The Book of Books (26 page)

Richard Dawkins writes: ‘I am not a dualist,' and then goes on to explain why. He quotes from Paul Bloom who puts dualism most squarely in the minds of young children, though he concedes that this condition persists in some adults. Dualism is defined
here as ‘a fundamental split between matter and mind'. But is there another way to look at this differently, that does not demand a split between mind and matter? Is there not another intriguing ‘split': in the mind itself which can inhabit two or more places simultaneously?

For what about imagination? When Einstein was asked what was the most important factor in his work, he said, ‘Imagination, above all, imagination.' When Samuel Beckett wanted to signal the end of things he wrote: ‘Imagine dead. Imagine.' Knowing that we could not. And when we look at men and women who leap as it were to new thought worlds, it is imagination that takes them there, that conjures words out of the air, as Shakespeare said of the poet's gift, and gives them ‘a local habitation and a name'. What does that tell us?

Children move easily into other worlds. A game of football or cricket as a boy often involved us taking on the names of our heroes: ‘I'm Denis Compton; I'm Jackie Milburn.' (Long-gone stars of respectively cricket and football.) As Richard Dawkins points out, they can have imaginary friends; they can go to see a film and when they come out for some time they can ‘be' one of the actors they have seen.

I think it is mistaken to think that this faculty does not persist throughout life. For example, the late Brigid Brophy, a fine novelist, wrote an article on the subject: ‘The Novel as a Takeover Bid'. And so, for many of us, it is. We receive from an author of fiction, most often someone who is a stranger, these infinite combinations of the alphabet. Generally in solitude we translate these intimate revelations into our own experience and they become ‘us' and we become ‘them'. We are ‘wrapped up' in them, ‘spellbound' by them, ‘carried way' by them, ‘hooked'. Is this not living another life, even lives? And if so does it not have something to say about hitherto ‘unproven' possibilities of other lives?

These fabricated people stand outside us. We not only bring them inside, we are also perpetually aware that they stay ‘outside'. In short, we have experience of what is both inside and outside of us. The notion that there is a being, spirit, essence, entity, force, pulse, emanation, otherness ‘out there' is part of how we experience the world. Without this faculty we would not be able simultaneously to operate on the many levels we do.

The evidence that we are apparently encoded with this leads me to conclude that the long catalogue of ‘worlds out there' and all manner of ‘otherness' is part of our world. It is not psychic or weird but normal. Not to have imagination may be a cause of insanity. The King James Bible provides us with a blazing instance of that majestic and opaque ‘other worldness'.

Finally, is reason, as Dawkins believes, the only way to understand ourselves and our predicament? ‘The heart has reasons which reason does not know' – a cliché but like all clichés well worn because found consistently useful. Perhaps, as Francis Crick a co-discoverer of DNA believes, or rather asserts, we shall come to a time when every jot and tittle of every move we make, every step we take, every impulse we feel, every thought we form, every sensation we experience, every sight we see, sound we hear, taste we take will be accessible to mathematical formulations described in minute and inescapable detail. That is a certain outcome, if a wholly rational universe is postulated.

But what about those other words that we have found to describe the state we are in? What about romantic or wholly inappropriate, unsuitable, dangerous, foolish love – could that be broken down into reasonable particles? If not, does it not suggest that there may be more than one path to the top of the mountain? And the sway of music, does that come out of reason? And unexpected pleasure – ‘surprised by joy' – is that in the same arena as logical thought? What about those artists and inventors and
lovers who have ‘defied reason' and taken imagination (as Einstein did: as Shakespeare did) and arrived at conclusions unexpected? Were they serving reason all along? This is not to suggest a heaven or hell or any form of reincarnation: it is however to suggest that something is going on for which, as yet, we have no satisfactory explanation – and perhaps we never will – and therefore there are still open doors.

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane whom Richard Dawkins admires greatly, wrote (quoted in
The God Delusion
) in
Possible Worlds
: ‘Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose . . . I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.' Or even, one might add, in the philosophy of atheism.

Dawkins's non-religious Enlightenment is a place which has little or no flexibility. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to which we return, found benefits in plurality.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND WILLIAM WILBERFORCE

I
t is too easy to see this story in terms of ‘movements'. The Englightenment is one example of several – the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Civil Wars and so on. It is tempting to see and over-emphasise the effect of these movements with the neatness of hindsight. It was all more stumbling, more fractured, more human than that.

Because the overwhelming majority of the population led lives unchronicled until very recently, we have only a small pool of examples to choose from if we wish to put a face, a documented human being, on to these movements. So much of the face of our history is of kings and queens, aristocrats and archbishops: the mighty, who had the time, the wealth and the chroniclers to make and keep records of their lives.

To illustrate how effective individuals were in this story of the impact of the Bible, I have picked out two people whose actions rather than their ancestry raised them into their history.

Mary Wollstonecraft is credited with being a key early voice, even, by some, a founder, of the movement which became feminism. William Wilberforce is credited with being an essential voice in the long struggle to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself. Both came out of the late eighteenth-century
Enlightenment when rational, distinguished and brilliant intellectuals had pronounced that the Bible was dead, or not much more than mumbo-jumbo. Yet both Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wilberforce were profound Christians and it was their Christian belief, nourished through intense study of the King James Bible, which drove them on.

Their impact – based on their Christianity – came out of the eighteenth-century parallel with the Enlightenment (of which it could be argued it was in its way a fine example). It swept at first slowly but then irresistibly through the nineteenth century and it can still be seen clearly in the fabric of society today.

