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Press: Welby seeks common good in midst of bad

16 August 2024

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FOR a lift right out of the news, try James Butler’s subtle and sympathetic review in the LRB of Marilynne Robinson’s book on Genesis (Books, 5 April). A book that, he says, “narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days of my life,’ Jacob declares as his wanderings come to an end.”

“The decorous move would be to invoke the separation of church and state at the level of criticism: our metaphysical beliefs (or lack of them) remain private, but we agree that the stories in Genesis are significant, rewarding, important — any category other than ‘true’. For Robinson, such a separation would be dishonest and unsustainable.

“In line with her Calvinism, Robinson finds in Genesis evidence of God’s goodness, his interest in human beings, a providential pattern to history and unmerited grace. Her belief that ‘events are working themselves out at another scale and towards other purposes’ entails delaying judgment and blame, though it can make human agency feel illusory. As she says, ‘providential’ is not a ‘synonym for happy or propitious’ but it can still seem like divine self-exculpation.”

And so on — I could fill the whole column with quotes from this piece and still not do it justice. Of course, Butler must ultimately disagree with Robinson, but his essay is a wonderful example of what might be called good disagreement. Go, read, as the angel said to Augustine.


“GOOD disagreement” brings us to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Guardian op-ed on the bad disagreement of the riots, best read in conjunction with John Gray’s reminiscences of Hayek in The New Statesman. These first appeared in 2015, but a mysterious providence dropped them as if they were fresh on my iPad when I opened the News Statesman app on the morning I write, and I do not doubt its wisdom.

The Archbishop is hated and despised by the rioters’ apologists online and by the Brexit press. But, even if he’s not going to persuade any of his enemies, he should have encouraged his friends with a clear statement that far-Right groups are unchristian, and that small-scale civic engagement was a necessary complement to forceful reaction from the police. “We must develop and cherish these examples of civic virtue that have been counter-messages to those of the mob.”

Then comes an extraordinary sentence which hangs limp from the high-voltage line it has just grabbed: “The philosophical turn to the self has been an enormous gift to the development of ideas in every section of knowledge. But it does not necessarily help us build communal life.”

If this means anything — and it is certainly intended to do so — it means that Enlightenment liberalism is destructive of communal life, and that we should be turning away from it. This is not only a criticism of liberalism as an economic doctrine, but of the underlying philosophical premiss that the only ultimate judge of what’s right for anyone is the autonomous individual involved. That seems to me radically opposed to all forms of organised religion as a matter of sociology quite as much as of theology. Faith communities, like any other sort, are organised only to the extent that their members submit to collective judgements.

But there is no reason to suppose that these necessary communities will ever merge into a glorious harmony. Even supposing that the swords are all beaten into ploughshares, there may not be enough land to go around. This is the heart of Gray’s disagreement with Hayek: “Hayek’s belief that vital freedoms can be enshrined in law and thereby taken out of politics is ultimately delusive. But it is not an aberration peculiar to the brand of right-wing liberalism that he professed. An anti-political liberalism is the ruling illusion of the current generation of progressive thinkers. Philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin had views of justice very different from Hayek’s. . .

“What all these thinkers had in common was the idea that reasonable people will converge on a shared conception of what justice requires. In this view, politics isn’t a rough-and-tumble in which rival interests and ideals contend with one another unceasingly, but a collective process of deliberation that leads to a common set of values.”

Gray believes that this optimism was nourished in Hayek by his experience of growing up under the shelter of the Habsburg Empire under Franz Josef. Some similar illusion is fostered by the experience of growing up in another benevolent anachronism such as the Established Church. (I like this analogy, not least because it makes St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, a nest of bomb-throwing Serbs).

I don’t think you could find a better description of the ideals of the Living in Love and Faith project than Gray’s words — “a collective process of deliberation that leads to a common set of values” — nor a better description of its reality than “a rough-and-tumble in which rival interests and ideals contend with one another unceasingly”.

The common good is hard to find; the common bad is obvious all around.

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