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By Janet Briggs

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The Holy Ghost directed "The Passion of the Christ", claims its human Director, Mel Gibson. If this is so, then the Holy Ghost is devoted to horror comics, horror films and video nasties in the worst possible taste. This latest attempt to turn the Gospels into a film script is a remorseless assault upon the senses. Mel Gibson wields his film like a blunt instrument to pound home his argument, but we are so disorientated by this battering, that we have no idea of the direction he is taking us.

The film depicts the final 12 hours of Jesus’ life on earth from his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, his midnight appearance before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, his interrogation by Pontius Pilate, the scourging, the walk along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary, the crucifixion and the resurrection. During these twelve hours, however, Jesus is subjected to a continuous physical assault: he is loaded with chains, thrown over a bridge, kicked punched, shaken, knocked to the ground, dragged over stone pavements, and beaten. Every Roman soldier in Jerusalem appears to be under orders to assault Jesus at every opportunity. Indeed, so great is his suffering that in real life he would have died long before his interview with Caiaphas.

So is this a film about suffering or violence? Or is it about guilt? Traditional Christians believe that it is the Crucifixion that achieves the reconciliation between God and humankind and it is the passion of the Christ that brings this about; this film, therefore, ought to be about suffering, but this is not where the emphasis seems to be placed. The most emphatic scene is not the crucifixion but the scourging and here the director pursues violence compulsively like an addict.

For almost twenty minutes, Jesus is subjected to an uninterrupted flogging by two tall, muscular Roman soldiers who take a malicious delight in causing him extreme physical harm. To start with, they deliver thirty strokes to his back and sides with thick canes. They then continue with cat-o’-nine tails barbed with sharpened pieces of bone or bronze, thirty blows to his back, followed by thirty to his chest, abdomen and sides. Enjoying the spectacle hugely. is Caiaphas and the Jerusalem mob, shouting vile abuse, laughing and applauding the soldiers, prompting them to ever greater barbarities. His disciples skulk around the edges of the mob while Mary, his Mother, and Mary Magdalen watch nearby. Jesus, his tormentors and the crowd, are splattered with his blood while the pavement gradually turns red. This is violence for the sake of violence. The narrative stops at this point, while the audience is trapped into watching this appalling spectacle. Presumably we are expected to be horrified by the suffering inflicted upon Jesus; but instead we feel angry that we have paid good money to witness orgiastic cruelty which seems to have no purpose other than the personal gratification of the film-makers. The revulsion we feel at this sadistic exhibition drives out every other emotion. In addition, as we, too, are present at this scene, we are made accomplices of the baying mob, share in their responsibility and, therefore, are expected to feel guilty for what they and we have done. The scene, however, is so exaggerated that it loses the respect of the audience: in reality, common sense tells us that anyone subjected to such a beating would have died in the first few minutes, and, therefore, prolonging it, completely misrepresents the Bible account, as Jesus did not die then. Indeed, the Gospels only mention the scourging very briefly.

The account of the walk to Calvary is similarly flawed. Carrying an enormous cross which no man could lift, and subjected to an endless barrage of blows, kicks, lashes and abuse, Jesus stumbles up the hill to his crucifixion where the nailing to the cross is dwelt upon in lingering, unnecessary and inaccurate detail. The film-makers are much more barbaric than the Romans, inventing forms of torture that had not occurred to them. Pity is once again driven out by the sheer brutality of the exercise because we know this is all sadistic self-indulgence and we wonder why intelligent, cultured people would want to portray these events so crudely. After all we have all experienced pain and understand the agony caused by torture without a graphic demonstration of its techniques. Exaggeration undermines authenticity.

Mel Gibson is a traditional Roman Catholic and knows that the Atonement is achieved at the cost of Christ’s suffering and death. Yet this is not a spiritual film: it does not explain the Atonement. We are not allowed to enter the mind of Jesus in this film. We do not know how he is responding inwardly to this treatment. His vocal responses are limited to sighs, groans and the cries of pain that reveal his physical nature; but we are not shown the spiritual side, the internal struggle between love of self on one hand and love of humankind on the other, and the sense of duty willing him to endure his fate; nor are we privy to the divine nature of the Christ which might explain why a God of Love would subject such a flimsy thing as a human body to so much pain in order to become reconciled to the species. What was God thinking about during those final, twelve hours of his incarnation? This film does not tell us; nor does it help us to understand why people would believe in the conundrum of the Atonement. The voice of God is lost in the clamour of the violence (and the excruciating soundtrack!).

