Charles Taylor, “Perils of Moralism” and Responses
Perils of Moralism
Charles Taylor
A great deal of effort in modern liberal society is invested in defining and applying codes of conduct. First, at the highest theoretical level, much contemporary moral theory assumes that morality can be defined in terms of a code of obligatory and forbidden actions which can be generated from a single source or principle. Hence, the major importance in our philosophy departments of the battle between utilitarians and post-Kantians. While they agree that there must be a single principle from which one can generate all and only obligatory actions, they wage a vigorous polemic over the nature of this principle. On the one hand, there are those who opt for some or other mode of calculation of utility (rule utilitarianism, act utilitarianism, utilities as preferences, etc.). On the other hand, we find those whose criterion lies in some form of universality. Some of the latter embrace universality in its original Kantian sort of acting by universalizable maxims. Others embrace more sophisticated modern versions in which the proper norm is that which is agreed to by all those affected (Habermas) or that a right act is one which you could justify to those affected (Scanlon). The constant here is the identification of morality with a unified code, generated from a single source.
But if you move out of the academy into the political realm, you encounter a similar (and related) code-fixation. One expression of this fixation is the legal entrenchment of certain fundamental principles of our society. The most prominent and visible form of this entrenchment is the constitutionalization of various charters of rights and non-discrimination which is a central feature of our world. This leads to a more and more elaborate definition of legally binding codes. But this approach extends in spirit beyond the political sphere. It is taken for granted that the way to achieve certain important collective goods, like tolerance and mutual respect, lies in a code of behavior, like the “speech codes” which some campuses have put in place. The contours of disrespect are codified, so that they can be forbidden, and if necessary sanctioned. Thus will our society march forward.
The obvious question that suggests itself here is what’s wrong with this? In this first section, I’d like to present some obvious and often rehearsed objections to this way of proceeding. In later sections, I want to try to go deeper into our culture and history to trace the sources of this code-fixation, and some of the forms of resistance to it. At the end, I will try to articulate some specifically Christian concerns about it.
Why can’t our moral/ethical life ever be adequately captured in a code? Here are some of the reasons:
1. Situations and events, Aristotle pointed out, are unforeseeably various; no set of formulae will ever capture all of them. Thus, any pre-fixed code will have to be adjusted to new situations. For this reason, the good person—the person with phronêsis—really operates on a deep sense of the goods concerned, plus a flexible ability to discern what the new situation requires.
2. The fact that—as Aristotle recognizes but Kant and Bentham and all those who try to derive morality from a single principle do not—there exists a plurality of goods. These goods can conflict in certain circumstances: liberty and equality; justice and mercy; commutative justice and comity; efficient success and compassionate understanding; getting things done bureaucratically (requiring categories, rules) and treating everyone as a unique person, etc.
3. The plurality of goods, moreover, intensifies the uniqueness of situations. More specifically, it creates dilemmas; and dilemmatic situations differ in non-predictable ways. Thus, we need phronêsis even more. We need a sense of the two goods in conflict here, and of the weight of each demand in the tension in relation to its own kind. If one is really weighty and the other relatively trivial, we know which way to lean.
Different examples of the “same” dilemma, therefore, call for different resolutions. It is in the nature of dilemmas, furthermore, that even in a concrete case, they may admit of more than one solution. The “same” dilemma, defined by the goods in conflict may in this concrete case, in other words, admit of more than one solution, like quadratic equations with two unknowns. Why?
We are not only dealing with goods (justice and mercy, liberty and equality), but with the claims of certain people, certain agents. How they choose, or can be induced to treat their own claims can have a fateful effect on the outcome. Someone has suffered a historical wrong; commutative justice demands redress. But there are other considerations. What might be considered full redress, if we just look at the nature of the wrong, will have other effects that could be damaging to parties who are either innocent, or whose guilt is not all that total. This is obviously what arises in cases of historical redress: reparations payments to historical victims; or in cases of transition from a despotic exploitative régime to a more open, democratic, egalitarian one. In this latter case, we have also to consider the effect of full reparations on the future co-existence of the descendants of exploiters and exploited in the new régime.
Now, in a conflict where the two parties remain locked in conflict, at arms length, one “right” solution might be an all-things-considered award to the victims. But, if they can be brought together, and become motivated to try to find some good future basis for their common existence, then one may emerge with quite a different “award” or solution. Cases of contemporary transitional justice come to mind, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Of course, this raises some big questions: Did the victims really agree? Who exactly were the victims? Were they rushed, pushed, forced into conceding too much, etc.? But the basic idea behind this kind of procedure was to get the ex-victims to accept that they could have a maximum of one kind of closure (the truth about what happened) at the cost of renouncing a lot that they could quite legitimately claim of another kind: punishment of the perpetrators, an eye for an eye. The aim was to find an “award” that allowed also for a reconciliation, and therefore living together on a new footing.
The important point here is this: that one reason dilemmas admit of more than one solution is that they are frequently also conflicts between claimants, and these can be seen or interpreted differently by those involved. By moving the interpretations in a certain direction, the same dilemma can be resolved in a less costly way to the two goods. One resolution, in other words, may be the only right one here because the parties remain rigidly hostile and opposed to each other, insisting on their full “rights”; as a result, the “award” to the victim is in one sense higher thus hurting the perpetrator more. The resulting hostility, however, also deprives the victims and their successors of the goods of comity and collaboration. As against this, the operation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission can lift us to a new point where the issue is not so totally zero-sum. It can bring about, in relation to the first situation of total hostility, a win-win move.
