The Great Partnership

by Jonathan Sacks

  Nietzsche called this a ‘laboriously won self-contempt of man’, for there is nothing self-evident about it. Is it the scientific equivalent of original sin? Have scientists become a new priesthood, offering salvation from humankind’s ever more drastically fallen state? Nietzsche wrote On the Genealogy of Morality, from which this quote was taken, in 1887. Yet scientific self-abasement – the systematic insistence that we are ‘nothing but’ reproductive units blindly replicating ourselves – has continued unabated ever since.

  It is totally unwarranted. The fact that we occupy a small space in the universe and a small stretch of the totality of time says nothing about our significance or lack of it. Yes, we have dark drives, but we also have high ideals, and sometimes the force of the latter can lift us above the pull of the former. There is no logic that forces us to accept the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’12 of the Marxists, Freudians and neo-Darwinians, that we do not really mean what we say, that all human communication is either deception or self-deception. In plain language, this is mere cynicism and its effect is to undermine the trust on which human relationships and institutions depend.

  This is more than mere nit-picking. Marxism and Darwinism came with the highest price in human lives ever exacted by ideas. Let me be clear. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Marx and Darwin would have approved of the use others made of their ideas. They would have been horrified. But we may not forget that Marxism led to Soviet Communism and Stalinist Russia, and social Darwinism was one of the main inspirations behind Nazi Germany in general and Hitler in particular.

  How many people died as a result of Marxist teachings we will never know. During the years of Stalin alone, an estimated 20 million people died in mass executions and forced movements of populations. Many died as a result of deliberately created famine, others in the course of slave labour. In the early 1930s the Central Committee of the Communist Party took the decision to shift from ‘restricting the exploiting tendencies’ of the kulaks – peasants considered ‘bourgeois’ – to ‘liquidating them as a class’, leading to a programme of mass murder on an almost unimaginable scale.

  It was a regime of unmitigated brutality and ruthlessness. Stalin had many of his leading colleagues, including Trotsky, assassinated. The regime maintained a constant atmosphere of fear through the secret police, informants and show trials. Those who perpetrated these crimes knew that one day they might suffer the same fate themselves. It was the longest nightmare yet undertaken with high ideals, and it took a very long time indeed before Marxist fellow travellers in the West acknowledged that they had been worshipping what André Gide, Arthur Koestler and others eventually called ‘the god that failed’.

  As for Nazi Germany, we do no service to the cause of understanding either to isolate it as a unique instance of human depravity or to normalise it under Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’. There were many influences on Hitler and his supporters and it would be wrong to single out one as if it alone were responsible. But the link between social Darwinism and the attempt to exterminate Jews, Roma, Sinti and the mentally and physically handicapped is unmistakable.13 In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written:

  A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong.14

  An unpublished note of 1928 shows his reliance on Darwinism to justify his programme of eugenics and infanticide:

  While nature only allows the few most healthy and resistant out of a large number of living organisms to survive in the struggle for life, people restrict the number of births and then try to keep alive what has been born, without consideration of its real value and its inner merit. Humaneness is therefore only the slave of weakness and thereby in truth the most cruel destroyer of human existence.15

  The point is not simply that Hitler imbibed these ideas, whether through Nietzsche, Spencer, Haeckel or other writers. They were widely shared among intellectuals of the time. The movement for eugenics, the selective breeding of humans and the sterilisation of the mentally handicapped and those otherwise declared unfit, was pioneered by Darwin’s half-cousin Sir Francis Galton and supported among others by H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Compulsory sterilisation of certain classes of individuals was undertaken by thirty states in America between 1907 and 1963. Only the full realisation of the scale of the Nazi genocide finally rendered such programmes unacceptable.

  In Germany the escalation was almost seamless, beginning with the compulsory sterilisation of unwanted types, then the killing of ‘impaired children’ in hospitals, then the killing of ‘impaired’ adults (the mentally and physically handicapped) in special centres by carbon monoxide gas, then the extension of this to the concentration and extermination camps. The programme was carried out, throughout, by doctors and psychiatrists, only a handful of whom objected. It was eventually halted in August 1941 because of protests, largely from the Churches.16

  Reading the vast literature on what Claudia Koonz calls ‘the Nazi conscience’, the rationalisations Nazis gave for what they were doing, what is striking is not only the specific ideas of social Darwinism – the strong eliminate the weak, the Aryan race must be protected against pollution – but the overwhelming sense of the authority of science, whatever the science. You had to say no more than that the Jews (or the gypsies or the Poles) were a cancer in the body of Germany and therefore needed surgical removal, and consciences were stilled, as if science had taken the place of revelation and could not be questioned. Here, for example, is Konrad Lorenz, a Nazi Party member who subsequently received the Nobel Prize for his work on animal experimentation, writing in 1940:

  It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today … In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organisation; otherwise, humanity would, for lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.17

  The language is calm, unemotional, matter-of-fact. ‘Hygiene’, ‘degenerative phenomena’, a self-evident ‘must’, and the simple implication: we must annihilate or we will be annihilated (by mentally defective children and so on).

