Putting things right

As another hunting season draws to a close (one much disrupted by the weather), it is worth considering the position of one of our great cultural traditions.  Despite the Conservative Party’s pledge to hold a free vote on the ban, despite Tony Blair, the man who as Prime Minister who used the Parliament Act to force the ban through the House of Lords unconstitutionally, admitting he was wrong and despite a clear impact on farms such as sheep farms on the Fells hanging on by their fingertips, hunting for political reasons alone remains banned.

Just as it was once useful for Mr Blair to allow frequent free votes on hunting to keep his more prejudiced backbenchers happy, so for the current Government hunting can be a useful political football.  It is all very well to launch a review into the impact on farming of restricting the despatch of foxes to one couple of hounds, but repeal of this aspect of the ban could be achieved by statutory instrument, with no need for a Parliamentary vote.

It feels more as though the review is to send a message of sympathy to hunting people without actually acting.  Yet even Tony Blair now admits the hunting ban was a mistake.  There are few who would argue the ban was about animal welfare.  It was as Tony Banks said “totemic” – it was a deliberate attack on a certain way of life and an imaginary, stereotypical foxhunter, who bares little resemblance to the majority of keen hunt supporters - The people that in Tony Banks’ bitter mind represented the class enemy.  Because this was about a visceral hatred and class resentment, no argument would ever have won around a man like Tony Banks.

So what is to be done?  Hunting has shown its determination to survive within the law, despite that law being unjust and unclear.  It faces the threat of animal-rights extremism, increasing urbanisation taking away country, an ambiguous and draconian law and this season, as so many others have also suffered, the impact of the flooding.

Hunting has rightly been defended on animal welfare grounds.  Most people of sound mind understand that hunting an animal is more natural and humane than trapping, poisoning or shooting.  Most realise that fox numbers have to be controlled.  The real misunderstanding seems to be that urban people assume that people enjoy hunting because they enjoy killing.  This is a complete misunderstanding and comes from ignorance, so perhaps it is time to talk about what is so enjoyable about hunting.

If hunting is only justified on the very valid argument of pest control the debate is narrowed to a question of whether foxhunting is cruel or not.  While that argument can be clearly won, the urban mind still does not comprehend what is enjoyable.  So they then ask: Why don’t you just treat it like pest control?

The answer to that is surely that hunting has grown organically throughout the centuries as part of rural English culture.  It is therefore multi-faceted.  Nobody sat down one day and planned hunting as the means to control foxes.  Rather, it has arisen naturally through tradition.  So the enjoyable things about hunting (which previously did a vital job in wildlife management) are the community, the tradition and pageantry, the thrill of riding across country and jumping fences and most importantly of all working with animals – horses and hounds.  Anyone who truly loves animals cannot fail but be absorbed by hounds working.

We know hunting did a vital job before the ban, but just because it did that vital job, does not mean that it should not be enjoyable or rich in community and traditions.  So rather than the hunting rules and rituals being unnecessary, they are precisely what make hunting so rewarding.  This is perhaps why hunting is surviving all that the Government throws at it. 

However, the question must be asked:  What about the fox?  For as long as there are so many restrictions on how a fox can be legally hunted, other less humane methods have to be resorted to by others (trapping or shooting).  The landowner will need to be rid of the fox, whatever the intentions of Labour MPs when they voted for the ban.  So really anyone who cares about animal welfare should be pressing for the ancestral duty of hunting to be restored to it.  Hunts across the land are fighting hard to sustain a way of life handed down to us, but for as long as hunts can only go through the motions, the fox must be controlled in more brutal ways by others.

Our ancestors handed us a method of fox control that respected the law of nature – often the sick and the diseased despatched naturally through hunting, rather than more indiscriminate means of culling.  The fox was given a clean chance of either complete escape or instant demise, with minimal suffering.  Hunting has survived under the ban because it is multi-faceted and is sustained by the commitment of hunt staff and masters and the rich tradition and the closeness to animals and nature it offers supporters.  Nature would be better served however if hunting were given back its historic role of humanely controlling the fox.  

Bring back the age of chivalry!

When a gentleman acts courteously towards ladies, he may often receive the welcome comment that “The age of chivalry is not dead after all!”  Of course the age of chivalry was about much more than behaving as a gentleman towards ladies, but it was certainly an integral part of it.  Etymologically the word comes from the French for horse and was the code of honourable and Christian behaviour for the Knights of Western Europe. 

Back to Troy

G K Chesterton saw the roots of chivalry as going back to pagan times and being embodied by the character of Hector, whose epithet in Homer’s Iliad is “the tamer of horses”.  Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man:

“Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of the Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat.  The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.”

