The radical variants (such as Calvinists, Presbyterians, and Huguenots) were as uncompromising in their rejection of central and human authority as in their view of religion. Man proposes, God disposes: according to the dogma of predestination, every individual’s fate was predetermined by the Almighty. You did not know what God had in store for you; all you could do was to live a sober, God-fearing life, living by the ‘sweat of your brow’. Worldly success could be a mark of God’s grace, and you should not therefore derive pleasure from it. On the contrary, it was merely an incitement to work harder. Profits had, above all, to be reinvested to make more profits. Amsterdam became the epicentre of this process, while the Dutch East India Company became the first multinational with clear political powers. Max Weber explored this phenomenon at the beginning of the previous century, in Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The roots of our economy lie in our religion.
Protestantism brought about a shift towards a religious individualism that refused to bend the knee to worldly authority. This did not mean that strict morals were a thing of the past. Quite the contrary, in fact. A priest might easily be bribed, but God saw everything, and his judgement could not be escaped. More than ever, the goal was to lead a virtuous life under the all-seeing eye of a strict God. The Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was a religious meritocracy, with pay-by-performance and an ultimate assessment interview in the hereafter. Poverty and failure could not be attributed to misfortune or chance, but betrayed religious and moral shortcomings. Conversely, success and wealth testified to God’s blessing on one’s personal efforts. The blend of religion and enterprise created an ethos of thrift and sheer hard work: the recipe for the Golden Age.
The rejection of Papist central authority laid the foundations for an open society, in which new ideas were welcome even if — perhaps especially if — they were opposed elsewhere. It is hard to think of a controversial thinker from that period (the late 16th and 17th centuries) who did not flee to Amsterdam and publish his work there. Moreover, the findings of these scholars were quickly put to practical use, which in turn benefited trade.
As long as the dawning of science did not interfere too much with religion, no one objected. Indeed, there was a considerable degree of affinity. Just as the Calvinists approached God directly, scientists cross-examined nature directly. Experiments and mathematical proofs showed the way within a school of thought that took reason as its guide.
The self-discipline that characterised both Calvinists and the scientists of that time had the effect of removing the human factor from both science and religion. Religion was purged of anthropological projection, just as science was purged of passion: exit the bearded figure in the sky, and enter the scientist as a cool, rational machine. Self-denial was required in both cases, in the interests of attaining truly objective knowledge or divine truth. The only ‘self-knowledge’ common to both science and religion was the conclusion that human nature is bad — being impure, contaminated, and subjective.
From then on, acting ethically became associated with ‘self-conquest’, a concept that still resonates today. We all want to behave well, but the flesh is weak, so we have to resist it, which means resisting ourselves. The more strictly and consistently we do this, the more moral we are; a ‘self’-conquest that takes no effort doesn’t count. Being virtuous must hurt. The pathogenic effect of this approach to ethics would not become clear until the discoveries of Freud.
Inner conflict, self-denial, and transcendence
Even a cursory comparison with Graeco-Roman morality shows what major changes Christianity has wrought in the way we think about ourselves. Ancient ethics is all about habits, character, and self-realisation. Man has an innate, inner goal: excellence, which is achieved through self-care leading to self-control. The best leader is the individual with the most self-knowledge. Pride invariably goes before a fall, and its negative consequences aren’t confined to the individual, but extend to the community. Conversely, self-care benefits the community as well as the individual.
From a Christian point of view, ethics is part of the relationship between a person and something that transcends him or her — that is, God. Human nature is even regarded as inherently evil, so that self-denial is necessary to do good, to approach the divine. In any case, the latter is only possible in the hereafter; life in this vale of tears is fleeting, and serves merely as a means of acquiring God’s grace. Every mortal lives in constant fear, and must continually consult his or her conscience. The result is inner conflict, a never-ending battle with the self, often culminating in penitence and punishment, in which it is mainly the body that has to pay. There’s no guarantee of salvation, even for those who persevere in their efforts through work and prayer (ora et labora); but there is a strong incentive, because on the Day of Judgement, accounts will have to be settled. Efforts of this kind are not made to benefit the community, because a believer’s only obligation is towards God.
The double shift in thinking brought about by Christianity persists today and has now become part of our identity. First, we have come to perceive ethics and morality as outside ourselves, and as in conflict with our ‘natural’ impulses — meaning, of course, that natural impulses are bad. Second, we are convinced that we are accountable to a higher being, an omnipotent agency that watches us all the time. As a result, we have to devise all kinds of escape routes, and we would actually prefer to eliminate that omnipotent agency altogether.
At the same time, we have given a new twist to the conviction that humanity is inherently evil, replacing the concept of original sin with equally vague socio-biological notions of man as a wolf for his fellow man, selfish genes, et cetera. Thus, without realising it, we are espousing the ancient Greek view that ethics is innate — albeit with the opposite conclusion: people are inherently bad and need to have this evil whipped out of them during their upbringing. No wonder that we see ethics and identity as two separate things; inasmuch as we question human nature, the answer tends to be pessimistic.
