What is a liveable life? What is needed in order to make life, if not perfect, then as decent and as tolerable as it can realistically be? Questions like these are at the very heart of our so-called culture wars. They are personal questions, but also deeply political since the way we answer them will have a knock-on effect on our politics.
One answer is that the liveable life is a life with as few restraints as possible: the liveable life is the unlimited life, the life without boundaries or prohibitions. In this version, liveability increases as moral convictions and precepts decrease. This version of liveability was proposed long ago, in a garden, when a wily serpent told a woman that if she disregarded the commandment not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, she would be like God. The outcome, however, was not increased liveability, but sadness, suffering and death.
We cannot begin to answer the question of what constitutes liveability unless we have a sense of what our life is for”
The myth of this version of liveability continues to this day. Promises of independence, freedom and ecstasy routinely turn out to be lies, and all too often, those who fall for the lie learn the truth at great personal cost. The chaos that can result in individual lives is reflected in the political sphere: when, as a society, we buy into the notion that a primary role of government is to legislate for ever-increasing personal freedoms, we find that more and more political energy and economic resources need to be allocated to picking up the pieces. All too often, the morning after the night before turns out to be a socially and economically costly scene of wreckage and devastation.
Let that be taken as a metaphorical observation, but let’s also be mindful that literal disorder on our streets does not simply happen: it has deep roots, some of which lie in false understandings of what makes life liveable. We needn’t be naïve: not every social problem is the direct result of a defective philosophy. Social injustice and political lethargy must carry a share of the blame. Yet we should be willing – individually, politically, in our families and our classrooms – to ponder the question of liveability, and to acknowledge that the pursuit of maximum individual freedom has not produced fruits of contentment, harmony and peace.
So, what is a liveable life, and what resources do we have that can help us to ponder this question wisely? We cannot begin to answer the question of what constitutes liveability unless we have a sense of what our life is for; a sense of what it means to be a human person. To use a very simple analogy: if I don’t know what a machine is for, then I have no way of knowing whether or not it is functioning properly. If I lack a sense of what my life is for, then I cannot know what liveability looks like.
Understanding
A marked defect of our secular culture is that it lacks a common, shared understanding of what human life is for, and for this reason, it is substantially unable to provide the intellectual and spiritual resources we need in order to live a life of harmony and contentment. Our Christian faith, on the other hand, offers a clear understanding of what it means to be a human being.
The heart of that understanding can be summed up in a negative statement, and a positive one. Negatively, our faith insists that human beings do not discover themselves by radical freedom from limitations and commitments, or by the pursuit of pleasure, independently of the good of others. Positively, our faith teaches us that we are made, we are ‘hard-wired,’ for self-gift, for loving relationship with others, and that true contentment requires selflessness and sacrifice.
It is political folly to ignore the resources that citizens – including men and women of faith – can bring to the task of making their lives and their communities more liveable. Political folly will be with us always. Its proponents may defensively excavate the past for instances of where the Church, or individual believers, have failed to act or teach in such a way as to make life more authentically liveable. There is no shortage of such examples, and – just like political folly – sin, too, will be with us always.
But as believers, we can be confident that we have a better, wiser, more realistic take on human nature. At this time in history, as the long party fades and the consequences of untrammelled individual freedom become clear, we Christians have a wonderful consolation and a glorious task: that of living and proclaiming the understanding our faith gives to us. It is in this way that we can, slowly, falteringly, and not without reversals, usher in a new culture of life – of authentic liveability.
