CONFUSIONS

20 minutes only

Is it wrong to have sex with a chicken?

          In the pre-Kinsey era, those agreeing it would be wrong would probably have cited Leviticus 18.23:  “You shall not have sexual intercourse with any beast.”  Or, if not the text itself, then at least its sentiments.  It’s against nature.   End of.  

          Nowadays, our society – or those who run its morals for us – has rejected the idea of an external God who can dictate to us how we should behave.  With most versions of the sex act now a valid expression of the god within us, those who would say it was wrong to have sexual congress with a chicken are obliged to use a different argument.  It’s wrong because we have not asked the chicken’s permission; it’s a violation of her rights. 

          But chickens are used to that sort of thing.  When a rooster gets the urge, he simply jumps aboard, rips out a few neck feathers, and sets about his appointed task. 

          Does this have implications for animal rights?  Should we consider not only how humans treat animals, but how animals treat animals?  Is a re-education programme necessary?  Do roosters need counselling?

          If we go vegetarian to save the planet, what about those animals that are still carnivorous?  If they refuse to change their eating habits, will they have to be exterminated? 

 

As we have rejected the authority of the Old Testament, so we have rejected that of the New.  Typical refutations of St Paul’s right to adjudicate on sexual matters are that he lived long ago and was unmarried; although by the criteria of the modern world, the latter might be all the more reason for listening to him.  As it is, we have listened instead, among others, to Havelock Ellis (who was urinated on by his wife to achieve erection) and to Alfred Kinsey (who would masturbate with a toothbrush up his urethra, and with rope slowly tightened round his testicles).    For myself, I prefer St Paul.

 

On a more mundane level, in the short-stay section of my station car park, there are two notices.  One, painted on the tarmac in front of the relevant spaces, says ‘Ten Minutes only’.   The other, a large sheet in the perspex display area on the wall, says ‘Twenty minutes only’.

           Which is it?  An appeal to modernity will not help in this instance.  The tarmac painting has been freshly renovated, and the wall poster is part of a new display.

          Could there be a clearer symbol of the unresolved contradictions within the mind of our society? 

 

SICK = COOL

Sick = Cool

 

I knew I was old when a teenager told me I was random, and I misunderstood her.  I thought she meant my ideas were muddled, and I was upset, but it wasn’t that at all: she’d been chatting to a friend, and not listening to a word I’d been saying.   She simply meant that I was strange.

     That was fine – in her terms, almost a compliment – but it raises a problem of a different sort.  If teenagers say ‘random’ when they mean ‘strange’, what word do they use when they mean ‘random’?  How would they express the idea of ‘random thoughts’: such as these?   If they were asked to take part in a random survey, what would they understand themselves to be involved in? 

     At one time, “I’m good,” and, “I’m well,” were two different things.  One referred to your moral condition; the other to your state of health.  But “I’m good,” now means, “I’m well.”  So how do you say you’re good?  Or is morality no longer an issue?[1] 

     At one time, “He’s fit” referred to his physical condition.  Now it means he’s sexy.  There is, of course, an obvious link: he’s sexy if he’s fit because if he’s fit he can keep shagging you for a long time: the apparent ideal for the typical modern girl.  There is, however, scope for endless confusion.  If your doctor says you’re fit, what is your doctor doing: telling you you’re ready to go back to work, or giving you the come on? 

    ‘Sick’ used to apply to mental as well as physical description.  You could say that Thomas Harris’ Hannibal was a sick book, or that the Marquis de Sade had a sick mind.  It’s different when ‘sick’ becomes a term of approval.   It could cause no end of a problem in dealing with teenagers.  When they say they’re sick, are they praising themselves, or seeking medical assistance?

     ‘May’ and ‘might’ used to be distinct from one another, but are now used interchangeably: at the cost of a useful nuance of meaning.   You can, it is true, say, “I may go to London,” or, “I might go to London,” and mean much the same thing:  the distinction between ‘may’ – be allowed to – and ‘can’ – am able to – having disappeared irrevocably.  But, “I may have won the lottery,” and “I might have won the lottery,” is not the same thing, even now.  With ‘may’, you don’t yet know the result.  With ‘might’ you do: the result is now in the past.  It could have been different: if you’d bought a ticket, say, or changed one of your numbers.

     I’ve heard on the BBC that, “The Germans  may have won the Second World War,” as if we still don’t know the result.  We do; the Germans lost.  What was meant was that they might have won with a different strategy: using their Jewish scientists, for instance, or not attacking Russia.  

