SIR,—My reaction to Bamber Gascoigne's article on December 8 is
that he is altogether too kind to MRA. It is likely enough that many of them are sincere people, convinced that they are doing good. But naivete of this sort, when it is reinforced by blind conviction and enormous financial resources, is more than an innocent exercise in meditevalism.
I was invited to lunch by them at their house in Berkeley Square a week or two ago and spent an hour and a half arguing with the seven members who had apparently been allotted to look after me. I can confirm all that Gascoigne wrote about their obsession with sex. At one point I asked one of my hosts to define what he meant by absolute purity. He answered by referring to North American films designed to titillate. I asked him whether he meant by this that all sexual activity, homosexual and heterosexual, was wrong. He then became visibly embarrassed, and said that he was a married man and that anyway everybody knew what was wrong about sex.
M RA's absolutes are not absolutes; they are value judgments that every person is expected to make according to the dictates of his own conscience. I had exactly the same result when I tried to discuss their concept of absolute truth.
I don't think Bamber Gascoigne gave enough emphasis to the political side of M RA. As I see it they design their nonsense about an 'ideology' to appeal to well-meaning people, often lapsed church- men, who would like to do some good in the world; and then use them and their money to influence world politics. So much for their claim to observe `absolute honesty.'
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