Despite the recent post-modernist revolt, Western culture still labours under much of the mythological residue left over from the Enlightenment. The axiom, for example, that religion is unimportant and irrelevant still survives.
Society should be redesigned along secular lines. Substitution of a materialistic for a religious worldview would leave morality unaffected and economic prosperity and political peace to thrive. It would simply be a case of being more practical - more tolerant, more progressive, less superstitious.
But after two centuries, the discrediting of such mythology seems complete. To the collapse of secular philosophy has been added the disappearance of secular ideologies. To political disillusionment has been added the surprisingly widespread fear that science itself may, after all, prove more sorcerer's apprentice. That there is a moral crisis, few would deny. To ordinary men and women it seems self-evident.
Malleable tolerance
If society is left with only one 'supreme value', namely tolerance, how can it support its lesser values? Tolerance presupposes values, it cannot initiate or maintain them. How is a moral order arrived at in the first place? Who decides which actions are tolerable and which intolerable? In short, is morality nothing more than 51% of the vote and endlessly malleable?
The issue cannot be resolved without recourse to a larger frame of reference. Fukuyama describes it as the difficulty of finding a 'rational understanding of man'. Appleyard is more pointed and historically precise: 'On the maps provided by science we find everything except ourselves.' Our problem of values, in other words, is specifically related to the Enlightenment and its misguided understanding of science.
Sleight of hand
For during the past 200 years, not only has science been taken to be the source of progressive technology, it has been viewed as the source of all knowledge. Our epistemology is an epistemology of science. We do not derive our personality, including our capacity for objective knowledge, from the infinite and personal God of the Bible. Our personality is purely physical. We know things empirically and only empirically. This is contemporary dogma, confirmed so it is alleged by the very fact of science; and it is now the practical assumption of the West, post-modernism notwithstanding. Science is now a major religion.
However, we need to understand that it is a 'religion', an orthodoxy, resulting from a sleight of hand - a sleight of hand so dextrous that an entire civilisation has been deceived.
In what way? Simply because the 18th-century intellectual revolution represented the scientific enterprise as necessarily a naturalistic one, as if the very fact of 'science' obviated any sort of metaphysical or 'supernatural' explanation. It focused upon one aspect of science's constituent elements. It highlighted the experimental part - the 'scientific method' which characterises modernity - while overlooking its other equally important part: its presuppositional framework. In keeping with all human experience, science cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to rest upon philosophical assumptions unproveable by science - an objective and ordered universe, however complex sub-atomically; likewise real human personality capable of true knowledge. A philosophic framework is necessary to ensure both the 'object' of science and the 'subject' of science. Science by itself cannot manufacture it.
This explains Kant's prompt reaction to Hume in the 18th century. Why? Because it appeared as if the principle of causality was no longer secure either for science or for life. Kant realised that if causality goes, science goes, for the 'object' of science is then undermined. And the same holds true for 'personality'. Science presupposes personal knowledge, not impersonal 'oscillations of molecules in the brain'.
But, some might argue, 'personality' may simply be the epitome of human arrogance or human beings may be explicable like everything else in purely physical categories.
Fukuyama draws out the implications of such a view: '. . . If there is no basis for saying that man has a superior dignity to nature, then the justification for man's dominion over nature ends . . . why does man have more dignity than any part of the natural world, from the most humble rock to the most distant star?' Hence his conclusion: 'The intellectual impasse in which modern relativism has left us does not permit us to answer either of these attacks definitively, and therefore does not permit defence of liberal rights traditionally understood.'
Appleyard's conclusion is equally insistent: 'In some final sense, the inviolability or otherwise of the human self is the complete and most pressing issue of contemporary knowledge.'
Where not to look
But how can the inviolability of the human self be assured in the absence of a metaphysical and religious framework? The answer is that it cannot. The Enlightenment worldview has been tried and found wanting, therefore it is pointless to look any longer in that direction. But where else can we look?
In particular, it must be said, away from the Enlightenment claim to religion-free zones for public experience within the state. Such a claim constitutes a stranglehold that must be broken if society, and derivatively education, is to change; for it represents an ideal that is meaningless, a programme that is futile, and a policy that is unjust. Why should religion be excluded from discussions concerning human rights or poverty or sexual ethics as if either irrelevant or an improper imposition of faith on those who choose not to believe? Are humanists and scientific materialists any less religious, in the broad sense of the word, when they promote and defend their moral and social agendas? Is their philosophic alternative any less far-reaching in scope and implications than religion's? After all, it involves nothing less than the entire displacement of one worldview by another!
