Told of such a god, I am an amused atheist

In his Victory Day sermon, Mgr Paul Cremona preached about the danger cultural relativism posed to civic life. He called for (according to this newspaper's report) "a common definition of what constitutes the truth as a guiding light for society", saying the state ought to consider "filling in the void" with values derived from Christianity.

Well, do we have a moral "void"? And if we do, is it a problem for civil society? Can it be addressed by a common definition of the truth? Should the state be in-volved?

Some of the examples Mgr Cremona gave - of vices he finds alarming and widespread - do not seem to be the best illustrations of his target, cultural relativism. Unless he was badly reported, he blamed "the relativism of current culture" for theft, corruption, greed and injustice. But is anyone trying to justify any single item on that list?

Soon after the online report appeared, some posts promptly accused the Church of some of the very vices Mgr Cremona had condemned. The argument is not about whether these things are bad but about who is guilty of them. The contention concerns what cases qualify and the mitigating circumstances ("everyone's doing it").

However, there is no doubt that Mgr Cremona was targeting social libertarianism; roughly, the philosophy that laws and social practice should privilege individual choice, as long as those choices do not harm others. It is a position in practice often associated with permissive stances on sexual ethics and bioethics. And, again in practice, it sometimes goes together with "just one life, then you die" cheerful nihilism.

But nihilism may be the wrong word. "Void" certainly is. Every libertarian I have read, heard or met has left me feeling that I was the nihilist. There is at the heart of the philosophy, whether homespun or sophisticated, a touching, profound belief in the individual and the ethics of egoism - of an autonomous, integrated, intellectual and emotional ego, a dynamic centre of intelligence and choice organised into a distinctive indivisible whole, heroically set against other such indivisible egos - that makes him (or her) an absolute value.

Told of such a god, I am an amused atheist. Or if you wish, like a Buddhist who thinks this self is an illusion. I understand why the idol is attractive: such a contrast with our incomplete, fragmented lives and multiple selves set against each other. But in my view, the challenge is not to try to become what we cannot be but to face up to the predicament that we are, so to speak, "dividuals", divided against ourselves by the demands of our compartmentalised lives.

If that thumbnail sketch is correct, then some of the issues Mgr Cremona mentioned need to be recast. Take a virtue he emphasised, loyalty. In practice we may find that the problem is not (or not only) how to be loyal but how to choose between, or resolve, competing loyalties. We may not need to be taught "values" but how to evaluate them or even "transvaluate" them, that is, live them in a new way that addresses a form of life without precedent.

But should any of this be of interest to civil society?

If the libertarian vision of the individual is a problem for civil society it is not because it creates some "void". The problem is not its relativism but its absolutism. The exaltation of private goods, the privatisation of ethics, crowds out the possibility of discussing public goods in meaningful ways. That means we might never even discover some of the systemic harm of which we are victims or perpetrators.

Mgr Cremona is right. We do need to be versed in how to discuss public goods - like the environment and all those institutions, from marriage to government, that require public trust to function well. It is not just that they are affected by private behaviour. The reverse is true as well. Many of our private troubles, beginning with work-life imbalance, have a public or social cause.

But is he right to suggest beginning with a common definition of truth? I am not sure. The truth of experience - personal and collective - is contentious and always subject to new realisation. The civic interest in ethical discussion (as opposed to moral teaching) is as much in the discoveries one makes, as in the exchange of certainties. We discover what we know, paradoxically, as the conversation unfolds.

Where does that leave the state? In a place where it needs to tread very carefully.

In a pluralistic society, adults should be treated as free agents. But the state also needs to have a confident vision of the social conditions of our liberty, enough to be able to decide, however provisionally, which kinds of services, enterprise and associations it wants to promote, which ones it can live with (but not support), which ones to discourage or even prohibit.

However, the state remains a bureaucracy. If it gets more involved in our ethical life, there is danger that things will remain the same, except that ethics would have become bureaucratised - as big a problem as their privatisation.

ranierfsadni@europe.com