Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Hallelujah for CUCA

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Slightly off-topic, but a website has come out recently that uses online translators to translate back and forth repeatedly, usually creating a strange answer. It’s at www.conveythis.com/translation.php

I put in CUCA. The result, via Coca-cola, Porridge and Barley, was “The Messiah”

The Conservative Party came out as “special”

Rather strangely, Brown comes out as Messina, which is in Sicily. I therefore conclude that Gordon Brown is a mafioso.

We can also find an important message about the direction in which the party has moved under Cameron: Tory becomes Left.

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Posted in Politics by Joseph M Sanderson | No Comments »

U.S. Bishops must NOT back Obama

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/13499

In today’s issue of The Tablet (the international Catholic weekly Founded 1840 – Britain’s oldest journal bar The Spectator), that publication’s characteristically hysterical Obamamania has been taken beyond all moral acceptability, orthodoxy, or any pretence of Catholic sensibility. This time its about healthcare, or “Obamacare”. I shall elucidate.

On political issues the Catholic Church has always been a bit split; prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) the Church mainly focused on critiquing liberalism, secularism, “Modernism” (a sceptical and anti-authoritarian outlook), socialism, Communism, in the 19th Century democracy itself, sexual liberalism, divorce and all the traditional thorny medical ethical issues – abortion, euthanasia, artificial contraception, etc. However, since Vatican II there has been an increasing focus on social issues, including “social justice”, workers’ rights, the evils of excessive capitalism, and re-focusing economics in such a manner that the human being is seen as the end rather than merely the means of economic activity. Laudable moral intentions, for sure, but often displaying a lack of awareness of how economics really works. How do we MAKE people care about each other? The answer to this is pretty unclear, other than everyone becoming Christians and being charitable towards one another voluntarily.

However, The Tablet chooses to interpret these moral imperatives solely according to a narrow, statist understanding. This is certainly a long way from Pius IX’s 1846 pronouncement that socialism is “a pest”, and reflects an uninformed and naive outlook. Having championed Obama during his election campaign, the (highly unorthodox) editorial of The Tablet  has proudly asserted from on high that “U.S. Bishops must back Obama.” The argument presented is dangerous and wrong – that the Church in America ought to shelve its problems with state-sanctioned abortion (in the Church’s view mass state infanticide) and all the other areas where monolithic healthcare systems, such as the NHS, trample over traditioanl Christian moral values, in order to pursue the “general principle of the common good”. In contrast to this “common good” of public healthcare, the issue of abortion is passed off as a “specifically Catholic issue”, and the editor attacks the Bishops for failing to “put the promotion of social justice above their churchly priorities.” Sorry, one issue, that of the moral imperative to heal the sick, cannot be so warmly lauded as “social justice” while an equally important imperative – not to kill the unborn – is given the mere rhetorical status of “their own churchly priorities”. This is unfair, un-Catholic, cheap and incredibly one-sided, and a Catholic publication ought to know better.

Furthermore, The Tablet presents the Obamacare issue as solely one of a distinction between people either having healthcare or not – it’s either given to them graciously from Their Lord Barack or denied them by greedy capitalists, apparently the “robber barons” of our age. The subtleties of the difficulties of state funding, the inefficiencies and abuses generated by a universal “free-at-the-point-of-use” principle, as weighed against the evil of people not having healthcare, are dealt with using one sweeping, blunt conclusion: the state must provide universal care, so saith the Lord, and the Bishops are obligated to pressure for this. All else, even the rights of the unborn, are secondary.

