Utopía Está Aquí Ya
New philosophical, critical and creative non-fiction writing
by Cliff James
by Cliff James
A Very British Gethsemane
4th February 2023 - Cliff James
Late one afternoon during the torrid summer of 2016, I received a phone call that changed the material conditions of my life. The call was from my solicitor, David Greenwood, the head of the Abuse Compensation Claims department at Switalskis Solicitors, and he was calling with an update on my case. He was representing my claim for compensation from the Diocese of Chichester for the abuse I had suffered as a teenager at the hands of the former Bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, Peter Ball.
The Church insurers had finally put a price-tag on that abuse, measured the circumference of each intimate violation, the weight of its unquantifiable aftermath, subtracted reputational profit-and-loss variables, peeled the remainder, and were offering a modest financial settlement. David wanted to know if I would accept this settlement.
This telephone call came almost a year after Bishop Peter Ball had been sentenced to 32 months in prison for misconduct in a public office relating to the sexual abuse of 16 young men, and two counts of indecent assault against two teenagers. I had lived as a trainee monk with the Bishop for a year, from 8 October 1990 to 8 October 1991. I had been one of those teenagers.
Peter had run a monastic scheme for young men who wanted to experience the religious life. When I had first met him as a 17 year old, this monastic scheme had just been closed, but Peter said he would make an exception for me to enter. He said he could see something ‘different’ in me, something ‘special’, that Christ had chosen me to be one of his saints. I did not know then that such language was a typical opening move in the abusive process of grooming. I simply felt grateful to be chosen to live as a trainee monk in his house. The scheme involved rising at 5am to pray silently in the chapel, assisting with the daily religious services, cleaning the bishop´s house and tending his garden, obedience to his authority, keeping the silence. In time, he added more extreme, invasive practices. We had to go hammer-and-tongs for Christ, he had said. We had to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. We had to share in the humiliation and suffering of Christ in ways that I could not imagine. Most of all, we had to enter into the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, surrendering our own will to that of the highest authority.
At Peter’s sentencing at the Old Bailey in 2015, I had sat in the gallery while barristers read extracts of my own statements aloud, profoundly personal experiences announced to a crowded room, and I had watched as Peter Ball received his sentence. It was difficult to look at Peter directly. He had made me promise never to tell anyone what he did: he had told me that no one but God would understand. And yet, there we were – him in the dock, me in the gallery – the words of my statement still raw in the air.
After the old man had been sentenced and taken out of sight, I hesitantly began a claim for civil damages. I had not anticipated that the compensation process would take so many more months of interviews, cross-referencing of previous statements, meetings with psychologists and in-depth probing into the minutia of my life after the Bishop – from dysfunctional relationships to mental health issues to drinking habits and the taking of other substances. As with the abuse, there was no space for privacy during the invasive compensation process.
When I finally received that telephone call from David Greenwood, the amount the Church insurers were willing to offer was a little more than I would earn in a year in my part-time office job. It was barely a month after the EU referendum and every day, as I had walked between my home and office in West Yorkshire, I had passed beneath the laminated signs that proclaimed ‘LEAVE’ from every lamppost. The compensation money would be enough to take those Leave signs literally and emigrate from England. If I was careful and lived simply and frugally, the money might stretch for a year, maybe two. That might be sufficient time for me to write another book. Most of all, it could enable me to leave England – with its outdated institutions and regressive politics – and start over somewhere new.
And yet, guilt is a strange and constant companion, an uninvited guest that lingers long after the abuser has bolted. It is a shadow that lengthens in the corner of the room when you trust someone enough to break the silence. It whispers the judgments you imagine everyone must be thinking about you: “Are you telling tales? Why didn’t you tell anyone at the time? If it had really been abuse, wouldn't you have run away or fought back like any normal person?” It is an everywhere-presence that appears for no reason in a supermarket queue, or scrutinises you as you walk down a street, or sits at an empty cafe table with a disapproving look, an apologise-for-yourself expression. And when you do dare to tell someone you trust, or give a statement to the police, or speak to a solicitor about compensation, it digs its nails in places that only you can know.