Mary Wollstonecraft's immersion in the faith came by way of reason, what was considered to be divinely originated reason: that of William Wilberforce came through revelation. There were elements of reason in Wilberforce's conversion, though no evidence of revelation in the Protestantism of Mary Wollstonecraft. Both reason and revelation had been denied to Christianity by some of the Englightenment thinkers. Reason, it was thought, had no place in the unreasonable world of belief. Revelation, it was argued, had no place in the logical world of scientific investigation. But here were two individuals, two of many, who showed not only that a movement – such as the Enlightenment – can miss the exception but that the exceptional individual can have an effect greater than a movement.

Mary Wollstonecraft's book
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
was published in 1792 and, revised, in 1793. It can fairly be called the first feminist tract. Wollstonecraft sought, in her words, to ‘persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness'.

To today's feminists hers would seem a rather timid voice.
There was no frontal attack on patriarchy, no demand for women's votes. But, in her time, she was radical and hounded down for it but what she wrote and what she did planted a seed on fertile soil. People live in their own historical period: for her time, Mary Wollstonecraft was, and was seen to be, revolutionary and dangerous.

She believed that education was the key. Education, she argued, was to be as available for women as for men. She wrote about love, passion, sex, society, fashion and marriage, but the bedrock was education. Her own had been patchy.

Her father inherited a small fortune and squandered it in a drunken attempt to become a gentleman. He was violent with his wife, the mother of his six children, and Mary's youth was scarred by confrontations with him to protect her meek Irish Protestant mother.

She found ways to get the beginnings of an education with the help of the kind parents of her friends and her strong habit of reading. She became a lady's companion. She began to write for the cheap populist publications on what was known as ‘Grub Street'. It was rapid-turnover journalism, hack-work, but she had a flair for it and the guts to survive in a man's world.

Mary was a regular churchgoer, and it was her church which, in her young womanhood, gave her the education she needed to succeed as she wanted to do. Through the church she found a bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who published her first book ‘
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
' and her first novel
Mary: A Fiction
. Through Joseph Johnson, she fell in with a congregation of English radicals, Dissenters who had embraced the idea of equality emerging from the newly independent America. Dr Richard Price, the Unitarian minister of a beautiful plain church, which still exists, in Stoke Newington in east London, took Mary into his congregation and it was there that her yearning for an
education was fulfilled. Nonconformists and other Dissenters were forbidden to go to university so they set up their own equivalents in their churches or in their homes. Their achievements in many fields – especially in the sciences – often outstripped Oxford and Cambridge.

Price was a formidable polemicist and his impact on Mary was galvanising. In 1789 he set off the fuse which was to lead to her great work. He preached and then published a sermon congratulating the French Assembly for the new possibilities of religious and civil freedom offered by their revolution. In this sermon he developed this Christian idea of ‘perfectibility': that the world could be improved through Christian human effort. Mary took up that idea.

Dr Price's sermon provoked one of the great intellectual battles in English history. Edmund Burke responded fiercely with his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
which argued that traditional authority could not be sacrificed for ideas of liberty. Thomas Paine replied to Burke with his magnificent
The Rights of Men
. Mary rushed into the battle with her own version,
A Vindication of the Rights of Man.
This was soon followed by
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
in 1792 – dashed off and revised in 1793. She argued passionately for the God-given (as she saw it) rights for women of civil and religious liberty.

Her argument was that human beings have ‘natural rights' validated by God's will. And ‘virtue', she also argued, like ‘wisdom', both to be found in her King James Bible, were the keys to the kingdom currently occupied only by men. Because of that, she wrote: ‘if the present constitution of civil society is an almost insuperable obstacle, [to women] then the implication here seems very clear: the present state of civil society must be changed, if we are to progress.' She proposed a revolution, on Christian principles.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Anglican faith never left her. It drew on the radical elements of Christ's teachings in the New Testament which pointed the way to equality and a society released from traditional hierarchies. It also became plaited with the more secular revolutionary ambitions of Thomas Paine, with whom she enjoyed a platonic friendship and mutual admiration. Nor can her own personal frustrations with her education and her experience of a violent father be ruled out of the entwinement of ideas and ideals which became her voice.

Yet at the root of it was a Protestantism based on the King James Bible and shaped by the Dissenters. It was they, the nonconformists, who kept her reputation and her works alive in a nineteenth century which turned its back on her because of the perceived shortcomings of her private life.

That rejection points to another aspect of Protestantism: its capacity for pettiness, judgementalism and hypocrisy.

Mary's adult life was irregular. In London she had a wild affair with the artist-as-public-genius, Fuseli. In Paris to meet the French revolutionaries, she met and fell in love with an American, and went through what she thought of as a marriage. It was a sham. She had a child. It turned out to be illegitimate. Her American lover abandoned her. She made two attempts at suicide.

Her next marriage was to the radical agitator William Godwin. When she died at the age of thirty-eight, he published an honest memoir on her which openly detailed what appeared to many commentators an immoral life. As the revolutionary mood changed to repressed piety during and after the French wars, Mary, who had been a radical heroine in revolutionary Paris, was thought to be too dangerous. Her ideas were feared to have been contaminated by the French connection and were even more unacceptable because of her apparently licentious and uncontrolled life. To take up the work of Mary Wollstonecraft was to forgive what were seen
as her sins and that was beyond most of her successors, save for Dissenting women writers. They kept the faith.