Oprah’s popularity reveals some of the appealing elements of the secular ethic. It promotes individuality, because each of us now has our own moral script and our own way of being human. It eschews hypocrisy. Nothing could be worse under this ethic than to pretend to be the kind of person you are not. Why put on airs and live a lie? It’s better to live naturally, even if this raises a few eyebrows, and to encourage people to accept you as you are. It promotes independence. When you become your own person you are no longer subservient to the will of others, or to the artificial appeal of “society.”
Under the secular code, art assumes a central role as a means of self-realization and self-expression. The artist is no longer copying nature, in the manner of conforming to an external code, but rather employing sculpture and painting and poetry to reveal his own (sometimes incomprehensible) inner self. No wonder that art has largely replaced religion as the institution to which secular people pay homage: it is much more fashionable to serve on the local museum’s board than on the parish committee’s.
The deepest appeal of secular morality is its role in the formation and preservation of “love relationships.” How do we know that we love? There is no other way but to reach deep into ourselves and consult the inner voice, which is not the voice of reason but the voice of feeling. We succumb to that inward self so completely that we feel that we have lost control. We don’t love, but are “in love,” and we are now not entirely responsible for what we do.
Love is the sin for which we find it almost impossible to repent. That is why Paolo and Francesca, the two adulterers who inhabit the outer ring of Dante’s inferno, still cling together like doves, appealing to the law of love, “which absolves no one from loving.” Love has transported them into an almost transcendental state outside the real world, and yet more real than the world. Love of this kind is, quite literally, “beyond good and evil,” and that is why the new morality has become such a powerful justification for adultery. When the inner self commands love, it does so authoritatively, defiantly, and without regard to risk or cost or all other commitments. As C. S. Lewis once observed, erotic love of this kind tends to “claim for itself a divine authority.”