Even if one accepts that Church teaching on imperatives to heal the sick must translate directly into state-run healthcare (a highly contentious assumption), one must surely accept that this is less clear and more tenuous than Church teaching on abortion, which is thoroughly clear-cut. What’s more, the Church must fight the battle of attitudes: we in the West generally do not see any intrinsic evils in state healthcare, but are morally apathetic about abortion – the Bishops must draw a line in the sand and defend it, because once Obamacare is accepted in principle it is only a small step further to sanction state-funded abortion en masse. Even if you personally agree with abortion, or believe in the right to decide for oneself whether it is acceptable, then surely on the latter principle one must oppose the confiscation of taxpayers’ money to spend by the state on abortion “services” against the will of many of the taxpayers? Opposition to abortion in the US is widespread and many will be outraged to see their money spent in this way. The Bishops are entirely right to focus on this issue and the need to keep abortion out of the state system. This is not a “mistake” and The Tablet, if it makes any claim to retain the name of a Catholic weekly, ought to be ashamed of itself.

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Posted in Politics by Gavin Rice | 3 Comments »

Easter Day Message to CUCA

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Easter Day Message: De-Bunking Weak Socialist Exegesis

I’m not going to do any work today, for obvious reasons probably minutely detailed in Canon Law somewhere. Instead, I thought I would offer, as briefly as possible, some exegetical clarifications that Christian Conservatives can make when markets and finance are attacked as immoral and enforced redistribution of wealth is advocated as a genuine response to Christ’s exhortation to charity.
What I’m going to do is to take the two most oft-referenced passages used by agoraphobes (in the etymological sense) to try and claim that Jesus opposed markets. Then I will endeavour to point out a few of the complexities of these passages, or otherwise how an anti-market understanding of them simply ignores the historical or literary context. I apologize in advance for not being able to cite the commentaries that taught me these details when I did my exegesis paper last year. Well, here goes.

1) The famous ‘render’ passage (Luke 20:21-28):
(in which Jesus is asked by Pharisees whether or not Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar, and replies that one must ‘render unto Caesar what is his, and unto God what is His’)

This is doubly important as it is also used to attack an Augustinian opposition to big government: statists claim that obedience to the laws, whatever they are, is simply ‘rendering unto Caesar’ and so the only proper way to oppose unjust laws is to go through the rigmarole of parliamentary democracy to change laws (that is, impose Christian morality on society using government). Usually, however, it is used to argue that Christ has basically given taxation (the violent collection of money from people living within a certain territory) a Divine Command carte blanche. Its repercussions in terms of doctrine and simply theological attitudes towards government stretch and multiply throughout Thomist theory and beyond.

First, we need to ask ourselves why Jews would object paying taxes to Caesar at all. The uninformed answer is that Jews simply resented being subjected to Roman rule and may have felt that, since Caesar had simply invaded Israel, he had no claim to their loyalty or a portion of the profits of their labour. But there’s more to it than that. Crucially, the wording on a Roman denarius, the coin with Caesar’s profile on it which Jesus holds as he gives the ‘render’ statement, calls Caesar a god. It refers explicitly to the imperial cult, in which Caesar is both ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’, among other divine titles – titles that Jews used for God. For Jews in the first centuries, to use Roman money was to traffic in idolatry and by implication ought to be avoided (more on this later) yet at the same time its use was practically demanded of them under Roman rule.

So the Pharisees’ question isn’t a tricky one because it seeks to expose Jesus as being either a rebel against Roman rule or a collaborator. It is difficult to answer because it represents one outward expression of a major moral dilemma for Jews then: how to refrain from idolatry to the extent that the Law demands, while living under the rule of an empire which relies on idolatry (the imperial cult) as its cohesive force. It is true to say that Jews were exempt from the usual requirements to sacrifice to Caesar: yet Roman understanding of the Law was not so adequate that they were allowed, for example, to pay taxes in their own currency, or keep the imperial cult out of their lives in the many minor ways in which it daily infiltrated the lives of subjects of the empire. It was not the paying of taxes to an external ruler per se that Jews objected to (although they surely objected to paying too much), as can be seen by the same dilemma not arising under the other imperial powers, without imperial cults, that dominated them in the Old Testament. It was the idolatrous violations, if minor, of the rule incurred everyday by living under Roman rule. So when Jesus tells Christians to ‘render unto Caesar what is his’, how should they understand that? If Caesar is an idol then nothing can belong to him.

