This is Chapter 9 from David Hay’s book Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, published in London by Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006. ISBN 0-232-53637-0; and in Philadelphia by Templeton Press in 2007. ISBN-10: 1599471140; ISBN-13: 978-1599471143.
See also David Hay’s little book Why Spirituality is Difficult for Westerners, published by Imprint Academic in 2007, ISBN-10: 1845400488; ISBN-13: 978-1845400484
"Greed is good."
Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street (1987)[i]
Billboard advertising Lynx deodorant, (2005)[ii]
"We have to fight uphill to rediscover the obvious, to counteract the layers of suppression of the modern moral consciousness. It’s a difficult thing to do."
Charles Taylor Sources of the Self [iii]
Not too long ago I spent several weeks taking part in a discussion forum on the Internet, run by the London based Independent newspaper. One of the topics regularly debated was the plausibility of religious belief. Many of the participants were critical of religion, so I decided to submit the following question, “Why do Europeans find religion so difficult?” For some people this was like waving a red rag to a bull. A small proportion of the replies were of the following type:
“As an adult with a job and a free thinking mind I have more important things to do than read through the babblings of a religiously impaired person such as yourself.”
Or,
“I really can’t see what all this crap or worshipping some ineffable being is about. Talking to people who believe in god, any of them, is like talking to children.”
There were some people who also included at least a cursory reason for their annoyance. For example:
“It is a very straightforward matter to spot the primitive, infantile, pathetic mumbo-jumbo claims of religious ideologies of all kinds. How they offend so gravely against the well-attested findings of modern science and all good sense.”
“Political thinkers from Machiavelli to Marx have seen religion as a means of control, and rightly so, since social control is actually the very essence of what any organised religion is.”
“Difficult? Superfluous and damaging. Those are the words I would use for religion. There is not a religion in this world that does not write its history in the blood of innocent people”
And so on.
Now I know that the form of my question was provocative. Also, since those taking part in the forum had pseudonyms, there was no restraint upon people who enjoy unloading their anger anonymously. Nevertheless it seemed to me that the annoyance my question evoked was in itself a vivid symptom of the problem I was investigating. Religion is difficult for many people in our culture because (they say) it conflicts with the findings of science, because it is no more than a concealed means of social control and furthermore is a major source of violence and bloodshed.
These opinions are not new in Europe. In 1657 Blaise Pascal wrote as the opening aphorism of his notes for an apology for the Christian religion, later published as the Pensées:
“Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it may be true.”
Most historians of religion date the first emergence of widespread religious scepticism in Europe to the centuries surrounding the period when Pascal was writing, that is, the 16th and 17th centuries. But there is more to my curiosity. The complaints of my correspondents are familiar enough, and to a degree they are valid. Religion has been the cause of bloodshed; it has been used as a form of social control and has been in conflict with science. These things are true of religion well beyond the bounds of Europe or Christianity. Yet the intense religious doubt that emerged in European culture is distinctive. Europeans seem to have invented a very extreme form of religious scepticism - in a way that appears not to have been duplicated in any other culture.[iv] That is a sweeping claim and my intention is to justify it by unpacking some of the factors lying behind the rise of Individualism and, via its undermining of religion, its concomitant effect on spirituality.
The social destruction of spirituality
Individualism has extremely complex roots in history[v] and since we Westerners are ourselves immersed in this history its individualistic assumptions are likely to be hidden from us, unless we specifically look for them. When we do look closely it is possible to pick out four major steps in the construction of Individualism. It is important to recognize that each of these steps has an ambivalent quality, that is to say, each is accompanied by both gains and losses for our humanity. Individualism is not the same thing as individuality, and the difference will become clear later in this chapter. For the moment it is sufficient to say that our individuality is what makes us unique and note the two earlier stages that are essential for this uniqueness to emerge.
How I come to think of myself as ‘I’
Words leave no fossils in the rocks, so the question of when language first appeared in the genus Homo is problematic. If we make a conservative estimate and confine language to our own species, Homo sapiens, then it goes back to perhaps 200,000 years at maximum. If on the other hand it is argued that the skills necessary for the manufacture of stone tools imply being able to speak, then this might apply to an older human species, Homo habilis, whose fossil remains in East Africa have been dated to two million years ago or more.[vi] Either way, the effect of language on the construction of the self has been going on for a very long time.
Animals without language, although they are sensitive to their surroundings and relate to them in a knowing way, give at best only rather ambivalent indications of self-awareness.[vii] Whilst they quite clearly have a memory, they lack the verbal apparatus for reflecting upon their memories or for considering the fact of their own existence. Consequently they live almost entirely in the here-and-now of the immediate events around them, immersed in an unbroken continuum that includes themselves. The distinction between self and other, though it is acted out in the way animals manipulate their environment, is never clearly articulated. We saw in an earlier chapter that the same is true of young infants. Adult observers of infants’ behaviour can see quite easily that they operate in ways that implicitly recognize a distinction between self and other, as was remarkably shown in the work of Emese Nagy.[viii] Putting it grammatically, they discriminate behaviourally between subject and object, but have little or no conscious awareness of the difference between the two.
