J. Andrew Kirk has selected a variety themes for thoughtful consideration of what present day ‘Christian mission’ looks like in a world that is post-modern, post-Christian and post-Western, post-everything! It should be helpful to for church leaders, students and all thinking Christians, inside and outside the academic world, wishing to relate their faith to contemporary social trends.
227pp. Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Christian mission and the sacredness of secular freedom
2. Mission as dialogue: the case of secular faith
3. The calling of mission in a post-Christian environment
4. Vindicating Scripture in a pluralist culture
5. Mission as evangelism: the question of religious believers
6. The role of religion in conflict
7. Overcoming violence with violence: is it ever justified?
8. Mission as prophecy: a voice from Latin America
9. The Gospel in context the case of same gender relations
10. Mission post-everything? A postscript
Bibliography
Index
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Review |
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Chapter One: Christian mission and the sacredness of secular freedom
It is now a universal truism that mission is severely impaired without an adequate understanding of the context in which it takes place. We may proceed, therefore, to make a number of assumptions about the relationship between mission and the present context, as long as these are open to careful examination. We might refer to them as law-like generalisations that can be confirmed or denied by adequate evidence. Firstly, mission is effective always in proportion to a valid understanding of the mechanisms that drive contemporary cultures. These latter include basic beliefs, values, traditions, customs and institutions, that tend to interact in complex and often unpredictable ways. Secondly, the dominant global force driving human cultures for the last quarter of a millennium has been the pursuit of freedom. In the celebrated trilogy of human rights, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, the middle virtue is deemed the necessary condition for the exercise of the other two. Without genuine freedom, both life and happiness are severely compromised. Thirdly, as a consequence of the previous assumptions, productive will depend upon grasping the historical and social significance of modern notions of freedom.
Given the impulse, over the last three centuries, to construct a new view of human life without recourse to any reality beyond the natural world, there has been an increasing tendency to see freedom as release from the imposition of beliefs and values not personally decided on. In this sense, the concept of freedom, in all societies affected by the ideas of the Enlightenment, is secular in nature. (1) It presumes an innate independence from external controls decided by some institution – such as religious bodies or political establishments – without individual consent.
Due to the limits of space, we will only touch upon the two main notions of freedom that have arisen in the course of the modern history of the West. (2) Although increasingly important in the controversy over the relationship between the brain, mind and will, the technical philosophical argument about free will and determinism is beyond the confines of this particular debate. (3)
The liberal tradition (freedom from. . .)
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, a number of important factors in the cultural and social life of Europe had begun seriously to undermine the hierarchical and authoritarian structures of the existing social order. Firstly, there was a growing acknowledgement of the sovereignty of individual conscience, arising mainly from the struggle for the recognition of religious toleration. Chronologically speaking, freedom of religious belief and practice was the first civil freedom to be contended for. Then, secondly, the beginning of modern science, based on disciplined investigation of the natural world, presupposed an unfettered approach to intellectual research and discovery. By its very nature, the scientific enterprise could not be directed to fit preconceived beliefs. Its method demanded freedom from external supervision and constraint. Thirdly, incipient notions of political democracy, that challenged the divine right of some to rule and that used the language of accountability to the will of the people, were beginning to emerge.
During the eighteenth century, these factors translated into forces, which gathered strength. They were fuelled by the writings of political philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine. Though called ‘The Age of Reason’, it might just as well have been known as ‘The Age of Revolt’. It marked a fundamental change of mood in society, externalised to some degree in the American and French Revolutions, in which people were demanding freedom from all kinds of external restrictions, limitations and impositions, and in particular from the detailed regulation by the state of most aspects of life. Although not always articulated in this way, the mood reflected a challenge to all forms of ‘elitism’, in which some group, alien to oneself, assumed a right or duty to determine the limits of personal choice and self-determination.