David Greenwood was still waiting on the telephone for my answer. If I hesitated to accept the Church’s offer, it was because of that shadow in the corner of the room, the expectation that I ought to be ashamed rather than accepting money. If I answered too quickly, it was because I feared my hesitation could be interpreted as disappointment with the financial offer. You can never win with the shadow: it always thinks the worst of you. Recognising that this presence was dead tissue from an ancient injury, I told David that I accepted the settlement.
Nothing happened immediately. One month passed and then another, walking to and from work beneath those hostile ‘Leave’ signs, whose purple was fading but still lingered like a bruise that never quite went away. When the settlement cheque finally arrived in the post in the early autumn, I took those signs literally and left England for good. It was partly the particular political moment that drove me abroad at that time: a need to flee the public discourse of vulgar nationalism and British exceptionalism that followed the EU referendum. More than that, it was a long-standing desire to run away from a country that revered privilege over truth.
I had witnessed first-hand the rottenness at the heart of the British Establishment. Various bishops and MPs, respectable headmasters of public schools, an archbishop, a law lord and a prince had allegedly manoeuvred in support of Bishop Peter Ball to shield him from scrutiny and prosecution. It was this blatantly broken system that I decided to leave behind and search for a different kind of society, one that valued the dignity of all its members, the marginalised no less than the powerful. It was, and still is, a Utopian pursuit – but no less necessary for that.
* * *
After leaving Dover by ferry, I arrived in Calais to volunteer at the refugee camp nicknamed ‘The Jungle’. The money from the Church had been a symbolic gesture to compensate for inhumane treatment, so it was important for me, as a humanist, to turn that gesture into practical humanitarian acts. The work in the Calais Jungle was simple but essential: sorting tents, blankets and emergency clothing, preparing medical kits, hot meals, materials for shacks. After a while, the Calais camp was forcibly dismantled by the French police, so I travelled further afield, volunteering at other projects around the world. Each journey added more distance between me and the UK; each project was an opportunity to encounter – and to write about – different communities that aimed to improve the world and the human condition.
There are dozens of camps on Europe’s borders for people who have been displaced by powers they could not withstand, so I volunteered at a refugee warehouse near Thessaloniki, Greece. In the West Bank, I volunteered at a Palestinian-Israeli peace project near Jericho and, in Israel, an ecological project near Tel Aviv. Travelling eastwards, I studied at Buddhist temples in India and Nepal, worked with environmental projects in Japan and Australia, until finally reaching South America. Always moving east, writing about one community after another, I understood how each chapter of the journey was crystallising around a central aspiration: the search for an ideal society, one that was more open and equal than the inflexibly hierarchical, class-ridden one I had left behind.
Writing a book about that search was one way for me to exorcise the injury of the past and to transubstantiate what remained into something positive. As the journey progressed, the book became a collection of notes on what Utopia might look like, a travelogue of communities that were seeking, in disparate ways, to create a more rational, empathetic and humane world.
In order to move forwards, however, one must see clearly what has been left behind and why it had to be rejected. Distance provided me with an opportunity for such clarity.
* * *
If there is a vocation in writing, then it is characterised by the writer’s need to represent and re-imagine the world around them. My desire to control the narrative of my experiences may well be a reaction against the experience of having been abused, in which the victim’s understanding of the world – as much as their body – is manipulated and controlled by the abuser. In cases where abuse is committed by clergy, the Church has demonstrated an institutional tendency to perpetuate the initial abuser’s control over their victims. If it is not able to contain the survivor within a cell of silence, the Church has sought to manipulate the public narrative of the victim`s experiences. In a real sense, power over the victim is “shared” between the abuser and the abuser’s collusive institution. The body of the victim continues to be a site of conflict long after the abuser removed his physical hands from the victim’s skin.
In his memoirs, for example, the Bishop of Chichester Eric Kemp described Peter Ball’s victims as “mischief-makers,” and added, “It was a very sad end to [Peter’s] ministry and his departure was a real loss to the Church which was, no doubt, what those who brought it about intended.” It later emerged, as documented in the IICSA inquiry, that Bishop Eric Kemp had paid a private investigator (Brian Tyler) to undermine the police investigation into Peter Ball. One police officer at the IICSA inquiry stated that, “Tyler [the Church’s private investigator] tried to dissuade witnesses from giving evidence.”
