There's a part of me that wants to go with Matthew Taylor, the head of the RSA, who is championing a sort of worldly-wise return to Enlightenment values - an autonomy that does not degenerate into individualism and admits we're not entirely self-determining; a drive for universal concerns informed by a practice of empathy; and a renewed focus on human goods that can contain the destructive logic of competition and bureaucracy. He wants to reassert the ethical questions about how we live.

And yet, I can't. And I've been trying to work out why.

Part of it is that I don't buy the notion that contemporary science is throwing up all kinds of new insights into what it is to be human. Some say, it's that we now realise that our capacity for reason also depends upon our emotions. Have they never read Plato or Aristotle, for whom that was taken as read? Others say, we now know that we're not very good at choosing what makes us happy. Now know? Isn't that the assumption of pretty much any and every pre-Enlightenment thinker of note, to saying nothing of many since, like Freud?

I suspect that what the contemporary science of human nature is doing is more of a corrective - correcting what the more optimistic versions of the Enlightenment forgot about human complexity. That is no doubt useful. But it needs to be seen as such, because what is actually pretty basic is otherwise presented as innovative wisdom. And if it's taken as wisdom it will reduce our humanity, not expand it. I suspect that's why we see 'new' theories (the latest 'big idea') come and go with every book season - one year it's 'nudge', next it's 'shove', and so on.

Another part of it is that I don't think empathy can do the work Taylor wants it to do. It's a thoroughly ambivalent capacity. Good empathy is widely celebrated, with good reason. But there's bad empathy too. The skillful torturer empathizes with a victim. The one exacting revenge wants to know the pain they inflict. And when you empathize with your group - think football - no humiliation is too small for your enemy. The shadow is actually there in the research: what's sidelined is that when the mirror neurons fire in the monkeys they study, the monkey in question is just as likely to respond with fear and fight, as love and compassion. Stepping into some else's shoes can be too terrifying. Compassion fatigue and the like must be thrown in the mix.

I suspect that what's going on here is a search for scientific foundations for moral imperatives. The trouble is that whilst science is good at what is the case, it can tell us nothing about what ought to be the case. You read your moral values into your science of choice. Hence good liberals quote research in support of good empathy, more or less reinventing the golden rule, because they've ceased to trust its religious origins. But, of course, the golden rule is a moral imperative precisely because it is often quite unnatural, irrational and unpleasant to defer to strangers and enemies.

Put these two elements together and what you get is, sadly, a superficial philosophy. It struck me that Taylor quotes Foucault's essay, What Is Enlightenment?, in his lecture, as if Foucault were all for those 18th century values. Actually, he was brilliantly suspicious of them, and argues that we now need a kind of way out of the regime they impose upon us.

Foucault likes Kant's negative prescription for enlightenment - as a form of escape, from immaturity. But he proceeds to apply that negation to the Enlightenment forms of knowledge that have emerged since, what he calls the 'blackmail' of the Enlightenment - behave this way, and we'll say you're normal. Rather, Foucault continues, we need to take ourselves as objects of 'complex and difficult elaboration'. For Foucault, we must invent ourselves, not in some postmodern move that believes it can just make it up, but by a treating ourselves as 'obscure texts' to be worked upon. There's something of psychoanalysis in that, though Foucault was actually more interested in Christianity at the time. He saw in the ascetic lives of the early monks, like John Cassian, the creation of a revolutionary new ethic. What they'd developed was a way of life that embodied deep uncertainty about what it is to be human.

The implication is that we today need more of the mystery about what it is to be human, and it's only from that we might build an ethic that is both intellectually satisfying, as opposed to just fashionable, and humanly enriching, as opposed to shallowly appealing. That's what the Christian revolution brought to our culture, though it feels rather exhausted now. It's what Enlightenment optimism questioned - though, interestingly, the two greatest thinkers of that period, Kant and Hume, both treated human nature as 'obscure' too: Kant wrote a series of books on the limits of human knowledge; Hume was a sceptic. They might both be thought of as negative thinkers, in Foucault's sense.

