Built On Nothing - Article1
THE SMUGGLING OF VALUES IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Professor Steven Smith in his book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse suggests that serious thought about ultimate issues has almost completely died out in contemporary western society. This contrasts with Classical times when both pagan and Christian western peoples inhabited a world they thought to be intrinsically normative or purposeful – human action was in phase with cosmological realities. This sense of an overarching metanarrative characterised the whole of western history until recently.
It was true also of the Enlightenment thinkers who believed that human reason could discover ultimate truth and should be dedicated to that quest. The massive confidence of Enlightenment thinkers in human reason urged them to follow reason wherever it took them. But gradually over the next two hundred years the Enlightenment flickered and then “went out”.
Max Weber argued that modernity had become an “iron cage” – submitting life and discourse to the constraints of secular rationalism. The results were, in science, massive progress, but in normal life, the truncated secular vocabulary has proved inadequate for the full range of human values, intuitions, commitments and convictions.
Smith argues that to deal with this problem society has been guilty of smuggling. If the deepest human convictions rely on prescientific vocabulary then we need to smuggle them back in. Smith identifies 2 dominant smuggling families:-
(a) autonomy-freedom-liberty
(b) equality-neutrality-reciprocity.
He examines various thinkers who have tried to set these up as autonomous freestanding values; and other thinkers who question that, for example Klarman who comments of the notion of freedom “the infinite contestability and malleability of freedom … the concept does no serious work in the various debates”.
So there is now in our postmodern society “reasonableness” not reason. The value placed on pluralism means no one truth can predominate. There is therefore an interest therefore in keeping public discourse shallow, and a general loss of confidence in reason to lead people to absolute truth.
CONCLUSION – How do Christians respond to this poverty of public ideas and debate? Surely there is room for questioning the statements of values by public figures and by ordinary people, our neighbours and friends when these statements are both opposed to the Christian faith and without any sustainable intellectual basis; for example in item 2.