Ever since, the liberal tradition within Western societies has campaigned for this as the fundamental concept of freedom. It is classically defined by Isaiah Berlin as, ‘freedom from any agent external to myself determining what is in my best interests and forcing me to comply’. (4) He calls this negative freedom. We are free to the degree that no individual or group interferes with our activities. The obstruction or prevention of doing what I would otherwise do is to be unfree, coerced or enslaved. (5) ‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.’ (6
According to this way of thinking, as logically it must be, negative freedom is dependent on society accepting a strong separation between private belief and public authority. This in turn springs from the notion of the intrinsic worth, or sanctity, of individual selves. They are self-contained, autonomous units, always to be treated as an end in themselves, never used as the means to other ends, especially those of the state. (7)
In the course of time, the ‘sacred’ nature of private space and time has led, as indeed it must, to society awarding the highest values to permissiveness and tolerance. The claim to a natural, self-evident right to manage one’s own life, free from external interference, is also a claim that society must permit and tolerate my own self-chosen life-style, as long as this is compatible with an equal freedom accorded to others. Two manifestations of self-determination – the public right freely to elect and dismiss the governing powers and the private right freely to choose and change the government of one’s own life – have become mutually reinforcing. As we shall see, however, the recognition of the right to political self-determination, as in the case of former colonies, (8) was not met by an equal ability to gain freedoms in the sphere of personal life.
The socialist tradition (freedom for. . .)
Another major social tradition, that of ‘human rights’, also saw its beginning in the eighteenth century. The language of rights has become, perhaps, one of the most persistent and significant pieces of vocabulary to be used in modern political and civil life. The notion is enshrined in the Bill of Rights which accompanied the American Declaration of Independence: ‘All men are born free, and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ In this proposition, human rights are set out in the form of what most people must be free to do, in the light of what they are by their very nature. Hence, it takes the form of what is called positive freedom. According to this vision, freedom is about possibilities, potential and potency.
Negative freedom, on the other hand, could be interpreted as being reductionist. It really comprises a double negative: not being prohibited from certain courses of action (for example, women not being forbidden to join a hitherto all-male club or society). But a non-prohibition is quite different from a positive opportunity. The women in question may be free to join the club, in the sense that the rules no longer bar them from membership, but not free in the sense that they do not have the ability to pay the exorbitantly high entrance fee.
Positive freedom can be understood as ‘the power of acting. . . according to the determination of the will’. (9) In this sense, part of actual freedom is the creation of conditions that make a choice a real, open possibility. For this to happen, sometimes negative freedoms may have to be curtailed so that freedoms overall may be increased. The classic example of multiplying the positive aspects of freedom in a social setting is the income tax system. Negatively, a citizen might argue that nobody has the right to interfere in the use of his or her accumulated wealth legitimately acquired. Nevertheless, positively, the redistribution of wealth through tax is intended to allow otherwise disadvantaged people an opportunity to develop skills and knowledge that give them access to more possibilities for their lives. Other examples of the same principle working might be a ban on smoking in public places, to guarantee the positive freedom of breathing unpolluted air, and land reform, to enable more people to earn a livelihood in agriculture. In both cases people’s right to be free of sanctions against smoking wherever they please or holding huge tracts of uncultivated land are overturned.
So, positive freedom is about widening access to resources, such as education, healthcare, sanitation, job opportunities and minimum financial support when work is not available, to enable wider choices to be made. If freedom is closely related to power, increasing freedoms means equalising power. This, in turn, implies the redistribution of the means of power, i.e. wealth, privilege, patronage, knowledge, status in the community and decision-making mechanisms. It is recognised that redistribution is coercive and inevitably restrictive of some individual freedoms. (lO) In political philosophy, it is justified on the utilitarian grounds that it is aimed at the expansion of the sum total of freedoms. One of the main debates between advocates of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ in politics concerns the balance between negative and positive freedoms.