Hector does seem in many ways to prefigure the Christian Knight – he is a type, albeit from a pagan world.  Hector of course was loyal and loving to his wife, but is primarily remembered for giving his life for his brother’s sins inasmuch as he died for his City to protect it from Greek vengeance against Paris.  Chesterton went on:

“And as with the city [Troy] so with the hero [Hector]; traced in the archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight.  There is the prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse.  It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends.  It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry.”

The Origins of the Knight

Mediaeval knights emerged from the chaos of the end of the Carolingian Empire, when Christians fought Christians.  The Church and the Knights themselves felt that there was something profoundly anti-Christian about brethren of the faith killing one another.  The chivalric code therefore grew up to control these mounted warriors and initially dealt with how they should deal with their defeated opponents.  Ransoming your defeated opponent replaced the pagan approach of killing prisoners.  So the Church attempted to restrain Christians in war.  Later with the crusades in response to calls for help from the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, Pope Urban II tried to employ Saint Augustine’s much earlier concept of the Just War, which became part of chivalry in the fight to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim invaders.  Further crusades such as those to drive the Muslims from Catholic Spain led to the just war becoming a positive duty for the Knight.

Courtly Love and Hunting with Hounds

Later the code of courtly love became part of chivalry.  The knight began to serve the lady and the Christian idea of defending and venerating the weaker sex, particularly linked to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, became integral to chivalry.  This is where our idea of behaving as a gentleman towards ladies can be traced.  It is a uniquely Christian cultural approach, where the woman is honoured rather than oppressed.  The lady goes first through the door, not walking behind her man.

One aspect of modern culture where chivalry survives is in hunting with its codes of behaviour.  Hunting was another integral part of being a knight.  The poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a key example of this, where the moral of marital fidelity is combined with long pieces on hunting with hounds.

The Modern Attacks on the Chivalric Code

Today in the modern world there are many forces arrayed against chivalry.  Feminism attacks the gentleness of the gentleman towards the lady as a form of oppression.  Islamist extremists burn poppies when the modern day soldier returns from defending Afghans from the oppression of the Taliban (our armed forces are surely the strongest example of the chivalric code today).  And the anti-hunting movement seems to be motivated not by concern for animal welfare (hunting clearly being the most humane way to control the fox) but through an atavistic loathing of the symbol of the mounted hunter, which can be traced back to the Knights of Christendom.

Of course, even when chivalry was the dominant code there was hypocrisy and a failure to live up to the ideal.  Abuses took place and prisoners were slaughtered.  Because of this, the opponents of all that chivalry represents attack the concept itself, rather than concede flawed humanity will always fail to live up to the ideal.  Does this really mean the knights should have abandoned their code not to kill prisoners because sometimes it was violated?  It is beyond the blogger why the fact individuals fail to live up to a good code should mean the code is wrong.  This seems to be flawed logic.  Let us keep the ideals of chivalry and the gentleman, because those ideals can only be a force for good, raising us up from our flawed nature, however infrequently and fleetingly.

The Moral of Camelot

One is reminded of the story of Camelot.  Of course Camelot failed in the end and part of that failing was Sir Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s adultery.  And yet Malory is clear that the true fault lies with Mordred who exposes Lancelot and thereby brings the whole kingdom down.  Yes Lancelot failed as a human, yet he was still the “noblest knight”.  The real sin was Mordred’s, as revealed at the end of the tale.

Is this not a metaphor for all those who would pull down our inherited moral codes because they detect individual failure.  The exposure of hypocrisy is enough justification to pull down the whole edifice we have inherited from our ancestors.

Living in Ugly Modernity

Returning to Hector, for those of us who believe in that moral code of the knight that evolved into the idea of the gentleman, are we not living in a strange world today?  All that is good and symbolic of that code is disparaged and attacked.  So that like Hector’s widow, Andromache, we find ourselves in a foreign and strange country.  To quote Charles Baudelaire as he bemoaned the loss of traditional Paris:

“Andromache I think of you – this meagre stream,

This melancholy mirror where had once shone forth

The giant majesty of all you widowhood,

This fraudulent Simois, fed by bitter tears,

Has quickened suddenly my fertile memory

As I walked through the modern Carrousel.

The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes

More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart).” 

The Forces of Conservatism versus Relativism

Conservative is a misnomer for extremists

There is nothing more annoying than when commentators refer to radicals and militants as “conservative”.  By definition radicals are not conservative.  They throw away the lessons built up over centuries and go back to the root.  So the Islamic radical rejects the wisdom of ages in Muslim thinking, that has taken on board Aristotle, living amongst Christians and Jews and accommodated real human-nature.  In the same way the political radical, whether Bolshevist or Jacobin, rejects the institutions that have evolved over the centuries, in the hope of reverting to some ideal original state of nature.

Islamic extremism has been in the public eye recently with the trial of the two murderers of Drummer Rigby, in a brutal and barbarous attack.  It is the argument of this blog that what leads to extremist evil is a subjective approach to life that rejects the shared lessons of history.  In effect the radical attempts to shake off shared values accumulated over time and assert their own opinion in the place of common values.

