Prisoners of style:

...When the highest wisdom is "don't get hurt...

...Those words have an antiquated sound...

...The people who still place faith, or what passes for faith, in that dream are offended when its assumptions are challenged...

...The good reason for such an aversion is the fact that people have been willing to die for horrible as well as noble beliefs, and Nazis have gone to their deaths with the same firm conviction as early Christian martyrs and those who resisted the Nazis...

...It is another case of religion refusing to take the place assigned to it by a secular society with a stake in seeing religion made an innocuous, subjective taste rather than a force for personal or social transformation...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...Trevor-Roper's irritation is one which has profound consequences...

...He is able to forgive error, and that is all well and good, but to prefer treachery to arrogance is downright odd...

...I had problems with the pastoral, particularly its relatively uncritical acceptance of the place of the nation-state, but it was a carefully worked-out document, very much in keeping with the traditional Catholic approaches to the place of government and the just war theory...

...Too much evil has been done in the name of truth for anyone to leap easily, or even to move at all, into the camp of certainty (whether religious, moral, or political) -Jim Jones makes people wonder why anyone is willing to put that sort of trust in anyone, and it is easy to equate the demand for allegiance of any sort with the mad allegiance which leads to Jonestown, Nazi victories, and holy wars...

...But this view is finally a hopeless one, and the paradox is that by asserting the fact that some things are worth dying for, we witness to a depth of life which the pragmatic survivalism of hawks and genteel liberals can't account for...

...I can imagine the Times saying that we must learn to live with slavery, some time before it was abolished, back in the days when abolitionists were naive...

...Trevor-Roper trots out to underscore it, there is the fact that what he says is wrong on the face of it, a weird arrangement of concerns...

...At the same time they voiced profound skepticism over whether nuclear conflicts could be kept limited, given the nature of the technology...

...Well, no, it really doesn't and the bishops made quite clear the fact that the whole concept of total war (whether conducted by nuclear or conventional means) is immoral...

...The self-sufficient Cambridge Communists were convinced that they alone knew how to save the world," Trevor-Roper says, and it is this conviction which galls him...

...This is the remnant of the Enlightenment dream...

...We are left with forms of polite behavior, and a reliance on the experts who will tell us what we must believe in order to belong to the "real world," which is, finally, the world of correct opinion...

...To a person who believes that one thing (the absolute truth that there are no absolute truths) any counter-claim will look arrogant, ill-mannered, naive, or all three...

...We are left with a distrust of any claim to truth, and the human need for meaning-which is not at all the same thing as the need for information-is left unsatisfied...

...The old ways (which had led to misery and death and the suppression of free thought) were dead, and for awhile there was hope that something better had been born in the effort to dethrone them...

...But the bishops aren't trying to hide, only trying to point out to a society which finds such reminds ers inconvenient, that there are moral truths which are worth living and even dying for...

...Paul have sent Timothy to the Christian cells of Greece, or the Jesuit general speed a doomed missionary to the secret priest holes of Elizabethan England...

...The uncomfortable fact is that martyrs in any cause probably all have the same feeling as they go towards it...

...There are some things we may not do, even in order to survive...

...There is an a-version to being told by anyone that there is such a thing as a truth which is worth one's life...

...What the bishops are saying, though, is clear enough: if something is inherently immoral, we must do more than learn to live with it...

...This reason"-the reason on which he hangs his judgment on that treachery is less offensive than arrogance-is the questionable belief that a left-wing victory in Spain would have led Hitler to conquer Spain and thereby win the war...

...But the alternative to the nobility of a Gandhi, or a Bonhoeffer, is the empty belief-or not a belief, not even a conviction, but the empty reaction which takes a political form, a response which expresses a form of despair-that no public moral meaning can be found at all...

...Which is understandable enough...

...Quite apart from the merits of this argument, and forgetting the gratuitously anti-Christian sentiments Mr...

...The despair which is implicit in Trevor-Roper's belief that conviction is worse than bad manners is one result of the collapse of the foundations of our post-Enlightenment culture...

...This heresy-the belief that the theories of experts may be challenged from a point of view the experts might find inconvenient-leads the bishops to "undermine any strategy of deterrence by opposing the targeting of Soviet cities -even to threaten retaliation for the destruction of American cities...

