Writing to the Papers

Sir, Mr MacKichan’s letter about memorial hardwood trees (May 17) prompts me in my turn to suggest a modest proposal upon which the ‘Year of the Tree’ might look with special favour.

It is that, instead of allowing the spread of more large, bare, featureless, tarmac town car-parks, ready to roast cars in hot summer weather, we should pass a law requiring all car-parks to be planted with trees (whether or not in memory of loved ones): not fiddling pink cherries, which put out branches too near the ground and give little shade and less rest to the eyes, but proper English broad-leaved trees.

Consider the advantages: acres of ugliness beautified at a stroke; clearance for the tallest people and cars; maximum shade to keep cars cool; scarcely more consumption of ground space than with white lines; employment sweeping up leaves for the autumn unemployed; and an abundant supply of leaf mould for municipal gardens.

Similar tree-planting occurs to great effect on the Continent. Europeanism joins with common sense and the Year of the Tree in demanding that we follow suit. But I fear that this is the sort of proposal, humane but yielding little direct material gain, which would be put into effect not by any ordinary government, but only by a temporary dictator such as

Yours truly,
HENRY HARDY,
The Poplars, 7 Butler Road,
Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

[20 May 1972] 

Sir, Although nearly 52 years separates our ages, we both agree heartily with Mr Tyldesley (March 23) in his embarrassment at the custom of not applauding at musical concerts in churches or cathedrals. But we believe that there are signs that this puritan taboo will soon be a thing of the past.

For example, last time the Three Choirs Festival was held in Hereford Cathedral, one of us went to a concert on the second day. Clearly there had been some applause at an earlier concert, for the proceedings were opened by a peculiarly joyless cleric who made an announcement to the effect that we were reminded that the Dean and Chapter did not deem it seemly to applaud in God’s house. What joy when, after the splendid first item of the concert, the audience (not ‘congregation’!) burst immediately into spontaneous and loud clapping! We don’t know whether a similar announcement was made at later concerts.

It is of course a well-known fact that the Pope is applauded when he is carried round his basilica of St Peter in his sedia gestatoria.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY,
ARNOLD MALLINSON,
St Frideswide’s Vicarage,
19 Botley Road,
Oxford,
March 23

[28 March 1973; editorial cut restored]

Council help with trees

Sir — Why don’t we plant more trees in our streets? It’s one of the cheapest and most effective ways of beautifying an urban environment.

They are good at tree-planting in Continental towns, but many English authorities, when they manage anything at all, often only give us a smattering of pathetic pink cherries.

I recently moved into a nearly treeless Oxford street, and wrote to the city council asking whether they would consider planting trees in it. I received an encouraging and constructive reply. I learned that, though the street is considered too narrow for trees to be planted in the pavements, the council is ready and willing to provide and plant trees in residents’ front gardens, if the residents will maintain the trees once they are installed. If more residents were aware of this facility, and took advantage of it, parts of Oxford could be transformed.

The man to contact is Mr John Thompson, Landscape Architect in the City Engineer’s department at the Town Hall (telephone Oxford 49811, extension 250). His department issues a leaflet entitled The Gardens of the North Oxford Victorian Suburb which includes a list of trees suitable for various situations, not only in North Oxford. But these are only suggestions, and other suitable trees can be supplied as well. I hope that many of your readers will take up this opportunity.

[19 September 1980]

Sir, To the oddities mentioned by Geoffrey Sampson (August 20) I would add the following amazing provision (I quote from the official leaflet): ‘The translator, editor, compiler or reviser of a book, even if his name is on the title page, cannot be treated for PLR as an author of the book.’

If this means, as it surely must, that nothing can be paid under the PLR legislation to anyone who translates Homer, edits Dickens, compiles anthologies, or revises legal textbooks out of all recognition, the well-established tendency of the law to fly directly in the face of common sense is exemplified once more.

Yours faithfully,
HENRY HARDY,
August 20.

[26 August 1982]

Sir, The word Mr Rigby needs – for both substance and activity – is grease.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY

[2 October 1991; Mr Rigby had asked for a word to replace the verb ‘to butter’ that would apply to the use of butter substitutes on his bread]

Sir, Yes, Mr Philpott-Kent’s answers (letter, December 3) to the calculator questions set by the School Examinations and Assessment Council for seven-year-olds seem obvious – except for that mysterious drawing of a calculator display to the right of each question (report, November 18). The numbers shown in these displays seem arbitrary and redundant – what Wittgenstein called ‘a wheel that turns without being part of the mechanism’. Any number would do, and none is needed to solve the questions. Why then are the displays included at all? My seven-year-old couldn’t tell me. I think we should be told – perhaps by eight-year-old Rosie Enock, whose letter you published under Mr Philpott-Kent’s.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY

[7 December 1992]

Tyndale’s use of it and hym
From Dr Henry Hardy

Sir: Ashton Nichols says (letter, 3 October) that in his version of John's Gospel, William Tyndale ‘referred to divinity with a gender-neutral pronoun’, and makes much of this as a kind of prescient theological correctness.

But when Tyndale wrote ‘All thyngs were made by it’ etc., by ‘it’ he means, of course, not God, but the ‘worde’ previously discussed. (The Greek pronoun translated ‘it’ could be masculine or neuter, so we cannot be certain whether John meant God, as the Authorised Version has it, or the word. Not that it matters much here, since John has just said that the two are identical: ‘and god was thatt worde’).

It is ludicrous to read heresy or gender-neutrality into this passage: after all, at the end of the extract in your accompanying illustration Tyndale writes ‘the world by him was made’, perfectly normally.

Yours faithfully,
HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College
Oxford
3 October

[6 October 1994]

Sir, May I respond to the challenge from Mr James Willis to try to supply a better example of bathos than the adjacent book titles he quotes (letter, January 22)?

