What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

by Paul Verhaeghe

  The popular remedy is everywhere to be heard. More church, more police, and more punishment — that’s all we need to set the world to rights. A world in which father is smoking his pipe by the fire, mother is busy in the kitchen, and children go to bed on time. Preferably with CCTV everywhere.*

  [* I can’t resist quoting Gerard Reve’s poem about the Pope’s annual message, entitled The Good News:

  I sat with beating heart in front of the colour tv,

  and thought, ‘Surely His Holiness will mention

  the ongoing decline in morals?’

  And indeed, he’d hardly begun when I heard:

  decadentia, immorale, multi phylti shorti skirti;

  influenza filmi i cinema bestiale contra sacrissima matrimoniacale

  criminale atheistarum rerum novarum, (et cum spiritu tuo), in shorto:

  no problemo.

  A shame that it was over so quickly.

  But afterwards an army band played some nice music.

  This life is already great as far as I’m concerned.

  And soon there’ll be eternal life in Heaven!

  You sometimes wonder,

  ‘What did we do to deserve this?’]

  On the other side of the fence are authors like the historian Jonathan Israel, whose impressively researched writings distinguish between moderate and radical Enlightenment. The moderates attempted to reconcile reason and religion, so that we ended up retaining the worst of both, with none of their advantages. As we shall see, our reasoning is still informed by what Philipp Blom in A Wicked Company calls the ‘all-pervasive influence of … unexamined theological ideas’. (In his book, Blom convincingly shows that we actually need more radical Enlightenment as opposed to the soft and pseudo-religious version inspired by Voltaire and Rousseau. That, above all, we need a greater focus on the passionate side of human nature, alongside the rational.)

  When something disappears, it often returns in disguise. The so-called loss of norms and values has generated an unstoppable proliferation of different types of ethics: bioethics, media ethics, medical ethics, contract ethics, care ethics, etc. Most of us are left cold by these mini-ethics, regarding them as a form of occupational therapy for old codgers in dusty offices, churning out directives that no one really feels a need for. Even the word ‘ethics’ sounds passé. Does anyone care about it, apart from lunatics who want to ban stem-cell research and erase Darwin from school textbooks?

  As a result of the above proliferation, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy has sprung up from which no one can escape, and codes and regulations are running rampant. Take my university’s exam regulations, which for many years consisted of one-and-a-half sheets of paper. Suddenly, they ballooned into a 50-page document that had to be constantly updated and amended. These committees are a thorn in the side of those doing the actual work, because they just make things harder. Seen from this point of view, ethics is at best tangential to science and technology (and, more broadly, the professional world), and at worst an obstruction. We would be better off getting rid of it, the thinking goes, so that we can get on with our work in peace.

  It will be clear from the previous chapter that I by no means share this view. The frustrations we experience from a host of petty regulations cause us to lose sight of the true significance of ethics. When all is said and done, norms and values are our way of dealing with our bodies and those of others. They define us, and consequently form an integral part of our identity. Changes in the ethical sphere spark changes in the sphere of identity and vice versa, always reflecting changes in the wider environment from which individuals derive their identity, and, as a result, their norms and values.

  Since the 1970s or thereabouts, we have regarded identity as something personal, something unique to us, and we find it difficult to accept that we are a lot less original than we think. By contrast, we think of norms and values as external to us, and we are reluctant to admit that they are part of who we are. This reluctance has to do with the judgemental character inherent in ethics. In these days of political correctness, judgement, particularly moral condemnation, is suspect. So it’s condemned.

  Our current conception of ethics, as an external system of rules that is often petty and always disruptive, derives from a particular social evolution. But ethics or morals indeed determine the distinction between good and evil — two words that nowadays immediately put people’s backs up. And that’s strange, because we’ve been asking questions about this distinction since human history began — questions that are effectively about the essence of human nature, and therefore also about who we are.

  They have produced two conflicting answers, along with two entirely different views about the development of identity. One school of thought regards humankind as essentially good, and sees it as society’s task to ensure that our benevolent disposition comes to the fore. The other believes humankind to be essentially bad, and wants society to act as a police officer, to curb our evil tendencies as much as possible. A society in which self-realisation is central proceeds from the assumption that people are essentially good — so self-realisation is a good idea. A society that takes the opposing view of human nature will be focused on self-denial, because it’s all about keeping a check on evil impulses: regular monitoring is necessary, and a firm hand needed on the reins. This notion has dominated Western thought, taking its penultimate shape from Christian ethics.

  Yes, penultimate. These days we cherish the illusion that we have freed ourselves from such things, even as we nervously anticipate the next performance interview and are childishly pleased when we receive a positive evaluation. So it’s worth just taking a look at history.

