Masses Today

6.30: Kathleen Carr, (Anniv)
9.00 Richard Tierney, (Anniv)
11.00 Ellen Reynolds, (Anniv)
12.15 Matthew Griffin, (Anniv)
6.30 Kathleen Brennan, (Month's Mind)

AS I WAS SAYING...

It has been a week of great confusion, both politically and morally. Some very disparate characters now find themselves in the same bed, politically speaking, of course. 'The devil is in the detail'. Never was that aphorism so true. We have been mentally crucified by detail. It is not my intention to add further to your confusion. So I will draw away from the devilish detail in an effort to provide a broader perspective. We are no longer an island people; through our own electoral choices, we now belong to a community of 'liberal western democracies'. It might be of help to reflect on relatively recent trends within that broad band of communities. One of the more lucid contemporary commentators on Western democracy is the British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. (I make no apologies for leaning heavily on his ideas here.)

Over 40 years ago the most renowned English legal practitioner of his day, Lord Devlin, delivered a lecture which subsequently became the basis of much discussion, entitled 'Morals and Criminal Law'. Among other things, he stated:

Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures. There is disintegration where no common morality is observed and history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage of disintegration, so that society is justified in taking the same steps to preserve its moral code as it does to preserve its government and other essential institutions. ...."

That argument was roundly rejected and, in the intervening 40 years many laws thought to have a moral or religious basis have been repealed or liberalised. What originally provoked Lord Devlin's remarks was a sentence in a report of the Wolfenden Committee (1957) which stated as follows:

'Unless a deliberate attempt is made by society, acting through the agency of law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a sphere of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business.'
The report then added, by way of postscript, 'To say this is not to condone or encourage private immorality.'

Obviously, there are extensive tracts within the human heart into which law must never intrude. (I use the term 'Law' in the broad sense, including constitutional and legislative) However, subsequent experience has shown one thing to be false, namely the assumption that you can change the law without leaving morality untouched. The authors of the Report evidently believed that homosexuality could cease to be a crime while remaining in the public mind a sin. It could no longer be punished; it would merely be denounced. Morality would not be enforced by law. It would instead be reinforced by teaching and preaching.

That attractive prospect has proved to be unfounded. Were the authors of the Wolfenden Report to repeat today that certain sexual behaviours whilst not criminal are nonetheless sinful, they would find themselves banned from most Western classrooms and Universities on the grounds of 'homophobia'. The liberalisation of law has led to a fairly rapid eclipse of the very idea that there are shared moral norms. What a single generation ago was regarded as the avant garde of radical liberalism would today be seen as the politically incorrect face of moral fundamentalism.

Are we in the process of creating an environment where moral judgement is condemned as being judgmental, in which the idea has become orthodoxy that there is no sexual ethic beyond the consistent application of personal choice, in which there is no moral authority beyond the self or the 'sect of the like-minded'? If this is the case, there can be no moral role-models who epitomise our collective values and virtues, because we are too divided to reach a consensus on whether we should look up to Mother Teresa or Madonna. There can, in short, be nothing beyond the random aggregation of individuals and groups living in accidental proximity, each with its own lifestyle, each claiming our attention for the duration of a sound-bite. The moral voice has been replaced by noise, coherence by confusion, and society itself by a series of unconnected particles called individuals.

At times such as this an immense burden is placed upon law. Up to relatively recent times law was seen as expressing some communal consensus, what Leslie Stephen described as 'the seal on the wax of moral sentiment'. Today however, law is seen as an external constraint, limited to the prevention of harm to others. But, because we no longer seem to have a shared moral code, the law is called upon to decide on what is effectively undecidable, namely, what constitutes harm to others. Does abortion? Does genetic experimentation? Does cloning? Does the destruction of an embryo created by in vitro fertilisation? Does the withdrawal of a life-support machine? The law is placed in an increasingly invidious situation as we expect more and more from it, and as society's moral code and institutions give it less and less support. Ironically, the law becomes our only authority in an age which is hostile to all authority!

The law needs and deserves support from all who have moral influence in society. We must have the courage to make judgements, to commend some ways of life, and to point to the shortcomings of others, however much this offends against the canons of our non-judgmental culture. We must lead by moral vision and example, and be prepared to challenge the icons of individualism, the idolatry of our age. While we can't 'unring the bell', we can summon the courage to rebuild a moral consensus, beginning with that most fundamental of all questions: What sort of world would we wish to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren?

-Dick Lyng

EVENTS THIS WEEK

COUSIN EVA

Cousin Eva
A deep-sea diva
Never sat at the Met.

Not only too wet
But too snotty

Which drove Pavarotti
Potty!


-Roger MacGough.


MEMORABLE QUOTES