     ‘They’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ used to mean more than one.  They don’t any more:  ‘An applicant should hand in their form...’   It is, of course, to get away from the old chauvinism of ‘his form’, regardless of sex.  But what on earth is wrong with ‘his/her’ (alternating, if necessary, with ‘her/his’ for strict equality) or (s)he?  That way, gender and plurality are alike respected. 

     There was a musical once called Guys and Dolls.  The males in it were the guys, and the females were the dolls.  Now we say “You guys,” to a mixed couple.  Why hasn’t “You dolls,” taken off in the same way?  If you can call a woman a guy, but can’t call a man a doll, then you are, by implication, raising a woman to the temporary status of a man: the reverse, presumably, of the actual intention behind the change of terminology. 

     I can see why ‘postie’ should have replaced ‘postman’ when the job is now often done by a woman; and why ‘Chair’ should replace ‘Chairman’,  given how often a meeting is led by a woman. 

      But why the term ‘male nurse’?  If a judge is a judge, regardless of sex, and a doctor is a doctor, surely a nurse should be a nurse?  Otherwise, you are suggesting that there are differences between men and women as to what they can do [2] 

      If the reply is that some things in nursing are better done by a woman than by a man, then why the beef to replace ‘actress’ with ‘actor’ for both sexes?  There are things in acting that a woman can do better than a man: like playing a woman.  (The whole fun about a pantomime dame is that we know she’s really a man.) 

     It could be argued that a ‘waitress’ should become a ‘waiter’ because the function here is the same for both sexes.  Maybe.  But think back to the days of Carol Doda and the topless bars.  An advertisement for topless waitresses; that was something!  But topless waiters: that just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.  Especially if you don’t know before you get there which sex might be serving you.

     More than language is involved in all these examples: there has been a profound change in beliefs as well.   Thinking through the implications of some of them, and what they might mean for the future, I’m not sorry to be old.

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[1] It is possible the term originally meant, ‘My health is good’, or ‘My situation is good.’   The subsequent abbreviation has been the cause of the ambiguity.

[2] One obvious example of difference is that women can give birth, and men can’t.  It’s why the extreme sexual egalitarians want men to be fitted with artificial wombs.

THE DIFFERENCE A WORD CAN MAKE

I have just been listening, after a long break, to a Paul Simon compilation that includes the 1972 song Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard.

      ‘Me’ and Julio, spotted doing something illegal, are reported and arrested.  I recalled that when Paul Simon had been asked by Rolling Stone magazine what it was that the MaMa saw he had no idea, but probably “something sexual”.  Remembering that, I decided to check out the opinions of a few bloggers.  Fascinating!

     Those focusing simply on the title see ‘Me’ and Julio in some sort of homosexual encounter.   But, in fact, the lyrics say, “you, me and Julio, down by the schoolyard.”  That one little word indicates the presence of a third person.

     So who is this ‘you’?   Fairly obviously, Rosie, the Queen of Corona, who is mentioned in the previous line.

     Does that mean that the homosexual argument collapses?  Not a bit of it, say its advocates (those, that is to say, who have conceded the extra presence).  A ‘queen’ is a flagrant homosexual.  It’s about a homosexual threesome.

     Well, yes, that can be a meaning of ‘queen’.  But ‘queen’ can also be a word for a significant female (as in ‘Dancing Queen’) or a female ruler.  The current Queen of England, for instance, is a woman.  “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts…”   The Queen on a chess board.  The Queen Bee.  The Queen Alien in Aliens.  And so on.

     More prosaically, Corona is a district in the New York borough of Queens.  Paul Simon is presumably indulging in some sort of pun.  Rosie, our queen (as in favourite girl) of the district of Corona in the Borough of Queens.

 

My own reading.  Early in the morning (hence, MaMa Pajama rolling out of bed) Rosie, ‘Me’ and Julio are engaged in some sort of clandestine sexual activity.   (Not clandestine enough, because they are spotted.) Because what is happening is illegal, (and also happening in the schoolyard) both boys are probably under age.  Maybe Rosie is too.  That would account for the disgust of the MaMa and PaPa.  Rosie’s parents?  Julio’s?  Or just concerned citizens?

 

What does it matter?   In terms of the song, not at all.  Who cares?  But attention to data might matter in a real-life situation: a rape trial, say.

        Two people? Three?   Hell, it’s just a piece of fiction.   But it’s also worrying evidence of careless reading if some of those choosing to comment on the song cannot even work out how many there are involved. 