Generalizing this, we can see that dilemmas have to be understood in a kind of two-dimensional space. The horizontal space gives you the dimension in which you have to find the point of resolution, the fair “award,” between two parties. The vertical space opens the possibility that, by rising higher, you’ll accede to a new horizontal space where the resolution will be less painful/damaging for both parties.
Examples of this phenomenon abound in modern politics. A “fair” resolution for Bosnia after the terrible mutual killing is perhaps this strange tri-partite state with separate cantons and a triune presidency, and a great deal of uncertainty and instability. Over time, however, if some trust can be re-established between the parties, then one can see the possibility of moving toward a more normal federal system.
This is why the great benefactors in politics are leaders like Mandela and Tutu whose charismatic interventions help a society to move up in this space. Put another way, we can say that dilemmas of this kind are also trilemmas, or double dilemmas. First, we have to judge between claims A and B; but then we also have to decide whether we will go for the best “award” between A and B on the level we’re now on, or try to induce people to rise to another level. Great leaders—like Mandela—here have a mixture of shrewd judgment of where people can be induced to go, as well as great charismatic power to lead them there.
4. The vertical dimension I have been talking about here is one of reconciliation and trust. This whole discussion, in turn, shows how Christian faith can never be decanted into a fixed code. It can never be reduced to such a code because it places our actions in two dimensions: one of right action and an eschatological dimension. This is also a dimension of reconciliation and trust, but one pointing beyond any merely intra-historical perspective of possible reconciliation. It can, however, inspire vertical moves in history, like those of Mandela and Tutu. (Tutu’s faith commitment is well known, and, if I don’t know what Nelson Mandela actually believes, his approach was obviously deeply inspired by Christianity, if only historically. Forgiveness, after all, is a key category, however downplayed as a term here.)
The New Testament is full of indications of this. Take the owner of the vineyard who invited workers in at the beginning of the day, then successively at later hours until the end. His proposal to pay everyone one denarius is obviously outrageous as a suggestion for the basis of wage policy in a stable society—hence the protests of those who came at the beginning of the day. But the parable opens the eschatological dimension of the Kingdom of God: at the height of that vertical space, that’s the only appropriate distribution. God operates in that vertical dimension, as well as being with us horizontally in the person of Christ.[1]
But that means that there aren’t any formulae for acting as Christians in the world. Take the best code possible in today’s circumstances, or what passes for such. The question always arises: Could one, by transcending/amending/re-interpreting the code, move us all vertically? Christ is constantly doing that in the Gospel.
One “solution” adopted in the past consisted in marking out different roles. The clergy, for example, were forbidden to do certain things which the laity were permitted to do, such as participating in battle. Today, however, we tend to distrust that approach, and a more exigent demand of Christian pacifism would wipe out this distinction. But this only raises the question of whether that is the right move.
My claim above was that modern liberal society tends toward a kind of “code fetishism” or nomolatry. This focus on codes causes it to forget the background that makes sense of any code, namely, the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize and the vertical dimension which arises above all these. We can see this in both contemporary Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy and the drive to codification in liberal society.
But the sources go back deeper in our culture. I want to argue that it was a turn in Latin Christendom which sent us down this road. The turn in question was the drive to “reform” in its various stages and variants. I mean here not just the Protestant Reformation, but a series of moves on both sides of the confessional divide. The goal of these moves was to make people into more perfect practicing Christians through articulating codes and inculcating disciplines. Their ultimate effect was to make the Christian life more and more identified with these codes and disciplines.
This code-centrism, in short, came about as the by-product of an attempt to make over the lives of Christians and their social order, so as to make them conform thoroughly to the demands of the Gospel. I am talking not of a particular, revolutionary moment, but of a long, ascending series of attempts to establish a Christian order, of which the Reformation is a key phase. These attempts show a progressive impatience with older modes of post-Axial religion in which certain collective, ritualistic forms of earlier religions existed in uneasy coexistence with the demands of individual devotion and ethical reform which came from the “higher” revelations. In Latin Christendom, the attempt was to recover and impose on everyone a more individually committed and Christocentric religion of devotion and action, and to repress or even abolish older, supposedly “magical” or “superstitious” forms of collective ritual practice.
Allied with a neo-Stoic outlook and drawing on new disciplines (Foucault enters the story here), this became the charter for a series of attempts to establish new forms of social order which helped to reduce violence, disorder, and create populations of relatively pacific and productive artisans and peasants, who were more and more induced/forced into the new forms of devotional practice and moral behavior. This process took place in Protestant England, Holland, counter-Reformation France, the Germany of the “Polizeistaat,” and later in the American colonies.
My hypothesis is that this new creation of a civilized, “polite” order succeeded beyond what its first originators could have hoped for, and that this in turn led to a new reading of what a Christian order might be—one which was seen more and more in “immanent” terms (in which the polite, civilized order was seen as the Christian order). This version of Christianity was shorn of much of its “transcendent” content and was thus open to a new departure, in which its new understanding of good order (what I call the “modern moral order”) could be embraced outside of the original theological, Providential framework, and in certain cases even against it (as with Voltaire, Gibbon, and in another way, Hume).
Disbelief in God arises in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of rights-bearing individuals, who are destined (by God or Nature) to act for mutual benefit—an order which thus rejects the earlier honor ethic which exalted the warrior, as it also tends to occlude any transcendent horizon. (We see one good formulation of this notion of order in Locke’s Second Treatise.) This understanding of order has profoundly shaped the forms of social imaginary which dominate in the modern West: the market economy, the public sphere, the sovereign “people.”[2]
The process was completed when these disciplined forms of life began to be seen as not needing any transcendent endorsement; they could be made the content of an exclusive humanism. As a matter of fact, thinkers like Hume and Gibbon argued that these forms of life were liable to be destabilized by any appeal to the transcendent, which tended to breed “fanaticism” and/or “enthusiasm.” With this modern enclosed humanism, the vertical dimension is largely eclipsed, or else disappears altogether.
