A friend has drawn my attention to two articles in the Daily Telegraph (my, you know you are getting old when you start to say `Amen’ at the end of articles in the DT).

The first concerns Richard Dawkins, who has caused a storm by stopping any foul-mouthed whacko who wants from posting on his popular atheist website.  A very good move.  It is a great shame that the blog world has led so many to confuse freedom of speech with the right to say anything they want on somebody else’s webpage, a point made clear by the nature of much of the criticism of Dawkins’ move..  No print organ of which I am aware would adopt such a silly notion that it needs to devote space to everybody who demands it.  And, while Ref21 has attracted its critics for not allowing threads of comments, free speech is not endangered thereby: neither Richard Dawkins nor Derek Thomas work on behalf of the government, so even the most vicious bloggers can sleep easy at night.  Foul mouthed characters, conspiracy theorists, and compulsive gossips, yobbos, and libelers are quite free to set up their own websites without government interference, just as Dawkins is free not to allow them to use his section of cyberspace.

The second laments the loss of the British stiff upper lip, pointing to the national embarrassment that surrounded the death of the Princess of Wales as the start of the rot.  The article not only cites Brief Encounter and Zulu, two of the best films of all time, but also offers explanations for the sad decline of the British into mawkish emotionalism.   The collapse of empire and the influence of America’s therapeutic culture are seen as prime culprits.

There may well be a third element too: the death of the idea that public reality is greater than my private significance; and that the meaning of my life is only of partial, minor relevance to the greater whole.  Not any more: my grief, my loss, the events of my life, need to be made public because they are of such cosmic significance. And when someone else dies, I need to muscle in on the grief to show how `authentic’ I am.  Yet, ironically, when I claim to grieve or feel the pain of a complete stranger with whom I have no personal relationship, what I am really doing is cheapening the grief and pain of those who genuinely are bereaved and turning it into a soap opera.

These days, the self is surely at the centre; and when one looks at how many even conservative Christian books are preoccupied with `me problems’ — focusing on family, sex, marriage, depression, self-esteem etc etc — rather than issues of the greater theological reality — God, incarnation, resurrection, sin, salvation, the church etc — it seems there is nothing for the comfort even of the Christian world here.   We too have turned matters that really belong to our private lives into the centre of the church’s public ministry.  Let’s pray that we can return to an age when personal griefs,  joys, successes, and failures are once again private affairs, and the public space — secular and ecclesiastical — is left for issues of greater importance than our own little worlds.

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