This film, by dwelling on violence, clearly misses its mark. But why? One might answer, cynically, that violence sells well. This film has so far earned more that $350,000,000 in the United States alone. Perhaps because we have become desensitised to suffering, having seen so much of it on television, it was necessary to exaggerate the violence to make the point. Then, the film may be seen as a metaphor for the violent, cruel, barbarous and inhuman condition of the modern world, just as unstable and nasty as Palestine 2000 years ago. Subjecting his hero to intolerable physical abuse is Mel Gibson’s house-style as in "Braveheart" "Payback" and "The Patriot" so perhaps he is just running true to form. However, I think this degrading of human flesh, this obsession with flagellation, is driven by guilt and perhaps fear.

Is this, then, the self-loathing of a film-maker guilt-ridden because of his vast wealth, luxurious life-style and indifference to an impoverished world; or is it a reflection of a deep, spiritual unease in the heart of the richest and most powerful nation on earth since 11^th September 2001? Why are we being punished in this way? What have we done wrong? How can we expiate it?

This hysterical dwelling upon the abuse of Jesus may be an attempt to express a corrosive sense of guilt that nothing can assuage, and perhaps a feeling of frustration that so great is the offence, that self-abasement will never achieve wholeness and salvation.

This is a deeply pessimistic film. There is nothing redemptive or transcendent here. Apart from a few very special people like Mary, Mary Magdalene, St. Veronica and Simon of Cyrene who helped to carry the Cross, the rest of us are imprisoned in the hell of our own bestial nature, and the film’s curtailed and off-hand treatment of the resurrection would suggest that salvation is still a long way off.

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CHRISTENING AT SEA

The Rev. Dr. Colin Wicker was aboard the Broughty Ferry Lifeboat in the Firth of Tay on 1st May, 2004 conducting the first ever Christening aboard a Lifeboat. The star of the occasion was 20 weeks old Katherine Louise Drummond Brown, daughter of Gillian and Murray Brown, the Lifeboat Coxswain. It was a beautiful, calm day and we wish Katherine Louise fair weather on her voyage through life.

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BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

Congratulations and many happy returns to Jamie Smith who is celebrating his 94th birthday this mouth (July). Jamie is a founder member of the S.U.F. and is a poet whose work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines. In honour of his birthday, we reprint one of his poems which appeared in The Link of Summer 2000.

Jamie A. Smith

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PROJECTING JESUS

By Terrance Skene

While the process of transferring the Gospels from printed page to celluloid seems always to have been fraught with difficulties, transforming the Old Testament stories into spectacular epics for the silver screen seems to be accomplished with relative ease and financial success. In the 1940's and 1950's, Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, The Ten Commandments, all based directly on the Bible, and film versions of novels such as Ben Hur, Quo Vadis and The Robe were all extremely popular with audiences and on balance received pass marks from contemporary critics. Ben Hur, for instance, won an unprecedented seven Academy Awards. In addition to being competently produced and employing the most recent technical innovations and visual effects (The Israelites crossing the Red Sea), these films exploited the colourful settings and lavish costumes of a land and era as alien and exotic as that of Sheherezada and her Arabian Nights Entertainment, and made the most of the heightened passions, the dramatic tensions and sexual implications of these ancient Biblical tales. (Star of The Queen of Sheba (1921), Betty Blythe, is reputed to have commented, "I wear 28 costumes, and if I put them all on at once, I couldn't keep warm".)

By concentrating upon literal, scriptural accounts of events and on themes of good against evil, love against hate, liberty against oppression and forgiveness overcoming the desire for vengeance, these films were undemanding, uncontroversial, highly entertaining and at the same time made bits of the Bible accessible to millions of people who would never have bothered to read it.