With the coming of language a radical change occurs and by the age of eighteen months any healthy toddler clearly and easily articulates the subject-object difference. The other job that language does is to provide a framework for memory and imagination. When we are able to name the things around us it makes them stand out for us in contrast to their surroundings and we can also reflect on them remotely, at other times and in other places.[ix] One of the most prominent objects that an infant learns about through language is its self, a fact that is drawn attention to constantly by the parents when they teach the baby to say ‘You’, ‘Me’ and ‘I’. The awareness of ‘I’ as an object of consciousness means that it can be thought about in the same way as any other object. ‘I’ begin to build up a set of memories and anticipations that make up a life history. I have become an individual. Nevertheless it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the process of individualisation is not done in isolation; it is always done in the context of a culture and in the company of others.
Literacy
Compared to the span of existence of the human species, literacy arrived almost yesterday. Most people for most of human history have been illiterate and this was true until little more than a century ago even in the industrialised West. For example in Britain it was not until the passing of W.E. Forster’s 1870 Education Act that a concerted effort was finally made to eliminate illiteracy (a task that is not yet complete). Human consciousness has therefore evolved over many millennia in the absence of the ability to read and write. So in a way literacy is a move out of the natural and universal human condition. As we shall see in a moment, that natural condition still largely restricts awareness to the immediacy of the here-and-now.
It is hard for those of us who are able to read to imagine what it feels like to be illiterate, but a remarkable piece of pioneering research in the first half of the 20th century allows us to have some insight. During the 1930s the Soviet government, under the leadership of Stalin, decreed the forced collectivisation of agriculture throughout the vast republic. The decree was combined with a vigorous effort to teach the peasantry to read and write because they needed to be literate if they were to be able to manage the complex work of the collective farms. A young psychologist at Moscow University, Alexander Luria, took the opportunity to study how the change affected hitherto illiterate peasants living in a group of remote mountain villages and pasturelands in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. These people were members of a primary oral culture, that is, they belonged to a community that had never been literate.
In summary, Luria [x] showed that, compared with people who could read and write, the thinking of illiterates is much more tied to the immediate situation (that is, the here-and-now) than to abstract reflections on the past and future. This meant that intellectual tasks which were elementary for literate people, for example simple classification, were difficult or impossible for them. In one of Luria’s experiments, semi-educated and only recently literate collective farm activists were easily able to sort skeins of wool in terms of category, shades of blue, red, yellow and so on. On the other hand illiterate peasant women who, as expert embroiderers, were perfectly well aware of subtle variations of colour, usually named the skeins concretely, with terms like ‘pig’s dung’, ‘a lot of water’, ‘cotton in bloom’, ‘rotten teeth’. When asked to classify the colours into groups, for example shades of brown, the women would say things like ‘It can’t be done, they’re not at all alike; this is like calf’s dung, this is like a peach.’
Luria tested illiterate men on their ability to complete simple syllogisms. One sequence went like this: In the North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the North. What colour are the bears there? Most of the men were unable to give the correct answer, saying things like, ‘How should I know, I’ve never been to the North. I’ve seen a black bear.’ More crucially, people also seemed not to have much conception of themselves as individuals. For example when asked questions such as ‘What sort of person would you say you were?’ illiterates were unable to describe themselves and suggested to Luria and his assistants that they should ask some else to answer for them.
Luria realized that such responses were not due to lack of intelligence, but to the structure imposed on thought by illiteracy. Literacy continues the process of individualisation initiated by the ability to speak, but with much greater impact. Literacy extends memory, permits us to classify and to generalize and gives us the ability to move in our imagination out of the concrete here-and-now and into lengthy abstraction. Above all, literacy opens the possibility of a private world and the ability to have a uniquely personal point of view, limited only by the size of one’s library. In an important sense, literacy opens the door to personal freedom.
The social destruction of spirituality.
Complex modern society would be unable to operate without the skills that become possible with the ability to read and write. But the construction of a vast private world also potentially creates a blindness to our relationship with the here-and-now. Along with this loss there is the likelihood of a deterioration in our immediate sense of belonging to and being continuous with the surrounding community. In those traditional religious societies that are literate (Jews, Christians and Muslims are after all, ‘People of the Book’) this weakness is recognized and strategies have been created to counteract the loss of immediacy. Each of these cultures has developed a highly sophisticated set of practical exercises that help the believer to enter more and more deeply into awareness of the here-and-now. I mean of course the skills of contemplative prayer (raising the heart and mind to God now, in this moment) or silent meditation (for example maintaining awareness of the act of breathing in and out as it happens). These practices are undertaken by the faithful as a structured routine, attended to several times each day. Ultimately the aim is to remain in this state of alertness permanently, or as St Paul put it, to pray without ceasing.
