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Is there only secular democracy? Other possibilities for the third millennium.

Article Excerpt
ONE OF THE GREAT vices of our age is that we get used to things too quickly. The German philosopher Nietzsche, a master of the dubious aphorism, once remarked that what does not kill us makes us stronger. He held that this was one of the marks of "a human being who has turned out well". For most of us, however, and for most of human history, it is truer to say that what does not kill us we learn to live with. Those of a more pessimistic bent than myself are even tempted to claim that there is nothing that human beings cannot accommodate themselves to, whatever their personal misgivings or fears might be in a given instance.

The course of democratic life in the West over the past forty years seems to bear this out. Television is a handy barometer of this. In recent times one very popular American daytime television show ran a program interviewing people whose intimate partners are animals, including a man who spoke of his five-year relationship with a horse called Pixel. It is not the whole story of contemporary television, of course, and against this example we have to put shows like Judge Judy, to name only one, which rate just as well and whatever their shortcomings make it very clear that bad behaviour--even on television--should not be rewarded. But that daytime television should cover bestiality in the same way as it might cover a school's Fourth of July celebrations does not really cause us much surprise. This is a long way from the first night of television in Australia in 1956, when the comperes wore tuxedos and it was unthinkable--literally impossible to imagine--that the f-word would become a staple of dialogue in adult television dramas.

Other more important examples could also be given. Today, Catholic teaching on artificial contraception is incomprehensible, not only to secularists and some other Christians, but also to many Mass-going Catholics. It is not that the teaching is unreasonable or difficult to understand, but something more fundamental: many people do not see why the Church should insist on treating contraception as a moral issue of any sort at all. But forty years ago, prior to the United States Supreme Court decision in Griswold v Connecticut, many American states had laws prohibiting or restricting contraception, and opponents of these laws had failed in every attempt they had made to have them overturned or diluted, both in the courts and in the legislatures. Even in the midst of the sexual revolution the state of New York continued to ban the sale of contraceptives to minors until 1977, when the court struck the law down.

Treating artificial contraception as morally objectionable is now considered one of those strange Catholic things, like devotion to the Infant of Prague. Only a little more than a generation ago, however, there was nothing strange about Catholic teaching in this area at all, because it was just one part of a wider moral consensus. It was from this consensus that laws against contraception arose. They were not the result of a conspiracy to keep the population ignorant and progenitive, but of democratic deliberation, debate and decision.

The same is true in the case of abortion. Attempts to repeal or liberalise anti-abortion laws, sometimes entailing referenda, were defeated by large majorities in most American states prior to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade. These voters were the same people who voted against racial discrimination and for civil rights measures in the 1960s. Since Roe v Wade there have been, by one count, more than 40 million abortions performed in the United States. The numbers in Australia are not quite so great, because we are a much smaller country, but proportionately they are just as alarming--averaging out at approximately ten abortions for every twenty-five live births.

We have got used to this too--or at least, large numbers of our compatriots have. Whereas not so long ago abortion was prohibited and reprobated, politicians today who query the rate of abortion and the suffering it causes, as the federal Minister of Health in Australia has on several occasions this year, are...