That negativity is against the positivity of the contemporary science of human nature. But, actually, it is only by such a route that we can hope for enlightenment. It's not just that we might want to escape the blackmail. Rather, for we humans, the negative way is, in fact, essential to being open to newness. That follows because we can only fully say 'yes' to what we already know and grasp. It's consoling, but leaves us immature. Whereas maturity requires a negative dialectic. Only that has the capacity to lead us to deeper understanding, towards that which is perhaps fearfully beyond our comprehension, to the transcendent - in short, to enlightenment.

Reading Rowan Williams' address to the new parliament, the archbishop, as ever, made some arresting points:

• Human dignity is the bigger aim of politics, beyond the management of Caesar's taxes; 'shared dignity' being a kind of 'civic warmth'.
• That means 'strong citizens' defined as 'building capacity for co-operation, encouraging mutual dependence and skill-sharing, helping to create what some have called a "social-quality market" in which people collaborate to define the goods they are seeking together instead of being reduced to the level of the simple relations between producer and consumer.'
• Then, there's the links between celebration and virtue: 'The unfashionable idea of political virtue needs dusting off as something we can all acquire in our own spheres – a sense of the significance of our decisions, of patience with others and willingness to discover together what is good for a community, even an attitude of celebration of our common life as villages and cities and a variegated national community.'
• Though now, we to find need resources for celebrating in straitened times, because most post-religious ways of celebrating are connected to material abundance.

Richard Sennett believes we are in the midst of a new reformation. Like the first, our period is marked by new technologies, new freedoms, new communities, spiritual improvisations. And at the heart of it lies a crisis that is also an opportunity. We are unsure what narratives bind us together; we are unsure what rituals carry life's meaning for us. We flirt with weakening both, in capitalist lifestyles characterised by mobility, individualism and short-termism. And yet, reformation is where we're at - rather than a renaissance that recovers or a revolution that wipes clean - since, Sennett believes, we're in the process of retelling our origins to find a way forward; we're seeking deep roots to shape change.

Sennett is retiring from the LSE, and at the conference yesterday to celebrate his work, he was joined by Rowan Williams to talk about narrative and ritual.

Williams focused on the notion of difficulty. Narratives we live by are difficult by necessity because without tensions and resistances, without things that we bump into that threaten to derail us, life would cease to be differentiated and interesting - in short, be worth living. Most profoundly of all, we become a question to ourselves, and so our narratives never come to an end. Instead, there's what Sennett calls 'narrative movement', connecting events in time and accumulating experience.

Difficulties are not always to be overcome, then, as we tend to assume. Meaning arises from engaging with difficulties, though with an attitude of faith, that attitude which maintains hope amidst doubts, which keeps seeking connections amidst uncertainty.

I've a piece on the Guardian's Cif Belief (which has been nominated for a webby again - do vote), arguing the Conservatives need a more radical policy on marriage to help undo the damage of their neo-liberal economics. A taster:

Of course, there's no going back. For good and ill, we've got the neo-liberal genie to contend with. But the past does help to expand our imagination when it comes to the present. Rather than trying to use amoral monetary means to prop up marriage, it might be possible to identify other commitments that people make to each another – in communities, friendships, extended families – and to forge ways of nurturing and supporting them. Civil partnerships provide an example. A truly radical government might develop others.

The explosive reaction to Rowan Williams's comments about loss of credibility in the Irish Catholic Church - which, when you listen to them, are an anecdotal reflection not an assault - says once again that the crisis is deep. And it's not just because of the scale of the problem across time and place, or the bureaucratic nature of the institution, which is clearly ill-equipped to deal with what's happening. Rather, it's a crisis of moral authority - in a way that Clifford Longley understands in his column in The Tablet this week.

He contrasts Catholic Social Teaching with Catholic Sexual Teaching. The social teaching is based upon relationships - the goods, and ills, that arise from a shared life. The sexual teaching is based upon prohibitions - blunt rules that bear little or no relation to life as lived. Witness celibacy, contraception, divorce, homosexuality. The absolute rules on these matters don't make for human flourishing. They are stones that sink lives, should individuals be unfortunate enough to find themselves tied to them. That disconnect is part of the problem now: if the social teaching is vigorous because it's grounded in the experience that people have of trying to live well, the hierarchy has drained itself of wisdom in matters of personal relationships.