However, the report that Tyler finally produced for Bishop Eric Kemp was not quite what the Church had paid good money to read. Tyler wrote: “Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion he [Peter Ball] had been involved in abusing not only his Office but very many young men who passed through his care.” Having read this, Bishop Eric Kemp concealed the report from the police and promoted a knowingly false narrative in which Peter was re-cast as innocent and his victims as “mischief-makers”.
George Carey, the discredited and disgraced former Archbishop of Canterbury, repeatedly reinforced this false narrative. Despite receiving several letters from Peter’s other victims (which Carey concealed from the police) and allegedly having been sent a copy of the damning Tyler Report that confirmed Peter’s guilt, George Carey nonetheless told parishioners in 1993 how he prayed, “the investigation will clear [Peter’s] name and that he will be restored to his great work of Christian ministry”. Carey perpetuated the narrative that Peter Ball was “basically innocent” for decades until the moment Peter was sentenced. As the IICSA inquiry concluded, “Carey repeatedly misrepresented the gravity of what Peter Ball had done whenever he could.”
Words have power, and the words of the powerful can be lethal. Shortly after police re-opened the investigation into Bishop Peter Ball in 2012, one of Peter’s victims – Neil Todd – took his own life. In her incisive book on this subject, Fiona Gardner highlights the direct causal link between Neil Todd’s death and the false narrative of Peter’s innocence – as championed by the likes of George Carey and Eric Kemp. She writes,
“One can only surmise that he [Neil Todd] was simply unable to face a repetition of the isolating and destructive treatment he had received from the Church over the previous twenty years. The stress and fear of the post-abuse trauma repeating itself was too great… Ball and his supporters did, for a long time, overwhelm Todd’s actual experience by their concerted denial of it and calling Todd a liar… Ultimately, Ball and his supporters can be seen as responsible for Todd’s death” (Sex, Power, Control, Fiona Gardner, The Lutterworth Press).
It was not only the most senior clergy in the Church of England who championed Bishop Peter Ball and provided significant weight to the false narrative of his innocence. During the year that I lived as a trainee monk with Peter, he often made references to his personal friendships with senior members of the British Establishment, including the then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, various Conservative Members of Parliament, the Queen Mother, and the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III.
Peter’s purpose in alluding to his friends-in-high-places was primarily, I believe, to emphasise his own importance and the security of his personal position within the existing social order. However, while asserting his own importance, he was simultaneously declaring the cultural importance of the Establishment. In a mutually reinforcing discourse, Peter was signifying both his own untouchable status and the authority of the Establishment from which he derived that status. As a denizen of the Establishment, it was inevitable that the highest members of the Establishment rallied to defend Peter when ‘mischief-makers’ in the lower orders threatened to expose him. As Fiona Gardner makes clear in Sex, Power, Control:
“Ball could also draw on his friendship with Prince [now King] Charles when complaining about a ‘malicious campaign’ against him and the ‘fraudulent accusers’. Prince Charles in 1995 said: ‘I wish I could do more. I feel so desperately strong about the monstrous wrongs that have been done to you’. He wrote of a ‘horrid man’ and in 1997 described one apparent accuser (presumed to be Neil Todd) as a ‘ghastly man … up to his dastardly tricks again’. With such friends in high places it is easy to see how the false narrative became embedded” (Sex, Power, Control, Fiona Gardner, The Lutterworth Press).
Although the final IICSA report stated that Prince Charles and these other Establishment figures were merely ‘misguided’ in their unwavering support of Peter Ball, the question remains as to why they each chose to promote the false narrative of the Bishop’s innocence for decades, despite knowing he had admitted to gross indecency and received a police caution in 1993. The answer to this, I believe, can be found in a clearer analysis of the British Establishment and the harmful ideology that it is both steeped in and which it generates throughout the whole of society.
The term ‘The Establishment’, as it is used today, was first coined by the writer Henry Fairlie in a 1955 article for the Spectator magazine. While investigating the defection of two Foreign Office officials to the Soviet Union, Fairlie found that the defectors’ wealthy families were being protected from media scrutiny by a network of well-connected people, which he termed ‘the Establishment’. These well-connected figures “knew each other, mixed in the same circles and had each other’s backs. It was not based on official, legal or formal arrangements, but rather on subtle social relationships”.