What happens to consciousness though, when these strategies for staying in touch with immediacy are largely ignored, or abandoned altogether, as is more often than not the case in contemporary Western society? This constitutes the third step towards individualism. As literacy becomes more and more widespread it is more difficult, less natural, for people to enter the here-and-now awareness that is commonplace amongst members of primary oral cultures.[xi] One effect on those who are highly literate is the increasing probability that they will acquire a disembodied, theoretical consciousness of the self, withdrawn from engagement in the surrounding environment.
The legacy in academic circles, perhaps especially in the field of empirical science in which I was educated, is an admiration for detached objectivity as a necessary professional stance. Like every other beginner in the laboratory, I learned that the inconstant and emotionally labile ‘me’ never puts water in a test tube. In writing up experiments ‘it was noted’ that ‘water was placed in a test tube’ by an abstract, clinically detached being who had nothing to do with the scruffy bunch of schoolboys occupying the classroom. Taken far enough, this sort of training can include a distancing from other people and a loss of awareness of ones own emotional state. Intellectuals are notorious for ‘living in their heads’, that is, cut off from what is going on below the neck, sometimes to the detriment of their health.[xii]
No doubt this kind of objectivity is important in scientific research, but it is part of a much larger social movement. Many suggestions have been made about both the timing and the historical and political aspects of this growing sense of personal isolation. The Nineteenth Century Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, was one of the first to suggest a specific period in which individualism began to become dominant in European history. In his pioneering study The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy he identified the emergence of the ‘free person’ as occurring first in Italy, pre-eminently in renaissance Florence. At the same time Burckhardt recognised that associated with this detachment was the appearance of a complementary private subjectivity, in that people recognized themselves as ‘spiritual individuals.’ We might guess that the process was not unlike the shift towards subjectivity witnessed by Alexander Luria amongst newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan.
Another suggested source of individualism is the Protestant branch of the Christian religion. The sociologist Max Weber claimed that Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist form, created an inner isolation in the believer sufficiently powerful to change the entire economic and political structure of the countries of the Reformation during the 16th century. This was brought about by John Calvin’s emphasis on the doctrine of predestination, which states that God has determined in advance the eternal destiny of every human being; whether they will go to heaven or hell. Since this has been decided from all eternity and God’s will is immutable, there is nothing that someone predestined to hell can do about it, for example by leading a virtuous life. Furthermore no one can be sure whether they are one of the ‘elect’ or one of the ‘reprobate’. Weber comments that anyone who takes this belief seriously is faced with an unprecedented inner loneliness:
"No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the word of God only in his own heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments had been ordained by God for the increase of His glory, and must hence be scrupulously observed, they are not a means to the attainment of grace, but only the subjective externa subsidia of faith. No Church, for though it was held that extra ecclesiam nulla salus in the sense that whoever kept away from the true Church could never belong to God’s chosen band, nevertheless the membership of the external Church included the doomed…… Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the elect ……"[xiii].
The mere appearance of goodness is no guarantee, since anyone can make a public pretence of virtue whilst being inwardly corrupt. Therefore a robust doctrine of predestination encourages not only endless self-questioning, as Weber remarked, but also suspicion of the motives of others. In view of Calvin’s strong belief in community and his setting up of a theocratic state in Geneva, it is ironic that his most famous doctrine had the unintended consequence of encouraging such alienation. A belief in predestination was not limited to Calvinism; it also appeared in certain 17th century forms of Catholicism, especially Jansenism.[xiv] In his essay Of Charity and Self Love written in 1674 Pierre Nicole, Jansenist priest and friend of Blaise Pascal explains how impersonation of virtue can be so accurate that it deceives everyone; hence it is not wise to trust anyone. It is deeply incongruous that a religious doctrine should have the effect of encouraging the erosion of the relational consciousness that underpins spirituality.