This involved not only a change in the foreground understanding of Christian life, but also and even more fatefully a deep change in the background understanding. As a result of this change, the pre-modern sense that any code can only hold in a larger order that transcends the code, articulated in such events as Carnivals, or hierarchical reversals, which Victor Turner has so brilliantly analyzed, has almost totally faded from our world.
Code fetishism means that the entire spiritual dimension of human life is captured in a moral code. Kant proposes perhaps the most moving form of this (although perhaps the capture wasn’t complete in his case). His followers today like Rawls, Habermas, and countless others carry on this reduction (although recently Habermas seems to have had second thoughts).
Modern culture is marked by a series of revolts against this moralism, in both its Christian and non-Christian forms. Think, for example, of the great late 19th-century reaction in England against Evangelical “puritanism” that we associate with names as diverse as Arnold, Wilde, and later Bloomsbury. Likewise, think of Ibsen, or of Nietzsche and all those who follow him, including those (such as Michel Foucault) rebelling against the various disciplines that have helped constitute this modern moralization.
These reactions, however, start earlier. The code-centered notion of order (and its attendant disciplines) begins to generate negative reactions from the 18th century on. Indeed, these reactions shape the central themes of the Romantic period. Many people found it hard to believe, even preposterous, that the achievement of this code-bound life should exhaust the significance of human existence. It’s almost as though each form of protest were adding its own verse to the famous Peggy Lee song “Is that all there is?”
The reactions were in fact plural, and not all in one direction. Some wanted to return to, recover, or reconceive forms of Christian faith that acknowledged transcendence. But others tried rather to reconceptualize immanence, giving rise to what could be called the “immanent counter-Enlightenment.”[3] What may seem to call for a return to belief may give rise also to new forms of unbelief and vice versa.
The multiplicity of the reactions and multiple directions in which they can be carried out has meant a steadily widening gamut of different possible positions in our civilization. I have called this “the nova effect.” We can get a sense of this by looking at the dynamic of this movement in somewhat finer detail. The whole package—disciplined, buffered identity, within the code of freedom and mutual benefit—has given rise to a gamut of negative reactions, sometimes leveled at the package itself, sometimes against one or another part of it, sometimes against particular solutions which arise from it. I want to look at least at some of these and follow out a little the path of the polemics, as the nova expands, along several axes at once.
Disintricating these axes will be difficult because in the actual struggles there has often been more than one issue at stake. In doing so, I am going to have to make a number of analytic distinctions which are bound to seem rather artificial when we look at any particular thinker or movement. This move is justified, however, because, although already connected, the strands combine in a number of different ways.
For our purposes here, it might be helpful to pursue two axes separately. The first consists of critiques of the buffered self and modern order as too narrow, self-enclosed, denying a greater reality both within and without. They are often optimistic and point toward a way of healing through openness or completion. The second, on the contrary, consists of critiques which insist that this modern outlook is too facile and optimistic. It frequently points to irremediable division and introduces a note of tragedy.
Some of the principal critiques moving along the first axis are as follows:
1. One of the central themes of the Romantic age was a critique levelled at the disengaged, disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. The accusation was that it had repressed, denied feeling; or, alternatively, that it had divided us, confined us in the prison of a dessicating reason which alienates us from our deeper emotions. Now this critique in fact went back some considerable way. Shaftesbury had reacted to the calculating hedonism of Locke, and rehabilitated the “generous affection” of which the soul is capable.[4] His was part of the inspiration behind the moral sense school. Later Rousseau in his own eloquent way protested against the narrow calculus of self-interest which divides us from each other and stifles the reasons of the heart. The great importance laid on deep feeling as a facet of human excellence, on sentiment, on sensibility, reflected in part a reaction to the excessive demands of ordering reason. All this forms the background to the classical statements of the Romantic period, like Schiller’s in his Aesthetic Education, which posits the goal of overcoming this internal division as the way to wholeness and freedom, the very height of human excellence.
Now this reaction could be part of a way back out of rationalist Deism into orthodox belief. This is what it was for the Pietist movement. True religion couldn’t consist in this intellectual fascination with doctrine—it had to engage the whole heart, or it was nothing. Spener pronounced his lapidary judgment on the apologetic obsessions of establishment theologians: “Whoever would prove the existence of God, he is already an atheist.” This religion of the heart was passed on to Wesley and Methodism, where it took ecstatic, often spectacular forms which were deeply disturbing to those who feared above all “enthusiasm.”
But the same reaction could lead in a quite different direction. The tyranny of reason over feeling in the context of much traditional morality involved a condemnation of base desire. The rehabilitation of ordinary feeling could therefore take the form of a rejection of this moral tradition, and also of the Christianity which seemed to underlie it, with its picture of human nature as damaged and depraved. Rousseau’s Deism, for instance, sloughed off the doctrine of original sin. And others would follow this lead down the path to a humanism in which natural, spontaneous desire was the source of healing.
The same response, in short, could lead in two diametrically opposed directions: if it leads us to John Wesley and today’s Pentecostal movements, it also leads us to D. H. Lawrence and various 20th-century cults of liberated sexuality (not to mention all the mediating links between these two Englishmen living a century and a half apart).
