The march of ‘nonsense on stilts’

In secular Europe moral discourse is becoming a parody of infantile egoism, says leading theologian Fr Aidan Nichols in his new book

26 March 2010

A student walks past a banner reading 'Against the papacy' and 'No Pope' at La Sapienza University in Rome (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Legal developments incongruous with the Christian ethos would have been unthinkable in the United Kingdom without the aggressive incursion of secular liberalism. Such liberalism can only base rights discourse on the parity of each and all as they choose the way of life they prefer to follow, whether their preferences be well-founded in the objective moral order or not. We have moved into what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has described as a period of romantic expressiveness on a mass scale, where the existentialism of a few influential figures in earlier 20th-century European thought has now become, in a demotic version of itself, the maxim of so many men and women in the street. Allow me to do my own thing: meaning, to choose my own values.

It is not pleasant to attack values, but sometimes it has to be done. [As H L Dreyfus wrote:]

Once we get the idea that there is a plurality of values and that we choose which ones will have a claim on us, we are ripe for the modern idea, first found in the works of Nietzsche... that we posit our values - that is, that valuing is something we do and value is the result of doing it. But once we see that we posit values, we also see that we can equally "unposit" them. They thus lose all authority for us. So, far from giving meaning to our lives, thinking of what is important to us in terms of values shows that our lives have no intrinsic meaning. As long as we think in terms of value positing rather than being gripped by shared concerns, we will not find anything that elicits our commitment... "No one dies for mere values."

Connected herewith, surely, is the difficulty many people in our society have in finding strong reasons for living - and connected in turn with that is the too easy descent of our young into the miasma of drink and drugs. "Strong reasons" for living, however, even or especially when they are appropriated with our mother's milk, or through breathing the social air around us, customarily take what may compendiously if somewhat barbarously be termed a "culturo-politico-metaphysico-religious" form: the form of a comprehensively persuasive way of life. It is this form which is undergoing corrosion today.

The manner in which secularisation is occurring in modern England - and the superbly competent Christian Institute at Wilberforce House, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, monitors the public aspect of this process on an almost weekly basis - is not, evidently, the coercive one of, for instance, the League of Militant Atheists in the Russia of the 1920s. Rather, we are dealing with a soft secularisation which seeks to privatise religious aspiration, so that the public square can be cleared of all religious claims from whatever quarter. As with communitarianism, this too comes with a hefty price tag attached.

Secular liberalism decreases the moral capital of the culture, which derives, or so I would argue, from its historic (Judaeo-Christian) patrimony which itself incorporated what was best from the ancient world. It entails the shrinking in public life of the metaphysical imagination, which becomes ever more unable to advert to the spiritual dimension of human existence. Indeed, the legal establishment of secularism - even if introduced in the name of communitarianism rather than liberalism - would amount to a declaration that agnosticism is now the religion, or anti-religion, of the state.

The human poverty of secular liberalism can already be inferred from the results of contemporary secularisation. In modern England moral discourse is in danger of becoming a parody of infantile egoism. The moral life becomes a matter of wishes, preferences, needs and desires. It is true that the moral life begins with desire. But such desire, as Plato argued and the English historian of ancient philosophy John Rist has emphasised in his study Real Ethics, is not the desire which leads us to pursue "enlightened" self-interest, in the form of the hedonistic calculus which asks how I can maximise pleasure. The desire which impels the moral life is, rather, desire for the good because it is beautiful. To dignify with the term "ethical" the expression of preference by reference to wants contravenes this principle. In terms of moral aesthetics it is ugly. That can be seen in the way typically secular liberal ethicists find it difficult to avoid the justification of moral pathologies: for example, the choices of those who freely contract to inflict physical pain on each other for the purposes of sadistic satisfaction.

Outside the purview of abnormal emotionality, the combination of secularism with utilitarianism is capable of producing equally repellent effects, as in the 2008 proposal of the influential moral philosopher Baroness Warnock that elderly people in mental decline are wasting other people's lives and should be encouraged to consider it their duty to opt for euthanasia. The awareness that the good is truly beautiful such that it is fine to serve it, regardless of inconvenience - what the Hellenes termed kalokagathia - sits as uncomfortably with Lady Warnock's asseverations as, by contrast, it fits like a glove the moral beauty of the Church's saints, in whose lives the voices of creation in pagan antiquity entered into concert, so to say, with the biblical revelation. Pope Benedict XVI has called the saints the demonstration of Christian claims in an empirical age since between them the saints span all the main sectors of human living, from public service through education and health care to the arts and domesticity, and in those realms give evidence of a great range of virtues.