Film-makers, who sought to portray Jesus on the screen, however, trod a thorny, uphill path, and their efforts are frequently met with abuse, condemnation and outrage. Of the twenty or so major .Jesus films that have played in commercial cinemas since Cecil B. De Mille's full length epic "The King of Kings" (1927), few have avoided offending the spiritual (and political) sensitivities of one religious group or another. Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake of the De Mille film was set upon by the Catholic Legion of Decency which issued an "official warning" against it.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) was stigmatised as anti-semitic and anti-Christian, but was endorsed by millions of rock fans who ensured its financial success.

Franco Zefferelli was vilified by fundamentalist Protestants in the U.S.A, when he claimed his Jesus of Nazareth (1977) was a portrait of an "Ordinary man - gentle, fragile, simple". Perhaps their hysterical opposition was intensified by Pope Paul VI's open approval of the film's merits. General Motors, however, indifferent to its quality, rather than antagonise the Christian Right, withdrew its sponsorship of the film. Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ(1988) so scandalised the traditional Christian community that it played to empty seats, was quickly withdrawn and lost its producers a vast sum of money.

Hundreds of millions of people revere Jesus and many claim that any attempt to represent him on the profane cinema screen reduces his significance as an object of worship and defiles his holiness. How can an imperfect human actor, they ask, portray the perfection of a Divine Being, the thoughts, the feelings, the speech, the expression, the reactions, gestures etc? In addition, each Religious Group has its own treasured image of Jesus anti is acutely offended if film-makers dare to project any other, thereby misleading the unenlightened masses occupying cinema seats. The film-makers, therefore, face the insoluble dilemma of the nature of Jesus: is he divine, is he human, or a mixture of both? Their choice will decide the fate of their film

The twenty or so major portrayals since 1927, have been unable to reach any consensus and evident in all of them is a tension between the divine and the human. The producers instinctively wish to emphasise the humanity of Jesus with which the audience may identify but the need to observe a reverent attitude towards the Sacred Being and so disarm criticism, is paramount, and so the imperfections and complexities of the human personality are submerged in the assurance of the God.

King of Kings (1927) presents Jesus (Played by the distinguished British actor H. B. Warner) as a mature, majestic and other-worldly figure, self-composed, compassionate, gentle, virile, but essentially remote, like the Christ of Victorian religious painting. One reviewer of the time thought, "Mr Warner's expression is a little severe".

During the making of the film, in order to preserve a proper sense of reverence, only the director was allowed to speak to Warner while in costume, and he was transported veiled, in a closed car from one location to another.

Jesus, in Nicholas Ray's remake of King of Kings (1961), as portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter is so youthful, that the film was nicknamed, "I Was a Teenage Jesus". This Jesus is a beautiful young man, very occasionally confused but usually self-contained and always compassionate. He is strong, gentle and firm but he shows little emotion, even when under great physical duress. Even his dying moments are strictly controlled and passionless. Divinity rather than humanity seems to the main constituent of his make up.

In stark contrast is the Jesus of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), by the marxist-existentialist director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. This is an unsmiling, thin-faced ascetic; the portrait of an angry revolutionary, stirring up the poor against the rich, defending the weak against the strong, a grim, driven Christ of the People, whose frenetic journeying around Palestine displays the energy of a tornado. As played by Enrique Irazoqui, he is a disconcerting, even disturbing presence, but despite revealing many human emotions, he retains an other-worldly detachment that proclaims his divine origin.

Max von Sydov's interpretation in The Greatest Story Ever Told, (1965) is by far the most spiritual and mystical. This is a calm, introspective Jesus, who speaks slowly and thoughtfully, knows his own mind and fulfils his purpose without flinching. He is a strong, noble creature who walks the world but has his being elsewhere.

In the 1970's there were two contrasting portraits, the youthful hippie of Ted Neeley, (hair blowing in the wind) in the all singing, all dancing, rock-around-the-cross film version of Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973); and the very reverential image of an inward-looking, divine visionary created by Robert Powell in Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977)

Jesus, the man, eventually appears in all his humanity, resisting the claims of divinity, in Martin Scorses's The Last Temptation of Christ( 1988). William Dafoe presents a sinful, confused figure, indecisive, struggling to come to terms with his own nature, his conscience, his wish for a normal, family life and his awesome divine destiny. This is a human Jesus in the grip of forces that he can barely understand and which are pulling him apart. His spiritual turmoil and his imperfections, he shares with all human- kind, and so is a more relevant and significant image than any of the others.

