How Culture Wars Threaten Ethics and Religion

Shimon Cowen, Politics and Universal Ethics (Connor Court, 2011), 120 pages, $22.95

Reading this set of essays readily brings to mind two great and true adages. First, Tacitus’s “When the State is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied”; and second, Edmund Burke’s statement: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle” (Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770). Neither of those sentiments has lost any of its melancholy force; and they are very much applicable at the present day, in a world which now “advances progressively backwards”.

The five chapters in Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen’s new book, launched at Parliament House in Canberra and the Victorian State Parliament recently, are, as its author points out, essentially a collection, reworked and edited, of several papers which were published in various journals between 1998 and 2011. Chapter 1, “The Adversary Culture”, appeared in Quadrant in October 2009, as “‘Rights’ as a Weapon in Culture War”. They have been felicitously brought out together at a time when their topicality is high, given the push for various legislative changes fuelled by certain trends in public perceptions and in political debate, that are in turn given impetus by identifiable “intellectual” groupings.

We should not forget that although we now say we face “culture wars”; that phrase is very much derived from the Kulturkampf policy pursued by Bismarck in Germany from 1871 to 1878. Even though ultimately a failure, it presaged the later political obsession of the National Socialists to expunge from national life and from the public square all broader and universalist influences, especially certain religions.

Politics and Universal Ethics offers us a telling sketch of the state of play, as it were, in the modern Kulturkampf, as it has re-emerged in contemporary Australia. Other commentators (including some of this parish) have noted the method of dismissal by silence practised upon any public intellectuals who seek seriously to challenge the canards, cant and claques of the current “politically correct” mindset which so dominates key institutions such as most universities and federal and state bureaucracies. Cowen’s first and second chapters go straight to the problem, as exemplified in the events surrounding legislation in Victoria in 2008 to effect “profound changes to basic social institutions and norms, and [open] up a fundamental conflict of values in our society—and in Parliament itself”. These changes related to the laws on abortion and “re-engineering of the laws of de facto unions”. The changes to the abortion laws meant that in certain situations, the law required that “the doctor must act against conscience”.

Some of these changes led to vigorous protests on behalf of conscience, and especially of religious freedom, by various people, including not only Rabbi Cowen in his Quadrant article, but also Rev. Fr Frank Brennan, whose critique of elements of the Victorian laws, “Religion, Conscience and the Law”, appeared in Quadrant in May 2009. It is passing strange that such changes in the law can be contemplated by those who say they are upholders of human rights and of the rights of “the vulnerable”. For example, the ACT Human Rights Act 2004 contains express provisions which have the effect that indeed the most vulnerable of all are denied human rights; and denied them by the statute! Cowen dissects like elements of the Victorian laws, touching upon such fundamental issues. 

Cowen analyses the forces which have coalesced to bring about such changes in the public mind and which are rapidly having their effects upon the body politic and the legal regimes in all Australian jurisdictions. In particular, he adopts the term “Hedonomat” for the “philosophy” or the “teaching of the dominant school of contemporary materialistic secularism”—that is to say, Hedonistic Materialism, as the contemporary counterpoint to the “Diamat” (Dialectical Materialism) of communism. He argues that the doctrine and influence of “Hedonomat” is enunciated, maintained and extended, in the contemporary academic and professional sectors, by 

a vast voluntary self-censorship or collective repression of the “personal experience of religious faith”, described by the outgoing President of the British Royal Society of Psychiatrists, as the “unspeakable” taboo at the end of the twentieth century.  

Cowen notes that Hedonomat’s adherents “substantially staff academia, major sections of the non-tabloid media, state television and radio and bureaucratic elites”; and that one primary trope, mode or tactic adopted by its operatives is an overblown and extended conception of the meaning of the separation of church and state, which goes far beyond the doctrine, enshrined (in slightly different ways) in section 116 of the Australian Constitution and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. He observes that neither constitutional provision requires “that religion be purged from the public square”, as the “Hedonomatists” would have it. He identifies that 

a second measure of Hedonomat is to foreclose discourse by linguistic (and possibly also legal) means. There is a danger that speech will move from an etiquette of political correctness and silencing to political repression and punishment. The suffix “phobic” already demonises and pathologises attitudes [and, one should add, conscientious and religious beliefs] not held to be politically correct.  

In his Chapters 3 and 4, Cowen develops his notions of the most important “Questions for a Universal Ethics”. He builds upon the “unity and diversity in the tradition of universal ethics” and in particular, “the body of seven broad, universal precepts with many details” which are known as the “Noahide Laws”. Cowen says that “As divine revelation, these laws are eternal and immutable”. He refers to the “conflicting paradigms of universal and human law” and in particular the tension between the Natural Law tradition and modern Positivism in Law. Perhaps, he might have also referred to the notion of Natural Right and the influence of Historicism in modern thought, as discussed by Leo Strauss, but that is a little beyond the scope of the present book, although very germane to Cowen’s argument, which touches on Augustine, Aquinas and Maimonides, as well as the effects of the move “from status to contract” observed by Sir Henry Maine in his influential work Ancient Law. Cowen also cites some important comments by the former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Murray Gleeson, who in an address in 2004 cautioned that purported rights are anchored in values. Not surprisingly for a rabbi, Cowen notices with care the importance of “tradition and temperament” in the proper articulation of universal ethics. 

In his final chapter, “Entry Points to a Politics of Universal Ethics”, Cowen provides a forward-thinking meditation upon what he identifies as the key elements of a workable “political culture of universal ethics”. These include a concept of how the “spiritual health of a society” involves the “spiritual consciousness of human beings” that has “found resonance there and fashioned core beliefs which in turn motivate ethical conduct”. Cowen argues strongly that the maintenance of these things depends radically upon “spiritual literacy” and the importance of arresting its obvious decline in regard to the whole field of education. He then raises the possibilities for a “potential culture of universal ethics”, noting some elements of “common ground” he sees in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He notes the reaffirmation of the seven Noahide Laws by the US Congress in 1991 and by the then Governor-General of Australia, Major-General Michael Jeffery, in 2004. He also cites the important text, Dialectics of Secularization (2005) a discussion by Jurgen Habermas (who was one of Rabbi Cowen’s teachers) and (the then) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict.

Cowen closes with some reflections on the “informing of individual politicians” and “political courage”—concepts which Sir Thomas More, Chancellor and martyr, and the patron saint of lawyers and legislators, would easily recognise. More lived and died in a context where particularist legislation was used to trump traditional, important, and general or universal, values.

This book is a compendious little volume that should find a place in the reading of any conscientious parliamentarian in Australia. It will be of interest to anyone who seeks to scrutinise the strange (and often bizarre) things that are being urged upon the public for legislation. Cowen’s book has a green cover, but the cultivated farmlands depicted on it, themselves created out of a desert land, have patches of blue, which may remind us of W.H. Auden’s line: “here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck”. Overall, as was said at its Parliament House launch in Canberra, the gist and argument of Cowen’s book is summed up by Robert Frost’s quip: “Change—you hear about it all the time—well, some things just don’t change—for instance, have you ever seen a stick with only one end?” It is time we all reflected more upon that kind of simple and homely truth.

One detects in Cowen’s argument a deep suspicion of Bills of Rights, in so far as they are often used as Trojan horses for “social engineering”. Yet, as great jurists such as Dr Heinrich Rommen (persecuted by the Nazis) have demonstrated, the Natural Law principles are important for the maintenance of the tradition of individual and civil rights and freedoms. The securing of authentic human rights is not achieved by freewheeling, nor by nihilism. 

Dr Douglas Hassall is a frequent contributor to Quadrant on the visual arts and other subjects.