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?