If you scroll down here, you'll find what purports to be a link to a column by Jeanette Winterson. The link is bad, though, and leads to another piece altogether. But in the interests of disseminating knowledge, I reproduce for you Winterson's opening paragraphs, as copied from the paper version of today's Times:
How do we read the Christmas story in a world that has polarised into fanaticism on the one side and secularism on the other?
The likes of the Taleban and al-Qaeda, Sarah Palin and apocalyptic evangelism, that George W. Bush calls himself a Christian, and that Israel as a nation state believes as fervently in armed conflict as it does in the omnipotence of God, makes religion of any brand seem foolish and dangerous.
But secularism is not at all the independence of mind that Martin Amis likes to talk about as the opposite of the fundamentalist attitude. We have created a society without values that believes in nothing. Reviving the god of the Philistines - Baal, the flesh-eater - human dignity has been eaten away by the relentless drive to make money at any cost; especially money you don't have.
So here we are, going shopping again at Christmas, millions out of a job, millions more utterly miserable and defeated by this experiment at life otherwise known as Nothing. We laugh at the primitive religious idea of human sacrifice – but whatever fancy words and theories you want to play with to describe this present spectacular collapse of global capitalism, it is human sacrifice on a scale undreamt of at the altars of idols.
Winterson eventually gets to the way she thinks you should read the Christmas story, but I found so much to contend with in these opening paragraphs that I'm just going to concentrate on them. Let's start with the spectacular collapse of global capitalism. Like you, I know that the global economy is in trouble, and the global economy being what it is, this means that capitalism is in trouble. But so far as I'm aware, it hasn't yet collapsed, and I'm betting that it still won't have collapsed by next Tuesday. Had it already collapsed, however, what is it - the broad system of political economy - that we see around us at present? Communism, socialism, feudalism? I'm thinking, myself, that 'capitalism' still best describes it.
Then, we have from Winterson that secularism, instead of being what it is - a certain view about the proper relationship between religious belief and the political sphere - is rather 'a society without values that believes in nothing'. No argument for this, just bare assertion: secularism has destroyed values - presumably even the values it commends, like freedom of belief, tolerance of a plurality of beliefs, the neutrality of the political domain. And one might raise an eyebrow - only one eyebrow, for let's not go to extremes - about the claim that this is indeed a society without values. Here is a woman enjoying every advantage vouchsafed by the rights and liberties of the country she lives in (the institutional expression, these, precisely of certain important moral values) lightmindedly opining that the society has no values.
People without jobs and miserable on account of it, that is indeed an indictment; but it would carry more force unencumbered by the rest of what Winterson serves up with it. Like 'shopping again at Christmas'. Oh, the horror of it - that people should want to buy gifts for those they love, for their families, their friends. Yes, it can incorporate excess, but there is at the heart of it a certain common human value, and those who scoff at it diminish only themselves. And 'this experiment at life otherwise known as Nothing' - so says our haughty occupant of one of the more humane times and places in the history of the planet.
Well, I didn't cover everything, even from those few paragraphs, but gimme a break already. I'm leaving some of it to you.
Update at 4.30 pm: I found the link.