 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Editorial:
"Know Thyself"
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Illiberal Democracy
Alwyn Thomson
From
the Director: Good News People?
David W Porter
Balancing
on the Edge
Tony Davidson
Grateful
to God
David McMillan
Space
& Freedom
David Hewitt
Imaginative
Engagement
Keith Getty
No
longer at ease with this dispensation?
Mike Wardlow
Living
with our deepest differences
Os Guinness
Deep
Questions
Johnston
McMaster
Steady
presence
Cecelia Clegg
No
longer lonely
Joseph Liechty
Something
to give
Ingri Sakaria
Bible
study series: Faith in the future
David
W Porter
Review:
The Elusive Quest, Reconciliation in N I by Norman Porter
Bill
Brown
Review:
Journeying Towards Reconciliation, A Song for Ireland by Ruth Patterson
Lynda
Gould
Review:
Islam in Conflict:Past Present and Future by Peter G Riddell &
Peter Cotterell
Alwyn
Thomson
Review:
The R Option - Building Relationships as a Better Way of Life by
Michael Schluter & David John Lee
Anna
Rankin
Review:
Blue Diary by Alice Hoffman
Glenn
Jordan
Summer
School Poetry
Various
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 6: Truth
LIVING WITH OUR DEEPEST DIFFERENCES
The
Burning Question
We are living in a world that is both globalising and shrinking and the
challenges of diversity are truly worldwide. Again and again the question
is raised: How do we live with our deepest differences so that diversity
becomes a matter of strength and richness, not of Weakness and division?
The first time I went to Washington, I visited George Washington's home, Mount Vernon. The guides there tell you about everything in the house from the furniture and the china to the wallpaper and all sorts of things. But I was intrigued by the one item that was completely overlooked - a huge, massive, rather misshapen, rusty old key in a glass case. I asked the guide about it and she said, "That's the key to the Bastille." I later read that the Marquis de Lafayette, after the storming of the Bastille, had believed so passionately that the American Revolution was the key to many of the events in France that he sent Washington the key to the Bastille.
Now, ironically, it had been totally overlooked in my guide's tour of Mount Vernon. And in many ways, on this issue of liberty and diversity some of the deepest lessons of the American experiment are overlooked today, even in America.
The end of the twentieth century presents us with a witches' brew of ancient hatreds and humanitarian nightmares from Rwanda to Bosnia; Kosovo, to East Timor and to many other parts of the world. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the last century as the caveman's century. A hundred million were killed in war, a hundred million in political repression and nearly another hundred million in sectarian and ethnic violence, which at the end of the century was as strong as at the beginning.
Clearly, one of the burning questions for our earth is, "How do we live with our deepest differences?" I've wrestled with this question with activists and extremists in the United States and with Chinese scholars who are also wrestling with the issues of nation building, in an extraordinarily large country, after the collapse of Maoism. With some of the stands I've taken I've actually had death threats, even in America. So, clearly, some of the issues we're facing here in Ireland are global issues that many countries with different backgrounds are all wrestling with together.
Let me set out a number of propositions that give some of the broad considerations, taking it much further and wider than things like forgiveness, although that's a very key part of what we're looking at.
Proposition
one:
Three cataclysmic forces that shape our modern world: revolution, war
and migration.
War and migration, of course, are ancient while the word revolution had
never been applied to nations until the eighteenth century. The Glorious
Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution were the
three revolutions out of Western Europe that have truly, since then, changed
the world. But many would say that the age of the impact of revolutions
is probably over.
The last century, we hope, was the age dominated by war. The First World War, Second World War, the Cold War and hundreds of local wars – all represent immense human destructiveness. We have certainly shifted from total war to a very new situation in war. Hopefully, total war will not be the story of the twenty first century.
But the third cataclysmic force clearly is the challenge of the twenty first century – migration. Just take the simple fact, in more recent modern history, that five hundred years ago the white peoples of the world were only in Europe and that over the last five hundred years millions and millions exploring, trading, conquering, colonising, have changed the face of the world by migrating all over the world.
In the last hundred years – apart from Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand – increasingly, the white peoples are coming back to Europe. It is reverse migration and the explosion of pluralism all over the world has begun.
It is often said by social scientists today that everyone is now everywhere and we live in a world that would be unrecognisable to our great grandparents. The changes, for example, in the United States in fifty years alone are said to be the greatest changes in ethnic composition that any nation in history has ever faced. So, take California today. One third of the entire world's immigration is in that state with, say, ninety religions in one public high school, throwing into the balance questions about whose prayer, in terms of school prayer? And so on, and so on and so on.
Clearly, asylum, migration, guest workers and many other forces have changed the face of our European homogeneous societies beyond all recognition. So what you face in Ireland today is not just between two communities in tension and conflict, but a world tomorrow with a diversity that Ireland has never seen in its history. We need to look forward to that challenge as well as back.
