Killing for God

New research published in the March issue of Psychological Science may help elucidate the relationship between religious indoctrination and violence, a topic that has gained renewed notoriety in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the article, University of Michigan psychologist Brad Bushman and his colleagues suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.

The authors set out to examine this interaction by conducting experiments with undergraduates at two religiously contrasting universities: Brigham Young University where 99% of students report believing in God and the Bible and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where just 50% report believing in God and 27% believe in the Bible.

After reporting their religious affiliation and beliefs, the participants read a parable adapted from a relatively obscure passage in the King James Bible describing the brutal torture and murder of a woman, and her husband’s subsequent revenge on her attackers. Half of the participants were told that the passage came from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament while the other half were told it was an ancient scroll discovered in an archaeological expedition.

In addition to the scriptural distinction, half of the participants from both the bible and the ancient scroll groups read an adjusted version that included the verse:

"The Lord commanded Israel to take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD."

The participants were then placed in pairs and instructed to compete in a simple reaction task. The winner of the task would be able to "blast" his or her partner with noise up to 105 decibels, about the same volume as a fire alarm. The test measures aggression.

As expected, the Brigham Young students were more aggressive (i.e. louder) with their blasts if they had been told that the passage they had previously read was from the bible rather than a scroll. Likewise, participants were more aggressive if they had read the additional verse that depicts God sanctioning violence.

At the more secular Vrije Universiteit, the results were surprisingly similar. Although Vrije students were less likely to be influenced by the source of the material, they blasted more aggressively when the passage that they read included the sanctioning of the violence by God. This finding held true even for non-believers, though to a lesser extent.

The research sheds light on the possible origins of violent religious fundamentalism and falls in line with theories proposed by scholars of religious terrorism, who hypothesize that exposure to violent scriptures may induce extremists to engage in aggressive actions. "To the extent religious extremists engage in prolonged, selective reading of the scriptures, focusing on violent retribution toward unbelievers instead of the overall message of acceptance and understanding," writes Bushman "one might expect to see increased brutality."

###

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of the article "When God Sanctions Killing: Effect of Scriptural Violence on Aggression" and access to other Psychological Science research findings please contact Catherine West at (202) 783-2077 or cwest@psychologicalscience.org.

anticant comments: Interesting - but yet another example of research "scientists" setting up an elaborate rigmarole to "prove" the bleeding obvious!

Godswallop

The broadsheets, as always nowadays, are dripping with articles about religion. In today’s Times that crusty old Catholic William Rees-Mogg predictably argues that we need more religion, not less, and that orthodox Christian doctrine has always been opposed to slavery and the champion of liberty and equality. If he believes that, he’ll believe anything. In the Telegraph Boris Johnson, who I would have expected to have more sense, argues that allowing Turkey into the European Union will improve the chances of Islam and the West settling down together as one big happy family.

The most mind-boggling piece of obfuscation, though, is to be found – as one would wearily expect, in that erstwhile bastion of liberal good sense, The Guardian. The writer, Stuart Jeffries, has been trotting around various religious and non-religious informants and has made the astonishing discovery – surprise, surprise! – that the root of the trouble is not religion itself, or disbelief, but the increasingly popular and vociferous fundamentalist varieties of each.

According to the Anglican Dean of Southwark, Colin Slee, there is not just a two-sided divide, but a three-cornered one – religious fundamentalists in one corner [boo], fundamentalist secularists in another [boo], and “intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Baptism, Methodism, other faiths” [interestingly enough, Islam isn’t mentioned in this category] “and, indeed, thinking atheists, in the other corner." In Slee’s book non-thinking atheists include those such as Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling who, he fatuously maintains, “are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England”. [Again, he doesn’t mention Islam].

This is news to me: I hadn’t noticed Dawkins or Grayling igniting any bombs anywhere, except verbal ones which are obviously making their religious targets wriggle. I wonder how many of Dawkins’ critics have actually read The God Delusion? Far from being an intemperate rant, as they like to pretend, it is in fact a closely argued and generally good tempered polemic which requires reasoned refutation [if that is possible] and not mere mindless abuse.

