Almost any condemnation of any private behaviour was dismissed as ‘judgemental’, possibly the first time in history in which judgement – usually seen as a virtue akin to wisdom – has been regarded as a vice. To argue that one way of life is better than another is seen as prejudiced, intolerant or authoritarian. Moral relativism tells us that there are no absolutes in the moral life. Multiculturalism insists that every culture is equally entitled to respect. All else is a form of racism or phobia or authoritarianism. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, rewrote the Ten Commandments for the new age: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt: Relax!’16 We have in fact come very close to losing the traditional sense of right and wrong, meaning that there are certain things we may not do, and others that we must, even if no one is looking, even if we will not be found out, and even if no one else will be harmed.
That does not mean to say that we no longer have concerns. Manifestly we do. We care about things our grandparents hardly thought about: world poverty, economic inequality, global warming and the loss of biodiversity. But these issues have in common that they are vast, distant, global and remote. They are problems that require the coordinated action of millions, perhaps billions of people. They are, in essence, political rather than moral.
To be sure, we can each make a difference, and we can put pressure on governments, global corporations and other key players. But world poverty or the economics of equality are not about personal morality. They are not about prudence, justice, temperance and wisdom, or about faith, hope, charity and love. They are not about the choreography of interpersonal grace. The global economy and ecology are vital to our future. But they are not what previous generations would have thought of as moral issues. They are political ones.
When it comes to personal behaviour, we have come to believe that there is no right and wrong: there are only choices. The market facilitates those choices. The state deals with the consequences, picking up the pieces when they go wrong. The idea that there are choices we should not make, desires we should not satisfy, things we would like to do and can afford to do but which we ought not to do, because they are dishonourable, or a betrayal of trust, has come to seem outmoded.
To take an obvious example: there were some spectacular failures of business ethics as well as irresponsible behaviour on the part of banks and financial institutions that led to the Great Crash of 2008. Yet there was remarkably little remorse on the part of the people responsible. Few of those involved admitted that they had done wrong. They were in effect saying: It’s legal, therefore it’s moral. Besides which, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I? But morality is based on the idea that there are things that are wrong even though they may be legal, and even though others are doing them.
This is a fundamental and historic shift. One of the first people to diagnose it was the American sociologist David Riesman, who argued in the 1950s that we were moving from an inner-directed society to an other-directed one. An inner-directed society is one where people have an internalised sense of right and wrong. An other-directed society is one in which people take their cues from what other people do. Only in the latter can you have a situation in which people say, ‘If everyone else is doing it, it can’t be wrong.’17
When social conformity becomes our only standard, concepts like duty, obligation, responsibility and honour come to seem antiquated and irrelevant. Emotions like guilt, shame, contrition and remorse are deleted from our vocabulary, for are we not all entitled to self-esteem? The still small voice of conscience is rarely heard these days. Conscience has been outsourced, delegated away.
So, in place of an inner code, we have regulatory authorities. Where once people believed that God sees all we do, now we have CCTVs and video surveillance. When self-imposed restraint disappears, external constraint must take its place. The result is that we have become the most regulated, intrusive society ever known. And still it fails, and will always fail, because without an internalised sense of responsibility to others, people will always find ways of outwitting the most sophisticated systems. In fact, it becomes a game to see how much and how often the system can be beaten.
That is what Voltaire was talking about, even if he was doing so with a measure of cynicism. To believe in God is to believe that we are known. God sees. Therefore we are seen. We can deceive others. Sometimes we can deceive ourselves. But we cannot deceive God. That forces on us a degree of honesty that is an essential part of moral integrity.
Plato in The Republic has one of his characters ask us to engage in a thought experiment. He tells the story of Gyges’ ring, whose effect was to make its wearer invisible. What would prevent the possessor of the ring from committing any crime he felt like committing? He could never be caught. Would we not all be tempted, if we had such a ring, to do whatever our heart desired, knowing we would not, could not, be found out?18
The religious answer is that if God exists, the evil we do, even in secret, is nonetheless evil and is known. That does not mean, as some would caricature it, that God is a kind of cosmic policeman, patrolling the inner recesses of our mind like a member of the London constabulary on the beat. It means that we have a compelling psychological reason to take right and wrong seriously, even if those around us do not. That is what Riesman meant when he spoke about inner-directed individuals, people who do not get swayed by others, who have the moral courage to stand out against the crowd.
Edmund Burke once wrote, ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without.’19 By that he meant that the less self-restraint we have, the more we will be forced to depend on police, surveillance and all the other intrusions we have had to introduce in the past half-century. That is what has happened. As we have become more convinced of each individual’s right to do as they choose, we have lost the idea of a shared moral code voluntarily enforced, and come instead to rely on law enforcement agencies. Society has become manifestly less trusting and open than it was when doors could be left unlocked and people could walk the streets safely at night.
