Some groups have already been doing so for years, to the best of their limited ability).

3 By pooling resources, the various constituent bodies could also achieve many other aims which would be beyond their individual means. For example, the publication of a "quality" periodical for public distribution at a reasonable price. This could deal with topical moral and ethical issues from a Humanist point of view, in addition to some of the articles from individual Humanist publications, with perhaps some cartoons and lighthearted humour as well, similar to humanist magazines in other countries. For example, the Norwegian "Humanist", (6 iss. per an. Kr35 per copy), and the German "Diesseits" (quarterly, DM3.50 each). Given adequate public response, this could also result in a demand for a "Humanist Helpline" to give advice, on such subjects as funerals, weddings and other human situations.

It seems to me that all these proposals are feasible, if only in a small way to begin with, and would greatly enhance the status and influence of Humanism in this country. Some such future arrangement seems inevitable. Is there any good reason why such proposals should not now be seriously considered, if only as an objective at which to aim? Frank Holmes — Edinburgh

Public Debate on ANARCHO-TERRORISM A debate between Peter Cadogan and Nocolas Walter Conway Hall, London WC I Friday, 17 February 1995, beginning at 8.00 pm Further information from the London Anarchist Forum: 081-847 0203

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Registered 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 all relevant fields. We invite to membership all those who reject supernatural creeds and find themselves in sympathy with our views. At Conway Hall there are opportunities for participation in many kinds of cultural activities, including discussions, lectures, concerts and socials. The Sunday Evening Chamber Music Concerts founded in 1887 have achieved international renown. A reference and lending library is available, and all members receive the Society's journal, The Ethical Record eleven times a year. Funerals and Memorial Meetings are available to members. Membership is £10 p.a. Please apply to the Secretary for Membership Application forms.

Ethical Record, February, 1995 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall Humanist Centre, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1 Tel: 071-831 7723 FEBRUARY Sunday 12 11.00 am WRITING THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN UNORTHODOX VICTORIAN: G.H. LEWES. Profesor Rosemary Ashton 3.00 pm MEMBERS AFTERNOON

Tuesday 14 6.30 pm PHYSICS FOR BEGINNERS (V), ATOMIC PHYSICS Evening Class. Tutor: Norman Bacrac. El (inc tea).

Sunday 19 11.00 am EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Nicholas Maxwell 3.00 pm CAPITALISM IS COMPATIBLE WITH HUMANISM. David Reid

Tuesday 21 6.30 pm PHYSICS FOR BEGINNERS (VI), NUCLEAR PHYSICS. Evening Class. Tutor: Norman Bacrac. El (inc tea).

Sunday 26 11.00 am DARWIN (1809-1882); THE MAN WHO TURNED A LADDER INTO A BUSH. Ralph Ison 3.00 pm THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRANK RIDLEY — a celebration arranged by Ellis Hillman.

MARCH Sunday 5 11.00 am REASON, EMOTION AND THE ARTS. Nick McAdoo (Open University) 3.00 pm BALI ILLUSTRATED (inc. mass cremation). Ron Cady

Sunday 12 11.00 am NIETZSCHE AND HUMANISM. James Brix, Professor of Anthropology at Canisus College, N.Y. and contributing editor of Free Enquiry

British Association for the Advancement of Science Science Education and Technology Week — SET] Wednesday March 22 2 30 pm Dinosaurs and Creationism — Mike Howgate 4.30 pm Science and Religion — Norman Bacrac 6.00 pm The Image of Science in our Culture — Prof. Sir Hermann Bondi FRS.

SOUTH PLACE SUNDAY CONCERTS — 6.30 pm. Tickets 83.00 Feb 12 THE EMPEROR STRING QUARTET and CHARLES TUNNELL (Cello): Mozart; Boucourechliev; Schubert.

Feb 19 JOHANNES ENSEMBLE: Schoenberg; Brahms.

Feb 26 GOULD PIANO TRIO: Haydn; Faure; Brahms.

Mar 5 BRINDISI STRING QUARTET: Puree!, Bartok; Mendelssohn.

LONDON STUDENT SKEPTICS Room 3D, University of London Union, Malet Street, WC1. 7.30 pm. Feb 13 Bill Harman - The Liquefying blood of St. Januarius. (Video). Feb 27 Alan Bradley — Babel and beyond: a skeptical linguist's report. Mar 13 AGM

Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion square, London WC1R 4RL Printed by J.G. Bryson (Printer) Ltd., 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS