13
It is fascinating to see how, in an age which is in many respects in denial of its Christian roots, and in which secularist values are often aggressively promoted, the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition still moulds so many of our perceptions, values, and ideals. As we shall see in this chapter, even when the advocates of secular unbelief strive to remodel humanity from what they take to be “first principles”, the Judeo-Christian moral world view retains such a hold upon their mental architecture and creative imaginations that it returns to haunt their aspirations. And when secularists try to make the world better, or explain humanity’s place in the greater scheme of things, its indelible traces soon become apparent, if only we look for them. So why do we, even when vigorously denying God, recast ourselves, no doubt unthinkingly, in the role of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus? To generate a secular “transcendence”, in fact!
One of the premises behind much social, scientific, and secular thinking over the last 250 years is the idea that mankind is somehow “perfectible”. All one needs to do is replace the Judeo-Christian religion, with its doctrines of original sin, atonement, and redemption, with a rational psychology of original innocence and the right sort of education, and a new and nobler order of being will emerge. Our innate benevolence will achieve full potential at last, and wellsprings of human virtue and natural goodness will bubble up from below, so that poverty, war, and cruelty will simply melt away. Indeed, we will even relinquish our claims to be the custodians of Nature, as asserted in the book of Genesis, and the secularized lion will lie down with the freethinking lamb, and a rational child of Nature will dwell among them. (Nature, one notices in this tradition, is invariably spelled with a capital “N”, to make clear its status as the deity of reason.)
Of course, elements of this way of thinking were present in late seventeenth-century deist writers such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal, while even John Locke’s writings on property, such as in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), contain a few strands. For in the beginning were hard-working peasant farmers who “mixed their labour with the soil” to make it blossom abundantly, in something resembling Arcadia. On the other hand, we must not forget that Locke, the liberally minded “reasonable” Christian physician and philosopher, nonetheless saw this world as related to the biblical Eden.
One central component of the human perfectibility school, however, were the “social contract” thinkers – philosophers who saw “Man” as a reasonable being, who agreed or “contracted” with his fellow-men upon the basic ground rules of communal living, influenced, no doubt (although this was generally unacknowledged), by the “covenant” theology of the ancient Jews. An early and clear articulation of the “social contract” theory, indeed, is to be found in Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651, where, in their rational wish to escape the barbarous, dog-eat-dog circumstance of being survival-programmed machines, individual humans come out of their lurking places and strike a communal deal to abstain from killing each other. This is how Hobbes made the transition from “man the machine” to “man the political, sociable machine”, as the human clocks now synchronized with each other to form a “civil society”.
Locke, though less brutalist in his thinking than Hobbes, also saw civil society as based on an original consenting peasant communism. But then, in Locke, the differences that separate each and every one of us soon clicked in: the idle neglected their farms, which the energetic took over, paying wages to the idlers that kept them in basic necessities but not especially in prosperity. And so one saw the natural emergence of social rank, with peasants, gentlemen, and kings. Yet even kings held their office entirely under contract from the gentlemanly group (Parliament, by 1690), and most definitely not by unchallengeable divine right.
This way of social and political thinking coloured that entire movement popularly styled the “Enlightenment”, and was very much born out of the need to find a way of challenging absolutist royal authority: first in England, where it proved a very successful – and after 1660 a bloodless – way of reining in the House of Stuart, and then, rather more messily, with France’s Bourbon monarchy. It also created a whole tradition of discussion about the nature of property, wealth, and the relationship between political and economic power that was developed by François Quesnay and the Physiocrat School in Paris, and by Adam Smith in Scotland. But the man who took it further than anybody, and who trumpeted it most loudly, was the Swiss-French idealist-opportunist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom we first met in Chapter 4.
The opening sentence of chapter 1 of his Du Contrat Social (1762) gives you a broad hint about what is to follow: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” The chains, it is true, were by no means entirely religious, although absolutist kings used religion to their advantage in destroying man’s natural freedom. For Rousseau was probably not an atheist: he does, after all, begin his Émile (1762) by stating: “God makes all things good.” More likely he was a philosopher who had started out as a Genevan Calvinist Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism when enjoying the intimate friendship of Madame de Warens and other high-placed ladies, and then probably became a deist or, at best, a very liberal believer.
It was Rousseau more than any other thinker who gave rise to the idea that “Man” was naturally good, and if released from the bonds that shackled him and the burdens imposed by Western civilization could regain his natural virtue. But the time we needed to start bringing out the natural goodness that lay embedded within was soon after birth, and it is not for nothing that Émile would become the foundational text for so many subsequent educational idealists. For instead of the hero of the book, Émile, being subjected to the stern discipline of an eighteenth-century school, with its Latin, Greek, mathematics, and rules – usually enforced with the master’s stick – he would simply roam free from all constraint. As would his sweetheart Sophie.