In his book on this subject, the journalist Owen Jones writes: “For Fairlie, the Establishment included not only the centres of official power… but the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised… In other words, the Establishment is all about ‘who you know’”. In listing the various elements that comprise the Establishment, Jones includes big business, financial and political elites, various academic and media institutions, and the established Church of England, which, “runs one in four primary and secondary schools, while its bishops sit in the House of Lords, making Britain the only country – other than Iran – to have unelected clerics sitting in the legislature”. Ultimately, Jones highlights the symbolic role of the monarchy in sustaining this matrix of power relations: “Above all else, it is Britain’s monarchy – and not its people – that is sovereign. It helps to institutionalise the inherently undemocratic features of the Establishment. After all, Britain is not, constitutionally, a country ruled by its own people.” (The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, Owen Jones, Allen Lane/Penguin Books).
Although the Establishment evidently includes specific state institutions, such as the Church, the monarchy, military and political branches, it should not be seen as a monolithic structure made up solely of state organisations. Rather, it can be understood as a cluster of associated sites of influence, between which social, economic and cultural power flows. Furthermore, as elements within a matrix of power relations, these sites continue to be mutually supportive of each other and of the overriding network that sustains them for as long as it is in their existential self-interest to do so. So, for example, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and the Household of the Prince of Wales continued to support Peter Ball up to the moment he was sentenced at the Old Bailey. After Peter was demoted to a persona non grata by the Establishment’s law courts, both George Carey and King Charles (then Prince of Wales) abruptly dropped him and claimed to have been ‘misled’ or ‘misguided’. They each knew beforehand that Peter had received a police caution in 1993 for gross indecency, but that fact was less important than the reputational and structural (if not, moral) integrity of the Establishment.
The case of Peter Ball also highlights how the flow of power is not contained within individual institutions. Rather, power is a fluid currency that flows along class lines between the various sites of influence within the Establishment. During the first investigation into Peter’s abusive practices in 1992-3, the police and CPS received numerous letters from Establishment figures that promulgated the narrative of Peter’s innocence and allegedly sought to influence the CPS not to prosecute him. Some of these letters came from Peter’s colleagues within his own institution, the Church of England. However, many more were written by senior figures from other sites of influence within the Establishment, including Baron Lloyd of Berwick (a ‘law lord’), the headmasters of public schools (including those of Harrow and Lancing College), and the Conservative Cabinet Minister Tim Renton. The Conservative MP, Tim Rathbone, sent his letter to the police on official House of Commons paper, stating that it was “literally inconceivable” for Peter to have engaged in any of the crimes of which he was accused. Peter’s defenders emerged from various sites of influence within the Establishment, not only the state Church, and exerted pressure along the conduits between these sites, because – as Owen Jones states – the Establishment is not a single institution but a matrix of power relations.
It is useful here to consider the British Establishment in the light of work by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. In his groundbreaking and still relevant 1970 essay, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser takes as his starting point the traditional materialist metaphor of society as a building. The foundations of the building – the base-structure – consist of the current property rights, economic conditions and exchange-relations that people have to enter in order to exist in that society. Above this base-structure are stacked the departments of the superstructure: the legal, political and cultural institutions of that society. The economic base-structure shapes and influences the superstructure, which in turn ensures the continuation of the current economic conditions by idealising them – through ideology – as the only conceivable conditions of existence.
Althusser expands this traditional theory by dividing the superstructure into two distinct areas: Repressive State Apparatuses (including the government, police, army, courts, prisons) and Ideological State Apparatuses (churches, schools, art and literature, cultural and media outlets, and so on). Both apparatuses function to maintain the economic conditions but, whereas the Repressive State Apparatuses function primarily by physical repression, the Ideological State Apparatuses function primarily by ideology. If the British Establishment were to be mapped on to this descriptive framework, it could be visualised as a distinct layer that overlaps areas of both the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses, but which operates beyond the internal rules of any specific institution or field. It is a meta-network which, as Owen Jones says, is all about ‘who you know’.
As a meta-network, it is also evident that the Establishment carries its own ideology of inherent privilege, which plays on a higher frequency to that of the rest of society. Althusser defines ideology as an individual or group’s “imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence”. In this sense, ideology does not mean a set of conscious beliefs or ideas. On the contrary, ideology here means an understanding of the world that so envelops the body of the subject as to be felt instinctively as common sense and obvious, and to which no alternative is even imaginable: “It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousness and obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognise and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice of conscience’): That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’ (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser, in Mapping Ideology, Slavoj Zizek (Ed), Verso).
