h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 4
Thinking back to my daily dose of “Father Brown” yesterday, the first episode of the repeat of series one, I am minded of the fact that there is a common theme linking Father Brown with “Call the Midwife” and “Bletchly Circle”- and that is the ‘refugee’ world that I found myself living in as a toddler, that first “Age of Austerity”. And it is probably no accident that we have found a new interest in these times, with “Call the Midwife” now billed as Britain’s favourite drama series.
Surely a part of the appeal of the programme is in the sense of a real common struggle associated with that determination to ‘Win the peace the way that we won the war’, with the Midwives acting as urban missionaries coming into lives of deprivation and hardship in order to give the children of the post-war generation ‘a better start in life’. But perhaps no scenario can bring out more clearly the fact that the war had been fought, not to defeat and destroy Nazi Germany, but in order to preserve ‘Christian Civilization’, the essence of which is not really belief in God but belief in people.
To some extent that distinction goes right to the heart of the “Father Brown” stories of G.K.Chesterton. Back in the time of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland”, which dealt with Britain in the economic and social crisis of 1921, Chesterton chose the topic of William Cobbett, when asked to give a memorial lecture, and followed this up with a brief biography of Cobbett, which included very appropriate comments about the whole culture of corporatism, corruption and immorality that was associated especially with the vast fortunes being made in America through the giant oil conglomerates, and this was years before the ‘Teapot Dome’ scandals of the late 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the World Chaos of 1932-33. But ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt and the Muck-raking journalists had already led the counter-attack, Roosevelt observing that ‘Money makes a very good servant, but a very bad master’, something that seems very relevant too in our current problems that have been created by our corrupted and unhealthy relationship with the Financial System.
Chesterton felt back in 1922 that in these most recent war and post-war times what was particularly missing was the voice of ‘the Little Man’, which had been the provided in the new revolutionary age of the printed mass media by Cobbett through his “Political Register”. One of Cobbett’s first references to the ‘Little Man’, however, was in a piece that he wrote c1809 when it was proposed to change the system of representation in the Parish Vestry Meetings , which had been central to the operation of English democracy at the grass roots level, the level that sustained the idea defined in the Tudor period as the ideal of ‘Commonweal’- that is that nothing should be done that was not beneficial to the whole community. As the system of English Parish Poor Relief set up in Tudor times had been changed from community support to an essentially mechanical system that was possible in the developing market economy in which money was becoming more important than direct human interaction, it was proposed that the voting in parish affairs should be changed with more votes being given to those with more wealth and property. Cobbett objected vehemently arguing that the ‘Big Man’ within the parish had all the advantages of his education and his wealth, and that in any healthy community everyone else would see these as advantageous and an asset to the Commonweal, and would, more often than not, listen very carefully to whatever the ‘Big Man’ had to say. But on occasions the ‘Big Man’ might well think more of his self-interest than that of the Commonweal, and on such occasions it was important that ‘the Little Man’ had equal status at least when voting on local issues. That proposal was rejected, but almost ten years later, in the difficult post-war years the change was made, with a move towards the enfranchisement of wealth and property which became the standard approach for elections to the Westminster Parliament that represented Great Britain and Ireland in 1832. Henceforward English politics was to be based not upon the efforts of the whole English Commonweal but upon wealth and property, as the work of the Scot Adam Smith, who had advocated a collective pursuit of “The Wealth of Nations” in his book of that title that became the ‘Bible’ of the Age of Heroic Materialism.
After his biography of Cobbett, Chesterton continued his theme of trying to revive the spirit of that great Englishman by joining with friends to set up PEN, an international organization to promote the work of such ‘Little Man’ writers. Poets, essayists and novelists. And PEN really struck it lucky, when Arthur Miller was persuaded in the Sixties to become its Secretary and to turn it into a force for the promotion of international understanding and a vehicle for promoting the voice of ‘the Little Man’ from all over the world, a Sixties and Seventies world of Cold War, and often of repressive regimes supporting both ‘East’ and ‘West’.
At the same time Chesterton was an important part of the Roman Catholic revival in England. In fact William Cobbett was at least open to that because he read a Roman Catholic historian’s account of the Reformation in England and was disgusted to see that the whole thing was no more than the result of the lusts of Henry VIII, both for Ann Boleyn and the wealth of the Church in England, which he saw, along with the tithes that were still being collected, as in effect the Friendly Society Funds built up by the parishioners for their own security, and not the private wealth of the Church or its clergymen. By this time ‘livings’ in the Anglican Church had become acceptable places to ‘park’ the younger sons of the gentry, who would never inherit the family wealth, or be financed into a military career which might well be the ‘making’ of them.
Roman Catholicism, however, was something of a ‘Broad Church’ in England with a powerful “Anglo-Catholic’ tradition, which had led John Newman to progress from his position at St. Mary’s, the university Church at Oxford to being the first English Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. But perhaps a more important influence on people like G.K.Chesterton was the great Cambridge Historian Lord Acton, who had finally deserted his ‘master’, the great German historian von Ranke, when von Ranke became too aged and infirm, but also when the new German Empire became authoritarian, aggressive and obsessed with world dominion, while at the same time the Roman Catholic Church adopted the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. This was something that Acton could never accept, insisting on remaining a ‘Liberal Catholic’ in that Anglo-Catholic tradition that argued that it was the Church of England that had remained true to the Catholic (and universal) principles of Christianity and the principles of Love and Understanding.
It is this kind of ‘Christianity for the little man’ who is at least as close to God as the ‘Big Man’ that Chesterton celebrated in his Father Brown stories, setting them in the Cotswolds of my own roots