In my shelves there is a row of books whose titles are themselves
instructive. They begin with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American
Mind (Penguin Books 1988) and include such titles as Egalitarian
Envy by Gonzalo de la Mora (Paragon House 1987), Illiberal Education
by Dinesh d'Souza (The Free Press, 1991) A Nation of Victims: The
Decay of the American Character by Charles Sykes (1992, St Martin's
Press) and All Must Have Prizes by Melanie Phillips.
The theme which is common to these books is the damage inflicted upon
the ordinary man's perception and understanding of the truth by what
might loosely be called Modernist and Post-Modernist Liberal attitudes.
We had been advised of this threat as far back as the 1940s by C.S.
Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man (1943) and in his slightly
earlier but still very readable essay The Poison of Subjectivism from
which that book developed (originally published in Religion and Life,
Vol. XII, 1943). Its consequence was the widespread intellectual malaise
of "The New Morality" and "Situational Ethics" which swept over an
unsuspecting, though not unwarned western culture in the 1960s. As
Walter Hooper says in his preface to Christian Reflections (Collins,
1967) where the essay can now be read:
"...the modernist theologians were trotting out innumerable books
on ‘situational ethics’ and the ‘new morality’ which anyone familiar
with the New Testament as well as the past will instantly recognize
as the old immorality in a new dress. The ruinous effects of their
works we already know, but the ‘innovators’ – as Lewis called them
– have now gone even further in seeking to provide for individual
and universal ‘happiness’ by the dethronement of traditional values,
jettisoning truth and reality from their vocabulary and philosophy."
Today we are seeing the full flowering of this particular weed in
the Anglican Communion and elsewhere, not least in the decisions of
General Synod and General Convention in England and the USA respectively.
Much of their time and our money is being devoted to the systematic
removal of the familiar and scriptural and doctrinal landmarks and
the substitution of other, more flexible and therefore more manipulable
ones.
However, into this scene there has entered a rather different kind
of book from the ones which we have come to expect from Anglican academics.
Nigel Biggar's Good Life – Reflections on what we Value Today (SPCK
1997 £12:99) is like a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere whose
intellectual fetidness was becoming rapidly unbearable.
Biggar is Chaplain of Oriel College Oxford. It needs to be explained
that Oxford Chaplains are generally academics as well as pastors and
therefore not only have the pastoral responsibility for the undergraduates
in their colleges but also lecture in the University at large. Biggar,
for instance, teaches ethics in the University's Faculty of Theology.
Reading between the lines one gathers that Biggar has been listening
carefully to the views and opinions propounded by his young charges
and has reckoned that the time has come to challenge some at least
of the assumptions by which they purport to base their lives.
He selects seven contemporary values: self-fulfilment, freedom, work,
ecstasy, tribal loyalty, tolerance and community and examines on what
authority (if any) the students' beliefs about them are based. His
analysis is very gentle and sympathetic, showing that he has taken
a lot of trouble to discover what they do believe (as opposed to what
they think, and at first claim, they believe), so nobody could possibly
accuse him of being unfair or dismissive to them.
However, and this is the real glory of the book, and a reason in itself
for reading it, Biggar opens with a chapter entitled Just a Matter
of Taste? The Question of Moral Relativism. In this chapter he does
such a deft and devastating hatchet-job on the whole area of popular
morality, that the book would be worth buying for this chapter alone.
Indeed I personally think that the book might have usefully concentrated
on the first chapter and the second one (Self-fulfilment... Must it
be Selfish?) to the exclusion of the rest. My hunch is that Biggar,
having realised the thoroughness of the destruction he had wrought,
got cold feet and feared that none of his protegés would read the
rest of the book if he went much further!
It is, therefore, with these first two chapters of the book that I
shall be concerned here. If as a result you decide to acquire and
read the whole book, so much the better, but it is the issues addressed
in these chapters about which the most serious misunderstandings today
prevail.
The "modern" mind, Biggar points out has been confused between “making
a judgement” and “being judgemental”. Like Macaulay's misunderstood
dictum which I quoted in the last issue of the Rock ("no spectacle
[is] so ridiculous as the British public in one of it periodical fits
of morality”) which so far from condemning public indignation was
actually commending it, but pleading for it to be more equally applied,
the confusion between judging and being judgemental is a clear-cut
one. Judgementalism is an excessive or inappropriate use of the human
ability (and duty) to distinguish what is good from what is bad, what
is right from what is wrong, what is false from what is true, and
having made that distinction to take whatever may be the appropriate
action to rectify, clarify or correct.
Human nature being what it is, some men will always be unable to distinguish
between varying degrees of wrongness, falsity and badness and hence
acquire the bad habit of finding fault at every possible opportunity,
not with themselves (which might be a sign of grace) but with others.