 

 

APPENDIX

These gems did not fit into the above, but are too good not to be commented on.

 

1. (My personal favourite, this.)  We should look through the 1972 copies of Newsweek, and see which one has the kids on the cover.  It has eluded this particular interpreter that if the kids are fictional (and Paul Simon says they are), then the reference to Newsweek is fictional also.

 

2.  A devotee of the gay-twosome theory (you  have to hand it to these guys; they just never give up) explains away the “you” as follows:

“See you, me and Julio down by the schoolyard” should be understood as ‘See you,’ ie ‘Goodbye, everybody.’

   That does have a certain plausibility if you simply look at the words.  However, it does not square with the way Paul Simon sings the line: the pause does not come after ‘you’, but after ‘Julio’.

 

3. It must be an anti-war protest because the kids get the support of a radical priest, and no priest would support sex or drugs.

     Really?  This commentator obviously hasn’t come across the sort of priests I have.  Radical priests, in fact, have been the victims of their own success.  Having hauled biblically-forbidden things like fornication and homosexuality into the cultural mainstream, and with paedophilia well on the way towards respectability, where do they go next?   Necrophilia?   Incest?    Sex with sheep?

 

4.  Other interpretations of ‘corona’.

a.        Since ‘corona’ means the end of the penis, Rosie is a prostitute: expert at giving head.

b.      Since a ‘Corona’ is a cigar…  Then, as for explanation a: except Rosie is also a Cuban.

c.       Since ’Corona’ is a beer, Rosie is a champion at downing them.  Before they get started, the kids have Coronas; so the song is about under-age drinking as well as about under-age sex.

d.      Since ‘corona’ means an aura round the Sun, Rosie (she must be Mexican, since Julio knows her) is an Aztec sun goddess.  After all, the Sun is rosy isn’t?  The parents are mad because Rosie is a Mexican.  It’s the race war:  a new version of West Side Story.  (My own invention, by the way.  I’d like to add it to one of those chat lines; only someone would be certain to take me seriously.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

HELL, HADES AND THE LAKE OF FIRE

The Authorised Version renders Revelation 20:14 as, ‘And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.’  My New English Bible version has it, ‘Then Death and Hades were flung into the lake of fire.’  This creates grounds for confusion.

     Hades, for those with a smattering of Greek mythology, is the common destination for the dead, with better areas like the Elysian Fields and worse ones like Tartarus.  Understood in Christian terms as a sort of temporary holding area, its destruction after the Last Judgement – when the Lake of Fire takes effect – would make sense.

     The destruction of Hell – the place of symbolic fire – by being thrown into another symbolic fire is more difficult. Indeed, in the minds of many, Hell and the Lake of Fire are one and the same thing. 

     If we think of a new Heaven and a new Earth, however, then it becomes easier.  The current frame of things is provisional.  New Heaven, new Earth, new Hell: which the Lake of Fire.  Hell as a sort of separate temporary Hades then makes more sense.

Literary treatments of Hell, and medieval illustrations, have added to the confusion. Dante is the worst culprit in this respect.  Dante’s Inferno is a sort of funnel with a three-headed Satan at the bottom of it gnawing on Brutus, Cassius and Judas.  That suggests Satan is fixed where he is; otherwise, what happens to Judas and the others when he’s away?

     Nevertheless, if Satan is confined to Hell in the medieval understanding, his minions are free to visit Earth.  In Chaucer’s The Friar’s Tale a summoner meets a yeoman even more demonic that himself; for the yeoman turns out to be a fiend, riding to the world’s end in search of prey. At the end of the story, of course, the fiend returns to Hell, taking the summoner with him to the special shelf reserved for summoners.  (Chaucer’s Summoner is not pleased, but gets revenge by pointing out that friars in Hell are in an even worse location.)

     Even in a later example, such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Lucifer himself still remains in Hell, and sends his servant, Mephistopheles. 

            FAU.  Where are you damn’d?

            MEPH.          In hell.

            FAU.   How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

            MEPH. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. 

     Although we might applaud the perception that Hell is a spiritual condition as well as a physical location, what about 1 Peter: 5:8, where ‘The devil goes about like a roaring lion.’ ? That says pretty unequivocally that Satan is still free to roam.  So does Satan’s temptation of Christ. True to this spirit, in Coleridge’s satirical little poem ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, the gentleman in question leaves his “brimstone bed”  and visits Earth to pick up some new ideas for torment.  Coleridge  is much more biblical than the other literary examples I have cited. 

