From 1964 until 1967, I went to the local primary school, Castle Street School in Kendal. It was a run-of-the-mill nominally Anglican primary school for children of 5 to 11 years old. Pupils were prepared for the Eleven-Plus, a test of intelligence which would determine whether boys would go to the Grammar School, girls to the High School or to Longlands Secondary Modern which would lead to apprenticeships in more manual occupations. It was a bit of a rough mix between different social classes. By 1967, my parents decided that it was not really the solution for my education and human development, but rather that I should attend a small private school for boys in Ambleside. That involved a return journey by bus each day from the stop opposite Kendal Post Office, via Staveley, Windermere, Troutbeck Bridge to Ambleside Bus Station. I was at Castle Street for three years.

Castle Street School was led by a kindly lady of near retirement age by the name of Miss Cliburn. One day, a black girl called Stella came to the school, and we were told to be kind to her. She looked different from all the other kids of the school because she or her ancestors came from Africa. We had been brought up on stories about British missionaries exploring Africa and other parts of the world to bring the “savages” to Christianity. This was an innovation for us white northerners that could provoke some serious bullying. As Miss Cliburn introduced this little girl, there were some nasty comments from children around me, and some would even do monkey imitations and pinch their lips together to mock the thick lips of African people. Personally, I was confused. Apart from the colour of the skin and slight facial differences, Stella was for me simply a human being, a child brought to learn to read and write, learn about other things and socialise with the other pupils. Two things were foreign to me, and it was not Stella. They were the racist behaviour of some of the children, but particularly the awkward and patronising way we were told not to be racist. The 1960’s were a long time ago!

I am not an expert in sociology or politics, but I have ideas about apparent things that I observe from my secluded distance. What I am targeting here is conventionally called identity politics or ideology. A few days ago, I discussed the gender issue, that of people rejecting their biologically assigned sex / gender and having recourse to medical and surgical means to identify as the opposite sex. Just yesterday, I saw a video sequence of a busload of male-to-female transsexuals meeting Pope Francis. It was frankly grotesque, especially the mincing and giggling – and profoundly anti-human! In today’s posting, I am considering people of different races and cultures, from different parts of the world. Returning to Stella and my first reaction on seeing a black child, my concern was not to put her into a category but simply to accept her as the human being she obviously was. She is probably a grandmother now living somewhere in England.

I have known nasty racism in the 1970’s. At school, boys got away with insults like You fucking Jew! They spoke of Pakis in Bradford, less about niggers than in America. Most of the immigration into the UK at that time was from Pakistan and India. Black people mostly came from the West Indies, so would be descendants from slaves who had been transported at some time to that part of the world. I have lived in the East End of London, and some of the nicest people I have known were from the ethnic communities. I ate many an Indian curry in Brick Lane in the late 1970’s. In the early 1990’s, I walked around the Algerian districts of Marseille in my cassock and bought things in their shops. They were charming and most respectful, as I was of them, also in their long baggy thobes. Muslims are far from being all terrorists or murderous! Some Algerians are risky, as Fr Charles de Foucault found to his cost, but generally the Moroccans and Tunisians were (are) polite and respectful of traditional Christians. What is in my mind is living with the humanity of people regardless of their culture, faith and ethnic origins. I simply have no problem with them, unless someone wants to do me some harm or steal from me. I am myself an immigrant into France – I was born in another country (England) and came here by choice – and went through the official process of acquiring dual-nationality. I speak the language and get on with people just fine.

The problem with the modern ideology is that, for our woke activists and politicians, multiculturalism asks us to concentrate on their differences. People are defined by identity: being of non-white races, women, gay, bisexual, transsexual and all other acronymes that have been added to the alphabet soup. In the 1970’s, homosexual people were under pressure to come out, and not to stay in the closet. The problem is that when a person thrusts his life and ideology in my face, I am not obliged to believe that it is right or normal for all, quite apart from the Church’s moral teachings. That person has created conflict rather than living his or her private life in a discreet and dignified way. Transgenderism has become almost a fashion as opposed to a small minority of people who have exceptional medical conditions or the recognised psychiatric condition of gender dysphoria. The busload of false women meeting Pope Francis deeply disgusted me – and many others! The problem is that each identity asserts itself and becomes opposed to all the others. Thus we now have pro-Palestinians who are saying the same horrible things about Jewish people as the Nazis did in their time.

Radicals like to emphasise the idea that rational universalism has failed and society has fragmented because it undermines the grip and control of the dominent elites. The problem with emphasising difference and fragmentation is the creation of a new form of racism and discrimination like I knew in the 1970’s. Racial thinking consists of believing that people are fundamentally different, and that some are perhaps sub-human. In past times, white people (Arians) were considered as being at the top of the ladder, and then other races were put on different rungs, going down to people who would be assimilated to apes or other non-human animals, or even trash to be disposed of. This ladder has simply been turned onto its side, and categories of people are still divided and opposed. If this is so, human beings cannot transform themselves and transcend their circumstances of life. We remain in the same dialectical and binary thinking.

This division is a most profoundly anti-human way of looking at humanity. We are now trapped forever in the identity that is projected on us – until individuals break out of the identity cells. In Iran, women are fighting with their lives to get rid of the hijab or veil. In Europe, the hijab has become an identity symbol, and the women concerned have no voice to protest. There are black men in the USA who vote for Donald Trump (we have the right to disagree with them) and believe in conservative and western values. Humanity is more important to them than being black, as it is for us whites, or Indians, Chinese, etc.! We are not caricatures but humans. This is true cosmopolitanism such as Novalis aspired to in the 1790’s. This does not mean the melting pot, or surrendering our local traditions and beliefs. What is does mean is that the value of the human person transcends our local and cultural characteristics and that we can find unity and put an end to war.

I believe I have come a step nearer to criticising the ongoing ideologies in the name of Christian humanism and our aspiration for a more just and peaceful world. At least, I try, given the difficulty we have in finding accurate information about what is going on in the world.