Existential freedom
Alongside the long and intense discussion of the meaning and scope of civil liberties and rights a major question exists about the existence of an inner freedom to choose, and choose meaningfully, without which external freedoms would be merely formal and conventional. From time to time the human spirit revolts against the constraints seemingly imposed by an enclosed materialist and rationalist account of reality. Human self-awareness strives to reach beyond the notion that an empirical reading of the natural world is the measure of our ability to know and comprehend the meaning of life. The experience of being human appears to transcend an explanation of the human condition that sees it entirely as the sum of its biological parts in nature. Important though a reasoned interpretation of human history and social development may be, human beings struggle to encounter a world that is not wholly encompassed by the powers of the mind.
The experience of living in a culture that has been dominated by a particular kind of rationalist view of reality is that modern human beings encounter the world as a series of unrelated experiences of the material that fail to explain the deep and permanent sense of personhood. If, in the philosopher Heidegger’s famous phrase, human beings are simply ‘thrown into being’, as if by chance, and have to learn to live with the irresolvable predicament of a life without any predetermined meaning, (11) they are of all creatures the most miserable and unfulfilled. They alone, apparently, live daily with the massive contradiction between what modern thought allows them to believe and an intense yearning for something much more significant. This is unquestionably a fundamental aspect of the longing to be free: free from the poverty of a diminished view of life.(12)
Secular accounts of freedom do not seem to offer any escape from the ceaseless flux of existence in which meaning, purpose, moral values and human relations are constantly, and arbitrarily, changing on a daily basis. Such a life is actually experienced as loss of freedom. Freedom, to be genuine, has to be related to what is worth choosing and, without an end in view that will eventually be vindicated as true meaning, we cannot know what is of value. Otherwise, every choice and every action is equally meaningful and equally absurd.
There have been a number of attempts to come to terms with what appears, without a constant, external point of reference, to be a vacuous life in an absurd universe. Albert Camus, in his celebrated book The Myth of Sisyphus, (13) proclaims the message that the true revolt against the futility of existence is not consummated in suicide, but in continuing to live. So, the recommendation is that human beings attempt to regain the freedom threatened by absurdity through their own voluntary, unforced, fully conscious decision to create their own meaning and values and to shoulder the consequences of their own actions.
Only the ‘lucid’ recognition of the absurdity of existence liberates us from belief in another life and permits us to live for the instant, for beauty, pleasure and the ‘implacable grandeur’ of existence. Lucidity. . . is the counterpart of the notion. . . of anguish as the self-conscious and unflinching apprehension of freedom. (14)
The only freedom that is open to us is that of personal integrity and authenticity: to be free from the hypocrisy of submitting to imposed meanings and values, of being the willing slave of a culture that decides on our behalf what is the good-life, what is (‘politically’) correct, what is normal.
The mechanics of freedom
One powerful image of contemporary perceptions of freedom is the solitary individual sitting in front of the TV screen with remote control in hand, able to switch at will from channel to channel. (15) By pressing a button he or she has instant access to an amazing kaleidoscope of programmes. However, there is a problem with this view of freedom as extended choice. Supposing that freedom is interpreted as the unrestricted decision to sit down one evening to watch whatever programme captures the imagination, yet on that particular evening nothing seems worthwhile viewing. Has not that particular freedom been thwarted? Then there is the dilemma that the impossibility of watching properly more than one programme at a time actually leads to the loss of freedom implicit in being unable to view all the most desirable channels simultaneously. Here we encounter the common experience of the paradox of freedom: extended choice results in extended limitations on freedom.
A yet more powerful image might be that of the same person, sitting in front of the same TV set, devouring a carefully chosen pre-prepared meal cooked in two minutes in the microwave or brought to one’s front door by the local take-away! Perhaps these images are partly the result of mass-advertising, which projects the (well-camouflaged) illusion that affluent members of advanced industrial societies have a freedom of choice that is only limited by the disposable wealth available to them to consume their preferred goods and services.