The idea of ‘man alone’ also gained currency in 17th century Europe through the influence of the two dominant and contrasting philosophical perspectives of that period. The archetypal representatives are the idealist René Descartes and the materialist Thomas Hobbes. In the case of Descartes, his decision to make the Cogito (Descartes’ famous conclusion, ‘I think, therefore I am’) the rock on which to build his philosophy had a devastating effect on the plausibility of relational consciousness. In the words of the Scottish 20th century philosopher John Macmurray,
"..... the adoption of the ‘I think’ as the centre of reference and starting-point of [....] philosophy makes it formally impossible to do justice to religious experience. For thought is inherently private; and any philosophy which takes its stand on the primacy of thought, which defines the Self as the Thinker, is committed formally to an extreme logical individualism. It is necessarily egocentric.[xv]"
At the other end of the scale, Thomas Hobbes’ materialism was probably even more influential than Descartes’ philosophy in promoting individualism. Hobbes was born in 1588 and lived through what historians see as one of the most violent periods of turmoil in European history. In particular the Thirty Years War ravaged the continent throughout his early adult life. It is perhaps no surprise that he had a sceptical attitude towards the possibility of human benevolence. Most scholars believe he was a secret atheist at a time when publicly declared atheism would put a person in considerable personal danger.[xvi]
His materialist interpretation of human nature led him to the view that in the state of nature life is a warfare of all against all. If we cooperate with other people it is only because we see these interactions as in our interest (in this sense he was a precursor of modern biological theorists of reciprocal altruism and kin selection).[xvii] His assumption that each of us is in a struggle for power against everyone else is based on a materialist metaphysics stating that ‘minds never meet, that ideas are never really shared and that each of us is always and finally isolated from every other individual’.[xviii] According to his most celebrated aphorism, life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and short’.
People who have not read Hobbes are not always aware of the extreme violence he uses to describe the natural state of human society – totally at odds with the insights provided by relational consciousness. Thus,
"All men in the state of nature have a desire and will to hurt."[xix]
In his master-work Leviathan, Hobbes makes explicit the brutality that people unleash upon each other in such a state:
"I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death……. The way of one Competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repell the other."[xx]
Here there is no law:
"To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place….. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it."[xxi]
Hence the need for Leviathan, a Sovereign to subdue the anarchy and who himself gains that position through acts of terror or outright warfare:
"The attaining to this Soveraigne Power, is by two ways. One, by Natural force; as when a man maketh his children to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by warre subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition."[xxii]
After my reference in a previous chapter to modern research on the tender relationship between mother and child at birth, it is apposite to note that one critical contemporary of Hobbes said that he,
"….. might as well tell us in plain termes, that all the obligation which a child hath to a parent, is because he did not take him by the heels and knock out his braines against the walls, so soon as he was born."[xxiii]
Individualism as the underpinning of the market economy.
The unbridled savagery that Hobbes loads onto human nature is of much more than antiquarian interest. The Canadian economic historian Brough Macpherson, one of the most eminent students of liberal democratic theory, asserted that Hobbes’ account of society continues to dictate the organisation of the modern bureaucratic state. It is based, in Macpherson’s phrase, on the doctrine of ‘possessive individualism’.[xxiv] The picture of human beings that Hobbes came up with was not simply the result of his free ranging scholarly reflection. It was conditioned by the social order in which Hobbes was living; that is to say, 17th century bourgeois society at the point where market forces first began to take on a dominant role. This is the fourth and most crucial step in the construction of European individualism.
Selfishness was to come to be seen as not merely acceptable, but a necessary expedient in the search for economic and political stability. The impassioned speech on behalf of greed as good by the reptilian financier Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street takes its justification from this belief. In his essay The Passions and the Interests,[xxv] the economic historian Albert Hirschman meditates on the remarkable metamorphosis of the mediaeval sin of avarice into a necessary economic virtue. Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed at the beginning of the 14th century, had envisioned sins of avarice as sufficient to consign their perpetrator to the fourth level of Hell. By the end of the 18th century, avarice had come to be seen by economists as the pivot of the market.
Hirschman traces the evolution of meaning in the first place to,
"…… a feeling [that] arose in the Renaissance and became firm conviction during the seventeenth century that moralizing philosophy and religious precept could no longer be trusted with restraining the destructive passions of men."[xxvi]
Hobbes’ initial solution, the advocacy of the straightforward repression of uncontrolled passion, came to be seen as inadequate. His pessimism about human motivation was not sufficiently responded to by the mere existence of a sovereign power. Who can predict if the sovereign will truly guard the peace of society, when in reality he may himself be a cruel despot, heedless of the cries of the oppressed, or merely weak?
