So the 2010 election campaign has begun, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard campaigning under the slogan ‘moving forward’. As various media commentators have pointed out, ‘moving forward’ seems to be a platform just a little light on content (eg: here) – and even our own Andy J has tweeted, ‘#movingforward can be either good or bad depending on where we move forward to… So what’s the plan @juliagillard?’
Moving forward is what we all want, it resonates with us – I mean, who wants to be the one standing still!? (Though sometimes I wish life would stand still long enough for me to catch up!) We all know we want to move forward, but the question for all the political parties is where shall we ‘move forward’, and what is the goal of all this ‘direct action’? What is the great vision, what is the ‘good’ that we should all seek, and what is the common good we should seek for our commonwealth?
This, of course, brings us to the school ethics debate. For what is ‘the good’ that the ethical person (believer or not) should seek? If our secularist fellow citizens have left behind God, the Bible, any ‘revelation’ in general, and any absolute moral principles, what is the good and how shall we decide? This approach seems to lead (inevitably!?) to a belief in progress for progress’s sake, progress as a moral principle. Indeed, ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ become moral descriptors, almost irrespective of their content.(And incidentally, whatever we count as ‘moral’ and ‘good’ today should not be held too closely, as surely we will have progressed beyond this in a hundred years).
Super brainiac ethicist, Oliver O’Donovan comments on this doctrine of progress:
Belief in progress [has] a general optimism, but no understanding of history as the restoring of what was lost, the recovery of things as they were always supposed to be. Value and meaning now arise from the very fact of transformation itself; there is no other criterion, other than the simple fact of change, by which we can judge good and evil. ‘Progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ become the standard terms of praise and blame. Despite its optimism, it is to the doctrine of progress that we must ascribe a large part of the anxiety and comfortlessness of our times. For when the future is known only as the negation of what is, and not as the more profound affirmation of its true structure, then it is simply alien to us. We cannot view it with hope, for hope requires some identification between the thing hoped for and the one who hopes for it. The only ways of facing the future are with fear or with the wild, self-destructive excitement which can grip a man when he stands on the edge of an unplumbed abyss. (p.29, “The Natural Ethic” in “Essays in Evangelical Social Ethics”, edited by DF Wright. Exeter: Paternoster, 1978).
The good news of Jesus tells us that God is restoring his creation, redeeming, that he’s achieved reconciliation through Jesus & his death. And yet there is more, we are heading towards the new creation that is more than a return to the garden paradise of Eden – it is a ‘moving forward’ (!) to the glorious city that is the goal of creation. It is this great (true) story that gives meaning to what is ‘the good’ and just what progress is.
In the meantime, much wisdom is required to know the way forward, on a thousand different policy decisions. But at the least, we need our political leaders to give much more content to just what is this progress that they seek, and for which they seek our democratic backing. It must be more than progress for progress’s sake, or we will continue to live with the anxiety and comfortlessness that is the mood of our age.
Dave
“If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.”
Martin Luther King, Jr