Bishop's letters: September 05 +James

REALITY

Ambrose Bierce, author of ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’, once remarked that reality is nothing more than “the dream of a mad philosopher”. Perhaps he was thinking of Plato, who regarded reality as an eternal and timeless absolute and who set a debate going which still rumbles on today.

Post-modernists insist that there is no such thing as reality. If that’s what you want – create your own. Others maintain that what you can see and touch is real. Anything else is a figment of your imagination.

But ‘reality’ isn’t only of interest to philosophers. The media like it too. So the word has become part of everyday speech with the advent of “Reality” TV Shows like Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island and The Farm (whose popularity, I have to confess, is completely beyond me!) ‘Real’ presumably means ‘unscripted’ here. Put a bunch of extremely ordinary people together in a confined space, point a camera in their direction – and see what happens, for hour … after tedious hour ..after interminable hour. As the journalist Craig Brown remarked recently, “Jokes are fast running out for comedians, for a joke must transform real life in some perverse way, and real life has begun to perform the same operation upon itself ..”

Or take politicians and diplomats. One school of political theorists concentrate on what they call the ‘realities’ or concrete facts of political life rather than mere ‘ethical ideals’. For instance, this means assuming that states will typically pursue their own self-interest in any situation, often through the use of military power (a viewpoint not entirely absent from arguments about the invasion of Iraq).

Reinhold Niebuhr claimed that this sort of ‘realism’ dealt honestly with the brutal facts of human behaviour and original sin. He would have approved of a recent article in ‘The Church Times’ by Peter Riddell. Referring to the London bombings, Riddell points out that there are in fact several texts in the Qur’an which ‘provide sustenance to radical ideologies’ and which need to be questioned rather than ignored. This seems to me a good example of ‘Real politik’.

Questions of reality are also of concern to psychologists and psychotherapists. In the mid-sixties, William Glasser introduced something called ‘Reality Therapy’. He maintained that humans need to love and be loved, and that their sense of self-worth is closely bound up with maintaining a certain standard of behaviour. In his view, it is difficult – even impossible – to be healed of any ‘mental’ illness until you begin to accept personal responsibility for the change that has to take place. As with alcoholism or anorexia – you must be willing to work towards recovery, and Glasser suggested ways in which people could be helped to get a grip on the ‘reality’ of their condition. He would not have agreed with the actress Lily Tomlin who once famously remarked, “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs”!

Above all, ‘Reality’ matters to theologians – which includes all of us who give any thought to what we believe and who ‘do theology’ in our every thought, word and action. ‘Reality’ is what we discover in Christ; and what God reveals in and through him sheds light into the darkest corners of our own lives. That’s why, as the poet T S Eliot puts it, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”. It is too challenging. Which is perhaps why we prefer to watch ‘Big Brother’ instead.

James Newcome