The trouble with humanity, Richard Weaver remarked, is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.20 We can fall into the illusion of thinking that because scientifically and technologically we are far in advance of previous societies, we are morally so as well. We have left behind the superstitions and inhibitions of the past and are ready to face a brave new world.
That is not so. There is a case for saying that we have not moved forward but back. Two figures in particular held views very close to today’s secular materialists, namely the third century BCE Greek thinker Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and his Roman disciple, two and a half centuries later, Lucretius (95–52 BCE).21 They believed that the material world is all there is; that we are temporary concatenations of atoms which will split apart when we die. We have no souls. There is no life after death. The gods are uninterested in the affairs of human beings. We are here, we live, we die and cease to be. There is nothing to fear about death, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are not. Epicurus and Lucretius could be writing today. Their books would be best-sellers.
How did they believe we should live? Unsurprisingly, they had no interest in the concepts of right and wrong. Human life is governed by two considerations only, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. To pursue pleasure, it helps to have good food and good friends. To avoid pain, stay out of public life, which will only cause others to envy you. Do not marry or have children: the risk of emotional entanglement is too great. Sex is fine; love is best avoided. Keep your wants simple: that way you will not be troubled by the things you cannot afford. The end result will be ataraxia, ‘tranquillity of mind’, that absence of passion that the Greeks – Stoics, Cynics and Sceptics as well as Epicureans –
seemed to see as the mark of a philosophical life. In a word: Chill!
As a way of insulating yourself from the heartaches of the world, Epicureanism cannot be faulted. But what a low-risk, uninspiring prospect it is, a Greek version of a self-help manual rather than a vision of the true, the good and the beautiful. Herschel Baker, in The Image of Man,22 says about Epicurus’ philosophy that it is ‘clearly symptomatic of the slackening of Greek thought’ and belongs to ‘a crumbling society’. ‘Wry, shallow’, it is ‘the last weary effort of the pagan world’. Even Bertrand Russell says that ‘the age of Epicurus was a weary age, and extinction could appear as a welcome rest from travail of spirit’.23
When humanity loses faith in faith, as it did with Epicurus and Lucretius then and the scientific materialists now, the human ceiling suddenly seems lower and the horizons of possibility more foreshortened.
Something else linked the Greeks of the third century BCE with moral attitudes today. The Greeks had no concept of the sanctity of life. They practised abortion on a wide scale. They practised infanticide also.24 Babies born with congenital defects were often simply left to die. That is how the story of Oedipus begins, with his father Laius pinning his ankles together and handing him over to a servant to abandon him on a nearby mountain. They had no qualms, either, about euthanasia. The word itself is Greek. It means ‘a good death’.
It is astonishing how lightly the Greeks took the idea of suicide. It was, for the Stoics, Cynics, Sceptics and Epicureans, a perfectly legitimate assertion of human freedom. If life was distressing, end it. If living would force you to compromise your standards, choose dying. Epictetus, the former slave who became a Stoic philosopher, is reputed to have said that leaving life is no more consequential than leaving a smoky room. It is even said that Zeno, the first Stoic, tripped, broke his toe, and promptly committed suicide.25
The contemporary West is headed in this direction, with abortion legalised, a strong movement for voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, and a number of ethicists including Peter Singer of Harvard arguing for the permissibility of infanticide.26
How shall we argue this case? We are faced here with two incommensurable philosophies of life. For one, there is nothing special about humanity, nothing that sets us qualitatively apart from other life forms. We are bodies not souls, matter not spirit. Nothing of us survives. Dust we are and to dust we return. What conceivable reason could there be to deny people the choice to die if, because of pain or incurable disease, they feel they have no reason to live?
For the other, yes, we are dust of the Earth, but within us is the breath of God. To be moral is to recognise that right and wrong are not of our choosing. We are answerable to God, to the universe, to life itself. To be morally mature is to recognise that there are limits to what we may legitimately do. The world does not always yield to our will. Sometimes our will must yield to the world. There are certain things that are holy, sacrosanct, non-negotiable, lines drawn in the sand. For the Judeo-Christian tradition the most significant is life itself, which we see as belonging to God, not to us.
What makes this particular disagreement so interesting is that it helps us see the larger issue at stake. For the Greeks in the third pre-Christian century and secularists now, the fundamental value is personal preference, autonomy, the choosing ‘I’. For the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is something infinitely larger than the ‘I’ – the beyond-within that is the voice of God. Curiously enough, it is just this connection between the self and the world beyond the self that answers one question atheists tend not to ask. Why, if Darwin is correct and survival over time is the test of fitness or success, does religion survive so much better than atheism?