The reaction to such self-righteousness has, however, been equally
excessive, and the idea has gained currency that there is no such
thing as objective truth, right and goodness, but only a series of
feelings or perceptions in which something may be "wrong for you but
right for me because that's the way I feel about it".
But if the sole arbiter of rightness or wrongness is my feelings on
the matter, there is no reason whatever to suppose that anyone else's
feelings on the same matter will coincide at any given time or place
between any two people. If "this is wrong" is a statement of the order
"I feel sick", it would be perfectly in order for someone else to
say "but I feel perfectly well". There can be no moral imperatives
without some independent authority to which appeal can be made.
In practice, of course, the young are constantly appealing to such
standards and authorities. Injustice, oppression and exploitation
are three favourite (and well-deserved) targets of their wrath. Nevertheless,
the command "thou shalt not exploit/oppress/be unjust" can only be
sustained on the ground of some principle acceptable to all the parties
concerned.
It's no use, for instance, trying to appeal to "Nature". Nature is
red in tooth and claw and knows little about injustice and a great
deal (by experience) about exploitation. Nor is it much more useful
to appeal to our common "Humanity" since human nature, left to its
own devices will be just as unjust and exploitive as Nature herself.
So if what the moral relativists claim is really true (that morality
has no objective, absolute existence) we are in what Biggar describes
as a "moral wasteland" He puts it rather neatly when he says:
Further, if morality lacks grounding in objective reality, then appeals
to justice will carry no more weight than expressions of mere distaste.
If moral values are not real, then when I spontaneously react to some
injury by exclaiming, “that's not fair!”, all that I have succeeded
in doing is uttering a sophisticated – or rather, a verbose form of
‘Ouch!’ My response has all the force of a merely personal dislike.
He then proceeds to lay waste the second contention of the moral relativist
namely that such moral rules as do exist vary widely from culture
to culture and are, in the last analysis, the product of a culture's
socio-economic factors.
It is simply not true that moral rules have differed as widely as
the relativist would have us believe. The three great monotheistic
religions, for example have an enormous amount of rules in common,
not least the Ten Commandments. Nor, if we look elsewhere and throughout
the course of history do we find the differences nearly as significant
as the similarities. Nearly every advanced civilization has rules
about preserving life, respect for property and duty towards offspring
and dependants, and these rules differ very little, if at all, from
one another; where differences do appear, there is nearly always an
explanation for them, and you will invariably find evidence of a significant
body of opinion within that culture applying itself to getting the
rules changed.
It is the very existence of such would-be rule-changers (or prophets)
which gives the lie direct to the belief that such rules are solely
the product of economic or social pressures. For the reformer no less
than the conformer is the product of the pressures whose effects he
is seeking to mitigate or change. The Wilberforces and Shaftesburys
and Mother Theresas of this world don't simply drop out of the sky.
They are the products of the very systems that they see themselves
obliged to try and change.
Biggar goes on to say:
Even those of us who are most ardently relativist can be found to
hold some moral opinions that we regard as universally valid. It seems,
then, that in practice we display more confidence in the possibility
of moral knowledge than is strictly allowed us by the theoretical
scepticism we tend to confess ...it necessarily presupposes certain
moral duties: that we ought to be honest and not pretend to know what
we have no (sure) grounds for knowing; and that we ought to be consistent.
And these in turn presuppose that knowledge of the truth is a value
that deserves our most careful handling. A policy of radical moral
scepticism, then, necessarily takes for granted what it is committed
to eradicate.
But if it takes these "duties" for granted, why these and not others?
Why should the moral imperative of seeking the truth not take precedence
over that of loving our neighbour? Why should I prefer the "good of
the community" to the "good of my family" (or myself)? The almost
universal instinct of human parents, unlike animals, to cherish their
offspring and to provide for them well after the time that they are
able to fend for themselves suggests that there are deeper forces
at play in our natures even though we can find no rational or intellectual
basis for them. Child care and the growth of love were not skills
first evinced by the spread of further education. On the contrary!
In his second chapter on Self-Fulfilment, Biggar examines critically
the previously unquestioned cult of "unselfishness" which so characterised
sections of Western society during the first half of this century.
Here the proponents of self-fulfilment are on (slightly) firmer ground.
A whole ethos of mindless conformity grew up around the concept of
unselfishness, with the result that to be "selfish", as it was was
the cardinal, if not the only offence that anyone could commit
What was needed was not a wholesale debunking of unselfishness and
its replacement by a cult of self-fulfilment (which has to an extent
been what actually happened) but a serious questioning of what precisely
people meant by the two terms, selfish and unselfish.
Something which can clarify this matter is the well-known fact that
males and females understand rather different things by these two
terms, especially "unselfish". Most women understand by unselfishness
"taking trouble for others"; most men on the contrary mean "not giving
trouble to others".
