Living Open Source

I had the privilege of attending a lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Saturday night at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral – an event planned as the year of Capital of Culture begins here in Merseyside. You can read the full text of the lecture on the archbishop’s web site.

The Archbishop argued that the present European mindset has become characterised by an obsession with the rights of individuals and self-creation. A mindset that is today expressed in European art and culture. The archbishop challenged this mindset as being one that belongs to a prosperous minority in the world and reflected on the internal strain and immense inequality it has produced. His observation is that this mindset has become hostile to faith, despite the historic influence of Christianity in shaping Europe in the first place. He seemed to be suggesting that the unhealthy mindset that has thus been formed is a direct result of losing the faith half of the brain!

So one way of understanding the ambiguous impact of Europe on our world is to see the modern European mind as the detached half of a complex reality that Christianity helped to bring to birth.

He also made some interesting comments about two alternative mindsets that the European has been challenged by in the last century – Marxism and Islam, as he tried to suggest how recovering the heritage might make for a better world. But this half of his lecture didn’t seem to be quite as clear or well developed.

He hinted at how faith in God, a power outside of ourselves, should lead us to think in terms of obligations to others rather than the rights of individuals and freedom for others rather than for ourselves, but I’m not sure he convinced us or showed how this could work better than Marxism which the West has rejected.