Human Dignity: The Present and Future

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  On the future of human rights

  Nick Spencer reflects on what is (and isn’t) likely to happen as Western culture drifts away from Christianity.

  Download Link Transcript 1 min 56 secs
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  There is some sense that this Christian understanding of human dignity – inviolable human dignity – and what it means might be being lost.

  There are two really important caveats here. The first is that it’s very easy to get apocalyptic about this: “oh, my goodness me, unless we all turn back to the church next week we’re going to hell in a hand cart”. That is not what I am saying. The second point is that I’m talking about, if you like, deep sea intellectual currents. These things change over centuries, not decades – let alone years or so. So if we see any change in Western culture because of a drifting away from Christianity, it won’t be within my lifetime. And I’m still kind of young and vigorous (I like to think, anyway).

  So they are very important caveats. But in things such as … and you tend to see it around the beginning and end of life debates – and I don’t particularly want to gravitate to those, but that’s kind of where you see them. In the idea that the human life can be determined by the value that the human puts on that life – or in the case of the very young and the unborn, that somebody else puts on that life – you are moving away from the idea that that life is valuable irrespective of what you think about it.

  Now I don’t see that leading towards a gas chamber – that is emphatically not what I’m saying here. But it’s always worth attending to the way in which we engage with those who are at the periphery or perhaps the weakest points of our society, those who are not able to defend themselves, or articulate their own worth. And that, I think, probably in the longer term is my greatest concern about drifting away from this Christian conception of the human.

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  On forgetting why humans are precious

  Francis Spufford explains what’s fundamentally unreasonable about Christianity.

  Download Link Transcript 2 mins 15 secs
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  I think self-understanding is in danger of being lost if Christianity fades out of the picture as the, kind of, the known source of some of these things. I think that people thrive best when they know what the historical roots of their own ideas are. In a way, it would be just the kind of perverse gift to the world that Christianity has specialised in giving, if we left you with a bunch of ideas about human rights and left you thinking, ooh, it’s those Christians that are the enemy of human rights, but that’s actually not true. 

  I think the danger is that if the connection of those ideas to their original source is obscured, then part of the kind of the armoury of means for defending those ideas has gone as well. Christianity is fundamentally unreasonable in its attachment to human love, equality, and respect. We do it because we believe it’s right and we’re told it’s right. We don’t in fact have philosophical justification all the way down; beyond a certain point, we do it because we’re told people are precious. And then we make the experiment of looking around and it doesn’t kind of seem that they are precious, actually.

  But in purely abstract terms it’s very hard to defend, rigorously, the proposition that you should always treat people with respect and always treat them as if they have infinite value. I mean, prove that. Perhaps they don’t have infinite value by the ordinary utilitarian calculus of the world – in which case, at the very least, Christianity is in the business of providing us with a potent “as if”, behave “as if” people had infinite value. We’re the wild-eyed fanatics who want to keep your minds on that point. We want you to go on remembering that people have infinite value. We think it’s because God said so – but you can ignore that part if you want.

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  On the foundation of morality

  John Lennox describes what happens when you accept (or reject) the idea that humans are made in God’s image.

  Download Link Transcript 2 mins 50 secs
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  The biblical claim that every man and woman is made in the image of God is regarded by many people, actually, as the foundation of morality. If we reject the transcendent dimension to morality, we’re left to discover a base for ethics within the world – down here, in there – and so we’re going to find it where? We’re going to find it either in genetics, or in the development and evolution of society and so on. But that leads very rapidly to a subjectivism.

  I mean a classic example is Darwin, who was a kindly man with a big beard. And he studied ants and said, well there’s a basis for altruism. But his contemporary Spencer looked at the same nature and said it’s red in tooth and claw, and talked about the survival of the fittest. Now both of those theories have been tragically – particularly the second – applied in ethics. And I think we’re seeing, in Europe particularly, the result of ignoring the Genesis story and therefore trying to get some sort of ethical foundations by moving away from the human to the animal.

  Whereas if we look at the human and what’s said about human beings – “made in the image of God” – what does that mean? Well it means first of all that they are rational. God is revealed as personal in the Bible. It also gives them infinite dignity and value. And of course our values are crucially tied to our ethical systems. And I recall once being in Siberia and talking about these things – for the very first time by the way, in a lecture, first time in 75 years that had been allowed – in the elite university in Novosibirsk, and I said if I took that one statement, that human beings were made in the image of God, I wouldn’t murder one of you let alone the 70 million that Stalin did. And it was most interesting to watch, I got a standing ovation – it was very moving as they all simply stood. They’d realised the colossal impact of that statement. So I think it’s central to all ethical systems that are meaningful. And we neglect it at our peril, because we ultimately end up by ethics being virtually purely subjective.

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