Choosing My Religion
Sunday Evening Hour - My English Traits - Chapter 46
The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.
Voltaire
If you could lay it flat, the surface area of the epithelial wall of your stomach would be one and a half times bigger than Wimbledon’s Centre Court. Its purpose isn’t to keep your breakfast, your braai and your beer from spilling out of it, but to keep the bad stuff, in the form of the bacteria and toxins in your bloodstream, from getting inside it.
In sad contrast, apart from the hard shell of your skull on the outside, your brain is protected on the inside only by three thin layers of tissue called the meninges. They’re good at keeping the bacteria and the toxins out, but they’re hopeless at sieving the occasional nuggets of logic or common sense from the tidal waves of all the shit you’ve ever read, seen or heard, and which, in the past few years, has swollen into a relentless tsunami of unprocessed sewage.
I knew nothing about the epithelium in 1969. I had chosen the masculine certainties of Science over the petty, puppy-floppy, pussy-pink petals of Biology in the fond expectation of growing up in a world that made more rational sense than Sunday Evening Hour.
How pathetically modern of me to have bet all my hopes for a saner society on the triumph of the cold facts of physics over the messy organics of the failing flesh, and the indisputable logic of mathematics over the warm fluff of fantasy. How pathetically modern of me to have imagined one was categorically different from the other.
I’ve yet to hear a conspiracy theory more absurd than the Virgin Birth. On the other hand I’ve yet to hear an explanation for the behaviour of subatomic particles that isn’t more laughable than a belief in the transcendence of the soul.
At the age of sixteen I was a long way from having the experience or the vocabulary to put it into these words. But it’s clear in retrospect that it was Sunday Evening Hour that provoked the nascent anxieties that led me to conclude, some fifty-something years later, that the mixture of faith and superstition that underpins every belief system, whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a macro-economic policy, or the recipe believed to produce the world’s tastiest Béarnaise sauce, is the same mixture of faith and superstition that underpins every conspiracy theory.
Their recipes will call for different ingredients. But their allure, in every instance, will be measured not by the consistency of their logic, the skill of their fabrication or the persuasiveness of their claims, but by the reputation of the cook, the popularity of their tastiness and texture, and — most significantly of all — by just how easy they are to swallow.
Rewind to Estcourt High School when Bad Moon Rising sounded positively welcome:
Schools were invented for two reasons, neither of which had anything to do with the welfare of children. The first was to free parents from the unproductive chore of raising their children so that they, the parents, could spend their waking hours much more productively in the factories, the forges, the foundries and on the farms that produced marketable goods for the owners of the factories, the forges, the foundries and the farms.
The second was to occupy the time of the children, at the expense of only a handful of under-qualified and underpaid teachers, so the young rascals and rapscallions wouldn’t be able to indulge in the manifold mischiefs and misadventures of growing up.
Boarding schools were invented for the same purpose but with the additional benefit of liberating the parents from the thankless chores of feeding, clothing and entertaining their children when they arrived home from school so that they, their parents, could take on extra early morning, late night and weekend shifts on the farms and in the forges, foundries and factories to earn themselves a few more shillings a week.
Sunday Evening Hour at Estcourt High School was invented to prevent the sexually frustrated and existentially anguished captive residents of the Sunnyside, Bergview and Eastside hostels from having dark thoughts — especially, as anyone who was there will remember, on Sunday nights. The thrill of “Ubani Bulala!” is behind you. Ahead of you lie the dreaded prospects of Double-History, Double-Geography, rancid mutton, boiled cabbage, Double-Afrikaans and ritual lashings.
A long black cloud is coming down.
Now lock these choleric and concupiscent boys and girls in their single-sex hostels with nothing to do, and desperation can get dangerous.
Which must be why R.O. Pearce or A.C. Martin before him invented the Sunday Evening Hour. The idea was simple. Since three hours of prep on a Sunday night would have seemed a little too Victorian even by Estcourt High School’s determinedly Victorian protocols, some life-affirming intervention was clearly needed to distract these fifty or sixty restless girls and boys from plotting, and maybe even initiating, an anti-Burkean uprising in the ninety minutes between supper and lights-out. Fire-extinguishers, bare fists and unbridled fury spring to mind.
So what better than an obligatory hour of lofty thoughts from lofty guest speakers who would drag the moribund spirits of this restless rabble away from the dull and meaningless rounds of their quotidian duties and up to those shining realms of hopes, dreams and mysteries where they might glimpse the true purpose of their higher beings? Assuming, more in hope than expectation, that they had them.
At least they would be sitting down, shutting up and visibly present — the first, second and third conditions required for meek acquiescence to official subjugation. Otherwise known as fascism.