If the biblical devil is not yet confined, neither are his demons.  In Matthew 8 the demons who later flee into the Gadarene swine ask Christ if he has come to torment them “before their time”.  That suggests they are still free; although they know of a future doom.  Why they choose the pigs is puzzling.  Don’t they have another location they could go to?  What happens to the other demons that are cast out?  Where do they go? 

     Is Hell, in fact, an option for them at this stage?   In Matthew 12:48, Christ says, “When an unclean spirit comes out of a man it wanders over the deserts seeking a resting-place, and finds none.”  It returns with seven other spirits more wicked than itself.  None of them, it seems, has any other fixed abode.  (I concede, of course, that the whereabouts of demons in not the main point of Christ’s words: he is talking about keeping one’s spiritual house in order, and allowing no opening for evil.)

     A counter to all this is the difficult verse in Jude about the rebel angels:  ‘God has reserved them for judgement on the Great Day, bound beneath the darkness in everlasting chains.’  One suggestion is that these are a special case.  These are the Nephilim of Genesis: too dangerous to be allowed on Earth.  They have been found guilty, but await their sentence. Yet a problem remains.  What and where is this darkness – even metaphorically speaking – that they are beneath?  Are they in the same place as condemned humans; or are they in a special place for condemned angels? 

In Matthew 25:41 Christ says to the ‘goats’; “Go from me to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”    That suggests a future location about to come into effect and not yet operative.  That is clear enough for the ‘goats’ alive at the time of Christ’s return.  But what of those ‘goats’ already dead?  Where have they been in the meantime?

      Christ says to the penitent thief, “This day you shall be with me in Paradise.”  Paul says that the dead will be ‘asleep’ in Christ: aware, but still waiting for their resurrection bodies.  This suggests that judgement happens immediately after death.  The redeemed, like the thief, are with Christ in Paradise. 

      The damned are in Hell: a place of metaphorical fire (the Lazarus and Dives parable) and metaphorical darkness: the darkness, perhaps, below which the chained angels are to be found.   It is a place where there is consciousness of loss: hence the wailing and gnashing of teeth.  It would appear to be a place/condition simply for humans.  The idea of tormenting devils seems to be as unbiblical as their supposed pitchforks.   Satan is described in the New Testament as “the prince of this world,” and “the prince of the power of the air.”  It is not the Bible that describes him as the Prince of Hell.   To that extent, Coleridge’s poem, too, is unbliblical; although, given its satirical nature, we need not take it any more seriously than we need take Chaucer. 

Christ returns, and there is the Last Judgement.  Those alive are judged.   The revived dead receive their resurrection bodies and have their fate confirmed.  The present order of things comes to an end.  The redeemed are with God in the new Heaven and New Earth.  The Devil, his demons and unregenerate humanity are cast into the Lake of Fire.  Even here the idea of devils punishing humans seems amiss: the devils will themselves be punished.  Unless, of course, all the self-willed of whatever description are consigned together and left to fight it out for precedence.  

This has been a sombre topic to discuss, and limited in scope.  My purpose has not been to consider the literal versus the figurative; the grounds for redemption and damnation; or the vexed issues of Purgatory, Annihilationism and Universalism.   My purpose has been to clarify for myself – and hopefully for others – a problem of biblical chronology.

ALLIANCES

 

 

Political alliances are funny things.  While some of them are akin to lifelong marriages, many more seem to end in divorce.

            Thus the German states were Britain’s allies against Napoleon, only for the French to become Britain’s ally against the Germans.  The hostility of Britain and the United States towards Russia transformed into a mutual alliance against Hitler –  the sufferings of the Russian convoys a case in point – only to transmute again into the Cold War.  Osama bin Laden was once backed by America… Etc. 

 

Within modern Britain, it seems to me there is a triangle of forces: Secularism, Christianity and Islam.    And both of Christianity’s opponents in some sense need  it – or may need it  in the future: Islam for a united front of faith against religious scepticism; Secularism for defence of the western-European tradition against the ideological inroads of Islam.

 

Western complacency about Constantinople – it doesn’t need help; it’s always been there; it always will be – received a rude awakening when Islam breached the impregnable walls: with help from a European cannon maker.   So much for those who take the Church for granted.  I only hope that those who want to get rid of it altogether, and have been systematically expunging the Judeao-Christian tradition from every aspect of western life, know what they are doing.  I hope they are not sawing off the branch they are sitting on, or creating an opening for an alternative religion they would like even less. 

 

“Better the devil you know” is – hopefully – an inapposite way of designating the role of Christianity in British life. Better, perhaps, is the regret expressed – too late - by Hamlet towards Laertes:

That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.