In terms of political theory, notions of freedom in a liberal democratic society are based on the idea of social contract (16) Members of society implicitly contract with one another, through due legal process, to respect one another’s rights to control personal decision-making processes, in ways compatible with everyone else’s rights to do the same. According to the reigning philosophy of political liberalism, the S(s)tate should have a minimal function: basically safeguarding the ‘sacred’ space of the individual by ensuring that the public does not encroach too far onto the territory of life-style choices taken in private. This is a major argument for the legalising of abortion and euthanasia and the decriminalisation of certain, self-styled, recreational drugs.
However, such a view of the state’s role is superficial. The reality of social life throws up numerous instances where the state is called upon to arbitrate between conflicting claims to freedom or rights (for example, the use of Sundays to shop or as a day of rest for shop-workers, or the use of vehicles against the right to breath clean air). One person’s right freely to enjoy a certain activity may well infringe another person’s right not to be molested by that activity. The conflict of interests, in such matters as noise pollution, the interpretation of good-neighbourliness and what constitutes cruel sports, is widely acknowledged and legislated for. Naturally, the state also has a responsibility to protect citizens against the abuse of the unscrupulous, in areas such as financial fraud and unsolicited material on the internet. In other words, one of the state’s main roles is to make and enforce laws that protect (generally accepted) superior rights against (equally recognised) inferior ones. This has led Ralf Oahrerrlorf to stipulate that ‘the new liberty. . . is the politics of regulated conflict.’ (17)
A minimalist view of the state, which in practice becomes untenable, because of the presence of too large a number of people willing to exploit the system at whatever cost to others, is based largely on a negative view of freedom. This view also underlies the vigorous free-market interpretation of capitalist economic theory associated in recent times with the theories of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Here the contract theory is said to work to perfection. Each individual agrees (implicitly) to trade goods and services in an open market, selling what they have and buying what they need. Hayek argues strenuously that, because a true market economy is spontaneous (i.e. it is not fettered by arbitrary political intervention), it cannot be coercive. Thus, to be disadvantaged in a market society is not a genuine constraint on freedom. (18) Belief in the possibility of free exchange as a natural human process has led extreme liberals to deny that the mechanisms of the market have anything to do with the morality of justice. Thus, Milton Friedman argues that ‘most differences of status or position or wealth can be regarded as a product of chance at a far enough remove’. (19)
This kind of argument is based on an interpretation of intention. As limitations on freedom brought about by an unequal distribution of economic power are not intended by the system, there is no question of the economic order as such being held accountable. Accountability only makes sense in the context of individual humans possessing full responsibility for their respective actions. On the other hand, the redistribution of wealth, through the collective power of the state, is coercive. It is the deliberately intended, forced appropriation of what belongs to one person given to another. Arguments put forward for the inviolable rights of private property and the neutrality of a market economy are highly significant in that it is often assumed, in the Western tradition of political discourse, that political freedoms are dependent upon laissez-faire economic policies.
The ambiguities of freedom
So far, we have dwelt mostly on the classical Western liberal understanding of the meaning of freedom. This view appears to be still in the ascendancy,z° particularly so in the aftermath of the crumbling of successive communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. It is said that these governments collapsed, when they could no longer contain the increasing pressure of the people, attracted by the freedoms and affluence of Western Europe. A joke used to be told in the Czech Republic. ‘Why is the sun so happy today? Because it knows that by this evening it will be in the West!’ The people spontaneously rose against the oppression of a government (under the auspices of a one party state) that curtailed individual freedoms, administered a stagnant economy and claimed a monopolistic right to rule. The long struggle for genuine self-determination, which had been postponed from 1956 (Hungary) and 1968 (the Czech Republic), was finally won.
Nevertheless, in spite of the near cultic status given to the idea of secular freedom, perhaps the highest position in the sacred pantheon of values, stark. realities are largely ignored. Commitment to an ideal with almost religious fervour blinds people, as is often the case with religions, to the adverse consequences of the faith, some of which undermine the very notion of the freedom being served.
