Cameron and Happiness

This past week, David Cameron has told us that he wishes to measure happiness and so help people to achieve 'the good life'.  He says that measures of purely economic well-being are not enough and too simplistic.  Cameron appears to be shifting his concern from a pre-occupation with material prosperity of the kind that the modern Conservative Party has fetishized for the past thirty years to a more holisitic appreciation of the good life for humans.  In itself, this is to be applauded.

Cameron's announcement should strike chords with most people, even those (like myself) who greeted his remarks with a smidgin of cynicism.  It would have been more heartening to hear the Prime Minister speaking in such terms during a time of economic prosperity but, even today, most people still say that the really important components of a good life are good health, the love of others, a sense of purpose, interior and exterior freedom, and the like.

So, to be fair, Cameron might be on to something.  I hope, as he does his research, that he will look to Aristotle, who offers happiness (eudamonia) as the supreme good.  The Greek word does not have a precise English equivalent, and it is sometimes rendered as 'human flourishing'.  For Aristotle, this good life requires the exercise of the ethical virtues (arete) such as, for example, self-control (sophrosune), generosity (eleutheriotes), self-respect (megalopsychia), friendliness (philia), justice (dikaiosune), among others.  The possession and exercise of these virtues points to the excellence of a person's character.  However, Aristotle concedes that the exercise of good character, as well as the enjoyment of eudamonia, is vulnerable to events which lie beyond the control of the agent (tuche).  Such events can poison all the excellences , or virtues, of character, grinding a person down so that they come to accept a more mundane conception of life.  There is a very real sense, then, that the good life for humans is fragile, and vulnerable to events which are external to the agent.

David Cameron would do well to ponder this ancient wisdom, since the policies of this new coalition government would appear to be introducing all kinds of additional impediments to human flourishing.  It is certainly the case that some groups of people are going to be far more affected than others.  Those most adversely affected are in general those who benefitted least from the boom years.  It is no good identifying 'happiness' in such as way that it is something understood to lie somehow outside a social context.  The soon-to-take-effect of the latest hike in the regressive VAT to 20%, the removal or reduction of essential benefits to people in vulnerable situations and the effective closing-off of higher education to the poor along with the consequent frustration of their aspirations will all militate against true human flourishing for many thousands of people.

Aristotle's eudamonia, and Plato's Idea of the Good are both presented in terms of their being ultimately situated in intellectual or philosophical contemplation, suggesting that they are invulnerable to external events.  But Aristotle, especially, acknowledges that relational goods (such as some of the virtues listed above) lie in the common life lived with others.  This common life, Aristotle stresses repeatedly, has a necessary instrumental role in the development of the good character essential to a happy life.  We need to belong.  Social impediments can corrode good character and, in turn, diminish eudamonia.  Deprivation from what is generally regarded as normal conditions for living causes frustration and, ultimately, alienation from what we are as human beings.  Our prisons are full of people who cannot flourish.  Some of our poorest communities are not so very different in this regard.  Government policy which serves to exacerbate hopelesness, frustration and alienation militates against Cameron's new project.

What is education for?

The student protests in London over the issue of tuition fees prompts again the question of the purpose and value of education. 

Over recent years, we have seen the question answered in an increasingly reductive way.  You get educated so that you become better able to get a good, well-paid job at the end of it, thus securing for yourself a better life.  Education has increasingly become defined in purely instrumental terms; the principle of utility has become paramount.  Education is no longer intrinsically valuable; it is simply the means to an end.

The establishment of this principle allowed the Blair government to replace a system of grants with the requirement for students and their families to pay tuition fees, a policy now extended by the present government, in spite of its claims to a greater progressiveness.  The policy is predicated upon two assumptions:  firstly, that graduates can be expected to earn better salaries and so be able to pay the fees back as they embark upon their working lives; secondly, that the only beneficiary of the education provided is the person who has been educated, in spite of the fact that Blair repeatedly said that 'the country' needed to have a greater number of graduates and hence the expansion of the university sector.

This extreme individualism hasn't always held sway.  In times past, there was something of a sense of education conducing to a notion of the public good.  There have always been those who have seen education as being mainly to do with an end product defined in terms of comparative material prosperity; and indeed, seen like this, it has provided pathways out of poverty for some.  But we seem today to have lost any widespread notion that education has an inherent value, and that a good education system makes a country a better place.

Now education has been reduced to something of merely economic worth, oriented towards providing the educated with a greater capacity to consume (and thereby in their turn made instrumental in the perpetuation of liberal capitalism), we see 'useful' subjects (defined as those which produce material wealth) preferenced over 'useless' ones in the arts and humanities.  Yet these latter subjects produce greater civility and humanity in society.  Their value cannot be stated in economic terms, yet they help to foster the healthy societal ethos which we have already largely lost, but which must be restored if people in this country are to rediscover a real sense of the shared or common good.

