Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 117 No. 4 £1.50 April 2012 CONWAY CONFIDENTIAL GALA FUNDRAISING April 13th & 14th, 7pm CONCERT, 6 MAY 2012 www.conwaycollective.com A weekend festival of new performance at Conway Hall celebrating the hall, its history, and its neighbourhood, and launching The Conway Collective, the hall’s new artists in residence. Two days of fun and frolics where the possibility of “anything happening” becomes a reality. Conway Hall will be crammed to bursting point with a diverse mix of drama, comedy, installation, film, and music. Events inhabit every available corner of the building (including the Festival Bar), Timothy West performs complimented with workshops see pages 18, 24 asserting Conway Hall as a venue for innovative performance. PART I Friday 13th April 19.00 - 22.00 £7.00 PART II Saturday 14th April 14.00 - 17.00 £7.00 PART III Saturday 14th 18.00 - 22.00 £7.00 CONWAY CONFIDENTIAL - FESTIVAL PASS (all three parts) £14.00 To book tickets and get a full schedule and details visit www.conwaycollective.com THE INFLUENCE OF QUAKER PERSECUTION ON PAINE Sybil Oldfield 3 RELIGION, IDENTITY AND PSYCHIC DETACHMENT: EXPLORING SOME CONSEQUENCES Rumy Hasan 11 SOUTH PLACE, SCANDAL AND – THE TITANIC? Jennifer R. Jeynes 16 GALA FUNDRAISING CONCERT Simon Callaghan 18 VIEWPOINT Barbara Smoker 18 HAITI – BUSINESS AS USUAL? Graham Bell 19 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk Chairman: Chris Purnell Vice-chairman: Jim Herrick Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison [email protected] Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Angelo Edrozo, Sean Foley, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerma Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected] New Members M Kinshott, Newham, London Mrs L H Lewy, Hendon, London Ms Catherine Maminska, Westminster, London Ms Nina McVeigh, Croydon Evan Parker, Hampstead, London Ms Linda-Marie Raby, Rotherhithe, London Terence Raby, Rotherhithe, London T C Snow, New Barnet, London James Walsh, St Albans Raymond Ward, Rotherhithe, London David Wilkinson, Leytonstone, London SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Library and Archives. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is now £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65) CONWAY HALL EVENING CLASSES, 24 April 2012 Conway Hall is running evening classes developed for a general audience by members of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group: Brendan Larvor, Peter Cave and Prof. Richard Norman: To make a booking or for more information about dates, tutors and further details on course content, please email [email protected] or call 020 7061 6744 or look up www.conwayhall.org.uk/courses 2 Ethical Record, April 2012 THE INFLUENCE OF QUAKER PERSECUTION ON PAINE Sybil Oldfield, University of Sussex Lecture to the Thomas Paine Society meeting at Conway Hall, 10 March 2012 Putting the World to Rights: The Presumptuous Audacity of Tom Paine How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at 13 (Gilbert Wakefield, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’) a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt: how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life ? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? Or should governments be representative and accountable – recallable through election? Is humanity capable of a more just, and therefore much more equal, distribution of the world’s resources and goods? Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? Can any religion, even Christianity be true? But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts; he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain: He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just Common Sense for them to do so. Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke; Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in The Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. Paine did not engage only with Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of the Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the Second Part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. Ethical Record, April 2012 3 Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God himself and denied the divinity of ‘Christ’ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church’. Where on earth did Paine get his audacity from? It was not unexampled. The Epistle of James, the most radical, angry exhortation to social justice in the whole of the New Testament, would resonate repeatedly among the Early Quakers, those of the recent persecution 1650 – 1690 and in Paine’s own writings. Moncure Conway, Paine’s first serious, sympathetic biographer wrote – ‘[Had] there been no Quakerism there would have been no Paine’. [1] Was he right? Who Were the Quakers? Had there been no Civil War or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between 1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. This English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the Royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of King Charles I in 1649. The men and women who would be converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathised with the Puritan, Roundhead side. Some (though not George Fox) had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the King. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier – for instance Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be actually descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew. During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘Independents’.