Christians are being persecuted. But, in our late Christian culture, this is taking an unusual form. There were persecutions under Nero, which led to the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul; and there were persecutions under Diocletian so severe that many of the bishops who attended the Nicene Council at Constantine’s request — held in the Anatolian city of Nicaea (it was originally going to be held in Ankara, where I write this) — were maimed and disfigured from the tortures which they had suffered only 20 years before. Modern persecution takes a different form: incomprehension, ridicule and dismissal. The Overton Window is incompatible with the Stained Glass Window.
Two weeks ago Eric Weinstein offered us just the latest of the memorable ‘two out of three’ formulations. Norman Stone wrote in his book Turkey that we can only have two out of the three of Islam, politics and economics; and Dani Rodrik wrote in his book The Globalisation Paradox that we can only have two out of the three of democracy, a globalised economy and the nation state. Eric Weinstein has thought of another two out of three. He says it is impossible for any intellectual to have all three of the following: a large audience, an independent mind and a sterling reputation. By ‘independent mind’ Weinstein means a willingness to tell the truth.
The argument is that it is impossible to have a large audience and a good reputation and tell the truth. If one tells the truth one can have a large audience, but one forfeits one’s reputation; or one can tell the truth and have a good reputation but must rest content with a small audience — one’s dining table, for instance. Most of the famous faces of our time bend their voices to the wind.
Weinstein is continually coming up with good ideas, so I hesitate to call this Weinstein’s First Law, so let’s call it Weinstein’s Law of Public Pontification. He has identified a modern problem. It was also an ancient and a medieval problem, and perhaps it has always been true, but most of us would ruefully have to admit that we have supposed that for a century or two it has seemed to be an invalid law. Charles Darwin had a large audience, good reputation and told the truth as he saw it. So did Cardinal Manning. So did John Stuart Mill. But they lived in the 19th century. The 20th century was, by and large, a century in which we could innocently believe that, in the West at least, our civilisation was committed to the truth. In retrospect, however, we have discovered that we were gently guided to this view by institutions like the BBC. The 21st century has witnessed not only the rise of less controlled forums — courtesy of the internet — which have enabled us to become conscious of this, but also the rise of a more explicit censorship than has been seen in a liberal country since the 17th century.
Marina Hyde has just written a bold piece for the Guardian in which she mocks Russell Brand for his recent baptism in the Thames. It is easy to mock, though one looks on with admiration to see the skill with which she does it. She contrasts Brand the Christian and Brand the “creep” who “denies criminal allegations”. She throws in a few vulgar jokes: “Thames Water is no longer responsible for the biggest piece of shit in the river.” She seems to know about Christianity; at least, she explains what ‘theodicy’ is — impressive: it’s a Leibniz word. But then she wonders about whether Bear Grylls as scout master is happy continuing to befriend someone accused of rape. She accuses Grylls of “twee twattery” and “whining”, and Brand of being a “wingnut” who goes on about “the deep state/Bill Gates/the plandemic”. It is all very invigorating.
I wonder what Marina Hyde thinks when she looks in the mirror, or when she looks at her painting in the attic. For she has a large audience — she writes for the Guardian — and she has good reputation — she writes for the Guardian — so I wonder if she ever wonders about the truth. (I see from Wikipedia that she originally began by using her double-barrelled name in journalism until she was advised that it would not wash with Sun readers, so she renamed herself ‘Hyde’. Was this a joke, or a happy coincidence? Wikipedia does not say.) Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde: perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde saw the writing on the wall. (That’s a biblical reference. Brand, if he wants to reply to Hyde, should send a small card to her with Mene mene tekel upharsin written on it.)
The problem is that the mirror is not working, or Jekyll is still in the attic, antiquated with truth. For Marina Hyde, though good at scorn, seems not to care about truth. She is, in fact, though she seems not to know it, or be willing to admit it, the enemy of the enemies of the deep state. She is, in fact, a cog in the mechanism of the deep state. What is the deep state? Well, one answer is that it is fronted by all the people who have a large audience, a good reputation and no concern with truth.