 

 

 

  

 

 

   

     

 

 

 

     

 

 

 

THE CASSANDRA CURSE

In Greek mythology, the luckless Cassandra resisted the advances of the god Apollo.   His revenge was to enable her to see the future; but for everyone to disbelieve her.

     In Greek history, Socrates was condemned to death for undermining the state; but posterity has judged Socrates to have been in the right, and his accusers in the wrong.  A lot of people have heard of Socrates, even if they have only the vaguest notion of who he was.  But how many could name even one of those who prosecuted him?

 

When I saw the film Darby O’Gill as a child, I was on the side of Darby.  He was the only one with the vision to actually see the leprechauns.


 

     Revisiting the film as an adult, I realised that, actually, it is the others who are in the right, and Darby who is deluded.  The captured King Brian is really just a rabbit. The Banshee is just a swaying bush, and her wailing is nothing but the sound of the wind. 

   

     And yet, the impression overall is that Darby is still the one with the truest vision of things.  The credits include an acknowledgment to King Brian, without whose gracious permission the film could not have been made.  There may not be leprechauns, but there are still more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. 

We are in similar territory with the first two Terminator films: set in 1984 and 1995, 1997 and 2029.  1995 and 1997 were still in the future when the second film came out in 1991.   How far the real 2029 might match the film’s nightmare predictions remains to be seen. 

     First some background: for those whose memories are rusty, or who missed the sequence altogether.    

     Skynet, the computer controlling American weaponry develops a malfunction whereby the enemy becomes not the Russians, but the entire human race.  In 1997, Skynet instigates a nuclear war, and then sets itself to creating machines to eliminate any human survivors. 

The worst of these are the cyborgs or terminators:  human-looking killing machines. 

 

     The human remnants in the Los Angeles of the future are rallied by one John Connor.  In 2029, Skynet sends a cyborg back in time to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah,  before he is born  (Film One), and another to kill John Connor’s younger self (Film Two).

     In Terminator 2, Sarah is directly in the Cassandra tradition. Knowing that a war will occur in 1997 unless steps are taken to prevent it, she has tried to blow up the computer factory where Skynet is to be produced, failed, and been declared criminally insane. 

     In the asylum, she is treated by a Dr Silberman, who regards her warnings about Skynet and the cyborg terminators as the ravings of a lunatic. 

    Two episodes from Terminator 2 stand out for me.  The first is when it dawns on Dr Silberman, confronted with two warring terminators, that his patient has been telling the truth all along.

     The second is when Sarah and her allies break into the Cyberdyne complex to destroy the microchip that will create Skynet and, ultimately, the cyborgs.  They are resisted at every stage by the police: who perceive only a felony, and who completely fail to realise that if they succeed in foiling the intruders they will be ensuring the destruction of themselves and the rest of the human race.

 

There is no Skynet, and there are no cyborgs, but the truth of the film is that there are visionaries who suffer for what they see.

     Jeremiah was persecuted for predicting the fall of Jerusalem.  Religious believers were confined to asylums in the former Soviet Union.  

     In terms of strict materialism, there was a logic to that.  If there is nothing but matter, then anyone who believes in spirit must be mad.  But only if the initial premise is correct.  Otherwise, materialists are the victims of truncated vision.

     There is, it seems to me, a similar - though currently less drastic - pattern in modern Britain.  For secular Utopians, Christianity - with its insistence on the uniqueness of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, and objective right and wrong - is a very great evil to be driven from the public sphere.  And, if the Thought Police, could have their way, from the private sphere as well. 

     “Sancta simplicitas.”  Thus John Huss, to an old peasant bringing a piece of wood to help burn him: the peasant who, by his ignorance, would contribute to the destruction of one who sought the welfare of the peasants. 

     Thus Aslan in The Magician’s Nephew:  “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good.” 

THE MURDER OF LANGUAGE

Today, the 22^nd November 2013, 50^th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, is the anniversary likewise of Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis:  the latter commemorated with a stone in Westminster Abbey.

      A more natural trio is Huxley, Lewis and Orwell: for all three wrote dystopias, and Orwell’s and Lewis’ both involve the destruction of language.

     Orwell’s Newspeak - successful to a degree that Political Correctness can still only dream of - is designed, by linguistic reductionism, to make certain thoughts unsayable, and ultimately unthinkable.  Hence the glorious “doubleplus ungood”. 

