Remembering Don Cupitt and his television series The Sea of Faith

The philosopher, theologian and Anglican priest Don Cupitt died yesterday.

I first came across him through his 1984 BBC television series The Sea of Faith. As that Wikipedia entry says, it dealt with 

the history of Christianity in the modern world, focussing especially on how Christianity has responded to challenges such as scientific advances, political atheism and secularisation in general.

The series had six parts, and this one dealing with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein is the one I remember best. 

I also remember it being discussed on Ludovic Kennedy's programme about television Did You See? One of the panelists was Bob Monkhouse, and I was impressed by his suggestion that the austere beauty of the house Wittgenstein designed for his sister in Vienna helps you understand his philosophy.

Certainly,  a good part of the appeal of Wittgenstein, who was the dominant figure in academic philosophy in Britain for much of the 20th century, was aesthetic, whether it was the rigour and numbered paragraphs of his early work or the endlessly interpretable aphorisms of his later.

So thank you to Don Cupitt, and I have to end by observing that we really don't get television like this any more.

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"On the few occasions in its history when the Conservative party has not just lost power but been roundly thrashed, it has been when wealth-creators and ideologues have fought each other: over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, imperial preference in the 1900s and the EU in the 1990s. Each of these internal splits led to ten years or more in the wilderness." Peter Kellner thinks the Tories could pay a heavy price for Brexit.

And it would serve them right, says Cicero: "The only thing that keeps this shop window of stupidity alive is the fake money that drives the modern Conservative Party. Intellectually moribund and the bear garden of deformed personalities, the Tories deserve utter ruin."

Chris Dillow says we are very bad at counterfactuals. An Ed Miliband would have been far better than what actually happened after 2015, but we would still have moaned about it.

"It has taken a while, but Nietzsche’s reputation as a philosopher has been fully restored. The story of his life is by turns inspiring, poignant and dispiriting, and it has never been better told than in this riveting book." Ray Monk reviews Sue Prideaux's new life of the philosopher.

A Lady in London is your guide to spending a weekend in Leicester.

Philadelphia's Bart King is the greatest cricketer you've never heard of The Maelstrom.will tell you all about him.

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"Officials took me through the cost-benefit analysis used by the Department for Transport and the Treasury to assess the viability of transport projects. This was almost exclusively an economic test and projects were judged by the economic value they created. In short, projects in parts of the country where the economy was strongest were more likely to score highest." Andy Burnham explains why the North of England misses out on public investment.

Oliver Newham briefs us on Sheffield City Council's war on trees.

Victoria Coren Mitchell attacks the government's failure to curb the spread of fixed-odds betting terminals: "Punters lose and lose and lose. And when they disappear, or kill themselves, or their child is taken into care and they start self-medicating with drugs instead, someone else steps blindly up to feed the monster. So, if you’re only allowed four per shop, open more shops!"

Instead of penning children in and shrinking pizzas to fight obesity, let children play outside with their friends says Rob Wheway (a name familiar from the old Liberal Party.

The alt-right misunderstands the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche just as the Nazis did before them, argues Sean Illing.

Hannah Booth interviews those who were there the day the Beatles came to Old St Pancras churchyard.

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"During last month’s election campaign, I made the most important political decision of my life. I resigned from the Conservative Party, for whom I had stood as a parliamentary candidate in 2015, to join the Liberal Democrats." Azi Ahmed explains why she is proud to be a Lib Dem newbie.

Jay Rayner was asked to a meeting by Michael Gove so that he could share is expertise on the implications of Brexit for our food supply. He declined, but this is what he would have said.

"The council’s advisors were clear that if planing guidance had been applied strictly then the council could have demanded over 1000 more affordable homes. They choose not to." George Turner dissects Wandsworth's mishandling of the Battersea power station project.

Mark Collins on the extraordinary bonfire of paperwork that accompanied the end of the British Empire.

Alexander Star examines Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on America.

"It occurs to me that watching the women’s game now is rather what it must have been like watching the men’s game in the earliest days of the modern era (in the 1870s and 1880s) : predominantly medium pace bowling and spin, well-pitched up, with the batsmen playing off the front foot with a straight bat." Backwatersman is variously ecstatic, bewildered or indifferent watching the Women's World Cup.

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"Although it's fine to see the Lib Dems making an effort on this issue it is disappointing to see the dangerously false notion that there is a mythical "balance between security and liberty" trotted out unthinkingly yet again." B2fxxx looks at our spring conference's call for a bill of digital rights.

Keynesian Liberal, a representative of what he calculates to be Generation W, has some advice for the young: " If Generation Y would like in their old age to enjoy the comfort and security that we do they should stop voting for parties which bribe them with promises of lower and lower taxes, and realise that you get what you pay for."

John Gray in the New Statesman argues that modern atheists should read Nietzsche.