...as many writers (most notably George Steiner) have pointed out, the Enlightenment dethroned religious and political orthodoxies, and for the past couple of centuries we have acted as if reason and the right sort of education could get us through life...

...This insistence, as in the pre-nuclear era, that military attacks must be limited to military targets paradoxically validates the view of those who want to prepare to fight 'limited' nuclear war...

...Trevor-Roper but, apparently, the editors of the New York Times, whose editorial on the final version of the bishops' pastoral on nuclear weapons is as strange in its way as Trevor-Roper's review...

...they shouldn't...

...don't make mistakes," the heroic and noble are gone forever...

...Arrogance is, after all, in the eye of the beholder...

...The picture of the priestly Blunt, with his thin, precise voice, ordering the lives of others at the behest of 'our friends' in the Kremlin and laying a paternal hand on their shoulders as they leave his presence will remain with me as the perfect icon of the Cambridge Apostle in 1937...

...But it can be questioned whether any culture which believes in nothing at all except a tolerance for the latest arguments put forward by those in political power (those arguments always get a hearing, in any sort of culture) can last for very long, or if it should last...

...It was not possible to return to the religious and political orthodoxies of the past, nor could any modern orthodoxy satisfy those who were made understandably skeptical of all claims involving the whole of the self...

...No doubt Jesus or Gandhi would have offended Mr...

...Hitler and Gandhi both commanded allegiance, but that does not mean that allegiance of any sort should be withheld...

...it is also possible to hide from it...

...The Times, in its need to make the bishops appear naive, ignores this aspect of the pastoral...

...Nothing is worth living or dying for...

...So might St...

...The editorialist concludes that although we may never love the bomb, we must learn to live with it, since we can't un-invent it...

...What really seems to offend the editorialist is the claim that morality can matter enough to force us to oppose even experts and presidents...

...That is a hard truth-it always has been-and it is much easier to believe that there is no such thing as truth at all...

...More is involved here than a simple fear of making mistakes...

...Abandonment is the easier course...

...This much the editorial nods to, but then it goes on to criticize what the writer calls the "curious position" of the bishops, who "are not only attacking the main doctrines of the Reagan administration but also straying far from the prevailing theories of the arms control community...

...It is much easier to believe that there is not and cannot be any messiah at all than to do the more difficult task of discernment, the task of looking for the truth rather than abandoning the belief that there is any such thing as truth at all...

...But when the most highly educated society in the West democratically chose Nazism, when it not only accepted a Hitler as leader but cooperated in the murder of millions, everything our faith had been based on vanished...

...Trevor-Roper as much as the Cambridge Apostles...

...They include not only Mr...

...The fact that both had followers does not make Martin Luther King and Jim Jones the same...

...We must "manage the problems it poses...

...It is the triumph of style over substance, good manners over real decency or honor...

...or rather, we attempt to satisfy it by looking to sources which are finally too shallow to do the job...

...We revere the latter, don't understand the former, and find ourselves completely alienated from those who died for the sake of Nazism...

...There is little strain for an individual who avoids commitment to the search for truth, whatever the truth may be, and a person can live in a form of suspended animation for a lifetime...

...It is possible to hide in morality...

...We look to experts, for example, and continue to hope that in the right opinion, the right information, we will find the answers we need...

...Trevor-Roper, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in The New York Review of Books, and then sud-dently at the end of a sane review ther,e is this remarkable statement: "For this reason, although I can forgive their error and even, at a pinch, their treachery, I cannot forgive their arrogance...

...The editorial concludes with a bit of finger-wagging: "There's no place to hide, even in morality...

...You can't imagine the Times saying that we must learn to live with slavery, genocide, or child abuse, trying not to abolish them but rather to manage the problems they pose...

...Straight's autobiographical account of his days with the Cambridge Communists is given good solid treatment by H.R...

...But Hitler's ascendancy, and Stalin's murder of even more millions, ended that dream...

...That irritation, the willingness to equate all forms of conviction with the peculiar form political conviction assumed during the 1930s among the British upper classes, is really a manifestation of moral chastity in its most extreme form: withhold any allegiance or commitment in order to avoid doing the wrong thing...

...A culture may exist for a generation or two in such suspension, living from the moral capital of previous generations...

...But the existence of false messiahs does not mean that there is no such thing as religious truth, or no such thing as genuine moral or religious authority...