Contra Pelagius

Thanks to the willing availability of my two excellent priest-colleagues, I have had a very light day of duties today.  Indeed, I sung the main Mass at 10.00am, and that was it!  I didn't even have to give a homily, or celebrate the early Mass, or take the Blessed Sacrament to the sick and housebound.  I got back home after the Sung Mass, put on my recording of yesterday's FA Cup First Round highlights and then had a light lunch.

After lunch, Karen and I then went out in the car for a drive.  Even when we stopped at Greenlands Farm to look at all the middle class frippery they sell, along with the various Christmas gift options, I was engaged and relaxed and would like to go back on another occasion and get some of the stuff.  After this, we went on up to Windermere, where I got towed around the big Lakeland shop they have there, where we looked at kitchen knives and bought a cheese box for the fridge.  It was all very relaxing, refreshing and renewing, though I'm not sure I'd have set off had I known that we would be effectively shopping all afternoon.

The we went off to Morland church, in the middle of nowhere (well, near Penrith) for a choral evensong.  There was a large assembled choir which had rehearsed all afternoon for this celebration to mark the centenary of the birth of the recently departed Canon Gervase Markham, the founder of the annual Morland Choristers' Camp.  In spite of one or two minor anomalies, this was pretty tolerable even if it wasn't something I'd normally trek miles for.  Then, on the way home, we called in at the Raj takeaway in Milnthorpe.  I now feel ultra relaxed, after a very agreeable day, and fully prepared for the rather full week's work that lies ahead.

Back at the end of the fourth/beginning of the fifth century, there was a lay theologian called Pelagius who propagated the belief that human beings can achieve personal salvation by their own efforts.  This teaching effectively rendered God's grace redundant, and was condemned as erroneous and heretical by the Church.  If there is an established religion in Britain, it is arguable that it is Pelagianism.  People speak to me regularly, at visits prior to funerals, about the virtues of the deceased person; how they would help anyone and all the rest.  Others tell me that 'you don't have to go to church to be a Christian', or that 'Christians are no better than anyone else' (has anyone said they were?).  Behind all these expressions is the idea that we can somehow justify ourselves before God by being good and especially by doing good works, with the implication that we can deserve or earn our eternal salvation.  As if.

In spite of Pelagianism having the status of heresy, we priests often go about our business like good Pelagians.  Priests often feel guilty about having time off, or setting aside time for reading or for our hobbies and interests, as if we really should be doing something, and as if everything depends upon us.  But, of course, the Christian life is about being - it's about standing consciously in a particular relationship to God.  Anything we do, as Christians, springs from this relationship of being, from this ontology of Being to being, Creator to creature, self-subsistent Being to contingent being.

Scripture tells us that Christ came to give us abundant life, not to enslave us in guilt or to flog us so hard that we never take time for ourselves and those near and dear to us.  I would never have guessed that I could be reminded of this though a visit to a farm shop, a Lakeland shop and a visit to a village church for evensong.

Liberalism

A definition of liberalism: a standpoint which relativises every position except its own.
Fr Stephen Jones

Contemporary Britain and the Good Life for Humans

The ancient Greek philosophers of the fourth century BCE, Plato and Aristotle among them, spent a lot of time trying to articulate what the 'good life' for humans consisted in.  It was a natural preoccupation - people in every age, to varying degrees, have pondered a similar question.  Even in today's crudely materialistic culture, most people still say that the most important things are good health, the love of those close to them, interior freedom and the like.

At the same time, there is a widespread sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with Britain, a sense that we have a lost a true perspective on things.  I don't just mean that the economy has failed, but something more basic than that.  We remain one of the richest countries on earth (the sixth richest, I think), yet there is a pervading cynicism.

In a recent book*,  my good friend the philosopher and political commentator, Phillip Blond (until recently a senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria in Lancaster) lists the symptoms as follows: ‘increasing fear, lack of trust and abundance of suspicion, long-term increase in violent crime, loneliness, recession, depression, private and public debt, family break-up, divorce, infidelity, bureaucratic and unresponsive public services, dirty hospitals, powerlessness, the rise of racism, excessive paperwork, longer and longer working hours, children who have no parents, concentrated and seemingly irremovable poverty, the permanence of inequality, teenagers with knives, teenagers being knifed, the decline of politeness, aggressive youths, the erosion of our civil liberties and the increase of obsessive surveillance, public authoritarianism, private libertarianism, general pointlessness, political cynicism and a pervading lack of daily joy’.

I guess we can all recognise some or even all of these symptoms of our society, even if we may not be quite as pessimistic in our appraisal of contemporary society (personally, I would be).  They all militate against the idea of the good society and the flourishing human life envisaged for humans by the ancient Greeks.

