First things first: there shouldn’t be compulsory prayers as part of the formal business at the beginning of council meetings if somebody on the council objects to them. (There shouldn’t be compulsory anything, neither prayers nor the absence of prayers. If there are non-compulsory prayers and nobody objects, then why ever not?)
There is a but, though, which gets bigger and bigger the more you think about the National Secular Society’s successful action in the High Court today. The but can be summed up in the words: “Why this battle, why now?”
It’s so important–is it?– that other people should not engage in acts of worship in front of you, that it’s worth going all the way to the High Court about it? It’s so important–is it?– that the National Secular Society has to fix on *this* as its headline campaign? Our Daily Hate, the thing we should be angry about today: it’s this, and not (say) the Syrian government’s open and merciless massacring of its own people?
You might call it a point of principle, I suppose. And principles matter, certainly. And of course I don’t know, myself, what kind of prayers the other councillors were practising in in front of the complainant, Mr Clive Bone. Maybe his apparent horror and revulsion at the idea (the idea!) of people praying in front of him had some basis in reality. Maybe they were speaking in tongues, handling snakes, levitating, or going into ecstatic trances, activities which, while harmless enough to others (apart from the snakes; and the levitating, if you go too high), might certainly cause a certain amount of perturbation in a a detached observer. But I doubt it. I’m prepared to bet a reasonably large number of jelly babies that the prayers involved were more Jill Archer than Jerry Falwell.
Here’s the thing, though: while I’m perfectly willing to give way on the point of principle, there seems to me a different point in the offing, a point about virtue. What does it say about me as a person that I make such issues as banning the aforementioned prayers my central preoccupation? Or in the case of the NSS’s employees, presumably my career?
There is always more than a touch of the puritan about the crusading atheist. (Historically, I suspect this is no accident at all.) And we all know what puritans do. They are motivated by what they take to be their own idealism, but what can seem to observers like little more than self-righteous spite, to sweep away the woolly well-meaning mix of inherited flotsam and jetsam that ordinary amiable people muddle along with, and replace it with something to which they like to apply words like “dictated by reason” or “rational”.
Now “reason” and “rational” are important but also dangerous words, and no one under a certain non-chronological age (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095a7) should be playing with them. To deploy them accurately and correctly for moral purposes in a historical vacuum is not possible. But that, unfortunately, is exactly what rationalist puritans always seem to be trying to do. They always fail. What usually ends up happening instead is that their replacement for the inherited flotsam and jetsam is something that more or less overtly serves their own own interests (this certainly happened under Cromwell). What always ends up happening is a great deal of more or less completely brutish destruction of good things that the “rationalists” have no serious or credible idea whatever how to replace (everyone knows this too happened under Cromwell, indeed under both Cromwells, Thomas and Oliver).
Just the other day the same puritan rationalist spirit–a harsh critic might call it self-important philistine destructiveness parading in the robes of reason–was visible in the protests of a previously unknown group called “Republic” against the proposed celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Interestingly enough, in fact, it wasn’t just the same puritan rationalist spirit; in many cases, it was actually the same people.
Anti-monarchism is a view I used to hold myself; I abandoned it for two reasons. The first was that I became an anti-monarchist (in about 1994) in a spirit of Rousseau-, Carlyle-, and Belloc-inspired enthusiasm for the republicanism of the French Revolution; but I gradually came to see (by about 1997) what a large number of French revolutionaries were themselves aware of, above all Mirabeau, namely that a republic need not be the same thing as a state with no monarch, and that republicanism is therefore not the same thing as anti-monarchism. (I’m still a republican, in the sense of believing in the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all citizens before the law, and in believing that the government only has the right to exist or act pro rem publicam, for the public good.) The second is that, the more I think about it, the more wanting to abolish the monarchy for being an irrational, anachronistic, old-fashioned, and “irrelevant” (to what?) institution comes to seem to me like wanting to abolish my grandmother on the same grounds. Some things that we derive from the past are, simply and quite properly, given–part of the scenery; to want to alter them on grounds of reason itself looks like an abuse of reason.
The moral is that rationalism, in the sense in which some use the word (of course we should contest this usage), is never the same thing as, and sometimes the opposite of, reasonableness. There is nothing more unreasonable than the inability to know how to apply reason; there is nothing more irrational than the reasonableness of a fanatic.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-16980025