A Muslim witness, Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, says the problem with secular fundamentalists is that they believe they have the absolute truth. “That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence” – which he curiously seems to equate with his religion – “I will fight to assert it.” It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that this is exactly how non-Muslims – and not just non-religious ones – feel about the incessant clamour being mounted by his co-religionists to impose more and more of their beliefs and practices on the rest of us, with the ultimate object of denying our right to make our own life-choices and coercing us to submit to Islam.

The liberal Jewish rabbi, Julia Neuberger, also follows the same fallacious line about sceptics. “What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt”, she says. “No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don’t accept there’s doubt in all things, you’re being intellectually dishonest.” Tell that to Islam! To an outsider always on the lookout for those mysteriously silent “Moderate Muslims”, this religion is characterised by a total lack of contingent doubt and a totalitarian cast of mind. And Dr Neuberger surely doesn’t believe that most rational people doubt that the sun rose this morning in the East, and not in the West. Or does she live in a perpetual haze of uncertainty about the obvious?

The nub of this ongoing row, of course, is that those who live their lives by faith in a supernatural being regard these notions as “sacred” and wish to ring-fence them from rational discussion. Sceptics – atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists – by contrast, consider all opinions and beliefs should be open to debate and susceptible of scientific proof. Disbelief is NOT a dogma, but a suspension of belief in the absence of convincing evidence that the “supernatural” exists. Despite thousands of years of high-flown religious claims, the existence of a god, or gods, has not been convincingly demonstrated to anyone who doesn’t already have faith in the concept. To a non-believer, the notion of a god such as Jews, Christians and Muslims contemplate is incredible and self-contradictory: if any god does exist, he, she or it is most certainly not both all-powerful and all-benevolent.

What is ultimately at stake is the survival of pluralist, tolerant democracy. This will only be safeguarded if the presently growing influence of religion in public affairs is diminished and denied any privileged position in policymaking and above all in education. It should be the responsibility of the state to ensure that education is rational and non-sectarian, and no longer the plaything of religious factions whether Christian, Islamic, or any other.

Americans observed

Ever since they emerged on to the world stage after the Revolution, The United States of America and the unique features of their society have been the object of much comment both from their own citizens and from external observers. Probably the most famous of these were de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens, but there have been others whose writings, now largely forgotten, throw illuminating shafts of light upon both USA past and USA present.

1. THE ENGLISH LADY – 1820s

Mrs Frances Trollope was the mother of the more famous Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope. She herself was an accomplished and voluminous writer, whose pen kept the family from economic disaster for prolonged periods. Her husband was an unsuccessful barrister and farmer, and they had several children, one of whom, Henry, had left school early without career prospects.

An acquaintance of the Trollopes was a rich, charismatic young lady, Miss Frances Wright, who was a convinced social reformer in the Owenite mould and had purchased a tract of land in the backwoods of Tennessee where she proposed to establish a utopian community dedicated to the education of slaves in preparation for their emancipation. With her husband incapable of making ends meet, Fanny Trollope decided to take all her surviving children except Anthony, who was still at school, to join in this quixotic venture, naïvely believing that, once there, she would be “very happy and very free from care”. Needless to say, it did not turn out like that.

The party sailed up the Mississippi in a steamboat, arriving at Miss Wright’s American “paradise”, Nashoba, in January 1828. What greeted them was three roofless log cabins in a malaria-ridden swamp, with only a handful of ragged, bewildered slaves. So the Trollopes continued up river to Cincinnati, then the fastest-growing city in America, where they settled for the next three years, becoming notorious in the process.

With seemingly boundless energy and determination, Mrs Trollope set the hapless Henry to giving Latin lessons to local gentlemen. When these did not materialise, Henry became the main attraction at the Western Museum in the role of the “Invisible Girl” – an oracle who spouted several garbled languages which evidently impressed the Cincinnatians. Not content with this, the Trollopes launched “The Infernal Regions”, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which continued to pull in crowds long after they had departed. Much more ambitiously, Fanny persuaded her husband – who had come out to visit them – to support her financially in establishing an arcade, or bazaar, in central Cincinnati with exhibition, lecture and reading rooms, a theatre, rotunda, coffee house, and a variety of shop stalls – a prototype shopping mall, in fact.

