Issue 43 • January 2020 • Record of Michaelmas Term 2019
THE
OCELLUS From the Headmaster
Readers of my earlier contributions to The Ocellus will know that I am a fan of Hilary Mantel, in particular her historical novels about that agent of the Reformation, Thomas Cromwell. The delayed third and final instalment of the trilogy is due in the New Year. It is said that Mantel has been reluctant to see her hero go to the scaffold – my apologies if that is a ‘spoiler’! She clearly has a loyalty to Cromwell, and it was perhaps his loyalty to his master, Cardinal Wolsey, that endeared her to him in the first place. There is something quite interesting going on here. Mantel admires loyalty to an individual, but is ready to let go of a widely accepted idea, that Cromwell was a brute. Zealous loyalty to ‘ideas’ can be dangerous. It may be inflexibility, even intolerance, in disguise. The philosopher Karl Popper argued that any currently accepted belief should only be seen as a working theory, always open to falsification. How doggedly we hold on to ideas is often tested at election time. Brexit – good or bad? The economy – spend or save? NATO - essential or outdated? It is an over-simplification, but the philosophical response to all these questions is probably ‘who knows for sure; let’s keep an open mind’. The ability to remain open-minded is one of the products of a sound liberal education, and the ability to change one’s mind an important key skill. Such flexibility seems clearly to be a virtue, not least because the opposite is potentially so damaging. But what to say about loyalty to individuals? The novelist E.M. Forster once wrote, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’. It is a challenging idea, and was even more challenging in 1938 when Forster wrote it. Loyalty and friendship do seem inextricably linked. A friend, after all, is someone we know we can rely on, in good times and bad. What value is friendship if, having made a mistake, our friends are quick to fade away. This, I think, is the point being made by Mantel about Cromwell and Wolsey. Wolsey was not without his faults! But he had been good to Cromwell, and Cromwell believed it important to remain loyal to him. But personal loyalty surely cannot be uncritical. As said by no less than St Augustine and Gandhi, one may come to hate the sin but still love the sinner. How to achieve that balance in practice depends on another intellectual quality, wisdom, something that may be teachable in limited measure, but which relies on perhaps the greatest of all teachers, experience.
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