a little requiem

Yesterday morning we came into our office to discover that the tree outside our window had been cut down. I loved that tree! It sheltered us from the intrusive gaze of the engineers across the courtyard. It hosted a myriad of birds, who sang and squabbled in its branches for our entertainment. In autumn its leaves slowly caught fire, shrivelled in the flames and fell.

Now we are exposed to the engineers, bereft of the charm of the birds, detached from the slow rhythm of the seasons. And we strongly suspect it's in aid of the construction of more parking spaces.

O Lord, deliver us from the wanton destruction of trees, the sinful pursuit of parking space, and all such evils. Amen.

sons of korah

I don't listen to much explicitly 'Christian' music, but I do listen to Sons of Korah - a lot. They sing the Psalms - pretty much just the Psalms - and they focus on the lament psalms. Lyrics about anger, grief, longing, desire for revenge as well as hope, peace, celebration. They are serious musicians, and seriously thoughtful about what they do. If you haven't had the opportunity to hear them, you can download a couple of songs, read their commentaries, look at the artwork they use here.

They live down the road from us (well, 80km or so!) but are touring NSW and the US in the next few months. If you get a chance, go listen!

needing and reading

A few preliminary thoughts on a subject I've been pondering:

When I was in ministry (the other sort) we ran a course on small groups that began by asking the very important question: what are small groups for? The 'correct' answer was that small groups are for spiritual growth and that such growth is achieved primarily through the study of Scripture (with prayer, the formation of community, the support of each other growing out of that study). It was one version of the reformed evangelical concern to 'let the Bible set the agenda'. Biblical small groups were specifically contrasted with groups that start with 'human' agendas, with our problems or our ideas about what we need. Thus studies of books of the bible were inherently superior to topical studies, sharing times were inherently less important than bible study times, etc.

I don't want to dismiss that model of small group - I think it is wise to continually submit ourselves to lengthy swathes of the narrative and reasoning that make up Scripture as a way of training our minds to look beyond our own obsessions. Somebody wisely said that we shouldn't read the Bible passages that say what we want to hear; we should read the Bible passages that are addressed to people in our situation. That takes wide reading. And I'm sure it is right that groups can become focused on personal problems in ways that are selfish and self-desctructive. Even leaving aside, however, the postmodern question of whether 'our agendas' can so easily be dismissed, my experience leads me to question some of the assumptions behind this approach.

Here's what I've found: The times when I have really listened and learned from Scripture in life-transforming ways have been the times when great need or disaster has made me desperate to hear God say something. That's when I come to God's word hungry, searching, serious. I don't think my need necessarily distorts my reading any more than my indifference at other times might. I think it sharpens my spiritual senses.

How odd, then, that in our small groups and our church services we often explicitly try to remove that sense of need. I've heard so many prayers at the beginning of such meetings that say 'Please help us to clear our minds of our worries, our concerns, the things that press in on us... and help us to focus on what you have to say to us today.'

I think it would be great if we prayed differently - if we prayed in ways that recognise those needs and fears, recognise that they matter to God, recognise that if he has something important to say about our lives at all, it's something that impacts on those needs and fears. We don't need our minds 'cleared' so we can hear, we need to hear so our minds can be transformed. And the transformation will almost certainly be a matter of those very needs and fears that are part of us.

good books

I finished a very rough draft of chapter 5 of my thesis on Friday! The conclusion was in dot points, which is NOT a good sign, but Friday was my last possible deadline, so I handed it in as it was. That freed me up to read some non-work-related books, including (in order of weight!):

Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate - the second in his series about Isabel Dalhousie, a philosophical Edinburgh sleuth. I don't think this series is his best (compared to the Ladies Detective Agency, von Igelfeld or Scotland Street books) but it's still very good. Favorite line: 'From the perspective of the cheese counter, Schopenhauer seemed very far away'.

I went to hear McCall Smith at the Melbourne Writers Festival a month or so ago, and he was even more delightful than his books. He told very funny stories with an entirely straight face until he got to the punch line, when he would dissolve in fits of giggles.

James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers - I really enjoy the Peter Wimsey mysteries, even though I have to suppress certain loud inner protests against the terrible snobbery of it all. Harriet Vane is the real star of the books for me, and DLS comes across in this biography as sharing most of her good qualities: courage, intelligence, loyalty, a passionate devotion to ideas and scholarship. She does not seem to have been a comfortable person at all, however, and it's hard not to feel sorry for the illegitimate son who she sent off to her cousin and only took notice of when he became 'interesting'.

David McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story and Offense - I'm reading this on the train on the rare occasion that I get a seat, so I'm moving slowly! So far, I've really appreciated his thoughtful treatment of the story from Matt 15: 21-28, where Jesus describes the Canaanite woman as one of the 'dogs under the table'. As McCracken says, this is a deeply offensive thing to say! I recently heard a sermon on this passage that said Jesus was being affectionate, but that seems entirely unconvincing to me. He calls her a bitch! McCracken places it in the broader context of Matthew's narrative, where the theme of Jesus as offence is important. The woman - unlike the Pharisees in the preceding passage - is not offended by Jesus, but presses on and gets what she desires. 'Blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me' says Jesus in Matthew 11. It's a profound challenge to the way we see Jesus, I think.

Now I need to stop reading (and blogging) and start editing chapter five!

footy fever

This may not mean much to those of you who haven't experienced Melbourne's love affair with Australian Rules, but I realised on Friday that I had no idea who was playing in the Grand Final this weekend. Quite an achievement in a city (and a department) full of footy fans. One of my fellow postgrads is even doing his PhD on football fan-dom as religious devotion. I remained blissfully unaware of the details until this morning. Swans beat Eagles by 4 points, apparently.

more on religion and reform

As a historian of evangelicalism with an evangelical heritage, I take what I study fairly personally. Much of it leaves me quite ambivalent. For example, I've just been re-reading Roy Porter's book English Society in the Eighteenth Century - an excellent little introduction to the period. Porter has lots to say about the evangelicals, which is appropriate given how significant they were in England during the eighteenth century. He chronicles lots of things that make me wince. For example, in 1800 the Evangelical Magazine published a "Spiritual Barometer" that allowed you to measure your spiritual state (presumably against the spiritual state of others). Down at the bottom end near 'perdition' were such behaviours as 'Parties of pleasure on the Lord's Day', 'Love of novels, etc', 'levity in conversation' and 'family worship only on Sunday evenings'. How handy! In 1793 the same magazine assured its readers that 'Novels generally speaking are instruments of abomination and ruin. A fond attachment to them is irrefragable evidence of a mind contaminated and totally unfitted for the serious pursuits of study, or the delightful exercises and enjoyments of religion.' (p.309)

More serious, to my mind, was the paternalism of the evangelical reformers - their concern for the poor seemed so infected by a sense of their own superiority and a desire to control. As one reformer wrote: 'The labouring poor demand our constant attention. To inform their minds, to repress their vices, to assist their labours, to invigorate their activity and to improve their comfort - these are the noblest offices of enlightened minds in superior stations'. (p.292)

I am profoundly uncomfortable with the moralism and paternalism of my evangelical forebears. And I am profoundly uncomfortable with the extent to which the flaws in their approach to reform are swept under the carpet by modern hagiography. We must be able to analyse and critique them if we are not to repeat their mistakes. The self-righteous Christians in I heart Huckabees (whom I discussed in an earlier post) are the descendants of these evangelicals, and it is no coincidence that George W. is a Methodist. And yet, as Porter concludes:

'For all the self-congratulatory rationalism of the Enlightenment, it was Christian zealots who were the selfless reformers of abuses... What first galvanised large sections of the workforce into self-help and self-respect were not polite letters, Enlightenment rationalism or Deism, but Methodism and New Dissent.' (p. 183-184)

And for that, I am proud of my heritage.

Pub Aid

Cheery little article in The Age today about a pub in Abbotsford that sells 'guilt-free beer' (who would have thought there was guilt attached to beer-drinking in Australia?) as a way of supporting Cambodian charities. And has a free theatre space, no pokies and lots of community spirit.
Wish there was a pub like this near my house!

Methodism

I have just written a review of this book for the history journal I help edit. It was my first review, so I felt the need to be professionally restrained. What I wanted to write was an extended rave along the lines of: This is the best book on Methodism that has ever been written. It is magnificent! It is sparkling, erudite, thoughtful and enlightening. It will transform the way Methodism is studied. David Hempton should be crowned with laurel and cheered around the academe. etc. etc.

