I remember my Dad reciting Shakespeare. Words from Wolsey when he was held in the Tower. "Are Cromwell. If I had served my God with half the zeal I served my King, he would not in my age have left me naked, before my enemy" The echo of my Dads solemn words as he put the full pathos of the Shakespearian message into the delivery, comes back to me over the years, since, I was a boy with little interest in Tudor England and now, a man, I'm catching up on time, trying, as always to gain a wider perspective !
Thomas Cromwell, the character thread that runs through the book, ruminates about England and about allegiances, about the boundaries about trust and the concept of being a guardian.
In this case, it was the right of the King of England, a sovereign nation, not to be told what to do by the Catholic Pope regarding marriage which of course led to the creation of the Church of England.
The issues were tide up with Henry's obsession with Anne but there was a deeper root, that of a national will, which trumps all other.
A nation is like a stone in a fast running stream, it is buffeted about on the streams bed until, "overtime", it is worn smooth and could be said to represent the characteristics of the stream and the environment over which the stream runs. The forces that come to shape a people, are many and profound, they are organic, as is the temperament of the individual living in that environment.
We have witnessed and taken part in "an experiment" to create an artificial environment in which it was thought that the force of the stream would wear away the rough irregularities that were now to be introduced into the stream and that a homogeneous outcome was possible.
In many ways this has proved to be true. People encouraged to join our society have moulded into the fabric and respect many of the norms that were here before they arrived.
They of course brought their own norms which, shall we call them, "the locals" absorbed, food is a particular example. But of course they also brought much more.
Culture is difficult to define but runs deep in mankind. Its a sense of identification, like a story passed down from an elder, told around a camp fire about ones past, about ones forefathers, about ones heritage about the tribe !! A sense of belonging, a sense of a common identity. Mixed in amongst these norms lie the traditions and the accepted way of this or that,of the permissible and the none permissible.
The "Rule of Law" hovers above all of this, as a nation seeks to channel the tribal energy into self-beneficial avenues but the law its-self has its own characteristics depending on the environment (remember the stream). Some environments from which people coming to our shores have grown up, are naturally hostile to the Law. Their experience has seen The Law as a repressive force, used in the hands of an oppressive elite to suppress opposition.
Others take their law from Religion and find it difficult, if not impossible to ignore the calling of a body of faith which is so entwined in their daily activities that the cultural norms of the host country are rendered irrelevant other than in a formal sense. A parking ticket still has to be paid !!
This is a problem and was highlighted, just the other day. Students going to University usually obtain a loan from the "tax payer" to pay for the tuition fees, they repay the loan over a number of years but only if,when they eventually find work, their earnings are above a certain amount. The loan, as do all loans attract interest, a very low and generous interest but interest never the less. There is a growing, noisy rejection to having "interest" attached to these loans, by the Muslim community. It is a tenant of Muslim teaching that "interest" is an anathema to their teaching and avoided in his conduct in business.
This is but one of the thousands of "unforeseen consequences" of artificially, often ideologically, interrupting the natural sequence of cause and effect.
(I must say, we might learn something from this, as we persecute the poor with the horrendous interest charged "within our law" by companies offering short term loans to people who can't obtain a loan any other way, but that's another story).
No comments:
Post a Comment