Proposition
two:
Three tasks of establishing free societies: winning, ordering and sustaining
freedom.
If you look at the discussion from the Ancient Greeks right down to the
present you can see there was always an awareness that these three things
had to be done. The first, and most obvious, is winning freedom. For some
nations winning freedom was instantaneous in their revolutions e.g. the
American Revolution and the French Revolution. For others it was a much
more incremental, tortuous approach, with an unwritten constitution, for
example the English approach – and there are many mixtures in between.
But in many ways winning freedom is the easiest task.
The second task is ordering freedom: giving the freedom won a political and legal framework which could be enduring. For the Americans, the Constitution tempered liberty. Again, other nations have done that in different ways.
The third task, always the hardest, is not just winning, not just ordering but also sustaining freedom. It is truly the hardest because freedom doesn't come free. It is always harder to be free than not to be free. Freedom never lasts forever – that is genuinely the challenge of freedom, to know how to sustain it.
Proposition
Three:
The understanding of three classical menaces to sustaining freedom: external
threat, corruption of customs and the passing of time.
The great thinkers in history went back to use history to defy history.
Freedom never lasted. What was absolutely universal and unanimous in all
the great classical thinkers was that one had to understand why freedom
always eventually declined and collapsed.
One reason for its decline is external. Suddenly, a nation finds itself with a greater power outside itself and there is little one can do except be vigilant and be prepared. That obviously comes close to the Americans at the moment because it has been an article of faith that America never had an external challenge. Being a continent-sized nation with two ocean buffers, that wasn't their principal challenge until September 11th 2001. What Belfast and Beirut and many other cities have known for a long time, New York at least now knows, with a savage closeness.
The second, though much subtler, menace is the corruption of customs, to use the old Greek word. In other words, in a nation, which is strong because of its fundamental laws and constitutions – however good – if there is a corruption of customs (the bedding in which the laws stand) eventually, freedom itself will be subverted and will decline. For the ancients, that was the principal reason why no freedom ever lasted.
The third menace in one word is the passing of time. When Edward Gibbon wrote his famous book on the decline and fall of Rome he got the idea from being in Rome and seeing grass growing and cattle grazing where the senators and emperors deliberated. In his last chapter of the great series he asks why Rome fell. His first answer is the injuries of time. Nothing in a world that is human lasts forever.
Proposition
Four:
The three assumptions that are necessary to keep freedom enduring –
freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith and faith requires freedom.
Many people think that just laws alone will do it or technology alone
will do it through surveillance. But the end result of that approach is
to have even more laws and regulations, even more surveillance and then,
less freedom. To see freedom endure you need to have three things that
feed on each other.
The first is the deep assumption that freedom requires virtue. As the great American framer, John Adams said, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, because the highest freedom is freedom that is obedience to the unenforceable." It is not just a respect for the law but obedience to the unenforceable that requires virtue and character.
The second point of the triangle is faith. Freedom requires virtue and virtue requires faith of some sort. The inspiration, the content and the sanction for the virtues that give freedom come from faith. They do not exist in a vacuum.
The third point of the triangle is freedom. Faith requires freedom. If it is voluntary and not coerced, if it's freely chosen and not established and imposed, then faith can provide the freedom and the virtue, and the triangle goes on in a selfperpetuating way.
Proposition
Five:
There are three reasons for the perpetual open-endedness of free societies:
nature of freedom, the democratic wager, migration and the development
of character.
The task of freedom is never over; every generation has to enter into
it in its own way. The first reason for this open-endedness is the nature
of freedom. Freedom is never just freedom from, that's the sort of teenager's
view of freedom, a negative freedom – freedom from parents, freedom
from teachers, freedom from the police. That is a very adolescent view.
The higher freedom is not just freedom from, but freedom for, freedom
to be, the obedience to the unenforceable and that's much more challenging.
And that is, simply, why it never lasts.
The second reason why freedom is always open-ended is the open-endedness of a democratic wager. When societies achieve freedom it.s often built on a tension. Constitutionally and legally there is no limit to what anyone can believe. But culturally and practically there is a limit, because some beliefs would contradict the whole system of democracy.
How does one bridge the challenge that legally there is no limit but practically there is? Through a robust, democratic debate in which the best, most just, most human, most free beliefs prevail in an open argument. If they don't there is an undermining of a system and freedom doesn't last.
The third reason for the perpetual open-endedness of freedom is migration and the constant openness of the crystallisation of character. Many historians would argue that, at the end of the day, the greatness of nations doesn't depend on geography or even laws but rather, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it about America, on the habits of the heart, on the nature of the character of the people who keep freedom alive.
