Their purpose is to safeguard the lives and limbs of workmen from the dangers that employers are willing to disregard, either from lack of imagination, habit, or ruthless greed. But as with everything, Health and Safety can be taken too far; and when it is, it induces into the community an atmosphere of stultifying cowardice. Be this as it may, a far worse disability descends of a community when it can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. In our society in Britain today, where money has been made the measure of all things, “right” is what makes you richer and happier, “wrong” is what makes you poorer. And in this society you hear of incidents in which the Police, whom I much respect, seem incapable of distinguishing a victim from an aggressor, or right from wrong. You hear of law-abiding people being arrested for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, at the very time when those preaching mayhem are left untouched. Does this not lead in time to the Nazi practice, when they sought to consolidate their power, of making the law-abiding bourgeois into the villains of society, and the ruthless law-breakers its saviours? There are certain parallels between our society and the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s, when they were sleep-walking towards disaster. And only a few people have the courage to protest.
The truth, disagreeable to many people, is that only the religions insist on the difference between right and wrong, and provide a motive for holding fast to one’s opinions. Different religions will say that different things are right and wrong; but they do at least have firm standards, whereas your secular State depends entirely on convention for its standards. Anyone who doubts this need only go to a Judge’s sentencing conference to discover that sentences for criminal behaviour are entirely legal convention.
There was of course a fierce debate, after the publication of Newton’s Principia, as to whether it led to a belief in a mechanical universe. Newton’s view was that it did not make much difference; but in the long term his work destroyed belief in a god-created universe. Particularly in France, it led the way towards the secular society of the enlightenment. The tragedy is that, when science showed that much of the detail of the medieval view was false, nobody declared that even out of a mechanical world of science, man’s freewill and the spirit to exercise it can blossom and flower, and above man’s domination of Nature the Divine Creation can still tower majestically beautiful. They forgot that the end-product may be much more wonderful and complex than the initial detail.