2. Another closely related line of attack against the buffered identity and its model of order—and the one most central to this discussion)—charged them with moralism. In a sense, this too goes quite far back. Already the “reasonable” religion which emerges out of the Civil War and its aftermath in England tended toward moralism. Our duty to God consisted in establishing and conforming to the moral order he had designed for us. The proofs of his existence and goodness pointed to his design of a world in which this order was appropriate, and his endorsement of it through the rewards and punishments he offers us. What had gotten lost was the sense that devotion to God, for its own sake, was the center of the religious life.
In a sense, this objection overlaps the previous one. Indeed, it could even be seen as the same charge taken from a different angle. It protests against a life totally absorbed in conforming to certain rules. The sense is that something central is missing here, some great purpose, some élan, some fulfilment, without which life has lost its point.
Seen in a Christian perspective, this missing centerpiece is the love of God, and this could give us an alternative way of describing Wesley’s rebellion against the established piety of his day. But the same charge can be taken up in a different perspective, in the name of an integral, fulfilled human nature. Schiller is a case in point. Simply imposing moral rules gives us a kind of unfreedom, a realm of necessity. If we impose them on ourselves, this means that we have created a kind of “master within.”[5] True freedom requires that we go beyond morality to the harmonious realization of our whole nature, a realization we achieve in “play.”
This appeal against the moral to a genuine self-realization can then be played out in a host of forms, both spiritual and naturalistic, as we see with Nietzsche, among others—and, of course, with Lawrence. Indeed, since moralism is one of the recurring forms generated out of the modern order of freedom and benefit, including its contemporary unbelieving utilitarian and post-Kantian modes, this response is still being generated, and in a host of different directions. The nova effect goes on.
3. But returning to the 18th century, we can see that these two objections could and often did combine with a third: the sense that the understanding of benevolence, of charity, is too pale and tame in mainstream Deism/humanism. The movement toward Deism, and eventually to the sceptical Enlightenment stance of a Hume or a Gibbon, involved some exclusion of practices which were previously seen as central to the love of/devotion to God, and their condemnation as excessive, extravagant, harmful, or “enthusiastic.”[6] A more demanding piety rebels at these restrictions. Thus, evangelicals felt called upon to throw themselves into causes which most mainstream churchmen were willing to leave alone, most notably the abolition of slavery. To the less stringent, more establishment-friendly, mainstream notion of order, it seemed excessive to upset production and property rights, and long-settled ways, to such an extent, for such a reason.
But the call of a more demanding form of justice/benevolence also gave rise to new and more radical modes of humanism. Again, Rousseau is a hinge figure. He spoke up, very eloquently and persuasively, for a more demanding standard of justice and benevolence; and he was the inspiration of a whole tradition of radical humanist views, beginning with those of the French Revolutionaries who swore by him.
The succession from Rousseau, moreover, also has to include Kant. In Kant, we have someone who, although in a sense on the verge of Deism, very sharply defined the inner source of the moral law and made morality identical to autonomy. He is a crucial figure in the development of exclusive humanism because, in spite of the continuing place of God and immortality in his scheme, he so strongly articulates the power of inner sources of morality.
And yet, we cannot be surprised when we learn that Kant came from a Pietist background. His philosophy goes on breathing this sense of the stringent demands of God and the good, even while he puts his Pietistic faith through an anthropocentric turn. We have a moving field of forces here, in which more than one constellation is possible, and more, in which the constellations frequently mutate.
4. I have by no means exhausted the reactions to the buffered identity and moral order. The Romantic movement carried a multiplicity of protests in its current. Some have been mentioned, but I want to touch on one more here. This is a reaction to the buffered self as such. It is the sense that in closing ourselves to the enchanted world, we have been cut off from the great source of life and meaning, which is there for us in nature. Not that this was seen as an invitation to return to the past. On the contrary, the Romantics rather explored new ways to recover the link with nature, mediated by our expressive powers.
Now, there is a feature of this exploration which is especially worth mention. It is the malaise that follows from the adoption of a purely instrumental, “rational” stance toward the world of human life. The close link to the attack on this closure comes from the fact that it is usually this instrumental stance which is blamed for closing us off from nature and the current of life within and without us. But still, the attack on the instrumental stance takes up another side of this self-closure which has had its own devastating consequences. In the effort to control our lives, or control nature, we have destroyed much that is deep and valuable in them. We have been blinded to the importance of equilibria which can be upset, but can’t be created by instrumental rationality.
The most important of these in the contemporary debates is obviously the one touching the ecological balance of our entire biosphere. The line of protest which I am invoking here has been absolutely crucial to the ecological movements of our time. Some of these are grounded, of course, on instrumental rational considerations; but an important part of the whole ecological movement draws on the sense that there is something fundamentally wrong, blind, hubristic, even impious in taking a stance to the world in which the environment is seen exclusively in terms of the human purposes to which it can be put. Needless to say, this reaction, too, can take unbelieving as well as Christian forms.
The second axis, as was noted earlier, consists of critiques which see the modern outlook as too facile. Some of the principal critiques moving along this axis include:
1. Something that could also go with a strong piety, but might not, is the rejection of the Deistic notion of Providence as just too absurdly, self-indulgently optimistic. The insistence that everything fits together for the good is all too pat, and seems to deny the tragedy, the pain, the unresolved suffering which we all know is there. The most famous occasion for this objection was the Lisbon earthquake of 1757. And the most famous articulation of it is probably Voltaire’s in Candide, which shows right off how this response doesn’t have to feed a sense of piety. On the contrary, it can be used to put the whole notion of Providence on trial, and even belief in God as such. This has perhaps been its most important effect in the last two centuries. A very common objection of unbelief to Christianity has been that it offers a childishly benign view of human life, where everything will come right in the end. Such a view of life is something that the really mature person cannot believe, and is willing to do without. A truly mature person, in contrast, has the courage to face reality as it is. This was in fact one of the main motors impelling those who moved from Deism to exclusive humanism in the eighteenth century.
