Civic Virtues and the Politics of ‘Full Drift Ahead’ Professor Iain T. Benson CIS Occasional Paper 155 2017 Published May 2017 by The Centre for Independent Studies Limited Level 1, 131 Macquarie Street, Sydney NSW 2000 Email: [email protected] Website: www.cis.org.au Views expressed in the publications of The Centre for Independent Studies are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre’s staff, advisers, directors, or officers. ©2017 The Centre for Independent Studies National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Benson, Iain, author. Title: Acton lecture 2017 : civic virtues and the politics of ‘full drift ahead’ / Professor Iain Benson. ISBN: 9781922184894 (paperback) Series: CIS occasional papers ; 155. Subjects: Social values. Political ethics. Ethical relativism. Other Creators/Contributors: Centre for Independent Studies (Australia), issuing body. Civic Virtues and the Politics of ‘Full Drift Ahead’ The Acton Lecture 2017 on Religion and Civil Society For the Religion and Civil Society Project of The Centre for Independent Studies Sydney, Australia 4 May, 2017 Professor Iain T. Benson ©* * PhD (Wits), JD (Windsor), MA (Cambridge), BA (Hons.) (Queen’s); Professor of Law, School of Law, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney; Professor Extraordinary, Faculty of Law, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of law students Esther Adeyinka, William Lidden, Natasha Keshavarzadeli and Sorcha Dowling and for some helpful comments to his friends Justice Peter Lauwers and Shanaaz Adams. Some of the material in this lecture draws upon a lecture presented in Brussels to the Hans Seidel Foundation in 2015 and in minor places to brief references in the author’s PhD Thesis: “An Associational Framework for the Reconciliation of Competing Rights Claims Involving the Freedom of Religion” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2013) Introduction I would like to thank Peter Kurti for the invitation to give the 2017 Acton Lecture and for his kind introductory remarks. My hope this evening is to give some substance to a few terms that are important but often overlooked and to take a few terms that are widely used and to suggest that they are not as useful as we might imagine them to be. Before turning to these terms, to “civic virtues” and to “values”, however, I should like to place this lecture in the context of a series of ideas that have led to the replacement of a shared moral sense of “virtues” with the deeply ambiguous and relativistic language of “values.” Chief amongst these ideas are four: 1) that the state can be ‘neutral” in relation to moral claims and, related to this; 2) that metaphysics is an optional field of philosophy and 3) that “belief” is the purview of the religious citizen and 4) that techniques can be a substitute for purposes (that techne can operate without attention to telos).1 All four of these notions undergird many contemporary blind- spots. First, there is no such thing as the “neutral state”; the state may operate impartially but this is not the same as “neutrally.” Laws and policies, or the refusal to adopt laws and policies are necessarily moral decisions of one sort or another and so the idea of “neutrality” while comforting to the morally phobic is an illusion. Second, metaphysics are, as Huxley noted in his book Ends and Means, not optional - - one can have good metaphysics or bad metaphysics but one cannot have no metaphysics.2 Third, there is no such thing as an “unbeliever”. Everyone is a believer, the question isn’t whether he or she believes, but, rather what he or she believes in. The idea of a realm of unbelief is an illusion similar to the others mentioned. Finally, the idea that techniques can operate without attention to purposes is an illusion. Techniques are about how things operate and only an understanding of what they are for, an examination of their purposes, gives us a moral ground of evaluation - - an ability to examine whether this or that area of culture is “good” or “bad” or “fit for purpose” or not. Operating 1 Civic Virtues and the Politics of ‘Full Drift Ahead with systems that are not correlated to their purposes means that we cannot properly evaluate the moral appropriateness of things - - a dangerous “drift” that forms part of the concern behind the title this evening. The title also uses the word “politics” but it should be noted that I do not mean merely or even primarily that the drift at issue is that of politics understood as party politics. What I mean is politics in relation to citizenship. All aspects of culture are, in a sense, “political” in so far as they pertain to how we live our lives together and this lecture examines the real consequences of not attending to the moral purposes or ends of our lives in association as much as in relation to formal politics. In this lecture I shall discuss three main areas: first what has been described as “the crisis of Western cultures”; second, the meaning of “values” and how they differ from “virtues” and; third, a review of the April 2017 Document put out by the Australian Government3 in the hope that a new approach to citizenship based on “shared values” or “Australian values” will “strengthen the test for Australian Citizenship” and Australian culture itself. Finally, I shall offer a Conclusion and some Recommendations