REVIEWS: HOLLOWAY SPECIAL ..and a Rationalist voice tells the bishop...
You don't go far enough! ne of the most important tasks of O« and aesthetics - defined as thinking about such ideas as right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, nice and nasty - is asking what these ideas really are. For example, are they objective or subjective, absolute or relative, global or local, dogmatic or pragmatic, supernatural or natural, important or unimportant, useful or harmful, relevant or irrelevant?
Can these questions be answered?
Attempts to answer them during the past two or three thousand years don’t seem to have got much further than Plato or Aristotle, though rather further than Confucius or the Buddha, and much further than Moses or Paul. And if in fact they can be answered, the general view in our little corner of the world during the past two or three hundred years tends to prefer the second of many if not most of the alternatives offered.
Narrowing the problem in space and time and range, more and more professional thinkers and ordinary people here and now seem to agree that morality, like manners, is a human construction, derived from the usual combination of biological inheritance and environmental influence; that we pick up some of it as we grow up and make up the rest as we go along; that we need a certain amount of it, for our survival as individuals or groups or a species; but that a lot of it is too much of a good thing; so that the best approach is the universal golden rule, Do as you would be done by, or be done by as you did.
From this perspective, which is roughly my own, Richard Holloway’s book doesn’t say anything that is new or much that is interesting. It raises three issues, conducts reasonable but superficial discussions, and reaches reasonable but predictable conclusions, all of which have attracted excitement in the media but are familiar to anyone who knows anything about the subject.
The first issue, raised by the title and considered in the introduction, first chapter and epilogue, is the connection between religion and morality. The conclusion is that there is no necessary connection and that we need morality without religion. This may shock some religious people, but it is taken for granted by most non-religious people in principle, and by many religious people in practice.
The second issue, covered in the intervening five chapters, is the moral aspect of such subjects as sex in general and homosexuality in particular, the position of women, the use of illegal drugs, the practices of abortion and euthanasia, and artificial methods of reproduction. The conclusions are that such things should be judged without religious or other dogmatic preconceptions. Again, this may shock some religious people, and also some non-religious people, but the arguments could actually have been taken much further, from the liberal to the libertarian conclusion that sin, or victimless crime, or selfinflicted injury, or whatever cant phrase is used, is no business either of church or state or indeed society, and that the persecution of private behaviour is as daft as the punishment of illness in Erewhon. What we do with our own minds and bodies is our business, and you should mind your own business. The issues of abortion and women are more serious and deserve more searching discussion, and there are many other really serious issues, such as violence and war, property and poverty, education and politics, which demand more urgent consideration. Here the book isn’t nearly shocking enough.
The third issue is that the author of this eloquent plea for “godless morality” is a Christian bishop and a professor of divinity. Yet again, this has shocked many people, both religious and non-religious, but it too follows a familiar pattern, especially in the Anglican communion. All ideologies have to evolve if they are to survive, and the resulting confusion is all too familiar both in religious denominations and in political parties. The phenomenon is what George Orwell called “doublethink” - “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and believing both of them”. Most of us do it to some extent, and Anglican clergymen have to do it a lot. For the bishop of Edinburgh it seems to be a way of life and a way of making a living. Good luck to him!
NICOLAS WALTER on Holloway “Richard Holloway’s book doesn’t say anything that is new or much that is interesting. It raises three issues, conducts reasonable but superficial discussions, and reaches reasonable but predictable conclusions.” Nicolas Walter is a lifelong humanist who has just retired after 25 years work for the Rationalist Press Association. =_l <x [aml O Lu Oo.