  To survive at Auschwitz, Primo Levi had to pass a test qualifying him, as a scientist, to work at a nearby chemical factory. The examination was conducted by a Doktor Engineer Pannwitz. This is how Levi describes it:

  Pannwitz is tall, thin and blond, with the kind of hair, eyes and nose that every German is supposed to have. He is seated menacingly behind an elaborate desk. And I, Häftling 174517, I stand in his office, which is a real office, neat and clean, with everything in order, feeling as if I would soil anything I touched.

  When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me.

  Since that day, I have thought about Doktor Pannwitz many times and in many different ways. I have often wondered about the inner workings of this man. What did he do with his time when he was not producing polymers in a chemistry lab, when he let his imagination wander beyond the reaches of Indo-Germanic consciousness? Above all, I wanted to meet him again, now that I was free, not out of revenge, but to satisfy my curiosity about the human soul.

  Because the look he gave me was not the way one man looks at another. If I could fully explain the nature of that look – it was as if through the glass of an aquarium directed at some creature belonging to a different world – I would be able to explain the great madness of the Third Reich, down to its very core.

  Everything we thought and said about the Germans took shape in that one moment. The brain commanding those blue eyes and manicured hands clearly said: ‘This thing standing before me obviously belongs to a species that
must be eliminated. But with this particular example, it is worth making sure that he has nothing we can use before we can get rid of him.’18

  Knowing what happened in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao and in Germany under Hitler is essential to moral literacy in the twenty-first century. These were programmes carried out under the influence of ideas produced by Western intellectuals in the nineteenth century to fill the vacuum left by a widespread loss of faith in God and religion.

  My point is not to argue that secular schemes of salvation are worse than religious ones. Such arguments are unworthy of serious minds. Religions, including the Abrahamic monotheisms, have done harm, while science and technology have, on the whole, done immense good. The point of this chapter is simply to note how fragile is the concept of human dignity, and how easily it can be lost in the course of scientific thinking.

  Demoralisation and Dangerous Ideas

  To repeat: no blame can be levelled at Marx, Darwin and Freud for what others made of their ideas. Yet they were inherently dangerous ideas. Why?

  First, there is something intrinsically dehumanising in the left-brain mentality. The scientific mind lives in detachment, analysis, the breaking down of wholes to their component parts. The focus is not on the particular – this man, that woman, this child – but on the universal. Science per se has no space for empathy or fellow feeling. None of this is to say that scientists are not compassionate and loving human beings: surely they are. But when science is worshipped and religion dethroned, then a certain decision has been made to set aside human feelings for the sake of something higher, nobler, larger. From there it is a short distance to hell.

  Second, as Nietzsche rightly asked: ‘Why morality at all, when life, nature, history are “non-moral”?’19 There is no morality in nature. No good, right, duty or obligation are written into the fabric of things. There is no way of inferring from how things are to how things ought to be. The Talmud says that had God not revealed the commandments, ‘we could have learned modesty from the cat, industry from the ant, marital fidelity from the dove, and good manners from the rooster’.20 But equally we could have learned savagery from the lion, pitilessness from the wolf and venom from the viper.

  Every civilisation has a way of identifying and preempting disastrous patterns of behaviour, some way of establishing boundaries, of saying, ‘Thou shalt not.’ In mythological societies the work is done by the concept of taboo. In the Judeo-Christian heritage there is the divine command. There are certain things you do not do, whatever the consequences. That is what was lost in the modern age. Hayek called it ‘the fatal conceit’: that we know better than our ancestors, that we can calculate the consequences better than them, circumvent the prohibitions they observed, and achieve what they did not achieve.21

  By undermining the classic conceptions of humanity, Marxist, Darwinian and Freudian accounts tragically removed the great constraints on human behaviour. They did this in different ways, but all three subverted the force of the ‘Thou shalt not’. When nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacrilegious. When there is no Judge, there is no justice. There is only effectiveness and the will to power.

  There is a third point no less significant. Science cannot, in and of itself, give an account of human dignity, because dignity is based on human freedom. From the outset, the Hebrew Bible speaks of a free God, not constrained by nature, who, creating man in his own image, grants him that same freedom, commanding him, not programming him, to do good. The entire biblical project, from beginning to end, is about how to honour that freedom in personal relationships, families, communities and nations. Biblical morality is the morality of freedom, its politics are the politics of freedom, and its theology is the theology of freedom.