Better still, did modernism provide such clear principles for the moral government of society that religion is no longer needed? It appears not! 'There must be a real danger that liberal society . . . may now decline beneath the weight of its own spiritual indecision,' says Appleyard.
It was a case of yet another sleight of hand. The metaphysic was as vast, the dogmas and ideals as well-defined and exacting as in pre-Enlightenment culture: in relation to the metaphysic there was an immeasurable physical universe (without gods or angels or 'images of god' of course), in relation to ideals, 'progress', 'democracy', 'evolution', 'human rights' etc. The contemporary view was acceptable, the earlier not. But the difficulty was this: the further the logic of the alternative metaphysic was explored, the less it seemed able to guarantee the inviolability of the human self, along with its ideals and pretensions. Hence the post-modernist revolt.
Christian heritage
The appropriate direction to look is, rather, towards our Christian heritage. Not to religion in general, but to the specific worldview expressed historically by the Judaeo-Christian faith. For it is a delusion to think religion as such can be a solution, attractive as that may appear to a post-Christian and pluralist culture. The need to examine worldviews involving different religions is as important as the task of examining worldviews involving no religion. That the humanism of the Enlightenment left us with insufficient grounds upon which to rest morality and meaning is now clear; the ideas have been expressed tangibly, so to speak, within the unfolding history of the societies which adopted them. We are reaping the whirlwind.
So likewise with religious worldviews: they too require careful examination both theoretically and practically. If the scientific materialism of the West left morality and meaning unaccounted for, how do the variety of religions fare when faced with similar questions?
Which brings us to an interesting phenomenon. The rationale for human rights within contemporary Western society seems progressively less clear, yet the rationale historically could not have been clearer. As John Roberts points out: 'At the heart of Christianity, once St. Paul had done his work, there lay always the concept of the supreme, infinite value of the individual soul.' The somewhat politically incorrect deduction he feels warranted to make from this is also worth noting: 'Its importance can easily be sensed by considering the absence in other cultures - Islam, Hindu India, China - of such an emphasis.' The observation is uncomfortable but true.
Does it then mean little or no common ground exists between the differing religions of the world and their communities? Partly yes, partly no. For one thing, the make-up of human beings remains constant whatever their cultural environment. Even when worldviews displace one another, as in the West during the past two centuries, this does not remove the reality to which all human beings are subject. Their thinking may change, their 'being' remains the same. They may deny a larger metaphysical dimension to morals, but this does not release them from their own moral natures. Hence Appleyard's impatience with contemporary views of tolerance: 'It is . . . humanly impossible actually to be a liberal,' he says. 'Society may advocate liberal tolerance and open-mindedness, but nobody practises it. In fact, this is what preserves liberal society . . .'
Not their religions nor their philosophies but their humanity, then, remains the common ground between the moral views of diverse communities. And in these areas, quite considerable overlap occurs.
Plural but not relative
Societies, therefore, should be pluralistic in the sense that they allow freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but not pluralistic if what is meant is 'relativistic' - if not in morals certainly, so neither in worldviews. If moral choices are significant to individuals, how much more are choices between worldviews for nations. Michael Novak tells us: 'The first of all moral obligations is to think clearly. Societies are not like the weather, merely given, since human beings are responsible for their form. Social forms are constructs of the human spirit.'
The societies which observe at a distance the debauchery and depravity of the West are right to condemn it. Sadly, however, they ignore the tragedy of the Enlightenment when truths which had formerly enabled the formation of Western civilisation were exchanged for a lie. Benefits there may have been from the events surrounding the French Revolution. Viewed alongside the consequences of the religious revolution of the 18th century, however, and in particular the moral confusion that surrounds us today, they seem hardly noticeable.
This is a much-edited resume of a longer lecture.
Notes:
Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man. Penguin. 1992 (p.296).
Bryan Appleyard: Understanding the Present. 1992 (p.12).
J.M. Roberts: The Triumph of the West. 1985 (p.417).
Michael Novak: The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. 1982 (p.20).
Ranald Macaulay
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