Perhaps the best way of describing our cultural condition is - if I may be permitted an inexcusably clumsy phrase right at the outset - as one of agonistic hyperpluralism.

It is not simply that we live alongside and associate with people who hold radically different points of view (that would be garden-variety "pluralism"); nor is it that many of these points of view are so divergent as to spill over into the incommensurable, to the point of tearing away at the social fabric (that would be outright "agonism"). It is rather that we now lack even minimal consensus on the most fundamental questions of life, social obligation and political ends, as well as the means - the common moral and conceptual grammar, if you like - to resolve such widespread disagreement.

But what is most pronounced and historically novel about this form of "agonistic hyperpluralism" is that it is dispersed among individuals themselves, and not simply bound up in adjacent communities. This reflects, does it not, the great cultural revolution that has taken place over the last four decades, a revolution every bit as thoroughgoing and perfidious as those that ravaged the East in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike socialism - which invariably took the form of the radical assertion of the state over the economy, culture and indeed the bodies of the people themselves - the revolution that has defined our time and continues to hold sway within western liberal democracy is the assertion of the freedom, the rights and the pleasure of the body over every other person or institution that might stake some claim over it, whether it be nation, tradition, community, marriage, children or religion. Or, as Herve Juvin has nicely put it, the western body is "a body without origin, character, country or determination."

In just this way, this conception of the body that represents liberalism's political and cultural centre of gravity is both ahistorical - in that it is unmoored from its traditional determinants of kith and kin, its moral and civic duties, and even its biological inheritance and gender - and nihilistic - determined by nothing but what it chooses for itself, and oriented toward nothing but its own health, safety and pleasure.

In his incomparable account of the emergence of latter-day secularism in the wake of the collapse of the institutionalized worldview of medieval Christianity and the radical doctrinal disagreement unleashed by the Protestant Reformation, Brad Gregory has laid out the consequences of "hyperpluralism" for political and public discourse:

"There is no shared, substantive common good, nor are there any realistic prospects for devising one (at least in the immediately foreseeable future). Nor does secular discourse offer any realistic prospects for rationally resolving any of the many contested moral or political issues that emerge from the increasingly wide range of ways in which individuals self-determine the good for themselves within liberalism's politically protected formal ethics of rights ... As a result, public life today ... is increasingly riven by angry, uncivil rivals with incompatible views about what is good, true, and right. Many of these views and values are increasingly distant from substantive beliefs that derived most influentially from Christianity and that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained much more widely shared ... But the rejection of such answers to the Life Questions has led to the current Kingdom of Whatever partly because of the dissolution of the social relationships and communities that make more plausible those beliefs and their related practices. Most visibly in recent decades, this dissolution owed and continues to owe much to the liquefying effects of capitalism and consumerism on the politically protected individuals within liberal states, as men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfillment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them."

Are we not now everywhere witnessing the consequences of this dissolution of the social and abandonment of the politics of the common good - that we are, as Rowan Williams puts it, inhabiting "a world in where there aren't and couldn't be any real discussion of the goals and destiny of human beings as such"?

One could point, for instance, to the university's abandonment of the western educational ideal - which must necessarily include inculcating the virtues inherent to healthy democratic society - in favour of producing, as Martha Nussbaum says, "generations of useful machines."

Or, in the absence of some kind of shared moral grammar, to the emergence of what Charles Taylor has termed "code fetishism": the hysterical and ultimately arbitrary attempt to erect forms of protection against the bad behaviour of others by means of endlessly proliferating codes of practice, which can only ever be paltry substitutes for real trust, solidarity and mutual obligation.

Or to the widespread abrogation of our morally symmetrical responsibilities to the unwanted elderly and the inconvenient unborn: one group shovelled away behind the walls of third party care and the other sentenced to death; both in the name of choice and out of fear that our lives might be dragged down into their servitude.

Or to the increasing desperation with which voluntary euthanasia is being legislatively pursued in the West, where the fear of the slow loss of autonomy in old age has usurped the fear of death itself, and where the choice of one's own death is deemed the ultimate assertion of freedom.

