ANOTHER VOICE

Our age has not dispensed with demons. It has just transformed them into stalkers and pit bull terriers

MATTHEW PARRIS

Demons stalk the mind of 20th-century man as menacingly as they stalked the con- sciousness of the Dark Ages. The national hysteria provoked by that stupidly potent 'demon eyes' poster of Tony Blair is only the most recent reminder that science has hardly exorcised the demon from our world: 1990s Britain has a mediaeval quality.

As a Member of Parliament, I discovered to my astonishment what as a journalist I rediscover often: mention the subject of demons, devils, witches or black magic, and a significant minority of your countrymen will go ballistic. Now on the other side of the media fence, I have found that any ref- erence to the Black Arts provokes letters from frightened or angry readers. Discus- sion of these subjects on television pro- duces an even more alarmed response and it is remarkable how ruffled people get.

Where (as for a few mad weeks it was believed was happening in Orkney) sex and the occult are stirred together, a vein of hysteria running through our collective consciousness seems to be struck.

Many thus alarmed would deny that they themselves believe in dark powers. Often they protest as Christians, holding the sub- ject to be a sort of blasphemy. Plainly they think it is a dangerous blasphemy, and their protests betray a belief in its power to sub- vert. No general statement will be true of all these worried folk, but the violence of their reactions to satanism suggests to me a fear that there may be something in it. The influence of religion, far from dispelling superstition, seems to coincide with a heightened interest in it.

The attitude runs deep. Spreading beyond the Christian flock and among the godless too, it surfaces in a remarkable range of obsessions. For me, Dennis Wheatley has always been perfectly absurd, but his novels' sales figures suggest that for millions this is anything but true. One is tempted to conclude that not far beneath the sceptical surface of today's apparently liberal culture lies a sort of swirling, ill- defined Manichaeism: a nervy, sideways glance at a universe in which Darkness and Light clash in perpetual and equal struggle, and the forces of Darkness may lunge and grab at us at any time from the shadows. Demons walk among us. To such a mind, our world has been infiltrated. In a moment of inattention we may be over- whelmed.

I said `to such a mind'. But an age can have a mind and all of us to some degree share it. In our own generation, only a minority consciously fear demons. The majority would say they do not believe in them.

But they do. Their demons come clothed in different garb. Our age and its news media find devils not in rocks and trees, not on broomsticks or in Black Masses at mid- night, but in modern fear-objects. Pit bull terriers (against which we were moved to raise an Act of Parliament!), Dobermans (Devil-clogs,' said the Sun) and Alsatians (Wolf-dogs,' said the Sun) have each briefly trodden the modern stage as demon-substitutes. More recently 'stalkers', 'paedophile rings' — even 'fat-cats' — are held up to hatred, fear or ridicule. Gun- owners ('weirdos' say the tabloids) have joined their number. The demon mask eclipses the individual. We see not fellow- human beings with problems, weaknesses or unusual hobbies, but wickedness in human form.

Errant behaviour acquires a terrific potency. It is not errant. It is the telltale of a soul signed up to an alien calling. Perver- sity gains a sponsor. In this Manichaean world a 'stalker' ceases to deserve sympa- thy, ceases to seem a pathetic personality with the same kind of crush on someone as we have most of us felt, but too damaged or inadequate to deal with it; no, a stalker is a different breed. Posing as a fellow-human, he is really a stalker. The Sun offers you 20 ways to recognise one. The Daily Mail inveighs against 'the Menace of Stalkers'.

Even the atheists believe in demons. Our era is marked by panics about Christian 'cults' (many behaving remarkably like the Early Church). These cults are said to 'take over' people; the victims are recommended for `deprogramming'. Is it not the ultimate irony when paganism and Christianity, hav- ing taught us to look for demons, find themselves demonised in their own right?

The Manichaean lens simplifies the world. Once you have tagged someone as 'one of them' you are released from any duty of mercy, any duty to understand or to love. The fellow is simply a 'racist,' a 'Pah', a 'sodomite', a 'yob' or 'some kind of a Catholic nut' — as though that explained it. The nuts and the poofs then start fighting among themselves, sometimes in the pages of The Spectator.

Here, then, from one of the latter to one of the former, is a passage quoted by Sir Ian McKellen, speaking to the Tory Cam- paign for Homosexual Equality. Forming part of the only passage of Sir Thomas More Shakespeare is known to have writ- ten, it centres around a violent demonstra- ,tion by city apprentices against 'strangers' (immigrants), whom the apprentices believe to be the source of infection because they 'bring in strange roots' and eat parsnips. 'We will show no mercy on the strangers!' cries the mob. Sir Thomas More asks the mob to imagine it succeeds in its cause:

Grant them removed ...

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, Plodding to the ports and coasts for trans- portation, And that you sit as kings in your desires. . . And you in ruff of your opinions clothed . . .

Soon, says More, mob hatred would replace justice. Soon the apprentices them- selves could fall victim to persecution from a different mob. They too, like the strangers, would have to flee. And suppose, strangers themselves, they met abroad the intolerance they had meted out at home?

... Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper That breaking out in hideous violence Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owned not, nor made not you ... ?

'This is the strangers' case,' concludes More, 'And this your mountainish inhu- manity.'

Our era finds too few to make the strangers' case.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.