Thought for the Day

Radio 4 is more or less the soothing soundtrack of my life. Until Thought for the Day comes on, that is. It’s the that there is an overwhelming urge to shove the radio into the washing-up bowl, or maybe into the oven with the heat turned up.

It’s very weird to get this urge in the middle of a programme dedicated to pumping out the latest political horrors, which I can more or less listen to with equanimity.

The trouble with Thought for the Day is that it isn’t. It seems to trot out a succession of simpering nincompoops, with the Christian contingent being the poopiest. They have maybe heard of thinking, but prefer instead to broadcast conventional platitudinous crapola.

To be fair, there are one or two regulars who do challenge you with odd angles and interesting takes. Some leave you thinking for days. But most don’t. 

Bertrand Russell famously advised against trying to discourage thinking on the grounds that you are sure to succeed.

Once again, this morning some monotonous speaker was holing up Julian of Norwich as a sort of model thinker for these Covid times.

Now there are so many problems with this that it is hard to know where to start. Julian of Norwich spent her life as an anchorite, holed up in s small cell in St Julian’s Church, Norwich. She was completely cut off from the world, did not leave her cell, and had two maids who provided for her physical needs.

While I am very much for the idea of individual personal development, and even more for personal choice, this was clearly a woman with enormous issues. She did not so much have baggage as freight. Nowadays she would be identified as having mental health problems, and would, I hope, receive care and support.

But is she a role-model for today ? I don’t think so. Of course, her approach of complete isolation from the world would have worked a treat during the pandemic, but few of us would like to adopt it as a life-style. 

As with other anchorites, when Julian first moved into her cell, the funeral rites would have been said to signify that she was ‘dead to the world’. This does feel very fitting for such an anti-life approach.

We know little of her earlier life, and even that is a generous statement. We do not even know her given name. But it is worth asking what possible events and trauma formed a personality so fearful of the world and determined to withdraw from it so completely.  It is the response to life of someone who has sustained life-changing psychological injuries. 

To hold her up as a model for living today seems perverse, aberrant, slightly twisted. And unthinking.