The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution PDF

PHI 44010 Introduction to Apologetics &Worldview Analysis Session 1 The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Introduction The origins of this book lie in a curiosity about how and why a parti...

PHI 44010 Introduction to Apologetics &Worldview Analysis Session 1 The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Introduction The origins of this book lie in a curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” My grandfather died in 1994, less than thirty years ago, and yet, had he ever heard that sentence uttered in his presence, I have little doubt that he would have burst out laughing and considered it a piece of incoherent gibberish. And yet today it is a sentence that many in our society regard as not only meaningful but so significant that to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia. And those who think of it as meaningful are not restricted to the veterans of college seminars on queer theory or French post-structuralism. They are ordinary people with little or no direct knowledge of the critical postmodern philosophies whose advocates swagger along the corridors of our most hallowed centers of learning.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution And yet that sentence carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions. It touches on the connection between the mind and the body, given the priority it grants to inner conviction over biological reality. It separates gender from sex, given that it drives a wedge between chromosomes and how society defines being a man or a woman. And in its political connection to homosexuality and lesbianism via the LGBTQ+ movement, it rests on notions of civil rights and of individual liberty. In short, to move from the commonplace thinking of our grandfathers’ world to that of today demands a host of key shifts in popular beliefs in these and other areas. It is the story of those shifts— or, perhaps better, of the background to those shifts—that will be addressed in subsequent chapters. At the heart of this book lies a basic conviction: the so-called sexual revolution of the last sixty years, culminating in its latest triumph—the normalization of transgenderism—cannot be properly understood until it is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood. But the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West. And it is only as we come to understand that wider context that we can truly understand the dynamics of the sexual politics that now dominate our culture. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution The Sexual Revolution The term sexual revolution refers to the radical and ongoing transformation of sexual attitudes and behaviors that has occurred in the West since the early 1960s. The behaviors that characterize the sexual revolution are not unprecedented: homosexuality, pornography, and sex outside the bounds of marriage, for example, have been hardy perennials throughout human history. What marks the modern sexual revolution out as distinctive is the way it has normalized these and other sexual phenomena. It is not therefore the fact that modern people look at sexually explicit material while earlier generations did not that constitutes the revolutionary nature of our times. It is that the use of pornography no longer carries the connotations of shame and social stigma it once did and has even come to be regarded as a normal part of mainstream culture. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution The most obvious evidence of this change is the way language has been transformed to serve the purpose of rendering illegitimate any dissent from the current political consensus on sexuality. Criticism of homosexuality is now homophobia; that of transgenderism is transphobia. The use of the term phobia is deliberate and effectively places such criticism of the new sexual culture into the realm of the irrational and points toward an underlying bigotry on the part of those who hold such views. The Nature of the Self The second term that needs clarification is that of the self. We all have a consciousness of being a self. At base, this connects to our sense of individuality. But in this book I use the term to mean more than simply a basic level of self- consciousness. For me to be a self in the sense I am using the term here involves an understanding of what the purpose of my life is, of what constitutes the good life, of how I understand myself—my self—in relation to others and to the world around me. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution In this context—and as will become very clear in subsequent chapters—I am deeply indebted to the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, particularly as found in his book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. In that work, Taylor highlights three points of significance in the modern development of what it means to be a self: 1. A focus on inwardness, or the inner psychological life, as decisive for who we think we are. 2. The affirmation of ordinary life that develops in the modern era. 3. The notion that nature provides us with an inner moral source. These developments manifest themselves in numerous ways. Most significant is that they lead to a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say “feelings” or “intuitions”—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is. Another way of approaching the matter of the self is to ask what it is that makes a person happy. Is happiness found in directing oneself outward or inward? The answer I give speaks eloquently of what I consider the purpose of life and the meaning of happiness. In sum, it is indicative of how I think of my self.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Thinking Clearly about the Sexual Revolution Having defined the basic terms of discussion, it’s important now to highlight a couple of typical mistakes that individuals, particularly those who are committed to strong religious views, can make in approaching a subject like the sexual revolution: 1. One can so emphasize a universal, metaphysical principle to which one is committed that one fails to understand the particulars of what one is analyzing. 2. One can become so preoccupied with the particulars that one fails to see the significance of the more general context. The Christian might be tempted to declare that the reason for the sexual revolution was sin. People are sinful; therefore, they will inevitably reject God’s laws regarding sexuality. The Marxist might declare that the reason for the Russian Revolution was class struggle. Rich people exploit the poor; therefore, the poor will inevitably rise up in rebellion. Within the framework of each belief system, the answer is true, but in neither case are such blunt statements capable of explaining the particulars of the events in question—why the sexual revolution has thus far legitimated homosexuality but not incest, for example, or why the workers’ revolution happened in Russia and not in Germany. To answer those questions, one needs to address specific matters of context.