There are three main areas, where, I believe, a deeper analysis will show that Western culture is in the midst of a severe crisis, engendered by a virtually unbridgeable gap between expectations of freedom (themselves the product of culture) and the possibility of their realisation. (21)
The question of ends
In one sense the contemporary Western individual is an existentialist at heart. Freedom to choose what one wants to be in the face of the gut feeling that life is meaningless is itself the only valid end for humanity. What we are, or will be, is not in any sense circumscribed by the supposed given nature of life (preordained by divine will, evolutionary chance, biological fate or accidental circumstances). Rather, we construct, fashion and refashion our own image of ourselves by deciding to live in particular ways (life-style choices).
In post-modern thought, the revolt against religion (an institutional interpretation of the allotted order of things) has become a revolt against all ontologies that claim absolute validity through time. The result is the refusal of any self-evident truths, which lay claim upon the thinking and lives of all reasonable people. Post-modern consciousness thinks in terms of fluctuating images and (fictional) stories that help us to cope better with the circumstances in which we find ourselves. ‘Truth’, therefore is socially produced, historically developed, contingent, plural and changing. We no longer make choices within a reality already marked out for us, we choose to create our own reality. Thus, I may call truth whatever, at any point in time, conveys meaning on my life.
Two consequences flow from this recently articulated view of freedom and reality. First, human community and society dissolve into fragmented bits and pieces. An abandonment of common beliefs, and the creation of personal values, leads to a breakdown of communication. We do not share sufficient common understandings of the world to be able to enter into other people’s experiences. (22) Secondly, it cannot much matter what we choose to believe and to do, as long as our choice is serious and is pursued with full conviction and commitment. (23) We do not choose any particular course of action because it is intrinsically good or right, or because it is part of a settled over-arching purpose for existence. We choose it because it feels good to us now, and does not appear to produce harmful consequences for others.
The question of means
It is surely a curious paradox, perhaps explained by the severe contradictions induced in the human psyche by the existentialist, post-modern consciousness, that, far from creating a sense of exhilaration, freedom often produces a sense of dread. Erich Fromm explored this conflict many years ago in his celebrated book The Fear of Freedom. (24) Thus, for example, a certain obsession with the issue of law and order, which appears largely to treat the symptoms and not the cause of crime, is a response to the fear of lawlessness. Crime springs from the very individual choice to pursue particular ends by violent means (forcibly depriving others of what belongs to them). It leads in society as a whole to the loss of such civil liberties as freedom of movement, information and privacy. It is linked to the insidious threat of intimidation against those who wish to collaborate with 1awenforcement agents. It undermines that rare and precious commodity, interpersonal trust, without which freedom is always compromised.
There is also, though perhaps less openly articulated, the fear of aloneness. Linked to the more general fear of criminal activities, this may take the specific form of a deep unease about a possible attack on personal possessions. The significance of this fear is an apprehension about losing what is deemed to give substance to life; it is experienced, therefore, as a loss of security. Freedom is forfeited in this case by having to build barriers to protect possessions. So, one fortifies one’s house against the intrusion of others. Another kind of anxiety is that of having to take final responsibility for far-reaching decisions in one’s own life. Implied in the claim that, to be authentic, the inner self has to be free from unwanted external influences, accountable only to its own desires, is the reality that each person exists as an isolated individual. Freed from the pressure of submitting to the external authority of tradition, custom or convention, the subject is alone in choosing which, of a myriad of options, to follow.
