Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  The first step was to perform a thorough forensic analysis of the skull. The teeth—in particular the wisdom teeth—indicated that it was the skull of an adult. Evidence of “rough” attachment of the temporalis muscle suggested a person of middle age. Baba’s analysis would have pleased Louis-Pierre Gratiolet, who sparred with Pierre-Paul Broca over the matter of cranial capacity, for while Baba noted that “the braincase is wider than that of the average European male today,” he also concluded that “it is almost certain that the bones and muscles of the neck were smaller than those of the average European male, and Descartes was known to be a small man.”

  If there was any new information that came out of Baba’s study, it concerned diet. The teeth and muscles of the jaw indicated that the subject “had healthy teeth and ate plain, rough food.” More broadly, Dr. Baba concluded that “the individual who had this skull was a small and slender late-middle-aged European male. He is highly likely to have been a man of the late medieval or early modern era.”

  Working with a sculptor, Baba made a plaster cast of the skull, then applied muscle, cartilage, and skin and compared the head to what he took to be the most accurate portrait from life: the one in the Louvre. “The shape of the bones reflects the person’s facial appearance quite precisely,” he wrote. “This skull shows similar characteristics to the portrait of Descartes. The head was restored by adding muscle and skin onto the replica of the skull and there was no difference between the restored head and the portrait of Descartes.”

  From this point, the anthropologist and the sculptor worked from the painting to create a life-sized bust. This, side by side with the skull, formed the introduction to the Great Exhibition of the Face. It opened on July 31, 1999, ran through May of 2000, and had 300,000 visitors.

  Interestingly, Baba told me he had no idea of Paul Richer’s work. Without even being aware of it, he had duplicated Richer’s experiment, right down to comparing the results against the Louvre portrait. At the same time, Baba brought Descartes’ bones into the era of computer analysis and interdisciplinary study. Like Richer, Baba used the skull to fashion a life-sized bust, giving a face to the bones. The bust created by the Japanese anthropologist and artist is less bold and dashing than Richer’s; it has instead a simplicity and calmness. Baba gave a copy of it to Philippe Mennecier, who showed it to me where it is kept in a basement studio at the Musée de l’homme, remarking, with his dry delivery (and, I thought, some truth): “It’s a good likeness, though I find the eyes look rather Japanese.”

  IF IT’S FAIR to assign the credit or blame for modernity and its problems to any one person, Descartes is the prime candidate. Richard Watson, the American philosopher and biographer of Descartes, considers him sweepingly elemental:

  Descartes laid the foundations for the dominance of reason in science and human affairs. He desacralized nature and set the individual human being above church and state. Without Cartesian individualism, we would have no democracy. Without the Cartesian method of analyzing material things into their primary elements, we would never have developed the atom bomb. The seventeenth-century rise of Modern Science, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, your twentieth-century personal computer, and the twenty-first-century deciphering of the brain—all Cartesian. The modern world is Cartesian to the core.

  Of course, along with all of these achievements came the political strife and the clash of worldviews that dominate our times.

  Between them, with their various methods and working at opposite ends of the twentieth century, Paul Richer and Hisao Baba managed to give Descartes a human face. As Baba said, his ambition was to work outward from the skull to create a “symbolic face of modern man.” What, though, in the early twenty-first century, is the face of modern humanity? What are its features? In what direction is it looking? Those are the questions that drove me in the first place to investigate the story of Descartes’ bones.

  One bright winter day in 2007, I found myself in the restaurant of a fashionable New York hotel having lunch with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the internationally famous Somali-born promoter of the rights of Muslim women and one of the most admired and reviled women of the early twenty-first century. I was interviewing her for a magazine article, and as she talked—about what she sees as the dangerous irrationality inherent in all religion, but especially in Islam, and about how she believes the West contained its own irrationality by cordoning off faith from politics—it occurred to me that hers is one of the faces of modernity; her life story encompasses the legacy of Descartes’ bones. As a small child, she sat with her grandmother under a talal tree, shaded from the desert sun of Somalia. At five she was held down on a kitchen table while a man who was probably “an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan” snipped out her clitoris and inner labia with a pair of scissors. She grew up against a background of resurgent Islam, eventually fled to Europe, asked for asylum in Amsterdam, and began what she called “my freedom.” She enrolled at Leiden University (where Descartes had spent time while awaiting the publication, by a Leiden printer, of the Discourse on the Method), started reading Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, and turned her back on her faith and tradition. “Meeting Freud,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography with declarative understatement, “put me in contact with an alternative moral system.”

