Li Bai and the unicorns led by donkeys

DU YU: I see your neighbour in the hamlet has put up a rainbow poster.

LI BAI: Really? Gay?

DU: I don’t believe so. It says “NHS and all key workers”.

LI: Mmm… I find it strange. Do have some tea.

DU: Thank you…. Surely not. Strange to be grateful to the people saving us from this terrible plague?

LI: No, it’s not strange to be grateful to the individuals. What is strange is that the standing of the National Health Service, the organization, has never been higher. Yet everyone agrees that this country’s record in the pandemic has been abysmal.

DU: But you can’t blame the NHS for that. It’s the political leadership that has failed. The staff are lions led by donkeys!

LI: Maybe unicorns would go better with the rainbow theme. So let me get this right: our performance has been terrible, but it’s not the fault of the NHS.

DU: Exactly. If we’d had better leadership….

LI: Can I put it this way? In the world as it is, the NHS is doing terribly and we have a higher death rate than Colombia or Turkey. But in an imaginary counterfactual world the NHS is performing brilliantly.

DU: Prove me wrong! If we hadn’t had ten years of austerity….

LI: It strikes me as equally hard to prove you wrong, or prove you right. Actually, this reminds me of C. S. Lewis — “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”

DU: Come now. The National Health Service is not a religion.

LI: Are you so sure? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan says that some cultures no longer need “sky gods” to ensure their members cooperate. Instead they are held together by welfare states and social insurance.

DU: But that is not the same thing. Religion requires us to accept all sorts of beliefs that we can’t possibly know are true. The NHS is a secular institution.

LI: … which requires us to believe in an imaginary counterfactual world where it works. You know the old argument for constitutional monarchy? It is purely symbolic, and so it stops politicians with real power from gaining that sway over hearts and minds. People respect the Queen, so they don’t end up paying respect to a guy like Donald Trump. Perhaps it’s like that with religion: a set of harmless beliefs, which nobody can ever prove true or false, and which occupy people’s minds so they don’t think up anything stupider.

DU: Religion has hardly been harmless.

LI: People have been persecuted in the past. But today? You could stand outside, curse the Jade Emperor and blaspheme against Heaven, and nobody would pay any attention. But try going out there and shouting “Fuck the NHS!”… I dare you! In any case, the harm I meant was not that people get angry when you contradict their shibboleths. I mean that religion doesn’t really do anything. There’s the temple, it’s been in the village for centuries, you go there on some particular days, then you get on with your life. But these secular religions – they organize our entire society! They promise to save us in this life, not the next! We spend billions on them! And the thinking behind them is still the same primitive man with his voodoo, his totems – and his rainbows.

DU: I for one still believe in the principles of solidarity behind the NHS!

LI: Cool story, bro. Needs more unicorns. Biscuit?

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Rainbow poster: © Robin Stott, cropped.