According to Hirschman, the answer that emerged was to harness one of the passions against the others. The key to this solution, according to a whole series of 17th and 18th century thinkers, was the unquenchable desire for personal gain. The term that came to be used for this particular lust for possessions and which sanitized and set it apart from the others was ‘interests’:
"Because of the semantic drift of the term ‘interests’, the opposition between interests and passions could also mean and convey a different thought, much more startling in view of traditional values: namely, that one set of passions, hitherto variously known as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust."[xxvii]
The effect of this semantic drift is important, because throughout the 17th century, outside the field of economic and political writing, ordinary popular tracts on virtue continued to refer to avarice as one of the most repulsive of sins. On the other hand its synonym, ‘interest’, achieved a steadily enhanced status as the ‘countervailing’ passion. Finally, says Hirschman, it took on such a mantle of virtue, that in certain respects it was seen as more admirable, certainly more socially useful, than unselfishness. Thus in 1767 the Scottish economist Sir James Steuart could argue that in economic matters, self-interest is to be preferred to traditional virtue especially a meddling concern for the public interest:
"……were a people to become quite disinterested: there would be no possibility of governing them. Everyone might consider the interest of his country in a different light, and many might join in the ruin of it, by endeavoring to promote its advantages. (quoted in Hirschman)."[xxviii]
The point was, as Steuart’s colleague David Hume had also said of desire for gain, that it is a universal passion that operates at all times, in all places and upon everybody. It is thus much more predictable than other passions such as lust or revenge, which operate sporadically and are directed towards particular people. The very constancy of avarice had made it a virtue. Most famously, because of his influence on all subsequent economic thinking, in The Wealth of Nations published in 1776[xxix] the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith gave a financial rather than a political or moral justification for the unrestricted pursuit of personal gain.[xxx] Individualist philosophy (whether materialist or idealist) and the promotion of self-interest as the necessary basis for a stable market economy were mutually and powerfully reinforcing. They could not fail to be severely damaging to any trust in relational consciousness, and hence to spirituality. But beyond the four steps leading up to this point there is a fifth and final step to go.
Relational consciousness totally repudiated.
When Ludwig Feuerbach’s book The Essence of Christianity was first issued in 1841 it was greeted by many as a work of genius. He was a member of the Young Hegelian group in Berlin to which Karl Marx belonged and it was Feuerbach who famously inverted Hegel’s understanding of Geist or Spirit when he made the claim that ‘God did not create human beings, human beings created God’. As for spiritual awareness, the sense of the presence of God is a delusion because, as Feuerbach put it in a later work,[xxxi] there is no organ of religious experience[xxxii] any more than there is an organ of superstition.
Feuerbach is best known nowadays at second hand, via Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach.[xxxiii] In this short series of eleven aphorisms, Marx takes Feuerbach to task for failing to see that the religious illusion is socially created by unjust conditions in class society. In spite of Marx’s criticisms he accepted Feuerbach’s suggestion that religion is a projection, and indeed Feuerbach was more thorough in his account of the process of projection than Marx, who simply assumed it to be the case.[xxxiv] Feuerbach’s argument was built on a careful study of religious texts as well as noticing the way ordinary believers expressed themselves. He saw religion as a kind of secret anthropology. If you want to know about the best and highest qualities of the human species, you will find them by looking at the praises heaped by religious people upon God. Once we come to realize that the virtues attributed to God are simply projections of human virtues, we are able to emancipate ourselves from our religious delusions and replace them with ethical atheism. In other words a high minded, noble morality is still the proper duty of humankind, but now cut away from its mistaken religious attribution.
One might feel that Feuerbach’s repudiation of religion was as extreme as it is possible to get. Not so. His opinion was to be violently rejected as incomplete atheism by Max Stirner,[xxxv] another member of the Young Hegelian group in Berlin. With Stirner we see the final abandonment of any notion of relational consciousness. Stirner of course concurred with the rejection of a relationship with God as fantasy, but felt that Feuerbach had failed to see the full implication of his discovery. Feuerbach, though a convinced atheist, continued to hold to the moral ideals advocated by Christianity. To Stirner such ideals were also projections, no different in kind from belief in God. For him all ideals and moral laws, without exception, are simply religion by another name, since they imply an imaginary and enslaving obligation beyond the self.
