Better drowned than duffers

After covering the Russian revolution as a bold radical journalist then marrying Trotsky’s secretary, Arthur Ransome wrote a classic series of children’s stories, Swallows and Amazons, the first of which, itself titled Swallows and Amazons (1931), begins with a famous Post Office telegram:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN

This advice would nowadays provoke prosecution by the health and safety executive.

While a character named Titty presents its own difficulties.

Ransome believed that children should grow up doing dangerous things, whereas now society with its principles of precaution and inspectorates of correctness insists on risk assessments. Ransome’s world was different but I am more with him than against him on the idea that the best way for children to learn how to handle risks, is to start allowing them to face some. Obviously individual circumstances will vary.

Ransome is intriguing both for his radical ideas in child raising and his career as a foreign correspondent specialising in Russia.

See also (for hard core amateurs of Ransome): Arthur Ransome’s interview with Lenin, on marxists.org.

This is a text – really, two versions of a transcript – of an interview in 1922 in which Ransome strongly challenges Lenin on the contradictions of the New Economic Policy which Lenin (at the time – he would later change his mind) strongly defends. Ransome uses the word “Nepman” to describe traders who are evidently prospering and in whom, Ransome suggests, will soon grow a thirst for political power to match their economic muscle. Lenin denigrates this proposition by means of a logic that is pretty specious, offering a physiocratic view of the real wealth of the nation, to wit all the happy and productive peasants, easily paying their taxes. Obviously all this would end in tears for the peasants as well as many of the Nepmen.

This is quite a gutsy bit of interviewing by Ransome even if he is attacking Lenin from the left. A curious cameo, nevertheless.

The Arthur Ransome Society is here.

Christopher Hitchens is not great

“God is not great” is the latest polemic from the prolific, clever but also oddly deranged Christopher Hitchens. It is sharply written, studiously controversalist, superficially largely indisputable. Hitchens is such a brilliant man but there is a catch. He is capable of error. I am sure he is capable of conceding this. The hugeness of Hitchens’ mistakes on Iraq and his flirtation with neoconservatism does make it very difficult to assume that anything he says is necessarily sound.

Even though there is nothing especially original in the basic idea that all religion is a lot of tosh, Hitchens’s work is not entirely derivative despite the vacuum cleaner sourcing and introductions to all the great heretics. There are those who might criticise this book as a clipping job. But Hitchens has chosen the right clippings and assembled them in a sensible order. Even leaving room for scepticism, this does seem a pretty sound bill of indictment.

Hitchens believes religious faith not merely ignorant but an agent for making things worse and responsible for much that ails humanity. Possibly he is right. He acknowledges that man seems perfectly capable of creating secular faiths that are quite as wicked as religiously dogmatic ones.

Maybe we are just wicked by nature and the most wicked people of all will always be drawn to those institutions – such as the church – where they can practice their wickedness to cruellest effect. If it is true that the childhood of man was shockingly ill informed, it is also true that the great faith pillars were practically the only institutions going. Hitchens seems to think the religious dictatorships even worse than the secular ones, and it is to the credit of Hitchens that you are not going to find elsewhere between covers so complete or entertaining an evisceration of the world’s great faiths.

His book is much better than Dawkins’s recent rant, The God Delusion. Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins knows very little about religion, whereas Hitchens has taken on board a great deal and is a much better prosecutor. Whether Hitchens will convince the faithful of the errors of their ways is another question. If you are already in the school that reckons man created God and not the reverse, you will delight in this text. Or you may read it, snort and still find comfort in the Catholic mass. Hitchens removes the entrails from all of the great faiths and finds much that is remarkable but on this question, you are either with him or against him, so I will be surprised if this book changes many minds. His call for a new reformation seems facile. I will send it to my niece in Illinois and hope for the best. I am still too annoyed with Hitchens to give it the praise others say it deserves.

Lenin, blogging from a parish nearby, comments criticially on Hitchens here.