Sunday Evening Hour. To this day, those three words still have the effect of cramping my stomach into writhing spasms of excruciating pain, of choking my lungs, of chilling my bones and of freezing their marrow. The end of the weekend felt like the end of life. It remains as forebodingly ominous today as it was then: I fear death only because I fear it will feel like Sunday Evening Hour — but for longer even than the eternity we experienced it as then.
To be fair, as we say in England to ensure our interlocutor knows in advance that we regard their stated view with profound and bitter disdain, the teachers who selected the guest speakers were alive to the spiritual eclecticism of their audience.
We were all white, of course. But counted in our number were untroubled Catholics who could sin and be forgiven, ascetic Methodists allergic to all ceremony and all the trappings of ceremony, adherents of the Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk who thought the rest of us were soft on the blacks, a Jehovah's Witness (from America!), a handful of Presbyterians, a smattering of Congregationalists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Adventists and, of course, the more than several Anglicans like me who regarded the rest of them as sadly lacking in good taste, common sense and decent manners.
Yet we still couldn’t help envying the Catholics. Imagine the relief of not having to bear the burden of your sins until doomsday? We couldn’t.
So the priests, preachers and proselytizers of all the mainstream churches were duly represented. Each of them in turn, on their designated Sunday night, would take great pains to point out that God would almost surely forgive most of the heresies of the Christian sect we had heard from the makeshift pulpit last Sunday on the grounds that they must unwittingly have been led astray by charlatans, opportunists and Jesuits.
We could believe what we liked, of course, but don’t say we didn’t warn you if, when you arrived there at your appointed time, the Pearly Gates opened onto a fiery pit where the souls of the misguided, the misled and the misinformed Methodists (for example) were screaming to be released from the torment of their ever-roasting bodies inflicted on them for not eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood.
We would then be tutored on the one and only true path to God’s mercy, each of which appeared to twist and turn in a uniquely mysterious way. The contradictions between them were less confusing than the sincerity with which their advocates elaborated their catechisms.
In the absence of an epithelial wall to keep toxins out of our brains, we heard it all while doing our best not to listen. Some of it stuck.
The preachers, pundits and proselytizers would offer to take questions at the end. No one asked a question is case the answer lasted longer than the 9.45 pm cutoff time when, in a chaotic melee of scraping chairs and hallelujahs, we were officially allowed to get the fuck out of there.
We had learned our lesson from the night Wessels asked the Baptist if black people had souls. The Baptist had spent twenty precious minutes of potential masturbation time reassuring him that, as hard as it was to believe, their souls were just as white as ours while the rest of us prayed for Apocalypse now.
I remember a dominee from the NGK who had seen some of us swimming in the Bushmen’s River one Sunday and dedicated his Sunday Evening Hour to naming and shaming us for not respecting God’s Day of Rest. Ja, julle: Wood, Fisher, White and Torr, in your onheilige underpants!
I can’t forget a Rhodesian of unspecified denomination who brought his Ridgeback to bark the syllables of the Lord’s Prayer for our edification and amusement. “Woof, woof-woof; woof- woof-woof-woof-woof; woof-woof-woof-woof-woof. Woof, woof-woof, woof.” And so on to the stirring finale: “Woof-woof-woof-woof-woof — woof, woof.”
Amen.
He said Ian Smith had laughed his head off when he heard it. Someone behind me whispered, “If only.” It could have been History.
Sensing, after the Baptist incident, that some of us had views that tended towards the secular, the scope of invitees was broadened to include a drug addict from Weenen who had found salvation in Jesus and Mainstay, and a doomsday Adventist who encouraged us to prepare for the imminent Ice Age.
Then there was the Episcopalian mountaineer who had met the Holy Ghost up in the Aasvoelkrans Cave in the Drakensberg. The Holy Ghost told the mountaineer that He, the often and sadly overlooked Third Party of the Trinity, was the One True Author of Blowin’ in the Wind. He sang it to the Episcopalian to prove it, accompanying his resonant baritone with an invisible guitar. Not that He didn’t like the Dylan version.
The mountaineer confessed that he was skeptical until the bushman painting on the cave wall animated into a live eland hunt which ended in an actual eland slaughter and braai replete with several cases of Castle Lager — yissus, out of nowhere, man. And they were miraculously frosty despite the hot summer sun.
I liked that story. It was less gruesome than Easter but much meatier than, say, the fishes and the loaves.
So, yes. In the course of a lifetime you hear a lot of shit. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. Then the bits that stick go on to stick to the other bits that stick to the same kinds of shit. Sooner or later enough of them have stuck together to form the satisfyingly homogeneous pile of shit we call a belief system. Once that’s happened, it’s very difficult for any more shit to get into your brain unless it’s almost exactly the kind of shit your belief system is already made of.
