Joan Smith in defence of the modern, secular Britain
I woke up as usual yesterday in the “geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death” – and very pleasant it was. I fed the cats, read the papers and carried an espresso into the back garden, congratulating myself on being a citizen of a country that doesn’t stone women to death, hang gay men from cranes or murder people who change their religion. I mean, how great is that? I love living in the “selfish, hedonistic wasteland” that is London – both quotes come from one Edmund Adamus, who is apparently a senior British Catholic and an adviser to the Archbishop of Westminster – and I just wish more nations would follow our example.
Frankly, I’m tired of hearing religious bigots running down this country. For all its faults – crap public transport, Nick Clegg popping up everywhere and a national obsession with Simon Cowell – Britain is still one of the most civilised places in the world to live. It’s not Iran, where prisoners are subjected to rape and mock executions; it isn’t Saudi Arabia either, despite Mr Adamus’s downright peculiar belief that we’re more anti-Catholic than the Chinese or the Saudis. (Might I suggest he tries walking along a street in Riyadh carrying a crucifix and a Bible?) The Catholic Church has picked up this habit of dissing secular culture from hardline Muslims, who dislike pretty much the same things: gay relationships, equal rights for women and the freedom to mock religion.
Those of us who aren’t religious conservatives have had to fight every step of the way to create this modern, tolerant, secular Britain, and it’s easy to forget that many of the improvements are very recent. I can just remember the last hangings in British prisons, as well as a time when having an “illegitimate” baby brought shame on a woman and homosexuality was still illegal; even as recently as 10 years ago, when the current Foreign Secretary William Hague was Conservative leader, the party opposed the repeal of an iconic piece of anti-gay legislation known as Section 28.
So it’s good to have this wake-up from Mr Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the diocese of Westminster, about the need to defend secular values.
Oh What a Lovely War splendidly defined the modern irreligious spirit in theatre, celebrating ordinary people amidst the madness of their establishment betters epitomised by the god-obsessed Haig.
Joan Littlewood’s 1963 work does indeed focus with fierce satire on a culture of death – it is set in a trenched wasteland for soldiers to die for values wholly inhuman. Haig – “every step I take is guided by the divine will’ – and the inanities of the Padre anticipating battle – “the Dalai Lama has placed his prayers at the disposal of the Allies” – give the lunacy of faith a central role. Have recent wars done any better?
Mr Adamus chooses to confuse philosophical materialism with the selfish hedonism of commerce and consumerism, the materialism of money that has its heart in the corrupted Calvinism of the USA and wherever the powerful find the religious tradition of knowing one’s place a sure aid to unchallenged privilege.
Littlewood was influenced by Marx and by two great German theatre pioneers Brecht and Laban who rejected Nazism. Her uncompromising work deserves a very unmilitary medal for secular heroism.
Works of art, like individuals we can come to like, understand and be influenced by, are better landmarks for belief than the ancient rigidities of religion, so often cruelly oppressive. OWLW is a humanist essential in exposing the hideous by satire.