Theatre critics like to identify the most recent production of that play as "A Hamlet for our time". So we have had a  "pacifist" Hamlet, a "punk" Hamlet, several "gay" Hamlets, a "feminist" Hamlet, "a yuppie" Hamlet, and even a "self-seeking, high-rolling, Dallas" Hamlet (absolutely unendurable!), which in their time (allegedly) reflected a social, political mood. Arguably, celluloid depictions of Jesus may also be seen as reflecting social, political and religious attitudes over the past century. If that is so, Martin Scorsese's Jesus tortured by doubts about his way of life, sceptical about his spirituality, unsure of his purpose, crushed by his responsibilities and appalled by the possibility of his divine destiny, seems to be the Jesus of our time.

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THE REEL JESUS

The Holy Bible was one of the very first literary works quarried by film-makers in search of a dramatic story.

The first Jesus reel - La Vie de Le Passion de Jesus-Christ was projected in 1897, and in the next 14 years, 39 celluloid versions of the Gospels were produced, including one based on the Oberammergau Passion Plays, filmed on the roof of the Grand Central Palace Hotel, New York.

In 1912 Sidney Olcott directed From the Manger to the Cross an hour-long feature, shot on location, which with added sound-track, survived into the 1940's.

In 1913 the British Board of Film Censors was established. It immediately dissuaded local companies from exploiting New Testament sources for the next 40 years. Pope Pius X banned the showing of films in Church and so only 2 significant productions appeared, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. de Mille's epic, The King of Kings (1928) which created the definitive movie Jesus for the next 30 years.

J. Arthur Rank, the miller, founded the Religious Film Society and in 1939 produced but the camera plays the role of Jesus and his lines are taken exclusively from the King James Authorised Version of the Bible.

The remakes of Ben Hur (1959) and of King of Kings (1961), initiated a series of ,Jesus movies, from leading, international directors, including Posolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), George Steven's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Luis Bunuel's The Milky Way (1968), "Monty Python's" Life of Brian (1979), Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

In the same period television broadcast Son of Man (1969), written by Dennis Potter, and Zeffirelli's 6.5 hour long Jesus of Nazareth (1977), scripted by Anthony Burgess; while the musical theatre produced 2 versions of Jesus Christ Superstar (1971 and 2001) and Godspell (1973).

Mel Gibson's Company, Icon, has also produced the first full-length animated version, of the Gospels, The Miracle Maker (1999) by Stanislav Sokolov, with the voice of Ralph Fiennes depicting Jesus.

Currently there are 67 Jesus movies, 10 made for TV., 4 made for video and 7 TV. series.

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The film, "Sylvia", on current release, portraying the marriage of Sylvia Plath to the late Ted Hughes, the predecessor of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate, unfortunately, makes no mention of her Unitarian connections. Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, in 1932, Sylvia Plath is now recognised as one of the greatest English language poets of the 20^th century and her work is studied in schools, colleges and universities world wide. Her novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963, topped the U.S. best sellers list for months and was hijacked by the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s as a major work promoting the cause of women’s liberation. It was made into a film in 1979. Only one of her books of poetry, The Colossus, (1960) appeared in print before she took her own life in 1963, but there followed Ariel in 1966, Crossing the Water, 1971, Winter Trees 1972 and her Collected Poems 1981 won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1983. Her Diaries and Letters have also been published; and there have been at least three biographies, including Sylvia Plath Remembered (1983), by a Unitarian Minister, Max Gaebler. Just before his death, her husband published Birthday Letters (1998), his own poetic tribute to her. Interest in her work and life is greater than ever as is witnessed by this controversial film about her sometimes tempestuous relationship with her husband and fellow poet, Ted Hughes.

As a child in Jamaica Plain, Sylvia attended the Unitarian Church with her parents and younger brother. After the death of her father in 1940, the family moved to Wellesley Massachusetts. While her mother Aurelia taught in the Sunday School, Sylvia joined the Church Youth Group and in 1949 attended a Star Island Unitarian youth conference. Deeply concerned about the threat of nuclear war, Sylvia and a friend wrote an anti – arms race essay A Youth’s Plea for World Peace which was published by The Christian Science Monitor in March 1950.

