It’s perhaps a sign of the times that to be heard in the public arena, you have to yell with a militant shrill. It’s tempting to blame it all on public culture being increasingly beholden to tabloid standards. With headlines and sound bites now the currency of debate, one needs to get the ‘message’ or ‘spin’ right, and reduce things to the lowest common denominator. To be sure, we can rely on the custodians of the Daily Mail and the Sun to deliver on such doses—which is to say nothing of politicians—but not usually from our Oxford dons. However, there are exceptions.

As Britain’s atheist-in-chief, Richard Dawkins (Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science) has been a strident, if not abrasive, voice of secularism. His most recent book, The God Delusion, which quickly reached the bestsellers’ shelves and won him a British Book Award for Author of the Year, is representative. In it he speaks of ‘a mind hijacked by religion,’ of a belief in God as ‘pernicious.’ For Professor Dawkins, whose work is no doubt familiar to readers of the Oxonian Review, it’s secular reason or bust.

Professor Dawkins isn’t alone in his refusal to countenance religion. In God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (released last month), Christopher Hitchens puts forward the secularist case with typically trenchant fashion: ‘As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.’ For atheists like Professor Dawkins and Mr Hitchens, morality needn’t be grounded in religious belief. A different faith will suffice—a faith, that is, in the Enlightenment ideal of reason and secular politics.

Yet it’s clear secular humanists of a militant stripe are themselves guilty of the kind of blind dogma they’re so happy to denounce. Liberals may be inclined to give contemporary secular humanism the benefit of the doubt. In a pluralistic society, insisting on religious truth or divine revelation as the standards guiding our public life is a recipe for social disharmony. Whose religion are we to endorse? Whose truths are we to obey? If there is a modern liberal achievement, surely it is the toleration of different values and different ways of life. But it doesn’t stand to reason that liberals should fight intolerance with another form of intolerance—namely, an intolerance of any worldview that doesn’t accord science and logic with supreme value. Civilisation would be much impoverished, and would lose authenticity, were we to subject everything in our realm to the strictures of reason understood as absolute truth.

All of which is to say that British political culture is showing some fault-lines that should be cause for concern. Granted, controversy is the battery for any dynamic liberal democracy: it revitalises our debates and, as much as it reveals differences, refocuses our attention on the values we share. But while polemics have their place, they shouldn’t drown out everything else in the public sphere. The right kind of public debate is guided by an ethos of civility and mutual respect. It shouldn’t be about shouting down at others, or taking gratuitous pleasure in painting one’s opponents as deluded. If the polarisation between secular humanists and their opponents is any indication, this is unfortunately the situation that prevails. Much like the schism between ‘blue’ and ‘red’ states in the United States, Britain has become a divided country, of believers and non-believers.

It is timely, then, that last month the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (a former Chichele Professor in Social and Political Theory at All Souls College) was presented with the 2007 Templeton Prize. The world’s largest annual monetary award given to an individual for intellectual merit, the Templeton Prize recognises ‘progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.’ Professor Taylor is an inspired choice. A scholar renowned for his work on modernity, identity and culture, he is not one to side with fundamentalisms—of either the secular or religious kind. As he explains in his best-known work, Sources of the Self (1989), we acquire our moral languages through dialogue. We become full human agents not in isolation but by engaging in conversation with those around us. Sometimes our moral selves will be defined in opposition to others. But a dialogue also leaves itself open to a ‘fusion of horizons,’ an expansion of our ethical world through an appreciation of others’ perspectives. As Taylor argues, this requires us to admit, in all our humility, that we will always be some distance away from reaching that ultimate horizon for understanding the nature of the world and from which we go about securing the good life.

A value of dialogue stands in need of affirmation at a time when public debate is characterised by indiscriminate abuse and crass conflict. However, before any dialogue can begin, there must be a willingness to listen. The task for those like Professor Taylor who value a public conversation—as opposed to a public brawl—is a difficult one, for it remains unclear whether enough people—both secular liberals and religious believers—are ready even to recognise that their opponents might have a legitimate voice to be heard. This is the price we risk paying for speaking in the language of fundamentalisms.

Tim Soutphommasane
Editor-in-Chief
Balliol College, Oxford
June 2007