Public morality

Robert Blake

The Call to Seriousness Ian Bradley (Jonathan Cape £4.95) Dr Bradley's excellent book fills a gap. There are innumerable references, contemPorary and subsequent, to the Evangelicals and their effect upon nineteenth-century England. Yet there is no single work which enables the general reader to discover what It was all about, and to understand the Change of moral outlook which transformed the world of the Prince Regent into that of Queen Victoria. Dr Bradley quotes a revealing passage by Lord Shaftesbury, that archEvangelical, after a visit to Eton in 1844. He wrote of the school : It fits a man, beyond all competition, for the drawing room, the Club, St James' Street, and all the mysteries of social elegance; but it does not make the man required for the coming generation. We must have nobler, deeper and sterner stuff; less of refinement, more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward gertleman; a rigid sense of duty, not a "delicate sense of honour".'

'The man required for the coming generation'—what splendid confidence, what clarity of conviction! How many of us today would dare to predict the requirements for the coming generation ? In an age of doubt, flux, and perturbation, it is comforting to look back at that period of moral certainty, absolute values and firm faith. Evangelicalism originated in a religious revival which occurred in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The period which is Popularly associated with 'Gin Lane', and Which at the other end of the social spectrum saw the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, get through 552 dozen bottles of wine at Houghton in a single year, was also one , when a number of Anglican and other clergy vers went through an experience of con ion which altered the whole course of their lives. The form of Christianity which they practised was called by them 'vital religion', and its essence was salvation by faith in the atoning death of Christ. Conversion took the form of an intense conviction and relief at sin being forgiven. The true convert thereafter devoted his life to the task of imparting that conviction to Others. As Dr Bradley puts it, 'the starting Point of Evangelical theology was the doctrine of the total depravity of man'. Eternal damnation was the natural and inevitable fate of all those who did not repent and accept the death of Christ as the atonement of their sins. The Evangelicals, however, did not follow What might seem to be the logic of their position and, after having been converted, sit back and do nothing till death brought them to eternal life. Good works, though not in themselves capable of bringing salvation, were regarded as the only sure sign of genuine conversion. The true Evangelicals in Wilberforce's words, could not be absolutely certain that they had inherited ever lasting life 'except so far as they can discern in themselves the growing trace of this blessed resemblance to God'. With that anxiety went a deep sense of accountability.

'This perpetual fear of being found wanting when the Day of Judgment came led the Evangelicals into agonising sessions of selfexamination and soul-searching'. Journals of vast length recording the daily results of this process were a feature of the time—and very painful reading they often make.

The Evangelicals were thus engaged on a double task : good works to prove to them selves that they were converted; even more important, the duty of converting others.

Dr Bradley rightly regards the great age of Evangelicalism as lasting from 1800 to about 1860 and the two greatest figures in it as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. The Evan gelicals were not devoid of worldly wisdom.

Tracts were among their principal weapons, but the problem was distribution. Fortun ately, there was already in existence an efficient network run by the hawkers of

obscene ballads. The Evangelicals decided to pay them slightly more in order to distribute tracts, thus killing two birds with one stone, suppressing vice and promoting virtue. The Evangelicals fully recognised the existence of a social hierarchy and had no inclination to disrupt it. Indeed the task of mass conversion was perhaps easier in an age of deference, if only one could be sure of getting at the top people. George III was a natural convert. Had he not made the famous statement that nothing pleased him more than the thought of every cottager reading the Bible? The Prince Regent was a less promising subject. Nevertheless, in 1815 Wilberforce paid a winter visit to Brighton to see what could be done. The Prince, on meeting him, recalled a party long ago at the Devonshire House. 'We are both, I

trust, much altered since, Sir', replied Wilberforce. The Prince observed, 'Yes, the time which has gone by must have made a great alteration in us'. Wilberforce did not relent. 'Something more than that too, 1 trust Sir'. The Regent invited him to dinner with the assurance that nothing would be said to give him offence. Wilberforce ac cepted, but there was to be no conversion. It was not until Queen Victoria came to the throne that an Evangelically-inclined monarch again ruled Britain. That the Evangelicals made vast changes for the good in English life cannot be disputed. Whatever their convoluted motives may have been, Wilberforce abolished slavery and Shaftesbury achieved more social reforms than any person of his generation. If England became markedly less addicted to drink, brutality, gambling, duelling, prostitution and debauchery of every sort, the Evangelicals must be given the principal credit. There was nothing quite like them on the Continent.

On the other hand, Europe was spared the obverse side. The Evangelicals achieved two notable triumphs on this front. They made the English Sunday a day of unsurpassable gloom and ennui. As Dickens wrote in Little Dorrit,

'Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world—all taboo . . . Nothing to see, but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe, but streets, streets, streets . . . Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his six days with the monotony of his seventh.'

It is only in very recent times that the effects of this attitude have at last begun to die away. Their other achievement was to substitute moral character for political capacity as the criterion of the statesman. 'Charles James Fox was perhaps the first English politician to suffer as a victim of his countrymen's new-found obsession with the private lives of their leaders', writes Dr Bradley, and he contrasts the immense popularity of the virtuous, but intellectually mediocre Spencer Perceval. Here, as with sabbatarianism, the tradition has lingered long and who can be sure that Lord Lambton, Lord Jellicoe and Mr Jeremy Thorpe are the last of its victims?

