Daily Diversions (Web Log)

David's Mental Meanderings
3rd December 2002
Great Britons - Part Two

Now that the BBC series is over, I can offer a summary of the Top Ten greatest Britons of all time, as decided by the phone-in and web voting British public. I'll do it in David Letterman-style reverse order.

Coming in at number 10 is a favourite for some of you, Oliver Cromwell. Though he is touted by some readers because of his theological views, he was primarily pitched on the BBC as the father of Parliamentary democracy. This is a bit overstated. You could try to get away with saying that he represents the triumph of Parliament over the monarch. It's a bit of a stretch, but a plausible position. But considering that he ruled over England for a short while, prosecuted disastrous wars, and smashed up churches, when the force of his own personality was gone, the Commonwealth rapidly disintegrated and Charles II took the throne to much rejoicing.

Parliament would never have had the opportunity to wage war against Charles I, had it not been for Simon de Montfort in the reign of Henry III. It was this earlier war against a king which established Parliament in the first place and forced the monarch to come cap in hand for tax money. The Parliaments of the 17th century were not democratic institutions. They wouldn't begin to resemble democratic representation until the Reform Act of 1832. Even today, there are some Parliamentary constituencies with a population of less than 25,000 and others with more than 100,000.

Why am I really no fan of Cromwell? I cannot go into a church in this country where the people of God have worshipped for 500 or 1000 or 1500 years and not be horrified at the destruction of the Interregnum period. Given the way he treated the remains of holy men of God interred in consecrated ground, I cannot help but think it appropriate that his own body was exhumed and desecrated.

The only purely military leader finished in ninth place. Horatio, Lord Nelson is arguably the greatest admiral in Britain's long dominance of the seas from the 16th through the 19th centuries and won some of its greatest naval victories. He destroyed Napoleon's fleet at the Battle of the Nile and famously died at Trafalgar. The control of the seas helped Britain maintain a growing Empire and become a world super-power. Should he be in the top ten? Probably not. He would make it into my overall list of the top 100.

Given that eleven percent of the top one hundred are pop and rock musicians, I suppose we have to be glad that only one made it into the top ten percent. Any possible candidate would have been there based upon promoting an agenda to which I would be opposed. This particular individual was not there because his contribution to songs such as "She Loves You", "Let It Be", "Hey Jude", "Yesterday" or "Strawberry Fields Forever", even though these were voted amongst the top 50 British-written songs of the last 50 years.

He wasn't even put in the Top Ten because of his martyrdom in front of his New York apartment. Our fourth-ranked Briton may have written the gospel of the prevailing religion, but Number Eight has been enshrined as its great hymn writer:

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

I do not relish the fact that John Lennon has now found that imagination is a sufficient defence against eternal damnation. But neither do I find it appealing that a cigarette-lighter-waving generation has followed this Pied Piper to the open mouth of the fiery Abyss.

The only monarch in the Beeb's elite group ranked seventh overall. Elizabeth I may have given her name to an age which could be considered the English Renaissance, but TV viewers were only mildly impressed with her impact on the history Britain as a whole. She was a remarkable woman and succeeded as queen where her sister Mary had been an utter failure. After her brother's radical Protestantism, then her sister's even more violent Catholicism, Elizabeth managed to maintain a fragile balance. The domestic tranquillity, however delicate, created an environment in which the arts and sciences flourished.

Elizabeth I was one of the great monarchs of England and Wales. However, as she executed one of the monarchs of Scotland, you can imagine that she didn't get a lot of votes from north of the border.

There are those who were voted into the Top Ten and belong in the Top Ten, and never had a chance of being a number one hit on the history charts. He was a loner, finding it difficult to get along with others. He was at times paranoid. At one point he spent years recovering from a mental breakdown. He also had terrible theology - he was a Unitarian before Unitarianism was cool. Yet with such a poor understanding of the Creator, he was the first to grasp some of the fundamentals of the creation. He is not here because of the years that he put into his passion for alchemy and his search for its key catalyst, the Philosopher's Stone. But rounding out the bottom half of the league table is the father of physics - Sir Isaac Newton.

It is not an exaggeration to say that everything we know about nature of motion and gravity we got from Sir Isaac. Everything. Even though neither had the advantage of his invention of the reflecting telescope, Galileo and Kepler had ideas about the universe. Newton made them work, but not by his telescope or other foundational discoveries in the science of optics, such as the nature of light itself. The entire sciences of mechanics and astronomy are founded in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (commonly known as the Principia). When Apollo 13 became disabled on the way to the Moon, it was Newton's mathematical formulas that took them around the Moon and back to Earth and found the razor-thin window of the re-entry angle and velocity.

Receiving over 25,000 more votes than Newton, and flourishing in the Golden Age of Great Briton Number Seven, is the man who did for language what Newton did for science. I don't have a lot to say about him, because it has already been said. More books are published about him every year than about anyone, with the possible exception of Jesus. He has even written more Hollywood screenplays than any other person. Fifth overall is William Shakespeare.

If the pre-series hype was anything to go by, the finalist in fourth place was the favourite of series editors. Bear in mind that a "Great Britons" is "anyone who was born in the British Isles, including Ireland; or anyone who lived in the British Isles, including Ireland, and who has played a significant part in the life of the British Isles." Number Four certainly qualifies for the Top Ten. His contribution to science was minimal. His impact on the philosophy of science continues to be immeasurable. One of the comments on the BBC's message board really sums it up: "Darwin changed the way we see life, the way we see ourselves. He challenged and changed our beliefs and our value system."

Charles Darwin's cosmology laid the groundwork and created the excuses needed to throw off the constraints of responsibility and morality. The theory of evolution was embraced like a harlot by an ostensibly Christian culture eager to exchange the free love of God for the love of hedonism. Scientists became the priests of the near-universal religion.

But the most dreadful development has been the offering of incense by Christians on the altar of Darwinism. In times of Roman persecution, Christians could escape death or imprisonment by paying lip service to Caesar. It was okay to believe in Jesus, as long as it was combined with a willingness to acknowledge the civic religion. Today, Christians are not "taken seriously" unless they acknowledge Darwinism. However, it is Christians who bow the knee to what is not a scientific theory, but in fact a theological position, who cannot be taken seriously.

In the United States, there are remnants of resistance. The media ostracise them, but they are unwavering. They are characterised as anti-intellectuals, forsaking proven facts for make-believe. The irony is that the very people who offer their air-tight scientific arguments are hermetically sealed in a philosophical bubble floating in an epistemological vacuum.

In the United Kingdom, however, with one voice the people worship the uncreatedness of the world with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. There's no Kansas or Ohio or army of homeschoolers. The geologic column towers over the land like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar and you would be hard pressed to find three people who dare to remain standing before it.

Three-fourths of the way through the final program of Great Britons, the voting for the finalists as a whole ended. The votes were tallied and the bottom seven were eliminated. Each of them had a chief proponent who then offered their support to one of the top three for the final push for phone and web votes.

Who were the Top Three? Stay tuned.