A further issue that came out of the Calvin and Servetus thread was what value should we put on the public understanding of Right Religion and Philosophy in any of its various manifestations. Can we put a price on it or should we try?
For the sake of this discussion I am assuming that various long-standing philosophical and religious traditions have a kernel of wisdom that is being carried by practitioners who have put them into practice and realised them. I strongly suspect that this kind of knowledge was far more widely spread through the public sphere before the revolutionary ideas of the sixteen and seventeenth centuries concerning the state and the cosmos made their way into various influential speculations on ethics in the eighteenth century (when we all became Enlightened). Allied to this we have the revolutionary changes in society and art that accompanied the industrial revolution (the rise of the novel and all that).
The accumulative effect of all of these developments was to turn people away from self-awareness and trying to achieve well being through non-instrumental self-development. Instead, in line with the social and intellectual revolutions, we see the habitual pursuit of happiness exclusively through instrumental means, this becoming the orthodox understanding.
My point is that it is relatively easy for clever opportunists and cynics to corrode the fabric of collective understanding, with dismal consequences. The conservative movement could be said to be a reaction to this wholesale destruction of values, but the reactionary tendencies of this movement are just as much a modern phenomenon. Some have called it ‘fundamentalism’, but Rowan Williams prefers ‘aggressive religious conservatism’. This reaction is an even more dismaying development for philosophy, for it hollows out religion from within. (This is related to the previous post on moral relativism, and as I have said, I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the teachings of Calvin and what they have been taken to represent by a later more confused age.)
Clearly ‘aggressive religious conservatism’ isn’t the answer. Unlike Alasdair MacIntyre I think it is vain (and thoroughly confused) to look for a resolution in the imposition of a single value system. The world has become too diverse and interconnected for that, and to hope some utopia will appear at the other side of a grand dissolution strikes me as wishful in the extreme.
But I think some kind of religious conservatism has to be taken seriously. Which is to say that each religious tradition will seek to maintain orthodoxy and impose a tax on innovation in order to avoid the teachings becoming destabilised through frivolous innovation.
The best approach, as George Monbiot has just argued in the case of corrosive climate scepticism, is for people in positions of responsibility to take their responsibilities seriously and see that ignorance is dissolved through knowledge. But until more people in positions of power become more acquainted with both knowledge and responsibility i think patience and perseverance will be essential.
What Price Philosophy?
For the sake of this discussion I am assuming that various long-standing philosophical and religious traditions have a kernel of wisdom that is being carried by practitioners who have put them into practice and realised them. I strongly suspect that this kind of knowledge was far more widely spread through the public sphere before the revolutionary ideas of the sixteen and seventeenth centuries concerning the state and the cosmos made their way into various influential speculations on ethics in the eighteenth century (when we all became Enlightened). Allied to this we have the revolutionary changes in society and art that accompanied the industrial revolution (the rise of the novel and all that).
The accumulative effect of all of these developments was to turn people away from self-awareness and trying to achieve well being through non-instrumental self-development. Instead, in line with the social and intellectual revolutions, we see the habitual pursuit of happiness exclusively through instrumental means, this becoming the orthodox understanding.
My point is that it is relatively easy for clever opportunists and cynics to corrode the fabric of collective understanding, with dismal consequences. The conservative movement could be said to be a reaction to this wholesale destruction of values, but the reactionary tendencies of this movement are just as much a modern phenomenon. Some have called it ‘fundamentalism’, but Rowan Williams prefers ‘aggressive religious conservatism’. This reaction is an even more dismaying development for philosophy, for it hollows out religion from within. (This is related to the previous post on moral relativism, and as I have said, I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the teachings of Calvin and what they have been taken to represent by a later more confused age.)
Clearly ‘aggressive religious conservatism’ isn’t the answer. Unlike Alasdair MacIntyre I think it is vain (and thoroughly confused) to look for a resolution in the imposition of a single value system. The world has become too diverse and interconnected for that, and to hope some utopia will appear at the other side of a grand dissolution strikes me as wishful in the extreme.
But I think some kind of religious conservatism has to be taken seriously. Which is to say that each religious tradition will seek to maintain orthodoxy and impose a tax on innovation in order to avoid the teachings becoming destabilised through frivolous innovation.
The best approach, as George Monbiot has just argued in the case of corrosive climate scepticism, is for people in positions of responsibility to take their responsibilities seriously and see that ignorance is dissolved through knowledge. But until more people in positions of power become more acquainted with both knowledge and responsibility i think patience and perseverance will be essential.