There is a second problem with the statist interpretation of the ‘render’ passage. The formula of ‘give to X what he/it deserves, and to God what He deserves’ is not unique here: Jesus borrows it from the Old Testament, where the meaning is occasionally explicitly ironic or hostile. In 1 Maccabees, for example, the dying Matathias, at the end of a battle, tells his brother to “pay back the Gentiles in full, and obey the commands of the Law”. So perhaps if what is Caesar’s is his use of violence and striving for temporal power, then the ‘render’ passage is really directly rebellious.
This argument, however, is not majority opinion.

Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees cannot be shown to be an injunction to pay taxes as a service to Caesar equivalent to following the Law as a service to God: Caesar’s role as idol rules out such an understanding. What Jesus’ answer did was allow him to express his dissatisfaction with Roman rule without saying something that could get him mistaken for a political rabble-rouser; and he could make the ambiguity of his answer more acceptable to those worried about the idolatrous implications of following Roman laws and customs by including a reminder that, whatever you did with your denarii, Gods Law was notwithstanding.

The radicalism of Jesus’ social message, and His admonition to turn from worldly concerns, however, extend to political life and what role we accord government. Civitas Dei would be the obvious recommended reading on that whole theme.

None of the details I draw out in this article are intended to show that the converse of the statist interpretations is true (e.g. that tax is bad or shouldn’t be paid) but rather that these interpretations don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. The ‘render’ command can’t be used to show that we are divinely enjoined to pay taxes and obey the law. Attempts to do so may entirely miss the point of the passage.

2) The expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple (I don’t cite the passage because here the redaction between gospels is relevant)

This is not often used as a proper argument that Jesus was antipathetic towards markets: it wouldn’t hold up if used that way because the Temple-context is obviously central to the passage. Instead, it is appealed to as evidence of a general sentiment – shops make Jesus angry – which is easier to support with a string of irrelevant quotes from the sermon on the mount and so on. There’s anecdotal evidence below of the earnest, if not necessarily effective, way in which this passage is appealed to as evidence of Jesus’ broad dislike of people buying and selling things.

Among the G20 protesters there was a chap dressed up as Jesus bearing a placard with ‘throw the moneylenders out’. Firstly, he had misquoted the gospels. Secondly, I don’t understand how he thought the economy was going to recover without them. Money-lenders serve a necessary purpose in our financial system (as in pretty much any – there’s evidence that Thales bought olive fortunes).

Likewise, the money-changers in the Temple of Israel had a very important function in the Jewish sacrificial cult: Jews could offer money to the temple coffers as a sacrifice, and needed to pay for the animals they intended to sacrifice (hence the livestock salesmen: also a necessary service), but they could not do so using pagan money, stamped as it was with images of idols and bearing profane creeds. So money-changers were needed to trade foreign coinage for the domestic currency. This service became particularly important in the early first century as Jews were returning from a plethora of different nations, bearing different currencies, to sacrifice. Technically, then, there was a market-place in the Temple: but it was there because it was needed for the Temple to work in the way it always had done.

The past tense there is the key. Jesus was going to change the way that God’s people sacrificed to Him: rather than animals in one physical building in the world, the people of Israel, after the Crucifixion, were going to re-present Christ’s sacrifice in their own churches, anywhere, and it would be a complete rather than petitionary sacrifice. John’s gospel makes it explicit that Jesus’ expulsion of the money-changers and livestock salesmen from the temple was a symbol of the impending total renewal of the cultic practices of God’s people (John 2:18-21).

To understand the passage as Jesus accusing necessary cultic service-providers of being “robbers”, implying that money-changing and livestock selling did not belong at the edge of a holy place, carried to its logical conclusions, suggest that not the nature of the Temple cult but rather the extent of the providers’ profit-margins was the issue at stake. Nevertheless, the “den of robbers” accusation that finishes this pericope in Mark (11:17), Luke (19:43) and Matthew (21:13) seems pretty strong and needs consideration.

