The Rock, November 1998
In England Now
SET Point
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
So runs the opening paragraph [after the preamble] of the “Declaration if Independence of the Thirteen Colonies In Congress, July 4, 1776: The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”
The Self-Evident-Truth (SET for short) several examples of which occur in the paragraph just quoted, has always fascinated people.
This fascination is partly due to the fact that SETs save people who have no aptitude for rational thought from having to think about anything at all. If something is self-evident, why then, it's bound to be true, isn't it? And there's an end on't!
“My dear fellow,” we can hear one Pre-Copernican Man saying to another, “?of course the sun goes round the earth. I mean, you've only got to look into the sky and you can see it happening every day before your very eyes. Besides which, the Bible says, doesn't it, that ‘the sun... cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course’ and ‘it goeth forth from the uttermost part of the heaven and runneth about unto the end of it again’? So what this Copernicus-johnny thinks he's doing upsetting people by questioning what everyone in his heart of hearts knows to be true I just don't understand. Strikes me that he needs his head examined”.
And with that matter resolved to their mutual satisfaction P-C Man and his friend decide to sink a pint of ale and turn their minds to more important matters such as the weather or the price of turnips.
Another attraction of the SET is its sheer beautiful simplicity. There is a well-founded suspicion on the part of those whose formal education has been minimal, that Wiseguys take a perverse delight in making everything more complicated that it need be. By so doing (the theory goes) "intellectuals" contrive to put such things beyond the reach of the rest of us simple folks, enabling them to perpetrate all sorts of verbal legerdemain.
The third attraction of the SET, the one which makes it appeal to rulers and politicians in particular, is that it enables everyone to believe the same thing: which is useful, of course, if you happen to be in the business of forming and manipulating public belief in the first place. It makes the job a whole lot easier if your subjects can be helped and encouraged to believe in a few SETs (of your choosing, naturally!) and thereby turn him into a neo-P-C or Politically Correct Man, who will become an up-to-date version of his Pre-Copernican forebear.
That's all very well until things start to go wrong, which they invariably do, in one of two ways.
The first is when rather too many people start to question the SET itself: for example the statement quoted above that all men are created equal. Equal to what? Equal in what?
Even the simplest mind realises that whatever such equality is supposed to consist in it cannot be applied to such qualities as physical height, weight, intellect or ability. In these and other matters no two people are precisely the same and therefore equality is a Natural non-event.
But perhaps "created equal" means being "created with equal human rights." But why, in that case, should so much of the business of civilized government consist in helping those who are seen to be "disadvantaged", whether they were born that way or have become casualties of life's hardships? For to give help to the disadvantaged is something we do precisely because not everyone is "born equal" – or anything approximating to it.
So, one way and another, the "simplicity" of the SET begins to wear a bit thin the moment you come to look at it closely. The fact that, from time to time, "everyone" believed it, is no guarantee that it is true or ever was. It needs only your actual Copernicus or Galileo to be sufficiently methodical in their investigations and persistent in publicising them, and your beautiful SET goes right out of the window!
The second problem about SETs arises when they "stop working": that is to say that a policy based on an SET simply doesn't work out in practice. History is littered with bright ideas which started their life as brilliantly lucid SETs but which, when applied in practice leave things in a far worse state than before, not least in the area they were designed to ameliorate. In this century both Communism and Nazism are examples of ideologies based on some very plausible SETs, which in practice both turned out to be major disaster areas.
Our present age is particularly partial to SETs. If one were to cite some examples the following would be typical:
² everyone is as good/bad as everyone else.
² anything someone else can do, I could do as well, if not better if I wanted to
² if something makes you feel good you should do it
² everyone has a right to happiness, self-fulfilment and their share of the world's resources
² the private lives of public personages are their own concern and nobody else's
² after death, life continues more or less uninterrupted but without any of its present drawbacks
² it's nobody's business to judge other people.
Now, although there are many people in the world who behave as if the above propositions were self-evident, an equal if not greater number doubt the claim of one, or more, or all of such supposedly Self-Evident Truths either to be true at all, or at least not self-evidently so.
If they are true, they will want to know why they are believed to be so; but the very fact that their advocates base their belief in them solely on their supposedly self-evident nature means that they are in no position whatever to justify them rationally when required to do so. All that they can say is "but it's obvious" and in their minds dismiss as a mentally or emotionally disturbed, or mischievously obtuse, anyone who does not agree that it's obvious. Like the case of the Pre-Copernican sun-watcher, what appeared obvious to him and his colleagues turns out in fact not to be the true.
Argument, or debate, about the truth or falsehood of an SET is simply impossible, because there exists no common ground for arguing about it. The SET Brigade are applying the adage "seeing is believing" in a way it has never previously been understood. Moreover, the histrionic terms used against those who dare to cast doubts upon the supposedly "obvious" by those whose most cherished theories are being challenged is in itself indication of how far society has been infected by what C.S. Lewis called "The Poison of Subjectiveness".
This is well illustrated in a book of essays soon to be published called Act of Synod – Act of Folly?
The essays in this book are written by people who are both deeply committed to the ordination of women as priests and fundamentally opposed to the safeguards provided by the Act of Synod which accompanied the legislation in 1993 to make such an action legally possible.
It was a precondition, insisted upon by the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament at the time, upon whose say-so the whole future of the Women Priests Measure depended, that an Act of Synod be passed safeguarding the rights and recognizing the integrity of those who, for any reason, were opposed to this novelty. The Act was passed by an overwhelming majority in the Synod and has enabled people like myself to continue our ministry under the authority of the "Flying Bishops" and others.
The complaint of the authors of Act of Synod – Act of Folly? is not that the arrangement hasn't worked, but that it has worked much too well for their liking. So far from everyone "seeing" the rightness, the wisdom and indeed the necessity of ordaining women as priests ("necessary" because it is self-evident that man and women are for this purpose equivalent to and therefore interchangeable with each other), this particular SET, like others before it, has begun to look distinctly vulnerable.
Vulnerable, because its self-evident nature has been so widely questioned. Cost of Conscience and Forward in Faith, to name but two organisations which have from Day One questioned the rightness of this action, and not least its claim to be self-evident. Opposition has coalesced into a well-run, financial stable integrity which, horror upon horror, is beginning to look suspiciously like what many people have supposed the Church of England to be: the local guardians of English Catholicism. More horrors still, the innovators have begun to look more and sound more like ECUSA every day!
But even worse was in store at the Lambeth Conference 1998. The arguments of the Eames Commission on which the whole provision of PEVs, the "provisionality" of such women priests' orders, the possibility of its being discovered to be a mistake during the lengthy "Period of Reception" which would necessarily follow such ordinations, were accepted by the Conference almost without demur.
There is neither space nor time here to rehearse the arguments for and against such ordinations or whether they are, as some of us would doubt, ordinations at all. But what now lies beyond the hope of recovery is the claim that the truth upon which such supposed ordinations were based can any longer be held to be self-evident.
So what can its advocates do to rebuild their fallen house of cards? Reading between the lines of these essays and observing the behaviour of those who have been most disappointed by the outcome there is only one course of action left to them summarized by the saying "Carthago delenda est" – Carthhage must be destroyed. Wipe out all opposition by persecution if enticement fails to do the trick.
Persecution won't work, of course. It never does, although locally and intermittently it may appear to achieve its aim. It was Tertullian who said "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church". The reliance which people place upon the supposed invincibility of the Self-Evident Truth may prove to be the greatest and most fundamental of the blunders that the innovators have so far made.