Aloneness, however, is usually experienced as unendurable. Few, if any, people are able to stand as isolated individuals relying wholly on their own resources to cope with life. Thus, most are prepared to barter this idealistic notion of freedom for the reassurance given by submitting to some kind of collective, external ‘authority’. Sometimes this ‘authority’ amounts to a prevalent, fashionable set of assumptions about what is important in life. Beliefs and life-styles are set according to current trends. Anyone who does not share these beliefs is, by definition, old-fashioned. They are deemed to be out of touch, meaning they are dissenters as far as front line opinion is concerned. In this situation, freedom is experienced as a choice between either belonging to the past or being up to the minute. What is important, however, is not the rightness or wrongness of the creeds being espoused but the sense of not looking different from the group that is setting the trend.
Thus, real freedom, which in its secular manifestation rests, as we have seen, on the ability to resist external pressures to conform, may well be compromised for the sake of psychological tranquillity. It is a curious anomaly that those who most strongly demand the outward form of freedom (young people in their struggle to be free from parental directives) most easily succumb to the pressures (and, on reflection, even the tyranny) of fashion. Perhaps conformity to the collective opinion of their peers concerning clothes, music and experiences is a source of the courage needed to exert influence on their parents; ‘cool’ becomes a synonym for normal in their world! Whatever the causes and whatever the rhetoric, the reality of freedom demonstrates that genuine human choice is bound to purpose, community, tradition, responsibility, established identity and right and wrong. Without all these elements in place, language about human rights has no meaning and freedom is self-delusion.
The question of economics
The view that the ideals of capitalism as a system of economic exchange and growth represent the best of all possible, though not necessarily all imaginable, worlds is superficially attractive. Certainly the technological innovation and the selective accumulation of wealth engendered within the system have been phenomenal. However, such a view can only be held plausibly by selecting evidence, which favours the thesis, marginalizes that which does not and ignores or denies adverse consequences.
The ideal of an economic system unfettered by social and political constraints simply jettisons unpalatable realities. We mention and comment briefly on three of them. First, the distribution of resources is not due largely to the mechanisms of an impersonal set of economic laws, under which all individuals are potentially equal, but to a process of violence. The primitive accumulation of wealth is, more often than not, the result of those possessing social power exploiting the misfortunes of the socially weak by restricting their economic freedoms for personal gain. Thus, for example, the ancient prophets of Israel, with divine insight into the social conditions of their times, saw clearly how those who held political power exploited the tax system to raise money for capital building projects. By extending their assets, they increased their power yet further. This process, along with the burden of taxation on the most disadvantaged to finance war, can be observed with ruthless clarity in the reign of king Solomon. (25) Markets do not operate in some kind of sanitised social vacuum. They work according to the manoeuvrings of those with most ability to influence outcomes. Where vested interests clash, those able to manipulate market conditions will almost always succeed. It is for these reasons that the notion of economic justice and economic inequity are not meaningless terms. It would indeed be surprising that economic life alone was unaffected by the old adage that power tends to corrupt.
Secondly, it is a myth to pretend that capital and labour are equivalent factors in the productive process. Capitalism as an economic way of life presupposes that both capital and labour demand a price in the market (either the payment of interest on loans and investment or the payment of wages), as if they were: separate and equal entities that somehow come together to increase wealth for everyone’s benefit. Capital, however, is another name for surplus-value, which is produced in a manufacturing process by labour (i.e. human time, power and abilities). One is the product of the other. However, in present circumstances and increasingly on a global scale what is created controls those who create it. Thus, freedom to share in the fruits of labour is exchanged for the relatively restricted freedom to sell one’s labour for whatever price capital ultimately allows the market to offer.
Thirdly, the freedom of the market is not exercised through the harmonious reconciliation of mutual interests. Rather it operates as a system in which power conflicts with power and is temporally resolved. It has been described as an arrangement in whicih general ‘warfare’ at the centre is suspended, but without eliminating frequent skirmishes on the periphery. Economic libertarians are ingenuous if they pretend that firms and corporations are a part of a neutral, spontaneous system, which upholds basic freedoms and rights. To survive they have to act forcefully, often pushing expediency to limits only curbed by the countervailing of force of popular morality in cases such as the degradation of the environment, low wages, sub-human working conditions, ethical investment and industrial espionage.