Published in 1845, four years after Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, Stirner’s only major work is The Ego and Its Own.[xxxvi] He currently appears to have something of a cult following, since his book has appeared in five different English editions over a period of thirty years, the most recent in 1995. At the time of writing, according to the Internet Search Engine Google there are more than 154,000 sites on the Internet relating to Stirner. Of all atheist writings, Stirner’s is the most thoroughgoing in its uncompromising rejection of every philosophical, religious and political ideal, seen as nothing more than the depreciation of the individual:
"Away…. with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think that at least the ‘good cause’ must be my concern? What’s good? What’s bad? Why I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. The divine is God’s concern: the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free etc, but is – unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!"[xxxvii]
And, reminiscent of Hobbes,
"For me you are nothing but my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."[xxxviii]
Stirner’s biographer R.W.K Paterson[xxxix] comments,
"Whether owing to a failure of nerve, or to some basic astigmatism, the Feuerbachs and the Bauers[xl] had all stopped short of the crucial point; at the last moment they had admitted the presence of some transcendental object in the scheme of things – not indeed a ‘God’ in the sense of a personal deity, but a ‘Humanity’, or a ‘Society’ or a ‘Morality’, all of which were as fictitious, and as autocratic in their claims upon the individual concrete human being, as any personal God had ever been; and thus the programme of atheism still remained to be carried through to its conclusion. …."[xli]
And with a brutality fully equal to Hobbes,
"Nothing, not even the primordial obligations not to lie, steal, kill etc. can induce the self-possessed egotist to take any step that is not in the fullest accord with his own distinct interests as he himself determines them ……" [xlii]
Paterson sums up:
Stirner’s contribution to the German religious debate of the 1840s was to bring the whole debate to a momentary and stupefied halt. The full consequences of thoroughgoing atheism were now disclosed for all to see.[xliii]
Remarkably, Stirner’s hero, the isolated self-sufficient individual, had already been identified and attacked ferociously by Karl Marx. He was none other than the capitalist fat cat, the unencumbered entrepreneur who is still with us today in plentiful supply. He is, in Marx’s words
".... an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice... [for him] the only bond between men is natural necessity, need, and private interest."[xliv]
Marx was outraged by Stirner’s book. In 1845 he and Friedrich Engels began writing what was meant to be a critical response to Feuerbach, entitled The German Ideology. But its main bulk turned into several hundred pages of attack on the follies of Stirner. It seems an obsessive response to someone whom Marx dismissed as small-fry. The part of the book devoted to Stirner is certainly turgid which is perhaps why it was not formally published until nearly ninety years later, in 1932.[xlv] Marx’s disproportionate reaction has puzzled his biographers, who sometimes dismiss it as no more than youthful vitriolic exuberance.[xlvi] It perhaps also suggests that, at some level, Marx realised that one line of materialist reasoning (leading back to Hobbes) could indeed eventuate in the disparagement of all ideas transcending the self, including Marx’s own relational insight into ‘man as a species-being’
Stirner’s extreme individualism put into stark and uncompromising words what had been developing as an increasingly powerful, but muffled and disinfected assumption over the previous two centuries. Individualism encourages the complete suppression of relational consciousness and a consequent leeching away of ethical relations between the members of our modern commercial society. Once transcendence is abandoned, (either belief in God or the kind of transcendental equivalent advocated by Feuerbach), morality becomes entirely subservient to what is financially prudent. In practice, Hobbes had already dispensed with all purposes apart from those that ensure the smooth working of the marketplace.[xlvii] The binding obligation that remains in possessive market societies is to make sure the market does not collapse through financial mismanagement. In this circumstance the difference between moral obligation and what is financially prudent becomes insignificant.
Where financial prudence is the arbiter of conduct, politeness and care for the other person become suspect as no more than a manoeuvre, an optional extra to smooth the path of a financial transaction. In other words it is spiritually corrupt. Martin Buber makes the same point in his comments on Stirner:
"Responsibility presupposes one who addresses me primarily, that is, from a realm independent of myself, and to whom I am answerable. He addresses me about something that he has entrusted to me and that I am bound to take care of loyally. He addresses me from his trust and I respond in my loyalty or refuse to respond in my disloyalty, or I have fallen into disloyalty and wrestle free of it by the loyalty of the response……… Where no primary address and claim can touch me, for everything is “My property”, responsibility has become a phantom. …."[xlviii]
The difficulty for Stirner is that he has entirely lost touch with relational consciousness. For Buber, he is a sociopath:
"He simply does not know what of elemental reality lies between life and life, he does not know the mysteries of address and answer, claim and disclaim, word and response…" [xlix]
Macpherson notes a yet more ominous difficulty at the heart of individualism. Paradoxically, individualism needs collectivism and, as he puts it, ‘the more thoroughgoing the individualism, the more absolute the collectivism’, as in the totalitarian authority of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Totalitarianism is the logical endpoint for a society that has lost touch with relational consciousness. Buber makes the same point in his insight into the role of extreme individualism in the creation of the authoritarianisms of the political Right and Left.
"True is what is mine" are formulas which forecast a congealing of the soul unsuspected by Stirner in all his rhetorical assurance. But also many a rigid collective We set in, which rejects a superior authority, is easily understood as a translation from the speech of the Unique One into that of the it which acknowledges nothing but itself - carried out against Stirner’s intention, who hotly opposes any plural version.[l]
Nazism and Stalinism are prominent examples of the genre, but the category should also include certain forms of religious fundamentalism, Western and Eastern. In their polarization of the world into good and evil empires and their disregard for human life, they have become tragically disengaged from the relational consciousness that underlies genuine religion. The political consequences of this dismissal of spiritual awareness are very great, to the extent that the next chapter is given over to the politics of spirituality.
