For millennia food—preparation, blessing, sharing—has been the sinew of society. Many major religious holy days in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam involve food—either the communal eating of it or the communal abstention from it. Indeed, when some Christian denominations take Communion—i.e., joining not just the community of fellow Christians but entering into the body of the church itself—they do so by eating the transubstantiated flesh of Jesus. Depending on the denomination, this is a solemn moment or a celebratory one, but in all cases the significance is greater than merely snacking on “my little cracker,” in the words of Donald Trump.57
In subsistence societies, a great feast combined every aspect of life. It was a celebration, a cause for thanksgiving as well as entertainment. The feast was also the keystone of politics: the Big Man’s authority derived in very large part from how he distributed food at such gatherings to members of the clan or tribe. The feast was also a vital tool of diplomacy. Peace with an enemy tribe was often brokered and usually celebrated at a feast. Marriages, one of the central tools of alliance making, were both sealed and solemnized with a great feast.58
The Hebrew Bible is crammed with countless rules about what kind of animals we can eat, how they must be prepared, etc. The modern mind looks at such rules and says, Ah, that was about hygiene, or some such. But that misses the forest for the trees. No doubt, hygiene played a role in such norms, but to say Kashrut (“kosherism”) is just the ancient version of a sign saying “Employees must wash hands” is absurd. Prior to the scientific revolution, we did not compartmentalize meaning as we do today.
Think of it this way: For some primitive tribes a tree was many things—a source of fuel, a resource for shelter and tools, a plaything for children, perhaps a source of food, and a manifestation of some divine purpose or entity. Separating the practical ways of seeing a tree from the transcendent ones is a modern invention. To the extent anyone does believe we are simply Homo economicus and nothing more, they blind themselves to the vast scope of meaning that cannot be reduced to economic inputs.
Ernest Gellner argues that, in the transition to modernity, we lost something that defined how humans saw the world until three hundred years ago.59 We used to layer meaning atop meaning, horizontally, like one sheet of tinted film atop another. Utility and sacredness, habit and ritual, convenience and tradition, metaphor and fact—each lay atop one another, producing a single lens through which we viewed the world. The scientific revolution changed that. We now hold each sheet of film separately and look at the world through it. We have one sheet for religion. Another for business. Yet another for family. We pick up each one like a special and separate magnifying glass for each specimen.
This division of mental labor has helped to produce enormous prosperity, cure diseases, reduce violence, and liberate humanity from millennia of superstitions that held individual humans from realizing their potential.
But it has also produced enormous challenges, because this way of seeing the world is unnatural. Our modern tendency to put different aspects of our lives into distinct silos—religion over here, entertainment here, food here, politics over there—is wholly alien to how man evolved to live. In our evolutionary natural habitat, we stack meaning atop meaning. Family is a sacred bond, but it is also a survival mechanism. Food is sustenance, but it is also an opportunity for community and sacralization. Politics isn’t an artificial mechanism or a separate sphere of life, blocked off from religion, survival, or community; it is how every important question of daily life is answered, and it is how God, or the gods, or our ancestors, wanted us to live—all at the same time.
By separating out the different meanings of our lives, each one seems more diluted, less all-encompassing and fulfilling. We miss the unity of the pre-Enlightenment mind. And so we yearn to restore meaning where it isn’t. We yearn to end the division of labor and find ways of life that are “authentic” and “holistic.” We attach ourselves to ideologies that promise unity, where we are all part of the same family or tribe. We flock to leaders on the left and the right who promise to tear down walls and end division—but always on our terms. So much of the rhetoric about the evils of money and the “capitalist system” isn’t really about money but about how so much of our lives has been chopped up by this division of psychic and spiritual labor, banishing the ecstasy of the transcendent from our daily lives. This, in short, is the romantic temper. The romantic wants to pull down the walls of compartmentalized lives and restore a sense of sacred or patriotic unity of meaning and purpose.
Still, just because the modern mind compartmentalizes more than the ancient one did doesn’t mean the walls are as high and as sturdy as we think. They are being broken down every day, in our own minds and in the larger community. That is because our inner tribesman doesn’t like this world, and he is desperate to get back to where he came from. The problem is that seeking such unity in all things is the first step in leaving the Miracle of modernity. The desire to decompartmentalize every facet of life—work, family, politics, economics, art, etc.—is a reactionary one. It is the totalitarian temptation, and a corruption of the civilization we are blessed to live in. And it is utterly natural.