An exotic building, partly modelled on the Brighton Pavilion, was commenced on a central site and Mr Trollope [who had returned to England] sent out “$4000 worth of probably the most trumpery goods ever shipped to America”. With an unfinished building, unsaleable stock, and the bills piling up “Trollope’s Folly” earned the contempt of Cincinnati, which regarded its proprietress as dowdy and tactless, which she probably was. After two years struggling to make the bazaar pay, Fanny decided to move on and set out for the Alleghenies, the East Coast, Washington, Niagara Falls and, eventually, home after a four-year transatlantic sojourn.

Throughout her time in America she had been making copious notes of her impressions and experiences, and on her return home she wreaked her revenge for what she regarded as inconsiderate treatment by writing what became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic - Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832. It was an immediate scandalous talking-point, drawing mostly howls of outrage in the US and some quiet amusement in the UK. It was only half a century since the former colonies had declared their independence, and their emotional ties – both positive and negative – to their erstwhile mother country were still strong.

Fanny had crossed the Atlantic with strongly democratic sympathies, but these moderated as she encountered ceaseless American self-praise and often ignorant observations about England. And, while praising the beauty of the country and the enterprise and independent spirit of the inhabitants, she found some of their habits repugnant – especially the universal male habit of spitting tobacco-juice anywhere and everywhere. On the Mississippi steamboat she was confronted with “the total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured….the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife.”

These uncouth table manners contrasted comically with the Americans’ extremely prudish attitude towards literature and the subordinate place occupied by American women. A well-to-do American housewife, Fanny said, spent a day of almost unrelieved tedium until her husband’s return for dinner, when “he comes, shakes hands with her, spits, and dines. The conversation is not much, and ten minutes suffices for dinner. The husband then goes off to his club for the rest of the evening. And so ends her day.”

Religion made matters worse, with itinerant preachers of many denominations who sound positively creepy [not much change there, then!] insinuating themselves into the good graces of their female congregations with sometimes untoward results. Fanny went to both a revival meeting in Cincinnati and a “camp meeting” in the wilds of Indiana. At the former, after a fire-and-brimstone sermon, a number of young girls “came tottering out, their hands clasped, their heads hanging on their bosoms, and every limb trembling…Young creatures, their features pale and distorted, fell on their knees on the pavement, and soon sunk forward on their faces; the most violent cries and shrieks followed, while from time to time a voice was heard in convulsive accents, exclaiming, ‘Oh Lord!’ ‘Oh Lord Jesus!’ ‘Help me, Jesus!’ and the like. “ The preachers walked among these girls, offering them “ whispered comfortings, and from time to time a mystic caress. More than once I saw a young neck encircled by a reverend arm.”

It didn’t always stop with encircling arms, though. Mrs Trollope relates, in suitably shocked fashion, the tale of a young Philadelphian lady whose feelings for one of these preachers was “a curious mixture of spiritual awe and earthly affection”. Luckily her father noticed what was going on in time to forbid the preacher the house before irreparable damage was done; he left the city, but a few months afterwards “no less than seven unfortunate girls produced living proofs” of the father’s wisdom. Not surprisingly, Mrs Trollope is scathing, and also highly amusing, about the abundance of religious hypocrisy she encountered.

She is also very critical of the Americans’ strange mixture of crudeness and prudery, and their civic hypocrisy. Ceaselessly proclaiming that they enjoyed the best constitution and government in the world, and their devotion to democracy and equality, they nevertheless for the most part enthusiastically endorsed the “peculiar institution” of slavery, and Fanny was shocked to discover that negroes were being bred in the “free” northern states for export to the south, where they were sold as slaves. “You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves”, she remarked. American treatment of the native Indians she characterised as “treacherous and false almost beyond belief”.