Really, it is very good. If you are at all interested in the history of modern Christianity, you should read this. Methodism, which two hundred years of institutionalising and academic study has managed to make boring, emerges here as the fascinating, diverse, energetic movement that it was. How it grew! From a handful of followers in the 1730s, to the largest Protestant denomination in the US by the eve of the Civil War. If you include Pentecostal believers among the heirs of this movement, Methodism looks even more significant, with some scholars suggesting that there will be more than a billion Pentecostals before 2050. Methodists were involved in converting individuals, planting churches, sending missionaries and establishing educational and charitable institutions by the hundred. They have been an enormously significant cultural force in the North and South.

Why Methodism grew (and why it declined in the twentieth century); why it spread (and why it failed to take root in some places); who Methodism attracted (and who it offended) - these are the questions that Hempton explores. He thinks, for example, about the tensions within Methodism, the competition between Methodism and other movements, the way money was spent by Methodists, the relationship between Methodism and those on the margins of society. He emphasises throughout one of the most interesting aspects of Methodism - the majority presence of women in the movement. His call for more study of how this shaped Methodism is one I hope to respond to in my future work.

Anyway, read the book. It's terrific.

Miyazaki

The TV card is vindicated! News just in is that SBS is showing a series of films by the anime director Miyazaki. Miyazaki is probably most famous in the West for his Academy Award-winning film Spirited Away, but he's made plenty of others. The ones I've seen have been thoughtful, amusing, original films.

On Wednesday, 28 September, SBS screens Ghibli: The Miyazaki Temple. This documentary looks at the growth of Japanese animated cinema through the world of Miyazaki and his Ghibli studio. The documentary will be followed by the Miyazaki film Porco Rosso. Throughout October, four Miyazaki films will screen on SBS including Laputa:Castle in the Sky, 10pm Wednesday 2 October; Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 10pm Wednesday 9 October; Kiki's Delivery Service, 10pm Wednesday 16 October; and Spirited Away 10pm Wednesday 23October.

speaking kingdom

I've been having a conversation with a wise friend, Graham, about trying to find new words or frameworks within which to understand and explain my faith. I don't doubt that Jesus is worth following or that 'in him we live and move and have our being', but the words I have learned to use in speaking about that to myself and others have become increasingly unconvincing. Graham wrote that the ministry he was involved with early in his Christian life was:

'... so focussed on salvation but I wasn't entirely sure exactly why we were alive - at least I didn't have the words to articulate it or the sense to live it. Having the source of life, and yet not feeling that this is life"to the full" somehow is maddening and doubt inspiring. I think it added to my philosophy when I crashed to "try every ill to find a cure" like an undergrad Kerouc fan looking for "authentic" experience. What we all need is something that bridges the high ideals of growing the kingdom and it's justice with the earthy pleasures and satisfaction of work/life that are so indisputably true (and the profound pain that goes with each) it doesn't need to be sophisticated, it just needs to be there and alive..'

Graham isn't just talking about language, but language seems crucial to me. The odd thing is that the Bible gives us a language for that kind of living. If you could somehow learn the language of Proverbs and Romans, of John and Song of Solomon, of the Psalms and Revelation, you would be able to speak both idealistically and realistically, of both the sublime and the street-level. Jesus speaks that language in the gospels! Learning that language must be like learning any language - immersion, practice, a willingness to make an idiot of yourself, love for the nuances and idiosyncracies, a deep desire to communicate. Instead, most of the time we seem to be like people who take a phrase book around with them and point to the words we think most approximate what we 'really' mean.

marvellous melbourne and the masterful Dutch.

I have just spent the weekend 'seeing' Melbourne with a couple of friends visiting from Queensland. Predictably, the only time I seem to get out and explore this wonderful city is when I'm showing people around! We only had two days together, so we really packed it in. We went to the Dutch Masters Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, had lunch at Federation Square, went shopping at Bridge Road, had a drink at the Gin Palace, ate dinner in Chinatown and listened to jazz in Bennett's Lane... and that was just Saturday! Yesterday we went to the Vic Markets and had coffee in Lygon Street before church. I'm completely exhausted, which probably explains why I usually spend my weekends on the couch with a book!

The Dutch Masters Exhibition was fascinating. In my Anglo arrogance, I was surprised to discover how significant the Netherlands was (were?) in seventeenth-century Europe. Most of what I know about this period comes from Neil Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, a rollicking series of novels set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The novels are about alchemy, slavery, Barbary corsairs, Isaac Newton, royalty, philosophy, religion, forgery and lots of other interesting things. Andrew and I read them out loud to each other, which took a long time but was lots of fun. In the series, Amsterdam is a centre of trade and (relative) religious tolerance and that does seem to have been the historical situation if the exhibition is to be trusted. Certainly, though Amsterdam had a Calvinist history, it was a much better place to be a Jew than almost anywhere else in Europe. And as a number of quotes at the exhibition emphasised, in keeping with the success of Dutch trade, the values of frugality, temperance, reliability were highly prized. Max Weber, come on down. Having said that, a large proportion of the artefacts on display were elaborately designed vessels used in drinking games!

