The rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the left in the UK recently has been fascinating. Most of my friends are of the left or at least casual Labour party supporters. A number of them have been alarmed or disheartened but most have been excited. For many of a certain age, it is a trip down memory lane – the happy days of student protest and Red Wedge. For youngsters, it is finally someone that speaks their language of liberty and equality (ignoring that those two ideals are mutually exclusive.)
It is also notable that the same subset of friends all loudly declare their atheism. Atheism is de rigeur at the moment and seems to have acquired a cachet and coolness that it lacked in my youth. People post pictures of themselves brandishing copies of the Origin of Species with the hashtag #atheistlives, something which might have rather alarmed Charles Darwin. I came to atheism in my late teens – I desperately wanted to believe in God, but the universe only made sense to me when you removed God. If an omnipotent being really existed, surely it wouldn’t be so cack-handed in its management.
The idealism of the Cobynistas and their belief in a white-bearded deity who will bring peace and justice to all humanity seems to have a rather touching overlap with my original belief in God. I wonder if it demonstrates that most of us need to believe in something that defies all objective analysis. My friends who have embraced the absence of God have found they need something else to fill the space God occupied and placed Jeremy Corbyn there. The rituals and prayers of the faithful have become rallies and Facebook posts.
As with God, no matter how much I want to, I can’t believe in socialism. Socialism, at least the sort espoused by Jeremy Corbyn, has never succeeded anywhere in the world. It is a brilliant, perfect theory that is disastrous in practice. It doesn’t work because ultimately it relies on trust; if you have faith that your fellow workers will all do their bit and everyone will work for the greater good, you will too. This is why you can have a socialist village, where everyone knows each other and slackers can be identified and called out. But you can’t have a socialist town as you can never be certain that someone you don’t know is doing what they should be. And without that direct connection, you substitute trust for rules and rules are enforced by the state and the state becomes an authoritarian regime that allows no dissent.
I hope I am wrong and when I die I find that God is there ready to lead me to a better place (or at least not shove me towards the fiery pit.) I also hope that if Labour win the next election it ushers in an era of full employment and a fairer, freer society. But I’m not putting my faith in it.
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 