Mark 11:17: “and he was teaching, saying to them, ‘Hath it not been written — My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the nations, and ye did make it a den of robbers?’” (my italics). Note that ‘the nations’ is the equivalent term for gentiles. The prophetic-symbological interpretation, then, can be maintained here: Jesus is making the distinction between the universality of the future temple cult of the Church and the specificity of the Temple in Jerusalem which has led to its misuse (not necessarily at that very moment) in the history of Israel. So an anti-market interpretation in the Marcan pericope is not necessarily appropriate. Matthew copies Mark’s account almost word-for-word.

Luke 19:43: “saying to them, ‘It hath been written, My house is a house of prayer — but ye made it a den of robbers.’” is much less clearly symbological, although it contains compressed references to the Marcan juxtaposition of universal spiritual future and flawed contingent past. It could be argued that Luke’s redaction of Mark here tones down the prophetic content, perhaps in order to bring out Jesus’ vehemence towards markets. This contention becomes rather strained since Luke places that very redaction immediately after a parable in which a servant gains his master’s praise by successfully investing the master’s money, gaining profit.

The above analysis is, of course, somewhat speculative and quite close to the text: I am an amateur and my conclusions worth little. The attempt to use this passage to paint Jesus as an habitual opponent of trading and capital, however, requires two things: it not only requires (a) that Jesus is specifically throwing traders out of the Temple specifically because they are trading there, but also that (b) he does so vehemently enough that we can infer a negative attitude towards trading per se and not just in the Temple – otherwise the most that the G20 placard-bearer could have been complaining about is, perhaps, that he had to pay for his Catechesis in the church book-shop. If (a) is ambiguous – if not a misunderstanding – then we cannot move to (b).

I’m sorry that took so long. Thank God you don’t have to do it for weekly supervisions! Basically, try to paraphrase the arguments in your head so that the next time a statist tries to claim Jesus would have raised capital gains taxes, you have something to say back besides attacking their party’s anti-clericalism (which never goes down well, and often results in one accidentally defending clause 28 or something equally tasteless). Have a good year!
p.s. last time I tried arguments like this on an evangelical I know in the CSLD he claimed I was ‘intellectualizing’ the gospel. There’s a very easy way to undercut such an approach: ask so-called ‘literalists’ to explain how the words of the Bible teaches the existence of the Holy Trinity. Then watch them squirm.

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Posted in General, Politics by Hugh Burling | 7 Comments »

Ideological monopolies

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Religion in general has come under a lot of criticism in recent years. It is becoming more and more common-place to claim that religion is not only misguided but the root of much evil in the world. However, it is far too simplistic to claim that it is an institutional belief in God which has caused so many of the world’s problems. Rather it is a belief in something (anything) which claims to have a have a monopoly on truth that causes most of the evil in society. As such, we should all fear it when any ideology is accepted by a society as a given.

Derived from attacks against religion, secularism has become the watch-word for state action. Lip service is still paid to the union between church and state in the British constitution, but when it comes to government action, religion must take a back seat. Indeed, it must be pulled along clinging onto the back bumper. Of course, most people do not have a problem with this. As we all know, the Bible does teach us that homosexuality is wrong, and adulteresses should be stoned to death, and implicitly that the earth is only 6,000 years old. But for society to accept uncompromisingly the default position is equally unfortunate.