Taken together, they tend to produce a terrible cynicism in the hearts and minds of people.  There is a general sense of a lack of hope that things can or will get better.  In older people, there can easily be formed a nostalgic sense that so much has been lost over the decades.  It would be hard to argue with this.

Blond goes on in his book to commend a new kind of politics to respond to the situation in which we now find ourselves as a society.  It is surely the case that many of the symptoms have potentially political solutions, and we need to recognise and acknowledge this.

But what should be the shape of an appropriate Christian response to the perceived ills of society at present?  It is a fair and apposite question because Blond's list of social and domestic woes seems overwhelming; and yet many Christian writers over the centuries have identified hope as the distinctively Christian virtue. This is not at all to suggest that Christians somehow have a monopoly on hope, but that because we see in the Person of Jesus Christ the embodiment of the Good; and that through our participation in his life, we know that things can be other/better than they are.  Yet the current situation remains a challenge, because Christians, too, can easily lose hope in the face of such impediments to the Good for humans.

Christian ethics and social concern are rooted in the theological principle that every person, without exception, is created in the image and likeness of God.  Blond’s list of the symptoms of malaise represents a massive affront to what we believe about the world (God’s world) and about the dignity of the human person.

Clearly, Christians cannot expect a largely secularised society and government to construct a polity which is grounded upon traditional Christian doctrine.  But what Christians believe about the inherent and intrinsic value of every human life finds an echo in the deepest convictions of, arguably, most people.  Over recent decades, we seem to have lost any real sense of an ethos of the public good, embracing in its place an orgiastic culture of consumption in which there have been winners and losers and groups of people set against one another.  We cannot simply blame this on Thatcher and the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s.  The same culture of individualistic indulgence was fostered by Blair and Brown under the title of New Labour; shockingly, under a Labour government the gap between rich and poor actually widened as Mandelson reclined, declaring the government 'relaxed about extreme wealth'.

And now, under Cameron, we have what Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine (2007) calls 'disaster capitalism', which uses a yearned-for crisis as the occasion to re-shape the economy in the interests of business and against the mass of the people.  A crisis hits the private sector, fuelled by the greed of the rich in the banking sector, and then the mass of the people are required to pay the price of it, first through a massive bail-out of the banks from the public purse and then through cuts in the public sector which provides the services they need.

Ever since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, this country has suffered under the extreme neoliberal economic theory of the Chicago School and its guru, Milton Friedman.  These people believe that the public sphere should be eliminated and business allowed to do as it sees fit.  They are hostile to the principle of direct taxation and the social spending such taxation makes possible.  Their theories are thus inimical to the idea of a public or common good because they makes no provision for the securing of the key components for a good human life for all citizens.  They set up a competitive spirit in which material consumption, or the wherewithal to secure this, is the only enduring and regulative value.

In spite of all this, and in spite of the fact that over 50% of Britons at present broadly support the Cameron/Osborne approach to the national debt, there is a sense that we have been getting things wrong in Britain for a generation and more.  It may take direct action on the streets as well as votes cast in ballot boxes to turn things around, as the effects of the cuts take hold and the lives of many of our people are blighted,.  It may be that the effects of the cuts on vulnerable communities and individuals help us to recover the sense that there is indeed a common good for humans, as the ancient Greeks saw, and of the need to find ways of  encapsulating this principle in our public life.  If not, we run the very real risk of travelling further down a road which leads to greater hopelessness and more widespread alienation. 

 Fr Stephen Jones

*Phillip Blond (2010) Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It.  London: Faber & Faber.

Current Realities

I am much exercised at the moment as to the unfolding situation in the Church of England.  Those of us who have always wished to stress the catholic inheritance of the CoE have now reached the point at which it is going to be unimaginably difficult to remain in this ecclesial community for very much longer. 

Following the decision to allow the priestly ordination of women back in 1992, the CoE developed the strange, novel and ungrammatical notion of the 'two integrities'.  This arose not out of a genuine desire to be accommodating to those who simply wished to maintain an orthodox stance; but rather, out of a utilitarian desire to get the legislation permitting the ordination of women through the General Synod.  If anyone doubts this, and would call me cynical, I would simply say that the recent decisions of the Synod to allow no accommodation of our position show clearly that there is no lasting place for us, in spite of the solemn promises of the past of an enduring and honoured place.

The 'two integrities', whilst introducing great anomaly into Anglican ecclesiology, at least created a space for us to occupy whilst a process (open-ended, we were told) of reception began.  This is now to come to an end.  There will be nowhere for us in the CoE.  I have reached the point now where, even if something is done for us (which seems a forlorn hope), I'm not sure whether I want to stay in communion with those who would create a church and, indeed, a body of doctrine according to their own specifications.  Apart from being in communion with the Church Commisissioners, what is there to be said for it, when any space made available would be grudging, provisional and temporary?