On Cognitive Dissonance and Earl Grey Tea

Friends, those of us of a religious bent are occasionally accused of entertaining mutually exclusive concepts and ignoring the resultant cognitive dissonance, of being intellectually dishonest both with others and ourselves.  Well, I don’t know about that, but I have found myself in an intellectual quandary that I see no way out of.  Two of the pillars of my existence have set themselves against each other, and I no longer know what to think.

I have said before that I am a fairly firm monarchist.  I wouldn’t ever want an absolute monarchy, but I’ve always felt that the constitutional monarchy that we have in the UK is the best of both monarchy and democracy.  I’m a great admirer of our current queen, and I have no problems with her son, although I’ll admit that for the sake of the popularity and future survival of the institution, it might be better if he abdicated in favour of his own son immediately upon his mother’s death.

I am also a great fan of tea.  I mean, obviously, after all I’m British and a Methodist to boot.  Tea is important.  Cheap for the poor and elegant for the rich, a stimulant for the weary, a relaxant for the overwrought and a comfort for the distraught, warming when it is cold, cooling when it is hot, drink of the gods and an excellent excuse for a biscuit.  This is true of regular tea (loose leaf, made in a pot, served in a cup and saucer, milk in first) but also of its lesser cousins, like Lapsang, Green and Earl Grey.  None of these latter though, as any civilised individual would be able to tell you, are ever served with milk.  Ever.  I am aware that there are some ‘people’ who do, but surely they can be pitied, although never despised.

However.  I have discovered something that has rocked me to my core, cut me to my quick and shaken the foundations of my life.  It having being her majesty’s birthday last week, the papers and news sites have been full of stories and potted biographies, and one of them revealed to me this shocking and distasteful truth: The Queen drinks her Earl Grey with milk!

What am I to do with this information?  How can I square my support of the monarchy with my certainty that Earl Grey with milk is a sin and an abomination unto the eyes of the Lord?  Must I become a republican (unlikely) or must I accept that it is permissible to have milk in your Earl Grey?  I know that socially speaking I’m fairly liberal, but that seems a step too far even for me.

Must I reject one principle or the other at all?  After all, I hold no belief that the Queen is infallible, she’s only human after all, and I don’t believe that she has any divine right to rule.  Perhaps I must accept it as a small but significant character flaw in someone whose life has otherwise been characterised by duty and service to her country.  I think that I must hate the sin but love the sinner, and forgive her this great wrong.

I may well write to her and implore her to give up her wicked ways, but then again, she does have the SAS onside, and I don’t want to provoke a sniper bullet through my bedroom window by telling her how badly she gets her tea wrong.

On second thoughts, perhaps I will remain silent on the subject, and merely pray that she sees the light and repents before it’s too late.

Real Things

A quote for you, from a book I’m reading at the moment:

“With them (…) was a power mightier than any, the power that in its highest form does indeed make the world go round; the one power in the world that is above fortune, above death, above the creeds, or, shall we say, behind them.  For with them was love in its highest form, the loves that gives and does not ask, and being denied, loves.  In their clear moments men know that this love is the only real thing in the world; and a thousand times more substantial, more existent, than the objects we grasp and see.”

This is not, as you might assume, from Unspoken Sermons, by George Macdonald, which I mentioned in my last post.  It is from The Abbess of Vlaye, by Stanley J. Weyman, a historical swashbuckler set in sixteenth century France.  Stanley Weyman was writing in the 1890s and 1900s, and his works are similar in tone and content to Alexandre Dumas but unlike him, and quite inexplicably, Weyman is now almost completely unknown.  It might be that his heroes and heroines are somewhat nobler and more wholesome than Dumas’ more roisterous protagonists, and thus excite less interest, but although I’m a huge Dumas fan, and would class The Count of Monte Cristo amongst my favourite books (and which includes, at the very end, a wonderful quote about hope), I think on the whole, I prefer Weyman.  Weyman’s A Gentleman of France instantly catapulted itself into my top 10 books list as soon as I read it, and his Under the Red Robe is also excellent.  Because Weyman’s works are now out of copyright, they can be downloaded for free from the wonderful Project Gutenberg, where I’ve acquired all mine, and I highly recommend them if you’re into books full of duels, chases, narrow escapes, true love, giants (Wait, no, that’s The Princess Bride.  There aren’t any giants) and cameos from Persons of Historical Significance.

Anyway, enough literary criticism.  The reason I quoted the above is because it resonates with me in much the same way as the C S Lewis quote which adorns the top of this page.  The idea that the important things, the real things, aren’t the ones that, in Weyman’s words “we can grasp and see”.  It’s a view that some people find hard.  “I only believe what I can see” is a phrase that I’ve heard a great many times.  Presumably these people are agnostic about the backs of their own heads, but there you are.

I am, if not an ardent, then at least a confirmed monarchist, and when discussions on the monarchy occur, they often end up coming down to money.  It commonly ends up in a debate over whether the royal family brings in more in tourism than they use in public money, but to me this misses the point.  The importance of the monarchy isn’t a material one.  Ignoring the excellent work they do in terms of diplomacy and international PR, their value to me is much harder to define, much less straight forward, but all the more important.  It’s about tradition and history, pomp and circumstance, about magnificence and dignity and continuation.  There are a great many bland republics about, but only one British Monarchy.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no advocate of absolute monarchy, but I definitely feel that with our parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, we have the best of both worlds.

Likewise my feelings towards religion; towards love, faith, hope, grace, forgiveness, goodness.  We are told that these are all merely evolutionary adaptations that increase social cohesion and group survivability, that love is merely ‘chemical brainwashing’, forcing individuals to stay together against their will, for the sake of raising young, that even the very concepts of goodness and justice are nothing more than nature’s way of tricking us into being nice, with the sole aim of increasing the likelihood of passing on our genes.  That may well be true.  It could well be that the concepts that we hold dear are things that we have invented, things we’ve dreamed, things which we cannot weigh or measure or touch or show when sceptics demand that we give them ‘proof’ or else admit that our beliefs are fantasies and fairy-tales; unconditional, disinterested love, perfect forgiveness, faith in the face of doubt, hope in the absence of any cause to hope, Grace that deserves the capitalisation, not as the result of firing neurons and sloshing hormones, but independent, free, objective and absolute.

If these aren’t real, and I don’t believe for a second that they’re not, then reality seems pretty rubbish really, and we have found a much better one.

I seem to be throwing a lot of quotations around at the moment, but just one more for the materialists, sceptics and ‘realists’, this from the great Baron Munchausen:

“Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I am delighted to say I have no grasp of it whatsoever!”