Does brain research corroborate “Dominus illuminatio mea” ?

I have great admiration for Thomas Paine: he was indisputably a man of principle and conviction, fearless and articulate in expressing the Enlightenment message. He was an apostle of the Materialist, rationalist faith in the superiority of Man, taking the message to America, Britain and France.

To read Paine’s work is to be carried along by a religious fervour of justice for all. Today Paine’s philosophy of the Material Man has many influential adherents in western institutions.

Institutions like the University of Oxford are a good barometer of the ruling intellectual climate of the day. The animating spirit of contemporary Oxford exudes the same Materialistic faith proclaimed with such evangelistic zeal by Paine.

At Oxford,  Paine’s principles appear to be

Axiomatic Dogma

So, Oxford today is Republican and anti Monarchist. Therefore official reaction to the death of Elizabeth II was terse and factual; an acknowledgement of a lady widely respected. Elizabeth was a wonderful human being, but this had nothing to do with her Christian faith, nor her role as Governor of the archaic Church of England.

The consequent accession of Charles to the throne is an unfortunate event in an age when Reason should have dismissed such undemocratic nonsense to the ‘trash-can’ of the past. Therefore Charles accession will only be mentioned when unavoidable.

Two pillars of the traditional English Establishment and Constitution are thereby being edited from the record in a campaign to reframe public consciousness according to the new faith.  It matters not that the systematic conservation of the totality of knowledge and understanding of our existence is the business of a “University”.

Clearly contemporary Oxford does not see things this way. Like the adherents of all proselytising beliefs, Paine~ian Oxford is concerned to protect the young, the impressionable and the un-enlightened from ignorance and from their own mistaken ideas. Like Paine they know far better. Just as Paine condemned Edmund Burke’s insightful “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, so Oxonian experts see today’s reactionaries as advocates of “horrid principles” which are “poison”. Accordingly, their behaviour “cannot be pardoned”.

Oxford was therefore embarrassed by the Roger Scruton Memorial lectures held in its celebrated Sheldonian Theatre this term. Scruton  may have been one of the most significant Philosophers of recent times, but he was the principal British apologist of the Right.  Worse still, the lectures were given by Britain’s most strident right-wing commentators.

They included Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, Nigel Biggar  – the scholar who trashed the Apostle Paine’s Rights Idealism with his 2020 book, “What’s Wrong with Rights  ?”

Worse still, they included Peter Hitchens the rabble rousing, death penalty advocating, Trotskyist turncoat who betrayed the Cause in his youth and has spent his entire career casting doubt upon the triumphant Materialist Revolution.

Hence there could be no promotion, recognition, or even mention of the Scruton Memorial lectures by the University Establishment.

Edmund Burke diagnosed this censorious mindset as “the spirit of atheistical fanaticism“. And in the same 1790 treatise he warned us that such Enlightened persons, “…. had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety.”

Such zeal is evident at Exeter College in the University of Oxford. The College was founded by the Bishop of Exeter in 1314 to prepare men for Church ministry. In 1565 the College was given a critical financial endowment by Sir William Petre. That endowment was made for the “increase of sound learning, and for the common profit of the Church of Christ and of this realm and of the subjects of the same“.

Last year, however, the Enlightened Fellows of the College obtained the blessing of the Vice Chancellor and Council of the University to update the Statutes of the College to conform with today’s reality. Exeter College now promotes the crypto-communist, American ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign with Paine inspired wisdom and zeal.

I am wondering, however, when the College or the University will find time and resources to mount campaigns for

• black African Christians routinely murdered by literalist, politicised Islamic extremists; or
• for European school teachers and journalists so badly persecuted by said religious extremists that they now live under constant police protection …

The answer to this paradox was provided by the University itself in the November 4th 2022 Romanes lecture given by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin.  He spoke with deep concern for liberty and democracy, for diversity, equality and inclusion. But when it came to specific elaborations, Mr Martin’s understanding of those words appeared to be at odds with their inherent meaning.

Brexit and the phenomenon of electing right-wing governments generally are “authoritarian” and “populist”. In fact they constitute a “very direct threat to liberal democracy”. It is clearly Mr Martin’s view that a democratic vote can only be legitimate when it endorses the agenda and worldview of liberal democratic Centrists. All other perspectives are “extremism”. Given that the existence of the European Union is axiomatic, hallowed Truth,  no normal, rational and civilised person could possibly disagree.

Vaccination against the Covid pandemic has been an indisputable success. People who question this must be dangerous extremists.

EU immigration policy is also a success – even though member States still fail to agree a policy of distributing illegal immigrants among them, after more than two decades. As I write, in November 2022, France and Italy are yet again at loggerheads on this very issue.

“Populism encourages active distrust of government”, says Mr Martin. But his speech does not address the root issues behind ‘populist’ appeal. Why ? Because such problems exist only in the minds of the populists and their ignorant or duped electorate.

“Active distrust of government” ?

The 13th century Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights were the institutionalised, constitutional “distrust of government” and the very basis of the traditional English conception of liberty. And the separation of powers in French and US constitutions ?