Sandstone Press

Yes contains no

Posted by RLD on 23rd August 2009

‘Yes contains no because yes is the word of permission. An absolute yes permits all things including refusals, denials, constraint and death.  More importantly it allows discussion, argument, agreements and disagreement, freedom and life. Democracy is a yes because it allows even anti-democratic elements to compete within it, leaving it to an electorate to reject or accept refusal, denial, constraint and death.  Sometimes an electorate will so accept, and then God help them. No does not contain yes because it does not allow. No as an absolute is a stopper. Against that, no within yes is a road sign.’

The above, rather abstruse, thoughts have been revolving in my head since my visit to the Edinburgh International Book Festival a few days ago.  In addition to some useful meetings I bought a couple of books in the Book Tent and am about half way through the first, ‘A Book of Silence’ by Sara Maitland. The second is ‘Hell and High Water’ by Alastair McIntosh.

I have been in occasional touch with Alastair since he provided such an excellent foreword to Jamie Whittle’s ‘White River’, and have also kept half an eye on his wider career. Alastair does a lot of good outwith his mainstream academic work and writing, not the least being his involvement with the GalGael Project in Govan. As an aside I will say I am lost in admiration, especially for this last project. This slight connection also means that I already knew that Alastair is a Quaker.

It turned out that both books are written by Christians as Sara Maitland makes it clear early on that she is a practicing Catholic, that she converted from Anglicanism quite a few years ago, and that she tackles her subject of silence from that base. Sara’s book is quite a page turner; not surprising since she is such an experienced and accomplished builder with words.

Just the same I find ‘A Book of Silence’ slightly disturbing and am still not entirely sure why. I think perhaps it is that her stance, or the main weight of her stance, is in the life of faith rather than the life of reason. She mentions the Big Bang as a theory when it is no more a theory, by now, than is evolution. She dismantles the name, ‘Big Bang’, pointing out that the event was sub-nuclear and therefore not in any literal sense ‘big’.  She also points out that in zero atmosphere conditions no sound is possible.

On the surface this is reasonable except that it doesn’t allow for the expansion, the ‘bang’, continuing, and the fact that sub-nuclear as it may have begun it contained all of space and time and always will. She does not permit a use of metaphor by scientists that she would not only allow for religious thinkers but, I suspect, describe as beautiful, as indeed it is in its scientific usage.

Everyone’s thinking, and their actions, are a result of the mixture of faith and reason. We have to believe there is a future if we are going to act in the present; hence faith. At the same time we have to work our way through lives of practical decision making; hence reason. In human lives pragmatism and idealism eat each other’s hearts out.

My first scan of Alastair’s rather apocalyptic title suggests a similar balancing act, but with his weight grounded on reason. Alastair’s major faith statement comes at the end of ‘Hell and High Water’ and is based as much on his work experience and the book as it has developed as on inherited belief, ‘traditional’ belief if you prefer.

At least part of my sense of disturbance comes from another piece of reading, this time in the most recent issue of Scottish Review of Books. A very fine poet, Tom Pow, has been working for some time on a project known as ‘Dying Villages’. Europe’s population is in decline, he tells us. In particular village, or peasant, life is dying out. The more important, therefore, that voices from these dying ways of life be recorded now and Tom has set about, thankfully with financial aid from the Scottish Arts Council, to do not only that but also to generate a body of poetic and other work.

In his SRB article Tom suggested that there has been a decline in community values over the past decades, and perhaps longer. He also seems to believe that these demographic changes are, if not a bad thing, a cause for regret. To the point, meaning my point, he increasingly sees the European Enlightenment as a point of departure significant to all this and views it in a negative light. He is particularly suspicious of what he describes as the Enlightenment idea of ‘progress’.

This, in turn, sent me to another book which I refer to from time to time for precisely its negative, to me strange, view of the Enlightenment.  This title is ‘Memory and Identity’ by Pope John Paul II. Readers should understand that I tread carefully when discussing, and more especially writing, on the great Christian schism. I come from a local culture where it is tied, seemingly inextricably, with Irish and British nationalism in a mix that is almost always poisonous and, sometimes, actually lethal. Paranoid it most certainly is, and of course paranoia is catching. Let us beware.

We can agree though, that the late Pope was a man of faith. Right at the start of his book he says, ‘The modern history of Europe, shaped – especially in the West – by the influence of the Enlightenment, has yielded many positive fruits. This is actually a characteristic of evil, as understood by St Thomas, following in the tradition of St Augustine.’ There’s no getting through that, is there? Elsewhere, ‘The European Enlightenment led not only to the carnage of the French Revolution, but also bore positive fruits . . .’ Did it? No mention of oppression; instead, the voice of a particular establishment ‘allowing’ for some positive values in the shadow of that earlier statement.

It seems the Enlightenment is being fingered for a lot of misery and wrongness, possibly even ‘evil’, and I think, frankly, it’s a bum rap. In an effort to reach secure ground I reached for my trusty Collins single volume dictionary (the final book I will refer to in this piece, I promise) for a definition.  Here we go.

Enlightenment the n. an 18th-century philosophical movement stressing the importance of reason and the critical reappraisal of existing ideas and social institutions.

Reason and faith are uncomfortable bed fellows but share the bed they must. In Christianity, these days much mistrusted of whichever cast, there are those who temper faith with reason, and those who temper reason with faith. Faith is characterised, obviously, by acceptance, therefore unity.  Reason is characterised by disagreement, argument, principled stances and continuing schism. If this breach had never been made we would have no Richard Dawkins – but, I promised no more books.

Let me go back to that opening notion of yes containing no, of the idea that one idea might contain another and not the other way around.  There is not a negotiation between yes and no. We might better think of them as boxes.  Open the lid of yes and you will find no along with much else. Reach inside and open the lid of no and you will not find yes, unless a bogus yes that assents to negation, defeat, totalitarianism and fear.

Open the lid of reason and you will find faith securely in its place, doing its important work of giving us hope, purpose and frameworks to live within, guiding us but yielding to new discoveries, never exactly giving up the ghost. Open the lid of faith and if you find reason at all, it will be distorted by constraint, by selected parameters, likely by terror, certainly by tradition.

Knowing it cannot be truly itself until it is free reason beats against the walls of faith and will not, ultimately, be contained. In the outside world of human interaction, the church retreats before science. Science does not retreat before the church.

Sara and Alastair make their faith statements very clearly at, respectively, the beginnings and ends of their books. I hope you will read them both. At the very least they are entertaining, probably they are much more. Tom will no doubt continue his important project but I hope he will divest himself of any idea that those, predicted, demographic changes are necessarily wrong, or indeed irreversible, and of any ‘just out of reach’ golden age of community. The time for villages may be past, but it may indeed return. Reason will decide in the light of changing circumstances.

These days I consciously allow myself only one faith statement and it runs as follows: In the beginning was the word, and the word was yes.

Here are some web sites you might wish to visit.

http://www.saramaitland.com
http://www.alastairmcintosh.com
http://www.galgael.org
http://www.dyingvillages.com