  Ancient ethics: a good character has mores

  Almost all accounts trace the dawn of Western ethics back to antiquity and subsequent Christian reworkings. In the ancient Greek discipline of natural philosophy — a study of nature and the physical universe that ultimately gave way to modern science — and especially in the teachings of Aristotle, we find a strong argument for regarding identity, norms, and values as parts of a single whole. Aristotle links etho (habit) to èthos (character), deeming a good character to be based on good habits. A link of this kind between ethics and character has since been lost, though traces of it remain in our language: ‘He’s a bad character.’

  Inherent to this line of reasoning is a clear starting point: ethics is intrinsic to human nature; it is innate. As far as Aristotle was concerned, that was simply a biological given. But on top of that, he argued, each organism has a life goal, a telos, which it tries to achieve as best as possible. Success or failure depends both on the surrounding environment and on the efforts of the organism itself. Looked at from this perspective, the goal of every life form is self-realisation, which entails cultivating ourselves as best we can from the seed of self that we are born with.

  In the case of humans, that goal entails pursuing happiness for yourself and your family, and developing into a fully fledged member of society. Aristotle regarded those two objectives as inextricably linked because he thought that a human is by nature a zoön politikon. This is usually translated as ‘political animal’, but that is not quite right. Politikon comes from polis, the city-state of antiquity, the precursor of Western democracy. A more accurate translation would be ‘community animal’. If a person develops optimally, and achieves his or her innate potential, the person will become a true member of the community, and that will in itself bring happiness.

  Self-realisation of this kind within a community boils down to developing certain virtues or arètai, the seeds of which are in us all: wisdom, justice, moderation, and courage. This involves maintaining a balance, because if we have too little of a certain characteristic, we won’t achieve optimal self-realisation. Too much of a certain characteristic is equally bad, and in both cases the individual and the community pay a price. This balance is a product of self-knowledge, because self-knowledge leads to self-control. The better we know ourselves, the more we can control our
selves. Hence the afore-mentioned injunction, Gnothi seauton.

  The most excellent individual is the one who has the most self-knowledge, making him or her the best-qualified leader. The worst ethical fault that people can be guilty of is hubris — extreme overestimation of their own capabilities — which can cause not only their own downfall, but also bring ruin on those close to them, and even on the community. This theme recurs time and again in Greek tragedies. The opposite of hubris is sophrosyne, a virtue combining temperance and wisdom, which fosters self-control.

  The fatal consequences of a lack of self-knowledge are most famously illustrated by Oedipus Rex and the downfall of Thebes. Oedipus loses his self-control in a confrontation with his father — whom he does not know — and kills him, for which not only he, but also his children and the city are made to suffer. The fact that Oedipus is unaware of what he has done makes the situation all the more tragic, but does not exonerate him.

  Punishing an entire family for the crimes of one of its members or destroying a city as punishment for the crime of its leader, is something we cannot grasp. Equally incomprehensible is the notion that an individual’s self-care and optimal self-realisation will necessarily benefit the community. This shows how much our ideas have changed, and more specifically how we regard the individual as fully distinct from the group, each having their separate interests. Aristotle saw it completely differently: a person is a social being, and his or her actions, good and ill, will automatically benefit or harm the group. Indeed, he regarded this as so self-evident that he didn’t even feel the need to amplify the point in his Nicomachean Ethics. A system of ethics and identity development focused on the interests of the individual would have been literally unthinkable to him and his contemporaries.

  The Greek philosophers made way for Roman lawyers, and for a subsequent link between ethics and codified law. This connection is touched upon in the first century AD by the Roman historian Tacitus, who writes in his Annals, ‘Non mos, non ius’: something that is not unwritten law cannot become written law. Ethics revolves around the way in which human relationships are defined by traditions and customs — some of which go on to be enshrined in law. To impose mores (the plural of mos) on an individual is to force them to adopt certain manners, to comply with convention. The civic-integration courses that migrants are made to take in certain countries are a modern form of this phenomenon. We seek to impose our mores on outsiders, because they are part of our identity.

  In the Christian era that followed, this essentialist view of humanity changed dramatically: ethics was something that was imposed externally by a divine agency. Ideas about humankind underwent a corresponding change, with the accent shifting from the Greek citizen who had a duty to contribute to the community, to the Christian believer who needed to chastise himself in the hope of salvation in the afterlife. Self-realisation made way for self-denial.

  Christian ethics: man is inherently evil

  For Aristotle, as well as for the church, ethics had solid foundations. The former saw it as internal, of biological origin; the latter as external, of divine origin. In other words, ethical rules are not arbitrary. That is the main similarity between the classical interpretation of ethics and Christian morals; for the most part, they largely differ. I shall list some of the differences, as they continue, even now, to shape our thinking much more than we suspect.

  The Christian view is that humanity is subject to the authority of the one true God, whose commands have to be obeyed on pain of damnation. Any attempt to escape His all-seeing eye is doomed to failure; sooner or later we will have to pay the price. Instead we must try to live as virtuously as possible, with only one single aim: to attain eternal life in the next world. Life here on Earth is only significant in the light of the hereafter.