The magazine of Lancing College (where I was a schoolboy in the 1960s), in a list of publications by members of the staff, once placed next to one another a book by the chaplain, The Way, the Truth, and the Life, and one co-authored by the assistant chaplain, the Shell Guide to Lincolnshire.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY,
January 22.

[27 January 1997]

Sir, In my experience there are two standard results of having letters published in The Times (letters, June 26, July 3, 5): begging letters from Third World schoolchildren seeking financial support; long screeds in single-spaced typing from cranks urging the merits of strangely neglected panaceas for the world’s ills.

Why it should be thought that those who appear on your letters page should be unusually rich and charitable, or specially susceptible to intellectual junk-mail, I cannot imagine.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY

[10 July 1997]

Sir, In view of the discovery by reputable scientists that life is almost universally fatal, there is a pressing need for legislation to ban human reproduction. Why is the Government dragging its feet?

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY

[18 December 1997]

Sir, The one type of road sign not so far mentioned, I believe, in your correspondence (letters, May 25, 27 and 29; June 5, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28 and 30) is the flatly incomprehensible.

I cannot imagine what drivers in Oxford approaching the Martyrs’ Memorial from the north are expected to make of this notice under a sign prohibiting access to motor vehicles:

Except local buses taxis and licensed private hire at any time and except buses " 6pm–10am.

Hello?

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY,
Wolfson College, Oxford OX2 6UD.
July 2.

[3 July 2000]

Sir: Congratulations on your linked group of articles on ‘Faith and Reason’ (20 March) – rich fare even by your customary high standards.

Though I agree with much of what your contributors say, I gagged on one astonishing paragraph by Andrew Kenny in ‘Down with superstition’. He says that since ‘religious belief seems to be innate in man’, so that people are bound to ‘form religions’, ‘it is far better that they belong to the great religions’, with their accumulated wisdom and experience, than starting new ones, which lead to slaughter. (The old ones don’t?)

This strikes me as pernicious defeatism, based on the assumption that our species is incapable of growing in spiritual maturity. We have already come a long way from our primitive superstitious past, and there is no reason in principle why we should not progress further, and gradually free ourselves even more from the shackles of organised religion, as we have largely done from those of organised slavery.

Kenny’s argument is like saying that, since the impulse to do evil is innate (as Theodore Dalrymple also declares in ‘The evil that men do’ in the same issue), so that people are bound to be malefactors, it is far better that they should do wrong in ways with solid historical credentials rather than devising new forms of mischief.

My point is well stated by Isaiah Berlin in one of his most famous paragraphs: ‘the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past’; this is ‘perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity’.

Of course, Kenny may have in mind only the moral injunctions of a religion, not its metaphysics, but accepting the former while ditching the latter (his own position with regard to Christianity) isn’t what I call ‘belonging to a religion’. Nor is it enough to assuage the inborn need for religious belief whose ineluctability Kenny alleges. He doesn’t take the medicine he himself prescribes.

Henry Hardy
Wolfson College, Oxford

[27 March 2004]

Sir: Raymond Carr (‘A leading light amidst the gloom’, 3 April) makes a mistake worth correcting when he writes: ‘My intelligent pupils found in Karl Popper’s Open Society (1945) the defence of pluralism that was to become [Isaiah] Berlin’s hallmark.’ Popper himself, indeed, appears to suggest in his autobiography, Unended Quest (1974), that he anticipated Berlin’s pluralism. He observes there that ‘there always exist irresolvable clashes of values: there are many moral problems which are insoluble because moral principles may conflict’. This, he implies, is a view to be found in his Open Society.

When I first encountered these retrospective remarks of Popper’s, I read right through his famous two-volume wartime work in search of a passage that stated or implied Berlinian value pluralism. Not only did I not find any such passage, but there was clear evidence that, for the Open Society Popper at any rate, plurality of value was no more than a necessary transitional (if endemic) device on the path to unitary truth. For instance: ‘people with the most divergent cultural backgrounds can enter into fruitful discussion, provided they are interested in getting nearer to the truth’.

Berlin did not invent pluralism from the void (though he certainly put it permanently on the intellectual map). But Popper wasn’t there before him, since he didn’t subscribe to Berlinian pluralism, at any rate before Berlin made it a prominent theme of his own.

Henry Hardy
Wolfson College, Oxford

[not published]

Sir, I am sorry to see Dr Jonathan Sacks (‘I am a religious fundamentalist, and very proud of it’, August 14) falling for the standard canard of supposing that liberals must be relativists. On the contrary, their standards can be just as firm as his; but they do not attempt to impose their own particular relationship to them on other people.
 
Dr Sacks misunderstands the quotation he uses from Joseph Schumpeter, at any rate as it was deployed by Isaiah Berlin. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly’, wrote Schumpeter, ‘is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ The use of the word ‘relative’ here, without explanation, is certainly unfortunate, since it obscures the fact that the relativity in question is not relativity to our personal morality or to the culture we belong to, but to the human condition. Berlin uses the quotation in a famous passage about the immaturity of wanting our moral guidelines to be permanently inscribed in some metaphysical region independent of the transitory phenomenon of humanity, rather than accepting that they arise out of (and so die with) our species in its known form.
 
So when Dr Sacks writes ‘If kindness is only relatively good, why oppose cruelty which is only relatively bad?’ the answer is that, for human beings, kindness is absolutely good, cruelty absolutely bad (worse than almost anything else, in fact), and that this is recognised by the liberal every bit as much as by the fundamentalist – maybe more so.

Yours etc.,
HENRY HARDY,
Wolfson College, Oxford OX2 6UD.
August 16.

[not published]