Incidentally, I've a piece in The Tablet this week too, about Newman's theology of friendship. He thought intimate, personal friendships are the context in which human beings get a taste for the goodness of love - 'the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely.' And yet, friendship gets sidelined in contemporary Catholic teaching, because it's not amenable to rules. That is precisely its virtue.

(Image: Newman and Ambrose St. John by Marie Giberne)

I've a piece up on Cif Belief. A taster:

It’s striking that alongside the question of pleasure, Aristotle similarly discusses the moral virtues that interest the scientists, virtues like courage and loyalty. But he notably adds others, like prudence and restraint – virtues that are enhanced by a capacity of self-reflection. They are known as the cardinal virtues, those upon which a distinctively human morality hinges. So what this adds up to is that the ethical life for the human animal is a mix of what Aristotle called practical and rational intelligence. They are functional and cognitive skills improved by engaging in life.

So what’s religion got to do with it? Link the evolutionary story with the insights of virtue ethics, and it’s clear that living a good life requires training – the cultivation of those virtuous habits, the gradual erosion of personal inconsistencies. Moreover, it’s a journey powerfully influenced by the stories we tell ourselves about what makes for the good we pursue – the stories that speak to our humanity and inspire us to keep at it. It’s why moral heroes and morality tales are so important. They address our reasoning and feelings; they shape the moral emotions.

Vampires are big right now, in programmes like True Blood and books like the Twilight novels. The thing that freaks us about vampires is they are people who look exactly like us. We can even fall in love with them. Only they differ in one key respect. They drink blood. And given half a chance, they’d suck the lifeblood out of us.

In other words, vampires are fascinating to us now because they speak about the anxieties of our plural age – an age in which we live with others who look almost exactly like us, but we suspect might be different – might be ‘others’. Perhaps, like vampires, we should fear them, maybe even expel them? Thus, there’s the tendency to dehumanise people. An atheist might regard rationality as a key human quality, and so condemn the believer as irrational. The believer might regard compassion as the essential virtue, and so accuse the ardent rationalist of heartlessness. A first tip for living in a plural world would be, therefore, to beware of believing in vampires.

To expand on that, think of the issue of respect. Respect used to be a virtue in the public square, a prerequisite for engaging in debate. The ethic is still rehearsed in the parliamentary formality of referring to MPs as ‘honourable’. That the practice sounds old-fashioned or eccentric is a sign of the erosion of respect.

But respect matters not because of some nostalgic desire for a lost world in which we doffed hats and were called by our surnames. It matters because if I show you respect it signifies that I’m giving you the time of day. It means I’m treating you as a person. Moreover, it recognises that I might learn something from you if I do. And I might learn something about myself too – that most difficult category of knowledge.

Respect was a virtue recognised by the philosopher Immanuel Kant as crucial for any flourishing public square. And the public square mattered to him a lot. He believed that it is only by debating openly, generously and honestly that human beings can hope to move towards the state that he called enlightenment. We simply can’t do it alone, or in like-minded groups. That way serves merely to reinforce ignorance.

In short, we need those we might think of as vampires. Which perhaps throws a more positive light on why we’re so interested in them right now.

Piece on the Guardian's Cif Belief, taking a lead from Oscar Wilde. A taster:

'Our problem, then, is too strict an insistence on the truth. Relentlessly champion accuracy and you kill the imagination. Insist on proof at every turn and conversation becomes verification. The "monstrous worship of facts" sucks the beauty out of art, and would abort all pregnant possibilities. Without lying, there is no human interaction at all, just an exchange of data as if we were machines.'

Really enjoyed Ray Tallis' thought on this. It reduces you to an object. You're skewered, left pinned and wriggling. It's a 'metaphysical insult,' he says - and writes in his latest, brilliant book: 'You are merely that meaty object at this moment, now, and all your back history and your vision and opinions don't count.'

Don't do it!

Philip Pullman, Michael Sandel, Rowan Williams, Alain de Botton, Angie Hobbs, Tariq Ramadan, Andrew Copson, Camila Batmanghelidjh, Mary Migley, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Will Hutton, John Milbank and more. They all agree that something profound has gone wrong with the way we do ethics, ensure justice, pursue the good life.

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