A priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk are talking about moral issues and attitudes. After an hour or two they give up and go home – probably disappointing for them but more disappointing for you, given what might have seemed a classic set-up for a joke!
There is unfortunately no joke here. While this quartet might agree that certain things are right or certain actions wrong they are unlikely to agree about why. They can each try to describe their position to the others, but no one is likely to change his mind about anything.
In this respect they are actually no different from the rest of us, whether we are believers or not. Because we live in a world which is as multicultural, multi-religious, multi-everything as it is, we often find we have no common reference points when it comes to talking about things which we might expect would matter most to us. Even basic words – right and wrong, good and evil – have different meanings for each. It is often as if the meanings depended on feelings or gut reaction, like the opinions of rival supporters of different football teams.
Most of the time this common problem may not matter greatly because we rub along and just avoid the most difficult questions. Sometimes, though, it matters a lot because we are confronted with some major dilemma in our lives and we are forced to work out where we stand and what to do. The dilemma may not even be personal – it may be about what kind of society we want to belong to, what kind of laws we think we should observe, which groups we welcome and afford rights to and which we exclude. Recent referenda are cases in point.
The problem is, of course, about the framework of values we each adopt and live by. But it is more importantly about how much of the framework we share with others, because a stable society needs shared values. Even democracy itself breaks down if we can’t at least talk sensibly about values to each other – not just to describe our irreconcilable positions like the quartet we started with, but to discuss and find common ground.
At a personal level values are about how we shape our lives – even, if rather grandly, about how to live. Collectively or politically they are about how we shape our society and what kind of society we want to create. Such issues are very different from normal political problem solving. Is austerity the right way out of national indebtedness or would growth work better? If we intervened in some foreign conflict what would be the consequences? In these cases it’s all about what will work best to give us a certain outcome. At most, it’s about which outcome would best serve our interests. (“Whose interests?” is another kind of political problem, but we aren’t going there today.) But with value questions we are talking about something deeper.
Values are of course related to the role religion plays in society. If a whole society (or the great majority) shares the same religious viewpoint there is less of a problem about values. All religions tell us who we are and what the purpose of our lives is, thus providing the kind of common framework we need for values. Such security has a price: it may result in intolerance or harsh attitudes towards some groups or behaviours, although it doesn’t have to. It may also involve acknowledging an authority to interpret the right thing to do which will some will abuse, because someone always does. Whether it’s Catholicism, militant jihadism or something else, religion doesn’t necessarily give us a society to everyone’s taste and is often incompatible with democracy. But at least we know where we stand.
But as soon as we question religious authority, even if we still believe the doctrines, life gets more complicated. In particular, if there are many different religious viewpoints in a society (including unbelief) values potentially get fragmented. In some ways it’s rather like the transition from childhood to adulthood – where once decisions were taken for us and a path laid down, now we are on our own. So what do we do, how do we decide? Is the choice really between religious authority and individual gut feelings?
It happens that we live immersed in an economic system which affects most aspects of our lives. That system is, of course, consumer capitalism and it generates our work, the things we buy and consume and most of the things and experiences to which we aspire. So, what happens when old values are dislocated is often that the desires and demands of the economic system rush in and swamp the place where values once were. We end up with no settled values at all, just shifting economic desires and responses. And this is true not just of individual lives but of society as a whole – economics dominates politics, social organisation, institutions, everything.
Some attribute the alienation and materialism thus produced to some fault in capitalism itself and suggest sweeping it all away in some kind of economic revolution. But apart from the historical evidence that no other system comes anywhere close to doing better than capitalism from an economic point of view, why should we think that the answer to an excessive economic focus is economic at all?
It’s more likely that what we really lack is a framework of values strong and convincing enough to stand up to capitalism, the framework religion might once perhaps have given us. After all, if we don’t know what is most important in our lives consumer capitalism is very good at suggesting answers. But now, to allow sharing across religious boundaries values have to be secular, because nothing else will work. We need values which anyone could adopt – real human values. But the problem is that modern secular thought has practically given up on the idea of values altogether.
Since at least the days of Aristotle, though, attempts have been made to create a suitable framework for values on the basis of happiness or fulfilment in life – “flourishing”. We may disagree about the details (which admittedly have caused some eminent people to declare the very attempt pointless) but in flourishing we at least have something everyone wants, whatever their culture, religion or society. What is missing is to show how to interpret this idea in a secular but non-materialistic way. If we could achieve this, we could explore what it means for our personal values and what the implications are for politics, because somehow or other the same values should surely apply in both spheres.
Of course there is no prospect that all disagreement on values would disappear, even if this exercise were successful. But at least we might reassign some purpose and meaning to our lives beyond consuming. More than that, we could use our efficient but sometimes remorseless economic system for ends we understood to rest in human flourishing, rather than allowing ourselves to be enslaved by our own economic machine. Capitalism without values leaves us like children, wanting more but doing as we are told. Growing up requires the effort to create and fill our world with values.