Conclusion
Stirner and Hobbes between them bracket a period in European history marked by the progressive and cumulative discrediting of a fundamental aspect of our biological make-up, relational consciousness. The casualties of the process are all around us. One example that became salient during the second half of the 20th century is a decline in social participation throughout the Western world. This has been comprehensively documented for the United States in Robert Putnam’s study, Bowling Alone.[li] He provides statistics that show a collapse since the 1960s across almost all social behaviour: political and civic participation, informal social groupings, altruism, volunteering and philanthropy, reciprocity, honesty and trust. The loss of what Putnam calls ‘social capital’ is graphically illustrated in the ubiquitous deployment of the paraphernalia of surveillance (cameras, electronic tracking devices, alarm systems, databases) to discourage crime. They are a totalitarian means of controlling a society in which relational consciousness no longer forms the basis of a moral commonwealth. [lii]
I have indicated my belief that the source of these discomforts is located in long-term social processes first detectable in 17th century Europe. Their appearance coincides with the rise of religious scepticism.[liii] From the perspective I have presented this loss of formal belief has behind it, at a more fundamental level, a suppression or repression of relational consciousness, because of the individualistic requirements of the marketplace. Accordingly, Michael Buckley [liv] identifies a change in direction of religious apologetics at this period, away from an appeal to personal experience of relationship with transcendence and towards the argument from design. As we saw in Chapter Two the design argument as deployed by William Paley was still dominant two hundred years later, when Darwin was a student in Cambridge.
Theologically, the move amounted to a long-term abandonment of the sense of personal relationship with the immanent God, and replacing it with an intellectual conviction based on detached philosophical argument. Given the individualist assumptions of both materialist and idealist philosophers at the time, this was an understandable strategy. But what was being discarded was any sense of trust in the relational consciousness that I have argued is an inbuilt feature of the human organism.
It is no wonder that spirituality has an increasingly difficult time in the Western world, and along with it the plausibility of religion. Commercial and intellectual pressures force us towards a heartless individualism that cancels relational consciousness out of the human equation. Nevertheless, empirical evidence is steadily accumulating in support of the view that spiritual awareness is a constant in our biological makeup. The fact that human decency and mutual trust continues to be widespread is evidence of its resilience, even though constricted in its range by the straitjacket of individualism. Furthermore, since individualism is quite clearly a socially constructed ideology, there is always the possibility of deconstruction. The worldwide surge of interest in spirituality that was beginning in the final decades of the 20th century is an indication that something of the sort is under way.
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[i] Starring Michael Douglas in the role of Gordon Gecko. Directed by Oliver Stone, written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone.
[ii] I saw this slogan advertising Lynx deodorant on the day that the famine in Niger became public knowledge. The conjunction sparked off the following quatrain:
“Greed is good”, the advert said
In letters three feet high.
A gaunt child lying almost dead
In Niger, whispered, “It’s a lie!”
[iii] Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1992
[iv] The atheism of Advaita in India, or in Theravada Buddhism might be cited as evidence to contradict my thesis, but these forms of atheism are in fact intra-religious. They are aspects of a debate about the nature of transcendence and as such are akin to certain mystical movements in Christianity, for example the near monism of someone like the Fourteenth Century Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart
[v] There are many texts on this theme. Possibly the best introduction because he gives a systematic overview of its many dimensions is Stephen Lukes’ Individualism published in the series Key Concepts in the Social Sciences by Basil Blackwell, in 1973; See also, Colin Morris The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200, published by SPCK in London in 1972; and Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism, published by Chicago University Press in 1986; also Aaron Gurevich, who disagrees with Morris’ claim that individualism appeared in the 12th century, see his The Origins of European Individualism, published by Blackwell in 1995.
[vi] For further information on these questions see the articles by Terrence Deacon on ‘Biological aspects of language’ (pp. 128-133) and C.B. Stringer on ‘Evolution of early humans’ (pp. 241-251) in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, (edited by Steve Jones, Robert Martin and David Pilbeam), Cambridge University Press, 1994.
[vii] The question of the self-awareness of other animals is hotly disputed. It is discussed at length in Marc Bekoff et al. (eds.) The Cognitive Animal, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
[viii] See Chapter Six.
[ix] For a popular discussion of the effect of language on self awareness, see John McCrone The Ape that Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind, London: Picador, 1990.
[x] See Luria’s book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. (translated by Martin Lopez-Morillas and Lynn Solotaroff; edited by Michael Cole), Harvard University Press, 1976. Because of difficulties with Stalinist censorship these findings were not published in the Soviet Union until the decade of the 1970s.
[xi] One only has to think of the way that reading and writing dominate our everyday lives, now added to by the ubiquity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, to begin to see that the mode of action of our consciousness is very different from that of our non-literate forebears. See, for example, John L. Locke’s (1998) book, Why we Don’t Talk to Each Other any More: the Devoicing of Society.
