5 minute read
Last Word
Jonny Dymond (1983-87) Are You Sure?
When I was 18 I realised that I knew everything and my parents knew nothing”, Mark Twain reportedly said, “but by the time I was 21 I was surprised by how much my parents had learned.”
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This quip is offered up as more than simply reassurance to Old Paulines that their offspring will one day realise that they do not hold a monopoly on wisdom, and that their parents may have something of some value to add to their vast store of understanding.
It is also about doubt. More precisely, it is in praise of doubt. And as such it runs, rather alarmingly, counter to our times. Those who troubled themselves with the political drama of the Boris Johnson – Dominic Cummings relationship may remember the pearl-clutching that went on in some quarters when the former senior advisor took time off from criticising everything and everyone to acknowledge that he might be wrong about Brexit.
The wounds from the 2016-2019 Brexit campaign are not only raw but still open. So it’s not exactly surprising that any admission of doubt from the man who rather brilliantly ran an extraordinarily divisive campaign should elicit some anger.
I hesitate to quote the great man in full for fear of ruining some readers’ day but here goes. “Questions like ‘is Brexit a good idea’ – no one on earth knows what the answer to that is,” he told the BBC “I think anyone who says they’re sure about questions like that has got a screw loose.”
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say Brexit was a mistake and that history will prove that – of course it’s reasonable for some people to think that,” he went on, “I honestly don’t know what sort of person you’d be if you didn’t have a view like that.”
Cummings was stating what is known epistemologically as the bleedin’ obvious. Cries of ‘hypocrisy’ were misplaced; he believed on balance that leaving was the right course of action and then campaigned for it with every ounce of fibre in his being (and with every trick in the book). No one overturns the status quo with the slogan ‘Probably For the Best’ or ‘On Balance, Likely To Turn Out Better’.
But the campaign, alongside two other political earthquakes, put many on one side or other of an enormous chasm; two sides utterly convinced of the other’s wrongness. The Iraq war left a considerable number convinced that many politicians and people in authority were liars; the financial crisis, that they were fools; Brexit, that they were traitors. Each piled certainty onto the other; buried at the bottom of this particular Pandora’s Box, poor old doubt rather struggled to get out.
Which is rather odd. Because like the terrible consensualist (still a crime in some southern US states) that I am, I always had a vision of Britain as bit more sensible than all of that. Some of it is that inverted intellectual snobbery of cartoon-Edmund Burke; you can take yer fancy French revolutionary ideas and dunk them in a barrel of good British beer. Some of it is the muddling-through of George Orwell, whose nation of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes” rejected absolute ideas in the same way as it had a long time beforehand rejected absolute monarchs. “Why,” asks Orwell, as the bombs tumble down around him “is the goose-step not used in England? There are heaven knows plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.” That sense of the ridiculous, that shiny boots and shiny ideas might not be all they are cracked up to be, was a good chunk of what we were. And victory in war, hot and cold, helped. What better to boost the cause of doubt than the resounding defeat of totalitarian certainty?
Maybe as those battles, real and intellectual, recede into the past we are losing the taste for doubt. The technology that surrounds us seems to help but doesn’t. Beautifully produced high-definition TV news portrays the world not as it is – chipped at the edges and washed out, with little bits of fluff in the corners – but as it might be, precise and clear, hard bright colours replacing shades of grey. The instant availability of information settles arguments about football scores and GDP in seconds, leaving little room for just leaving-it-be or making a bet and forgetting to claim the winnings. And the dreary siloes of social media send users spiralling down echo-chambers of certainty. If you’ve ever been tempted to have a sensible conversation on a controversial topic on Twitter, don’t. You won’t.
I have some skin in this particular game. Quite a lot of news broadcasting and debate is the promotion of doubt, the questioning of ideas, the eyebrow raised at the declaration of intent. This used to be a pretty accepted part of national life. For some – and it is difficult to know how many, because it is a lot easier now for a few to make a lot of noise – it no longer is. So deep is doubt buried under certainty, that to query an idea is often taken as opposition to it; to air an argument akin to agreeing with it.
Tempting as it is to declare this ‘profoundly dangerous’, that is only to commit the same crime-of-certainty as all the other felons around us. It is, however, often depressing. Doubt runs through this fine nation, through our politics and literature, through our understanding of who we are.
“I have never met a simple man,” Father Rivas says in Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, “Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple…No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say “Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace”. Bravo.
CELEBRATING 150 YEARS OF ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT
October Annual Dinner at School – speaker John Simpson
Launch of the 150th Appeal by OPC President, Ed Vaizey, to take Bursary Places to 153
November The Future of Politics – George Osborne The first in a series of seminars at the School featuring eminent Paulines
January The Future of Britain in the World – Simon Fraser and Tom Tugendhat
February The Feast Service at St Paul’s Cathedral and Mercers’ Hall
The Future of Health – Matthew Gould and Robert Winston
March The Future of The Arts – Simon Fox and Patrick Spence
Earliest Vintage Lunch at School
May The Future of Education – Ken Baker and the High Master
