The Power and the Passion
A Lent talk for BBC Radio 4, 2014
Aged 20, I spent a week in the ancient ruined city of Petra where one night a grey-bearded man in a turban invited me to dinner in his tent. By day, he sold Coca-cola to blue-rinse American ladies visiting the rock-temples. At night, he resumed his position as chief of the local Nabatean tribes. Over our meal, he said something I’ve treasured. “We have a saying that the more power you possess, the more brain cells you need to be able to cope with it.” In other words, to execute any form of power, you must use every scrap of intelligence and imagination to stop it going to your head.
My father was a diplomat. As a public servant, he shook hands with figures one would automatically consider “powerful”. Aside from the Queen – whose power lies largely in the fact that she deprives others from competing for it – he met a number of rulers who had absolute authority over their people.
At a palace in the High Atlas with snow on the ground, dressed in an elaborate gold-braided uniform, plus sword, my father shook hands with the menacing King Hassan of Morocco who ran his kingdom like a medieval monarch. In Phnom Penh, he befriended King Sihanouk, who didn’t exude menace but giggled a lot and played the saxophone; Sihanouk was in control of Cambodia partly because he was a deity. In the Elysée Palace, my father was clamped by the huge hand of President de Gaulle, who saw himself as the incarnation of France. Also in Paris, he shook hands with the Duke of Windsor who, like Lear, had given up his throne and seemed miserable the whole time. Complimented on his house outside Paris, the former Edward VIII and Emperor of India murmured, “Nice place, wrong country.”
Then there were the dictators seduced by Nietzsche’s “will to power” who imposed their rule by force. Latin America in the 1970s was dominated by ruthless, ultimately banal military men who had tortured and murdered their way to the presidential palace. At the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, my father shook hands with General Perón months after Perón had returned on the heels of a massacre. “I wished him a happy New Year, and he responded by wishing me a Happy New Year.” Looking into Perón’s ravaged face, my father felt in the presence of evil, a sensation that he experienced in triplicate on the same New Year’s Day ceremony two years later when he shook hands with the coup leaders of Argentina’s “dirty war”.
It was in their Argentina that I came of age, a country where the state had become a parody of the phenomenon it most feared; and where the leaders behaved just like the terrorists that their actions, when in power, had created.
With its fulfilment, desire passes. Power is different. Its taste has a toxic effect, corroding the sensibility of even the most modest partaker, and leaving an appetite for more that proves irresistible. The Czech playwright Vaclav Havel noticed when he became President that “I find myself in a world of privileges, exceptions, perks, in the world of V.I.Ps who gradually lose track of how much a streetcar ticket or butter costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car and how to place a telephone call.” From there, it can be a short but fatally distancing step to the situation we have witnessed in the Ukraine. After government snipers fired on a crowd of protesters, a woman in Kiev lamented: “Right now, our politicians have forgotten they are human beings.”
Anyone dipping their feet into politics exposes themselves to a centrifugal force which demands further expansion to protect gains already won. Nations with a democratic tradition learn to impose checks and balances to limit the corrupting properties of office. In newer countries, these checks are the earliest inconveniences a new regime sweeps away.
History is next to be repudiated. Rulers come to power on promises to make fresh laws, repeal old ones. “Traitor” describes anyone who did not support the latest successful act of revolution. Renaming becomes mandatory. In Mexico during the 1930s, the anti-clerical government tried to efface three centuries of Christian past by changing the street names. In Buenos Aires following the Falklands War, Plaza Britannica became the clunkier Plaza de la Fuerza Armada. The bust of George Canning, donated 150 years earlier by the British Community, was hurled into the River Plate.
To deny all continuity with your predecessor is, in its way, to skate on frozen time. The constitution annulled, most successors dedicate themselves to staying in power. Force is used to plunder or repress what force will not defend. Foreign policy is dictated by the premise that democracies will not fight, while internal opposition is stamped out with the help of the state apparatus. In this way, corrupt leaders become seamless with the corrupt state, kept in power by the army and police who owe to them their position, jobs and livelihood. And so it goes on, until a new regime decides to exchange the existing corruption with its own – and another round of handshakes begins.
