On the weekend we went to Diamond Harbour to experience the brand new ferry, the Black Pearl. It is a really comfortable catamaran with large panoramic windows and plenty of seats. If you want an enjoyable, affordable trip I’d highly recommend it. It’s free for Super Gold Card holders!

I also noticed a few other ships in port at the time. In particular there was the Poavosa Wisdom, a bulk carrier discharging fertiliser. In large letters the words Wisdom Line were on the hull of the ship. Having looked at the Book of Proverbs during church services recently, the name seemed quite apt. There are clearly some people who value wisdom. The company is a Taiwanese shipping line and the wisdom they might be considering might not exactly reflect Biblical wisdom.

However, as C. S. Lewis has argued, despite the differences in the wisdom traditions and morals, the many similarities across the different cultures point to the objective reality of values: prohibition of murder; goodwill towards others; duties to elders; duties to children; honesty; justice in court; the law of mercy. In the book “Abolition of man” he argued against the modern philosophical position that all values are subjective. C. S. Lewis maintained that despite the differences and even the subversions of traditional morality, it is objectively real and establishes what is good across cultures.

“[Traditional morality] is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from traditional morality itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to traditional morality and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against traditional morality is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

C. S. Lewis feared the destruction of values by those who control thought in society and through it the abolition of man. This is one of the more philosophical, rather than Christian books of C. S. Lewis. But his thoughts, of course, are tied in to his Christian faith, as he saw the true source of traditional morality in God, even if it is reflected imperfectly in societies and beliefs. That’s where Biblical wisdom and general wisdom intersect.

So go on a ferry trip and see whether you’ll get all philosophical as well.