The exemplars we have in this island from the Christian past and present - and those who today, without personal faith, show in decency of life the effects of the Christian faith in an inherited ethos - constitute a spiritual commonwealth that is our most precious form of national wealth. In terms of real function that commonwealth is the most important part of the body politic since it shows us the telos, or "goal", at which life lived in the light of a common good aims. Nothing can compare in culture-creating power with the example of people who embody the highest goods in their due order of significance.

Some people will commend a secular state simply as a pragmatic response to cultural diversity, albeit an important piece of pragmatism since it holds out the hope of social peace. They fail to see how every such response carries its own ideological load which may include substantial negatives. Considered as a state ideology, secular liberalism, paradoxically enough, has one attribute in common with the Islamist militancy that is propelling it towards power and prospective hegemony. It will not address questions of the common good in a way that can build up a firm texture for the social fabric. While Islamist terrorism seeks the outright dissolution of that texture, such liberalism merely allows it to unravel, but the result may be much the same: an atomism that destroys effective solidarity.

Atomism can be a word for separating individuals who are contemporary with one another in space. But in this social application it can also denote the dissolution of inter-human bonds across time. Secular liberalism cannot help looking for a politics without memory, which is why it allies so readily with mass-media pundits bound to the instant contemporaneity captured in the sound-bite. It is a modernism insouciant of the past. But, as with the homo sovieticus of the Bolshevik experience, its attempt to sever the past from the future produces an attitude to human living which devalues the real present, depriving it of richness of reference. The theorists of secular liberalism have their own (contractarian) "tradition" - the late American political philosopher John Rawls is the final outworking of this, yet their tradition is not one of life, but of thought-experiments by ratiocination. It is a "tradition" defined by inquiry into what any rational agent would do to acquire minimum security. Such theory is always inclined to deny history and particularity, including those of a religion. This does not sit well with our culture which, as the Labour Member of Parliament Denis McShane has written, "from Shakespeare to Pope to Brontë to Orwell has been about a deeply felt sense of language and history". More profoundly still, philosophical liberals rarely understand the foundational character of metaphysical and religious belief and thought, which turn on how human beings are made with a deep inclination to seek and worship almighty God. Philosophical liberalism marries readily with secularism. Secularism wants to suppress the public relevance of the human orientation to transcendence, while philosophical liberalism has already lost the sense of it. By "transcendence" here is meant a goal lying beyond humanism.

Unfortunately, there is more than one way to transcend humanism. The divine way of salvation in the triune God - such is the message of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures - goes beyond humanism by gathering in all authentic human good beyond the deaths of persons, cultures, and even the cosmos itself. This is not a counter-humanism so much as an eschatological humanism that licenses sacrifice and renunciation now. Many 21st-century secular liberals, still fighting High Victorian battles, do not sufficiently appreciate that the real enemies of humanism are situated a million intellectual miles from the Church, on the far boundaries of scientific technology and naturalistic ethics.

Thus, for example, scientists intrigued by "transhumanism" are investigating, at any rate theoretically, the possibility that nanotechnology and atomic re-arrangement may permit the spring-boarding of the development of a post-human species. For other transhumanists, since the world's only underlying feature is information - which itself is fluid, reconfigurable in indefinitely many ways - it should be possible to "upload" the brain patterns of individuals, transferring them to computers, whether with prosthetic bodies attached to replace our out-of-date hardware, or simply for the purposes of continued existence in cyberspace. Meanwhile, the more radical deep ecologists castigate the human race as a vermin species afflicting Gaia, and yearn for a global pandemic as a cure, while the bioethics movement grows increasingly utilitarian, denying human beings intrinsic worth in order to justify not only abortion but eugenic infanticide.

Where, we may ask, is the dignity of the human here? Without a theological basis in the doctrine of the imagehood of God in man, such dignity is insecurely placed. It is not surprising that rational humanists have been hard put to find a stable philosophical foundation for human rights claims. Yet they need to meet the objections to the well-foundedness of those claims, objections summed up in Jeremy Bentham's dismissive description: "nonsense on stilts".

This is an extract from Criticising the Critics by Fr Aidan Nichols, published by Family Publications (www.familypublications.co.uk, 01865 321321), priced £11.95