And Another thing
PAUL JOHNSON
The truth little Red Rum can teach those clever dons
One of the most moving stories in the history of animal life is the racing career of Red Rum. This little horse won the Grand National in 1973 and 1974, came second the next two years and then, amazingly, won it again in 1977. This third victory, the only such in the history of the race, left the hard-bitten racing crowd in tears. The horse had a proud habit of cocking his ears as he passed the winning post ahead of the field — he knew he had won. He lived to the ripe old age of 30 and is buried beside the starting gate at Aintree.
No one can quite explain why certain animals make huge efforts to achieve distinction which in a human context we would call heroic. My view is that such endeavours are attempts, part instinctive but also perhaps part conscious, to escape from the fatalism which surrounds all animal life. A horse is born, lives, usually in some kind of servitude to humans, breeds and dies. There is nothing he can do about his fate but accept it. Animals in the wild are no less imprisoned by their environment. Yet animals, occasionally, perform extraordinary feats of courage and endurance, sometimes with what we can only call a moral object. There are many well-documented instances of dogs risking their lives to save their master’s. Such creatures exhibit an altruism they are not supposed to possess and, even more important, appear to be fighting against fate, to achieve a kind of freedom of the will — over events, and over their own frail bodies. This is quite different from, and superior to, the freedom to roam — much closer to what St Paul meant when he wrote of the freedom we find in Christ.
The idea that animals may be imbued with an idea of freedom which leads them to fight against blind, meaningless fate is a striking one. After the Battle of Waterloo, Sir Astley Cooper, the famous London surgeon, attended the sale of the wounded horses, considered fit only for the knacker’s yard. He bought 12 of the most serious cases, had them taken to his estate in Herefordshire, and began the systematic extraction of bullets and grapeshot. He saved the lives of all and turned them loose in his park. Then, ‘one morning, to his great delight, he saw the noble animals form in line, charge, and then retreat, and afterwards gallop about, appearing greatly contented with the lot that had befallen them’. These creatures had all served in different formations, and their self-taught drill was remarkable in itself. It was as though they grasped perfectly well that they had been through a horrific experience, so their exercises were a demonstration not only of their freedom of movement but their liberty of spirit: their masters had beaten the French, but they had overcome fate too.
I suspect that by studying the resistance some animals offer to fate, and the freedom they secure by their efforts — the internal freedom which is the only true kind — we can learn lessons about the spiritual evolution of primitive man. For he and she were once prisoners of a blind, purposeless and seemingly implacable fate, as animals are still, as a rule. Why did they not remain so? It was undoubtedly because, on my reading of the early history of humans, they studied the operations of nature, both frightening and benevolent, over long periods and with great attention, and came to the conclusion (or some of them did) that nature was moved by beings of great power, who could be placated. The efforts of placation, or supplication, whether by sacrifices or prayer, might not succeed, but at least humans were in with a chance. There was something they could do to alter or improve their lives. They did not have to submit without protest or struggle with events over which they had no control whatsoever. This self-importation of the notion of God in human brains, the discovery of religion and a consciously practised morality as a means to elevate the human condition was the origin of all progress. With it came the notion of freedom to struggle against adversity in all its forms, for if humans could improve their lot in some directions, they could do it in others, indeed in any.
Thus human beings ceased to be wholly fatalistic and some of them became Promethean. Without this development I should think it highly unlikely that the race would exist today. As it is, our future appears limitless, if we retain our freedom of will and our refusal to accept material domination. But will we? Fatalism is deeply rooted in many people; it is a subjective propensity rather than an objective fact, and its expression takes many forms. In the ancient world it survived the discovery of gods. It grafted itself on to or cannibalised the new concept, so the fates came into existence as new forms of deity, themselves to be appeased, but to no purpose since they had no ultimate aim themselves and anyway were unappeasable. It was fatalism which held back the world of antiquity from progress, and was in the process of destroying it when Judaeo-Christianity came to the rescue.
Fatalism is on the march again, in its new form of militant atheism. It has made big strides, particularly in the past decade, especially in higher education, and has captured key centres, notably my old university, Oxford, which is now a place of despair and misery. Modern materialist fatalism takes two particular forms. In science, especially in the current fashionable subject, biology, it has produced Darwinian Fundamentalism. This is now taught as the explanation of everything by the process usually called the survival of the fittest, but might equally be called the destruction of the unfit. In academic philosophy, which has become a mere slave of Darwinism, it is called Naturalism, though there is nothing in human nature about it. It teaches that any phenomena not capable of a materialist or scientific investigation are outside the reach of philosophy.
This combined attempt by two of the leading academic ‘disciplines’ to banish not only metaphysics and religion but any form of spirituality or psychological truth from human activities will ultimately destroy all progress. It teaches that human beings are not essentially different from the lowest form of life, nor from a puff of dust or a lump of rock. The only thing which exists is matter, in various forms, subject to irresistible laws which determine existence or extinction. But existence has no purpose and extinction no significance.
In the 20th century the Jesuit Karl Rahner used to teach that if belief in God disappeared so that not even its memory had a place in human hearts and minds, our race would become no more than very clever animals and its ultimate fate would be too horrible to imagine. I used to think Rahner was being too pessimistic. But if it is true that modern atheism is just another form of fatalism, capable in the long run of destroying all progress, then Rahner was right, and we will become just ingenious brutes, though not so clever as little Red Rum.
The truth is the reverse of what the materialistic fatalists, be they biologists or philosophers, teach. It is not that human beings have no more significance than pieces of rock. On the contrary, rock and soil acquire significance from the loving hand of nature. Wordsworth saw in the Lake District the supreme masterpiece of this process, from the origins of the earth through all subsequent changes, latterly assisted by the intervention of humans as farmers and sheepbreeders. The co-existence of natural, animal and human significance is the central theme of Wordsworth’s great poem The Prelude, and especially of its Twelfth Book. If the human race is to continue, and progress, we must recover our belief in significance, as expressed throughout creation, inanimate, living and human.
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