Love your enemy
Ian Flintoff explains how listening must triumph over ‘trouncing’
I’ve occasionally had the fantasy that if early Friends had lived for several centuries they would have watched how their earliest hopes had, or had not, been fulfilled. Committed to peace and nonviolence, for instance, they could only be confused by the way scientific progress is hijacked for the most efficient and cruellest forms of destruction. Nuclear energy is discovered and nuclear bombs are made. Infectious parasites are isolated by biologists and used for germ warfare. Communication systems are extended and refined and used for propaganda and psychological violence. Women’s rights are sought: the sex-trade and pornography ensue.
So what goes wrong? It may be that those who seek to lead us feel it necessary to encourage the hatred of others so that their own positions are stronger. This is so banal as to seem trivial: divide-and-rule is as old as tyranny itself; scapegoating is the device of the charlatan.
Time teaches us that these hatreds are phoney; in their time the French have been our most evil foes, as have the Germans and the Spaniards. Jews, black people, Christians and women have all been the targets for hatred, insult, contempt and ill-treatment. It is eventually, and painfully, discovered that these attitudes were not only wrong but vicious and inhuman.
I was prompted to this line of thinking by the recent reactions to the proposal that all couples, of whatever sexual orientation, should be able to be united together in the ceremony of their faith and religion. Let me say from the outset that this proposal is something that I can only endorse with a full heart. In my work as a professional actor – a profession often decades if not centuries ahead of others in its gentler perceptions – I have known well, and loved, many homosexual colleagues. Though heterosexual myself there are men whom I have loved all my life, so that this concept of love does not seem strange or bizarre to me. That love between two people of the same sex, also physically drawn together, should be denied the blessing and recognition of their god (however they both understand that) seems to me to be unfair.
This is where what I have called ‘the trouncing’ comes in. On the one hand, those in the media who favour same-sex marriage like to ‘trounce’ the doubtful as bigots, dinosaurs, bullies, fascists or (weirdly) as being time-warped in the year 1952 (why that date is used I do not know, but it occurs time and again!) They have nothing good to say about others’ beliefs on the matter, however deeply held.
Equally, those who mistrust ‘political correctness’ – that is, purporting to be progressive but merely running with the parrot-pack of contemporary causes – find it impossible to look deeply into their individual heart (or hearts) and see that the fervour and sincerity of their own beliefs and loyalties can be equally found in the hearts of two men or two women who love each other, and wish to do so for a lifetime. The ‘trouncing’ from this side often includes words, phrases and insults that would be inappropriate in this journal.
Trouncing in this abusive way short-cuts thought. It makes caricature easy – the word Quaker itself derives from this propensity. Worse, it reinforces group-hysteria and, at its mildest, leads to social ostracisation or spitting in the street and, at its worst, to torture, gas-chambers or even crucifixion.
Let me finally try to illustrate how trouncing might be avoided. Among those who are doubtful about same-sex marriage will be some who, for reasons of faith, believe that the Bible is an indicator of the will of God, sometimes distorted through the practices of their time – for example, few would believe that stoning for adultery is God’s will today, any more than did the rebuke against ‘casting the first stone’ – but otherwise the Bible is their guidance of how humanity should seek to be.
In the sincerity of these people may also lie the affirmation that marriage was originally conceived as a partnership between man and woman, not least for the security, health and propagation of children. In some cases marriage may also have been a protection for women, giving them social and legal status (and clout) against common abuse and abduction. To denigrate these earlier perceptions as archaic stupidity is to fall into the same trap of trouncing – mouthing our know-all certainties at the cost of others’ pain.
One of the most formidable things I have learned from my long involvement with Friends has been the increased desire and capacity to listen. If we include ‘listening’ to mean reading the silent voice that speaks to us in the words of the living or the dead then almost everything we know comes to us by listening to others. I often feel that I know little or nothing on my own account, but only from the insights and wisdom of those to whom I have listened. Once this is thoroughly and deeply understood it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘trounce’, aloud or inwardly, those who have something of their own to tell us.
If there is to be one great blessing from the much-hailed culture of new technology and communication it surely has to be, not our chance to tweet and preen our own opinions, but to listen, to heed, to learn and to understand. There is no single person anywhere from whom we can’t learn something. And by learning we are both wiser and more sound. That, I believe, is the thing our bygone Friends would rapturously applaud.
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