In part, this bespeaks a one-sided definition of Christianity in terms of Providential Deism whose central role in early modern Christian thought, especially in apologetics, has been documented by Michael Buckley.[7] It shows the importance of the order of historical events, and the key role played by Deism in the development of the modern debate. But this line of criticism is also somewhat justified by the continuing place of a liberal, sanitized Christianity, which doesn’t quite know what to do with suffering.
There is something deep in this objection. Deism or Christianity is taxed with unrealism; but there is also a moral objection here. Unrealism doesn’t always have to be a moral matter. Some may even admire Christians or anarchists for their utopian hopes, and their willingness to fight for things which others recognize as impossible of attainment. But in the case of Panglossian optimism, the unrealism is held to betoken an immaturity, a lack of courage, and inability to face things.
Moreover, it is held in some way to cheapen life, to render it shallow. Recognizing the tragedy in life is not just having the nerve to face it; it also consists in acknowledging some of its depth and grandeur. There is depth, because suffering can make plain to us some of the meaning of life which we couldn’t appreciate before, when it all seemed swimmingly benign. This, after all, is what tragedy as an art form explores. There is grandeur because of the way suffering is sometimes borne, or fought against. Thus, in a curious way, a picture of life as potentially frictionless bliss robs us of something.
This is undoubtedly what Nietzsche was getting at in The Genealogy of Morals, where he says that what humans can’t stand is not suffering, but meaningless suffering. They need to give a meaning to it. And he mentions specifically what we could call the judicial-penal model, the idea that we suffer because we have sinned, as an example of a belief which comes to be accredited partly because it makes sense of what is otherwise unbearable.[8]
Nietzsche is on to something here, although I have reservations about the idea that there is a demand for meaning as such—any meaning, as it were—as against something more specific. This is rather endemic to our modern humanist consciousness of religion, and gives a particular (and I think dubious) twist to the hunger for religion in human beings. Nietzsche is followed in this, among others, by Weber, and also Gauchet.
But nevertheless there is something important here. A too benign picture of the human condition leaves something crucial out, something that matters to us. There is what might be called a dark side to creation. Along with joy, there is massive innocent suffering; and then on top of this, the suffering is denied, the story of the victims is distorted, eventually forgotten, never rectified or compensated. Along with communion, there is division, alienation, spite, mutual forgetfulness; enemies are not always reconciled and brought together again.
Even where a voice of faith wants to deny that this is the last word, as with Christianity, we cannot set aside the fact that this is what we live, that we regularly experience this as ultimate. All great religions recognize this fact, and place their hopes in a beyond which doesn’t simply deny it, which takes its reality seriously.
An image like the dance of Shiva, which brings destruction as well as creation in its wake, or a goddess like Kali, are a reflection of this. And so, for all its faults, was the juridical-penal model. It offered an articulation of the dark side of creation. Simply negating it, as many of us modern Christians are tempted to do, leaves either a vacuum or an unbelievably benign picture. Such a picture cannot but provoke people to either unbelief or a return to a hyper-Augustinian mode of faith, unless it leads to a recovery of the mystery of the Crucifixion, of world-healing through the suffering of the God-man. Certainly this central mystery of Christian faith becomes invisible, if one tries to paint the dark out of Creation.
2. There is another reaction which has arisen against precisely the models of benevolence and universalism in Deism and humanism. This is an attack that sees them as levelling down. Everybody is to be equal, and the old virtues of aristocracy—heroism and other warrior virtues, for instance—are no longer valued.
In this objection, the tilt in modern humanism and “civilization” towards equality is linked with their valuing of peace over war, their affirmation of the “bourgeois” virtues of production, and the relief of suffering and rejection of “extravagance” and “excess.” The whole package is condemned for levelling, for pusillanimity, for a negation of any high, demanding ideal, for the negation of all heroism.
We can see this in reactionary thinkers like de Maistre, but also in Tocqueville; in Baudelaire, but also in Nietzsche; in Maurras, and also in Sorel. It can not only place itself on Left and Right (although perhaps it has been more evident in the 20th century on the Right); but it also can take pious forms (Where are the great vocations of asceticism and self-giving?), as well as fiercely anti-Christian forms (Nietzsche, who sees all this modern liberal egalitarianism as Christianity continued by other means).
3. Closely related to both of these is a critique of the understanding of happiness implicit in modern ideas of order. It attacks the modern idea of happiness—especially in its most simplistic, down-to-earth, or sensuous forms, as with certain kinds of utilitarianism—as flat, shallow, even demeaning. Moreover, it is held not just to reflect an intellectual error, an erroneous theory of happiness, but to be the charter of a debased practice which threatens to spread in the modern world and to degrade human life. Humans so reduced will end up finding the point of their existence in “les petits et vulgaires plaisirs” which Tocqueville saw as the only remaining concern of the subjects of soft despotism[9]; or in the even more horrifying vision of Nietzsche in which these reduced beings would end up as “last men.”[10]
In the curved space of modern controversy, this axis clearly interweaves with the previous two. In one way, it clearly lies close to the critique of modernity for rejecting the warrior virtues, in that this idea of happiness is being judged as base, unworthy of humanity. In another way, however, it can connect to the critique of the Deistic view of Providence, and be denounced as profoundly illusory, unrealistic. Human beings, however much they try cannot really be happy this way. Their attempt to be so will be frustrated, either by the natural, unavoidable occurrence of suffering and death, or by the stifled sense within them that they were born for something higher. Although this latter criticism has been frequently levelled by Christian writers, it can also be seen as implicit in Nietzsche’s scornful picture of the last man.
