A relic of the old order
Happy Easter to you! I say it though in this house you’d never know it was Easter. For I have raised Hackney kids of the 21st century, and they have no idea why you’d get in a lather about a day that means only two things:
- the end of the school holidays
- chocolate.
I had thought they’d find the chocolate a sufficient inducement to come, but apparently not. So I’ve got some Lindt bunnies going spare…
Anyway, my train of thought today has been around this strange shift…
Maybe there are people in America who still do what we did – get new clothes, have the Easter Bunny round, go to church and then have a big ham with the relatives. Well, I’m pretty sure there are, and they’re more than in the UK. Here in London of course there are African communities – I’m thinking of my erstwhile stomping ground in Brockley – where the finery today must be beyond resplendent. I’d love to see the turbans. I’m in a Hassidic street, of course, so you don’t get that so much here, though Purim is fun – and my kids are just completely like, what?Quite rightly, too, they are thorough denizens of their own indigenous culture.
We’ve had Richard Dawkins – who seems to think he is capable of defining the boundaries of the unknowable – and they fall firmly within what he knows we know, apparently. We’ve had the Hitch, whose great polemical work God is Not Great does not once use the word “religion” in a way that isn’t completely interchangeable with “human nature.” We’ve got the Taliban and the irregularly spelled Al Qaeda, the Tea Party and American Talk Radio, anti-Muslim hate crime and anti-semitism on the rise in Europe… and amid all that, here in Britain at least, you have the basic ironic British stance in which to be seen to seem to care would be the worst ignominy of all.
Religion is the position of the fanatic, the totalitarian, the hate-fuelled. There’s a cache of exposives found in Ulster, a Good Friday announcement of a new “capability” on the part of Northern Irish terrorists and the threat of a new wave of sectarian violence.
So, no longer is the big thing about Easter the difficulty of explaining its essential mystery. Now the hard thing seems to be to justify its continued existence.
To be religious in any way – which seems to mean even to engage with, or even possibly to know, the stories – is seen as engaging with the patriarchy, the hegemony, the evil empire, the darkest forces in human nature – and also embarrassingly anti-intellectual. To believe something without proof (or without trusting that someone, somewhere, has the proof) (and conspiracy theories are the common outcropping of this exact anxiety) is just stupid, right?
(And yet, and yet, was it these same people I saw queueing round six blocks behind Regent Street on the day the iPad 2 came out, waiting to get one? Who’s so superior, then?)
You can see above that Ms Baroque was raised in another world entirely – as if in pre-Revolutionary Russia or France – where, although we were little hippie kids and ran wild in our bare feet much of the time, we also went to Sunday School without asking why, wore white gloves on Easter because there was no question, and accepted that there were going to be no friends to play with that day because they were all with their grandmothers.
Easter was such a gentle day, the awful story of Holy Week behind you, and nothing but good to come, and jelly beans and marshmallow chicks (not yet a brand name, just a confection) and ham awaiting.
This “OMG I’m a dinosaur” moment comes with backup from, of all people, Peter York. (I know! I know!) Peter York, the definitive explicator of culture and style in the eighties, might have seemed like a bit of a dinosaur himself in recent years. But with that other everlasting resurrection, the royal wedding, looming on us, we are now back on his turf. He has written a long and wonderful article about the new royal wedding that I can’t précis, only ask you to read.
He captures something completely authoritatively, the change and death of a world and the birth of a new one that might not, in parts, even realise it’s a new one. Like a ghost that doesn’t realise it’s died. It finds the thread, and traces it from where we are back to where it all started, and back again. He makes some incredibly pithy observations, too.
Well, it may be my age, but I find it a uniquely intelligible argument, and maybe, for those of us who remember the horror of what he calls “the Charles and Di years” only too keenly, it was going to take a look from this angle to make it make any sense. WHY are we being subjected to all this? Who cares? A “young person of my acquaintance” has said she thinks things are missing from the argument, and that people of her age find simply NO relevance whatever in the event. I’m open on that point, but – as with ghosts, God and the other universes – I do think that not seeing the relevance doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there. I read some arguments of the diehard republicans, who are like the diehard atheists. They may well be right, but there is something depressingly closed about their arguments; they ask no questions and look down no side roads; and their arguments , however cogent, always seem to lack a dimension.
Anyway, then there’s this piece by Martin Amis, of all people, in this morning’s Observer about his aforementioned friend, Christopher Hitchens. Both Mart & the Hitch are, in the Baroque canon, as regular readers will know, problematical figures. So you will appreciate the discomfort of finding my comfort of the day in this passage from that article. (But you also knew I would always read it.)
“Life is a great surprise,” observed Nabokov (b. 1899).* “I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one.” Or Bellow (b. 1915), in the words of Artur Sammler: “Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more … But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge.”
Such thoughts still haunt us; but they no longer have the power to dilute the black ink of oblivion.
My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. “The measure of an education,” you write elsewhere, “is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” And that’s all that “agnosticism” really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won’t make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.
The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse.** The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence” – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.
See?
Now I’m going to get the hell out of this house, and go do some work in a coffee shop while the sun is still shining; and there’s a drink in a friend’s garden later, as I’ve just received a text to say. The earth and all in her – even while Syria and Libya and other places go up in flames and down in blood – even then, and that was once the main part of the point of the story – are once again reborn, and life springs up and we with it. Is it a new beginning or just the reassurance of carrying on for a bit? Everlasting might be a frame of mind; hope, if nothing else, springs eternal. I will do my work and then get some prosecco to take with.
* Nabokov’s another one, of course. His whole childhood vanished utterly and he was left with his gloriously fluid English and his butterfly-collecting…
** This sounds suspiciously like an out-of-town furniture warehouse…
Baroque in Hackney 