If the Archbishop were really an intellectual, he’d answer the questions he wordily posed
‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’ I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop.
Given the tremendous row, we really should read Dr Rowan Williams’s recent speech on Islam and the Law properly, from start to finish. The more I read, the more I am struck by the parallels with Eliot’s Mr Casaubon, his argument ‘lost among small closets and winding stairs’.
Journalists are not good at handling intellectuals. When we come face to face with one of these we treat it like something encountered in a zoo. If it has a beard, so much the better. Equipped (we suppose) with inferior intellects ourselves, we approach the creature as if it were possessed of a mysterious attribute whose qualities we are unqualified to fathom. We delve for a clutch of associated words — ‘learned’, ‘scholarly’, ‘academic’ — as though they meant the same thing; we describe the creature as having ‘one of the finest minds of his generation’; and then we go on, with illconcealed sniggers, to hint that this person is unworldly, indecisive or out-of-touch.
Thus the intellectual gains a kind of immunity from critical examination, at the cost of not being taken seriously as a man of action. Commentors, meanwhile, are excused the tiresome chore of actually asking whether the intellectual’s intellect is any good. Keith Joseph got similar treatment. So does Gordon Brown, of whom we repeat (because we have heard it somewhere) that he is ‘astonishingly well-read’, and that he has a deep knowledge of political philosophy and can quote the names of all the leading authors, and passages from their books. How much of their work he has really absorbed and understood we hardly think it our place to ask, being able only to establish that he is conversant with it. Confronted with incoherence, we make the same allowances as Dorothea, who had ‘a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed that Mr Casaubon’s mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to get to the surface again’. What we never do (and nor did Dorothea) is take these people on their own terms as intellectuals, and examine their capabilities. Somebody should. Now I’ve read his speech I’m unconvinced that, though Dr Williams’s beard may be real, his intellect is of the towering kind that justifies the term ‘intellectual’ — if by that word we imply a capacity for focused reasoning, penetrating logic and argument from principle. My best guess is that he’s no more than a scholar: a voracious reader, with a retentive memory and a dogged capacity for cross-references to the thoughts and writings of others.
I keep reading that the Archbishop delights in ‘studied ambiguity’, but all we can find in his speech is a tendency, like Mr Casaubon’s, to shy at philosophical fences, taking refuge by diving back down into detail. We encounter, too, a prolixity all too common among academics: a wallowing around in clauses, subclauses, circumlocutions and academic jargon which is not an indication of intellectuality but a substitute for it. It is rude and lazy to write sloppy English at self-indulgent length: it shows disregard for the reader, and tends to shield the argument — it there is one — from examination, lost in thickets of verbiage.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative. ‘I have been led farther than I had foreseen, and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which, though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit. The task, notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from that too continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study which has been the snare of my solitary life.’
You could insert this passage seamlessly into almost any section of the Archbishop’s speech, perhaps about here ...
I have argued recently in a discussion of the moral background to legislation about incitement to religious hatred that any crime involving religious offence has to be thought about in terms of its tendency to create or reinforce a position in which a religious person or group could be gravely disadvantaged in regard to access to speaking in public in their own right.
I would relish, but you might not, going through every sentence of the Archbishop’s massive lecture; trying to extract his meaning and logic; and then, having laid out what (if we could find it) might be the philosophical skel eton of his argument, testing it for completeness and consistency. But that would require the whole magazine. Instead, then, may I summarise what I think we might conclude?
The whole lecture could have been expressed in about one twentieth of the length the Archbishop took. But had an intelligent précis been attempted, the gaps, muddles and inconsistencies in the argument would have been exposed much more clearly.
Williams seems to be trying to say that the wellsprings of any national legal system are to be found in human communities and the spiritual, ethical and cultural values they share. Sometimes these may conflict, between one community and another. National law needs to hold the ring and must in that sense trump all ‘subsidiary’ community systems of rules. But it should not forget where its wellsprings lie, nor disregard nor needlessly affront the communities whence respect for law ultimately comes. There is precedent for national law paying deference to communities who wish to use their own rules within tightly defined circumstances.
Particular attention now needs to be paid (he seems to be arguing) to the Muslim community, and sharia. A case may be made for giving it greater scope for jurisdiction, though of a supplementary kind. Sharia, however, is neither clear nor undisputed within Islam; and outside Islam it has a brutal and misogynistic reputation. It may or may not be inherently aggressive towards competing faiths or agnosticisms. Arguably, it may be able to respect external, ‘secular’ jurisdictions. All these questions deserve discussion. Most importantly, we would have to discuss how individuals could opt in or opt out of sharia, establishing a sort of ‘marketplace’ of jurisdictions.
And that’s it. Honestly. That’s basically all the Archbishop was saying. No great intellect is required for this. What would require the capacities of an intellectual would be to answer — if they can be answered — the questions and difficulties Williams has set out. The Archbishop has performed what in international summit meetings is called the role of the ‘sherpa’, setting out the options and arguments. But he has not proved a good sherpa because his paper is overlong, badly drafted and logically confused, and at times lurches into ambitious claims that the argument and evidence do not support. ‘Painstaking but sloppy’ would be my marginal note, were I a don marking this as an undergraduate paper in philosophy: ‘has this candidate considered theology?’
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