DID you know that the Dalai Lama is a gadget fan; and that he is never happier than when he is fixing wristwatches? Neither did I. But, as this information came from last Monday’s Afternoon Play, Grace (Radio 4), don’t quote me on it. But then, the play — written by Mick Gordon and the philosopher A. C. Grayling — often presented us, in the context of a fictional drama, with “false friends”: things that you cannot quite remember whether you read in the paper or not. Take, for example, the notion of a research project in Canada in which scientists are attempting to recreate — with the use of electric stimuli to the brain — a religious experience. It sounds as if it might be true. And what about the central character of the play, an academic, Grace, who is an extremist atheist, boring on about “the blind watchmaker” until everyone is heartily sick of her? Surely no one we know fits that description? Grace was played with gusto by Paola Dionisotti. When she learns that her beloved son is to become an Anglican priest, Grace behaves as others might if the revelation were about joining the Foreign Legion: “What’s wrong? . . . it’s all my fault . . . I feel like a failure.” Tom and Grace have great ding-dongs about the nature of faith and love, before Tom gets himself blown up in a terrorist attack perpetrated by — you guessed it — religious extremists. In its favour, there was a splendid performance by Priyanga Burford as Tom’s fiancée, Ruth; and this was certainly a cut above the standard Afternoon Play fare. Yet, by engaging with topics that are so very current, Grace ended up sounding even more fantastical than the “God helmet” that was supposedly designed to provide our electronic epiphanies. Just how current it was became plain in In Our Time (Radio 4, Thursday of last week), one of whose contributors was none other than A. C. Grayling. The subject was the history of philosophical materialism, and here we got a better sense of what Professor Grayling wanted to convey in his drama. This was a hasty affair, starting with the pre-Socratics, then Epicurus, and leaping to Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Kant, and Leibnitz. Only on In Our Time would you ever hear a presenter signing off by saying: “I’m sorry we didn’t get to Hegel, Marx, and quantum physics.” It is not that the approach is superficial: the guests tend to be methodical in their contributions, and part of the fun is to hear how Melvyn Bragg manages his impatience. Grace ended with some kind of reconciliation between the discourse of hard-headed materialism and the romantic sensibility. Similarly, Professor Grayling concluded In Our Time with an acknowledgement — in the face of contemporary “eliminative materialists”, who look forward to the time when the emotional and spiritual worlds can be entirely explained physiologically — of the usefulness of metaphysical language and concepts. They are, he admits, metaphors that are full of insight, even if they are not necessarily accurate. The irony is that Professor Grayling seemed a great deal more comfortable here — as well as more articulate and persuasive — than when attempting the metaphorical language of drama. |
back to Media
previous story
|
next story 
back to top.gif "Caris Magazine for girls aged 11 to 16 © site")