Sylvia was an unusually bright and industrious pupil at school and was enrolled at the prestigious Smith College, her expenses being paid by the Unitarian novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, who had been impressed by her great literary and intellectual gifts.

While a student at Smith College, in an essay about Unitarianism, written for a Religious Course, she called herself "an agnostic humanist".

At the end of her third year, Sylvia suffered badly from clinical depression and after enduring several session of electro-convulsive shock treatment hid herself from her family and swallowed a huge dose of sleeping pills. The Unitarian community, including their Minister, the Rev. William Rice and the Rev. Max Gaebler, a family friend, spent two days searching for her before she was discovered close to death in the crawl space under the house. She was admitted to a sanatorium for extensive psychiatric treatment, the cost of which was again borne by Olive Prouty who had herself suffered a nervous breakdown when a young woman. Sylvia’s novel The Bell Jar deals with this event in great detail.

Sylvia recovered from this episode, completed her degree, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge, where in 1956, she met and Ted Hughes who was trying to establish himself as a poet.

She had hoped to be married in the Wellesley Unitarian Church but in the end circumstances prevented it.

While living in England she attended the local parish church for a while, there being no Unitarian Church nearby; however, being "a pagan-Unitarian at best" as she described herself in a letter to her mother, she was upset by the fundamentalist preaching and did not return. She wrote to her mother, " I’d really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley. The Unitarian Church is my church. How I miss it. There is just no choice here." Her severe depression returned. In the last few months of her life she felt isolated and abandoned by husband and friends. A Unitarian connection then might have brought her some comfort.

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OLIVE HIGGINS PROUTY

In addition to being Sylvia Plath’s benefactress, literary adviser, correspondent and friend, Olive Prouty was a philanthropist who gave time and money to a great many charities, including the Boston Children’s Hospital. In her will she left $50,000 to her Unitarian Church, in Brookline which she and her husband attended for 50 years.

Born into a well-to-do family in 1882, and married to a very wealthy husband, Olive became a highly successful novelist and amassed yet another fortune by her own efforts. In the 1920’s,30’s and 40’s she produced one best-seller after another, and one of her works, Stella Dallas was filmed three times, in 1925, 1937 (with Barbara Stanwyk) and in 1990 (with Bette Midler). It was made into a play in 1924 and, much to Olive’s distress, became the basis of a radio soap-opera which was broadcast daily for 18 years! She published her last work in 1951 when her husband died and thereafter until her death in 1974 devoted her time to philanthropy and her local Unitarian Church. Writing gave her great pleasure and the fact that she was earning vast sums of money as a result of doing something she enjoyed, worried her so much that she tried to give it all away to deserving cases, one of which of course was Sylvia Plath.

She had been brought up as an evangelical Congregationalist, but as a teenager she came to the conclusion that the uncompromising message from the pulpit, six days out of seven, seemed to make little impression upon the conduct of the people in the pews. In the Unitarian Church which she joined in the 1920’s, she found what she had been searching for: an open-minded, compassionate religion with high ideals of service to the community. She described her quest for religious truth as "searching with fumbling finite mind….leaping from doubt to bright surmise."

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CHILDREN AND THE BIBLE

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THE CONTEXT OF EVIL

The war in Iraq has cast up yet another appalling contradiction. Young soldiers, brought up in a God-fearing, law-abiding, well-intentioned community and serving the cause of democracy have been accused of inhumane and cruel behaviour in the course of interrogating Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib Jail in Baghdad. There is world-wide outrage. The U.S. President has apologised to the people of Iraq and embarrassed U.S. politicians are demanding an immediate investigation. How can decency, rectitude, discipline, justice, trust and humanitarianism have been so completely betrayed by those who were there to safeguard these very ideals?

We may not always he happy to admit it, but we all have the potential to harm our fellow beings, given the appropriate circumstances anti motivation. Fear, greed, jealousy, revenge, spite, hatred, contempt, indifference, ignorance, prejudice, thoughtlessness, even lack of imagination may provoke any one of us to do evil. Most of us have been taught from childhood to control our emotions in the name of good order and are constantly subject to the promptings of conscience. At the same time the community in which we live has erected a structure of laws against wrong-doing to ensure the security of freedom of us all. The Rule of Law exists to guarantee justice and fair play for us all, no matter how lowly anti insignificant our station or how meagre our financial resources. We who abide by the law may live secure within the fortress of the law an(] defy the assaults of the lawless, no matter how powerful and rich they may be. But a great sea change is upon us; a cancer is attacking our Rule of Law and the fabric of democracy is beginning to crumble.