An example of the default position to creationism is Darwinian evolution. Although it is ridiculous to claim that an adherence to Darwinian evolution leads inevitably to eugenics – the evolution of the emotion of self-sacrifice discredits the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ in every case – any idea is necessarily debased for wider consumption. This is why the inaccurate belief that evolution means ‘survival of the fittest’ has gained currency. When a state accepts this position uncompromisingly, allowing simplistic generalisations to take hold, it is not ludicrous to see how it could lead to a policy of eugenics. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is the problem when one idea holds a monopoly on truth in a society. If an idea is taken as read, it can be moulded to suit the will of those in power. It is now accepted in the West that democracy is absolutely right. The underlying principle behind the Iraq War for neo-conservatives was the unwavering belief that it was right to bring democracy to a country otherwise in the grips of dictatorship. It is perfectly acceptable for individuals to accept this position, but when a society’s assumption becomes a policy of its state, alternate ideas cannot be voiced. Opposition to the Iraq War was based on the idea that it was not a war that should be fought, not that it may be wrong in principle to bring democracy to a country that had never known it.

The solution is to avoid state ideology, even if it is secular or democratic. A state needs to adopt one principle over another to function (after all, the state needs a political ideology in order to form a government), but it should not adopt such an ideology as a given in the execution of policy. For example, the argument that Britain is a ‘secular country’ should not rear its ugly head in the debate on faith schools. This argument necessarily makes religion something alien to British society in principle, thereby allowing the state to take actions without recognising the alternate position. As such, the state can take unilateral action without debate: maybe there is a God; perhaps democracy is not an end in itself for every country; conceivably nationalised industries are bad. The state must not be allowed to hold a monopoly on truth.

This is not to say that individual people cannot hold monopolistic ideas. It is impossible for someone to both believe in God and at the same time not believe in God. Either they believe, do not believe, or have yet to make up their mind. But the state cannot and should not make the same judgment. Otherwise individual liberty to believe something different is trampled and cannot be debated in society.

With monopoly comes exploitation and abuse. And a good way to prevent monopoly is individualism.

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Posted in Politics by James Arthur Sharpe | 1 Comment »

On the inadequacy of liberty

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

In a response to my own request for non-libertarian articles, I have decided that it would be advantageous to make a case for the insufficiency of liberty as our sole aim and desire, and its inadequacy as a moral principle. The idea is inspired by an article in this month’s “Prospect” magazine by Edward Skidelsky, a philosopher at Exeter University, who makes a case for the importance of the taditional virtues, and the poverty of any attempt to reduce morality to a mere matter of rights and obligations. According to Skidlesky, there is much in the rich intellectual treasury of the pre-moderns from which modernity can learn.

David Cameron was right when he recently warned that we are “becoming quite literally a demoralised society, where nobody will tell the truth any more about what is good and bad.” In a previous edition of “Prospect”, Richard Reeves argues that Britain’s poor lack not only the material but also the moral resources to better themselves. Put simply, Britain’s underclass are by and large lacking in the basic virtues of hard work, self-restraint, a sense of discipline and respect for authority, and consideration for the needs and rights of others. Such moral poverty is the cause of much crime, but also of an ethically impoverished culture that has descended into little more than hedonistic barbarism. Sadly, this is often as true for the rich as it is for the poor, only the rich have enough money to indulge themselves without falling foul of the law. Mr Cameron’s comments would come as a breath of fresh air from the stagnant moral framework called liberalism, if only he had any idea of how it ought to be challenged. The notion of returning to traditional notions of “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, is a step in the right direction, but it is of no use if one’s frame of reference has been so defined by liberal, relativist orthodoxy that one is unable to draw conclusions that differ in any way from those of a utilitarian Benthamite.

The liberal “big idea” (to use employ a disgustingly trendy phrase), is that individuals are sovereign in their own sphere, and that only when they infringe upon the rights of others may they be rebuked. Unfortunately, this nice-sounding principle, which underpins both liberalism and libertarianism, is totally inadequate. Firstly, I would argue that individuals are an awful lot less free and sovereign than John Stuart Mill (possibly, in pure academic terms, the worst moralist of ethical intellectual history) would like us to think. For example, a hallmark of modern liberal values is sexual libertinism. However, I would argue that it is very difficult to decide at what point a person infringes the rights of his sexual partner, since, especially on this most animalistic and irrational of activities, we can hardly be described as cool, calculating agents, fully capable of calm decision-making. Someone who is emotionally pressured into sex has, according to the liberal mind, consented, and under the rule of sexual contract, has not been offended by their partner. I would argue that a moral offence has indeed been committed, which has damaged the emotional welfare of the pressured partner. As such, a far more rigid set of rules for sexual behaviour is needed, based on external, general principles, since allowing a contractual model is inadequate, fails to take proper account of the complexity of human emotional behaviour, and as such is downright dangerous.