Thus the young Islamist extremist living in Britain attempts to define himself against the more moderate and conservative Islam of his parents.  For the extremist the wisdom of the ancestors, the building up of knowledge and tradition, should be rejected in favour of the original, pure “truth”, which happens to be his own subjective view of the truth.  In Mali the Islamist extremists set about destroying traditional Islamic art and historical artefacts. 

Just because it's your opinion doesn’t mean you are right

The real danger to Western society is not dogmatism, but the rejection of shared dogma in favour of “my opinion”.  People talk about their opinions as though because they own them they somehow possess a special validity.  Actually it is only that person’s opinion and it cannot contain the experience of generations that exists in our traditions and inherited values.  It is inevitably a partial and limited view.

It also commands no intrinsic legitimacy.  For example, one of the late Drummer Rigby’s murderers claimed to be a soldier and justified his atrocious crime in this way. He did not really belong to an existing army it was just his own opinion that he was a soldier.  There is no existing army that I know of, with commissions, paid salaries and a duty to serve a head of state that gave him such an order.  I have not heard of such a State that would give this order, outside of the conventions of war, in violation of the Geneva Convention.  There was no call from the established institutions of the Islamic faith for a crusade; only some madman in a cave in Afghanistan had unilaterally created his own violent creed.  This so-called army has been set up without legitimacy and without authority.  The murderer’s view that he belonged to an army was nothing more than his subjective viewpoint – it was only his opinion, with no authority.  He is in fact a subject of Her Majesty protected by Her Majesty’s forces that he attacked and will now be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.  Whatever he thinks, that is what the case is in the real world.

Contrast this pretend “Islamist” soldier with Drummer Lee Rigby.  He belonged to a real army that serves an actual head of state and works to defend a physical nation state, with real boundaries and a rule of law and a Parliament.  This State is a signatory to international conventions on what its army will do and not do in war.  When individuals violate these rules, they are prosecuted by the State they serve.  Drummer Rigby’s real army is a vivid contrast to the imaginary army serving an imaginary nation that his murderer claimed to belong to.

The other extremists are just as subjective

This subjectivity and idolatry of one’s own opinion manifests itself in many other ways.  We see it in the animal-rights extremists, who have set up their own warped, subjective moral code and demand that others adhere to it – a code that justifies abuse of their fellow human beings in the name of their own idea of what rights animals possess.  We see it when traitors such as Edward Snowdon, who took the view that his own nation fell short in his own opinion and therefore acted in breach of the laws of his land to reveal secrets he was under a duty to keep.  A particularly dreadful example of this subjectivity and vainglorious philosophy is of course Julian Assange, who would rather see the West’s enemies benefit and her allies suffer than put aside his own ego.

Well, the common trap that ensnares all these people together is the sanctity to which they grant their own opinions, regardless of common values and shared traditions.  Whether in the name of religion, as with Drummer Rigby’s murderers or in pursuit of some skewed political ideology as with Juian Assange, these people share the same idolatry of their own opinions.

The danger of Liberalism leading to relativism

The danger is that the West, in attempting to remain true to its values of freedom and liberty is falling into the very same trap of accepting someone’s opinion is true simply because it is held – the danger of relativism and multiculturalism.  Tolerance is the sacred value of the West, which stems from its Christian heritage.  Tolerance means not persecuting that with which you disagree, it does not mean the values of society and our culture are neutral.  Replace tolerance with relativism and the moral authority is lost.

For example, how can you argue with the Islamic extremists without any grounding in faith yourself?  It is impossible to reject beliefs as false if you yourself do not believe in truth!  The greatest disrespect to all religions is to say that they are all equally valid, which means in effect they are all nonsense and invalid; rather the truly tolerant outlook is to remain true to our Christian values and to tolerate and speak to other faiths on that basis.  Not all beliefs are equally valid, many beliefs are wrong (as manifested on the Woolwich street)– but that cannot be said without we ourselves holding to a belief in something that is true.

Conservatism is the way to counter extremism

Conservatism is about accepting that our values are handed down to us and that we are shaped by that heritage.  We are not able to reinvent a whole set of universal values ourselves as we can only have a partial view.  Reject what is handed down to us and we lose the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.

Now that does not mean accepting longstanding injustices, but continually comparing what is with what should be according to those inherited values.  Thus William Wilberforce in light of his Christian faith opposed slavery and Emily Hobhouse fought against Lord Kitchener’s camps for the Boers.  On the other hand, the Islamist extremist, the animal-rights extremist, the followers of Assange have all lost touch with their inherited values and turned their own, partial opinions into idols.  Only conservatism, by recognising civilization is based on shared, tried and tested values, can resist this subjective relativism and act as a force for moderation and piecemeal reform.