A couple of days ago I wrote about the idolisation of the will, and how we have allowed personal desire, or “choice”, with no reference to what is good and true, to be the lodestar of morality. Lo and behold, here is someone who agrees with me. Peter Smith, who attended some of the debates at the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican back in October, has the following report from the front line:
John Haldane, a softly-spoken Scots academic from St Andrews … and fellow-traveler Catholic, put forward the proposition that the fundamental cultural debate is between one collection of ideas, called ‘the anti-realists’, and another, those of ‘the realists’, and that this cultural tension is manifest in political and social policy. Real ideas … contained at their core the notion that the universe is natural, objectively ‘out there’, knowable but distinct, and informing views on sexuality, sex, marriage, death, etc. Anti-realist ideas, by contrast, consider everything as human constructs, plastic and malleable, which can be bended and altered but which inherently are unknowable. Realism and anti-realism contain fundamentally different understandings about what is knowable and what is not, what can be change and what cannot, and mankind’s place in creation.