This is but one example of the failings of the idolatry of liberty. A wonderful diagram for the liberal view of mankind is one of many gardens with fences erected between them, each gardener being free within his own domain but unable to interfere with his neighbour’s garden. This view of human behaviour is simplistic and simply wrong. Humans are by their very nature social, each forms is frame of reference in terms of the influences of others around him, and each is reliant on the activities of others for his very existence. From this much more comprehensive view of human interaction I do not draw the Marxist conclusion that all men must therefore by subordinated to an impersonal state; by disempowering individuals and (dare I say the “c” word?) human communities, the statist philosophy is just as inhuman as the notion of dogmatic individualism.

Skidelsky argues that humans must cultivate virtues in order to give purpose to their existence, but also to improve their relationships with other human beings. For the libertarian, an individual is sovereign in his own sphere, and may indulge himself as much as he wishes so long as he does not inflict upon the rights of others. The problem is, the libertarian concept of not infringing upon the rights of others is not broad or detailed enough. By being selfish, unpleasant and malicious in one’s personal relationships, one may damage other people just as much as if one took property from them (to the libertarian’s mind the greatest capital sin). Skidelsky uses the example of a man who, having completed his “obligations” towards others (e.g. having completed a day’s work and therefore satisfied his contract with his employer), sits down with a six-pack to watch porn all day. To the liberal, who’s moral outlook is shallow and incomplete, he isn’t offending anybody, and is within his “rights”. On the contrary, there is immense fallout from such a self-destructive activity. The man’s attitudes to women and sexuality will become (possibly slowly and subtly, but nevertheless surely) selfish, centred around his own gratification. The man has failed in his obligations to respect women and to treat them as individuals worthy of respect, and to uphold this general principle in terms of society’s moral fabric. By being so irresponsible in cultivating virtues and indulging vice, he will mould himself in such a way that he is likely to behave badly towards others in the future. To the liberal this is irrelevant: the man is operating within his own garden. But the garden fences are permeable. Since we may not propogate any system of coherent values without offending the man’s right to detemine his own lifestyle, we as a society fail that man, since his behaviour will not ultimately result in happiness. Liberalism is unable to distinguish between long-term happiness and short-term hedonism, or to criticise the latter in order to protect the former.

There are left-overs in our minds from the days when virtues were cultivated and vices looked down upon. People find the beer-guzzling porn-watcher instinctively disgusting, and many are revolted by gluttony, obesity and binge drinking. There is a (often culturally suppressed) negative gut reaction when we see another person smoking, as we are aware of the damage they are irresponsibly inflicting on themselves. However, liberalism has rendered us incapable of expressing this revulsion except in liberal terms, hence the (spurious) stress on passive smoking; it “infringes” upon the rights of others.

However, modern society has no frame of reference with which to make sense of these instincts. In centuries past the Church was the bearer of this ethical tradition, but it is now a casualty in the war with the dogma of individual sovereignty. Some churches have embraced individualism and as such have merely leapt into bed with the enemy, and as such will have nothing of relevance to say except to prop up the liberal orthodoxy. The conservative churches who have refused to be reconciled to modern liberal values have been exiled to the cultural fringes of society. Marxism provided a clear sense of values, direction and purpose, as well as a way of explaining the way in which people ought to relate to each other (albeit within the framework of a philosophy with which I profoundly disagree), but it has been superseded by global capitalism.