These last three axes define types of controversy, rather than identifying fixed positions. A given critical position, in other words, may itself be attacked from a more exigent standpoint as being open to the same criticism. Thus, taking the critique of the modern idea of happiness as our example, the lowest-level hedonistic definition of a Helvetius, can be spurned as debased by a Rousseau, who will introduce a range of higher sentiments as well as an intrinsic love of virtue into his picture of human happiness. But from a more tragic standpoint, this vision of harmonious fulfilment in a virtuous republic may seem quite utopian, while in the light of a more stringent demand for self-overcoming, it may seem too indulgent, insufficiently heroic, all-too-human.
These potential shifts in a more or less radical direction crop up in most of the axes I am identifying here. The Utilitarian Enlightenment was insufficiently spiritual for Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant, but they in turn appeared too crassly humanist to Chateaubriand, etc.
4. Another related line of attack concerns death. Modern humanism tends to develop a notion of human flourishing which has no place for death. Death is simply the negation, the ultimate negation, of flourishing which must be combated, and held off until the very last moment. Against this, there have developed a whole range of views in the post-Enlightenment world, which while remaining atheist, or at least ambivalent and unclear about transcendence, have seen in death—or at least the moment of death, the standpoint of death—a privileged position from which the meaning of life becomes clear or at least clearer than it is possible for it to be in the fullness of life.
The thinkers who have articulated this position—such as Mallarmé, Heidegger, Camus, Celan, Beckett—have not been marginal, forgotten figures. On the contrary, their work has seized the imagination of their age. We don’t fully understand this, but we have to take it into account in any attempt to understand the face-off between humanism and faith. Strangely, many things reminiscent of the religious tradition emerge in these and other writers, while it is also in some cases clear that they mean to reject religion, at least as it has been understood.
In the previous two sections, I have been trying to offer a quick sketch of the development which leads up to our modern liberal society, and the modes of exclusive humanism which play an important role in it. In terms of my narrative, a crucial turn was the development, in the 17th and 18th centuries, of an outlook, sometimes Christian and theist, but always verging on Deism, which identified the demands of Christian faith with a certain mode of social order, one of mutual benefit among rights-bearing individuals. This was the civilized order of “polite” society.
We are still living with the aspiration to this order—although it has been reconceptualized a number of times since the 18th century, and is now conceived more radically and more universally. But for many people, it has been disconnected from its Christian and Providentialist roots, and in some cases, Christian faith is even seen as a danger and potential obstacle to it. This order, or certain variants of it, and the accompanying demands for discipline, rational control, the denial of aspirations which seem to go beyond and threaten it, have also awakened great unease. A gamut of positions critical of this order has emerged. Some of these (e.g., those articulated by Rousseau, Marx) seem to call for a radicalized version of it; others, (especially Nietzsche) for a root and branch rejection of it. The many-sided battle raging around this order, how to conceive it, how to ground it (e.g., in God or against God), or even whether to uphold or destroy it), has defined the great continuing kulturkampf of the last two centuries of Western civilization.
But from our point of view here, the crucial move was the original identification of the demands of Christian faith with a civilizational order, whose demands could be exhaustively expressed in such purely “immanent” terms, such as mutual benefit or the upholding of rights (immensely valuable as these are). The effect of this was to close off a horizon of further transformation, the kind of thing visible in the life, for instance, of a Francis of Assisi. This kind of aspiration came to be seen as a gratuitous and senseless aseticism, unpleasant, troubling, and perhaps even dangerous to civilizational order. (Hence Hume’s identification and condemnation of the cultivation of the “monkish virtues.”)
But this meant that what I called above the vertical dimension, in which our relations can be potentially transformed, and our moral predicament altered, was severely foreshortened, to the point frequently of virtual disappearance. This is the context in which code fixation can take hold. Once you cease to see your moral dilemmas as double, in the sense described above, that is, as situated in two dimensions, that of the two conflicting claims, on one hand, and that of the potential vertical movement on the other, they begin to seem much more tractable. It takes only a burst of confidence in procedural reason (never in short supply in modern culture) to believe that they can be arbitrated finally and decisively by a rationally derived code. This is the foreshortened vision that many of our contemporaries have come to see as unproblematic reality.
Hence the great weakness of modern moralism discussed earlier, namely, that it sweeps dilemmas under the carpet, particularly the ones involving verticality. It cannot take account of the importance of vertical movement, in short, because it doesn’t see the vertical dimension. This would pose one sort of problem if its view of the capacities of human nature were very low. But in fact, modern humanism very often makes an extremely high set of demands of people; a selective one, indeed, but very high in the areas selected. People are thought to be capable of a very strong sense of equality, an absence of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, etc., to be able to eschew violence and violent reactions, and so on. On the other side, they are not seen to be susceptible of a radical change in their motivations. Given the appropriate training and institutions, they argue, they are thought to be capable of going a long way toward realizing the very high standards championed by contemporary “liberals.”
A combination of high demands and utter insensitivity to a vertical dimension of transformation leads to some terrible consequences. To give but a few examples:
1. To begin with, there is violence. There seem to be gender differences here (although one may be taken to task for saying so). As we can see daily in the contemporary world, men, particularly young men, are frequently recruitable for some combative causes. But the remedy often proposed is to train them in the proper way. To the extent that violence is a male pattern, we should be able to train it out. Thus, we should not let little boys play with tanks, guns, etc., or on a rougher level, we should try to shame young men into renouncing various forms of violence.
