Two nations divided by a common language and...

Someone (the most popular candidate is George Bernard Shaw - or, as he's known in the States, "George Bernard? Sure!" - is supposed to have said that Britain and America were two nations divided by a common language. Despite the odd argument over faucet/tap, john/toilet, humor/humour and tenderize/tenderise, we do have a common language, which enables us to misunderstand one another better because we assume that someone speaking our language is similar to us and better communication means more differences are identified. In Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the Babel Fish, which enables instant translations from any language to any other in the galaxy, has been the cause of countless wars because suddenly people understood what that lot were saying.

Nonetheless, Britain and America (meaning the USA) do have a lot in common, so it's significant that they seem to be growing further apart despite globalisation. The divergence can be seen most in and around religion and politics - much less, say, in literature and business - and it's on politics that I want to concentrate.

The early American colonists came mostly from England and Scotland, and most of the rest from Ireland, which for good and ill had experienced much English and Scottish influence. They imported not only a language but a legal system and both political ideas and experience of representative politics. When the break came, leading British and Irish opponents of the British government such as the elder William Pitt and Edmund Burke saw the American rebels as Englishmen fighting for English rights. After independence, British people continued to emigrate to America and trade across the Atlantic preserved a close relationship. After one short and slightly half-hearted war in 1812-15, the two countries never again went to war despite a massively long frontier between the USA and Canada and all the uncertainties caused by Westward expansion north and south of that border. Major artistic figures like Whistler, Henry James and Charles Dickens were famous in both countries and moved quite freely from one to the other despite the length of the sea crossing. In the twentieth century the countries were allies - eventually - in two world wars and have been formal allies ever since.

When I was growing up a politically-aware kid, the main oddities about American politics (in the eyes of Britons) seemed to be:

*The very different system, with primary elections, a federal system, an elected President and so on, with the American President a hugely powerful figure compared to a British Prime Minister;
*Racial oppression in the South; and
*Two parties which didn't seem to differ much, in contrast to British and West European political systems dominated in most countries by some sort of centre-right conservative party and some sort of democratic socialist party.

The difference in the systems still exists, though the American President, so often blocked in Congress, now seems a much less towering figure. The American South has changed astonishingly and with Britain now having a much larger Black population than it had in 1945, the differences between the two countries in this area are now much smaller.

But important trends in politics have gone in opposite directions. While the U.S. is still governed by Democrats and Republicans, the political divide there has widened to a chasm. In Britain and nearly all Europe, on the other hand, the big right and left parties dominate less than they used to and are harder to tell apart than they were in the 1940s and 50s. While the influence of organised religion on British (and most European) politics has waned, in the U.S. it has increased, and it's fundamentalist strands of religion that call many of the shots.

The economic and geographical divides that underlay the Conservative/Labour divide in Britain (bosses and bosses' assistants against the industrial masses; countryside and suburbs against towns and inner cities) have almost vanished, but when we listen to American politics, it seems that remark about two countries divided by a single language could be applied within America. Liberals and Conservatives seem to draw on different cultures with little in common and the level of hatred and vituperation in American political debate startles us.

I understand one reason for this is an unspoken pact between the two parties to draw the boundaries of congressional districts in ways which minimised the number of marginal seats, thus creating a situation in which the great majority of representatives did not have to appeal to the middle ground. Low turnouts also helped the more zealous zealots, whose supporters could be counted on to turn out, to dominate - but higher recent turnouts in Presidential elections haven't reversed the trend. The shift has largely helped the right (conservative) side, so that whereas when Kennedy was battling Nixon, American politics was not obviously to the right of British politics except in the Deep South, now an American moderate liberal can sound like a European conservative and the Tea Party sounds to a European like something on the wilder fringes of the outside right. There is also what seems to a European Christian like an odd alliance between unrestricted capitalism of the devil-take-the-hindermost-and-the-hindermost-is-actually-morally-inferior type and fundamentalist Christianity. If anything the religious types in Britain tend to be on the left and the Catholic right of continental Europe, while conservative on social issues, is not particularly conservative on economic issues.

In Europe, including Britain, economic issues dominate alongside immigration and the environment. These issues matter in the U.S. too, but abortion is a massively bigger issue than anywhere in Europe (even the Irelands, Spains and Polands)and it's practical politics to attack the theory of evolution - a debate most Europeans view dumbfounded. Now I'm not suggesting the European version is better in all respects - I wish abortion was debated more in Britain - but the American system, with weak political party organisation and discipline, is ill-prepared to deal with deep and bitter divides and as someone who has greatly admired the American genius for politics, I wonder where America - that is the USA - is going.

