First confession
At a time when they are under threat across Europe, Reg Naulty reflects on a defence of liberal values
Chris Patten, perhaps best known as the last British governor of Hong Kong, was also an MP for thirteen years and held ministerial posts under Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Later, he was a commissioner in the EU, chairman of the BBC Trust and chancellor of Oxford University. He still sits in the House of Lords. His book First Confession: A Sort of Memoir is a ringing exposition and defence of liberal social and political values against populism and terrorism.
As to politics, Chris Patten writes:
The real question is whether America forgets what has made it great: the values of freedom and the rule of law that shaped it and helped to shape so much of the history of the world.
He concludes, provocatively:
America is the only country that matters absolutely everywhere.
America has been a stout defender of democracy, which has the significant merit of making governments accountable to the electorate. It also supports the UN Declaration of Human Rights, less robustly abroad than at home, but enough to make it matter internationally. These rights include fair trial, free speech, and freedom from torture and enslavement. Chris Patten notes that denial of free speech leads to the same calamities everywhere: corruption, bad government and economic crimes.
The author had four years exposure to China, and was not impressed: Leninism plus capitalism. He maintains that China has not been able to deliver the promise of communism, a fairer and more equal society, and has had to resort, instead, to nationalism, which the early communists deplored. China’s biggest ‘existential’ problem, he contends:
…is the lack of a civil ethic which draws together economic interests, political aspirations and patriotism.
China is not the only country with a problem about social unity. Chris Patten writes:
What we must not try to do is sign up to a form of incoherent multiculturalism, which in effect behaves as though Britain [or any other country] could be a sort of federation of identity groups. They should all be enveloped in a common set of values.
Religion can help with these. It is true that religion has a patchy record as a vehicle for social unity, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Better education can help. Besides, there are bridges between religions that have not been used in the past.
The Islamic mystical tradition is not very different from the Christian one. There is a stream of Hindu mysticism that is much the same. ‘Nontheistic’ Hindu and Buddhist mysticism derives, in the main, from meditation rather than prayer, which is the origin of most Christian mysticism; whereas the latter commonly has an experience of God’s love – ‘[his] whole soul somehow becomes a movement of divine love’ [saint Bernard] – the former typically has an ecstatic experience of union with the physical environment, as though it were spiritualised, and also an experience of the self as a non-spatial light, as in Plotinus and saint Augustine. The two types of mysticism are not in competition.
It may seem odd to expect social unity from mysticism, which has been such a peripheral phenomenon, but it does not have to be. Mysticism says: ‘If you do x, y will follow,’ which makes more sense than most religion. Chris Patten doesn’t appeal to mysticism as a source of social unity, but his deepest instincts are religious, and that could provide it. The twentieth century was, in many respects, different from its predecessor, and the next century may be different from this.
First Confession: A Sort Of Memoir by Chris Patten is published by Penguin at £9.99.