A quote from Skidelsky: “The erosion of these languages, sacred and secular, explains the ploriferation of targets and guidelines that has overwhelmed the public sector. Targets are an attempt to codify the uncodifiable, to substitute bureaucratic directives for professional honour and wisdom. Their implacable logic denies hospital beds to the sick and swells academic journals with unreadable articles. Yet the main damage they do is to the self-respect of those who must implement them. There is no surer way of destroying public spirit than to deny its existence. Those treated as jobsworths will become jobsworths.”

The academic field of economics is a further domain within which liberal individualism, assuming the sovereignty of the individual as an isolated logical agent, has taken hold. An methodology that treats humans as earners and spenders, producers and consumers, as collections of numbers rather than as morally equipped individuals is a poverty for academia. Economists are debarred from talking about “morality”, except as an instrument of growth – “moral capital”. Furthermore, they can only talk about happiness in terms of the absurdity called “happiness economics”.

Skidlesky is enthusiastic about contemporary virtue ethics, which led Oxford philosophers such as Iris Murdoch away from the prevailing consensus that morals are a matter of personal choice towards the realism of Plato, Aristotle and the Scholastics. It allows us to make a moral judgment about another’s actions, and indeed about the person who performed them, without risk of being told that we are imposing a mere opinion, and impeding the object of our criticism’s rights to moral sovereignty. I am less certain, since society takes many years to catch up with academic opinion, if it catches up at all. The inadequate theories of Bentham and J S Mill have become so ingrained in the public mind, the concept of choice valued so highly, the notion of one’s own preference or what one personally feels comfortable with reigns so supreme, that it is hard to see society’s mass retreat from the moral abyss.

Libertarians and conservatives have much in comman – politically, at least. We both know that taking individual human behaviour and locating it within “society” rather than individuals is artifical and wrong: if a criminal commits a crime then it is his fault, not society’s. However, for libertarians the matter stops there. The criminal is sovereign in his own moral garden, chose to break down a fence, and will pay the price. For the intellectual cultural or social conservative the question must penetrate deeper, and we must find ways of attributing blame to individuals while also identifying and tackling the sources of immoral (and I mean immoral) behaviour. We must abandon garden-fence theory, and look more closely at the complex ways in which individuals interelate, and realise that while the market is useful for producing wealth, it is not universal explanatory theory for human behaviour. The consequences of our actions are much more widespread than we like to think, and we must not abdicate moral responsibility by using the excuse that we are individually sovereign. A common values system, allowing us to make judgments about what is really right and really wrong, must be rediscovered, and we must realise that humans have an obligation to cultivate behaviour that is good, not merely behaviour that doesn’t adversely affect others in a direct, immediate sense. We need to replace “liberty” as an end in itself with a rather old-fasioned idea, which Plato called “the Good”, and we need to realise that there is a lot more to being good than to keeping within the boundaries of one’s own garden fence. In order to set about achieving this societal redirection we could do a lot worse than rediscovering and applying virtue ethics.

 

This article draws on ideas and arguments from “The return of goodness” by Edward Skidelsky, in “Prospect” magazine, September 2008

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Posted in Politics by Gavin Rice | 7 Comments »

Religion and Politics?

Friday, April 4th, 2008

It is a modern assumption that Religion and Politics don’t mix. The American Christian Right are synonymous in secular Europe with a regressive social agenda and intolerance of minorities. Closer to home, reactions to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent incursions into politics with his comments on accommodating Sharia law come firmly from the Henry II school.

This is an assumption I share. I may go to church, and I may go to CUCA events, but never the twain shall meet. However I was rather taken aback last Sunday having hauled my caucus to church early in the morning that the day’s sermon was overtly political. More manifesto than Mark.