A Gap

Perhaps the most famous scene in the Sherlock Holmes stories occurs in the story "Silver Blaze". Holmes has arrived to investigate the apparent murder of a race-horse owner's most trusted employee and the disappearance of the race-horse. Having found that the official detective has diligently collected a lot of information, he runs through the information and then says he is leaving. The Inspector asks if he wants to draw his attention to anything. Holmes actually refers to two things - an epidemic of slight lameness among sheep kept near the stables and "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time!" the Inspector exclaims.

"That was the curious incident," Holmes replies.

Now for my curious incident this morning.

Near my house is a small shopping-centre with a post office and a building which used to announce itself as "Kingsway Evangelical Church". That was on a large, prominent white board across the top of the front of the low brick building and also on a neat square notice behind a glass panel.

This morning I approached it and got that strange feeling that comes when you notice something is not as you expect, but for a moment you don't know what.

The big board had a conspicuous big gap in the sign. It now said:
KINGSWAY *********** CHURCH. The middle bit had been painted out. I looked at the square notice. The gap was less obvious, but the same thing had happened: the word "evangelical" had simply been removed.

It set me wondering. Had the ruling committee or whatever decided going out and converting people was not very important after all, or gay marriage was a really good idea or it was possible to get too enthusiastic about Jesus? Here my ignorance came into play. Were the churches calling themselves "evangelical" and not part of some traditional set-up such as the Church of England or the Baptists organised under some structure of authority? If so, had the Kingsway church offended against some requirement or split away on some point of principle? Or had they all decided to drop the word for some reason?

Whatever it was, it seemed to have happened quite suddenly: otherwise the signs would have been replaced, not awkwardly censured.

Sherlock Holmes would have had an answer.

Back to the reorganisation at Odanglesex County Council next time.

The Sound of Silence

Odanglesex fans - and there do seem to be some in the U.S., U.K. and France - I'll return to and finish "the Partnership" next time I'm on. Right now I want to write about something else.

I'm a Quaker. Quakers are a worldwide movement and in some places - notably the U.S. - practices have gone a long way from the original. British Quakers have stayed close to the original in terms of practice and organisation - no clergy, meeting for worship centring on silent contemplation, a great shortage of DO's and DON'T's, just "advices and queries" - but I'm sure some would say that with our ranks including Buddhists, Hindus and agnostics, we're some way from the original theology. But this is not an essay on being a Quaker and still less a piece of proselytisation. It's an essay on silence.

Quaker worship starts with a period of silence we call "centring down" and it can happen a whole one hour meeting is silent. This is evidently very challenging for some people, and we hear the same from people leading meditation or spiritual experience in other traditions: people don't like silence as it makes them uneasy and they don't know what to do to fill it. This seems to be a growing trait. I occasionally attend my local Church of England church and when the priest says, "We will now have a moment's silence", the moment seems to last 5-7 seconds. However, there are still people who love spending hours alone and largely silent, fishing (and say the peace, not the fish, is the main thing) and others who walk alone in the hills as I do given a chance.

We're getting more and more used to instant replies and instant gratification. I hear someone on their mobile phone, perhaps walking along oblivious to the physical world outside, telling a partner or close friend about something that's just happened and is clearly not urgent, and I wonder if anything would be lost by waiting till they met. Many people apparently are really afraid of being separated from their mobile phones, unable to make or receive instant contact. If I'm curious about something factual, Wikipedia will tell me, and that's marvellous; but when do we leave time for calm thought, or beyond that, an emptying of the mind so the unexpected can come into it - or is that precisely what we want to avoid?

Any number of people have told me they find classical music "gloomy", and even apply this to gloriously joyful works like Grieg's "Wedding at Trollshaugen". Do they mean "gloomy", or disturbing because it encourages you to think, or are the thoughts that come to them below the surface all gloomy?

I strive to fill silence myself sometimes. I walk by an estuary or in a wood, and if I have no bird identification tasks before me, I analyse the relegation-threatened end of the football Premiership, or consider Diplomacy moves. That's why the discipline of the Quaker meeting with a common silence is so valuable - that plus the sense of coming closer in silence. I think I should be in silence more often - and if someone finds silence threatening, can they identify the threat and consider if it really is a threat?

The causes of wars

It's possible to get really deep on this subject. I'm going to get really superficial. However, anyone who comments is welcome to make it deeper and I'll join you.

If you're in any way religious, you'll be familiar with people saying religion is bad because it causes wars. Well, yes, it does cause some wars. Anything about which people feel passionately is likely to cause some conflicts. It also stops or prevents some wars.