[xii] Note for instance the experience of the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin (1981), when encountering academically high-flying clients in his Chicago consulting rooms. Gendlin comments on the disconcerting fact that he was unable to help many of them to explore their immediate emotional difficulties because they were isolated from the felt sense of their bodies. Too good a training in academic detachment had crippled them. See also the related arguments from the eminent neurologist Antonio Damasio (1994, 2000) on the importance of the body in relation to emotion and consciousness.
[xiii] See, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (translated by Talcott Parsons), London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930: p. 104 Pastoral need led to the mitigation of the doctrine and it became accepted that one plausible sign of election was material prosperity in this life. Weber’s (often disputed) contention was that this belief encouraged the growth of capitalism in Europe.
[xiv] The teaching of Cornelius Jansen, which split the Roman Catholic Church in France in the mid-17th century. Jansen emphasised the belief that an individual can do nothing to assure their own salvation, all is due to divine grace. Jansenism was centred on the abbey of Port Royal and Pascal was its most prominent lay supporter. The Jansenists were excommunicated in 1719.
[xv] See The Self as Agent. (with an introduction by Stanley M. Harrison), London: Faber & Faber, 1995, p. 71
[xvi] See David Berman’s fascinating thesis on hidden atheism in, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell, London & New York: Routledge, 1990
[xvii] For a readable account of orthodox altruism theory, see Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
[xviii] In, Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1988, p.
[xix] In, Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society, Ch. 1, Section 4, 25-26, (quoted in MacPherson 1962: p. 44)
[xx] Leviathan (edited with an introduction by C.B. Macpherson), London: Penguin Classics, 1985.
[xxi] Ibid. p. 188
[xxii] Ibid, p. 228
[xxiii] Quoted in Hampton, op. cit. p. 10
[xxiv] C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford Uniiversity Press, 1962
[xxv] The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph was first published by Princeton University Press in 1977, and republished as a Twentieth Anniversary Edition with an foreword by Amartya Sen.
[xxvi] Hirschman, Op. Cit. p. 14
[xxvii] Ibid, p. 40
[xxviii] Ibid. p. 50
[xxix] Currently available in the two volume Penguin edition, with an introduction and notes by Andrew Skinner, published in 1999.
[xxx] A distinction must be made between Smith’s account of the way things are in capitalist society and his personal view of ethics. Smith’s moral philosophy is expounded in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) published seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations. He has much to say of ‘sympathy’ which suggests that it is not remote from relational consciousness. The apparent ethical disjunction between the two works has led to much discussion. It must be added that Smith’s rhetoric, particularly in the later chapters of The Wealth of Nations frequently makes clear his distaste for some of the situations he is describing (See, Muller, 1993).
[xxxi] Lectures on the Essence of Religion (tr. Ralph Mannheim), New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 218
[xxxii] This assertion is more debatable today than in Feuerbach’s time. See my remarks in Chapter Eight.
[xxxiii] First published in 1845. Reprinted in Marx and Engels on Religion, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1957
[xxxiv] See, Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
[xxxv] Pseudonym of Johann Caspar Schmidt.
[xxxvi] Translated by Steven Byington, with an introduction by Sydney Parker. Published in London by Rebel Press in 1993.
[xxxvii] Ibid, p. 5
[xxxviii] Ibid, pp. 296-7. His lover in Berlin eventually left him in disgust, accusing him appropriately enough of being totally self-centred. She eventually entered religious life and died in a convent.
[xxxix] The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner, published for the University of Hull by Oxford University Press in 1971.
[xl] Bruno Bauer, another member of the Young Hegelian group in Berlin and a former theologian.
[xli] Ibid p. 31
[xlii] Ibid p. 263
[xliii] Ibid p. 197
[xliv] Quoted in Michael Walzer (1990). ‘The communitarian critique of liberalism’, Political Theory, 18 (1), 6-23
[xlv] An edition was published in the UK by Prometheus Books in 1998.
[xlvi] For example Francis Wheen in his highly readable Karl Marx, published in London by Fourth Estate in 2000.
[xlvii] Hobbes may have dispensed with religion, but it would be interesting to investigate the theological complexion of his early upbringing. He certainly encountered Calvinist opinions when he was a student at Magdalen Hall in Oxford and this may have encouraged in him a belief in the natural depravity of the species. When he discarded religious belief in his maturity he would then have been left with depravity, now deprived of saving grace.
[xlviii] See Between Man and Man, (translated by Ronald Gregor Smith), London: Fontana, 1961, p. 64
[xlix] Ibid, p. 66
[l] Ibid p. 61
[li] See, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
[lii] The phrase comes from the sociologist Philip Selznick. See his book The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
[liii] For useful and contrasting accounts of the history, see: David Berman,. A History of Atheism in Britain op. cit.; Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987; Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1987.
[liv] Op. cit.
