Here's a suggestion for getting politicians and civil servants to focus urgently on what the rest of us really value. We should prohibit all members of all governments and all senior civil servants from sending their children to private schools or themselves and their families from using private health care. Perhaps they should be compelled to live in average state-provided housing too - not the usual grace-and-favour mansions!
My wife tells me that this one is going to get me a fatwa from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but here goes anyway.
Religion is absurdly privileged in our society. Just the other day the Catholic primate of England (the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor) claimed that Catholic adoption agencies should be exempted from a law requiring agencies to consider gay couples as adoptive parents. The reason he gave was that “The rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning”. This was promptly supported by the primates of the church of England.
Of course, they did not really mean it. Or rather, they did not mean that the rights of conscience in general cannot be made subject to legislation. After all, there are plenty of positions held most conscientiously by other members of society that I suspect that the leaders of the Christian church would indeed want to have subjected to legislation. Or do the leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches think that the beliefs of Nazis, racists and others, which are just as sincerely and conscientiously held as their own, should also be given free rein? How about a Nazi adoption agency that refused to allow Jews or blacks to adopt white children?
In fact what they really meant was that religious beliefs should be privileged. Why this should be so apparently goes without saying. But what special merit is there in religious belief? I cannot think of any, though I can think of many reasons for being deeply suspicious of any belief that announces that it is the will of God.
One of the sillier expressions of pro-religious prejudice is the widespread view that religion is the only basis for morality. The opposite is closer to the truth: morality based on (revealed) religion is quite amoral, as it seems to consist of accepting someone else’s morality (i.e., God’s) regardless of whether one actually believes it oneself.
It would be reassuring if all religious people who came up with the morally repulsive notion that we should obey the will of God merely because it is the will of God really meant that one should analyse what we (supposedly) know of that will and its moral implications, decide whether it did indeed provide a valid moral framework, and only if it did, then adopt it as our own. But then it would be our will, not that of God, and if (as becomes evident when comparing the Old and New Testaments) God changes his mind, we would persist with our own beliefs until shown that they were wrong.
But what do we actually get? A series of beliefs of no obvious moral merit, including some fantastically vicious and bloody threats in the Old Testament. Most of it reminds me of Dr Johnson’s famous (but apparently apocryphal) book review – ‘Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’. Insofar as it is morally acceptable (or even intelligible), it could have been dreamed up by pretty much anyone, and to the extent that it is not, then it is not, and should be ignored or even actively resisted.
And that is the point. There is no reason society as a whole should privilege a system of ideas whose starting pont is outside the universe, and indeed outside all possible knowledge and experience, and then presumes to pronounce on the world at large, even when it is completely ignorant about most of it. There are plenty of ways of responding to people who think like that. One of the most effective is to increase their dose.
What does it tell us about the English that we have no words for bodily functions that are not either coy, childish, clinical or obscene?
I discussed this with my Spanish brother-in-law some years ago, and he literally could not believe that such a language existed. Certainly there is something repressed about English attitudes to the body, but I would have thought we were not much different from other Europeans in that respect.
It may be an interesting measure of whether we are actually finally getting over this perverse attitude if such words start to enter the language. Certainly it is much easier to talk about sex, defecation and all the rest now than when I was a child, but relatively few of the words seem to have changed their register. Perhaps ‘gay’ is a good counter-example, but I can’t think of many others.
I wish someone would explain to me the moral difference between ‘I was obeying the will of God’ and ‘I was only obeying orders’.
Let me start by assuming that those who favour the view that the world and human beings were created by a divine force are right. Let me also assume that a defining quality of human beings is our capacity for moral responsibility. A cat can slaughter a rat but it is not an immoral action. It would not even be an immoral action if it slaughtered another cat, or a human being. A human being, by contrast, must consider the moral dimension of all its actions, no matter how trivial, because every action potentially has a moral aspect, and we are morally responsible.
One thing we have discovered in the last half-century (starting with the Nuremburg trials of 1946) is that I cannot absolve myself of my moral responsibilities by simply claiming that I was ordered to do this or that by a higher authority. It is still my action, and the only moral effect of my having been ordered to carry it out by someone else is that they are implicated in it too. But their responsibility in no way lessens my own. This is not a zero-sum game in which the more responsibility they have the less I can be blamed.
And that is, as far as I can see, part of the religious message, at least as far as the ‘revealed’ religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are concerned. Obeying God is justification enough, and disobeying God inherently wicked.
But why should I obey the will of God? Or rather, why should I obey it unless I also agree with it? Conversely, if I do not agree with it, am I not a hypocrite? It doesn’t make any difference that it is the will of God – I am still responsible for my own actions, regardless of who put me up to them. How is this different from ‘only obeying orders’?
Indeed, in what sense is obeying the will of God a moral stance of any kind? How can I just follow anyone’s orders without being guilty of abdicating my responsibility to evaluate their merits? But abdication is simply amoral. In fact I’m not sure it’s even that!
Nice to see that Wal-Mart are putting more emphasis on environmental issues. Or at least, it may be nice. Who knows what they are really up to? Like any big company, their primary interest is in profit, and anything that deflects them from that goal needs to be corroborated thoroughly before it can be confidently accepted as a socially or environmentally responsible action.
For example, it is perfectly clear that the great bulk of Wal-Mart’s supposedly green initiatives will actually reduce their costs. Cost-cutting has always played a major part in Wal-Mart’s strategy, and although it may benefit the environment is some ways, in others it does not. For example, reducing packaging is often a good thing, but pressurising suppliers to cut prices is not, in itself, good, either for the environment or for society as a whole. But it is undoubtedly good for Wal-Mart’s bottom line.
So how can you tell when a big company is really contributing to improving the environment? From the point of view of individual actions, probably you can’t. Who knows what is in their financial interest, what is done for the sake of marketing their ‘good neighbour’ image, and what is really done for the sake of the environment?
But taking their actions as a whole, I would suggest a sequence of levels of credibility:
Oil companies go out of their way to make themselves seem greedy and irresponsible. Well, maybe not seem greedy and irresponsible - more like prove it.
It’s not as if they are inherently easy to criticise – after all, they may make a lot of mess, but they do it in an industry that a) is inherently messy, and b) makes products (petrol plastics, and so on) we could do without only if we gave up most of the modern world. It’s appalling that Shell’s CO2 emissions exceed those of 150 countries, but it sounds decidedly ‘holier than thou’ to complain about it when there is little evidence that the issue has really been taken to heart by the population as a whole.
So you have to admire their determination to make the worst of a bad job. Here are a few facts reported in today’s Guardian (a leading UK liberal paper):
We all need to take action on climate change and the amount of oil we use, and that will almost certainly demand serious sacrifice. But companies that make vast profits out of this process bear an equally vast responsibility. If they want to be left alone, they have to act out that responsibly and invest a great deal more of their almost unimaginably huge profits in research – not just to create “value propositions” but to alter the fundamental balance of human beings and the environment.
Perhaps oil executives everywhere need to be reminded of the words of the American millionaire who said that he did not mind that the American public took 50% of his money in tax, given that he got 100% of his money from them.
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