All this would constitute the best way of dealing with this problem, if one assumes a one-dimensional motivation. But there are certain views of vertical transformation, which, if true, render it to be highly questionable. Perhaps what needs to happen to the propensity for violent, combative, forceful action is not to discredit it, but to turn it inside out, to transform it into an energy with a quite different focus. We see something like this happening with the conversion of Ignatius Loyola from soldier into apostle.
If instead of this, you try to control young men by shame, you may be just stoking up trouble for all of us. (One thinks here of the work of James Gilligan,[11] which shows how much early humiliation can predispose people to later violence.) Of course, we have the making of a classical dilemma here. Not everyone can become a Loyola, certainly not right now. It may be necessary to use shame to control some pretty nasty behavior which poses an immediate threat (in the schoolyard, for instance). But we need to at least recognize the dilemma; and this is something that the mindset reflected in code fetishism makes it very difficult to do.
2. This is hardly the only example of nomolatry causing us to act imprudently in the motivations we encourage or intensify in order to realize the good. I remember a conversation with a leading figure of the Society of Engaged Buddhists, the Thai thinker Sulak. He had been traveling in Europe, and naturally he went to the convention of the German Greens. (Engaged Buddhists are very strong on ecological issues.) He didn’t mind the program but what surprised and disturbed him was the tone of anger and indignation in all the speeches. Didn’t they see that stoking up anger made them part of the problem, not of the solution? As a Westerner who has spent much time in Left movements, I could understand what he meant. (But the Right is no better, be it said.) It is generally thought that the more clearly you see the right, and the more committed you are to it, the more you will be moved by anger and indignation at all the violations of it that one sees around us. In this view, the pure in heart are in a perpetual flaming rage.
An openness to the vertical dimension might well raise the question of how we all have to change, in our most basic motivations, in order to live up to the ideals we’ve set for ourselves and would serve to alert us to the dangers of this cultivation of anger. Certainly, Buddhist verticality is very clear on how destructive this can be.
3. We can move from Sulak to René Girard: Girard has shown brilliantly how the age-old temptations to scapegoating, and to purification of our society/world by eliminating evil elements, can survive into the modern age of supposed rationality and disenchantment. The very moment when we feel the purest ourselves is when we’re hammering the really bad guys, making war on Miloshevich, or fighting the “axis of evil.” We at last know who is making the world worse, and who thus needs to be conquered or eliminated. We make a feast of our righteous anger. This is when we’re readiest to allow ourselves to commit the worst atrocities—and not even notice it, at least at the moment.[12]
Of course, this is not the monopoly of exclusive humanists. We Christians set the template in our civilization with the Crusades, anti-Semitism, etc. Reading the Gospels makes you shudder in astonishment that Christians were capable of falling into this kind of perversion, which the Crucifixion story seems so directly to warn against. The fact that we somehow did is a very sobering thought. Somehow we were blind-sided.
Today, modern humanists, thinking that all this scapegoat stuff depends on irrational religious beliefs believe that they are incapable of committing similar atrocities, but they too are being blindsided. Welcome to the human race—and thus to the predicament of sin.
4. Dostoyevsky saw how precisely this combination of high demands and blindness to the vertical dimension can prepare the ground for the most terrible atrocities. The very estimate of human potential, without aid of grace, prepares the way for a terrible disillusionment when flesh and blood human beings can’t seem to rise to the occasion. The high image mutates into anger and contempt for the actual human material that revolutionaries have to work with. This anger and contempt ends up licensing almost limitless violence and repression in the name of the radiant future one is aiming at. The astonishing thing about Dostoyevsky, as Solzhenitsin has pointed out, is that he foresaw so much that would happen in Russia in the following century, on the basis of such a minute sample of revolutionary movements.
The slogan of Dostoyevsky’s revolutionaries is: “no-one is to blame.” Evil comes from the working out of certain social laws. Things just have to be reconstructed in order to make these laws work for us. Blame and guilt are part of the discourse of myth and superstition that we have to put behind us. The slogan of his heroes is: “we are all to blame.” They understand that the recognition that we are all complicit in sin is the gateway to grace, and hence to the transformation which can take us out of the structures of evil. We are at the antipodes to self-righteous anger. We join Sulak, but for specifically Christian reasons.[13]
5. Nomolatry makes us unaware of the vertical dimension, and hence what is involved in changing ourselves. It also encourages a “one size fits all” approach: a rule is a rule. It cannot understand how there can be vocations which are valid, even while being in some profound way antithetical to each other. Confronted with celibate and non-celibate vocations, it assumes that one side must be wrong. Hence the response of many outsiders to the present travails of the Catholic church over sexual harassment and pedophilia. It all comes, they conclude, from demanding celibacy of the clergy. While there is some truth in the charge that these abuses sometimes come from the breakdown of celibate vocations, I’m talking about something deeper: the inability to understand how there could be such radically different modes of life, equally important and valid, equally essential.
If the code suffices, and it dictates one or other thing (either that celibacy is “higher,” or that it’s just an aberration, a proper life minus something). But in an economy of human transformation, where we all have to move higher, but where we can’t have everything together now, it makes sense for some people to strike out and blaze trails; and they can blaze farther in some directions because they’re renouncing others. This can serve to nudge us all upward. Celibacy is merely one example of this. There are other kinds of voluntary modes of poverty, stripping down of one’s life, which permit one to open out new forms of agapê. If we just think of the ways in which celibates have enriched the common spiritual life of all Christians, the point should be evident.