Now both of these dispositions are laudable. It is good to take trouble
for others and bad to neglect doing so; equally it is bad to cause
others (unnecessary) trouble and good to take steps to avoid doing
so. But the fact that most men and women are blindly oblivious to
the fact that they are talking about slightly different things when
they use the word "unselfish" means that a good deal of unnecessary
confusion results. In an extreme case Mrs Fidget's "unselfishness"
in caring for her family may put them precisely to the sort of trouble
they would most prefer not have inflicted upon them.
It was Elizabeth Montefiore in her book Half Angels about the difficulty
of bringing up children in a Christian family who coined the invaluable
phrase "The Higher Selfishness", meaning by this the important duty
which any mother has not to sacrifice totally her own "space" and
personal life for her children and husband. Previous generations took
it for granted on a wide scale that such was the preferred method
of finding fulfilment for women. In practice things are not quite
so simple as that. It might have been useful if Biggar had dwelt a
little longer on this matter.
However, as he is quick to point out, the cult of self-fulfilment
is no more satisfactory than the cult of pure unselfishness as a cynosure
for life. Both, in the end lead to unhappiness and frustration.
Here he draws the useful distinction between "selfishness" and "self-interest",
pointing out that they are very far from being one and the same thing.
Even the most "unselfish" or "selfless" person has to accept that
exercising this virtue partakes of the nature of self-interest. Nobody,
not even the most "selfless" martyr sacrifices himself for a cause
which he believes to be worthless. The martyr believes in what he
believes to the point of laying down his life for it Indeed, such
martyrdom, which is the very antithesis of "self-fulfilment" is about,
is widely regarded with approval, esteem, even a touch of envy, by
those very people most dedicated to the cause of self-fulfilment.
Contrariwise even the most dedicatedly selfish person will, if only
as a matter of enlightened self-interest, refrain from the immediate
gratification of some of their instincts if only on the grounds that
it will limit their ability to enjoy themselves in the future. True,
they may misjudge the situation and go one step too far: but that
is an error of judgement, not the absence of judgement itself which
prompts them to do so.
Hence martyrdom raises, in an acute form, the dilemma in which the
moral relativist and the self-fulfiller find themselves. On the one
hand it represents the total denial of what each of them has placed
at the centre of his universe. If moral principles are all relative
then it can make no sense to die for them; if self-fulfilment is the
chief end of man, then martyrdom (especially if it appears at the
time to yield no results, which is often the case) is the exact antithesis
of what the self-fulfiller professes to believe.
Yet what happens in practice? It is the moral relativist who is often
most eloquent in his panegyric for a colleague who has died heroically
and tragically for what he or she has believed; it is the young who
shed most tears for one of their number who dies a premature or unjust
death in the course of duty. When the chips are down neither the young
undergraduate, nor their tutor who has so busily been inculcating
moral relativism into him or her, is prepared to say the things which
they have actually been professing in their essays and tutorials.
Which brings us to the crux of the whole matter. The one fact with
which neither self-fulfilment nor moral relativism can cope is death.
Yet from the very beginning the Christian faith has put death and
resurrection at the very centre of its creed; the biggest mistake
which the churches have been making, and are seemingly intent upon
continuing to do so, is to try and put something else there.
There are plenty of candidates for the place rightly owned by death-and-resurrection:
human relationships; peace; world prosperity; education; culture.
The list could go on and on for ever; but the truth is that unless
a person has first come to terms with his own mortality and what that
entails he will never be more than a half-person and, in the last
analysis a non-person.
Biggar ends his book with a chapter entitled To whom shall we turn?
which seeks to address the whole question of an alternative to moral
relativism. And here he discerns, quite correctly, that the truth
is only likely to be acquired from those agencies which are committed
to the propagation of it. It's not the media or the lecturers or the
politicians who will come up with the answers. They are all compromised
to a greater or lesser degree by the circumstances in which they have
to operate. They may, of course help (or hinder) the process by what
they say and do, but they can never be the instigators of a moral
and perceptual revolution such as people are crying out for increasingly
today.
Though he does not mention The Faithful Remnant yet he clearly indicates
that the key lies with them. For almost on the last page he says:
Much of what we hold dear or regard as right, at least in our early
years, will have been taught us by our families and by the other immediate
communities in which we participate. And they will have been taught
us, probably not in the form of lectures, but more implicitly and
subtly through the examples of people to whom we naturally look for
social role-models, through the common practises of our communities,
through the heroes they celebrate, and through the stories of virtue
and vice that they are wont to tell
In times gone by every community produced one or more Story Tellers
whose job it was to keep alive the heritage which had been safeguarded
and bequeathed to it by previous generations. The bible calls it "The
faith once delivered to the Saints".
Our need today in the Church is not for great charismatic leaders,
nor yet enlightened management executives, useful though both of these
might be. The most pressing need is for Tellers of Stories who will
bring back to our remembrance those tales of good and evil, virtue
and vice, truth and falsehood which many of us learnt at our mother’s
knee but have somehow contrived to forget all about.
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