I disagree strongly with Alain de Botton when he writes this:
A terror of old-fashioned moralism has driven all talk of morality out of the public sphere. Who would now dare to suggest how our neighbours should be judged in the vast domain we term private life? In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. A democratic spirit has served to generate scepticism about authority and hierarchy in every sphere. Judgments about values tremble before the incensed question of who one person could ever be to tell another how to live. Those who profess to have answers are ridiculed in a tone adopted by furious adolescents when probing at the assumptions of their parents. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society. They can reliably be charged with believing in that most odious concept of modern secular politics, a nanny state.
Is Alain de Botton serious ? It seems to me that we live in a time when there are few nanny states in the world and that the problem of our time isn't the world has embraced the over-expansiveness of liberty. The problem of our time is "we" are still stuck with the moral system of the dark ages, which gives the privileged class (of which Alain de Botton is a member) limitless liberties while imposing a rigid moral structure, on the masses under the name of morality, traditions, religion, and decency. It seems to me that only a man who is at the top of the food chain would say that the modern world is too free and too secular when the contrary is true.
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