  Freedom is a concept that lies outside the scope of science. Science cannot locate freedom, because its world is one of causal relationships. A stone is not free to fall or not to fall. Lightning does not choose when and where to strike. A scientific law is one that links one physical phenomenon to another without the intervention of will and choice. To the extent that there is a science of human behaviour, to that extent there is an implicit denial of the freedom of human behaviour. That is precisely what Spinoza, Marx and Freud were arguing, that freedom is an illusion. But if freedom is an illusion, then so is the human dignity based on that freedom. Science cannot but deconsecrate the human person, thereby opening the gate to a possible desecration.

  We are free. We know that as surely as we know anything. We know what it is to choose between alternatives, weigh the options, calculate the consequences, consult our conscience, ask the advice of others and so on. Yet throughout history human beings have found almost endless ways of denying choice. It wasn’t me, it was the will of the gods, or the influence of the stars, or malicious spirits, or fortuna, luck or happenstance. It was the way we were brought up, or the influence of friends, or economic circumstance, or genetic endowment. Denial of freedom goes all the way back to the first couple in the Garden of Eden. Confronted with their sin, Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. Our excuses become more sophisticated over time, but they remain just that, excuses.

  The problem of free will has existed for close to twenty-five centuries. Plato discussed it. So did Aristotle. Paul spoke about it with great feeling in the epistle to the Romans. One of the earliest statements occurs in the fourth chapter of Genesis. God senses that Cain is angry and is about to commit a great crime. He warns him, telling him that though he is in the grip of strong emotion, he can control it:

  Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it.’ (Genesis 4:6–7)

  We can rephrase this a little more technically nowadays. Cain is experiencing a rush of emotion to the amygdala, the so-called reptile brain with its fight or flight reactions, including anger. God is urging him to use his prefrontal cortex, more rational and deliberative, capable of thinking beyond the immediacy of me, here, now. Neuroscience has shown us where in the brain the battle for freedom is fought, but it has not shown us freedom itself, which we can know only introspectively from within.

  The dangers implicit in the scientisation of the human person have not disappeared. They have reappeared in new forms. One is the intensive use of psychotropic drugs like Ritalin to control moods and behaviour. It is not that there is something inherently wrong in the use of drugs to treat conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but there should be general concern at the risk of viewing ever larger areas of the emotional life as conditions to be treated rather than responses to be cultivated as part of moral and ethical self-control.

  To the extent that we medicalise human behaviour, to that extent we deny freedom and responsibility. One can foresee a time when the whole idea becomes problematic. When that happens, criminal justice – laws, courts, trials and punishment – will cease to make sense, and instead law-breakers will be treated as they were for a period in the 1940s and early 1950s through a form of brain surgery known as lobotomy: justice will disappear and in its place will come social control. A brave new world along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s novel of that name, in which people no longer strive, aspire or love but are kept permanently pacified by mind-altering drugs and virtual experiences, is entirely possible even now. What holds us back is the conviction that we are free, that the happiness we make is worth more than a drug-induced serotonin-stimulated ecstasy.22 But there is no guarantee that we will always feel this way.

  If human beings are mere organisms like any other, with nothing to distinguish them from the animals, then there is nothing whatever to justify the idea that we should treat them as ends rather than as means. The supreme irony of contemporary secular ethics is that humans are treated as possessors of rights because they have autonomy, the ability to choose, while at the same time evolutionary psychology and neuroscience
are undermining the very idea that we freely choose anything at all. The contradiction at the heart of this secularised view of humanity cannot be sustained for ever.23

  It is no accident that freedom occupies a central place in the Hebrew Bible but only a tenuous place in the annals of science. The relationship of soul to body, or mind to brain, is precisely analogous to the relationship of God to the physical universe. If there is only a physical universe, there is only brain, not mind, and there is only the universe, not God. The non-existence of God and the non-existence of human freedom go hand in hand.

  The assertion of freedom as against its ever-present, ever-changing denials is what marks Abrahamic monotheism as a distinctive philosophy. We are free. We are choosing animals. ‘I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life’ (Deuteronomy 30:19). Life is choice. In that fact lies our dignity. If we have no freedom, what makes us different from the animals we kill for our own ends, sometimes even for sport? What makes us persons, not things? If we deny freedom in theory, eventually we will lose it in practice, as happened in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and as may yet happen in new and unforeseeable ways.

  For the sake of human dignity, science must be accompanied by another voice. Not in opposition to science, but as the humanising voice of what once we called the soul. There is no greater defence of human dignity than the phrase from the first chapter of the Bible that dared to call the human being ‘the image of God’.

  7

  The Politics of Freedom

  God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?

  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, p. 237