As a History graduate who's maintained my interest in the subject, I've come across huge numbers of wars going from ancient Egypt and Babylon to modern America, Russia and China. If I try to categorise the main causes of those wars (and of course there will be some disputable cases), it appears to me the main cause of wars is land - disputes over ownership of or greed for land. If I set out a table of the causes from the commonest down, it goes like this:

1: Land
2: Other resources (gold, oil, control of a vital trade route etc)
3: Political advantage (for example, a tottering regime may start a war in the hope that victory may rescue its political fortunes back home, and in a society where victorious generals often achieve political power at home, such as ancient Rome, ambitious generals may start wars. This could also be applied to situations where a neighbouring country is harbouring rebels or dissidents who are a threat to the regime and to the situation not uncommon up to the 18th century where there is a disputed succession to the throne of country A: perhaps Smith gets the upper hand but neighbouring country B supports Jones, that leads to war and then maybe country C supports Smith)
4: National pride and status (we like to hear our armies have been victorious; the land we're conquering may be useless, but it makes the empire look bigger on maps - would also cover wars caused by insults)
5: Revenge
6: Religion and other issues of belief
7: Giving the army something to do, since bored generals and bored common soldiers can both be dangerous in states without a strong tradition of the military staying out of politics.

I considered a category of "flexing muscles", where a strong country is showing off its power to others, but it seemed to me the motive then is probably 2, 3 or 4, depending on what the weaker countries are supposed to do when they've seen that power demonstrated.

I've excluded civil wars from that, and belief (but not necessarily religious belief) would be a stronger factor in many of those. However, many civil wars are arguably class wars (not in a Marxist sense necessarily), which comes down to a dispute over resources, whether wealth or power.

Of course those pursuing wars (whether aggressors or victims or 6/6 cases) generally invoke religion in their support. Even the officially atheist Soviet Union encouraged a revival of Orthodox religion in the Second World War bcause it was seen as strengthening people's will to resist and it put the war in the context of other Russian struggles against invaders of different beliefs. That does not make religion the cause of the war, and since the 20th century many of the voices raised against wars have come from religious groups.

Standing on Ceremony

People are often impatient of ceremony. I was when I was young, although I could see the beauty in some ceremonies and a half-hidden meaning in some. Ceremony seemed to get in the way of thought and so often to reinforce the status quo in ways you couldn't question rationally, only ridicule - and that was a great time for satire in the UK.

I still feel moved to remind myself (and others) that something isn't true or valuable because it's wrapped in ancient or impressive ceremony. Ceremony does not make a royal wedding either important beyond the couple, or loving between them. The Nazis deliberately built up a great edifice of impressive ceremony, some of it visually very clever, artistic and effective. Something can be great ceremony, something can be impressive art, and still be evil.

There are two dangers in ceremony. One is that wrong can be wrapped in gold and music and marching till it is accepted by people who might have rejected it. The other is that it is treated as magic. In rejecting so much ceremony, Puritans and Quakers (who differed on so many other things) shared a perception that these things could get in the way of truth.

When a priest raises a chalice with wine, when set words are spoken over a grave, when traditional things are done reverently before a marriage or a battle, do we think the words or the ceremonial acts themselves change anything? Traditionally many people have thought just that. If the right words were not spoken, if the right sacrifice was not made, the enterprise would not prosper and perhaps even the winter would not end. The fate of the dead person's soul would be different. I think one of the several reasons why people reject religion is that they associate it with this claim of effective magic. I reject this magic entirely. But I do not reject the ceremony.

Clearly people educated to believe in certain ceremonies will be affected one way by a ceremony done properly in the traditional manner, and another way by it going wrong. In the second case, for example, the soldier may be more inclined to perceive defeat coming and to run, making defeat more likely and reinforcing belief in the magic of the ceremony. I believe the impact of ceremony can go beyond that.

Ceremony is poetry - sometimes ossified, sometimes in a strange language people struggle now to understand, but still poetry. Ceremony can represent something powerfully beyond words and engage emotions which might otherwise fester and bubble under the surface. Have you watched while a priest threw a handful of soil on a coffin? Stood a moment in silent respect? Wondered why things as everyday as bread and wine could take on huge significance for Christians? Clasped hands at one moment and not another? Sacrificed a small coin into the sea or a river? Sung a song supporters of the same football club sang generations back? All these are ways of saying something, of symbolising something. The soil on the coffin symbolises our dependence on the soil, our bodies' identity with it, that we come from it and go into it. The football song symbolises unity in a common cause, common across time as well as numbers.

Sometimes ceremony becomes too ornate, too dominated by gold and jewels and long processions, just as some poets lose their way in their own clever and creative talent. At the root, though, there should be meaning - meaning we could not so effectively encompass in logic, but that does not make it illogical.