Friday Book: God, the pianist at a silent movie

GODLESS MORALITY:

KEEPING RELIGION OUT OF ETHICS

BY RICHARD HOLLOWAY, CANONGATE, pounds 9.99

A DRUNKEN bishop called me over at a party. "Here's a poem for you, Andrew", he said: "I thank you, Lord, that I am not a fairy. My willy is not brown. My arsehole is still hairy." That was at the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops last summer, which Richard Holloway, Bishop of Edinburgh, also attended. It was a triumph for traditionalist bishops, like my versifying friend.

Holloway and his side were stomped flat by people who argued with all seriousness as if the Bible were dictated by God and an entirely reliable guide to the intentions of the Maker of the Universe, except when these did clearly ridiculous things like banning usury (for money lent at interest is what pays the clergy pensions). He was one of the two or three liberals at that conference with any balls and his generous Scottish rage on behalf of the underdog remains quite admirable.

Which makes this book still more of a pity. It's not that I disagree with either the premise or the conclusion of his moral reasoning, since both are commonplaces of educated discourse. We must check the commandments of revealed religion against our own moral sense; moral codes shift over the years to accommodate human interests; the Bible is a difficult book from which to derive coherent instructions; feminism has revealed to us new truths; moral goods conflict with each other; it's all very difficult. And so on. These are the foundations of the prejudices of our tribe. You would find them in any number of Independent leaders, some of which I probably wrote. But if we're going to have a humanist morality, it would be nice to have deeper foundations than that.

Holloway is trying to produce an atheistic, democratic, and realistic morality. There is nothing particularly shocking in a bishop doing that; any more than in an atheist asking what Christian morality might entail. Other bishops might come back and say "But a Christian would think differently, and here's why". They might even give Christian reasons for reaching atheistic conclusions.

I suppose Holloway feels, as any honest Anglican must, that since morality is about the ordering of society, and Christian views no longer matter in ordering our society, there's not much point. It's no wonder that a church that has lost its political relevance believes in a God who plays, in Holloway's analogy, the role of a pianist at a silent movie screening, accompanying the action and interpreting it, but changing nothing of the story.

But if morality arises from human nature and circumstances, rather than being handed down by God, moral theories do not stand alone. They will be inextricably tangled with political arrangements, so that the morality of any society by and large protects the powerful. This Holloway sees clearly. They will also entail an anthropology. Man is a political animal, and so different moralities presuppose different animal natures as well as different politics.

There are times when the bishop does sound like an anthropologist, but one freshly arrived from Mars, or Morningside: "In one significant section of youth culture, many young people shag or have sexual intercourse with each other whenever they feel like it, the way they have a cup of coffee or a hamburger. It is part of a good night out, like drugs and drink. Shagging is about sexual sensation, and women go for it with the same determination as men."

There is as little realism in his account of moral sentiment as in his account of sex. True moral choice, in Holloway's world, seems to be the preserve of creatures with interesting inner lives, like the characters in novels. Jesus appears as the precursor of such beings, because he first replaced an appeal to law with appeal to conscience, thus inventing personal morality and so the modern personality and, ultimately, the modern novel. Such characters are able to weigh up the consequences of their actions, floating weightless and rational, like the Mekon, above the passions of the fundamentalists.

"Morality", he says, "tries to base itself on observed consequences, not on beliefs, superstitions, or preferences". This is utter nonsense. Morality is based on passion. We work out what is right only if we care desperately about acting well. Often the root of moral action is not even a passion for justice but, as with Holloway himself at the Lambeth conference, a hatred of injustice and bullying. The arguments come later, and without the passion they would matter no more than theology.

A Christian could argue that this is because God created us with a conscience. But if the bishop wishes to eschew such special pleading, and rely on our animal nature, he should realise that an evolved moral sense cannot be consequential. For if we were capable of accurate utilitarian calculations of our own and others' interests there would have been no need to evolve the short-cut rules of thumb which our moral sentiments encode.