     Lewis’ That Hideous Strength is an allusion to Sir David Lindsay’s description of the Tower of Babel.  During the banquet at Belbury, headquarters of the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments, speech disintegrates into such nonsense as, “the madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised.”  Reason?  As the resuscitated Merlin puts it (in Latin, and here translated):  “’They that have despised the word  of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.’”

   Only fiction?  To read the selected postmodern samples of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is to feel that the fictional curse has taken on the horror of actuality.   

            Thus Baudrillard:  “It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image…”

     Here’s Deleuze and Gauttari.  “…an external framing or exoreference. For these protolimits, outside all coordinates, initially generate speed abscissas on which axes will be set up that can be coordinated.”

     With this sort of stuff, you could slide in Lewis’, “'We shall not until we can secure the erebation of all prostundiary initems.’” and hardly notice a disparity. 

WHAT IS TRUTH?

‘Unique’ used to mean unique: just one, and no other.   Something was either unique, or it wasn’t.

     But now we have expressions like “very unique” (why not: very unusual?), or “almost unique” (why not: very rare?).  This is more than thoughtless use of language; this is a revolt against the very idea of anything being…   well, unique.  The same demolition principle has been applied to the word ‘truth’.

 

“What is truth?”  quipped Pilate.  Depends who you’re asking.  An Enlightenment modernist might have said, “That which exists independently of my opinion about it; that which correlates with the way the world actually is.  Hurricanes occur; and if you don’t believe in them you might find yourself in the middle of one, regardless of your scepticism.”

     But a Postmodernist might say (if a philosopher): “Truth is what a given society/speech community agrees about for the sake of social order.  Thus to drive on the left is truth in Britain; to drive on the right is truth in France.  If we decided otherwise, truth would change. If we decided murder was good, it would become so.” 

     A Postmodernist who is not a philosopher, but who has been subjected to the trickle-down effect of ideas, might lose the community focus in favour of individuality.  “Truth is what’s true for me.  There is your truth and my truth.  It’s true if it works for you.  Etc.”    (And yet it somehow doesn’t apply if my truth is that I was born to be a serial rapist: there the community thing kicks in again, over-riding the personal.)

 

A problem with both these Postmodernist positions is highlighted in the recent film The Debt, starring Helen Mirren.  Without wanting to give away too much of the plot to those who have not seen it, The Debt is about the attempt of three Mossad agents to capture an ex-Nazi doctor and take him back to trial in Israel.  In practice, he escapes.  To return to Israel without him would be to expose Israel to national humiliation.  The three come up with a very Postmodern solution: truth is what the three in the room decide it is.  The truth, therefore, is that the doctor was shot while trying to get away. 

     The tension in the film is the mismatch between this truth and the actual truth: and what denial of reality can do once the past catches up with you.  One might describe the film as post-Postmodern: a rejection of the Postmodern truth that truth is what you say it is, or what you want it to be. 

      A less-cerebral example of the principle occurs in Pretty Woman. “What’s your name?” the client asks the call-girl.  “What do you want it to be?”    Truth, fantasy what’s the difference? 

     But let’s assume high motive, and follow the philosophical position for a moment.  Suppose we had a conversation on Thursday 21^st November 2013.  But did we?  It’s only ‘true’ because we both agree within our speech community to call it ‘Thursday’, and using the Gregorian calendar.  By a Chinese or Muslim reckoning it would be a different  year; in French, it would be a different word.  But, surely, that conversation happened  at a particular (‘unique’: in the original sense)  period of time in the history of the Universe?  It happened, and was unlike any other moment, regardless of how we chose to nominate it.

 

The problem with the ‘your truth/my truth’ position is that it, too, assumes high motive.  But what about low motive: what used – not to put too fine a point on it – to be called ‘lying’?     

      Suppose you are stationary in your car, and I collide into the back of you.  That is your truth. (And also, what actually happened).  My truth might be that you stopped suddenly.   I have a vested interest in saying that; otherwise, it would be my fault.  And an insurance claim won’t be satisfied with different individual truths, not even in an era of Postmodernism. It will suspect that there are simply two variant accounts of the same event: and they can’t both be true since they conflict with one another.  And money is involved in deciding which verdict is the correct one.   When Postmodernism hits reality, it crumples like the rear of a car.

 

During the Profumo sex scandal, call-girl Mandy Rice-Davies was summonsed as a witness.  Told by the Judge that Lord Astor denied a sexual relationship with her, she gave the reply that has passed into legend: “Well, he would wouldn’t he?” 

     Quite so.  How would a Postmodernist deal with that?