I have had very little to say these last few days about Justin Welby, resigned Archbishop of Canterbury, as with the English Prime Minister Kier Starmer. I have watched videos on YouTube and seen articles on Google News, at least those that are not paywalled. None of the the various clashing collective opinions have totally convinced me, and I was surprised that Archbishop Welby resigned. There are plenty of videos about Mr Starmer having being obliterated by Nigel Farage and left with the only option of resigning. It has not happened.

As is my usual way, I am not convinced by any of the positions, for or against, but one side seems to have a little more probability than the other. It would seem that Mr Starmer is a liar, a corrupt person and applies the law differently to different segments of the population leaving many people with a sense of anger, disappointment and unfairness. The only thing that can really refute lies is time, waiting for facts to be known with certitude. I am a sceptic in the way John-Henry Newman reserved his judgement until the truth could be known with certitude. Many years of pain and suffering have brought me to this way of thinking and resisting the baying of the crowd.

I discovered the YouTube channel of someone called Piers Cross, who has attributed the problems of church bureaucracy, and politics by extension, to posh boarding schools. I watched this one about Archbishop Welby.

I also watched his introductory video which he did about ten years ago. I recognised some of the things he went through like gangs and bullying. I too went to boarding schools because my father desperately sought a solution for a son who was clearly suffering from family life. My late parents were caring and good, not a trace of abuse, and I still have the best of relations with my brother and two sisters. During my childhood, one sister was quite “overbearing”, the other sister more distant in her little corner, and my brother also in his world of collecting things and developing his numerous hobbies. I did very badly at school, whether it was being bullied at Castle Street Primary School in the parish of St George’s, Kendal, or other solutions my father tried. I could tell Piers Cross that my problem was not boarding schools but all schools.

The two boarding schools I attended were Wennington School near Wetherby in Yorkshire and St Peter’s School in York. I discussed some aspects of this experience in my blog article Tom Brown’s Schooldays. St Peter’s followed a decision by my father in a more conservative direction after the failure of various more “modern” ideas of education. Nevertheless, St Peter’s had had the privilege of Peter Gardiner who was a reformer in something like the spirit of Dr Arnold of Rugby. I have an extremely good impression of this school today in bringing the best of young human beings, though I detect a slight whiff of wokery! I say in complete candidness that I was a case of undetected high-functioning autism for which I underwent psychiatric diagnosis just a few years ago. Such a condition would be unimaginable in the 1960’s and 70’s except in the most severely handicapped. The human psychè is so complex that no single system of education can be perfect.

If we want to be completely honest, the issue of not education, in day or boarding schools, but humanity. In its natural state, humanity follows the instincts of most animals in competition for food and sex. The power of dominant males ensures a natural selective breeding and the survival of the fittest as Charles Darwin called it. In human society, these instincts are expressed as power, money and sexual dominance. The dominant male kills his competitors or expels them from the tribe. These are thoughts that inspired Friedrich Nietzsche as he contemplated the Übermensch and Zarathustra. Jung would have found a very powerful archetype here as he sought a balance between brute strength and empathy as emphasised by Christ in the Gospels and the contemplative Christian tradition. Would a psychopathic or narcissistic criminal be no more than an unsuccessful alpha male who was beaten by another stronger than he and one who holds political legitimacy?

It is a very dark and nihilistic view of humanity, deserving nothing less than a planet-killing meteorite. It is this reductio ad absurdam that relativises the question of boarding schools. There are many institutions in which young men are educated collectively, not least the day school, the Armed Forces, university colleges, seminaries. You name it. Prisons are designed to bring out the worst in bullies and dominant criminals to destroy the weaker men who fell the wrong side of the law.

We Christians seek a kinder world where human beings matter to each other in a relationship of love.

At the Nuremberg Trials of the leading war criminals in 1945-46, the American Army appointed a psychologist, Dr Gustav M. Gilbert, to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants. Gilbert reported to the Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson:

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to recognise and venerate the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself in other persons. This principle features in all religions and in the works of many philosophers and scientists. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – as Jesus said. Empathy implies recognition of human dignity and worth in others that one recognises in oneself. This is often what lacks in comments written, less so in this blog than certain others, by some people otherwise claiming to be Christians. Empathy is surely the yardstick by which we can judge all morality, goodness or evil.

However, we can be drawn to empathise with toxic and bad people, and that is our Achilles Heel of weakness. It can cause us to conform to mass ideologies contrary to science and reason. It is through empathy also that totalitarianism and ideology can poison humanity. We approach the very bottom of the rabbit hole of sin, that of humans and that of the powers of darkness. Errors of empathy and exploitation made by the evil “Führer” of that openness to the other bring us around full circle as we are forced to defend ourselves, even by killing in a just war or another situation of self defence.

Christ came to save us from ourselves, to give us the hope of being newly created as human beings in the created world. I don’t blame boarding school for my difficulties, but rather this reality of humanity that can soar high and fall to the darkest places. It is easier to discover the depths of the ocean or the furthest reaches of space and other worlds than to understand the other person just next to me. We can communicate by language, become friends, fall in love, but something always emerges from the nozzle of weirdness sooner or later. I spend most of my time alone, though I try to be good and kind with others. I try to be a gentleman as my parents and schoolmasters expected of me – but prudence, that Queen of Virtues, has to remain.

Some of you reading this will have suffered in life, others have breezed along in the corridors of institutional conformity. I have less and less trust in institutional churches and political ideologies. Evil in individuals can be rooted out and punished. That is less easy at the level of societies and nations. Consider the cost of defeating Hitler and other similar archetypal monsters. The worst was not the absurd methhead with the Charlie Chaplin moustache and the shaking hand, but the ideology that had possessed the souls and minds of millions of ordinary people.

We have to be ourselves.