(A possible fourth variety, in development)
The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 3: More in Sorrow Than In Anger
The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 2: The Implacable Agent of Cosmic Justice
The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 1: The Executioner
The international mission in Afghanistan has done some terrible things – locking up innocent people without due process, accidentally bombing civilians, humiliating families by invading their homes – but it’s also pushed back the Taliban, built a weak but better-than-nothing system of police and army, funded a government that would have otherwise collapsed long ago, and provided extensive humanitarian aid. Afghans would almost certainly be better off embracing the foreign presence, working with the Americans and Europeans, rather than rejecting it. They would also probably be better off living in a tolerant society that did not respond to every Koran-burning with violence and murder. But that’s not our choice to make, it’s theirs. The Afghans have the right and the power to choose their own future, and it looks like their chosen future doesn’t include us.
Right now, it’s a loser’s game to try to find a more ethical smartphone. Everything and everyone is compromised. But it’s a winner’s game to figure out how to use what we’ve got to bring progressive change. We have computers in our pockets that not only connect us more easily and effortlessly to information about what’s going on in the rest of the world than ever before, but also connect us to each other. We might (and we should) feel guilty and ashamed when we stop to think about the suffering of the workers who built those devices, and it sure seems like there’s a hell of a market opportunity for someone who figures out how to build these devices through a clean and green, worker-friendly supply chain, but in the meantime, our best option is to use our devices to learn more, donate money where it is most effective, and make our voices heard. In this crazy ultra-connected world, we might end up surprised at how fast things can turn around.
In talking to audiences outside universities (some of whom may be graduates), I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas and the quest for greater understanding, whether in history and literature, or physics and biology, or any number of other fields. Some members of these audiences may not have had the chance to study these things themselves, but they very much want their children to have the opportunity to do so; others may have enjoyed only limited and perhaps not altogether happy experience of higher education in their own lives, but have now in their adulthood discovered a keen amateur reading interest in these subjects; others still may have retired from occupations that largely frustrated their intellectual or aesthetic inclinations and are now hungry for stimulation.Such audiences do not want to be told that we judge the success of a university education by how much more graduates can earn than non-graduates, any more than they want to hear how much scholarship and science may indirectly contribute to GDP. They are, rather, susceptible to the romance of ideas and the power of beauty; they want to learn about far-off times and faraway worlds; they expect to hear language used more inventively, more exactly, more evocatively than it normally is in their workaday world; they want to know that, somewhere, human understanding is being pressed to its limits, unconstrained by immediate practical outcomes.
These audiences are not all of one mind, needless to say, and not all sections of society are equally well represented among them. At various points in their lives their members may have other priorities, and there will always be competing demands on their interests and sympathies. But it is noticeable, and surely regrettable, how little the public debate about universities in contemporary Britain makes any kind of appeal to this widespread appreciation on the part of ordinary intelligent citizens that there should be places where these kinds of inquiries are being pursued at their highest level. Part of the problem may be that while universities are spectacularly good at producing new forms of understanding, they are not always very good at explaining what they are doing when they do this.
Being a broken man himself, Greene knew how to probe the pain and romance of faith and its failed practitioners better than anyone else. Even those of us who never ended up in a prison in Mexico waiting for execution, like the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, knew what his self-disgust felt like. We knew what Greene was on about when he described the sadness of missing happiness by seconds at an appointed place. A little more self-discipline and maybe our tormented hearts would have ceased tormenting yet. But we also knew somewhere inside that it was our failures that kept us human.Being a priesthood themselves, great writers understand this better than most. Tennessee Williams knew that if he’d exorcised his demons he’d have destroyed his angels as well. And the poet Ian Crichton Smith understood that “from our weakness only are we kind”. Greene would have agreed with them both. There was human solidarity in weakness, fellowship in failure. That’s why the spoiled priest in his greatest novel was overwhelmed with compassion for other losers. When you looked at other men and women, “you could always begin to feel pity. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” And that had to include self-hatred. In Greeneland, in the end, everyone is forgiven because everyone is understood.