Yet in its most trustworthy form, a handshake, almost more than any other gesture, is an affirmation of our shared humanity. It’s also an acceptance of the responsibilities – and risks – which that miracle, if you like, implies. Every one of us when we reach out with an open palm exposes that part of ourself which the Romans drove a nail through when they hammered Christ to the cross.
One of Christ’s lessons, the Dominican theologian Timothy Radcliffe reminds us, is that we must not grab power – nor must we flee it. Rather, we must learn to use it in a mature, adult way. “Leadership is about ensuring that no one can grab control, because God’s unpredictable grace is in everyone.”
Even the most humble person owes their existence to an assertion of control – what Radcliffe calls “the voraciousness within us” – when they elbow aside 600 million other individual sperm to reach the egg. But power, for it not to become tyrannical, must be harnessed to its opposite, as Christ was reined to his donkey. It must know the liberating discipline of fasting – of powerlessness.
On 23rd March 1980, the day before he died, Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of San Salvador, preached on the woman taken in adultery. He said: “I have no ambition for power and for that reason, with complete freedom, I say to power what is good and what is bad and to whatever political group I say what is good and what is bad; it is my duty.” The source of true leadership, he suggested, lies in not letting bullies or frightened people or the media rule, but in giving command to one’s conscience. Romero concluded by summoning the soldiers to step into their freedom, to become fully moral agents, to refuse to be puppets of an unjust regime: “Brothers, you are of our same people, and kill your own peasant brothers and sisters, but over an order to kill given by a man ought to prevail the law of God which says: ‘Do not kill.’ No one has to obey an immoral law. Now is the time to reclaim your conscience and obey your conscience rather than the order of sin.”
For most of us, says Timothy Radcliffe, it requires a different power, the power of the imagination, to kindle our conscience like this. “If someone pushes for something that I find incomprehensible – the Tridentine rite for the Eucharist for example – rather than indignantly throwing my hands in the air, I must use my imagination and intelligence to discover why, and what is attractive and even legitimate in this desire.”
In the end, you must obey your conscience. But how you irrigate and enlarge your conscience – your soul – is important too. In the simple phrase of Aquinas: “The soul is, as it were, everything.”
As a novelist, I believe in the replenishing powers of fiction to lead you into a region different from any that you have been capable of imagining hitherto, and to leave you with an uplifting sense that you are yourself a slightly different person – while paradoxically someone who understands themselves, and others, a little better.
Whereas a historian must be concerned with facts, fiction concerns itself with describing an individual’s experience – in the best fiction, so penetratingly and acutely that it makes us love the character. The American philosopher Richard Rorty famously suggests that another way fiction differs from history is that it forces the reader to experience a subject’s pain. “Cruelty,” Rorty says, “is the worst thing we can do.” By imagining another’s suffering, it becomes harder to inflict pain ourselves. Fiction, by dramatizing the particular, the idiosyncratic and the personal, invites our empathy and therefore holds out the promise of making us less cruel. Radcliffe again: “An adult, mature approach to power is tempered by awareness of others and how we can sustain them.” Not surprisingly, this eminent theologian is a passionate novel reader.
A great novel has the power to put us back in touch, not only with each other, but with the verities enacted in the Passion, and so with our correct place in the world. In The Tree of Man, by the Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White, a poor farmer fails all his life to see God until, shortly before his death, he spits on the ground and is rewarded with an arresting glimpse of the Almighty. “He was illuminated. He pointed with his stick at the gob of spittle. ‘That is God,’ he said.”
“It is written,” Christ often says in the Bible, a book full of truths that you can only grasp imaginatively but which contain the power to shift mountains, even in the Andes. Of all the powerful people my father shook hands with, none impressed him more than Pope John Paul who visited Peru in 1985 at a time of civil war. “I got a sense of his goodness. He spoke, and immediately you listened to every word, and you felt he meant every word. And the magic was that the fighting stopped for the five days he was here – on both sides.”