COVER -> DAY ONE
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One of the distractions which has undermined my Biblical resolve has been a rapid survey of books on the last phase of the Byzantine Empire. Its capital, Constantinople, was sacked by Western "Latin" Christians in 1204 and its competing princes and soldiers in exile took almost sixty years to recapture it from what was always a feeble and tenuous occupation.
It was taken in triumph - that word again - by Michael VIII Palaiologos whose joy was short lived. The Greek Orthodox Church which he restored gave no end of trouble. The compromises he sought with the Papacy to preserve his city from recapture by Western adventurers were resented by his own people. And he was hastily buried without the rites of either side in the contest, another monument to the fickleness of our race.
Even the theologian in me cannot think so much misery is justified by a disagreement as to whether the Holy Ghost proceeds simply from the Father (Greek Orthodox) or from the Father and the Son (Roman Catholic). So, my Lent has been a season of ritual and history; and whereas ritual is a collective support for individual introspection, so history is an individual support for collective introspection. Never, at least in the United Kingdom, have we needed both in my lifetime more than now.
May 2nd was a bright morning when the New Labour British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, took up office with a landslide victory that properly ended a period of Conservative administration which began with deliberate brutality and coarseness and ended in venality and incompetence.
At least in the case of the Republican era which paralleled it in the United States the brutality and coarseness were, so to speak, collateral damage; only the venality was deliberate.
Three years into Blair's term he is under severe and frequently irrational assault from his own activists who, it appears, have completely forgotten the sweetness of victory and would actually prefer to be in opposition; the Prince is already a Pygmy and might soon be a pariah among progressives. He is, of course, the victim of his Conservative predecessors who exalted instant gratification to the status of a civic virtue. The core of the discontent is a public health service which is failing to keep pace with medical advances and demographic trends. As Blair has been in office for three years but it takes seven to train a doctor and nine to take a hospital from concept to commissioning, it is difficult to see, other than loading drugs, equipment and nurses into the system, what else he could have done by now. Nonetheless, many people one would have thought rational are casting him as a failure and threatening never to vote Labour again. It makes me wonder what they might vote instead to achieve the results they want more rapidly. This is where a little understanding of history might help.
As for ritual, it must not be confused with mindless gesture. Ritual at its best is a series of carefully considered words and gestures which provide a coherent and significant framework for collective and individual self expression, not just in matters of religion but also in the field of public affairs. Law courts rightly rely upon ritual to de-personalise proceedings and without ritual politics would be murderously cruel and impossibly fissiparous. It is therefore with a sense of foreboding that I watch the mindless repetition of tabloid mantras about our political condition.
All political parties are not the same; most politicians do not choose this vocation to make personal fortunes; my life would be very different if the Conservatives, rather than New Labour, had been elected in 1997 and the lives of the poor would be radically different; most failures to deliver instant gratification have no connection with political will. Indeed, the one thing we can be reasonably certain of is that if politicians could deliver instant gratification they would. Blair, for all his decency, is as anxious as anyone to receive the political credit for his investments in health and other human services.
There is part of me, recalling the ejection of Indira Gandhi after the declaration of a State of Emergency and the promotion of compulsory sterilisation in India, which thinks that democracies usually get the right answer even if the timing is often awry; but that hypothesis is weakening in the face of the fear that as voter registration and votes cast both fall we are approaching a point of no return. If politics is reduced to mindless platitudes even by the 'progressive' intelligentsia then the whole process will cease to conserve its waning legitimacy in a world governed by multinational corporations.
Because there are disagreements about the degree and direction of change, those who want to change society are necessarily more heterogeneous than those who want to leave it the way it is. That reality, and the financial muscle they derive from the status quo, always gives conservatives an in-built political advantage.
Those of a reforming tendency in the United States might wish to learn from the recent British record of fickleness and folly. In the face of the prospect of the most powerful country in the world being corporately and politically governed by a comprehensive, conservative hegemony, it is vital that Democrats and their allies do not get sidetracked by ideological hair-splitting. Even more important, they must studiously avoid trivialisation because to make politics trivial is to avow the futility of change and the inevitability of the status quo. As conservatives are better at being conservative than progressives setting out to imitate them, progressives might as well be progressive.
Mr Gore must not be afraid to be high minded and high principled. He will be ridiculed for it by his opponents because such behaviour gives him his best chance of winning but if he does win - and I pray he will - he will not be thanked for it by his own side for more than a fortnight. In case you have forgotten, the Greeks intrigued amongst themselves and the Latins, led by the Papacy, intrigued against the Greeks and the Byzantine Empire and its capital, Constantinople, the most fabulous city so far in history, was seized by the Islamic Ottoman Turks.