Time for a thought experiment. Let us bring Aristotle back to life and confront him with this changed view of ethics and identity. He will undoubtedly tear out his grey hair and lament the loss of norms and values. To him, the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity will be dangerous novelties; he will attribute our inner conflict to a lack of self-knowledge, and regard self-denial as a disorder. He will then write a new treatise, the Ethica Romana Decadentia, whose central tenet is that modern humanity does not understand the essence of human nature. What he would fail to grasp is that it is not the loss of norms and values that is at issue, but a change of identity based on a broader social evolution, whereby different norms and values have become part of an identity with which he, as an ancient Greek, cannot identify.
Christianity introduced yet another important change that is still part of our identity today, and that we may soon come to regret. God, as Supreme Being, is enthroned in Heaven. Beneath Him are the angels; on Earth, men are the closest to Him of all his creations. Consequently, men have dominion over the rest of creation, starting with women. More importantly, God is above and therefore outside nature. The material universe, the world of the body, is deemed unimportant. Only the spiritual counts, the world of the soul. This is the aspect of transcendence to which I referred earlier. Two thousand years of Christianity has imprinted this conviction so strongly that we are incapable of reasoning in terms of immanence, of seeing ourselves as part of the wider natural world.
Ton Lemaire’s book De val van Prometheus (The Fall of Prometheus) has convinced me of the importance of this realisation. A transcendent religion gives believers carte blanche to exploit the natural world as they see fit: they are above and outside it, and, anyway, animals don’t have a soul (or, in the more modern scientific gloss, aren’t able to reason). Inanimate objects such as earth, air, and water are even less important. An immanent religion, by contrast, perceives both th
e divine and human not as ‘above’ but as ‘in’ things, as part of a larger whole. Which means that you should think twice before killing animals, felling forests, or polluting rivers.
Not my problem, thinks the modern unbeliever, soothing his conscience with organic carrots. Oh no? These days, we talk about ‘the environment’, the need to do something about ‘the environment’, the fact that we are destroying ‘the environment’ — that is, something external to us, which starts about four metres outside our front doors. For an ancient Greek this would have been the ultimate example of hubris: the idea that we, as humans, stand outside, and even above nature, and that we could destroy it. We find it impossible to shed that transcendent reasoning, and the majority of us are unable to perceive the logic of immanence, however obvious. Homo sapiens is very much part of the natural world, and the punishment for our hubris is that we will make that world unliveable for ourselves — though ‘the environment’ will probably manage all right in future without us.
This brings me to a point in history where there was a significant changing of the guard. In the latter half of the 20th century, religion lost its moral authority, and the torch passed to science. The optimistic thinking is that this shift has enabled a new identity to be forged, with different norms and values, based on reason.
THREE
THE PERFECTIBLE INDIVIDUAL
Despite the separation of church and state, society was deeply religious until late in the 20th century. The resultant identity testified to internal conflict (‘Am I leading my life properly?’), and individuals chafed under the supervision of an authority that was still external (‘God sees you!’), as well as extremely hostile to the body and to women. It would take until the 1960s or 1970s before the impact of modern science was felt — the culmination of a long process that started when the Enlightenment dealt the deathblow to a core tenet of Christianity: immutability. According to the Bible, everything had been created by God, change was not part of the picture, salvation was only possible in the hereafter, and anyone who dared to doubt was guilty of superbia, pride. Hadn’t that been the sin for which God had cast a third of the angels into hell — angels whose rebellion had been led by Lucifer, ‘the bearer of light’ — proof positive of the diabolic nature of the Enlightenment?
The rejection of the Christian worldview is generally traced back to the study of the cosmos by scientists like Newton and Kepler. The role played by geologists is less well known. Rather appropriately, the most serious challenge to religion didn’t come from the higher spheres of cosmology, but from the subterranean vaults of hell — in this instance, from the first geologists. Around 1800, the fossils thrown up by major construction-works led to a growing conviction that the Earth had once looked very different — for instance, with oceans where there were now mountains. On his voyage in the Beagle, Darwin took with him Principles of Geology by the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. The discovery of fossils sparked fossil mania in Britain. Anybody who was anybody took up the new hobby of fossil hunting, and every noble home boasted a cabinet in which the proud owner displayed his or her collection. The problem was that these objects upset the notion of an immutable natural world — and that, of course, didn’t tie in with the rigidly ordered Scala Naturae, the product of God’s one-off working week.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first to formulate a coherent theory of evolution, but scarcely any notice was taken of him. Anglo-Saxon scholars and scientists were none too keen on the French, even back then, and the ruling classes were terrified that revolutionary notions might cross the Channel, along with guillotines and sans-culottes. Evolution? It might give people ideas! It took another half-century before Darwin published his beautifully argued theory, causing the heavenly gates to cave in at long last. Ironically, the final sledgehammer blows were dealt by an obscure eastern European monk, Gregor Mendel, the significance of whose experiments was only to be fully realised at the beginning of the 20th century. Inherited characteristics are passed on by the parents; each generation represents a new combination, and, every so often, unforeseen changes — mutations — take place. Evolution means change.