6. Another facet of this same blindness is that modern code fetishism can’t see how one person’s self-transformation can feed into, inspire, and nourish those of others. It doesn’t see how there can be sharing, communion at this level of being changed by God.
The simple fact is that modern nomolatry dumbs us down, morally and spiritually. It can blind us to certain dilemmas, as in the case of speech codes which so rigidly control for expressions of contempt that they severely limit frank exchange. It especially blinds us to the dilemmas arising from the vertical dimension. In particular, it can make us blind to the issue of moral motivation. Humanitarian action hits a ceiling when we find ourselves incapable of loving human beings as they are, but need to create idealized images to do so, images whose inevitable collapse leaves us feeling only disdain, contempt, or hatred for others. How do we become more capable of this? Most contemporary moral philosophy ignores this question; indeed, it cannot even see its pertinence.[14]
Although I’ve been criticizing forms of modern humanism, it must be remembered that nomolatry was pioneered by the churches of Latin Christendom.[15] Think of the tremendous investment of 19th-century Evangelicalism into a code of “respectability” centering on things like temperance and Sabbath-observing. Indeed, some of this was over-determined. Temperance was what many newly arrived workers needed in order to be able to “hack it”—to keep a job and get ahead—in the disordered industrial cities. The same is true today of many slums, ghettoes in the First World, and even more in the Third. Tragically, the code often ends up swallowing the faith. The next generation comes to find the disciplines second nature, and seek to relax some of the extreme prohibitions. They don’t need the powerful emotions of amazing grace in order to get on with their lives. Indeed, having trouble seeing what other point the faith has, they fall away altogether.
On the Catholic side, there is a kind of creeping nomolatry issuing from the Catholic Reformation: more and more coding and rules specifying what you have to do or have to avoid in order to stay in good standing.[16] Thus, in 19th-century France, people are driven out of the church because they engaged in dancing, just as today they are driven out because their married life is “irregular.” We sacrifice pastoral goals to the maintenance of a rigid code of don’ts.
Over against a great deal of pastoral wisdom and charity on the ground, the official pronouncements of the Church today still reflect our own historic forms of code fetishism. We helped create this modern culture, and, if we are having trouble helping it escape its crippling lack of moral vision this is because our typical response to its narrow code by art consists in nothing more than the statement of our own counter-code. Instead of helping people to move ahead on their own rocky path to sanctification, the official stance often consists in posing a lot of prerequisites they have to pass in order to join the course. Not surprisingly, when we publicly and lamentably fail to live up to our own pre-requisites, we provoke more Schadenfreude than compassionate understanding.
If we want to see what an alternative response would look like we need merely to look at Taizé[17] or the World Youth Days which it has so deeply influenced. The John Paul II who was among the great Christian leaders of our time was the John Paul of the World Youth Days rather than the figure at the center of a Vatican orbiting in a stratosphere from which the contours of the pastoral ground become invisible.
1. In a profound discussion of the parable of the Good Samaritan, Paul Thibaud remarks that the Samaritan’s response should not simply be seen as a one time act. It inaugurates a new relation. “Cette relation s’étend dans le temps, elle peut connaître des étapes comme le montre l’évocation de la convalescence à l’auberge, elle inaugure un temps meilleur, unissant les protagonistes dans la perspective d’un avenir commun. L’horizon qui s’offre n’est pas un horizon apocalyptique, comme dans nombre d’autres paraboles évangéliques, c’est un horizon historique, d’amélioration du monde.” “L”Autre et le Prochain.” I might add, and Thibaud might well agree here, that this historical horizon makes sense for Christians in relation to the deeper, apocalyptic one. “Esprit” June 2003, 13–24.
2. See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
3. I have developed this theme in “The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” in Canadian Political Philosophy at the Turn of the Century: Exemplary Essays, ed. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 386–400.
4. “Philosophical Regimen,” in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1900), 54.
5. J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, letter VI. in Literary and Philosophical Essays. Vol. XXXII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.
6. See Hume’s listing—and castigation—of the “monkish virtues”; An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford University Press, 1998).
7. Michael Buckley, S. J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Reclam, Ditzinger, 1988). “Die Sinnlosigkeit des Leidens, nicht das Leiden, war der Fluch, der bisher über der Menschheit ausgebreitet lag” (III 28).
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, La Démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981), 385.
10. See Also Sprach Zarathustra, Introduction, section 5.
11. James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (New York: Grosset/Putnam Books, 1996).
12. I have developed this further in “Notes on the Sources of Violence” in Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. James L. Heft (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 15-42.
13. I have discussed this further in my A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Lecture, ed. James L. Heft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. A very honorable exception is Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Yale University Press, 2001). True, in keeping with his naturalistic stance, he has to repudiate the vertical dimension as conceived here. His work, however, has the great merit of having posed the question of the moral motivations which might save us from repeating some of the worst atrocities of the previous century.
15. A profound and insightful statement of the thesis I am struggling to articulate here comes in his posthumous work, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Ilich, as told to David Cayley, Toronto: Anansi Press, 2005.
16. See Maximos Davies, “Celibacy in Context,” First Things, no. 128 (December 2002), 13–15. The author, a monk of the Eastern rite, contrasts the Eastern Churches conception of clerical celibacy within a “culture of asceticism” to the Western Catholic focus on rules and legal requirements.
17. A good account of the Taizé centre can be found in Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Le Pelerin et le converti (Editions Flammarion, 2001).