Dr Bradley has writtena valuable and stimulating book which throws light not only on the era which ends in 1860, but on many aspects of British life during the century after that. inside-outingly developed through the tetrahedron's base to produce the negatively balancing tetrahedron, only the four negative tetrahedra are externally visible, for they hide entirely the four positive triangular faces of the positive tetrahedron's four-base, four-vertex, fourfold symmetry The successive edges of the overall tetrahedron will never be rationally congruent with the edges of the original tetrahedron. This growth of dissimilar edges may bring about all the frequencies of the different chemical elements.' And .so on in organised, numbered paragraphs for over 780 pages.

Buckminster Fuller is a numerologist. Only he looks for patterns in space instead of patterns in numbers. Numerologists get quite carried away by the sudden appearance of patterns; by an overwhelming feeling that such consistency must be significant; and by the poetry of deduction which leads from one pattern to its ancestors and daughters and alliances.

'For this and similar reasons I have paid a lot of attention to ancient numerology, Thinking that it might contain Important bases for further understanding Of the properties of mathematics And of the intertransformative Structurings and destructurings Of the cosmic scenario yclept "Eternally self-regenerative Universe".' And elsewhere: '1220.20 Numerological Correspondence: Numerologists do not pretend to be scientific. They are just fascinated with a game of correspondence of their "key" digits—finger counts, ergo 10 digits—with various happenstances of existence.' I am not sure whether the appropriate definition is a numerologist who studies the hidden meaning in numbers or a numeromancer who imposes meaning upon them.

In his introduction Arthur Loeb writes: 'Like his great aunt Margaret, Fuller is a transcendentalist : he discerns patterns and accepts their significance on faith. His is not the burden of proof: the pattern is assumed significant unless proved otherwise. If Fuller had been burdened by the necessity of proof, he would have been too hamstrung to continue looking for significant patterns.' I must admit I have a great deal of sympathy with the pattern-seeking approach. The numbercrunching maniacs leech-like on their computer monsters have taken all the progress out of science by replacing the provocative poetry of imagined patterns with multiplying correlations that prove what we already know. Fuller is a Plato or a Descartes in his insistence that patterns come first and the more beautiful the pattern the more true it must surely be—for truth and beauty are both irreducible elegance.

The book is totally about the tetrahedron. It is packed with drawings and diagrams; concepts, implications and conclusions. The basic premiss is that the world went wrong when it took the cube as its reference shape for dimensions. At some point Fuller wonders whether this was not because a cone

shaped drinking vessel would not stand upright. Personally, I think it more likely because we ourselves are either vertical or horizontal and when we build we build a pile of stones or lay a stick across the top. Fuller would like to replace our cube-based reference system with the tetrahedron, which is the irreducible minimum stable structure.

'600.03 A structure is a system of dynamically stabilised self-interfering and thus selflocalising and recentering, inherently regenerative constellar association of a minimum set of four energy events.'

'608.05 We may say that structure is a selfstabilising, pattern integrity complex. Only the triangle produces structure and structure means only triangle and vice versa.'

'609.01 Any polygon with more than three sides is unstable. Only the triangle is inherently stable. Any polyhedron bounded by polygonal faces with more than three sides is unstable. Only polyhedra bounded by triangular faces are inherently stable.'

'610.12 If we want to have a structure, we have to have triangles. To have a structural system requires a minimum of four triangles. The tetrahedron is the simplest structure.'

'612.11 That is the reason for the employment of the triangulated icosahedron as the most efficient fundamental volume-controlling device of nature. This is the way I developed the multifrequency-modulated icosahedron and geodesic structure.'

So there we are at last : from the triangle to the geodesic dome. I have always wondered how Buckminster Fuller established such a reputation and following, on the single great achievement of the geodesic dome (the book mentions the Dymaxion car and the term 'space-ship earth' as well). There is no denying the importance of the dome as a major architectural innovation but even the strength of the dome may not bear all that is piled on it. Most of Buckminster Fuller's fans would not have a hope of understanding what is in this book and the complex semi-mystical mathematical language would only enhance the mystique of the great man. Having said all this I think he deserves his following for the qualities and energy of his mind and for the tetrahedron concept.

Every year I get about four learned papers sent to me by people to whom no one else will listen. Each of these highly complex papers sets forth a new mathematical way of looking at the universe or gravity or both. The papers are logically consistent and I can feel the anguish of frustration of an author whose eyes have seen the truth but whose tongue can find no ears.

The human mind is infinite in its ingenuity and there is an infinite number of ways in which the universe can be perceived and described. Internally many of these ways are logically consistent. The eventual answer is the crude one of `so what ?' If you look at the universe your way what practical difference does it make? The answer is usually: none. And yet we must not forget that Einstein's view of the universe was fundamentally different from that of Newton but in practical explanatory terms the difference was extremely tiny.

We also know that in a constructed system such as the metaphysical-language system we can build an edifice of any complexity by inter-relating and cross-deducing from a few basic starting concepts. Chinese science was adept at this and as a consequence sterile at experimentation. We are back with the traditional rationalist-empiricist dilemma. I believe we need both. At least we need the mathematical rationalist (like Fuller) but not the word-merchant type (because that idiom is too circular).

Fuller bases his adoration of the triangle and tetrahedron on their irreducible stability and believes that this stability must represent the basic stability form in nature. But perhaps stability is not so important in nature outside a few examples where for instance it is required as in domes and containers. Perhaps changeability and degradation are more important with dynamic stability achieved through change. In that case triangles would be a sort of dynamic dead-end.