Labels don't attract me because they can so easily become prescriptive and limiting. I prefer processes which are open and dynamic because that is one of the ways to become more fully human. If we think we have found the answer to a particular problem or indeed to life itself the process of search will end in death by satisfaction. Life is a struggle of measuring and it has no end.
I was brought up an Anglican with the comforting assurances of that doctrine. It was an important seed-bed through Sunday School, the choir, Bible class and eventual confirmation. I have pleasant memories of the church during boyhood and adolescence. This religious background began earlier when my parents christened me John even though they always intended to call me Jack. They thought that if I ever took holy orders, the Reverend John had more class than the Reverend Jack.
Yet since I left home at the age of 17 I have never been in a church except on ceremonial occasions such as weddings and funerals. It had been another rite of passage like scouts, going to dancing classes or passing UE. I don't know of any of the couple of dozen or so of us who shared those experiences who have become regular churchgoers since.
It wasn't that I didn't long to grasp the passion of belief. At my confirmation and on other occasions I concentrated to my utmost on the mysteries of the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the love of God and the power of prayer, but nothing happened - no joy, no magic, no revelation.
Having grasped so desperately for the substance within the words I have some understanding of how it might feel to be converted and reborn. That carries emotional meaning, codes, directions, signals, purposes and answers to all the awkward questions of life and death. Given the faith and commitment all else follows. Faith is not a matter of dispute - it just is and I have some envy for those who have it, but are not constrained by the dogma.
For many people it can atrophy. Among my friends are some in holy orders across the denominations. During the last 30 years or so a number have told me of their doubts and even loss of faith. Some stayed in their parishes for want of an alternative or for the comfort of habit or against the possibility of reason. Some were bothered by the thought that their example might undermine the faith of their parishioners, a peculiar form of dishonesty. They all agreed that the anomalies associated with their religion had become too numerous to tolerate. The church's explanations no longer satisfied their need to know and to understand.
Others have found satisfaction in the work of radical theologians who interpret Christianity in terms of critical social reform or even in revolution. There were no such messages in my youth so the voices of Marx, Freud and Darwin had a powerful resonance. Marx bequeathed a new way of analysing society in historical and economic terms: Freud opened doors to rational self-analysis and understanding and Darwin gave a scientific explanation of the development of life forms. They gave compelling meaning to what had been mysteries. For those who came of age around World War II there were high hopes that humans could use that knowledge and their reason to make a better world.
Having been reared on dreams of Heaven and fear of Hell, we were strongly inclined towards utopias. Inevitably, we were disappointed, for utopians with power are made dangerous by certainty. Now, I think we are more likely to keep on dreaming dreams but doing every day what is possible.
There were other landmark experiences at mid-century. Being involved in World War II shattered a number of illusions, particularly the idea that the use of force resolve anything. Why the churches were so enthusiastic about the war is still a mystery to me. The war also revealed some previously unrecognised racial and cultural prejudices which are not easy to shrug off. Finally it brought a generation face to face with itself when the War Crimes Tribunals found that people who committed crimes against humanity are responsible for what they did even if under direction from legal authority. This was emphasised in the early sixties when Eichmann was convicted of complicity in the death of several million Jews. His plea that, as a civil servant, he was carrying out the lawful orders of the state, was denied. He did it, so he carried the moral and legal responsibility. He couldn't blame God or fate or the state or anyone but himself.
The principle of responsibility was enlivened by Martin Luther King, among others, in the USA when he deliberately broke unjust laws and then presented himself at the nearest police station to be appropriately punished. How else could he have drawn attention to injustice and, concurrently, demonstrated his respect for the concept of law?
At the same time, peace activists in New Zealand began a grass roots campaign that changed our perceptions of ourselves and the nature of our society. Environmental campaigners have had similar success as have Maori activists. Individuals acting in concert for a greater social good can change the world.
The principle of action that transcends immediate selfish purpose was given another dimension by the distinguished Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist Father Teilhard de Chardin. He argued that evolution, the basic force in the iniverse, had operated by chance. In the process it produced humans with their superbly complex central nervous systems.
