Why treating everyone equally is a moral fantasy

[00:00:00]You spoke earlier the importance of nationhood the importance of all the sense in which you felt obligation towards the Glaswegian more than you do say a a Somalian and to my mind that is completely consistent with the Catholic Christian tradition is completely consistent with Augustine's notion of the order amoris which is developed and consolidated by Aquinas and and many other fathers as well which is not about not giving a damn about foreigners.

[00:00:29]>> It's a question about the effectiveness of compassion.

[00:00:32]>> Absolutely right and yet it would seem as if institutional Christianity in this country speaks almost with one voice in saying that borders really any kind of restriction on the borders and on immigration is it so factor a kind of an anti-Christian position it's very very rare in fact I've never heard a diocesan bishop in in the Church of England or indeed any sermon at all in any in any church that that that I've been to within the Anglican fold that might make the principal as ever made would make the principal case for structuring our lives and understanding that those that we bear stronger obligations to those who are closest to us particularly those who are suffering most economically and in terms of access to social goods over and above the distant of course this doesn't mean we disregard the distant quite the contrary that in the traditional view you learn how to love at home.

[00:01:30]>> Yes.

[00:01:30]>> Charity begins at home. It's the sort of the family is the sort of the school in which we all learn to order our lives in order to be able to go out into the world and love others best. You you can't love the rest of the world if you haven't learned to love those to whom you're closest to first.

[00:01:46]>> Yes.

[00:01:46]>> And yet there doesn't even seem to be a debate about that really in the in institutional Christianity even though I would have thought in in the Catholic Church.

[00:01:53]>> Well it's interesting that the Pope has recently on his tour of Africa, uh urged uh African students to stay in Africa.

[00:02:01]Uh not for reactionary reasons, but because uh precisely because of that ordering of love. Stay in the society that has helped to educate you and help to build it.

[00:02:11]Um so, you can take an implicit criticism of mass migration from that.

[00:02:16]Uh I I think there's a perfectly good Christian objection to uh uh to arbitrary immigration rules.

[00:02:23]There's a very good Christian objection to racism.

[00:02:27]Um but I think what's going on here is partly that as the faith has died in Western nations, uh people at the top of those hierarchies perhaps feel it's more alive globally and elsewhere than here.

[00:02:44]And so, their own affection might be drawn a little more to other places and other people.

[00:02:50]So, uh just just take a step back, really my I love philosophy and theology, but really I'm a historian.

[00:02:57]I see everything as rooted in context.

[00:02:59]I think everything is the product of social conditions, other than that which is true and a gift from God, etc. So, if you think about today, if you are a Catholic bishop, who are you surrounded by? Your congregation is is all immigrants. Well, a lot of it's immigrants, anyway. And then, what do you do on your weeks off? You visit Rome.

[00:03:19]You see, my my point is that they're almost like the heads of a global corporation.

[00:03:24]Now, I'm not saying that means they have no affection for that. That's not my point at all. I just mean that as a social experience, Catholicism constantly emphasizes the universal and it's all about moving around. A lot of people who train as as Catholic priests, especially they come from working-class backgrounds. This might be the first time that they live abroad. Cuz they're sometimes sent to Spain for their their first year, or they might be sent to Rome after years after that. My point is it builds a sentiment within people which favors the global.

[00:03:53]And I And I think that's entirely moral, and I appreciate it, and it's an element of the church which I truly love. Uh at the recent uh election of the Pope, I was in Rome, and I was standing in St. Peter's, and I was uh felt an overwhelming sense of connection and love for people I don't know from all over the world.

[00:04:11]The question is, how do I then translate that in my own community into effective action?

[00:04:17]And there is a risk sometimes that in thinking too much of the global, one can almost become abstract. We have to think about material conditions here at home, and they can be negatively affected by mass migration and by uncontrolled migration.

[00:04:32]Plus, uh if uh that those negative effects are so great, they could drive people away from the good. I mean, we always talk about appealing to the better angels of people's nature.

[00:04:43]If so, uh we have to have a discourse which is angelic.

[00:04:47]And we can't do that if people are full of fear and loathing. And that fear and loathing is encouraged uh by an immigration system that's out of control.

[00:04:55]>> Mhm.

[00:04:56]You describe beautifully the way in which the Catholic Church manages to combine the universal and the particular.

[00:05:05]>> Always has, yes.

[00:05:05]>> It is uh one of And it's And it's one of the great metaphysical challenges in the history of of philosophy. And yet, Catholicism is Christianity, classical Christianity, has has managed to capture that. You know, you're you're in a particular place when you're receiving the Eucharist at a particular time, and yet you're taking part in something as well that it is that transcends both time and space.

[00:05:31]Do you think part of the problem with the moral universe and moral discourse that has arisen in the wake of Catholicism, or you might say arisen in the wake of Christendom more generally, is that it is a it's valorized the universal over the particular, particularly in the post-war period, with the emergence of rights-based regimes and commitments to the doctrine of human rights, that it there's been a sort of an allergy and agnosticism about the particular, precisely because there's been a fear that this would somehow reintroduce sources of particularity and distinctiveness that were diagnosed as causing the great bloodbath of the 20th century.

[00:06:10]>> Yes. I mean, I I there's there's an irony in this that okay, the church is universal, but some of the developments you've seen in the last few decades have actually, to my mind, overemphasized the particular, especially when it comes to the use of vernacular in the mass. I mean, I love the idea of a global Christian language, that language being Latin with a bit of Greek in it.

[00:06:32]And there's something I'm very jealous of Jews and Muslims of having that gift of a second language that articulates the divine.

[00:06:41]And I think it's very sad that we've we've gotten rid of that. Um I think what you describe is is not a particularly Catholic problem. I think yes, it is a consequence of elite thinking of the 20th century that we are always reacting against the nightmares and the horrors of the 1930s, rightly because they were horrible, but in the process, we are we are denigrating that which could actually be very easily reconciled with the universal.

[00:07:07]And the other thing is Catholicism is very good at resolving tensions by saying there is no tension.

[00:07:12]The particular and the universal, but also reason and faith.

[00:07:17]There is no tension. You can have both.

[00:07:20]You can interrogate faith while still believing in it.

[00:07:25]You can make practical a practical case for the ideal.

[00:07:30]Um and the mind-body problem in philosophy as well. Catholicism managed to deal with this right up until Descartes very well. It just says it's a bit of both, isn't it?

[00:07:41]It's a very practical and human religion. And some of the some of the tensions and problems in our society, I think can be resolved not by converting everyone on mass. That would be absurd not even in the nature of Christianity, but by by giving people a perspective which says these things don't have to drive you mad.

[00:08:01]We don't have to be too concerned about these tensions. We can love outsiders and ourselves as much and as and as passionately without there being any contradiction.

[00:08:11]>> Yes, certainly if you're committed to the idea that God can be both three and one and that that God human nature and divine nature can be effused into a single person without confusion, change, division, or separation and yes, the mind-body problem is not going to cause you too many worries or or or or headaches.

[00:08:29]>> No, so I mean what I meant earlier was not so much that >> it's because of Catholicism that we've got this sort of rather desiccated moral universalism. It's really in a way it's sort of it's it's a feature of the kind of post-Christian moral landscape and it's a sort of a desperate bid for to develop a kind of moral Esperanto that isn't supposed to be spoken by everybody and therefore can be spoken by nobody.

[00:08:55]>> Yes.