I'm not sure if I should be at all concerned by the fact that even though I'm a 'professional' historian, I'm developing my understanding of this period on the basis of a few novels and an art exhibition....

demon on the desktop

Life in Crankersville changed forever last night: we got TV. After nearly four years of a TV-less marriage, Andrew inherited a TV card from a generous friend and has spent the last week or so getting it working. We can watch TV on our computer! A technical triumph, but I fear for our sanity and our marriage. To celebrate our possession we watched the late-night news on SBS - it took me two minutes before I was shouting at the screen. Tony Abbott (yes, him of 'as dead as John Brogden's career' infamy) taunting the Opposition with the information that at least on his side of the House they were friends. Somehow watching people's faces brings home the whole empty horror of politicking in a way that reading the papers does not. Print provides a buffer between me and my elected representatives that I would like to hang on to. Watching them I might have to leave to the more spiritually and emotionally mature.

narrative, character and community

I've been reading Stanley Hauerwas's book The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. It's a challenging read, intellectually and personally. Particularly for someone funded by the military-industrial complex, given that non-violence is central to his entire scheme of ethics. I can't do justice to the complexity of his overall argument here, but one aspect I have appreciated is his emphasis on the importance of character in ethical decision-making. He argues that the kind of character a person has formed determines the nature of the decisions they face. To use one of his examples, a person who has developed a non-violent character, when confronted with violence towards him or herself, is faced with a number of options but by virtue of his or her character those options do not include violence. This is not a matter of abstract principle, but a matter of the very person they have become. To quote Stanley himself:

`Once we resist the temptation to abstract "situations" and "cases" from their narrative context, we can begin to appreciate the testimony of many, both Christians and non-Christians, that in matters of significance even involving the "hardest choices" there was no "decision" to be made. Rather, the decision makes itself if we know who we are and what is required of us.' (129)

What I like about this approach is that it puts the emphasis not on those 'hardest choices' but on the day-by-day decisions that form our characters. These decisions, as Hauerwas argues, are not made in a vaccuum, but in a community that gives us a meaningful story by which to make sense of our lives. Either we make decisions that are true to that story, or we make decisions that reject that story and the meaning it offers. The gospel is one such story, and Hauerwas emphasises that it IS a story, not simply a set of propositions. The church offers us a community in which that story is continued. Our life within that community expresses the story and its meanings to others. Narrative, character, community - I think he's right.

getting emotional

My research is (broadly) into the way eighteenth-century Methodists constructed the experience of suffering. It continually brings me into contact with stories that both horrify and perplex. This is one of them:

In July 1758 Charles Wesley, Methodist preacher and poet, was sent a description of a mastectomy recently performed upon a Methodist laywoman. The description, entitled 'An account of Mrs Davis behaviour during the operation of her breast being cut out', was written by a woman who had been present during the operation. She wrote of Mrs Davis,

'While the inside of her breast was taken out she ask'd, if they had done cutting: I answer'd yes, and some thread being call'd for, she immediately said there is some in my work basket on the table: while they sew'd up the blood vessel, she said this pain is very great, she call'd on the lord to strengthen her and said I'm faint, and while she was going to receive some drops from the hands of a friend: I fainted away.'

For me, even the thought of the pain that Mrs Davis must have experienced is almost unbearable. This terse account and the emotional response is engenders raises an immediate question: how did eighteenth-century men and women endure suffering such as this? This is, in some ways, the central question that drives my research. But there are other equally interesting questions that this story raises. Later in this account the writer professes herself unable to understand why she fainted given that throughout the operation, she was at peace and 'entirely happy'. Her self-perception points to one of the many problems that the historian of emotions encounters. I struggle to believe that anyone could be 'entirely happy' while watching a friend suffer under the knife. But my struggle (and my immediate reading of her collapse as a physical response to unimaginable stress) is not necessarily a guide to the 'truth' of her emotional state, unless you believe that Freud's theories represent absolutes. Is it, in fact, possible or desirable to access such a 'truth' when reading about the experience of someone in the past? To put it more broadly, to what extent are emotions universal and to what extent are they socially constructed?