  Living a virtuous life is very difficult because humanity is, by nature, evil. That’s because, according to Christian teaching, we are all tainted with original sin. If people are left to their own devices, they will murder and steal. Self-realisation is a very bad idea; self-denial, a necessity. For Christians, ethics is about battling the inner tendency to evil that would otherwise run rampant. Seeking to acquire knowledge is also wicked because that’s how the trouble started. Eve wanted to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge — more precisely, knowledge of good and evil. That was why she and Adam were banished from the Garden of Eden. So seeking knowledge is a vain pursuit; mere mortals should leave that kind of thing to God and His earthly representatives, and concentrate on confession, penance, and self-chastisement.

  The ancients regarded the man (and it was almost always a man) with the greatest self-knowledge as the most suited to lead the community — the primus inter pares, first among equals. Christians take a very different approach: the leader is called by God, and takes an intermediate position between the supreme being and the faithful. A clear pecking order is thus established, with God at the top, followed by his deputised leader. The community and the political leadership occupy an inferior position, and the laws of the land pale into insignificance next to those of the kingdom of God. The Roman emperors threw the Christians to the lions not so much because of their belief, but because they refused to obey the laws of the empire. The Romans were very tolerant when it came to religion, but they regarded civil disobedience as unacceptable.*

  [* Something very similar can be seen in Western attitudes to Muslims today. The latter are free to practise their religion as long as it does not clash with Western sociopolitical organisation. ‘Their’ martyrs are terrorists in ‘our’ eyes, just as the Romans saw Christian martyrs as insurgents.]

  In the classical world, ethics was rooted in immanence, the notion that everyone carries within them the seed of norms and values. By contrast, Christianity gave rise to the idea of transcendence, originally meaning to ‘climb beyond’ or ‘surmount’. Everything that is good belongs to the domain of God, who stands above everything. We are created in His image and so we, in turn, stand above nature. The great chain of being, or Scala Naturae (Ladder of Nature), a concept that gained popularity in the early Middle Ages, arranged all matter and life in a strictly hierarchical structure. All of creation had its God-given spot on the ladder, and it was vital that everyone knew their allotted place. To study nature was to study that ladder and the creatures perched on its rungs, from the dust at the bottom right up to the seventh heaven at the top. The ladder is both complete and unchanging, given that God has created everything that could be created. Change is impossible, and anyone seeking to leave his or her place commits a cardinal sin: superbia, or haughtiness, the successor to the Greek hubris.

  God’s freethinking merchants

  Christian ethics remained in place for many centuries, creating a deep-seated conviction that man is evil and can only achieve salvation through submission to his Maker. God created a fixed natural order, and that was the end of the matter. The history books like to present this doctrine as having been overturned by courageous men of learning who risked eternal hellfire (to say nothing of being burnt at the stake first) to chart the stars, calculate the circumference and age of the earth, and dissect bodies in dark crypts. That’s only half the story; and, what’s more, the second half. Religion was first eroded from within, as happens to all ideologies. From the beginning of the Christian era, different interpretations of God’s commandments were put forward. As time went on, the wrangling increased, and by 1500 over 40 anti-popes had claimed to be God’s sole true representative on Earth. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church might have preached its seven virtues, but its prelates were more associated with the seven cardinal sins — avaricious, bibulous, and lecherous monks are ten a penny in mediaeval satire.

  Curiously enough, religious convictions led to greater importance being attached to work and trade. Despite all the disputes, there was agreement on one point: people had to work hard, either to earn their place in Heaven or to show that they were among the already saved. The Bible was quite clear on that score, ‘Faith without w
orks is dead.’ From the late Middle Ages this had been so taken to heart that a new wealthy class emerged, upsetting the static mediaeval social order of clerics, nobles, and peasants. An urban culture came into being, with new classes and thus new identities — craftsmen, bankers, and merchants. In this new climate, where for the first time scholars were allowed to think and experiment, more or less unhindered, science flourished.

  But the ferment caused by the mix of religious debate, new social classes, and the study of science came to a head. The old moral and religious, intellectual and political orders vanished, causing upheaval. Entire population groups were forced into exile, and violent death was a common fate. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) between Lutherans and Catholics was preceded by a war between Catholics and Huguenots (French Calvinists), and was followed by the English Civil War between King and Parliament, Anglicans and Puritans, leading to an increasing confusion about who was fighting whom. It is against this background that we must understand Thomas Hobbes’ view of human existence in a state of nature as a ‘war of all against all’ and as ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. As a political philosopher he saw the failings of a belief-based society, and proposed an unheard-of solution: a polity based on reason and science.

  The time was ripe for such ideas because various communities of believers had ceased to acknowledge the authority of the Catholic Church. The religious wars were ignited by a new, highly successful form of Christianity, Protestantism, which in keeping with its founding principle (resistance to central authority) soon disintegrated into innumerable different variants.