Nonsense, indeed, on stilts

It is often surprising to see how true and applicable is George Orwell’s aphorism that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Sometimes one discovers what was directly in front of one’s nose only after walking away from that place, and seeing it floating mid-air from a distance. Fr Aidan Nichols, writing in the Catholic Herald, does make some interesting points in his article “The March of Nonsense on Stilts”, but where he fails, it is exactly in the aforementioned blindness to the obvious.

The main object of his ire is secular liberalism, or some combination of philosophical liberalism and secularism. He lumps this together with radical Islamism, because, “while Islamist terrorism seeks the outright dissolution of that [social] texture, such liberalism merely allows it to unravel, but the result may be much the same: an atomism that destroys effective solidarity.” This can hardly be called an argument: he only appeals to our more conservative fear of slippery slopes, hardly addressing the precise way in which liberalism really leads to the dissolution of the social fabric. When he does attempt to provide us with evidence to support his view, it is tenuous at best, and ironically fails by the standards it uses to judge its opposite. For instance, he claims that the theoretical tradition of secular liberalism is that of “thought-experiments by ratiocination”, which, he says, is always inclined to deny history and particularity. If he means that it is inclined to deny the particularities of different religious beliefs, then equally Fr Nichols seems to deny the particularity of non-religious attitudes in general, and implies that all history is defined, to a greater or lesser degree, by its religion. Even if there is some truth to his accusation, then it can only be claimed of the present manifestation of secular liberalism, and not the thing in itself, because it seems rather obvious that thought-experiments, if they are to tell us anything of value, should certainly take particularity into account.

The real crux of his argument, though he never explicitly names it, is that morality is difficult if not impossible without God, and that in our modern godless societies there is no permanence to any moral views we might hold. He says:

But once we see that we posit values, we also see that we can equally “unposit” them. They thus lose all authority for us. So, far from giving meaning to our lives, thinking of what is important to us in terms of values shows that our lives have no intrinsic meaning. As long as we think in terms of value positing rather than being gripped by shared concerns, we will not find anything that elicits our commitment… “No one dies for mere values.”

Of course it is true that if we can posit a value, we can equally unposit it. But it is disingenuous to imply that this is impossible in the religious sphere, and dangerous to imply that the freedom to unposit is not a good thing. A theologian can easily and consistently take issue with, say, the claim that we are all born with original sin. Is this pragmatically any different from unpositing a value? Both beliefs, when taken to their proper limits, lead to very different lives and attitudes, yet neither has superior claim to being truly Christian. Indeed, one can change scriptural interpretations many times in a life, and yet consistently call themselves religious, because they are genuinely grappling with the text. If one of these interpretations, however, leads to some dissolution in the social fabric, are we right to say this person is no longer really religious?

This is not to dismiss Fr Nichols’ serious claim that the lack of some ethical and philosophical consensus, other than a very soft and vague one, is a potential cause of social disunity and may even, as he strongly asserts, be the cause of “the descent of our young into the miasma of drink and drugs.” But Fr Nichols can hardly be said to have put forward a practical solution to this problem. After all, by his rationale, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism are just as effective cures as is Christianity.