These are the kind of questions I'm reflecting on as I try to collect my thoughts on emotion for an article I'm planning to write. I still have a way to go before I'm coherent! Historians of emotion have considered these questions in more theoretical terms - I want to consider how they apply to the history of suffering in particular. Eighteenth-century Methodists conceptualised suffering in ways that modern historians have dismissed (or psychoanalysed) as unhealthy or unbelievable. I'd like to suggest that we take them more seriously on their own terms. But I also want to hold to my conviction that not everything is socially constructed - that we can identify with, sympathise with, understand other human beings across centuries as well as across distances, races, classes.

birds, bread, petals

This morning I walked to the station. I was walking and reading at the same time - a practice that has caused me trouble several times before! Halfway to the station, I passed a garden that contained the most beautiful blossom tree. I find blossom trees very moving - the contrast between the stark brown branches and the clouds of delicate pink petals. Beneath the tree stood an old lady, who was jerkily throwing handfuls of bread onto the lawn. Birds were darting in from every direction, fluttering and pecking, wheeling away to perch on the branches of the tree or the roof of the house.

At that moment, my eyes had just fallen on these words on the page I was reading.
Wind of God, blow far from us
all dark despair,
all deep distress,
all groundless fears,
all sinful desires,
all Satan's snares,
all false values,
all selfish wishes,
all wasteful worries.

Blow into us
your holy presence,
your living love,
your healing touch,
your splendid courage,
your mighty strength,
your perfect peace,
your caring concern,
your divine grace,
your boundless joy.

Wind of God,
blow strong,
blow fresh,
blow now.

The prayer, the darting of the birds, the kindness of the bread, the beauty of the petals undid me. I wanted to stand on the street and weep aloud for my dying grandmother, for my friends who suffer and yet have courage, for the carnage and horror in the news. So much dark despair and deep distress.

Wind of God. Your holy presence, your perfect peace, your boundless joy.

rough week

I'm having a rough week and don't really feel collected enough to write anything sensible about it. So here's my current favorite piece of graffiti (courtesy of the university toilet walls and in the face of some fairly serious competition):

What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it's all about?

fierce religion

I've been thinking about 'fierce religion' after reading an opinion piece by Pamela Bone in The Age (www.theage.com.au). Her basic argument is that good religion is the sort where the adherents 'politely ignore' the less palatable parts of their scriptures. Bad religion is the sort that has people passionately believing absurdities. She continues her argument with some statistics showing that formal adherence to religion seems to drop as prosperity and education increase, suggesting that improving all people's lives would put an end to religion altogether. She concludes that religion has its uses, but 'be grateful most people don't believe too fiercely'.

Today's letters page includes (of course) a couple of rejoinders - one of the 'I'm a passionate believer and I'm not a bad person' sort. This seems to me fairly unhelpful - none of us should be naive about the depths of our own propensity to violence, or the possibility that we will harness our own convictions to base causes. A couple of other responses occur to me.

Firstly, it is terribly sloppy thinking to equate fierce or passionate conviction with 'bad' religion. Without making grand statements about myself (who knows how I might use my convictions to damage others?) there are some useful historical contexts for considering this. Martin Gilbert's book The Righteous is a study of Europeans who protected Jews during the Holocaust. What is clear from his work is that Catholic teachings on the Jews contributed to popular anti-semitism and allowed a culture where the Holocaust could occur. Bad religion. What is also clear is that the majority of people who protected or saved Jews (at incredible risk to themselves and their families, usually with no desire for reward) did so out of religious conviction. Incredibly fierce conviction about the value of human life and the love of God for the persecuted sustained most of these'Righteous' Gentiles. Surely that's good religion.

I am reminded of the statement of a philosopher when she visited the site of Auschwitz. As she walked through those terrible gates she said 'I never want to be as certain of anything as the people were who built this place.' How inane. Only those who were that certain could possibly have confronted the powerful forces that built those gates. Only those who were that certain did. Of course religion is not the only possible source of such certainty. But I would argue that historically it very often has been.

Secondly, the suggestion that most believers cope with the uncomfortable parts of their scriptures by politely ignoring them suggests to me that Pamela Bone hasn't been in conversation with many believers lately. Thousands of years of thought, prayer, discussion and debate on such passages reduced to 'politely ignor[ing]' them. Sigh. It's hard not to find the underlying assumption that believers are mindless or heartless frustrating!

