Plenary, 10 Jun 2009

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Official Report 455KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

As always on a Wednesday, the first item of business is time for reflection. I am very pleased to say that our time for reflection leader this afternoon is the Right Reverend Brian Smith, the Bishop of Edinburgh.

Today's date, 10 June, has many associations. On this date, Lewis Carroll wrote to Tom Taylor to ask for advice on his "proposed fairy tale". He was unhappy with the title he was considering—"Alice's Adventures Under Ground"—as it sounded like a textbook on mining. He then moved to adopt the title we know.

Musing today on what might have been brings up two quite interesting Scottish resonances. Today, we might have been remembering St Margaret of Scotland, were it not for a decision a few years ago to transfer her feast day to November. Secondly, noting that today is known as white rose day, it being the birthday of the Old Pretender, we can muse on what might have been had the Jacobite campaigns of 1715 and 1745 succeeded.

In our personal lives we often muse on what might have been—"If only …". At the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland last month, at which I was pleased to be a guest, a speaker reminded us of the remark,

"We judge ourselves by what we have the potential to do; others judge us by what we have actually done."

The issue of what might have been can come up when we reflect on our mistakes and on what might have been had we not acted in a silly way.

However, that is only one side of the story. Even when acting well, we can still be haunted by the memory of the good things that we had to neglect so that the good things that we chose could come about.

It is tempting to believe that, in life, the difficult choices that we are faced with are between the good and the bad, and between right and wrong. We can be faced with such choices but, if they were all that we faced, life would be relatively uncomplicated. Given a normal moral sensitivity, we have, more often than not, to choose between one good and another good and, in achieving one good thing, we look back with regret at what might have been had we decided otherwise. In selecting one good thing, we were constrained to neglect another.

That is, of course, a major theme in the life of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin who remarked:

"The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament."

It is good, in the year of his centenary, to remember that. And so it is that I say, with Isaiah Berlin in mind this year, that the ability to acknowledge the real worth of the many things that one chooses not to do may be a sure sign of sound judgment and an informed conscience, concerning the moral contours within which our life is lived.