From earliest times, there have been two contradictory views of the rights and wrongs of human behaviour. One view holds that there are objective, universal, moral laws which are valid in every age and in every society. This is the principle upon which the Ten Commandments is based. The other view claims that morality is a purely personal matter, that it is up to the individual to make up his or her own mind as to what is right and what is wrong: what may be one person's idea of acceptable behaviour may appear to be wicked in the eyes of another. In this view there is no such thing as a standard of behaviour common to all and so there is no such thing as evil as there is no agreed definition as to what evil might be. Over the past three decades, this latter view has become more and more influential and increasingly people claim to be morally independent and act as they please without reference to other people. This state of affairs was acknowledged twenty years ago when Margaret Thatcher informed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that there was "no such thing as Society".

Morality and the Rule of Law depend upon the assent of the community; if there is no community, there is no general agreement about what is right and wrong, and so we descend into moral anarchy, where "might is right" and no one is safe.

This policy of ruthless self-interest and reliance upon naked power employed by nations inevitably led to wars and to overcome this difficulty a community of nations was created first of all the League of Nations and since 1945, the United Nation. Individual members agreed to abide by the resolutions of the majority and the U.N. became the judge of what was lawful behaviour among the nations.

Last year Britain and America invaded the sovereign state of Iraq, against the wishes of the United Nations and in the teeth of strong opposition from the major nations of the world. By doing so they undermined the authority of the community of nations and the principle of the Rule of law. The attack upon Iraq was an exercise in the use of vastly superior military and economic power to overwhelm a comparatively puny state, which in spite of claims to the contrary, was no threat to Britain or the U.S.A. There was some misguided notion that by overthrowing the government of Iraq, the world would be made a safer place; that potential terrorists would be overawed by this demonstration of might, put away their bombs and live out their lives in peaceful inactivity. However, we all know that wars beget wars; that killing breeds resentment and anger, and that these generate an irresistible desire for revenge. And so anarchy is unleashed upon the world, the context of evil is established, we are all now potential targets and the democracies of Britain and America are responsible.

Over the past few years the U.S. has reneged on the Kyoto Global Warming Agreement, weakened the force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by its Nuclear Posture Review, demanded immunity for its citizens before the International Criminal Court and immunity for its service personnel from prosecution by Iraqi Courts, ignored the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and demonstrated to the world that American interests are above The Rule of Law. 

If the U.S. Government's general demeanour seems to indicate an indifference to international law, regulations and agreements, it is not surprising that its soldiers behave in a similar manner. What the great one's do, the lesser will copy. If the U.S. administration shows that it undervalues the people of other nations by its treatment of those nations, then its service personnel have a model for their own behaviour towards the nationals of a state which they have Occupied. In condemning the actions of these prison guards, the U.S. administration is condemning itself.

If democracy is under threat as we are assured it is, if our personal security is now compromised, if the forces of evil are battering at our gates, the actions of our governments over the past few years are responsible. Force is no substitute for consensus, as the use of force leads to oppression and oppression destroys democracy.

By defying the Rule of Law the British and U.S. governments appears to he bent on destroying the democratic ideals they are claiming to defend. This contradiction is typical of the moral incoherence that flourishes in this context of evil.

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by Bill Stephen

A CRISIS OF TRUST

Newspaper and radio pundits, pollsters, politicians and occasionally clergymen on "Thought for the Day" are all trying to convince us that we, the people of Great Britain, have lost faith in our national institutions. We doubt every word uttered by government ministers (Westminster & Holyrood); we are critical of the N.H.S.; we have a jaundiced view of the railways; we find fault with the quality of services provided by local authorities; and we suspect multi-national companies are motivated solely by self-interest. All sorts of professionals feel they have lost the trust of the general public, doctors, dentists, teachers, lawyers, social workers, bankers etc. as we seem to live in a climate of suspicion. Yet, we are all aware that trust is essential for everyday living and we constantly trust all sorts of people. We take for granted that the bus-driver will follow the published route; we expect clean water to issue from the kitchen tap, that electricity will flow at the touch of a switch, and that the mail will he delivered regularly; we don't expect to be poisoned in a restaurant or sold rotting or contaminated goods in a supermarket or cheated in the Building Society. We still use the trains, consult the doctor, undergo operations in hospital, send children to school and deposit money in banks. If we cannot place trust in each other and in our institutions, life becomes impossible.

