Now, however, we are in the rueful 1990s. Prison and bankruptcy or exile threaten our heroes and the money­making machine seems in terminal decline, except for the economic rationalists whose ‘rationality’ appears as it is, a form of superstition appealing to those who need it to protect their power.

This is the situation Singer is concerned with here, how we are to live and to live ethically in what he calls an ‘age of self-interest’. His argument, as the title suggests, is that our crucial need is not to fix the economy, declare a Republic, change the Constitution, or whatever but face up to the question of value, of what we mean by the good life, even indeed of what we mean by ‘meaning’ in life.

In this sense How Are We To Live? could be seen as a kind of sermon – Singer’s encyclical, if you like. But it’s of a very different kind. There is no hectoring here, no appeal to fundamental certainties, only a series of questions and explorations of urgent contemporary issues, and no appeal to some God or cause out there, only an intense concern with matters of this world – even Plato and Kant he finds too much concerned with abstractions, their ideas too inflexible to provide the answer he is looking for, the way to live truthfully, aware of the world’s failure to be as we wish it to be and yet able to live with hope, purpose and even a kind of joyous reverence.

Singer writes well, lucidly, and easily. He is learned, well-informed, and open-minded and argues his case dialectically, taking into account a range of evidence, biological as well as historical, psychological as well as sociological. Most importantly, however, he writes from the heart, not the sentimental heart of ‘working off in words feelings he hasn’t really got’ and which the situation does not really justify, but the heart Pascal wrote about which ‘has reasons that reason knows not of’, intuitively as well as intellectually aware of the issues at stake, the search for some kind of meaning which will match and respond to a time of apparent meaninglessness. Our need, if you like, for what Ezekiel calls ‘hearts of flesh’ rather than ‘hearts of stone’.

Unlike most people concerned with these large issues, however, Singer has no taste for the apocalyptic. The emphasis is on what we have already seen and known on understanding it better. So he takes us behind the headlines to their consequences. Beginning in the recent past with Ivan Boesky, ‘the king of the arbitragers’ and the ‘hothouse, money-directed United States of the eighties’ we explore its origins, in the thought of Rousseau and Adam Smith and before then in the discussion of the art and ethics of money making, which started with Aristotle and concluding with Ronald Reagan. After that we move to matters of biology to consider the assertion that selfishness is in the genes, concluding that, on the contrary, it is the altruism of the few which has kept the human show on the road and continues to enrich it – there is a section on the heroism of those who resisted the Holocaust, for example. But the argument is also a real argument. A chapter on Japanese society illustrates the danger of individualism’s opposite, group feeling, drawing the conclusion from this contrast that both can be seen as the product of history and culture not, as proponents of both positions like to say, innate in ‘human nature’.

But that brings us to the key issue, self-interest, which threatens to destroy society and possibly the planet, and how to replace it with another kind of ethic, to change hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. Singer sketches the outline of this new kind of ethic convincingly. It means, he says, ‘thinking about things beyond one’s own interest’ and things which are large indeed, ‘taking the point of view of the universe’. This is persuasive. What all but the economic rationalists are beginning to realise is that life is a matter of relatedness, that human beings, animals, plants, the earth, its waters, and the air itself are all part of one web of life. Auden’s poetic saying, that ‘we must love one another or die’, is literally true. But, given the immense and hypnotic power of the media largely designed to serve and fuel self-interest, how can we begin to live this way, generously rather than greedily, cooperatively rather than competitively?

As I see it, this is where Singer’s secularity fails him, and to that extent How To Live? isn’t a proper sermon. It does not suggest how we might get from is to ought, how we might, in effect, be converted, that is, turned around. To do that, I suspect, one would need to take the question of evil more seriously. He is scandalised by the fact that Christians and Buddhists do not live up to their beliefs and therefore finds both Christianity and Buddhism wanting. But where the secular humanist remains utopian, both religions recognise that we are as prone, more prone perhaps, to do evil rather than good and suggest ways of dealing with this proneness to evil.

To say this is perhaps unfair, to ask Singer to take on board a point of view he suspects. But it does seem to me that, since the evidence he assembles makes it clear that we have reached the end of the Enlightenment, we may need to return to a larger sense of reality, the intuitive reality the ‘heart’ which ‘has reasons that reason knows not of’ is concerned with.

This is not an appeal for the irrational – in my view the irrationality and emotional hype of religious fundamentalism is both dangerous and distracting. But it is to say that How To Live? points us in interesting directions. If we are to find meaning in our lives by building ‘a temple [as he puts it] that endures and adds beauty to the world’ and draw strength as we do so from an active engagement with communities and traditions engaged in the same task, we might need to reconsider our definitions of reality. For one thing, in doing this we might also need to learn something here from Aboriginal Australians.