The ideology of the Establishment is evidently one in which its members possess irreproachable and unaccountable privilege. It is for this reason that Bishops George Carey and Eric Kemp promoted the narrative of Peter Ball’s innocence, despite possessing factual evidence to the contrary. It is the reason why Charles Windsor, then Prince of Wales, instinctively perceived Neil Todd as a “ghastly man … up to his dastardly tricks again”, rather than a victim of sexual abuse. And, most revealing of all, it is why the Conservative MP Tim Rathbone claimed that it was “literally inconceivable” for Peter Ball to be guilty. For subjects who are immersed within an ideology of privilege, any alternative is ‘literally’ imaginable.
Althusser identified the education system as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus in modern society. It is therefore particularly relevant that, among the ranks of Peter Ball’s staunchest defenders, several were headmasters of exclusive public (fee-paying) schools, including two former headmasters of his own Alma Mater, Lancing College. The fact that Peter received support from these exclusionist schools is revealing because it is within these institutions that the ideology of the ruling class – and the catechism of ruling-class loyalty – is inculcated in the future administrators of the Establishment. These schools are seminaries of power, where the subtle rules, rituals and know-how of elite authority are instilled in children at an impressionable age, and in which the who-you-know infrastructure of the Establishment is cultivated.
Only seven percent of British children attend these fee-paying schools, and yet – according to figures from the Sutton Trust – 29 percent of current MPs went to fee-paying schools. Sixty percent of ministers in the Cabinet of former PM Boris Johnson attended such exclusive schools, a figure that rises to 64 percent of ministers in PM Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet. All sites of influence within the Establishment are dominated by those who were formed in these exclusive institutes, from judges (74 percent) to editors of the mainstream media (80 percent). It needs reiterating that only 7 percent of British children have access to these exclusionist schools.
The problem with this elitist education system is not just that it perpetuates a British oligarchy, in which power is recycled within a relatively small, affluent section of the population. Of greater concern is that those who are groomed for positions of authority have been indoctrinated into an ideology that is fundamentally and violently hierarchical. It is a world-view in which the ability to dominate others – whether politically, physically or financially – is revered as a moral good. Conversely, the absence of power – particularly social and economic – is perceived as a moral weakness of the undeserving. As this ideology dominates all sites of influence within the Establishment, so it is reproduced in public discourse via the media and permeates the whole of society. However, it is in public schools that the future custodians of the Establishment internalise this violent hierarchy, with its moral code of domination, and develop an ‘emerging sense of entitlement’. As Fiona Gardner explains:
“Such schooling aims to achieve entry into the upper parts of the professions, and social access to resources and opportunities, where the boy feels entitled and deserving of being part of the elite… [M]en who went to public schools (as their fathers and grandfathers did before them) are still dominant in positions of power in the core of the Establishment… There is a sense of self-assurance which arises from an appreciation of one’s own qualities or abilities, and that these will be recognised. This kind of confidence ‘whispers “you’re special” – just like those who came before you’. It is feeling entitled to be present, entitled to be there, entitled to be heard, entitled to be recognised, entitled to be promoted and… entitled to have sexual conquests where and when you want and to beat others the way you were beaten. This is also entitlement but destructive entitlement – the ‘it didn’t do me any harm’ kind” (Sex, Power, Control, Fiona Gardner, The Lutterworth Press).
“It didn’t do me any harm” was a recurring motif that Peter Ball used to describe the inhumane treatment that he had suffered from older boys and staff when he was a pupil at Lancing College. During the year that I lived with Peter, he frequently mentioned how his public school prefects would flagellate younger boys, including himself, as a release for sexual frustration. Later, when those younger boys became prefects, they gained the entitlement to inflict that same treatment onto their inferiors. Peter defended such treatment as both character-building and an antidote to the ‘softness’ into which Western liberal democracies had degenerated.