Democracy depends upon trust. Our democratic rights are only meaningful if there are people and institutions who are obliged to supply and uphold these rights and do so fully and fairly on every occasion. Children may have a right to be educated, but that right is only meaningful if there are teachers qualified and prepared to teach them. The right to medical care is only credible if there are doctors available to provide it. The right to a fair trial is possible only where judges are unbiased, witnesses and the Police testify truthfully and everyone involved acts honestly. A right to free speech or fair elections means everyone involved must be absolutely committed to the principle, even where self interest may be damaged, otherwise there is no such right. A right to clean water and sufficient nourishment is meaningless if no one has been allocated the duty and the resources to supply them. Our democracy, then, relies upon trust, that those who have the responsibilities of' safeguarding and supplying  out rights, do so faithfully.

Terrorists, cheats, criminals frequently damage this trust by making use of it to further their own devious ends. Because they know the majority of people are honest and trusting of others they are able to take advantage. There also use various forms of coercion to force their victims to break their duly of trust others, for instance, by giving false evidence in a trial etc. Terrorists try to extort concessions from governments by attacking innocent and unprotected citizens in situations where they would never suspect any danger, thus creating a climate of fear and a sharp decline in trust as we have seen recently at airports, resulting in frustration, dislocation and confusion.

 Democratic governments, realising the importance of trust, and being very sensitive to suggestions that trust is failing, feel the need to act, and in consequence, perhaps over-react. Whether we do mistrust national institutions seems unproved since we all still use them, but our government has decided that there is a case to answer and believes that the solution is to make every service-provider and every official much more accountable. An enormous volume of legislation, regulations and control has over the past few years, demanding conformity to detailed procedures, compliance with prescribed work schedules, and setting performance targets and establishing league tables, all levelled it health trusts, Police forces, schools, universities and colleges, social work departments, the private sector and even voluntary organisations.  Every activity is audited, tested and assessed on the basis of national guidelines and funded according to performance. All this detailed machinery is controlled by central government, ignorant of local conditions, and intended to reassure us that we can trust all service providers whoever and whatever they may be. The trouble is so much time and effort are required to record and report, prioritise resources as required by the government, whether relevant or not, coping with changing and ever more stringent regulations that less time is available to provide the services everyone wants them to provide, and so government aspirations remain unfulfilled and the consumer still feels let down.

Democratic governments also set great store by transparency to reassure people They claim to abandon secrecy and provide masses of information. However, people exercise their judgment as to the accuracy of the information and as to who is providing it. Lack of secrecy does not imply lack of deception and a mass of unsorted and undigested information does not lead to knowledge or clarity of understanding. People who are compelled to write regular reports for public consumption can provide bland, general statements that conceal as much as they reveal and slanting a story one way or another to evade the whole truth or even to mislead is a well understood and frequently practised skill. Information appears frequently in the public domain these days without an attributable source so there is no guarantee of its accuracy: and even when the author may be known, we may be ignorant of his or her motives in publishing: is it for the general good; personal gain or what? Socrates refused to commit his ideas to writing because once they left his hand he would have no control over them and what other people might do to them or with them. His own spoken words he could vouch for; he could be interrogated, could be made accountable. This is not the case today when blind acceptance of information, no matter how spurious, is the norm. Tabloid newspapers can make unjustified claims about almost anything and expect to be believed by a large proportion of their readers. Transparency, then, the right to know, the freedom of the press, all appear to be reassuring features of democracy, but, only if their honesty and integrity are beyond reproach; otherwise they undermine that trust that is the basis of democracy.

In the end, trust is the product of complete honesty and responsibility at every level. No matter how insignificant the duty it must be performed perfectly. ("For want of a nail the battle was lost.") No matter how painful the consequences, the truth must be told. The price of democracy is constant vigilance; if we allow truth to he compromised, we risk the collapse of democracy at every level, local as well as national. 

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