Of course I should not be surprised by the fact that certain quotations appeal simply because they support what I already think. Years ago I learned to beware when after morning service a parishioner said, “Thank you so much Vicar, for such a good sermon.”
“The chances are that all you’ve done,” a wise priest told me, “is to have confirmed their prejudices.”

So when I read the quote at the beginning of chapter five of Christopher Lascelles’ book ‘Pontifex Maximus A Short History of the Popes’, I liked it. They quote was from H.L.Mencken and read,

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilised the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and wrong. The truly civilised man is always sceptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.”

But when I thought about it more the quote seemed to have a degree of judgmental certainty about it that I liked less. There is that aspect of it which suggests, “The one thing I cannot tolerate is intolerance.” And I remembered one of my children commenting once, long ago, “Take no notice when Dad says something loudly and firmly. It’s when he says something quietly and calmly, that’s when he’s probably right.” Mencken seems to me to be saying something loudly and firmly.

Yes, I liked the quote when I first read it, but to what extent does its weight lie in the meaning of the words themselves or is there just a neat smoothness in the phraseology. And who is or was H.L. Mencken? He could be a nineteenth century German philosopher or a columnist for The Guardian. It was unlikely, I thought, that he would be in the team of President Trump, or, if he were Russian, a protégé of President Putin. And does who he is or was matter? Anyway I googled him and found his Wikipedia entry.

‘Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. . .
As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.’

There he was, as presented to me by whoever writes Wikipedia articles. And there was another Mencken quote in the entry,

“War is a good thing because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature…. A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid.”

I did not like this quote at all. It is so far from what I think to be true. For me the central fact of human nature is life, not death. And, I believe, life has the possibility of fulfilment in so much that is positive – above all, love. This quote makes me very wary of others attributed to H.L.Mencken.

Through all this I come to the realisation that I need to be careful when approached by immediately appealing quotes, brief texts, or anything that seems to sum up too smoothly or glibly aspects of the human condition for which there is no easy summing up.

I gather the immediately appealing or attractive quote, phrase or saying, is close to what the young call ‘clickbait’. And, again from Wikipedia, I discover,

‘Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading. A “teaser” aims to exploit the “curiosity gap”, providing just enough information to make readers of news websites curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content. Click-bait headlines add an element of dishonesty, using enticements that do not accurately reflect the content being delivered. The “-bait” part of the term makes an analogy with fishing, where a hook is disguised by an enticement (bait), presenting the impression to the fish that it is a desirable thing to swallow.’

I really must learn to recognise and avoid the bait more readily or, perhaps much more importantly, to find out more about and get to know, the fisherman.

Silver swim this morning. I’ve noticed him before and he was there again today. He wears his swimming goggles above his forehead rather in the place where people push their reading glasses when they’re not reading. But these are not reading glasses they are swimming goggles. And he is swimming. I wonder why he bothers to wear them at all? I haven’t had the courage to ask him – yet.

It was a small coffee shop, not a chain, not especially fashionable, not particularly busy. There seemed to be a mother and daughter running the place. Above where there were a few biscuits and cakes there was a sign stating that supplies were difficult. Probably a result of the driver shortage, I thought. And underneath that, ‘Please bare with us.’ I looked at the sign, and said to the older woman, “I will, if you will.” She gave me a quizzical look, noticed me looking at the sign, registered it herself, smiled, and said, “It’s not going to happen.”

Michael Portillo was a Minister in the U.K. government from 1987 to 1997. When he was a politician he was frequently derided. These days he presents a number of television programmes. He is now a television personality and is often applauded. The late Sir David Amess was his parliamentary private secretary for ten years. In the Daily Telegraph on Saturday October 16th Michael Portillo began his article,

“Another parliamentary colleague has been murdered. I did not know Jo Cox. But I entered the House of Commons because my predecessor Sir Anthony Berry was killed by the IRA in the Brighton bombing. In 1990, my fellow Conservative MP and a dear friend, Ian Gow, was blown up at his home.
Members of Parliament may deserve many criticisms. But they do not lack courage. The chance that they will be slain doing their duty is now significant.”

The article then goes on to describe the hardworking constituency MP and friend Sir David was.