  From religious fundamentalism she veered toward what some of her critics have called Enlightenment fundamentalism. She became a member of the Dutch parliament, and from that platform gained attention as a critic of religion in general and of Islam in particular. When a young Amsterdam Muslim murdered Theo Van Gogh, the filmmaker with whom she had collaborated on an anti-Muslim film, and pinned a note to his chest threatening her life as well, Hirsi Ali became a global phenomenon; as she moved from Europe to the United States, she used the fame to amplify her views on immigration, cultural identity, and the interaction between the Muslim world and the secular West.

  Hirsi Ali’s beliefs are as sharp as a knife blade. Reason is the great light of humanity; religion is a force of chaos and darkness. “The West,” she told me, “was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. That led to secular government. Secular government is built on human reason, with all its fallibility. Faith assumes infallibility, and that is the danger. Our prophet Mohammad can never make a mistake, so we are stuck with him.” The fault line Hirsi Ali stands on runs back through the centuries of the modern era; the tensions that swirl constantly around her (as we ate lunch her round-the-clock security team hovered nearby) harken back to the forces that squared off at Utrecht University in the 1630s, when Regius, Descartes’ first disciple, presented a form of Cartesianism to an awestruck public, and to those that fueled the French Revolution. Only today those tensions are global. The challenge that Islam poses, in the view of many, is one of a culture that has not experienced the centuries of modernity—that has not lived with Descartes’ bones.

  By the time I sat down with Hirsi Ali I had been working on this book for two years, and I was used to discovering resonances between its themes and current events. While writing a cover story for the New York Times Magazine about Pope Benedict XVI and his efforts to renew the Catholic Church in Western Europe, I realized that everyone I met and interviewed—clergy, lay Catholics, European Muslims, all of them roiled by the tensions between secular Europe, Christianity, and Islam—was living on this fault line of modernity.

  On another magazine assignment, I found myself in the living room of a ranch house in suburban Maryland, sharing a meal with six people who were grassroots organizers of a movement in that state to amend its constitution to forbid same-sex marriage. Their feelings stemmed from their religious beliefs about homosexuality: it is a sin and a disease; it has no reality in the individual but is rather a sickness in society. That the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and virtually every other professional medical and psychological organization takes a completely diffe
rent view only reinforces the convictions of these people, for they see those organizations as based on shaky, non-biblical foundations. There have always been people at the fringes of Western society who refused to go along with the basic ideals inherited from the Enlightenment—views about the individual, the primacy of reason, and so on. But the beliefs I encountered in Maryland extend far and wide in America, where Christian absolutism is a major force. They go beyond human sexuality to biotechnology, education, social services, child development, and virtually every facet of life. They have influenced the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower. In this system of beliefs modern history turns out to be a series of wrong turns. The group in Maryland pointed these out for me as neatly as if they were holding bulleted outlines. The women’s rights movement. The birth control pill. The idea of a separation between church and state. Darwin. Finally, one man, a minister, said the name that was sitting in the front of my mind: “If you think about it, it really all starts with Descartes.” He then went on to talk eloquently about the changes that began with Descartes’ reorientation of reality around human reason. “The human mind can be led astray,” he said. “It is no basis for anything without God.”

  The historical nature of these clashes of worldviews is striking enough that it has become part of the public discourse. Each generation interprets the past according to its own needs, and lately—as people have found themselves faced with such challenges to modern secular society—the Enlightenment has come back in vogue. In the twentieth century, it was first reanimated in the World War II era. A handful of scholars who came of age under the threat of Nazi domination used the history of the eighteenth century and the work of the great Enlightenment thinkers as a beacon to light the darkness they themselves were living through. Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, which appeared in 1932, was intensely read throughout the war and in the postwar period and was instrumental in creating the twentieth-century view of the late eighteenth century as a time of reason beating back the forces of chaos. Cassirer was a German Jew who emigrated to the United States during the war; his objective was to use history as a tool. He cast his work as a frank appeal: “The age which venerated reason and science as man’s highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us. We must find a way not only to see that age in its own shape but to release again those original forces which brought forth and molded this shape.”

  At about the same time, the American historian Carl Becker gave a shorthand account of the beliefs that the twentieth century had inherited from the early modern era: “(1) man is not natively depraved; (2) the end of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; (3) man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth; and (4) the first and essential condition of the good life on earth is the freeing of men’s minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and of their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of the constituted social authorities.”

  This is the modern creed—or it was until a generation ago. Things changed in the 1960s and 1970s. After the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of that era, such a grandiose view of history began to seem precious and stale. Were the men and women of the eighteenth century really such paragons? Does history ever actually work that way? Is there really a march of progress, with each generation building on the work of the last and moving forward toward some ever-brighter future? If modern Western history was such a grand parade, how did one account for colonialism, Nazism, Soviet-style communism, for slavery and gulags and concentration camps? Postmodernism replaced progress with skepticism.

