Having looked through the five contenders for the Conservative Party leadership, I could not help but yawn. Come on boys, the only charisma was shown by David Cameron, and even then it was more appropriate for the ladies than the party membership. Not to tread on Tory toes (bring back Boris, our national treasure!), but I have to wonder what the difference is between the candidates. All were deliberately vague in their speeches, except Liam Fox who said, quite frankly, that the Union Jack was good. Wooppee. I must ask if my concern is simply part of the political apathy of today's youth? When I ask myself what the difference is between Labour and the Conservatives, all I can think of is that the Tories will charge higher taxes but both would have gone into an illegal war, except one would have been more honest about it. I'll leave you guessing who that might be...
Enough politician bashing! This rather ambiguous strain of thought led me to think that the politicians all stand for the same thing. However, if I knew exactly what this was then there would be no problem.
Let's take the debate on Britishness as an example. What exactly is the British way of life? It has been discussed ad nauseum but never fully defined. However what has been identified is what we must leave behind i.e. religion.
Since 9/11 there are certain beliefs and values that (astonishingly) are to be held by all without question. In our arrogance and pride many have come to see Secularism, Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights as indispensable, with the likes of President Bush happily shoving these beliefs and systems down the throats of foreign countries that may insolently wish to partake in their own beliefs and systems.
In short, this premise for the superiority of secular values devalues religion and those communities that would seek to have some element of their faith informing their value-system, arrangement of society and way of life.
"Freedom under the rule of law"; a simple premise, yet the cornerstone of all secular society. All Western laws and doctrines are derived from this premise, be it in the Bank of England or when Freshers trash the Reynolds (freedoms of intoxication?). The greatest ramification of the European Enlightenment is the belief above all else that man has the capacity from within himself to decide right and wrong without reference to a Divine Being. So today after that long, drawn out, process of 317 years, we end up with rationalism, secularism, nationalism, democracy and human rights and the marginalisation of the faithful. This is true across the board from Europe to Africa to America and so on. Any nation that has secular ideals at heart is of the same progeny, is a progressive state in the eyes of the secular West. The religious are simply naïve.
Yet there are problems with the freedoms of man when they go unchecked particularly by the accountability of religion, from the criminal who preys on fellow citizens to the warring state that preys on fellow nations. Churchill once said that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried", aptly showing his lack of faith for humans to adequately decide their own fate and their own conceptions of good and bad. Western-backed financial oppression of the third world is my favourite example of how the secular nation state model has failed to address global poverty due to setting its own priorities, and we all know how arbitrary the Geneva Convention is when a country that wishes to ignore it can do so as it pleases. As for national pride, it is unfortunately hard to remember the 'Dunkirk spirit', Trafalgar and the defeat of the Armada, but omit the history of the Raj, Africa and slavery.
So secular values are not perfect, no one said that they ever were. But are they negotiable? After all, they are the criteria by which we judge modern societies. Yet if we have a sense of moral superiority about secular values from the outset then perhaps we lose some of these values. If religion must be marginalised and public society secularised throughout, then are we not unilaterally forming our own dominant world view rather than accepting others and attempting to absorb rich cultures? After all, isn't how one looks or dresses irrelevant when our values are already predefined. Sound Medieval? You bet it does. I only hope that we will not end up justifying all manner of catastrophes, witch-hunts and wars with the lame excuse of protecting or enforcing values which may themselves not quite be perfect.
