Moralities: Sex, Money and Power in the 21st Century

By Joan Smith

Inside the front cover, the sales pitch for this book boldly states that ‘what we are seeing is the ejection of Church and State from our private lives and the adoption instead of a secular code based on justice, equality and human rights’. Apparently, Joan Smith will present the case for our ‘[having] before us the opportunity to create a new kind of society whose values, because they are based on respect rather than coercion, can truly claim to be more moral than anything that has gone before’.

I would be lying If I suggested that I am a supporter of contemporary feminism as it typically portrays itself. In fact, I would go so far as to say that by trying to force an equality that disregards gender specific qualities and characteristics, feminism has only succeeded in devaluing some of the core distinctives of women that are so very precious. But Joan Smith is a feminist and, reading this book, I was ready to give her a fair and objective hearing. It would be foolish, though, to pretend that her wider case for a liberal, secular-humanistic moral and ethical system isn’t primarily founded on the specifics of her feministic cause.

The book is usefully divided into three parts:

Part One – Sins of the Father
Part Two – The Policing of Private Life
Part Three – The Peasant’s Revolt

I would strongly recommend the commentaries on Augusto Pinochet, Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein that constitute Part One. They are well written, perceptive, eye-opening articles demonstrating the best of Smith’s investigative journalistic skills. She raises issues and caused me to pause to consider them in ways that I might not have done otherwise. The horrific abuse of power at many levels, politically, economically, socially and in other ways is disgraceful and the complicity of the West must, indeed, be exposed.

My problem is with the structure of this book, confusingly setting these potentially brilliant commentaries as some kind of foundation or context for Smith to work to a pre-determined agenda that doesn’t fit or work. The fallibility of three leaders, who happen to be men (a fourth of a kind, Margaret Thatcher, is notably indicted and attacked) is no basis for Smith’s argument for an unclear form of secular humanism. She throws into her introduction a preliminary attack on Christianity; agreeing with Nietzsche’s comment on Christians resolving ‘to find the world ugly and bad’ being fulfilled, she goes on to forcefully state,

‘Humanist beliefs, because they are argued logically and accepted voluntarily, have if anything greater force than the primitive threat-and-reward systems employed by religions like Christianity.’ (p.xi)

Having clearly not understood that the Christian gospel is all of God’s grace and motivated by His love for humans, this assumed superiority of Humanism pervades all of Smith’s moral and ethical comment throughout the book. She’s barely established it, but that doesn’t seem to bother her – she’s decided and that’s good enough!

In Part Two, sex and marriage and the family are apparently liberated by Smith’s analysis of their changing and vision of how they’ll look in the future. A more careful and realistic analysis of the personal and public problems of our day might temper her celebration of the break down of marriages and families. I hear more of an arrogant “didn’t we do well” on behalf of her generation than a thorough and genuinely benevolent consideration of how the building blocks of society’s morality for the future might be best assembled.

Smith’s morality is of the kind that, by removing any substantial foundation, is constantly in flux as it attempts to settle the dilemmas of any given situation or relationship whilst maintaining a tension with the supposedly reasonable (though, actually, inherently selfish) ambitions of the individual. Although she rightly identifies a number of injustices and issues of grave concern for us in the infancy of the twenty first century, Smith is unable to suggest any means of solution because her moral and ethical analysis is working so hard to deny the very means by which she is ironically able to identify these things and might, ultimately, solve them.

In her epilogue, Smith returns to religion-bashing:

‘…what I do know for certain (emphasis mine) is that Judaeo-Christian ethics have served us very badly, and that the new values that are emerging, based on a recognition of universal human rights, hold out the hope of creating a better, fairer, more humane alternative.’ (p190)

It is my conviction that it is in our better and more careful appropriation of Judaeo-Christian ethics (free-er from some of the abuses of years gone by), that the things Smith hopes for are, indeed, emerging. Her book is an interesting and thought provoking contribution that I would recommend as worth a read – but don’t expect to take a lot from it.