Attitudes to the British were patronisingly contemptuous, and often invincibly ignorant. “One lady asked me very gravely, if we had left home in order to get rid of the vermin with which the English of all ranks were afflicted.” She had been told, on “unquestionable authority”, that it was quite impossible to walk though the streets of London without having the head filled [with lice]. When Fanny demurred, the lady retorted “there is nothing so easy as to laugh, but truth is truth, laughed at or not”. Another enquired how the Trollopes could bear to return to a country where they knew they would be considered as no better than the dirt in the streets. When asked to explain, she said “the fact is, we Americans know rather more than you think for, and certainly if I was in England I should not think of associating with anything but lords. I have always been among the first here, and if I travelled I should like to do the same”. Fanny drily comments that in all the many conversations she held with Americans about England, “it was made clear that I knew much less about it than those I conversed with”.

Mrs Trollope had gone to America something of a liberal; she returned in a much more Tory frame of mind. “Strong, indeed, must be the love of equality in an English breast if it can survive a tour through the Union.“ Her final verdict was uncompromising: “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions…. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, and that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.” “All the enthusiasm of America is concentrated to the one point of her own emancipation and independence; on this point nothing can exceed the warmth of her feelings.”

Needless to say, Domestic Manners was a scandalous hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The British were highly amused by it; Americans were furious, their invective bearing out Fanny’s remark that “other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all”. Charles Dickens, who followed in her footsteps a decade later to write American Notes, was also disillusioned of his idealistic vision of the Republic, and told a friend that he believed “the heaviest blow ever dealt at Liberty’s Head, will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the Earth”. Much later in the 19^th century, Mark Twain admitted that Mrs Trollope “was merely telling the truth, and this indignant nation knew it. She was painting a state of things which did not disappear at once. It lasted to well along in my youth, and I remember it.”

FANNY TROLLOPE: Domestic Manners of the Americans, with introduction and notes by Pamela Neville-Sington. Penguin Classics.

Onward and upward

Blogging habits evolve, and there is self-questioning among some members of the Awkward Squad about where we go from here? Some of the AS are content the way things are, some would like to consolidate, others to expand.

I am of the latter opinion, because I see blogging as a wonderful way of enlarging our contacts worldwide and sharing news and views with lots more interested and interesting people. Through following up other peoples’ blogroles and preferences, I’ve discovered some very congenial sites and people, some of whom I’ve added to my own list of ‘friendly places’ and visit regularly.

It seems to me that networking in this fashion, both as individuals and interlinking rings, is the most fruitful way of broadening our internet horizons. While the Awkward Squadders will, I’m sure, happily pursue our established wayward way, some of us who want more ongoing, themed, discussion with longer threads and wider networking could form another ring. Toby has suggested “Renaissance” as a name “reflect[ing] our desire to be universal men/women with a refusal to turn a blind eye to any topic no matter how obscure and also indicating a glimmer of hope that perhaps society could experience a rebirth carved out by the new voices in the internet age.”

Sounds good to me, and I would be willing to set up a “Renaissance” ring if others want me to. The idea would be that each of the participants hosts and writes about a particular theme or themes on his of her own site, and also invites others to provide posts on those topics. Thus, if Toby’s “Reason’s Sword” was the theme-place concentrating on philosophy and ethics, I and others, as well as Toby, could [with his approval] put up posts there so that everyone knew where to go for those threads. Of course, that wouldn’t preclude the site’s host from posting on other topics as well when they wished to.

As founder-members I would suggest the following sites and themes:

1LONERANGER: the environment; the arts

ANTICANT’S ARENA: historical perspectives; social psychology; democratic deficit

JOSE’S SITE: global economic and political trends; 21^st century scenarios

TOBY’S SITE: philosophy; ethics; education

TYGER: British politics

These are just very early thoughts, with gaps to be filled in both membership and topics, so let’s have a full discussion here before proceeding further. The idea of even only a handful of us starting to take more positive steps towards a renewal of reasonable, enlightened, and optimistic discourse in this gloomy decade of conflict, bigotry and pessimism is a heartening one. Thanks for the inspiration, Toby!