Notes
1 Secular is used to describe a society in which the following conditions prevail: (i) there is an effective separation of the state and public life from the domination of religious belief; (ii) human life is interpreted and conducted normally without reference to any supernatural agency; (iii) the majority of the population do not even exercise a minimal attachment to formal religious institutions and symbols. I explore further the nature and scope of secular belief in chapter 2.
2 A much fuller account of modern concepts of freedom is given in J. Andrew Kirk, The Meaning of Freedom: A Study of Secular, Muslim and Christian Views (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998); see also, A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 1979); J. Gray, Liberalism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). Restricting the discussion to concepts that have arisen in the West may appear to assume that European civilisation is the reference-point for change throughout the world. However, although aspects of the liberal tradition are highly attractive to people in many other cultures, especially the young, I am careful to show that the presumed gains are often ambiguous and even harmful, and that there are other credible interpretations.
3 For a useful discussion of some of the main issues, see Roger Trigg, Reality at Risk: A defence of realism in philosophy and the sciences (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 142-152.
4 Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: our, 1969), p. 122.
5. Ibid. p. 122.
6 Ibid. p. 127.
7 ‘Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end’ (Immanuel Kant), see Garrett Thomson, On Kant (London: Wadsworth, 2003), pp. 66-67.
8 The move to political emancipation for all peoples became irresistible once the Atlantic Charter of 1941 accorded to people subjugated by the Nazi regime the right to be free from foreign domination.
9 International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences: Vol.5 (London: Macmillan, 1972)
10 This argument does not mean that individual freedom is a zero-sum game, in which there will always be some losers. An increase of positive freedoms can be of benefit to all.
11 Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 174; also, Peter Sedgwick, Descartes to Derrida: An Introduction to European Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 113-115.
12 There can be no escape from the poverty of a secular view of reality, until science is accorded a proper place in culture. As long as it is given the task of explaining the whole breadth of human reality in the universe, it will fail. It does not possess the tools for such an undertaking. Better that it be allowed to fulfil a more limited mission, otherwise people will become disillusioned with an enterprise, in which too much has been invested, see, J. C. Somerville, ‘Post-Secularism marginalizes the University’ in Church History, 71:4 (December 2002), p. 848.
13 A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975).
14 David West, An Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p.152.
15 Or, increasingly, moving from one web page or one computer game to another, at the click of the mouse.
16 See Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction (Basinglloke:Macmillan, 1992), pp. 26-28.
17 The New Liberty: Survival and Justice in a changing world (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 6.
18 Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. II (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 31-32.
19 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 165-166.
(20) The justification for regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq was based on the Anglo-American belief that the implantation of the supremely good ends of Western-style elective democracy outweighs the tragically necessary ambiguous means needed to achieve it. (The supposed threat of these regimes to the world community was a political manoeuvre and entirely fictional).
21 Many of the younger generation in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe are already discovering that the pre-Berlin-wall dream of liberty and prosperity has faded. Sucked inexorably into the processes of the global market, they are encountering the severe human disadvantages of current business practices: neglect of family; personal stress and the lack of time for aesthetic and leisure activities and for exploring spiritual reality.
22 Contemporary secular societies are characterised above all by allowing the equal validity of a motley collection of different beliefs and opinions. The inevitable consequence of such a situation is that there is no longer anyone collective tradition that binds society together. In the view of many commentators, this is one of the chief reasons for the loss of religious adherence: creedal tolerance leads inescapably to religious indifference and a consequent undiscriminating spiritual pot-pourri.
23 As in committed co-habiting relationships, whether hetero- or homo-sexual. Freedom is also evident in the loose way in which language is used: commitment can be self-defined to fit individual needs.
24. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
25 See Helen R. Graham, ‘Solomonic Models of Peace’ in R. S. Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991), pp. 214-226.
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