Another voice
A thoroughly English Cardinal
Auberon Waugh
'I don't mind your making a noise so long as you don't mind my stopping you'., said Cardinal Hume when he was a housemaster at Ampleforth to some boys •who were, presumably, making a noise. Twenty years later, he remembers this aphorism so vividly that he has to bring it up in the course of a television interview about his life as demonstrating his approach to discipline, his way with boys, his innate wisdom in earthly matters. If there had been a studio audience present at the interview, one may be sure it would have burst into rapturous applause. the Cardinal had that look on his face of a man who has just said something extraordinarily clever and is expecting applause.
I pondered this canny half-French Scotsman's bon mot for some time – he is, after all, the head of lily Church in Britain, chosen for the job by Mr William ReesMogg on account of his Englishness, warmly supported by that powerful political thinker Mr Hugo Young – and decided that in its wisdom and profound spirituality it was probably beyond my reach. Why, if he did not mind the boys making a noise, should he wish to stop them doing so? What: on earth did it mean? If the remark was intended to be funny, then it was the humour of the sadistic drill sergeant demonstrating the extent of his power over a squad of recruits, not the humour of a philosopher wrestling with the paradox of authority. Its closest echo is surely the prison warder in the early Peter Sellers film Two Way Stretch who says to a prisoner: 'SILENCE when you're talking to me: But the prison warder (played, I think, by Maurice Denham in the 1960 production) was intended as a figure of absurdity, not a deeply spiritual philosopher. Of course I am not denying for a moment that Cardinal Hume is a deeply spiritual man. My point is that he is also a profoundly silly man, that his judgments on earthly affairs — from school discipline to industrial relations, the British Nationality Act to the Brandt Commission – are so silly as scarcely to be worth discussing.
I suspect that he is also a somewhat vain man, but that is beside the point. If he were not so clearly a good man he would not be such a public menace. But Mr Rees-Mogg was surely right in choosing him for the job in the sense that this sort of cocksure silliness has become a quintessentially English characteristic. Anything said or writ ten in public which is intended to receive, or actually receives general assent is almost invariably silly. We are led by silliness and silliness has become the consensus. Perhaps there is something deeply spiritual, even holy, in it all. As St Paul wrote (1 Cor I 21-24) 'It pleased God by his foolishness of preaching to save them that believed . . We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block; and unto the Greeks foolishness . . . Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men.' Again, in 11 Cor HI 18-19: 'Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.'
And so we have become a nation of damp-eyed, foolish, bearded, holy men, it may be thought. Certainly, one sees enough of them around. But before we settle into a happy, self-congratulatory reverie to reflect how pleasing we must be in the sight of God, it might be prudent to take a glance from time to time at those in our midst who are neither damp-eyed nor foolish nor bearded nor noticeably holy and see how they are prospering in this atmosphere of fatuous, all-embracing benevolence. I refer, in particular, to those like Mr Len Murray, Mr Moss Evans, Mr Clive Jenkins, Mr Alan Fisher, Mr A. Scargill and Mr L. Daly whose difficult task it is to harness this amiable undirected fatuousness into a concrete programme, and also to those like Mr Berm, Mr Hattersley, Mr Shore and Mr Silkin, not to mention Messrs Roy Jenkins, Rodgers, Owens and Williams, who hope to harness it to their own self-advancement.
A distressing aspect of the contemporary English silliness – at any rate for those of conservative inclinations – is the way it seems to lean left. Perhaps there is a logical reason for this, that socialism can now be seen by anyone who comes to look at it as an essentially silly creed, producing nothing but poverty and wretchedness, so all the abundant silliness in our society tends to lope and gambol towards socialism as the nearest refuge from the unwelcome truths or 'harsh realities' of the world as God made it. In other circumstances one would rejoice to hear that the Church of England has halted the decline in its membership and now seems set for a period of steady growth; that Cardinal Hume, according to an amanuensis of his on the programme has succeeded in 'making it fun to be a Catholic.' He should speak for himself. To many cradle-Catholics it has become a pain in the back-side.
In fact, it would be easy for those of conservative inclinations to relapse into persecution mania. Last week the Press Council – not, whatever Sir James Goldsmith may decide, a particularly left-wing organisation – rejected two complaints from people who had been attacked in the New Statesman and who had been refused any right of reply. Two authors had challenged the generally accepted account of Nazi death camps, no doubt quite wrongly. Miss Gita Sereny, who attacked their writing in the New Statesman, declined to print their reply on the grounds that 'there was indecency in holding dialogue with such people', and that 'people like them mixed truth with lies'. Well, perhaps they do, but if one does not wish to give publicity to their activities, one should not attack them.
Similarly, one notices how the SundaY Times jumps like a salmon every time some militantly atheistic scientist claims to throw doubt on the Holy Shroud of Turin, which has been revered as such since at any rate the mid-14th century, while regarding it as an article of faith that the Anne Frank diary must be genuine. Only a neo-Nazi could possibly doubt it, we are told. Well, I am not a neo-Nazi, while finding the racial grudges of neo-Nazism only marginallY nastier than the class grudges of the 'respectable' left, but I would very much like, to know whether the Anne Frank Diary is genuine or not: whether it is true, as has been reported, that the Diary is written Ill two completely different hands, and whether it is written in large part in biro which, although invented at the time, was not available in Europe. I don't mind your making a noise so long as you don't mind my stopping you. It is easy, as I say, to grow frightened by the leftward drift, the general assent in leftwing assumptions which now seems to characterise all decision making. But the most frightening evidence came immediately after the Cardinal's long exposure. Something called Jobhunt is put out bY ATV from Birmingham with Dick Taverne in the chair as a sort of vox pop for unemployed , youngsters to confront 'etperts' in the field and ask why they are unemployed. The 'experts' on this occasion were a NUPE official, who made predictable noises about government expenditure cuts, a professor who spoke through den' ched lips to assure them that in the new technological age particularly nobodY, would ever need to be employed again, an" a sinister female social activist who spoke very fast in a menacing Birmingham accent to demand that everyone who wanted t° work be given a job, as of right. 'I' audience gaped and moaned a little. Nobody was even allowed to consider that trade union manning levels and labour legislation had made investment uneconomic and British workers unemployable' After a time it occurred to me that the speaker was urging greater government subsidy. All they wanted to do was moor! and make tough-sounding anti-governmen,I noises. If these programmes hold UP mirror to the nation, then we can now see, that the English have become a nation 0,.1 rather nasty imbeciles. But at least we hav` an English cardinal again to look after th* other side of things.
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