based on what has gone before. The Crisis of Western Cultures It is nothing particularly new to refer to Western cultures as being in Crisis. Christopher Dawson referred to the Crisis of Western Education in his 1961 book of the same title and I am sure that with a bit of digging earlier examples of the crisis genre could be located. What is interesting at the moment, however, is that what is being increasingly widely documented by scholars is a breakdown in a certain liberal consensus that has been in place for some considerable period of time. Paul Horwitz, in The Agnostic Age, for example, writes that: …we are now in the twilight of the liberal consensus as we have known it. It may survive, with important revisions. Or it may collapse all together, and new prophets will arise to predict what will come after it. One thing, however, 2 Professor Iain T. Benson seems certain: the liberal consensus that emerged after the enlightenment, gelled in the nineteenth century, and reached a more or less stable form in the twentieth century, cannot last much longer as a basic, unquestioned assumption about the way we live. From within and beyond its borders, the liberal consensus is under attack. On all sides we are hearing calls, sometimes measured and sometimes shrill, for a revision or an outright rejection of the terms of the liberal treaty.4 Ronald Weed and John von Heyking in a collection of essays examining civil religion, speak of a “crisis of citizenship” that is the result of the failure of secular society to “satisfy fully its citizens’ desire for meaningful community” consequent upon a failure “to integrate fully the human personality into a schema of citizenship.” This in turn, the authors note, produces as crisis of political unity.5 A recent book by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016) addresses what it terms “metacrisis” in relation to politics, economy, polity, culture and the world itself. With respect to the “metacrisis of liberalism”, the authors take a similar tack to Horwitz when they state that: The whole liberal tradition faces a new kind of crisis because liberalism as a philosophy and an ideology turns out to be contradictory, self-defeating and parasitic on the legacy of Greco-Roman civilisation and the Judeo- Christian tradition which it distorts and hollows out.6 The authors state that “the only genuine alternative is a post-liberal politics of virtue that seeks to fuse greater economic justice with social reciprocity” (3). Australian Clive Hamilton has written of “the disappointment of liberalism” and catalogues a significant list of the “maladies of affluence” that “suggest that the psychological wellbeing of citizens in rich countries is in decline”.7 What all these authors suggest as essential is a recovery or creation of a richer moral and aesthetic framework for life in contemporary societies. They all speak of “virtues” and of the 3 Civic Virtues and the Politics of ‘Full Drift Ahead traditions that nurture such virtues. They do not speak of “values” and with good reason. Language is always open to alternative forms of interpretation and law is in the business of interpretation. What informs legal interpretation; however, are background notions such as what we mean by a “secular” state, what we mean by “secularism” and what we mean by a state being “neutral”? Furthermore, is there a “liberal consensus”? What would such a thing as a “liberal consensus” be? What do we mean by “values” and what are these in comparison to “virtues?” To take two of these terms important to this lecture, a wide variety of contemporary scholars have come to the conclusion that the “liberal consensus” which for a time guided certain conceptions of law has now broken down and that “values” language is, if not bankrupt, at least in need of serious clarification if we believe that, by its use, we are conveying moral meaning. With respect to “liberal consensus” there are those who may wish to deny that this consensus no longer exists and who will continue to advocate for forms of interpretation that give their viewpoint particular advantage in the courts and politics. However, the fact remains that there is no longer, if there ever was, a consensus as to either the meaning of liberalism in relation to law, or how law should approach certain kinds of disputes involving rights. The meaning of central terms such as “equality” and “non- discrimination” need to be viewed “through the associational lens” or through the different contexts that are allowed in a society if the differences between communities on important matters such as religion and sexual orientation are to be realized. At the moment the manner in which a term such as “equality” is being placed in opposition to religion (itself an equality right) shows a failure to appreciate associational diversity and the need for principles of space- sharing in an open society. Similarly, we need to be wary of claims that a particular position represents “the state interest”. More often than not, when what is at issue is a contestable viewpoint, the state interest is multiple, not singular. The state, simply put, should not have only “one” view on controversial matters. These are questions that the state should keep “open” as far as possible. It is the nature of the pressures on pluralism, however, that, as with theocracies of 4