The fact that Peter’s first sexual experiences were coded into his body in forms of sadistic ownership and domination, rather than consensual affection, evidently shaped his conception of human relationships. Furthermore, in public schools such as Lancing that are explicitly grounded in the Christian faith, the crucified Christ – a virtually naked, contorted victim of sadistic torture – is the always-everywhere template of the ultimate good, the symbolic centre of the ethical universe. In this system of elite education, to suffer and to inflict suffering on others are internalised as the basis of all human relationships, and normalised as rites of passage into the Establishment,.
It would be misleading, however, to characterise the violent hierarchy perpetrated in public schools as the only thread running through ruling-class ideology. The UK’s superstructure is a synthesis of feudalism and capitalism, in which the upper echelons are occupied by hereditary peers and royalty as much as the merely rich. As capitalism replaced feudalism as the dominant mode of production in the base-structure, so capitalist ideology was incorporated into the superstructure. The Enlightenment values of the emerging Bourgeoisie – such as the pursuit of knowledge through reason, and some form of democratic governance – were assimilated into the superstructure, sitting alongside residual feudal principles of hereditary authority. The ruling ideology, perpetuated in the UK’s elitist education system, is therefore an amalgam of both of these historical forces, as well as a sterilised and de-politicised version of Christianity that merely decorates the rituals of the state. Running sometimes in concord, sometimes in conflict, the feudal and the capitalist threads coalesce around one archetypal image: that of the violent hierarchy. The divine right to dominate merges with the economic right to exploit. The role of the public school is to reproduce the obviousness of this ethos: that those with power shall dominate the weak, world without end.
Weakness, softness, vulnerability – all negative attributes, which must be suppressed through the process of submitting to the violence of a higher power and, in time, earning the entitlement to exercise that same power over others. The violence need not always be physical, as experienced by Peter’s generation at Lancing College but, of course, not all violence is physical. On the contrary, most societal violence is non-physical. Since Peter’s personal friend Margaret Thatcher had been in Downing Street, for example, successive UK governments have enacted violent public policies against the most vulnerable in society, punishing poverty while rewarding affluence. Nor should it come as a surprise that 91 percent of Thatcher’s Cabinet were privately educated.
The ethos of violence is instilled into students at fee-paying school in a variety of forms. Among these forms, Fiona Gardner lists the deprivation of love and family life, emotional neglect, normalisation of covert and overt bullying, admiration for the team-player who does not tell tales and, most importantly, an obsession with rules and authoritarianism at the expense of empathy. In Peter’s case, the ethos of a violent hierarchy was, literally, written onto his body through the inhumane treatment he received at Lancing College – and which he believed he was entitled to inflict on the bodies of others. In most cases, the violent hierarchy is hardwired into children’s psyches at public school at an age when their place in the world – and the world itself – is still being processed and interpreted. The fact that this ethos of domination is bound up with an ‘emerging sense of entitlement’ makes it more easy to assimilate, for privilege is always codified as the natural and rightful state of things.
In turning over these stones of what I have left behind – the abuse and cover-ups, the conspiracy of politicians, public school figures, bishops, lords and princes who close ranks when one of their own is threatened, and the ruling-class ideology that engenders violence – it becomes all too clear what an ideal society does not look like. The sentencing of Bishop Peter Ball to prison was a performative moment of justice, but the system that produced him continues to produce many other public figures who carry the same ethos as Peter into positions of authority. The existing structures of power can only continue to function if the responsibility for a scandal can be pinned onto the body of one supposedly ‘bad apple’, such as Peter, rather than on the network of institutions that conditioned him. In extreme circumstances, the system can afford to ritualistically sacrifice one of its own for the continuation of the whole. Far from being a ‘bad apple’, however, Peter Ball was the quintessential product of the Establishment.
There will continue to be inquiries into particular cases of abuse, and there will continue to be efforts to amend the internal procedures of this or that institution. However, unless we confront the bigger picture – of state apparatuses that generate an ideology of power and domination – nothing substantial will change. Structurally speaking, it is not just stones that need overturning.
* * *
After leaving Britain behind in 2016, I travelled in search of a more humane society. On my journey east, there was one particular destination that I was determined to visit. It was a geographical place fundamentally bound up with the mythology that Bishop Peter had used to justify his abuse. It was a place that I knew I had to confront before moving on. Appropriately, it lay on one of the most conflicted ideological faultlines in the world.
Jerusalem – Urusalim to the Canaanites – City of Shalem, god of the Evening Star. In Hebrew, Yerushalayim – the City of Peace. In Arabic, al-Quds – simply The Holy. So many names, so much unresolved. Jerusalem has serious issues.
