Merry hymns tide us through

Truth be told; more is found in a bottle of champagne than the gathering throng belting out songs of the doomed

I am not religious but lately find myself humming carols and hymns to bolster confidence when in a state of apprehension - which is much of the time in a country better known for cheaply-hired wife-killers than the nip-and-tuck safaris that used to attract niche tourism to our shores. Today, for the price of a month’s groceries in, say, the Agliotti household, you can readily hire someone to murder enemy and lover alike. That’s a bit unsettling when most of us are one or the other to somebody.
Humming along, I consider how odd it is that Anglican songs tunelessly belted out during twelve years at boarding school can still surface surreptitiously in the atheist’s brain. But there it is: muted appeals for safety regularly go from my pursed lips to the ear of the Almighty; He who was “our help in ages past, our hope for years to come”.
Not that this has been much of a year for religious revival, what with rampant child abuse among Catholic priests forcing even the Pope to acknowledge the scourge. No, my humming is not about conversion; it’s more a commentary on propaganda, whether the schoolgirl’s prayer at bedtime or the more potent weapon used by governments everywhere to confuse voters. Ours is no slouch in that department, recently unleashing The New Age on us as if it were a regular truth-seeking newspaper - which it is not. Indeed, the ANC’s new rag should contain a mental health warning for unsuspecting readers: ideas may linger even when consciously rejected.
I suppose it’s better that the default position playing in one’s head is Silent Night or Away in a Manger rather than the revolutionary songs filling Juju’s brain. After all, holy tendencies, which have not gone off the boil in South Africa nearly as fast as in many Western countries, promote good over evil while establishing decent, non-commercial values like compassion. I enjoy the aesthetics of religion and support its motives overall. For that matter, I sometimes wonder how those of us with secular ethics can remain humane without a moral law external to us.
Nevertheless, some of the claims made for religion are clearly contradictory.
For example, a social scientist at Florida State University, in declaring a link between faith and faithfulness, says religious people are more likely to be satisfied with their marriages and less prone to stray than others. That’s plausible enough at first glance: infidelity is common and, while public disapproval does little to dissuade the sinners, God’s censure is another matter. But hang on a minute: aren’t Africans among the most religious of the planet’s species – and among the most adulterous?
Our stratospheric HIV/Aids rate established just how unfaithful we are as partners. With the doom of disease descending and prayers for salvation ascending, we continued going to church in droves throughout the pandemic. Yet over here in South Africa, it seems, prayer did not have any impact on our promiscuity.
Frankly, I have to admit to doubting the efficacy of prayer almost as much as the findings of some of the world’s best-intentioned researchers.
With a growing population of over-educated but perhaps under-occupied scholars studying everything from happiness to love and affection, I was only mildly surprised that a solitary, mono-syllabic Fin at my B&B had chosen friendship as the subject of his PhD. Another visiting doctoral student in the field of paleo-anthropology recently told me she had received a grant from a French perfume company to study love at first smell, her intellectual interest lying in our underutilised olfactory sense.
What a pity the realm of passionate love hasn’t been left to poets and artists, I say. Scientists studying what they call “the emotional state of intense longing for union with another” describe it as a businesslike mental process involving 12 areas of the brain with names like dorso-lateral middle frontal gyrus and the anterior cingulate.
Perhaps more useful to us all, even in the sphere of romance, is the research on liars being conducted in laboratory conditions at the University of Portsmouth. You can apparently spot cheats a mile away because their stories are far too detailed. Contrary to popular belief, motivated liars do not fidget or avert their eyes but stay completely calm, having planned their lies down to the last detail.
As the festive season arrives in earnest, here’s another nugget of academic trivia no family should be without around the Christmas tree: the University of Hertfordshire is monitoring 680 people to see if, on unwrapping loathsome gifts like hand-knitted scarves, they betray their true feelings to the givers. The researchers note marked shoulder-slumping among recipients, with some staring at the offending present while others eye the door as if intent on bolting the scene.
So while some of us are lying to ourselves about a deity that may or may not exist, and others are lying to each other, and the government is lying to all of us, and researchers are studying ways to determine when any of us is lying about anything at all, may I remind you that ‘tis the season to be merry.
Hum a happy tune in your head and, if you really want to know what’s going on, try Graham Greene’s method of detection: “Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.”