It’s not for me or anyone else to tell you how to sort the good shit from the bad shit. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, good shit is in the nerves and neurons of the shit-absorber.
The point of this scatological riff on Voltaire’s brilliant epigram is simply to illustrate that the brain’s “...wonderful power of enabling men to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is he want to believe” can now be explained as the triumph of somatic assonance over cognitive dissonance.
In Dr Faulds’s psychology lectures at the University of Natal (PMB) in the early seventies we were persuaded to believe that the logical discomfort of cognitive dissonance would prevent our brains from holding two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time.
The epistemic wars of the 21st century have torn that myth to tatters.
It no longer matters if the information we receive is true, verifiable or logically consistent. If our bodies don’t mind, our minds can’t be bothered.
All that matters is how good it feels. Which is beautifully demonstrated by how we keep trawling through the shit on Twitter until we’re rewarded by the dopamine rush of seeing something or anything, no matter how self-evidently absurd, that confirms the righteousness of our most wrathful wraths.
It gets even more alarming in the real world.
A recent psychology experiment by Sander van der Linden and his colleagues published in the February 2017 issue of Global Challenges concluded that:
Misinformation and alternative ‘facts’ can cause people to suspend judgement. When presented with two conflicting pieces of information— fact and alternative ‘fact’ —people often don’t know which to believe, so they choose to believe neither.
Chess-master Garry Kasparov said pretty much the same thing. As a Russian, he would know:
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Michael Mina knew it too.
Yes, Michael Mina, contrarian brother of the deeply missed Andrea and my good friend Basil. I was in Standard Six when Michael told me he was an atheist. We were in the ablution block where he had come to bum one of my Texans. I don’t know why he told me. Perhaps just to return the favour.
“What’s an atheist?”
“Someone who doesn’t believe in God and that kak.”
I was shocked, stunned and stupefied. For several terrifying seconds I waited for the thunderbolt that would dematerialize not just us but most of Estcourt from the Memorial Hall to the Bacon Factory.
When it didn’t materialize, a foreign and hair-raising feeling crept up from my knocking knees and through my shuddering heart to flood my brain with a dagga-like balm of relief. It wasn’t the relief of realizing we hadn’t been atomized by the wrath of God. It was the relief of realizing for the first time in my life that I could choose to believe whatever I felt like believing. Which could be anything or nothing.
I understand now that I was probably the last person on earth to assume it was both mandatory and existentially essential to believe in something resembling a coherent, logically consistent, universal truth underpinned by a universally agreed set of values.
No one else appears to be bothered by the lack of one. And apparently they haven’t since 2000 when Margaret Thatcher sent Pinochet a bottle of Scotland’s finest whiskey while the dictator responsible for the death and torture of thousands of Chileans was under house arrest in Surrey.
Which explains why Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” (2017) are no longer regarded as quite as silly as they were when we first heard them. And why smart, fair-minded, well educated people — some of them close friends and family — are not in the least discomfited by believing that Donald Trump, the climate denier and convicted sexual abuser, is our only hope for peace and universal prosperity on all of God’s earth; that COVID was a hoax, that Brexit and Boris Johnson were good for Britain, and if COVID wasn’t a hoax it was almost certainly caused by 5G, The Great Reset, the European Union, Trudeau and the WEF’s ambition to part us from our cash.
None of these provoke any cognitive dissonance in the minds of the believers even if all of them fly in the face of science, common sense and Occam’s Razor. But I’d happily forgo any and all of these very 20th century measures of intellectual integrity if, for example, Donald Trump could stop the Ukraine war in 24 hours, or if The Great Reset could reset my Chrome settings, to say, 2008.
I used to argue with them. I now understand that you can’t argue with bodies. Bodies don’t have words, they have feelings. And I love my contrarian friends and family more than I disagree with them.
Thus is it that I too have at last come round to the view that facts mean nothing in the face of feelings. Or in the ears, mouths, limbs, lungs or guts of them.
Which is why we should be terrified by the current rise of the Social Darwinists on the Right. They are blind to logic, deaf to reason, and numb to consequence. They feel their righteousness in their bare fists, in their bones and in the invigorating bombast of their boiling blather.
They also have the money and the means.
The Left have only their sensitivities, their scruples and their sighs. More enfeebling than all of these together is how they persist in clinging to the naive belief that their unreasonable opponents will listen to reason.
Believe me. I’m one of them.
And as for choosing a religion, I’m still waiting for my body to make up its mind.
Meanwhile it’s Sunday night. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
".../I hear the voice of rage and ruin..."/
Incipient shadow of one.