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TOM'S
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Hypothetical...  Dear friends, An interesting debate has been triggered in Australia in the past week or so by a call made by the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Kim Beazley, for all visitors to this nation to sign a declaration saying they will uphold this nation's values. Some of that debate has focused on the question of what, precisely, are the universal "Aussie values"?
Writing in the e-journal, OnLine Opinion, Professor Bagaric opined... Beazley ... proposed that all visitors to Australia should
be required to sign off on a value statement in their visa form which
commits them to Aussie values, including respect for mateship and hard
work. As useful as this debate is that Kim Beazley has sparked, my purpose in raising it here is not so much to contribute further fodder to that particular public discussion as to what the shared "Aussie values" might be. Instead I want to use it as a trigger for a slightly different discussion in this place: is there some universal set of values that all of us who claim membership of the Catholic communion might subscribe to? In the case of "Aussie values" Mirko Bagaric goes on to suggest... It is misguided for the government to talk about entrenching
a provincial value base which has developed by historical accident, at
times fuelled by intolerance and bigotry. Remember the stolen generation.
Think now about the fact that gay people are still prohibited from entering
the union of marriage. I awoke this morning to another of those awe-inspiring pictures of the sky over Sydney and had to capture it digitally. The sun beaming down through the clouds which you can see in the headline animation reminded me of those pictures of old showing God beaming down the Ten Commandments to Moses. Hypotheticals are useful things sometimes as they help sharpen our focus. Of course it is a silly question even wondering if there were no ten commandments. The fact is there is — and their existence has deeply shaped the subsequent development of human civilisation. To speculate what civilisation might have been like were that biblical story never to have been told is about as useless a speculation as the one of hoping that we'd had different parents to the ones who actually brought us into the world. Despite the enormous freedoms God gives us, there are some freedoms that are denied us. Choosing our own parents is one of them. And trying to construct human civilisation, or just some local community or a family, on the assumption that the Moses and the Ten Commandments story, whether it was apocryphal or real, did not establish some base moral assumptions upon which civilisation has been built is another one. Of course these questions are not new. At some time or another all of the great literary minds and philosophers have speculated about what the ideal society might look like. Plato wrote a "Utopia" as did St Thomas More, trying to envisage whether some kind of ideal community or civilisation might be possible, and what it might look like. Differences of opinion within Christianity... At the very heart of the Christian understanding of life is this idea that humankind IS imperfect — we are all sinners. So, in a sense, as Christians we subscribe (or should subscribe) to the notion that "the ideal human society" is not possible this side of the Second Coming and the end of time. Within Christianity though, even on a question as basic as this, there are different interpretations. Calvin, for example, tended to see human beings as intrinsically evil whereas the Catholic understanding is far more nuanced than his and sees us in a kinder light as only having a tendency towards evil. Martin Luther ended up triggering one of the enormous splits in Christendom over the issue of justification — whether we are redeemed merely by our affirmation of belief (in Jesus as Saviour) or whether there is much more to it including our attitudes of mind and our actions? It hardly needs writing but there are still enormous gulfs within the Christian family over these issues. One of the headlines in CathNews this morning concerns the millennia-long rift between the Eastern and Western churches over the issue of the Primacy of the Pope — does God only communicate his laws and intentions through the Pope or does God use other channels as well? That issue, I submit, is a growingly divisive issue even within Western Catholicism and there seems no resolution is sight. In the Western world the great majority of people who claim the identity "Catholic" when it comes to filling in a government census form actually pay little heed to what opinions the Pope might have about anything. Differences of understanding within the Catholic communion... Even within the relatively miniscule still practising community one finds deep division even on a discussion board such as the relatively "middle of the road" one sponsored by CathNews the voice of the Sedavacantists who think all the Popes after Pius X are frauds, those who slavishly express their loyalty to the Pope without actually applying any significant rigour to trying to understanding what the Pope might be actually saying on the myriad issues a Pope comments on, to those, such as myself, who while looking to the Pope as occupying a position of Primacy do not mistake this as attributing to the Pontiff some notion of Universal Infallibility in all things. I, for example, do not believe the Pope is the ONLY channel through which the Holy Spirit communicates to humankind. The Holy Spirit communicates through all people and the collective human family. I do accord the Pope a position of Primacy and respect as being one ordained by God who helps articulate what the Holy Spirit is saying collectively to us all through those diverse channels. That is a very different notion though to one of seeing the Pope as some person who sits in his private chapel and each morning the Holy Spirit descends on that chapel and whispers in the ear of His Holiness what rules and messages are going to be communicated to us in tomorrow's Wednesday audience or next Sunday's Angelus. Yet, isn't that pretty close to the image some people would have us believe is going on? Mirko Bagaric in his OnLine Opinion suggests... It is universal moral truth that our politicians should
be encouraging the community to embrace, instead of trying to coerce people
to entrench relativistic values into their psyche.
None of these rules are absolute. The closest thing that we get to an absolute moral principle is that we should pursue the course of action that maximises net flourishing, where each person’s interest counts equally. Those words are hardly likely to make him a pin-up boy in the eyes of Pope Benedict. Unless one has been blind, deaf and mute in recent times though one could not help but be aware of the growing calls for the teaching of values in secular schools. The question is: is there such a thing as a set of "universal values"? And if there is, what are they? Are the "four commandments" (deliberate lower case) of Mirko Bagaric getting close to what those "universal values" might be? And can one have a set of "universal values" that are not absolute? These questions are important... A single article is not space enough to even begin to answer these questions I have raised today. For the pragmatic businessman and politicians who set the agendas in much of society there is little interest in questions like these that do not immediately translate into the bottom line of this year's profit or next year's election. "What's in this for me?" is their call, "what will this do for my bottom line?" Like the airheads who seem to equate the movement of electricity around their feelings with the movement of neurons around the mind and think it is the process of thinking these subjects are placed in the "too difficult" category. They can't concentrate on anything that is much longer than about three sentences in length. At the end of everything though I suggest these questions are important and we do have to concentrate on them. Mirko Bagaric raises some important issues. It is the increasing breakdown in society where business and politicians today seem to have become far more interested in lining their own pockets and those of the un-reflective, pragmatic entrepreneurs which is fueling this great divide in society between the insecure and "the rest" that eventually leads to fundamentalism and from there it is but a short step to terrorism and the airheads wanting to impose their sense of the absolute on all of humankind. And if we are not to face a future where civilisation isn't snuffed out by terrorism and fundamentalism, we face an equally dull prospect of it being wiped out by governments that are too interested in the economic questions and have lost sight of the values that we need to be discussing in terms of respect for our habitat and its sustainable development. Ian Elmer ended his reflection last Saturday with a series of questions. Here are the first two: Do we still believe in the future coming of the reign of God as a physical, corporeal, historical reality? What would that kingdom, that new world order, look like? I think many people do — including many Christians who should know
better. Civilisation has to constantly counter this tendency on the part
of its wacky minorities who are constantly wanting to build the kingdom
that is to come in the here and now. Wasn't the Four
Corners program last on ABC Television, exposing the activities
of the Exclusive Brethren testimony to that? We don't have to look that
far though to see these tendencies unleashing their destruction on both
our world and on human civilisation. Blessings, Tom Links:
What are your thoughts on this commentary? Tom Scott can be contracted at: |
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One
of the more interesting contributions to this debate I've come across
has been made by a Professor of Law at Deakin University, Mirko Bagaric
(pictured).
