Category — Ethics

British young people seem intent on drinking themselves and British society in a complete stupor. Our government believed that it could change the traditional British drinking culture of knocking back the booze until you fall over into a continental-style café culture of allegedly civilized drinking by allowing pubs and clubs to obtain licences to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.

This would, the story went, help regenerate run-down city centres into civilized piazzas with restaurants and bars and cafes frequented by well-heeled patrons eating and drinking moderately and enjoying their evenings out.

But the drinks industry, a monstrous beast whose main aim is to sky-rocket its profits, which it can do by selling vast quantities of cheap beer, wine, alcopops and spirits to 18-24 year olds, helped subvert the government’s café-culture dream world and turned it into a booze-filled nightmare of over-consumption and violence.

Of course, the drinks industry was swimming with a fast-flowing tide. A generation which was raised with a belief in its unlimited entitlement to whatever it wanted whenever it wanted it and which is the inheritor of a very long British history of binge-drinking (stand up and pour it down your neck until you fall over) was unlikely to resist the blandishments of the “happy hour” and cheap hooch. It was definitely not going to learn to sit for hours with its little finger crooked over a small white wine when it could blast its brains out 24-hours a day with high-alcohol-content drinks that tasted like lemonade.

in denial

Whose fault is this? The government’s? Well, I am sure that anyone with any brains left over after a stimulating night out could have told them the likely outcome of their strange fantasy about Britain becoming like an ad man’s version of France. According to Reuters, the government is in denial:

Despite violent crime between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. rising by more than a quarter, the government will say the total amount of alcohol-related offences has fallen by three percent, the Daily Mail reported.

But Sir Simon Milton, the chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA) and leader of Westminster council, has labelled the new laws a “mistake”.

Is the fault of the drinks industry - manufacturers, pubs, clubs and retailers? Who’s going to turn down the opportunity of lots of lovely moolah when the government gives you such a legislative present?

What about local authorities? Shouldn’t they have exerted more control? Or the drinkers? Shouldn’t they have exercised more self-discipline?

There are plenty of people to blame for turning our city centres into weekend battlegrounds. And, what do you know? Everyone is passing the blame onto everyone else.

Anyway, we can be happy in the knowledge that 24-hour drinking will continue. The government has no intention of changing those laws. Instead, it will punish retailers who sell to underage drinkers and put out adverts warning of the dangers of excessive drinking. So that’s all right then.

But a combination of a “two strikes and you’re out” policy for retailers and public health messages for the drinkers really seems to miss the hard core of the problem. Yes, retailers should make sure they keep within the law, and, yes, public health messages make us all feel better – even if they don’t change our behaviour. But the root of this particular complex of problems lies in a moral crisis and a cultural narrative that says that getting ratted = having fun.

a fundamental moral crisis

According to Udo Schaeffer (in Baha’i Ethics in Light of Scripture: An Introduction)

We are facing a fundamental crisis of morals with far-reaching impact on the stability of the body politic. (p. 101)

What is the cause of this process and where it is leading us? In my view, the crisis of morality is a consequence of the crisis of religion. (p. 103)

The crisis of the Christian faith is closely connected with the the crisis of morality. Norms and moral values are of an axiomatic nature and cannot be proved exclusively by reason. They are linked to convictions, to faith. One must believe in them. Religion has been able to create a system of transcendent values and ideals, to sustain a hierarchy of values, declaring some of them to be absolute and universal, others to be relative and particular. (p. 105)

In the absence of a strong religious foundation for ethics and people’s ethical commitment, we try to rely on reason to derive our ethical principles. But the rational justification of morals fails precisely because there is no guarantee that everyone will be convinced by any given reason for a particular norm, no matter how cogent; there is no longer any “public, shared rationale or justification” for morality, as Alistair MacIntyre states in After Virtue

This means that there are no unconditional duties and no universally binding norms. Each one of us becomes the judge of our own morality and the arbiter of social order.

When these notions are detached from human self-responsibility and from the commitment to the common weal, they become nothing more than expressions of egoism and selfishness. (Schaeffer, Baha’i Ethics, p. 107)

Zygmunt Bauman points up the conclusion of this relativisation of value:

In the plural and pluralistic world of post-modernity, every form of life is permitted in principle, or, rather, no agreed principles are evident which may render any form of life impermissible. (”Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos, no. 78, pp. 7-42.)

Says Schaeffer:

Society cannot survive once its members have lost the ability to share and sacrifice, once everyone emphasizes only his own rights and strives to serve only his own interests, once the highest aim in life is “fun”, once society is governed by hedonism and egoism…. The cultural crisis of the West … has developed into a global crisis of human civilization, one which gravely endangers the survival of mankind. (p. 108)

This is what Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha’i Faith wrote in in 1936 in one of his extraordinarily far-sighted World Order letters:

No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts, and the divinely appointed Robe, designed to adorn the human temple, is deliberately discarded, a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing. The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished. (Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u'llah, p .187)

Future perfecting

This would be a downbeat note on which to end this post. However, I believe that a new, religiously and spiritually founded morality is possible. Well, more than possible, it actually exists in the sacred Writings of Baha’u'llah, embodied (in embryonic form) in the life of the Baha’i community. As Baha’u'llah writes:

The purpose of the one true God in manifesting Himself is to summon all mankind to truthfulness and sincerity, to piety and trustworthiness, to resignation and submissiveness to the Will of God, to forbearance and kindliness, to uprightness and wisdom. His object is to array every man with the mantle of a saintly character, and to adorn him with the ornament of holy and goodly deeds. (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 299)

The alcoholic crisis of our city centres will never be solved by partial fixes to the licensing laws, nor, indeed, by a return to the status quo ante. No amount of policing is going to stop what is in fact a symptom of a deep spiritual and moral crisis. Nothing short of a renewal of a genuine and well-founded faith-based moral orientation is going to do the trick.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, alcohol, 24-hour drinking, licensing laws, morals, ethics, spirituality, Christianity

Tobbot (aka Tobstv) has posed a problem in the form of an intriguing parable.

It’s well worth reading, pondering and adding your comments. The parable has implications for all of us.

Technorati Tags: moral challenge, parable, neighbours

In my post about the meeting organized by the Maranatha Community in the House of Lords to discuss the diminution of genuine religious freedom resulting from the lack of reciprocity when a particular religion refuses to recognizes the right of people to leave their religion and choose another, I reported on a presentation in which Sam Solomon claimed that there was no equivalent of the Golden Rule in Islam and that this lack leads to deep rooted inequality in Muslim thinking between “believers” and “unbelievers”. Those who have been Muslims and convert to other religions are subject to particular obloquy as “apostates”.

Umm Yasmin (now a Muslim, formerly a Baha’i under the name of Rachel Woodlock) rightly says that I did not correct Sam Solomon’s claim. I should have done so. But before I do, I need to address the question of freedom to change one’s religion. If I seriously believe that my religion is truth given by God, then surely it is my duty to invite others to investigate this truth, since the seeker’s acceptance or otherwise of the truth will determine their fate through eternity. Baha’u'llah couches this as a statement of the Golden Rule:

The children of men are all brothers, and the prerequisites of brotherhood are manifold. Among them is that one should wish for one