Radio 4
I came across this programme quite by chance when driving home late from a business meeting. This is a weekly live broadcast, chaired by Michael Burke, in which a particular issue is looked at from many different points of view. The theme of this particular programme was the cause(s) of the current financial crisis. Several individuals, including an investment banker, a historian, a professor of psychology, a writer and a priest (the Abbot of Worth Abbey)gave their perspective in turn on what was happening, and then responded to questions from the other panellists.
The Abbot at first appeared to give a particularly oblique response. He spoke simply about the need for people to become more aware of themselves, and their own interior world and to recognise the distinction between needs and wants (the latter referring to the constant engrained drive to get a bigger house, bigger car etc). He was advocating nothing less than the need for people to work on themselves. Some of his terminology antagonised the other panel members – some of whom could not distinguish between greed and aspiration. However, he responded to some increasingly vitriolic questions with a striking level of equanimity.
Although I was unable to see the participants in the programme (they were in the studio together), there was an impression of different levels of understanding being expressed. The greater depth of understanding could not be recognised by those without it. And it raises a question. Is there a more objective capacity for truth in each of one us and how could we acknowledge it? How difficult it is to really understand what another person means. I was reminded of some words I heard several years ago about the general traditional attitude of middle Eastern peoples towards others – that people are judged on what they are rather than what they do.
This programme can be heard on Listen Again at
Another excellent radio programme is Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, which has very interesting subjects. This week it was covering the discovery of electricity and the conflict between “vitalists” who believed that there was a “spark if life” distinct from the electricity discovered in the laboratory, and the materialists who thought that electricity was that spark. Next week – he's discussing Dante's Inferno.
Geoff Butts
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