Whether or not this was part of a divine plan is irrelevant because the doctrine of free will absolves a creator of responsibility, thus leaving the choices and the responsibilities to us. Our fate, says de Chardin, is to see that henceforth evolution shall operate on a moral and ethical basis.
According to Socrates, ethics is "the way we should behave". There is no escaping the responsibilities for what happens to the world - the buck does stop here. Pollution, environmental degradation, ozone depletion, declining water supplies, waste, starvation and social decay are all down to us and we alone can reverse them.
For two millennia the church carried the ethical burden. Many church people still do but now it is often in worldly causes. Since the fifties this has been a powerful influence as people across the whole spectrum of philosophy and belief have campaigned of equality and justice. Their concern is no longer with an imagined next world but with this one.
However, there are still people who hanker for the old irrational authoritarian control. For example, in April of this year, the British Minister of Education claimed that more people were turning to crime "because they do not believe that they will pay for their sins in hell. Fear of damnation was a message reinforced through attendance at church every week", he wrote in the Spectator "The loss of fear has meant that a critical motive has been lost to young people when they decided whether to try to be good citizens or to be criminals."
In the same week the Jesuit review Civilta Cattolica of Rome said "too many people were forgetting how horrible Hell is". It urged bishops and priests to take the courage to instill in their flocks a wholesome fear of what they might expect in the next life if they did not behave themselves in this one.
Such doctrine is certainly not restricted to any one section of society, for the same authoritarian punitive impulse appears in many forms. Contemporary publicity about crime and punishment is an unhappy example as many people, including some in high places, bay for more punishment from the death penalty to flogging.
This all flies in the face of the weight of evidence which suggest that conditioned responses and fear are of limited influence on higher levels of behaviour, there is no adequate alternative to informed, rational choice.
Karl Popper captured this when he wrote:
What interests me are the objective critical rational reasons which can be advanced as to why, in the search for truth, one theory is to be preferred to another.
He made a clear distinction between truth and certainty. In the search of truth there can be no certainties because to be certain is to be beyond change, to be dogmatic, to be arbitrary with a mind that is closed to other possibilities.
As a teacher I was often uneasy at the way educational institutions concentrated on the right answers. That is a style of dogmatism that leaves permanent intellectual and imaginative scar tissue. Popper's preferred world is one that is free of dogmatism. It is one in which error is valued as a necessary part of finding what, for the moment, cannot be falsified and is therefore the truth.
In this unremitting search there are values as signposts. For example, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper asserted that the most important world [sic] which people have created is the moral demand "for equity, for freedom, and for helping the weak".
When the Thatcher government made Popper a Companion of Honour they quoted only freedom from that statement because it suited the prevailing market philosophy. As Peter Munz has pointed out the full statement makes it clear that Popper could not be classified so easily. I think that his may be one of the voices from this century which will profoundly influence the next.
Another major influence could be the ecological insights coming from that hard sciences, particularly from the quantum physicists. At the core of the atom they have found a natural reality which defies traditional analysis because it can only be understood as a whole. In there is a world of dynamic inter-relationships where the parts are intelligible only in relation to those around them. The world, probably the universe, is like a single organism governed by feedback loops of mutual dependence.
If interdependence is the natural order, systems which are repugnant to it will act as cancer cells within an otherwise healthy organism. An example could be a competitive market philosophy which crowds out other elements such as cooperation and mutuality. We may have already gone past the point of tolerance of the undesirable consequences of unfettered exploitation by market competition. It has the smell of another dogma which is immune to critical reason because it has been selected by its followers as the only option. There is an added danger that when it fails it s healthy elements will be rejected with the rest. One seeks in vain of Popper's objective, critical, rational reason which can be advanced as to why in the search for truth this theory, the market, is to be preferred to others.
Nevertheless, an ethical future of cooperative mutuality that is at once the natural order is possible. It is a human future requiring human choice and commitment. It requires hope and belief in ourselves individually and as a species. Is that a faith? Perhaps the traditional myths and visions don't change except to move the responsibility from the divine to the fallible, imperfect, vulnerable human being. we are all we have. To be fully human is to accept the consequences and get on with behaving as we should. Call it what you will, the repsonsibility is unmistakable and inescapable .
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