* Smith writes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not…possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.” Adam Smith. “V.1.19.: Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon our Notions of Beauty and Deformity.” The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS5.html
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CORRUPTING THE MIRACLE
When Human Nature Strikes Back
Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. (“You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.”)
—HORACE1
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
—RONALD REAGAN, 19672
In William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies, a group of British schoolboys get stranded on a deserted island. These adolescents are in some respects the pinnacle of Western civilization. But without supervision, the children almost instantly forget the rules of society. Brimming with testosterone, adrenaline, and all of the sexual confusions of adolescence, they fall back on primitive instinctual mechanisms. They form coalitions not just to hunt but to vie for status, safety, and power. They become tribal, cruel, and superstitious. In their paranoia, they create a demon that they both fear and worship. They mount a pig’s rotting head on a pike and call it “the Lord of the Flies” (the literal translation of “Beelzebub”)3 and worship it as their god. But the beast explains to gentle and stubbornly civilized Simon that the pig head is not in fact the real beast. The beast is not “something you could hunt and kill,” because the real beast resides inside all of the children themselves.4
That internal beast is human nature. It cannot be killed; it can only be tamed. And even then, constant vigilance is required.
The story of civilization is, quite literally, the story of taming, directing, channeling, or holding at bay human nature. It is human nature to take what you want, particularly from a stranger—if you can get away with it. It is human nature to kill—again, particularly strangers—if you don’t like them or feel threatened by them. It is human nature to grant favors to family and friends. Ci
vilizations—all of them—establish rules of one kind or another to direct or channel human nature toward productive ends. What counts as productive ends has evolved over time. For most of the last 10,000 years, productive ends were defined as “what is good for the rulers.” Since the Enlightenment, the definition has improved. The modern ideologies of socialism, nationalism, and democracy all claim that the ends of a just society must be the betterment of “the people.” But, human nature being what it is, the elites of every society often find ways to benefit nonetheless. And definitions of “the people” often turn out to be quite selective.
When a politician uses his power and authority for personal gain, we call that “corruption.” And that’s fine. But this understanding of corruption is but one small tentacle of the larger beast. The older, more authentic meaning of “corruption,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was: “The destruction or spoiling of anything, esp. by disintegration or by decomposition with its attendant unwholesomeness; and loathsomeness; putrefaction.”5
This understanding of corruption was once central to our view of the world and our place in it. The phrase,“ashes to ashes, dust to dust” doesn’t appear in the Bible—it’s from the Book of Common Prayer—but that was the idea.6 Genesis 3:19 gets to the heart of it: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Hamlet observes that “a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”7
Prior to the scientific revolution, corruption was more than a metaphor in our daily lives. Everyday cuts and scrapes could invite death if they got infected. Without refrigeration, uncured food began to turn almost instantly. Wood, a universal building material, was always losing the battle against rot and decay. How to hold at bay the corrupting power of nature was an obsession in everyday life. Think about what we mean when we talk about “decadent” societies, civilizations, or empires. “Decadent” comes to us from the Medieval Latin decadentia, meaning decay or decaying. A decaying civilization, like a decaying house, is one that has given itself over to natural forces of entropy.
From the very first societies that could call themselves “civilized,” the job of policy makers—whether kings, priests, or legislators and bureaucrats—was to fend off the corrupting power of human nature. When man’s law disappears or loses its force, nature’s law returns—quickly.
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This is most obvious when people resort to violence. When a political partisan or religious zealot picks up a gun and goes on a killing spree, we all intuitively grasp that violence represents an enormous step backward. But that language is inadequate. It is actually a form of rot, a regression to the mean, an expression of the natural savagery of humanity.
A common feminist slogan is that men must be “taught not to rape.” Some seem to believe this is a stance against some camp of pro-rape pedagogy out there. But on its plain meaning, the feminists are right: Men must be taught not to rape because rape is natural. Rape was considered by countless societies to be the natural extension of military conquest. When the Yanomamö capture a woman, the whole raiding party gets to rape her. She is then brought to the village, where anyone else who wants to rape her may do so. Afterward, she is forced to be some man’s wife.8
In his article “Explaining Wartime Rape,” Jonathan Gottschall, a scholar of this grim subject, reviews the prevalence and ubiquity of wartime rape and concludes: “In short, historical and anthropological evidence suggests that rape in the context of war is an ancient human practice, and that this practice has stubbornly prevailed across a stunningly diverse concatenation of societies and historical epochs…”9
It is significant that both rape and prohibitions against rape are universal to all societies. It wasn’t a question of morality but of situational ethics. It all depended on whom one raped and for what reason. Even among the !Kung or the Yanomamö, rape within the tribe or family or band was usually considered taboo. But rape—or murder—of the Other was not merely tolerated; it was celebrated. Women were legitimate spoils of war, from prehistoric times until just about the day before yesterday, in every corner of the globe.10
There’s a lot of talk about “rape culture” in America, as if America is somehow too tolerant of rape. Since we should have zero tolerance for rape, this claim is in some very narrow sense true. But the reality is that America—and the West generally—is less tolerant of rape than any society in human history.
