Qualms about Callings

Believing one has been chosen must be nice. History suggests it's probably wrong. And dangerous.

“I do think it is the reason I have been called to public service. I genuinely believe life is a test and you are accountable to God,” the Home Secretary recently told Sir Tony Blair, a man not ungiven to messianic moments of his own. Remember the “hand of history”…

Let us pass over Ms Mahmood’s narrow, if common, definition of public service. If she serves the public, then logically those who enable her to do so, do too – the people who produce her food, the people who produce the energy her office uses, the people who make the tyres for her ministerial limo. And so on.

Let us pass over her second sentence too. She may be completely right, she may be right about the general idea but not the specifics, or she may be flat wrong. We cannot tell. It would probably be useful if more people agreed with her. The range of cultures which have posited some sort of post-mortem existence, the nature of which depends on an individual’s Earthly behaviour, suggests that, whatever the truth of any particular belief system, religion is a helpful technology for persuading people to behave well when they do not have to.

Let us, instead, think about Ms Mahmood’s belief that she has been “called” to serve. She is not the first person to have had a similar intuition. Joan of Arc had visions which told her to save France. And she did. Whether or not this was a good thing rather depends on the side of the Channel on which you sit. Ayrton Senna believed during one lap of Interlagos that he had achieved a mystical union with God. Perhaps he had, perhaps he had not. He was still a couple of seconds quicker than everyone else.

On the other hand, though, in nineteenth century China, Hong Xiuquan decided he was the brother of Jesus Christ and had been called to convert the Middle Kingdom. The failure, 14 years and up to 30mn deaths later, of his Taiping rebellion, suggests he was probably wrong.

Hong’s story, and those of countless others who have adamantly insisted to the doctors in their asylums that they have been chosen or picked to accomplish some divinely ordained mission should make us sceptical about human intuitions as a guide to the divine will. Unless, of course, you choose to believe that God suddenly decided he could do with 30mn fewer Chinese people. Which would require a slight update to most mainstream theology…

But if it should give us pause, should it not also give pause to those who make those claims? If others have claimed to have a calling or a purpose and been wrong, why should they think they are right when they do so?

Because they are human, probably.

As we all know, to err is human. As we all forget, we err all the time.

Give the wrong answer to a question. That was a mistake. Reach into the wrong pocket for your keys, that was a mistake. Call someone by the wrong name, that was a mistake. Mistakes we all make all the time. Human cognition is a success in the Churchillian sense – we go from failure to failure and never once lose our enthusiasm. No matter how often we have been wrong in the past, we assume we are right at present.

This is not a charity we extend to others. Their mistakes are a reflection of their underlying reality, they tell us who they are. Ours are just random noise in the signal of our assumed correctness. They named Henry VII as Henry VIII’s successor – they’re an idiot. We think the father followed the son, we were having a bad day. We didn’t hear the question properly. We were distracted. We never allow our belief in our own wisdom to experience that greatest tragedy in science – a beautiful theory ruined by an inconvenient fact.

Believing one is divinely inspired while thinking that others who make the same claim should be sectioned is human, all too human. In one of the irregular verbs beloved of the Yes, Minister writers: I am inspired, you should be locked up, he/she is a spittle-flecked loon.

As an agnostic, a calling is not something I can experience. If something were to call me, I would have to believe it to exist, and so would stop being an agnostic. Even in my more Daoist moods, knowing that I had been called would mean knowing something about the Dao which is both unnameable and unknowable.

That does not mean I cannot see the attraction. Being called means one is special. Different to others. Picked out of all humanity for a mission. One has a destiny, not just a fate. Who (apart from Aeneas who spends most of the Aeneid trying to get out of his) wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t want to be plucked from the chorus line of humanity and given a starring role, the eminence we tell ourselves is our due?

For it is always a starring role. People are always called to positions of authority and status, never to clean the loos in a provincial service station (another undeniable public service), the divine imprimatur being given to desires for distinction. Priests lead their congregations, ministers lead the country. Both stand at the head of their flock, not among it. The humble are called to be mighty, the mighty are rarely called to be humble.

If we can understand the impulse (in those who have the conceptual machinery to produce it), that does not, of course, mean we should endorse it or encourage it.

“Virtue,” wrote Adam Smith, “is more to be feared than vice, for its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.” A person with a calling is a person, like the Blues Brothers, on a “mission from God”. Nothing, not the bar owner, the State and City Police, or even the Illinois Nazis can be allowed to get in their way, as the carnage of the final car-chase shows. Those who do, those who stand against someone called by God, stand against Him. Not just opponents but heretics. And history has never been kind to heretics. Even, or especially, when they are right.

This is not to suggest that Ms Mahmood is currently preparing her stakes. But in a world in which erring is inevitable, the quick recognition of mistakes is vital. Not something any of us is very good at; our egos twist and turn to deny it. But not something made any quicker by believing one’s actions have divine sanction.

Ms Mahmood could have asked Tony Blair about that. She couldn’t ask the 3mn dead Iraqis he left behind. Was that his calling?