In the 1760s Rousseau’s ideas caught on like wildfire in certain circles, as the idea of reinventing an idealized human became the fashion. And humanity-perfecting idealists also believed they had found substantiation in new geographical and anthropological findings, especially in Captain James Cook’s 1770s voyages to the then virtually unknown world of Pacific Polynesia. For here was a tropical paradise, with happy, innocent, sun-drenched islanders, apparently living on intimate and caring terms with the sea, sky, and forest, hitherto untouched by the pollutions of Western civilization and – of course – Christianity. The anthropological accounts of the islanders and their artefacts brought back to Europe by Cook, and the accounts of his scientific shipmates, Sir Joseph Banks FRS and the Swede Dr Daniel Carl Solander FRS, along with Sydney Parkinson’s and William Hodges’ seemingly idyllic Polynesian land and seascape paintings, all (albeit unintentionally) fed into the new fashionable concept of the “noble savage”; for did not these simple, noble people show that Rousseau really must be right in his analyses after all, for science proved it! Man really was an innocent when seen in the isolated “uncontaminated” conditions of Polynesia, and what European idealists and disciples of Rousseau aspired to do was to somehow restore him to that condition.
Of course, later travellers, quite independently of the much-maligned Christian missionaries, would demonstrate that indigenous Polynesians were no more innocent than Europeans. They had their own problems and violent tendencies, weapons and war canoes, just like the rest of humanity – as evidenced in what befell Captain Cook himself in 1778 – for an absence of guns, stock markets, and Bibles did not by definition conduce to innocence.
I believe, however, that the serendipitous coalescence of Rousseau’s writings and the 1770s accounts of Polynesian islanders was crucial in building up the myth of a secular or at best deistic, and often anti-Christian, belief in human perfectibility: instinctive benevolence is supposedly what you find when you get rid of original sin and the need for divine grace and salvation. Indeed, according to this way of thinking, all you have to do is rediscover and release the innocence that is buried within us! And to do that, you have to start rebuilding society from its very foundations. An inspired elite would lead their fellows out of superstition to freedom, dissident views would be curtailed or vilified, and wholly new doctrines and values – all Natural, of course – would be established. And most of all, God would be ruled out of the picture, or else marginalized to a benign pantheistic irrelevance, along with those whom “the Enlightened” particularly disliked, namely Christian missionaries, both at home and abroad. Ruled out on every level, in fact, from Jesuit priests taking the gospel to and living among the peoples of Amazonia to Harvard College trained Protestants bound for Hawaii, and even Methodist preachers heading for Cornwall or the Welsh valleys. And if the beneficent liberators met with opposition from people who did not share their new perceptions, be they traditionalists or monarchists in Revolutionary France, or in Moscow in 1920, then they must be subjected to ridicule and cleansed from the scene. As the plain unvarnished historical record abundantly shows, the rational, social-engineering, secular idealists can display a far greater capacity for intolerance than any Christian state.
Two things that have always made me sceptical about secular humanity-perfecters are: firstly, their often implicit (albeit, one hopes, unrecognized) hypocrisy; and secondly, their seeming inability to learn, both from history and from contemporary experience, along with their unfailing tendency to elevate secular theory above practice.
But what is it that makes some people wish to refashion humanity afresh, to strip away the accumulations of centuries, and begin again from first principles? A desire which, one must admit, has not been unique to secular materialists. Puritans down the ages, Christian and of other faiths or none, have consistently displayed this control-freak trait, and I suspect that it is found in varying degrees in all human groups – obsessive and driving in some, mild in others.
My suspicion is that it has a lot to do with whether or not individuals and their organizations can live with chance, unpredictability, and mess, or if it is essential that things be made to obey the rules that those in charge just know to be right. To some degree, whether one happens to be a pragmatist or an idealist, and whether the institutions one creates are flexible or rigid.
What is worrying in our own day, however, as the secular materialists have come to occupy so many important positions in our universities, the media, politics, and in non-elected political “quangos”, is that the legendary intolerance of the puritan and ideologue (often nowadays in the name of “modernity” and “diversity”) is being openly directed against Christianity, and in many cases encounters very little resistance.
But the deep and abiding tragedy is that when human control freaks believe that they are the measure of all things and, in their intellectual arrogance, insist upon enforcing their views of “perfection” upon rough and ready humanity, we begin to slide into a truly nightmare phase of human history. So be cautious about believing the myth that common, earthy men and women can be made perfect in this world.