When I arrived in Jerusalem, I walked around the walls of the old city, the Ottoman walls built by Suleiman the Magnificent, as though laying siege to the idea of the place, passing each of the seven gates without ever quite entering. Jerusalem takes time: it took Jesus a week. After circumnavigating the walls, I headed towards the Mount of Olives. That was the hill I had come to see, the reason I had arrived in this difficult land.
At the foot of the Mount of Olives, they say, is the Garden of Gethsemane – or one of them. Sites of imagined importance are surprisingly contested. One sect claims that the improbable probably happened here, another that the un-evidenced evidently occurred over there. Four other sects staunchly disagree and each identifies its own location of fabled certainty. The Garden of Gethsemane is one such moveable notion.
Gethsemane was significant to Bishop Peter: he made it significant to others. At his house near the South Downs of England, between Berwick and Wilmington, the Garden of Gethsemane was made manifest. On Thursday evenings, if you were there, if you were chosen to be there, if you had no choice but to be there, you prayed naked with Bishop Peter. It was always on a Thursday because, so the story goes, Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane on a Thursday, the day before his crucifixion, and prayed in agony for another way to be possible. According to the Gospels, he sweated drops of blood as he prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it.” No other way is possible but agony, but suffering, says god, says Peter’s god, says Peter. Thy will be done. And so it was, on Thursdays in Peter's manifestation of Gethsemane in his house near the South Downs of Sussex.
All those things returned to me in Jerusalem. No longer compartmentalised within a written statement, the memories – lived moments, dreaded and endured – reopened as I approached the supposed Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives. Old priests in black cassocks and bitter faces prowled the garden paths and barked at tourists taking photos in forbidden places. The olive trees were locked up behind iron railings as if in a tree museum. I do not know what I had expected in this place: a thunderclap of forgiveness, emancipation or absolution, an apotheosis of understanding, the end of it all. As I stood there, I realised that this was not any Gethsemane that I recognised, that place of weekly agony, the will that would be done. There was none of that in this religious theme park.
The Gethsemane that Peter had conjured in Sussex was a metaphorical site, a space in which he could take libidinal pleasure in manifesting the violence of ruling-class ideology onto the bodies of others. On Thursdays, he re-enacted the eternally recurring moment of subjection, in which the chosen subject, following Christ, believes they have no choice but to say, “thy will be done” to a merciless higher power. Peter’s rituals combined elements of his own adolescent experience of abuse at Lancing College with the myth of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. It is probable that Peter fetishised his own violent subjection at public school (which signified his entry as a subject into the Establishment) as a means of re-coding that sexual abuse into something ‘meaningful’. It was the ritualistic act of submission that, I believe, Peter took most pleasure in. It confirmed both the external reality of the violent hierarchy, and his privileged status within it.
In a surprisingly material sense, ideological power only becomes ‘real’ by the act of submitting to it. If one no longer accepts subjection to such power, it loses all potency. In an instant, with one word, it can all melt into air; all the rites and robes, titles and crowns, the bunting and the flags become mere props in a ridiculous theatre. I had lived in Peter’s house for nine months before I confided my experiences of abuse to a friend, who gave me the courage to defy the Bishop’s will. When it came, my confrontation with Peter was memorable, not only because of the abject fear I felt in opposing his will, but because of how he retreated and visibly seemed to lose authority. It was, literally, as if a spell had been broken. The ideological power that, just a moment before, we both felt he possessed, melted into thin air.
It was not how Gethsemane should go. It was not how Gethsemane had always gone. Until that moment, the idealised subject had always followed the script and said, “thy will be done”. But it is possible to re-write, to re-imagine, Gethsemane. It is possible to refuse to be a subject. And, when that happens, you can almost hear the castles in the clouds come tumbling down.
