Evening All
From Arthur O’Shaugnessy’s We are the Music Makers
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Readers based in the UK will be aware that the question of
euthanasia or assisted suicide is once more to be debated in Parliament, this
time in a bill (Terminally Ill Adults End of Life Bill) introduced in the House
of Commons by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater (Spen Valley, formerly Batley &
Spen) and due for a full debate at second reading on 29th November.
This is a perennial question for parliamentary debate that has been introduced
in one House or the other at some point in many of the parliaments of the last
forty years or so. The difference this time is that a Commons majority is not
improbable at second reading, and that the serving Prime Minister supports the
Bill, so do make your objection to it known to your own member of Parliament
and to Lady Hollins of the Catholic Union without delay.
Readers in Scotland should contact MSPs concerning the
separate bill under consideration at Holyrood, while those in Ireland must ask
electoral candidates to oppose any bill arising from the Oireachtas Joint
Committee report.
To the best of my knowledge, the subject was first raised in
the House of Lords by the Labour peer – it has only ever been raised by a
member of that party although it, unlike the Liberal Democrats, has no official
policy to support it, and its previous leaders have opposed it – Ted, Lord
Willis who had the distinction of being recognised by the Guinness Book of
Records as having been the world’s most prolific writer of scripts for
television, most famously as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green which ran for
over two decades at a rate of two or three series a year. He also did
standalone screenplays and other serials such as Virgin of the Secret Service,
Mrs. Thursday and Sergeant Cork, which is to say that he did a great deal to
shape popular culture and the attitudes or political positions arising from it.
How right the poet was who noted that it is the creative types of this world
who are for ever its movers and shakers for the music they make and the dreams
they dream shape the views by which the public opinion that drives political
action is formed.
What attitudes were shaped by the viewers of such a
productive writer’s output; the programmes of a longstanding Communist who
maintained Marxian positions even within the Labour Party after it obliged its
members to choose between it and the CPGB, a campaigning atheist and promoter
of euthanasia? To ask the question is to receive the answer: the attitudes of
all those young enough to have had their world moved and shaken by him and his
like. You have experienced them often
enough and you can see for yourself what the results are of the culture he did
so much to shape over a writing career of half a century.
And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day's late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers
resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.
One of the strange paradoxes of television is that the lurid
modern police and crime dramas with their pornographic depictions of sexual
activities and glamourised violence are far less problematic philosophically
than their ‘cosy’ predecessors of Willis’ heyday in that the events they
portray are clear violations of natural law; there is nothing in any way
equivocal in the need to condemn serial killers and predatory rapists. On the
other hand, the old-fashioned world of Sgt. Dixon was one in which events were
far less dramatic, and their morality was rather more a matter of
interpretation with the judgement upon them having been reserved to the makers
of the relevant legalisation or else to the agent of the state i.e. the
policeman. The morality depicted was then a positivist construct rather than an
objective absolute measured against a definite and external God-given standard.
That sense that right and wrong are essentially made so by human decisions lies
at the heart of all the suicide bills not to mention the legislation of sundry
other acts such as abortion or homosexual practices contrary to natural or
divine law, and it is rooted in the old dream of a world without God, dancing
to the tune of the satanic song Non Serviam, I will not serve.
As St. Thomas notes, in so far as that human laws deflect
from the law of nature, and therefore also from serving the common good, they
are no laws at all but rather a perversion; so our personal morality must never
be shaped by such legislation, instead these unlawful statutes must serve us as
a constant reminder that the regime under which we live is one in which the
disparity between legality and morality amounts to an active denial of the
divine Kingship of Christ (cf Summa I-II:95:2).
The entertainments we
choose for ourselves and for our households shape our mental and moral habits,
and those of our children, so if we do not choose wisely at first we might well
find ourselves unable to judge with sufficient clarity to choose wisely in
future and lay ourselves open to all manner of ungodly ideologies. It is, then,
imperative to reject at the outset any thoughtless or habitual practice of imbibing
entertainments of unknown provenance fired at us by broadcasters whose motives
are equally hidden from us, and to seek safety in what is known to be good.
“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever
holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if
any praise of discipline; think on these things” (Phil. iv. 8). “Life and
death, blessing and cursing” are set before us, “Choose therefore life, that
both thou and thy seed may live” (Deut. xxx. 19). In all things choose Christ.