Thirdly, Bone's statement about secular societies obviously requires further investigation. The second response to her article published by The Age took issue with this statement by giving examples of 'secular' societies that were/are human rights disasters - the USSR, China etc. Again, this is not entirely convincing because these societies are not strictly secular - they are atheistic. If Bone is arguing that secular societies (ie. societies that protect the right to religious expression and practice but separate church and state) are 'best', she of course needs to explain what she means by 'best'. 'Happiness indicators' such as suicide statistics would not necessarily support her argument. Even assuming that she is right, however, she immediately finds herself in debt to those pesky 'fierce religionists' who passionately argued for the separation of church and state on the basis of religious conviction. All of this is of course discussed in the wide literature on the history of secularisation.

It would be encouraging to think that we could analyse and condemn the horrors of religious bigotry and violence without resorting to such sloppy distinctions between those who are serious (and therefore loonies) and those who are secular humanists who have adopted a bit of religion as a sentimental trimming. We Christians are, of course, capable of just such stereotyping!

snicker

Ship of Fools (www.shipoffools.com) has just closed its offensive religious humour competition. If you're into jokes about randy priests, you'll love it. I gave up after the first few, but salvaged this semi-precious gem:

A priest, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar.
The barman looks up and says "What is this? Some kind of joke?"

two good things

So far my blogging has been rather bleak. To balance that, here are two (completely unrelated) good things that I have encountered in the last 24 hours:

1) Today is Daffodil Day, so there are bright yellow clumps of daffodils (and daffodil-related paraphernalia) being sold all over the place. As I walked in the university gates this morning, there was a girl in front of me carrying a bunch of daffodils. She was being followed, at about head height, by an absolutely enormous bumble bee! It was just buzzing along cheerfully, presumably following the scent (sight? what kind of senses do bees have?) of the daffodils. Wonderful!

2) I have been reading Walter Brueggemann on the Psalms, in preparation for talks that I am giving in Brisbane next weekend. He has very good things to say. Here's one of them:

'I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God's 'loss of control'.'
(Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg: Minneapolis, 1984), 52)

Which is also wonderful, and leads me to sneak in a third good thing - yesterday I got the program for the conference I am presenting at in the States in November (the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, www.aarweb.org ). Walter Brueggemann (and Mark Noll, Miroslav Volf and Stanley Hauerwas) will also be speaking! I'm feeling much more enthusiastic about the conference as a result.

slavery and sympathy

After writing yesterday about the moral questions raised by 'I heart Huckabees', I sat down to read a number of journal articles about the eighteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery. The historical development these articles are concerned with is this:
'An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750. Among the movements spawned by this new sensibility, the most spectacular was that to abolish slavery. Although its morality was often qustioned before 1750, slavery was routinely defended and hardly ever condemned outright, even by the most scrupulous moralists.' (Thomas Haskell, 'Capitalism and the Origin of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I', The American Historical Review Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 339.)
There are two main questions that this development of 'sensibility' raises for me (and the authors of the articles I'm reading). Firstly, where did this new sensibility - in a sense, a new moral parameter - come from? Secondly, why was it so selective? That is, why did humanitarian reformers, for the most part, expend enormous amounts of energy on the abolition of slavery, the reform of prisons and asylums, the improved treatment of indigenous peoples, while largely ignoring (or even worsening) the situation of the working poor in Britain itself?

There are a number of reductionistic answers to these questions. The hagiography that developed around the humanitarian reformers portrayed them as moral giants who were motivated by a new vision of compassion that came entirely from some source external to their historical context - either a new understanding of the gospel (for the evangelical reformers) or their own moral character (for the utilitarians and others). This hagiography failed to explain the selective nature of the reformers' compassion and was thoroughly attacked in the revisionist accounts of Marxists and others. In many of the revisionist accounts, the reformers acted primarily as agents for social control. As members of the growing middle class, they used the moral authority gained through the reform movements to establish social and cultural hegemony. Simultaneously, they supported the establishment of ever-tighter legal and social restrictions on the working poor. (Foucault, of course, argues that the humanitarian reform movements themselves acted to create these restrictions). In such accounts the reformers are either profoundly hypocritical or entirely self-deceived as to their own motives.

The articles that I am reading attempt to provide more balanced explanations of the reform movements that take both the economic, social and cultural context and the compassionate urges of the reformers seriously. This makes for better history than either the hagiographical or revisionist extremes. But it doesn't make for simple explanations! How easy to 'do good' within the parameters of our own understanding. How difficult to see the motives that drive us or the consequences that ensue.