  Then a new millennium—to be precise, September 11, 2001—brought a sudden turn of thinking, and a reappraisal. The threat from some quarters has seemed bewilderingly ancient, as if a dinosaur had suddenly reared up from its prehistoric slumber. One statement of it came in the form of a letter written in 2006 by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to American president George W. Bush: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.” Instead of democracy, Ahmadinejad predicted, “the will of God will prevail over all things.”

  Part of the inheritance of modernity has been the idea that its core values of democracy and individual liberty have the force of inevitability. They emerged at a given point in history, and now that they have arrived we tend to think that everyone acknowledges them as universal values. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. José Casanova, a sociologist of religion at the New School for Social Research, told me that the idea used to be that Western development “was prescriptive for the rest of the world, that it would be a model for other societies, so that these other societies would follow a secular path. But now throughout the world you find religious revivals. We’re learning that more modern societies don’t necessarily become more secular.” And whether in Western or non-Western tradition, theocracy has tended not to sit easily alongside concepts of democracy and individual freedom.

  The recognition of the sobering fact that these modern ideals are not necessarily spreading around the world—that, possibly, they are not inevitable at all but could rather be fragile, ephemeral, temporary themes in world history—has coincided with a desire to look back at our past to remind ourselves of what we are. I think that is good and necessary; I agree, for example, with the German scholar Heinz Schlaffer when he says that “Western culture is also fundamentalist: Its fundament is called the Enlightenment” and that “the paradox is that this fundament is the basis for our present society, but also half forgotten by it.” Hirsi Ali formulated her message for me in this way: “The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the Enlightenment, the message of the Enlightenment, and make the people who inherited all of this”—and here she waved her hand toward the window and the skyscrapers of Manhattan—“realize that this all just didn’t fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle behind the development of this society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that development.”

  I think this is largely true—and I think in its idiosyncratic way the history of Descartes’ bones sketches the long journey, filled with false starts and blind alleys, that led to modern society—but as it narrows, this line of thinking darkens. I suspect that much of the talk about valuing the Western tradition is cover for a brutish sus-or-them impulse. In these pages I have taken up Jonathan Israel’s thesis that there was a three-way division that came into being as modernity matured. There was the theological camp, which held on to a worldview grounded in religious tradition; the “radical Enlightenment” camp, which, in the advent of the “new philosophy,” wanted to overthrow the old order, with its centers of power in the church and the monarchy, and replace it with a society ruled by democracy and science; and the moderate Enlightenment camp, which subdivided into many factions but which basically took a middle position, arguing that the scientific and religious worldviews aren’t truly inconsistent but that perceived conflicts have to be sorted out. All three of these factions remain with us today. Their adherents express themselves on TV news talk shows, in blogs and opinion pieces, and in court cases. Those who promote “intelligent design” as a replacement for the theory of evolution are members of today’s version of the “theological party” who are attempting to infiltrate the moderate camp. In his best seller God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens sounds the trumpet for “radical Enlightenment” warriors of the twenty-first century by using language that mirrors the freethinkers of three centuries ago: “We distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. . . . The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

  Hirsi Ali “converted” not just to secularism but to its radical form. She would have found a
ready place for her ideas during the French Revolution, and indeed her ideas tend toward a similar extreme: she has declared that “we are at war with Islam” and that, in the name of reason, not just Islamic terrorism but Islam itself, along with its 1.5 billion adherents, must be “defeated” so that “it can mutate into something peaceful.”

  This is patently frightening talk, and I believe it exposes the flaws of radical secularism. I agree with the radical secularists that enormous ugliness has been done and is being done in the name of religion, and I think that we have to find an intelligent way not to tolerate religious intolerance, but I believe history shows that there is lethal error in radical secularism—or rather, two errors. First, it thinks too highly of reason, or of the ability of humans to employ it. The history of modernity, even the anecdotal version of it that comprises the story of Descartes’ bones—scientific stupidities proliferating majestically alongside real advances—makes plain that trying to follow reason is not the same thing as being right, and every successful demagogue of the twentieth century has demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate reason and direct its course from the truth to something like its opposite.

  One could argue that the antidote is to recognize the tendency to misapply reason and try to correct for it. But that ignores the second error, which is the greater. In the interest of pursuing its own brand of certainty, radical secularism takes a too narrow construction of reality. It puts on blinders. Religion, like art, is a way of negotiating the complexity that the philosophical puzzle of dualism, and all of the attempts at overcoming it, acknowledges. To deny religion outright exposes those who trumpet the use of reason to the charge of unreasonableness—of intolerance.