But, if there is the constant inflow of new people and they are not educated according to the virtues and the beliefs and the standards of the nation, then there is a perpetual openness to crystallisation of character and a generation arises that no longer understands what made the nation what it is – in other words, where our ancestors are actually less important than our descendants. This means a constant challenge to education in a very profound civic sense.
Proposition
Six:
The three options for the vision of the public square: sacred, naked and
civic.
In many countries in Europe, in the past, the vision of the public square
is what is called a sacred public square. In other words, one religion
or another was established – Catholicism in some countries, Protestantism
in others. Clearly, in an age of extreme pluralism and diversity that
is both unjust and unworkable because people of all the faiths apart from
the established faith don't have the freedom to enter an engaged public
life, as democratic opportunity should offer.
The other extreme, though, is what has been called the naked public square, where all faiths are rigorously excluded so the public square is secular and all faiths are private. Intriguingly, that is equally unjust and unworkable because it is just a matter of fact in our world today that most human beings are people of some faith or other. Those who have a secular philosophy of life are actually only a tiny minority and the irony is, when you create a naked public square you exclude most people while many secular people smuggle their faith through the back door, just as many religious believers used to do in the past.
The alternative is the very hard, third way, what is called a civil public square. In other words, a public square where people of all faiths have the equal opportunity, based on religious liberty, to enter an engaged public life on the basis of their faith. To bring their perspective but within a consensus – an agreed, carefully built consensus – of what is just and what is free for people of all faiths.
This means that a right for one is automatically a right for another and the responsibility of both, but more specifically, where a right for a Protestant is a right for a Catholic, is a right for a Jew, is a right for a Muslim, is a right for an Atheist, is a right for a Mormon and a believer of any faith under the sun. A right for one is a right for another and the responsibility of both in a civil public square. Part of which, of course, is a carefully built understanding of how we live with our deep differences. For instance, we persuade rather that coerce public dialogue.
Now this is not a civil religion. A civil religion, Jean Jacques Rousseau pointed out, is where what binds a nation, its patriotic cement as it were, is itself considered religious. All of us who are Christians would have objections to that. It's not a civil religion; it is what's called a public philosophy.
Neither is it a lowest common denominator, a melting down, where we.ll just get together about the few things left that we can all believe in. No, we have got to say that with modern diversity what divides us goes deeper than what unites us. But in a democratic society we work at building the important things that allow us a robust but civil public debate that doesn.t blow us out of the water. So that diversity becomes a matter of richness and strength and not a source of division and conflict.
Proposition
Seven:
The three requirements for building such a civil public square: legal
rights, public philosophy and personal attitudes.
The first requirement is clear: legal and constitutional rights that can
be appealed to in the courts. Here's where the American experiment has
been so clear and so strong.
But that in itself is not enough. We need to build the public philosophy because without the public philosophy, with only legal rights, we'll be in the hands of the extremists and the lawyers. That has been exactly the problem in the last thirty years in America, with its bitter culture wars. The public philosophy, the consensus, the understanding of a common vision for the common good has broken down and there is deep and growing bitterness in the United States.
The third thing is exactly what ECONI has been addressing through its Embodying Forgiveness project, the personal attitudes. There is no use speaking of clear legal rights or even in some way, abstractly, of a common vision for the common good, unless good-hearted citizens really have attitudes towards their neighbours and other citizens that truly respect human dignity and they know how to enter into the various things, like forgiveness, in their relationships.
A
Brighter Torch
So I would just urge you to see that this issue runs much wider than Protestants
and Catholics. In the Ireland of tomorrow, Ireland will be looking at
a diversity that Ireland has never in its history known before, as many
other parts of the world are today.
I would urge you also to look back in history. History is not, in Henry Ford's disastrous term, "bunk," history is the secret of a seasoned wisdom of the human race. Much of it is a legacy of the treasury of our terrible human mistakes.
But equally, look around. From the United States – which once considered itself to have the true remedy on this issue but which, in the last thirty years, has slipped seriously itself – to farsighted thinkers in China, who are looking to their future. The world today all over is wrestling with how we live with our deepest differences.
One of the last things de Tocqueville ever wrote, long after he had written his famous book, Democracy in America, was this: "In nation building and revolutions, as in a novel, the hardest part to invent is the end." Now, fortunately, we are not looking at the ending of our society, for we have the privilege today of writing our generation's chapter.
In many ways, when it comes to religious liberty and diversity and living with our deepest differences in Europe, the torch of justice and freedom has not burnt very brightly. We have a chance to examine the deepest issues of history and the challenges of our world and, by God's grace, hand on a torch to our children that is burning far brighter than the one that was handed to us.
From a talk given by Dr Os Guinness at a reception marking the completion of ECONI's research project, Embodying Forgiveness, in the Wellington Park Hotel, 26th March 2003.
 |
||
 |
 |
|