Friday, October 11, 2013

Snowden and the pope (Comment)

Pope Francis increasingly resembles a gust of fresh air blowing through the musty chambers of the Catholic Church. 

He looks and behaves like a normal human being. 

He wears shoes instead of red velvet slippers. 

He has good taste in books: Dostoevsky, Cervantes. 

And he has a more humane attitude towards homosexuals, even if he has not opposed church doctrine on sexual behaviour.

But the most astonishing thing that Francis has said, in a recent letter to Italian newspaper La Repubblica, concerns non-believers. A non-believer is safe from the fires of Hell, the pope assures us, as long as the non-believer listens to his or her own conscience. These are his exact words: "Listening [to] and obeying [one's conscience] means deciding about what is perceived to be good or to be evil."

In other words, neither God nor the Church is really needed to tell us how to behave. Our conscience is enough. Even devout Protestants would not go that far. Protestants only cut out the priests as conduits between an individual and his maker. But Francis's words suggest that it might be a legitimate option to cut out God Himself.

The Catholic Church would not have survived for as long as it has if it had not been prepared to change with the times. The Pope's statement certainly is in accord with the extreme individualism of our age. 

But it is nonetheless a little puzzling. 

After all, a Christian believer, as the Pope must be, would have to assume that questions of good and evil, and how to behave ethically, are prescribed by church doctrine and holy texts. Christians believe morality is a collective pursuit.

I do not know whether Edward J Snowden, the American former intelligence contractor who exposed official secrets in protest against his government's snooping on its citizens, is a Christian. 

Perhaps he is an atheist. 

Either way, he fits perfectly the new pope's view of the moral person. 

Snowden claims that he acted according to his conscience, to protect "basic liberties for people around the world". His view of the collective good was entirely individual.

Perhaps in a secular age ethical behaviour has no other basis than one's own conscience. If sacred texts can no longer tell us the difference between good and evil, we will have to decide for ourselves. 

Liberal democracy cannot provide the answer; nor does it pretend that it can. It is no more than a political system designed to resolve conflicts of interests lawfully and peacefully. 

Questions about morality and the meaning of life lie outside its scope.

Might there be new ways to establish a moral basis for our collective behaviour? Some utopians believe that the internet will do so by creating space for new citizen networks to transform the world. In the sense that social media can be used to mobilise people for good causes, there is some truth to this. 

Thousands of Chinese idealists, inspired by bloggers and social media, helped their fellow citizens after a recent earthquake, even as their government was suppressing the news.

But the internet is, in fact, pushing us in the opposite direction. It encourages us to become narcissistic consumers, expressing our 'likes' and sharing every detail of our individual lives without truly connecting with anyone. This is no basis for finding new ways to define good and evil or to establish collective meanings and purposes.

All the internet has done is make it easier for commercial enterprises to compile huge databases on our lives, thoughts and desires. Big business then passes this information on to big government. And that is why Snowden's conscience drove him to share government secrets with us all. 

Perhaps he did us a favour. 

But I cannot imagine that he is quite whom Pope Francis had in mind when he was trying to bridge the gap between his faith and our age of unbound individualism.