SoF Magazine No. 25, April 1996 SOLAR ETHICS Solar Ethics by Don Cupitt (SCM Press, 1995) ISBN 0-334-02618-0 Don’s latest book is less daunting than most of his recent offerings — at a mere 70 pages it is even shorter than God in Us — and can be read at a single sitting. That does not mean however that it is a lightweight book in any sense other than its physical size. It is not an ‘easy read’. It is still Don the don, Don the academic philosopher, who is addressing us, albeit in more bite-sized chunks than usual.
This is made clear right at the start-of the book where he makes the distinction between ethics and morality.
Morality has its origins in the ‘marketplace’ and is concerned with rules of conduct to govern trade and other social relationships. It is a conventionallyagreed code of practice whose periodic renegotiation is a matter of politics rather than philosophy. Ethics, by contrast, have to do with life-style — and solar ethics are for those who want to live in real Style.
Forget the market, that grey world of business and conformity and impersonal dealings. Think of the theatre, the pageantry and the ‘showing off’ which gives show business its name. Think of the sun, whose whole being is a matter of outpouring, of dying to live, of making a good show.
This is Cupitt at his outrageous best. We love him for it, and we love to be beguiled by his Sun-worship.
More than that, we respond to something deeply authentic in what he says. (He will not approve of my saying that: ‘deeply authentic’ is the language of the old order, of morality, of the men in grey suits. It implies that depth and inwardness are somehow superior to superficiality and outward show. Very unsolar! For, he says on p. 15, ‘The Sun is blessedly free from the outworn and deeply ugly idea that outwardness is vanity, shallowness, playacting. It knows nothing of the old Western notion that inwardness is more true and real and lasting. It has no inwardness. . . . It simply turns itself inside out; it goes public all over the place. It is its own self-outing.’) The sun is extolled by Cupitt for the way it overcomes our human distinctions — like those between living and dying, noun and verb, ideal and actual, inner and outer, good and bad, way and end.
He even cites the Sermon on the Mount as evidence of solar even-handedness in the treatment of good and evil people, and his appeal to religion at this point is not facetious. He has already told us: “By solar ethics 1 mean an ethic or lifestyle of all-out religious expression, the best kind of life that one could hope to live’ (page 13). But the Sermon on the Mount is notoriously high on vision and low on practicality. And exactly the same is true of Solar Ethics.
It comes back to the distinction Don makes between morality and ethics, and his philosophical disdain for the former compared with the latter: ‘Morality, for the most part, can be left to look after itself’ (page 11). I cannot believe that within the Cupittian trinity the priest and the pastor can be entirely happy with that pronouncement by the philosopher. Most readers of this magazine would agree that we cannot rely on a pre-ordained moral order whose laws are beamed in from outside. Morality and religion alike are human creations for our human use. But that does not mean we can sit lightly to the task of working at those human values which we call morals.
There appears to be a certain inconsistency in Cupitt at this point. On the one hand he rails against the old autocratic ‘above-it-all’ divinity of the past, and insists that everything that should matter to us is here and now and on the surface. On the other hand, he maintains an apparent gulf between the lofty ethics, which are the proper concern of the philosopher, and the down-to-earth business of morality which is too trivial for him even to discuss. But surely, by his own criteria, morality — the day-to-day business of living well together here and now — is what matters most?
Solar ethics are commended by Cupitt for not distinguishing between good and evil, but unless they can at the same time offer some practical guidance over such matters as social justice, international terrorism, crime and punishment, medical ethics, and a host of other similar concerns, of what value or use are they? It is not sufficient for Don (or any other Christian) to appeal blithely to Saint Paul and the alleged superiority of Gospel over Law, as he does in chapter 12. The gospel and its associated religious ethic must demonstrate their superiority in the actual rough and tumble of human living, where poor old legal morality is forced to do its unglamorous work.
Moral laws may not ‘exist’ in an absolute sense, or have been promulgated by a ‘realist’ deity, but they came from somewhere. That ‘somewhere’ is the human heart responding (however inadequately) to a human need. That need still deserves the attention of the philosophers as well as the politicians.
Review of Solar Ethics by Don Cupitt (SCM Press, 1995), ISBN 0-334-02618-0.