Is Honesty The Best Policy?
Chair’s address at John Hull’s Book Launch:
The Tactile Heart: Blindness and faith
and the re-launch of Touching the Rock
Venue: The Wakefield Room, The Queens Foundation, Birmingham
On 14th October 2013
By Kevin Carey - Chair, RNIB Group
I suppose, to put matters simply - too simply, perhaps - there are two extreme views on blindness
and life, the first being that the blindness is simply an incidental inconvenience, the other that it is
defining, not dissimilar to the discussion about whether religion should fundamentally inform what
we do or should be seen as a purely private preoccupation.
I tend to be at the integrationist end of both of these spectra, affirming that my own blindness has
had a profound effect on every aspect of my life, and that there is no point in a religion that isn't
fundamentally public. On the one hand, not being able to see has a seriously limiting effect on
what I can and can't say as a novelist; on the other, it seems anomalous at the very least to argue
that you can love your neighbour in private.
John Hull has brought these debates to an intense pitch in his new book being launched today. He is
not a theologian who happens to be blind, addressing himself to God, he is a blind theologian
lodging a serious complaint and it is a complaint in the public sphere, not some private spat with
the Almighty; and what John argues should have a lasting effect on the way we view physical
impairment, whether we are people of belief or atheists, or too idle to be either.
If we look at the history of Christianity and disability, we will see that the piety and cure paradigm
has been immensely powerful and of course, in its way, seriously impairing; for every Milton there
are a million mendicants languishing in a tepid pool of pity and watered-down gruel, producing a
heavily skewed dichotomy of heroism and impotence. This is our lot and it is what was laid upon
us, if not by Jesus himself, by the Evangelists whose word, we are told, is the Word of God.
Behind this deeply troubling layer of argument there is a more fundamental assumption in John's
writing which is of immense contemporary relevance. During the period 2005-10 I was a Member of
the Church of England General Synod and during the debates on women bishops I was in the tactical
engine room, a somewhat grubby location in a world of supposed Christian charity, primarily telling
people what not to say or even advising total silence on some points, and one of the main
arguments against us from both the extreme Catholics and the extreme Evangelicals was that we
were advancing the claims of women on the mere grounds of equality and social justice which were
trumped, depending on your point of view, by a doctrine of male headship on the one hand and
physical male representationality on the other. Now trust me, I'm a theologian: Jesus has nothing
whatsoever to say about either male headship or male representationality: he would, as a man,
have assumed the first in a general way and he wouldn't have understood the second; but what is
absolutely clear is the commitment of Jesus to equal concern and respect and to social justice.
John argues, however, that we would all have been better off if Jesus had recruited some followers
with physical or cognitive impairments rather than first curing them and then letting them into the
inner circle. I get the point, in terms of the contemporary language of rôle model, but I think the
argument at the deeper level of social justice is more important.
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I said in an earlier review of The Tactile Heart that "It is highly unusual in this Laodician - neither
hot nor cold - postmodern age to encounter a missile of blazing passion guided by cold, forensic,
calculation; but the enterprise is daring and the combination is deadly" for which, if my own
experience is anything to go by, John will not be easily nor quickly forgiven. For we live in an age
which, in spite of burgeoning higher education, is sadly lacking in forensic skills and which, in spite
of ever more extreme entertainment, has very little understanding of passion. And, as if that were
not enough, this combination of qualities strikes a horribly jarring chord when the judgment is
delivered by blind people on the seeing. Whatever makes us all different, blind people have this in
common: that, lacking the incessant input of circumstantial stimuli, we tend towards the abstract
which can make us sound very harsh; but that same internalisation and concentration tends to
make us passionate. But our postmodern age is one which, for lack of forensic skills and passion, is
almost incapable of making a sensible decision about anything. Whether we are thinking about the
vastly exaggerated and unscientific claims of neo-Darwinian new atheists or the un-rooted ranting’s
of the Tea Party movement, we are now almost beyond the capacity of the social imagination to
empathise with the other. Which brings me back to where I began, because I would argue that it is
my very detachedness from the incidental, brought about by my blindness, which gives me the
forensic capacity which opponents resent; and it is my passion, born of the ability to focus
emotion, which offends what people would characterise as nuance but which is, in almost all cases,
intellectual and, worse still, moral, cowardice.
But, for all its potential enemies, I would most of all warn John against this book's friends. As that
great poet and quasi theologian T. S. Eliot says in Murder in the Cathedral: "The last temptation is
the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason"; but I fear it is often the first
temptation. There is no safer sanctuary for the sentimental than a lazy church and so there will be
many accolades for John's book simply because it is a piece of advocacy by a person with an
impairment for people with impairments; but if you really want to know whether this means
anything just count the number of people with impairments the next time you go to church. I don't
claim it is much better anywhere else, but most places are less suspect because they make more
modest claims. We are used to a society where our rights expand with every year but our
enjoyment of them contracts.
And all of these considerations lead to the question of how we can have an honest conversation
about blindness unless thought leaders like John are prepared to be honest. Perhaps the blindness
institutions that remain are the last bastions of the stiff upper lip, but that attitude is only of
assistance to those who want to be comforted with the thought that as long as we are neat on
parade there isn't much that they need to do; but this is corrosively collusive behaviour. I once
asked the question: if you're about to negotiate a deal with a civil servant, is the power
relationship altered if you ask him before the meeting to show you to the toilet? My answer was
that if the two parties were women it would probably be all right but if they were men then the
power relationship would be radically altered, which explains why my kidneys are so heavily overtaxed. If we are not prepared to be brutally honest about blindness, then the world will take us at
our word, for its own convenience. This is why John's writing is so important and why it is vital that
his new book, like Touching the Rock, is picked up and read outside theological circles for while we
do need a theology of impairment we also need the wider capacity to understand it in an
imaginative context; the recent egregious failures in caring for the sick, elderly and impaired has
less to do, I think, with a lack of compassion than with the lack of imagination and emotional
engagement which is a necessary pre-requisite of compassion; we must, in some way, be forgiven
our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us; but repetition is unforgivable.
In conclusion, then, I simply want to thank John for being an important contributor to what has
been, to date, a somewhat distanced engagement with important issues. There may be a place for
the statistical approximations of sociology, and for the rational organisation of what we have
wrongly persuaded ourselves are limited public sector resources, but we would do far better, it
seems to me, to engage with the larger complexities, and even mysteries, of who we are and why
we are here. John Hull dares to ask, but do we have the courage to answer?
RCH1307 Book Launch Address, Birmingham 14.10.13 Final
Kevin Carey, Chair, RNIB Group
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