Christianity is concerned with truth. And this seems to have been its undoing. You may disagree with Christianity; you may dispute that it has the truth. But it is emphatic in using the language of truth, and of being extremely vigilant about not only lies, but also hypocrisy. (In fact, it is possible to say that Christianity, in insisting not only on our observing the law, but also changing our inward condition, invented hypocrisy, since it condemned as hypocritical the religion of those who simply observe the law outwardly.) So that won’t wash, will it? If Brand is Christian in the sense that he is willing to use the language of truth, then he is clearly no longer a member of the modern atheistic deep state. This is one reason — there may be others, of course — why he is now persona non grata.
Eric Weinstein is grappling with the difficulty of how to hold onto a concern with truth in contemporary conditions. It is a good question. Do we really think it is possible to ‘push back’, as we now say, against the forces of the deep state that care not a jot for truth: not for religious truth, not for historical truth, not for scientific truth? Or do we have to form sects of a few members, and defend the truth in private, in small communities? Is the Daily Sceptic one small gateway to a minor community of Jekylls concerned with truth? Or can it help overturn the Overton Window? Can it help clear out the Augean stables of our deep state by sweeping away all the Hydes? (That is my version of a vulgar joke. Tit for tat.)
Is it possible that politics was always Hydian, and that in the last century we were suffering from an extremely well-constructed secular illusion whereby we thought we lived in an Open Society? The only consoling thought is that if this is true — that it was an illusion — then at least we have come to our senses and begun to notice it.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
”Christians are being persecuted.” Time for a Captain Obvious cameo here but that surely begs the question of why we are allowing fake refugees into our countries who are from the very countries where those Christians are being persecuted? And it’s patently obvious to me that the people we’re getting are not the very Christians who should by rights be fleeing these majority Muslim countries because their lives are in imminent danger because one very big clue is that they’re not coming as families and arriving with women and kids in tow. It’s only the younger men. Bit of a giveaway that. What miserable lives these poor people must have but all we seem to get in abundance are the bloody Muslims who demonstrably hate us!
”People of Christian heritage are the most persecuted religion in the world. 9 out of 10 most violent places to for Christians to live are in Muslim countries & Pakistan is the most violent to Christians. WHY do we allow an ideology that persecutes & hates us into the country ?”
https://twitter.com/superphil123/status/1791072041283588176
https://twitter.com/FarazPervaiz3/status/1790919682662494592
And lest we forget the terrible atrocities committed by ISIS, as covered here by Raymond Ibrahim, himself a Coptic Christian of Egyptian heritage;
”A filmmaker recently announced that he is making a movie dedicated to the trials and travails of the 21 Coptic Christians who were ritually decapitated by ISIS terrorists in Libya in 2015.
The iconic and infamous moment the 21 men in orange jumpsuits were killed was captured by video and disseminated around the world. Kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs, the Christian martyrs appeared to be silently praying before their executors knocked them down on their faces, knelt on their backs, and began to decapitate them, as their blood mingled with the waters of the Mediterranean. Their deaths were neither clean nor quick.
I recently interviewed Egyptian filmmaker Raouf Zaki, who detailed his extensive research to gather information for his screenplay (including interviewing Libyan officials, investigators, and imprisoned or former ISIS members, as well as visiting the martyrs’ families in Egypt).”
https://stream.org/the-21-christian-martyrs-of-egypt-a-feature-film/
Ah. The old no smoke without fire slur.
I’ve never liked Mr Brand’s screen persona and seldom found him funny or particularly clever when he’s been on the idiot box in the corner. But it seems an accusation is good enough for Ms Hyde to find him guilty. Just as well he isn’t a Post Office subpostmaster or he’d be locked up by now… Oh, wait…
Ms Hyde might do well to read these Guardian articles:
Operation Midland: Complainant ‘Nick’ investigated for attempting to pervert course of justice – as it happened
Cliff Richard interviewed by police over sex crime allegation
Cliff Richard wins £210,000 in damages over BBC privacy case
And now Kevin Spacey. Dan Wotton had a long interview with him on his new YT channel.
