Maybe Churchill had it right.
The old Bulldog liked to look to space. It emerged last week that amongst the things that kept him busy
(cigars, whisky, winning the war) were thoughts of where we might find extraterrestrial life. He believed it was out there. His quote is worth repeating.
“I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe,” he wrote in 1939, “which contains living, thinking creatures. Or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”
He shows a level of humanity, humility and intelligence that some of our leaders – who profess to love him, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic – would do well to pause upon.
Of course not everybody is going to be like Churchill. To expect all important leaders to have greatness in them is foolish. Not all football managers are going to be Sir Alex Ferguson.
The number of people struggling to get by in Britain has risen by four million in the last six years
But at least there could be an aspiration to reach up and hit the heights, a desire to be better. It’s not just intellectual pygmyism that is seeping down, threatening to infect us all, it’s the closure to others. Churchill was so open he was going BEYOND the planet! Now, increasingly, there is a desire to close off, to compartmentalise and to blame damn outsiders, everybody except those we believe to be of our tiny patch and closed tribe.