A Stalin courtier once dared to quote to him that capitalist-imperialist swine John Adams by saying “Facts are stubborn things.”
“Then so much the worse for the facts,” replied the great oracle with his mirthless smile. It was one of those accidents that often signpost the lives of geniuses. Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple – and Stalin’s blueprint for our modernity, one he drew with unwitting nonchalance.
Modernity is driven not by ideas but by ideologies. And any ideology vindicates the crazier quantum claims by creating a parallel universe, one that has nothing to do with any palpable reality.
Any mention, no matter how casual, of facts grounded in actual reality rings alarm bells in an ideologue’s mind. Not for him the inductive method Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle, one that proceeds from a particular fact to a general theory.
(As an aside, much as I love Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle was, I think, mistaken when calling Holmes’s investigative technique ‘deduction’. It was in fact induction: observing minute facts and building a hypothesis on their basis.)
An ideologue never lets facts interfere with his delusions. If they do, then both facts and their bearers are treated the way ideologues treat their enemies. True becomes false and vice versa.
A significant part of our dominant ideology is an imaginary equality, and real irrelevance, of all creeds. Thus, to paraphrase Chesterton, Christianity and Islam are seen as very much alike, especially Islam.
Hence, stating the obvious fact that Britain is still a Christian country, if only technically speaking, is off limits. Anyone who says that isn’t just woefully misinformed. He is an enemy seeking to destroy everything held sacred in the parallel universe. Off with his head.
But Britain has a state religion, Anglicanism, a Christian confession! screams the condemned man being dragged to the scaffold. Our monarch is the Supreme Governor of that church! comes a muffled cry as his face is shoved onto the block. Our law, culture, politics all have Christian antecede… – the falling axe cuts off the last word.
The method of execution is metaphorical, but execution itself is real, ubiquitous and ineluctable. One man who can testify to that is a London school master banned from working with children after telling a Muslim pupil that “Britain is still a Christian state”.
(Another aside if I may: in Britain, as distinct from the US, colleges and universities have students, but schools have pupils. Yet the article I read about this incident treats this distinction with callous disregard. Makes me wonder which side of the Atlantic I’m on.)
Islam, he continued, digging a hole for himself, is a minority religion. That’s why the sinks in the boys’ lavatories are for washing hands, not feet, the use to which the pupil put it.
However, added the teacher, dropping into the hole, there is an Islamic school a mile down the road. If it’s so important for the pupil to observe the fard aspects of wudu, he’ll be welcomed there.
The pupil complained, and the school administrators didn’t ask him what parts of the teacher’s statement weren’t true. None of that mattered, in the virtual reality of ideology.
The hapless teacher was summarily sacked. A month later he was referred to a local safeguarding board and the Metropolitan Police.
The latter decided there was no case to answer, for the time being. But the former ruled that the pupil had suffered emotional trauma caused by hurtful statements about Islam.
Hurtful they might have been. But were they true or false? That distinction didn’t even come into it. Hell hath no fury like an ideology scorned, if you can stand another paraphrase.
The jobless school master is suing the school, invoking such outdated notions as freedom of speech. I can’t see what he is upset about. He was perfectly free to choose between keeping shtum or speaking out of turn and facing the consequences. He chose the latter, so what’s his problem? Sorry, what’s their problem?
This brings back my nightmarish memories of the country ruled for 30 years by the oracle who dismissed those stubborn facts. I went to school after Stalin died, but the curriculum still remained shaped by that great educator.
I mentioned the other day that, 40 years after Rutherford split the atom and at a time the Soviets were mass-producing weapons based on that achievement, I was taught that “the atom is the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter.”
Moreover, the Russians were responsible for all the great inventions in the history of technology. Polzunov invented the steam engine; Lomonosov, the lightning rod; Mozhaisky, the aeroplane; the father and son Cherepanovs, the locomotive; Kotelnikov, the parachute; Popov, wireless transmission; Petrov, the electric arc; Ladygin, the electric bulb – and so on.
It was called ‘Russian priority’, and anyone who denied it, even inadvertently, was in even bigger trouble than the London school master who dared suggest that Britain was a Christian country. Thus my uncle, a chemistry professor, referred to Portland cement in a lecture.
That was in the early 1950s, and little did he know that the most common type of cement had Russified its name the day before. Uncle Yuri was arrested for spreading anti-Soviet falsehoods, and only interference by his friend, the minister, saved him from a stretch in labour camps.
Britain’s Marxist government treats transgressors more leniently, for the time being. But its treatment of facts is becoming creepily similar, which worries me no end. When truth no longer matters and ideology rides roughshod over facts, tyranny is just around the corner.
I draw a mental picture of Starmer with Stalin’s moustache and recall the American communist Lincoln Steffens. After visiting Bolshevik Russia in 1919, he said: “I’ve been over into the future and it works.”
I too have been over into the same future, in fact spent the first 25 years of my life there. And let me tell you: it stinks. Let’s just hope that future never arrives in Britain, shall we?