Of course there has been widespread comment on this latest murder and whether or not it will mean MPs are less able to meet their constituents. Both David Amess and Jo Cox, a Labour MP, were murdered while conducting their regular ‘surgeries’.

My awareness through all this is the ways in which the job of the politician has been denigrated increasingly in recent years. Members of the television and print media have focussed on the personal failings, mistakes, verbal gaffes, bad manners, supposed misuse of expenses and sexual misconduct of politicians rather than the work they do or the service they are attempting to give. I have the impression that the interviewer is there to trip the politician up and glory in their fall rather than to try and discover what they think or hope to achieve.

And it’s not only in the official media but, I’m told, in the ‘social media’ politicians are among those subjected to online abuse. And the practice has grown among otherwise intelligent people to use, in speech and in print, nicknames for politicians that in any school would be banned and the child using the nickname taken to task for bullying. Here in the U.K. at least one politician has contributed to this climate by referring to another as ‘scum’. The policies maybe. The person, no.

All too often, it seems to me it’s a matter of ‘sneer, smear and not a solution offered’. Sneer and smear is on the spectrum that has murder at one end, and at the other, respect. Those who destroy someone’s reputation with words are there along with those who use a knife.

The fundamental Christian and, surely, Humanist belief lies in having respect for every person no matter who they are or what they’ve done. Respect is the starting point for Christian love and its practice because of the belief that everyone is God created. Respect is also the starting point for Humanist belief and practice because our humanity is what we all share and we hope for that respect for ourselves.

Many years ago one of my nephews had two pet lambs. When asked what he would call them he said ‘Piggy Muldoon’ and ‘Maggie Thatcher’. You can guess the era. The boy’s mother said, ‘No.’ Not on account of her political persuasion but because, she said, they were each Prime Ministers and that to use their nicknames did not respect their Office. The boy called the lambs, ‘Mr Muldoon’ and ‘Mrs Thatcher’.

A most distinguished English visitor happened to call and met the boy and the lambs. He asked their names and was told, ‘Mr Muldoon’ and ‘Mrs Thatcher.’ The visitor said to the boy, “What do you know about Mrs Thatcher?”
Thinking he was asking about the lamb, the boy replied, “She’s very gutsy.” (‘gutsy’ New Zealand child speak for greedy).
Thinking the boy was speaking about the Prime Minister, the visitor laughed and said, “I must tell her when I get home, she will be pleased.” (‘gutsy’ English adult speak for bravery).

The Office was respected. The mother was relieved.

The English novelist Nevil Shute spent his latter years in Australia. I really enjoyed his novels when I first read them in, I suppose, the late fifties and the sixties. He was a wonderful storyteller. I gather from ‘Wikipedia’ that, in his novels,
‘Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. A recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board), or religion (Round the Bend).’

I have been sorting out my books and found and read again, ‘The Chequer Board’. It is a great read and, as the Wikipedia article suggests, has the background theme of bridging racial barriers. However this novel reprinted in 2009 could not, I think, be reprinted today. The word ‘n….r’ is used in different settings, matter of factually, derogatorily and abusively. Now I may not write it down in full.

He also uses the word ‘Christ’ as an expletive. I don’t like that use of the word in print, or even less spoken, in that way. However I do realise that people did and some still do use it like this and when Nevil Shute uses it it is true to the character in the book. He never uses ‘f..k’.

Sometimes I have the subtitles on programmes on the television especially if my hearing is not so good. On a Sunday evening watching a contemporary thriller I was a little surprised to see that whenever a character said ‘f..k’, which different characters said frequently, the subtitles wrote ‘glock’. I’m told that the machine (only it’s not a machine it’s ‘software’) that creates the subtitles has a built in rejection of some words and substitutes another. Be it a machine or software a human being has thought to do it.

The fact is that certain words, unacceptable now, were used in the past. We cannot cancel out that past usage. And I fear that if we join those who say we cannot read those books now, recognising their historical context, or that these books must never be reprinted so that they cannot be read, then we are in danger of joining those who invoked a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for ‘The Satanic Verses’ or, in a much earlier age, of joining Savonarola in his ‘bonfires of vanities’.