Today ours is an increasingly diverse society in which we can observe the fragmentation of shared values and the emergence of extremist action, with profound on-going effects. In response to this emerging situation, our society has, on the whole, remained with its same priorities and pushed forward with the cause of the individual and of personal autonomy as the central values on which to build. The logical consequence of this is a particular and radical understanding of society itself. In this view, society as such exists to keep the peace between people of quite divergent views. Society’s task, basically, is to protect us from each other. In fact this is the core ‘credo’ of a secular, liberal society: society is the peaceful coexistence of potential or real enemies. This thinking underlies much of our public culture. The ‘social cohesion’ currently being sought is, it seems to me, based on this premise.
Yet this premise is, of course, quite inadequate. It is inadequate simply because it does not reflect the concerns and culture by which most people actually live. Up and down our society, in families, within friendships, even as neighbours, and in the very notion of civic friendship within many towns and villages, we seek for something far more than ‘protection from each other’. We share dreams and ambitions; we gather round mutual interests and enthusiasms; we appreciate ‘good things’ together; we still share, in these groups, patterns of thought, or at least profound instincts, about what is to be held as good and wholesome, and what it not. Within all these groups there is a great deal of shared perception (or moral belief) about what is ‘the good life’. These values, and the reflection that carries them, continue to be handed on from generation to generation, adjusted and enriched as that is done.
Yet these patterns of moral reflection, for that is what they are, are often marginalised by being unrecognised, disowned or sentimentalised within our public culture. Hence they are gradually being eroded. They are, in fact, being replaced by a static appeal to the opinions of a supposed majority or of well-organised pressure groups. ‘Political correctness’ is a typical and central expression of this process. And within political correctness, as a method of establishing a public moral culture, as many examples how, reasoning is minimised as a way of making moral judgements. In fact we can say that in forming our public culture we have moved away from rational ethics, the detailed discussion of difference, into a public strategy that is determined simply to control all expressions of difference, often removing difference from the public forum, for difference is seen as a potential point of conflict.
The roots of this thinking, and the project of social cohesion that flows from it, lie in a profound misunderstanding of the human person.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham Social Cohesion and Catholic Education (PDF)