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There are Gethsemanes everywhere: places of suffering inflicted by the powerful on the powerless, in forms of violence that are physical, psychological, economic, political or otherwise. Within the spell of ideology, the violent hierarchy in British society is simultaneously invisible and obvious: it envelops the body of the subject as to be felt instinctively as common sense. It is inconceivable to imagine anything but subjection to this code of domination. According to Louis Althusser, we are all ‘interpellated’ – or called into existence as a subject of ideology. Even before birth, we are always-already appointed as a subject by the specific social conditions in which we are expected. However, this does raise the question of free will: if we are pre-determined to inhabit specific roles of subjection within an ideological hierarchy, how is it possible to protest or campaign for social change? How is it possible for a working-class, state-educated teenager to defy the will of an Establishment Bishop? How is it possible to imagine a more Utopian society in which all citizens are valued equally?
The answer to these questions has already been partly addressed. Although the ethos of domination remains central, it is only one of the currents running through ruling-class ideology. As capitalism replaced feudalism, so the values of the emerging Bourgeoisie – such as personal liberty, human rights and freedom of thought – were assimilated into the superstructure. The conflict between these contrasting ideas creates faultlines that destabilise the core ethos of the violent hierarchy.
I would add that it is “literally inconceivable” to imagine an alternative to the ruling-class ideology of domination – until an event occurs that ruptures the veil between the unimaginable and the imaginable. As an example, we can take those figures who were incapable of considering Peter Ball to be guilty, until the event in which he was sentenced. Similarly, it was “literally inconceivable” that I could defy Peter’s will until the forbidden event in which I confided my experiences to a friend. The symbolic breaking of that silence ruptured the veil between the unimaginable and the imaginable, and initiated the process of transitioning from a victim to a survivor. It is a process that is not limited to victims of sexual abuse, I believe, but is open to all subjects of a violently hierarchical society.
This transition from victim to survivor is an unending process that entails an ongoing psychological re-setting or re-formatting (what I shall call, a re-imagining) of the subject’s body and of the world in which their body is situated. Re-imagining involves de-constructing the image of the self as a being in a world in which violent hierarchies and abusive power relations appear as natural as air and as invariable as the law of gravity. The process also involves re-constructing the image of the self and its relation to the world in ways that are radically different to that which has been imposed – including revoking all previously learned definitions of power. The process of re-imagining may also lead to a raised consciousness: a heightened sensitivity to inter-personal power relations, as well as to those invisible threads of control that are woven through the fabric of cultures like the UK, where privilege is revered over truth and justice.
It is “literally inconceivable” for there to be any alternative to the violent hierarchy that runs through British society. This is entirely true – until it becomes entirely untrue. Events that rupture the veil between the imaginable and the unimaginable are as likely to occur in a quiet conversation between friends as they are in a high-profile court case or during a stock-market crash. When such a rupture occurs, anything becomes possible. As the political activist Thomas Paine said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”. It is only occasionally, however, that we can catch a glimpse of such a world between the cracks in the ideology that imprisons us.
In Jerusalem, I understood it all clearly for a moment: the universe does nothing. There is no one to help. God does nothing to help the victims of abuse, just as he did nothing to save the Jews during the Holocaust, just as he does nothing now to save the Palestinians. Instead of looking up an invisible hierarchy for a higher power to bestow salvation, we must try to do our best without him. More than that, we must be bolder in imagining the unimaginable.
At the foot of the Mount of Olives, I reached through the bars of the tree museum, from the outside in, and stole a sprig from an olive branch. I considered taking it with me, a symbol of something I had gained or resolved or foreclosed, but none of those things was true. After a moment’s thought, I laid the leaves down like an offering, a message, a weapon unused. Then I turned and left the imprisoned trees and their twisted trunks behind.
Nothing was settled in Jerusalem, just as nothing was settled by receiving that pay-out from the Church. Whatever residual significance Gethsemane held for me dissolved in the act of seeing what it was. There was nothing to revere, nothing to be afraid of. Only stones, olive trees behind bars, old priests prowling the perimeter and hissing at tourists who dared to venture too close to the forbidden.
The compensation money from the Church lasted me a little over a year. Living frugally and volunteering in progressive projects around the world, I did find fragments of what I had left England to see: glimpses of Utopia, traces of what a better world might look like. That aspiration became ink on pages, notes on what a rational, empathetic and humane world might conceivably look like. When the journey ended, I settled in Europe and published the book, Life As A Kite, in which the shadow of Peter is named and revoked, his power dispelled by my own narrative, my words.
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The book, Life As A Kite (ISBN 9781839451439) by Cliff James (£9.99), is published with the support of LittleBirdZine.
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