Now, when I say that rape is natural, I do not mean that all men are equally disposed to be rapists. It surely came easier for some prehistoric men than for others. And rape—like violence generally—is far more prevalent among men. But my point is that the social norms against rape are modern inventions, artificial constructs of our civilization. That doesn’t mean these norms are bad; it makes them important and noble and worthy of protection.
The key point here, however, is that when we witness the evil of rape, some part of us recognizes it for what it is. It is not an expression of capitalist culture but a regression to man’s basest self. Long before feminism took up the cause of fighting rape, civilization had been working to make it unacceptable. Rape is a tangible manifestation of the corruption of civilized behavior. If you want to return to the time of the mythical noble savage, you want to return to a time when rape was a routine and acceptable practice in human affairs.
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A key tool for getting humans to play by rules nobler than those of the jungle is the idea of virtue. Definitions of virtue vary across time and place, but they are united by the idea that virtuous people adhere to a moral code above mere selfishness. Virtue requires denying one’s baser instincts—i.e., human nature—and doing what is right. This is why C. S. Lewis argued that “courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point…”11 Or, as John Locke said, “Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues…”12 In short, virtue takes effort.
“Man’s one resource in the face of Fortune and blind circumstance was his virtue,” writes Arthur Herman. “Originally, virtus meant courage in battle, but it came to include manly integrity in all spheres of life. Virtue was the inner strength necessary to overcome the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,’ as Shakespeare put it, and to forge one’s own destiny.”13 In other words, virtue is no longer just courage in military battle but courage in the battle against human nature. No principle is truly held lest it comes at a price.
At least until the rise of modern doctrines of progress—Whiggism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and progressivism generally—which all shared a teleological faith in inevitable human improvement, the metaphorical power of corruption and the eternal cycles of life informed nearly all literature, philosophy, theology, and, most importantly, daily life. It explained why nearly every society believed that civilizations mirrored the ages of man. It was the footnote to every explanation of why love fades, faith fails, and man disappoints God.
One of the dumbest tropes of smart people is the notion that modern science deposed man as the “center of the universe.”14 Yale’s John Bargh says that Galileo “removed the Earth from its privileged position at the center of the universe.” The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia tells us that Galileo’s “dethronement of Earth from the center of the universe caused profound shock…”
It is a modern conceit that the center is a place of privilege and honor. As I wrote in my last book, “Before Copernicus the general consensus among Western scientists and theologians was, in accordance with Aristotle, that the Earth was either at, or was, the anal aperture of the universe, literally.”15
In 1486, Giovanni Pico, a leading philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, penned his Oration on the Dignity of Man, commonly referred to as the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance. In it he observed t
hat the Earth resided in “the excremetary and filthy parts of the lower world.” Two centuries earlier, Thomas Aquinas concluded that, “in the universe, the earth—that all the spheres encircle and that, as for place, lies in the center—is the most material and coarsest of all bodies.” In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest pit of Hell is at the exact center of the planet, which historian Dennis Danielson describes as the “dead center of the universe.”16
This fetid world was, in short, not merely corrupt but corrupting. The ideal, the pure, the true, lay in the next world, and the man of virtue and integrity fought against the baser, natural temptations that pulled his gaze from what was good and noble.
“I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt and will turn from the way I have commanded you to follow,” Moses tells the Israelites. “In the days to come, disaster will come down on you, for you will do what is evil in the LORD’s sight, making him very angry with your actions.”17
In the Book of James, Jesus proclaims: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”18
Catholic priests, nuns, and monks turn their back on worldly temptations because they are the path to corruption.
This idea that human nature is corrupting of all that is divine, noble, or good is not merely the stuff of philosophers and theologians. It has been the central problem of politics and administration since the agricultural revolution.
In his Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama demonstrates that there are certain universal characteristics of all human societies, fixed features of the human condition that political orders must work with rather than deny or erase if they are to be successful. The first of these:
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 6