The speaker was one Dr. Michael Schluter, founder and chairman of the Jubilee Centre, a Christian research group based in Cambridge. In his paper ‘How to create a relational society: Foundations for a new social order’ (published in the Cambridge Papers), he advocates a complete rethinking of our economy and society along biblical lines. This rethinking takes as its inspiration the Jubilee legislation (from which the organization takes its name) as laid down in the book of Leviticus. As he laid out this vision in his sermon, I sat incredulous that our 21st century, post-industrialised, multicultural land should seek to model itself on that of a 5000 year old agrarian society. But as the sermon went on I realized that what Dr. Schulter was talking about was of great relevance today, particularly for Conservatives.

The legislation is designed to maintain the division of land between the tribes of Israel as decreed when they first came out of the desert and settled in the land of Canaan. It requires that every 50th year, the Jubilee year, all Israelis return to their place of birth, and the compulsory selling of property back to the original owner or their heirs. The point of this is twofold. Firstly it ensures that all property is shared equitably and universally. Secondly it discourages geographic mobility, encouraging families to stay together where they have deep roots. This is the relational society, placing the strength of relationships with family and community alongside economic growth and greater equality as the main political aims.

The universal ownership of property is a very old Tory idea. Margaret Thatcher may have re-popularised the phrase “a property-owning democracy” with her council house sales in the 1980s, but it has been a key plank of Conservative thinking since the Second World War, when in 1950 Anthony Eden pledging to build 300,000 new homes a year, and the concept can be found in Conservative thinking at earlier dates. An Englishman’s home is, after all, his castle. The idea is that when a citizen owns an asset in their society, they have a stake in the success of that society and see it as part of their responsibility to further that success. Property is also a wealth-generator- many families have more wealth stored in their pile of bricks than they do in their bank accounts, and more wealth can be created with rising house prices than through the 9 to 5 slog. Homes also are a necessity in creating stable families.

As for the second point: encouraging strong ties to family and place, I believe there is a tension in Conservative thinking. The tension comes from the two largest strands in modern Conservatism, that between economic liberalization and social conservatism. For example, conservative politicians all over the globe preach the benefits of two parent families bringing up their kids with love and devotion but those same politicians want both parents out working every available hour in the pursuit of profit and economic growth. Every hour at the grindstone is one less with the sprogs nurturing them into responsible adults.

Norman Tebbit famously exhorted the jobless to ‘get on yer bike’ and look for work. But for many finding work may mean uprooting and leaving town for distant places where their line of work is more available. This geographical mobility of labour (free movement of labour being one of the key planks of economic liberalism) surely disrupts stable family and community life. I myself remember my childhood where my Dad worked in such disparate locations as Plymouth, Manchester and Dublin to get the work he was qualified to do. The poor man not only got on his bike, but cycled it within an inch of its life. While it was necessary to put money on the table, it obviously made bringing up a young family much harder; and not all families would survive under this strain.

Conservatives are only just beginning to think through this tension. The work of Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and David Cameron’s leadership has finally begun to think how to redress the balance in conservatism away from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no such a thing as society’ economic liberalism without undoing the great and necessary gains that her premiership had. As the sermon came to an end, I realized that take out the references to God, and Schulter’s manifesto differs little from Cameron’s crusade to mend our broken society, or George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’.

What does this mean in policy terms. David Cameron has already talked of restoring tax breaks for married couples and those with children. Dr. Schulter goes further and points to some policies from Singapore. Tax breaks for homes shared with elderly parents, and lesser breaks for those who live within 5km of their elderly parents. With an ageing population set to put greater pressure on elderly care and the health service, encouraging families to act as a welfare unit for the old as well as young is surely sensible. He also points to the John Lewis partnership which will relocate its employees to any store in the country if they wish to be near their families.

No doubt there are many other policy implications which could have great benefits to our society. In future I hope to look past turbulent priests and anti-abortion, anti-gay bible-bashers to see that religion and its adherents have much to give in ideas, time and compassion to build stronger families, safer and more stable communities and a more humane society.

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Posted in Politics by Steven Clarke | 2 Comments »