Unreasonable rationality
Sir: I fully agree with the blunt but accurate observations of Melanie Phillips in her piece ‘Welcome to the Age of Irrationality’ (1 May). It is a good measure of the Western mind’s fall into murky confusion, and witless denial, that words like ‘rational’ and ‘secular’ have become prone to a transformation of their authentic meaning. But two points made by Phillips trouble me.
Is it really reasonable to saddle ‘the left’ with ‘distortions, fabrications and bullying’ in the same breath as she lauds ‘the right’ for their ‘attempt to uphold truth, reality and liberty’? Two, is it not too far-fetched to claim that Britain was ‘first into the Enlightenment’ but is ‘now first out’? Maybe we are all falling into the subtle trap of allowing our own rationality to be not quite as reasonable as it should be.
Alfred P. Zarb
Australia
Sir: On reason and religion (Melanie Phillips, 1 May), this verse by Abraham Cowley might help. (By the ‘eighth sphere’, the poet means the night sky.)
The holy book, like the eighth sphere, does shine
With thousand lights of truth divine.
So numberless the stars, that to the eye,
It makes but all one galaxy.
Yet Reason must assist too, for in seas
So vast and treacherous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.
Christopher Walker
London
The great debates
Sir: Toby Young (Status anxiety, 24 April) is surely not seriously suggesting that before the televised debates, the Great British Public selected their leaders on the basis of their ‘grasp of issues… their judgment, their ability to keep their heads in a crisis’? Or that anybody actually bothered to read the parties’ political manifestos cover to cover and voted rationally as a result?
I agree with Mr Young that the TV debates are necessarily superficial and will probably leave no one very much the wiser about the key issues at stake. But in the developed democracies, the real problem is not electoral faddishness, it is political apathy. For the first time perhaps since 1979, the British people are actually taking an interest in who might be running the country in a week’s time. Even my reality-show-watching teenage daughters are gripped, and the conversation over breakfast has switched from a critique of the latest YouTube offerings or what their friends have just posted on Facebook to an almost politically literate discussion (remember we are starting from a very low base) about the perceived merits of the candidates, based on what they saw from the TV debate of the previous evening.
If it can have this effect on oversexed, underemployed surly teenagers, then maybe our soporific electorate might even bother to get out of bed on 6 May and vote. The result might not be to the Spectator’s (or, for that matter, to my) liking. But if nothing else, at least the TV debates will have breathed some vital life into our political discourse, which in recent times has operated on an almost ethereal plane, totally disconnected from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. This surely has to be ‘a good thing’.
Pablo Miller
Warsaw
Dangerous swans
Sir: I would like to take issue with Rod Liddle (‘The Asbo swan of Cambridge’, 1 May.) Swans are in fact dangerous brutes. I played rugby at university, and the only match I missed was the fault of a swan. The bird was setting viciously about a small moorhen, and so I came to the rescue. I gave the swan a fine kick. Moorhen safe and sound, but I was off games for a week with a stubbed toe. I rest my case.
Sam Bell
Oxfordshire
Library copy
Sir: Anthony Daniels (Diary, 1 May) writes of young men wiling away their time in libraries ‘watching as near to pornography as the municipal computers will permit’. Hmm. I have read him describing this odd phenomenon before. In the latest edition of the New English Review, the same author described ‘eager young… consumers of pornography on the public library’s computers’. Do I detect an unhealthy interest?
Hugo Sabin
London E14
Let’s all ostracise
Sir: Paul Johnson’s advocacy of ostracism (1 May) as a means by which British MPs can be brought to book has merits. He suggested that, instead of exile, those ostracised should lose the right to stand for election, occupy an office of profit or sit on the board of a public company. Even better, they would not be permitted to appear on TV. This is a much better idea than the ‘power of recall’, whereby constituencies must vote to sack their MPs, but Mr Johnson must think bigger. Developing countries, where corruption is rampant, have a far greater need of ostracism. If Britain takes the lead, imagine how many might follow suit.
M.S. Rama Krishna
Bangalore
Cognitive dissonance
Sir: James Delingpole (You know it makes sense, 1 May) argues that Ian McEwan, in his public pronouncements on anthropogenic global warming, seems to be ‘an ardent Warmist’ but that in his latest book he exposes the ‘corruption and dishonesty’ of the AGW industry. He suggests that what he sees as this contradiction is down to McEwan’s cognitive dissonance. This is typical of anti-AGW campaigners, who love to believe that the wrongheadedness and confusion that are sometimes expressed in regard to climate change prove that it does not exist. For cognitive dissonance, look no further.
James Thomas
Guildford, Surrey
Screen Test
Sir: Roger Alton nominates Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (Sport, 1 May) as the greatest cricket picture. I would suggest Wondrous Oblivion (2004) or The Final Test (1953).
David Bennett
Sussex
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