Internet Curtains takes us to the post-war Nottingham suburbs of Beechdale, Bilborough and Strelley.

While thamesfacingeast visits a remarkable church beside the South Circular Road - and the Frankie Howerd Community Hall.

Wartime Housewife has found a poem about the Rugby to Peterborough railway line.

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Following the Liberal Democrats' internal elections, Liberal Bureaucracy is dissatisfied with the rules for them: "Why on Earth don't we allow candidates for the Presidency access to the membership list? After all, they're meant to represent the members, and the more able they are to reach them in the campaign phase (and don't worry, the £7,500 spending limit prevents anyone from going mad...), the better."

The Guardian claimed that "anti-Tory" candidates did well in those elections. As Caron's Musings points out, all the candidates were anti-Tory.

Northern Neil argues that "What we need is less graduates not more tuition fees". Make that "fewer" graduates and I am with you.

Birkdale Focus writes about my hero Charles Masterman and reminds us that his widow, Lucy Masterman, survived him by more than 50 years and was still around in Liberal circles in the 1970s.

Jonathan Rée writes about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche for New Humanist: "Nietzsche’s star has been rising since the 1950s: his life and work have benefited from tremendous efforts of scholarship, translation and interpretation, and eminent professional philosophers have taken to sporting a few Zarathustrian exotica – the assaults on truth, on morality, and on philosophy itself – to add dash and dazzle to their otherwise sombre intellectual wardrobe."

Flannelled Fools reveals Arthur Conan Doyle's claim to cricketing fame. He took only one first-class wicket:, but it was that of the legendary W.G. Grace.

Greenmantle by John Buchan

Still anxious to understand the world we live in, I turned from Conrad's The Secret Agent to John Buchan. Greenmantle is set during the First World War and tells of a German attempt to raise the whole of Islam in support of Turkey, thus defeating Russia on the Eastern front and turning the course of the war.

There was another reason for reading Greenmantle. The BBC Radio 4 was dramatising it in two parts and had aired the first when the bombs exploded on 7 July. The second part was pulled from the schedules. It was not just pulled without explanation: as far as I could tell, you would never have known from listening to the radio that the second part had been due to be broadcast at all.

Perhaps there was an announcement of some sort, because Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph (another version here if you need it) that:

A small news item this week announced that BBC Radio 4 had dropped its dramatisation of John Buchan's Greenmantle from the schedule. It contained "unsuitable and insensitive material" at this difficult time. A different reaction, you may remember, from the one the BBC displayed to another of its programmes: Jerry Springer - the Opera.

Having praised the BBC for holding firm over Jerry Springer, I have to say that Moore is right to draw this parallel and that its conduct over Greenmantle was weak, wet and rather sinister.

Enlightened readers are supposed to find Buchan either funny or fascist - there is a wonderful parody of him in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On. Yet he is quite capable of surprising you with how fair and liberal his views are. You come to scoff and leave impressed.

Take this conversation between the hero Richard Hannay (you may know him from The Thirty-Nine Steps) and Sandy, a figure who owes something to T. E. Lawrence - but see here. (Bennett suggests he was known at school as "Tee Hee Lawrence" because of his high-pitched, girlish giggle.)

Sandy Arbuthnot asks:

"Dick, did you ever hear of a thing called a superman?"
"There was a time when the papers were full of nothing else," I answered. "I gathered it was invented by a sportsman called Nietzsche."

And just when you are ready to laugh comes:

"Maybe," said Sandy. "Old Nietzsche has been blamed for a great deal of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge."

For one of the remarkable things about Greenmantle is its fairness to the Germans. Early in the book Hannay is being hunted in Germany and takes refuge in the cottage in the forest. The occupants are a mother and three children: the man of the house is away fighting the Russians.

Narrating this almost idyllic episode, Hannay says:

That night I realised the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard the hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

It happens that the mirror image of this incident can be found in the children's adventure story Not Scarlet But Gold by Malcolm Saville. A Shropshire woman recalls giving a German spy shelter in her cottage during the Second World War. A reminder of how strongly Buchan influenced this school of writing.

If Buchan is fairer to Germans (and German philosophers) than one would expect, what of his attitude to Islam?

I cannot find the passage I want, but Charles Moore quotes it for me:

One message of the book is the importance of understanding cultures different from our own. This produces a sympathy with Islam. Sandy, who knows "something of the soul of the East", explains that: "The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. They settle down and stagnate, and by and by they degenerate into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked. " 

And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft ... It isn't inhuman. It's the humanity of one part of the human race. 

"The problem comes, Buchan/Arbuthnot says, when this longing for purity is perverted. The "simplicity of the ascetic" is usurped by "the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilisation". The danger comes when "you can get the same language to cover both". Isn't that quite a good way of encapsulating our problem today?