I used to feel the same about Brand, have warmed to him recently though still don’t know much about him. One reason IMO why people like this Marina Hyde person are so keen to have a go at him is that Brand seems not to give a f*** about what other people think, at least not about bien-pensant types like Hyde. If it’s one thing that gets their goat, it is someone who is popular and doesn’t back down – Trump, Carlson, Rogan, Peterson. They are hated and feared.
Otherwise known as having the courage of one’s convictions, the Hydes of this world seem not to have either of those things.
Indeed. As Worf put it “The Borg have neither honour nor courage; that is our greatest advantage”.
Great question and one I find myself facing up to often.
It seems to himge on many battles ongoing at once.
Will Trump be thrown in jail or cheates out of a second term?
Will the WHO cheqt its way into approving a new treaty?
Will our governments bludgeon us with its Net Zero targets and confine the combustion engine to the scrapheap of history?
Will cash be torn away from our hands and all of us penned into a digital currency prison.
Will Elon Musk be taken out and X succumb to total censorship?
Lots of battles.
I’d vote for the statement in the last paragraph: We believed to be free because we ‘voluntarily’ refrained from kicking against the pricks. While I had started to have my doubts about a lot of things earlier, the so-called pandemic made the situation blindingly obvious when all our so-called rights were thrown in the bin overnight after the people in power had convinced themselves that they’d get away with it.
“If Brand is Christian in the sense that he is willing to use the language of truth, then he is clearly no longer a member of the modern atheistic deep state.”
Brand has never been “a member of the modern atheistic deep state”. He has always very strongly and explicitly believed in God, and has had friendly public arguments with Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais on the subject years ago, and, for example, wrote this article in 2011 in The New Statesman:
https://russell-brand.livejournal.com/254016.html
‘Why Richard Dawkins is the best argument for the existence of God’
in which he open-mindedly concludes:
“Could a witless miasma of molecules and dust ever have created anything as ingenious and incredible as Richard Dawkins? I don’t think so, but I’m prepared to listen and tolerate any theories and arguments, a concerto of contemplation, a requiem of speculation, to divert us till we know the truth.“
So it should not be so difficult for Marina Hyde to believe that he has now become a Christian, but nevertheless she questions his motives, as if he had no interest in Christianity up until now and then suddenly converted for PR reasons.
And she criticises Bear Grills for befriending him, as if it’s morally wrong for a Christian to befriend a sinner! Marina Hyde is displaying ignorance of Christianity. She probably belongs to the cult of ‘kindness’ and no forgiveness.
Marina Hyde has only a fair sized audience from my point of view, she does not have a good reputation in my eyes and I am absolutely certain that there are truths she would not recognise as such if they jumped up and bit her.
But then she writes for the Graun, and that organ in my view is best burned and buried.
“Christianity is concerned with truth.”
Huh?
A Church of Ireland Bishop once prayed: ‘Lord, guide me always to seek the truth, and protect me from people who think they’ve found it.”
Brand is a Legend!
I think it IS true. I think we HAVE begun to notice.
I wonder if Hyde would have been so offensively voluble in her hit piece if Brand had decided to be baptised (or whatever the process is) into one of the other Abrahamic religions – like Islam or Judaism? No, thought not.
Oh she wouldn’t have liked it if he’d decided to become Jewish.
Possibly even more so as his trangression would have been more offensive to her — imagine a guy who’s been accused of having sex with them by no less than four women(!) converting to the religion of peace. Doesn’t that make a mockery of climate change?
Marina Hyde, born Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams. Wonder why she assumed a pseudonym to write for the Graun?
I think she has what Charles Moore calls “A left wing face”.