It was none other than Darwin himself who gave us one of the great arguments for religion. He tells the story in The Descent of Man.
It began with a paradox Darwin noticed at the heart of his system. If evolution is the struggle to survive, if life is a competition for scarce resources, if the strong win and the weak die, then everywhere ruthlessness should prevail. But it does not. All societies value altruism. People esteem those who make sacrifices for the sake of others. This, in Darwinian terms, does not seem to make sense at all, and he was honest enough to admit it.
The bravest, most sacrificial people, he wrote, ‘would on average perish in larger number than other men’. A noble man ‘would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature’. It seems scarcely possible, he wrote, that virtue ‘could be increased through natural selection, that is, by survival of the fittest’.27
It is a measure of Darwin’s greatness that he acknowledged the answer, even though it contradicted his general thesis. Natural selection operates at the level of the individual. It is as individual men and women that we pass on our genes to the next generation. But civilisation works at the level of the group. As he put it:
A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.28
How to get from the individual to the group was, he said, ‘at present much too difficult to be solved’.
Technically, this is known as the ‘free rider’ problem. It is always in my interest to pay less or take more than my share in some public amenity: to travel on a bus, for example, without paying for a ticket if I can get away with it. Public goods – not just tangible ones like roads and transport systems, but intangibles like safety and trust – depend on everyone sharing the burden. If I can avoid paying, it will be to my advantage to do so; but if everyone did so, the system would collapse. So, for its own survival, every group has to devise ways of detecting and discouraging free riders, people who exploit the system.
One way of doing so, as we have seen, is to erect complex systems of law, regulation, inspection, detection, surveillance and prosecution. But these are costly and cumbersome and do not always work. The alternative is to create, within the minds of individuals, an identification with and concern for the group as a whole so strong that it defeats the constant temptation to become a free rider. This generates ‘high trust’ societies where enforcement costs are low and adaptability swift. Any group in which all the members can trust one another is at a massive advantage to others.
This, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has argued, is what religion does more powerfully than any other system.29 God is the voice of the other within the self. It is God who teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves, to welcome the stranger, care for the poor, the widow and the orphan, heed the unheeded, feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, and temper justice with compassion. It was Nietzsche, Darwin’s younger contemporary, who saw most clearly how unnatural these things are. Nature is the will to power. Faith, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is care for the powerless. Religion is the prime example of how, for Homo sapiens, culture overrides nature.
Perhaps without fully realising what he had done, Darwin was pointing us to the central drama of civilisation. Biological evolution favours individuals, but cultural evolution favours groups. So, as Judaism and Christianity both knew, there is a war within each of us as to which will prevail: self-regard or concern for others, egoism or altruism. Selfishness benefits individuals, but it is disastrous to groups, and it is only as members of a group that individuals can survive at all. As Darwin himself put it, ‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected.’30
There are three ways of getting individuals to act in a way that is beneficial to the group. One is power: we force them to. The second is wealth: we pay them to. The disadvantage of both these is that they leave selfishness untouched. They use external incentives. The danger is that strong individuals will outwit the system. They will use power or wealth for their own advantage.
The third alternative is to educate them to see
that the welfare of others matters as much as their own. No system has done this more effectively than religion, for an obvious reason. Religion teaches us that we are part of the whole, a thread in the fabric of God’s creation, a note in the symphony of life. Faith is the ability to see ourselves as joined to others by God’s love.
Not only does it teach us this, through story and ritual, celebration and prayer, it weaves it into our personalities, affecting all parts of the almost infinitely complex labyrinth of the human brain. No wonder then that religion has survived, and that we need it if we are to survive. And it was Charles Darwin who pointed the way.
Religion binds people into groups. It creates altruism, the only force strong enough to defeat egoism. Selfishness is good for me and my genes, but bad for us and therefore bad for my descendants in the long run. In Homo sapiens a miracle of nature meets a miracle of culture: religion, which turns selfish genes into selfless people.
It does it because great religious texts have the power to inspire the moral imagination. Reading the Bible, we encounter God listening to the prayer of a childless woman and giving her a child; Moses confronting Pharaoh and demanding that he let his people go; the prophets fearlessly condemning kings and priests for their corruption. This is morality at its most dramatic and world-transforming.
Michael Walzer argues that a religious morality is likely to be more interesting than its secular equivalents. It comes to the prophet with the force of revelation. Often it overthrows long-standing beliefs. When Hannah sings a song to God on the birth of her son, she says:
He raises the poor from the dust
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 16