This was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most important upheaval in the intellectual history of the West: the idea that living beings, and therefore humans, can change. The consequences of this realisation were enormous, and the questions it raised were far from trifling. It meant that there was no such thing as fixed identity. But then what about those norms and values? And, much more importantly, what about that ‘natural order’? Did this mean that people didn’t have to stay in their allotted place in the social hierarchy? That societies, too, could change and thus evolve? And could we steer these changes? Could we even improve our lot, bring about progress? Was man perfectible? Could society be engineered?
Utopia: an engineered society
Long before Darwin, religious wars had made it abundantly clear that a social order couldn’t be exclusively belief-based. Thomas Hobbes took this conclusion to its logical extension, proposing in Leviathan (1651) a secular society under the rule of an absolute sovereign who was in turn bound by a social contract. If that failed, humanity would revert to its ‘natural state’, which Hobbes pictured in bleak terms. In his vision, religion is a private affair, and society is founded on reason, under the tight reins of a central authority. Note that Hobbes does not go much further than a political translation of religious reasoning. He does not abandon the underlying premise that humans are bad and need to be controlled by a higher power.
The key question is whether we have we moved on since then. Do we take the idea of mutability seriously? At first sight, this appears to be the case. There have been quite a few proposals for an ideal society in which the ideal person could be nurtured. We call this ‘utopian’, a word whose etymology already rings warning bells. The more optimistic interpretation is that it derives from the Greek εὖ (‘good’ or ‘well’) and τόπος (‘place’), and therefore means ‘good place’; but another possibility is that it comes from οὐ (‘not’) and τόπος, and so means ‘no place’ — that is, an impossible state.
The word ‘utopia’ was coined in 1516 by Thomas More, in his eponymous book describing the ideal state, written in response to the crisis that was then tearing English society apart. Utopian literature breaks down into two different types: ideological proposals for a better society, and warnings of the dangers of such ideological paradises. The latter are categorised as dystopian (from ‘bad place’), and famously include Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell). The fact that both books assign a central place to psychology shows ominous prescience.
The optimistic concept of utopia was made possible by a twofold interpretation of the notion of mutability. Change means progress, and progress can also be engineered.
Progress
If you ask where this idea comes from, people tend to frown. Surely, progress has always been a concept? We can scarcely conceive that until late into the Renaissance, the opposite — the unchanging nature of all things — was universally assumed to be the case. Even the father of modern botany, Carl Linnaeus, was convinced that all plants had always existed and would always continue to exist; his only task was to systematically chart God’s work. Our thinking has undergone a sea change: nothing is fixed; everything is constantly evolving, and improving as it does so. The development that we go through individually — from little to big, from illiterate to educated — is reflected at the level of society (‘primitive’ versus ‘highly developed’ societies).
It’s such a natural assumption that we hardly ever pause to consider it. Note that even the word ‘pause’ has become somewhat tainted: a lack of motion implies stagnation. The main argument for the view that evolution equals progress is that our quality of life has improved compared to that of our ancestors. Life in the West has unquestionably become a lot more pleasant, but we tend to lose sight of the fact that this is al
most entirely due to technological advances. Moreover, we prefer not to dwell on the fact that this progress is enjoyed by a small portion of the world’s population at the expense of the rest, and at the cost of incalculable ecological damage.
Progress is not an unequivocal concept, and even discussion of the purely biological aspect of evolutionary theory is dogged by misunderstandings. First, evolution does not by definition mean progress, and ‘fittest’ is not the same thing as ‘most successful’. Darwin discovered that the extent to which organisms are fitted to their surroundings determines the number of their progeny. A good match or ‘fit’ between a specific life form and a specific environment results from a combination of chance mutations and environmental changes. If we dub this ‘success’, this says more about us than about biology. The most important lesson that evolutionary history teaches us is that the direction taken by evolution is random, unpredictable, and invariably temporary. Progress is a moral judgement by a creature that loves to regard itself in the mirror.
A second argument equating evolution with progress is also put forward in the name of Darwin. Current life forms are said to be much more ‘advanced’ than original forms. Creatures are classified into ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ species, with the reptiles crawling along in the lower regions, while we stand proudly upright at the top of the ladder. We think we see a sped-up version of this process during embryonic development, from a unicellular organism to a multicellular organism, from tadpole to little ape — until our unsurpassed self emerges in its full glory. A popular depiction of Darwin’s evolutionary theory shows a series of figures, starting with a hunched, hairy, sloping-browed apeman, and culminating in a proudly upright Übermensch (sporting a laptop, in some versions). But that’s scientifically proven, surely? Well, no; it’s nothing more than a variation of the Scala Naturae, based on the same notion of transcendence (humans, here represented by a Caucasian male, standing above the rest). Beyond the highest rung of the ladder, a penthouse awaits, an earthly variant of the heavenly paradise where we can finally become what we originally were — namely, the image of God.
What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society Page 5