On a hiding to nowhere?

“WE HAVE NO ETERNAL ALLIES, AND WE HAVE NO PERPETUAL ENEMIES. OUR INTERESTS ARE ETERNAL AND PERPETUAL, AND THOSE INTERESTS IT IS OUR DUTY TO FOLLOW."

- LORD PALMERSTON, 19^th century Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.

What has become of the much-vaunted Anglo-American “Special Relationship”? This largely mythical beast, which has been an axiom of British, if not American, foreign policy ever since the Second World War partnership forged between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, still mesmerises British policymakers.

Yet it is obvious to practically everyone else that the “Special Relationship”, if it still functions meaningfully at all, is a much more one-sided affair than its British propagandists like to think. In fact, it always has been, even in the heady wartime days of the Churchill-Roosevelt love-in. As is clear from Churchill’s war memoirs, he was unable to prevail over the Americans on many aspects of operational strategy in the conduct of military operations in Europe, and even less successful in preventing Roosevelt – already a dying man – from being bamboozled by Stalin at Yalta into agreeing on a post-war division of Europe into ‘spheres of influence’ which resulted in the Iron Curtain and the subsequent years of Cold War. The extent to which Churchill himself modified the original drafts of his memoirs to avoid annoying the Americans, and to keep his US publisher-paymasters sweet, has only recently been revealed by David Reynolds in his fascinating book In Command of History.

As Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked after the war, “Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role”. The loss of empire was not unwelcome to US politicians, who had been educated in the post-revolutionary tradition of seeing Britain as malignly imperialist and far more macchiavellian than she in fact was.

The Suez debacle, when the Americans effectively pulled the plug on the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, was the opportunity for the United States to assume the dominant Western role in Middle Eastern policy, the increasingly bitter fruits of which are still being harvested.

Prime Minister Blair and President Bush are both fond of proclaiming themselves disciples of Churchill, though one doubts whether he would have relished the compliment. The spectacle of “Yo-Yo Blair” trotting fawningly along behind the most right-wing US administration in living memory is humiliating. He increasingly resembles the tiger-riding young lady of Riga in the limerick: “they returned from the ride with the lady inside, and a smile on the face of the tiger”.

How long this state of affairs, which belies the sage wisdom of Lord Palmerston, will continue is anybody’s guess, but there does not seem much prospect of ending it soon. Even if it is no longer seen as a national asset by some British politicians and diplomats, they keep very quiet about it. But some Americans are more candid, and the following observations by Kendall Myers, a senior US State Department official, at a public lecture in Washington DC last November [as reported by Toby Harnden] are significant – although needless to say they were promptly disowned by both US and UK government sources:

"There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we've noticed.

"As a State Department employee, now I will say something even worse: it has been from the very beginning very one-sided.

"The State Department and the American Embassy in London, by God they'll be pushing the special relationship till the end of time.

"The last prime minister to resist American pressure was Neville Chamberlain who was a much more brilliant figure in British diplomacy [than Winston Churchill].

"We typically ignore them and take no notice. We say, ‘There are the Brits coming to tell us how to run our empire. Let's park them'. It is a sad business and I don't think it does them justice.

"It's hard for me to believe that any British leader who follows Tony Blair will maintain the kind of relationship he has. There'll be much more of a distant relationship and certainly no more wars of choice in the future.

"Harold Wilson was a great deal more clever in my opinion than Tony Blair. He managed to fool us all on Vietnam.

"The deal was not one cent, not one Bobby, not one Johnny, nobody, not one participant in the Vietnam war. Wilson succeeded by sounding good but doing nothing… Blair got it the other way round and in the end joined in this Iraq adventure.

"One of the most brilliant prime ministerships of modern times was brought a cropper by the Iraq war. He'll never recover in my opinion. It's been ruined for all time. That is tragic.

"The key fact was the British perception of the special relationship that when the Americans decide a major issue of national importance the British will not oppose. The way that Iraq developed it would have been extremely difficult for Tony Blair to have done a Harold Wilson.

