Marxist Moments

WHERE IS THIS LEADING? (Part 2)

          I’m not getting as far along with this blog series as I’d like to partly because I want to keep the instalments a bit shorter than other blogs have been till now. So I’m not tackling everything as promised at the end of the ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ blog, below. I am sure you are disappointed. Sorry.

          Ah yes, eunuchs. (Where is This Leading? Part 1). When I was a kid I was fascinated by religion. In my day boys went in for model trains or Airfix World War II or F-86 fighters. More serious brainboxes made stinks and blew themselves up in the advancing of the science of chemistry. I’m not saying that girls didn’t also do all this but girls in my time seemed to be keener on reading fiction and on sewing patterns.

          With me it was God and the Universe. Were they inside or outside each other? How did we humans relate to Him or to It? I didn’t pray a lot but I read the Bible to help find out. And the Koran. And the Analects. And the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. And the Buddha. Not to speak of the Tao te Ching. I still have four English translations of the Tao te Ching and they are so different from one another as to be quite separate, distinct books. But I’ve ended up favouring Tao even though I have little idea how it’s practised in modern-day China. Nor indeed what it means, although with Tao that doesn’t seem to be the point. Which is quite reassuring, really.

          Encouraged by my liberal mother so long as I didn’t make her come with me, I went for a time to a different church service every week simply out of curiosity. The American town where we lived for some years provided plenty of scope. We had the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and even some Unitarians. We had Quakers, Pentacostals, African Episcopals,  Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christadelphians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not to speak, obviously, of the Roman Catholic Church. No Greek or Russian Orthodoxy so far as I was aware, and our town was of insufficient size to have enough Jews to form the congregation for a synagogue or temple, which I thought was a shame. And at that time there would have been no mosque or Sikh temple. Nor could I locate any Taoists. But then I never thought I would.

          My favourite moment occurred when attending a small, austere and humble protestant church of one denomination or another. The preacher, a skinny, goaty little man, gave a powerful and lengthy if squeaky sermon from the pulpit. He ended with this resounding, conclusive climax: ‘And if you don’t believe me, just ask my wife!’

          Whereupon he turned and pointed a trembling bony finger at a grim-faced, grey-haired matron plumped down like granite in the front row of the church choir, the corners of her mouth thrust firmly downwards. There seemed little doubt that his missus knew exactly what was what. And then we went on to the final hymn. I have never since that moment thought the Christian Church to be unduly patriarchal.

          I just couldn’t take up with any of them. I became more fascinated by the class structure of the main denominations. Episcopalians  were the country-club nobs with pots of money, though obviously not entirely. The solid, substantial Presbyterians were next on the social scale. Further down in some sort of order were the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Congregationalists and the far more numerous Baptists. Every subtle gradation of social class seemed to have its own church, though the social mix was more fluid in the less orthodox communities, as was Roman Catholicism, which embraced the prosperous and the immigrant underclasses and office-cleaning Mexicans. In my town Sundays you had to pay to get into the local Catholic church. Perhaps because the fabulous display with its expensive upkeep brought uplift to poor people whose wherewithal was too uncertain to ensure an appropriate contribution from a voluntary pass-the-plate offering.

          So, religiously speaking, I was a kind of eunuch, fascinated by it all if unable to take part. I must have been approaching religion the wrong way for I was quite immune to its social attractions and practices. Except for certain moments in hymn singing or in thrall to a particular preacher of some charisma I felt no particular uplift, though that preacher’s missus did give me the shock of my life: if she was the repository of wisdom I was definitely afraid of approaching it. Some religions have gruesome idols to inspire fear as much as devotion but I was confronted that one time by a living one. I think she was alive though she never moved a muscle except when standing and in singing mode. And even then I was not sure which muscles were in use.

          I always revelled in informal camaraderie like our great little neighbourhood gang so I wasn’t as antisocial as all that. I joined the Scouts but soon found that camaraderie and semi-militaristic conformism didn’t mix. I was uninterested in square knots and I hated our horrible campfire food concoctions, not to speak of being advised to bash my underpants repeatedly against a tree trunk if there was no opportunity to wash them. The old gang with a girl or two or three was fine but this all-male junior honcho stuff showed up the unsavouriness (in more ways than one) of young malehood in organised and vaguely coercive circumstances, adhering to  some kind of group ethos that none of us really understood. All this brought out the rebel in me and I vowed the first thing I would do when I became a revolutionary would be to burn down the scout hut - preferably with a nest of scouts plus scoutmaster inside.

          I would never equate Marxism with religion and certainly not with scouting, but my approach to it has been as gingerly in some respects. Old habits and ways of thinking die hard. As I say, I love friendship and informal (including family) sociality, the informal seeming to have come about any old way. But formal and agenda-driven group sociality has always given me the willies. For some reason I find it embarrassing and even mildly oppressive. We’re all going to do this, or we’re all going to do that. I’m no neurotic individualist; I thrive in company far more than in myself. It is just organised company that I can’t deal with.

          Needless to say that away from the playground I mostly loathed school for all those terrible twelve years. It’s a wonder I got through into young adulthood and now I can’t really remember. Somehow I got to university and it all changed. Not only was the subject-matter more interesting but also I could opt in or out of sociality as I pleased and if I joined a small club of not much consequence it would be with like minds, similar to the old neighbourhood. And this is why I want unlimited access to university and similar higher education for all those who didn’t make the grade in school: it’s all so different, guys! The more you hated school the more you’ll love the next stage if you can ever get there. So if there’s a reinvention of the 11-plus let the ‘failures’ in before everybody else! Jolly unfair but as I learned some of those who excelled in school had a miserable time later in the more adult and less regimented atmosphere (and challenge) of higher education. They should really have left education while they were ahead! I shouldn’t think a single educational authority or expert would agree with me, but I know it’s true.

To be continued….