Or to the incessant striptease of social media, whereby embarrassing personal details are widely publicized, only for our actual selves then to be concealed behind a faux-indignant veil of privacy. We are willing, it would seem, for our idiotic predilections to mingle with those of others within an indifferent or vaguely sympathetic online space, provided our lives are never constrained by the moral demands of actual community.

Or to our inability to provide an intelligible account of what social ends or public goods the media serves, much less any arbitration between the true, the trivial and the manufactured - such that the media comes simply to duplicate and reinforce the divisions and bigotries endemic within society as a whole, precisely due to its irresistible attraction to the simplistic, the salacious and the cynical. It is no wonder, as Jay Rosen and Lindsay Tanner have argued, that the media has effectively become an impediment to authentic conversation and moral persuasion.

And this brings me - at last, you might be thinking - to last night's episode of Q & A . Nowhere are the moral limitations and intellectual poverty of agonistic hyperpluralism more apparent than Monday nights on ABC1. For months now, the panellists selected to "take your questions" have come to resemble cardboard cut-outs, caricatures of positions along the spectrum of opinion (with some truly extraordinary exceptions, like Raimond Gaita and Slavoj Zizek). As a result, the debate that most often ensues on the program is not authentic debate at all - which must necessarily open itself up to the possibility of persuasion and assent - but rather an orgy of visceral and utterly predictable emoting, drenched in multiple tinctures of piss-taking cynicism and self-interest.

Not only was last night's publicised "title fight of belief" between Richard Dawkins and George Pell no exception to this rule, it was perhaps the most grotesque example of it. Just consider for a moment what the program could have been.

It could have assembled a panel of energetic, sophisticated, disarming and even counterintuitive theologians, scientists, ethicists and humanists who would recast, and indeed redefine, the religion/science/ethics debate - a debate which has long since passed the point of intellectual exhaustion.

This panel could have demonstrated, through an intoxicating and all-too-rare mix of genuine disagreement and intellectual generosity, that the fundamental questions of Life, Truth and the Good have been languishing due to the impoverishment of the public square and the flattening-out of ethical obligation into a desiccated version of individualized "well being."

In the spirit of Easter, it could have demonstrated that entrenched divisions and bigotries can, in fact, be overcome through what Pope Benedict XVI has called a shared "pursuit after Truth" - that, in other words, friendship can arise in the place of animosity.

But instead, the Q & A panel was comprised of the two most divisive and respectively reviled proponents on either side of the debate. Richard Dawkins is not only the most theologically illiterate of the non-believing ultra-Darwinists, but he is also notoriously unsophisticated on questions of ethics and moral obligation.

Cardinal Pell, on the other hand, was almost the least ideal counterpoint to Dawkins (I'll cede that place to Steve Fielding): this is both because of his recent and regrettably unsurprising remarks on the science and mitigation of global warming - which were as ill-informed as they were ill-advised, and which, along with the Church's handling of sexual abuse and outright predation on the part of some clergy, and the increasingly gaudy antics of the glorified life-coaches and pay-per-view hucksters that accumulate under the banner of "pentecostalism," have set the moral authority and intellectual credibility of Christianity in Australia back by decades - but also because his writing has become increasingly arthritic and unengaged of late (in contrast to his audacious and often quite brilliant earlier work on theology and politics, such as that gathered God and Caesar ).

Given the choice of panellists, last night's Q & A was destined to be what it was: the vacillation of opposing monologues, interspersed by tediously predictable questions, and smattered with a derisive and frankly disgusting Twitter-feed. It is hard to shake the impression that, instead of genuinely informing and contributing to our public conversation, Q & A brazenly went after ratings. If that was the object, then as a stunt it worked magnificently.

But, I feel compelled to ask - perhaps appropriately given the season - "what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" In a time when so many of our civil institutions have collapsed, when moral and political disagreement has descended into a state of agonistic hyperpluralism, doesn't the ABC now have a well-nigh sacred vocation to protect and indeed to enrich public debate, to make all things virtuous and excellent available to everybody, rather than to debase it even further by succumbing to sensationalism?