The Air that We Breath …

This weblog recently began again with the prospects of wholescale ecological catastrophe.

And yesterday in response, we invoked here the little known dream of an Irish Catholic prime minister from 1943 …

I wonder if anyone thought: what is the point? Our world problems surely cannot be solved by going back to a dead past on an obscure little island, isolated from the mainstream. We must contend with the present forces of global society.

Forces, which I believe, are too often seen as having an aura of inevitability about them.

One of the chief things, it seems to me, in combating this aura of inevitability, is to HEIGHTEN CONSCIOUSNESS that there is a **worldview** that informs, shapes and guides all our current political, social and economic activity.

Which activity, moreover, is killing us.

But this **worldview** is not the only one we have available to us.

Yes, one of the first steps it seems to me, is **heightening consciousness** that this worldview is ‘pulling the strings’ – and that we have a choice.

Once we are conscious, that is, that our strings are being pulled.

Now I propose in this weblog to call this worldview ‘Secularism’. I am aware that this word is not quite accurate, nor adequate and that Secularism is not without noble roots and aspirations.

Still in a weblog like this, a certain SHORTHAND is necessary. And it is easier for me to say ‘Secularism’ than explain every time that our society is underpinned and moulded by a complex convergence of philosophical currents including:

Relativism, involving a despair of finding any basis for truth that is not relative to one’s own culture.

Philosophical Materialism, in which little but the most crudely obvious material dimensions are admitted as having **validity** and hence MEANING for the way our society is run.

A Negative Concept of Liberty which holds that any restraint, even **self-chosen** restraint, equals loss of freedom. This approach is also subtly materialistic, inasmuch as it emphasises material restraints over psychological ones (i.e. someone under house-arrest is seen as not free, but an agoraphobic may be).

While also acknowledging that the zeitgeist is informed by genuine aspirations, as well: liberté, egalité, fraternité …

I have tried to unpack these ideas a little in the previous weeks, and I cannot keep unpacking them each and every time. So for the sake of simplicity, I will use the word ‘Secularism’ as shorthand for the zeitgeist …

Now secularism so-defined, is the air that we breathe. We breathe this air so naturally and unconsciously that we never suspect that we might breathe a different air.

But I invoke very recent Irish history to show that people very like us, did indeed breathe a different air – and created a different society.

We are like fish in an all-surrounding sea – poisoned sea – which have no idea that there are very different options available. Fish in this case, that could breath a very different air, if they became aware that this was not the only sea available ...

But when these different options are suggested to us, we can react as though something will be IMPOSED on us …

Soon I want to expand on the story of a British mother I know and admire, as an example of what I mean. This British woman, who is not a Christian, had her children – for non-religious reasons - enrolled in an at least marginally Christian school. But she resented the fact that her children had Christian concepts ‘imposed’ on them.

But it never occurred to her that that in the state-run alternative, children were **also** having something imposed on them. Because these children are breathing in every day the air of secularism – an ideology composed, again, of materialism, relativism, liberty narrowly and materialistically defined – and so forth.

All of these things are being IMPOSED on our children. An ideology is being enforced. When I tried to explain this to her, she had no idea at all what I meant. And it seems to me that most of us have no idea at all – Secularism is the air that we breathe ...