"Tony Blair's a modern Gladstone. He really believes it. He may not have believed WMD – I don't know anybody knew that – he essentially believed this was in the West's interest to remove this evil dictator.

"Unfortunately, Tony Blair's background was as an actor and not an historian. If only he'd read a book on the 1920s he might have hesitated.

"I think it was probably a done deal from the beginning. It was a one-sided relationship and that one-sided relationship was entered into I think with open eyes. Tony Blair perhaps hoped that he could bring George Bush along, that he could convince him but of course George Bush has many other dimensions politically and intellectually. I can't think of anything [Blair] got on the asset side of the ledger.

"The more serious issue that confronts Britain is not the strength of the special relationship but the strength of ties to Europe.

"Tony Blair could sound European on a good day, could occasionally pronounce French well and he wears blue jeans with the best Americans. I just think the role of Britain as a bridge between Europe and the United States is vanishing before our eyes.

"What I fear is, and what I think is, that the British will draw back from the US without moving closer to Europe. In that sense, London's bridge is falling down."

All are Victims

"Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs."

- ARUNDHATI ROY

[Arundhati Roy, "Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire," 8/24/04 http://www.democracynow.org/static/Arundhati_Trans.shtml]

From the excellent Information Clearing House daily newsletter.

Patriotism

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”

- DR JOHNSON

“Patriotism …is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power”

- LEO TOLSTOY

Reading 1loneranger’s fascinating account of his childhood on a US Army base leads me to reflect, yet again, on the nature of patriotism. The Oxford Concise defines a patriot as “one who defends or is zealous for his country’s freedom or rights”. While it surely cannot be bad to defend one’s own country’s freedom, as in the two World Wars, over-zealousness in patriotic fervour all too easily leads to the violation of the rights of others. The history of the West is studded with examples of this.

The United States of America, in particular, has a fervent patriotic tradition which originated in the circumstances leading up to the Revolution against the British, in which the activities of self-styled “patriots” played a significant part. Whatever historical hindsight may tell us, the issues in that conflict were by no means clear cut, as the American historian Theodore Draper sets out in fascinating detail in A Struggle for Power. But history is written by the victors, and the American Myth that is the precursor of the American Dream assures us that it was all about blameless downtrodden pioneer colonists being tyrannised by a wicked monarch and a greedy grasping motherland. This myth lingered into the twentieth century, and is hardly fertile soil for the even-handed “Special Relationship” which so many British politicians have naïvely flattered themselves exists between the erstwhile motherland and her wayward overgrown daughter.

Even Kipling, that enthusiastic chronicler of Empire, mocked “jelly-bellied flag-waggers” in his schoolboy novel, Stalky & Co. In the earlier part of the twentieth century it was distastefully fashionable for loud-mouthed sedentary elderly gentlemen who never went nearer a front line than their West End clubs to exhort the valorous young to fight and die gloriously for their country in the Flanders mud. This type of hypocrisy, compounded by the election of a post-war parliament which, according a future prime minister, Stanley Baldwin [Kipling’s cousin, incidentally] largely consisted of “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”, led to a revulsion in the 1920s and ‘30s against the senseless patriotism of the killing fields, and was largely responsible for the appeasement mentality which at the time was not nearly so dishonourable as it may seem in retrospect.

Sadly, we are immersed in an equally senseless wave of misguided patriotism by the purblind responses to the Twin Towers atrocity of September 2001. Americans, never folk to swallow such a brazen insult, have embarked upon a “war on terror” which is as ill-directed as it is unwise. The spectacle of the world’s only [for the time being] super-power stumbling around the world like an infuriated elephant which has been attacked by a swarm of hornets and blundered into a quagmire is dismaying to all would-be friends not only of the USA but of freedom and democratic values. The ancient saying that the Gods first make mad those whom they wish to destroy is never far from one’s mind.

As Nurse Edith Cavell said before her execution by the Germans in World War I, “Patriotism is not enough”. And she added: “I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”. True patriotism requires not only the strength of lions, but the wisdom of serpents and the peaceful heart of doves.