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution The Argument Part 1 of this book sets forth in two chapters some of the basic concepts that will be used for exploring the historical narrative. Of particular importance here are the ideas of three philosophers of the modern condition: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Rieff developed some very useful concepts—the triumph of the therapeutic, psychological man, the anticulture, and deathworks. Taylor is extremely helpful both in understanding how the modern notion of the expressive self has emerged and also how this connects to the wider politics of society. His contributions on the dialogical nature of selfhood, on the nature of what he calls “the social imaginary,” and on the politics of recognition allow for answers to the question of why certain identities (e.g., LGBTQ+) enjoy great cachet today while others (e.g., religious conservatives) are increasingly marginalized. Finally, MacIntyre is useful because in a series of books starting in the early 1980s, he has repeatedly argued that modern ethical discourse has broken down because it rests ultimately on incommensurable narratives and that claims to moral truth are really expressions of emotional preference. These insights are extremely helpful in understanding both the fruitless nature and the extreme polarizing rhetoric of many of the great moral debates of our time, not least those surrounding matters of sex and identity.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Part 2 of the book looks at some important developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, examining the contribution of a number of figures associated with Romanticism, and ending with discussion of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. The central point here is that with the era of Rousseau and Romanticism a new understanding of human selfhood emerged, one focused on the inner life of the individual. This thinking finds its significant critical corollary in a view of society/culture as oppressive. Part 3 deals with the sexualizing of psychology and the politicizing of sex. The central figure here is that of Sigmund Freud. It is Freud, more than any other figure, who made plausible the idea that hu- mans, from infancy onward, are at core sexual beings. It is our sexual desires that are ultimately decisive for who we are. And this belief shaped Freud’s own theory of civilization: society/culture is the result of a trade-off between the anarchic sexual drives of human beings and the necessity for them to live together in communities. When Freud’s thought is then appropriated by certain Marxist thinkers, most notably Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, the result is a heady mix of sex and politics. The New Left that emerges from this synthesis sees oppression as a fundamentally psychological category and sexual codes as its primary instruments. The theoretical—and the rhetorical— background to the sexual revolution is therefore established.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Part 4 engages with a number of different areas of contemporary society in order to demonstrate how deeply the conceptual developments of parts 2 and 3 have come to transform modern Western culture. In conclusion, I offer some reflections on possible futures that we might have to face, from the difficulties posed by transgenderism and the prospects for religious freedom to ways in which the church should prepare for the challenges that are coming. What This Book Is Not This book is not intended as an exhaustive account of how the present normative understanding of the self has emerged and come to dominate public discourse. This book is not a lament for a lost golden age or even for the parlous state of culture as we now face it. What is offered here is essentially a prolegomenon to the many discussions that Christians and others need to have about the most pressing issues of our day, particularly as they manifest themselves in the variety of ways in which the sexual revolution affects us—personally, culturally, legally, theologically, ecclesiastically. The aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future. Understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times. And understanding the times requires a knowledge of the history that has led up to the present. This book is intended as a small contribution to that vital task.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Part 1: Architecture of the Revolution Chapter 1: Reimagining the Self The sexual revolution, and its various manifestations in modern society, cannot be treated in isolation but must rather be interpreted as the specific and perhaps most obvious social manifestation of a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self. While sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the very heart of what it means to be an authentic person. That is a profound claim that is arguably unprecedented in history. How that situation comes to be is a long and complicated story. Only a few of the most salient aspects of the relevant narrative can be addressed in a single volume. And even before the attempt is made, it is first necessary to set forth a number of basic theoretical concepts that provide a framework, a set of what we might describe as architectural principles, for structuring and analyzing the personalities, events, and ideas that play into the rise of the modern self. In this task, the writings of three analysts of modernity are particularly useful: Charles Taylor, the philosopher; Philip Rieff, the psychological sociologist; and Alasdair MacIntyre, the ethicist. While all three have different emphases and concerns, they offer accounts of the modern world that share certain important affinities and also provide helpful insights into understanding not simply how modern Western society thinks but how and why it has come to think the way that it does.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution The Social Imaginary To return to the questions posed in the introduction: How has the current highly individualistic, iconoclastic, sexually obsessed, and materialistic mindset come to triumph in the West? Or, to put the question in a more pressing and specific fashion, Why does the sentence “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” make sense not simply to those who have sat in poststructuralist and queer-theory seminars but to my neighbors, to people I pass on the street, to coworkers who have no particular political ax to grind and who are blissfully unaware of the rebarbative jargon and arcane concepts of Michel Foucault and his myriad epigones and incomprehensible imitators? The statement is, after all, emblematic of a view of personhood that has almost completely dispensed with the idea of any authority beyond that of personal, psychological conviction, an oddly Cartesian notion: I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. How did such a strange idea become the common orthodox currency of our culture? To make some attempt at addressing the issue, it is useful to take note of a helpful concept deployed by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his analysis of how societies think, that of the social imaginary. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution In A Secular Age, he offers a major analysis of the way modern society in general, and not just the intellectual classes, has moved away from being permeated by Christianity and religious faith to the point that such are no longer the default for the majority of people but actually are rather exceptional. In the course of his argument, he introduces the idea of the social imaginary to address the question of how theories developed by social elites might be related to the way ordinary people think and act, even when such people have never read these elites or spent any time self-consciously reflecting on the implications of their theories. Here is how he defines the concept: I want to speak of “social imaginary” here, rather than social theory, because there are important differences between the two. There are, in fact, several differences. I speak of “imaginary” (i) because I’m talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution As Taylor describes it here, the social imaginary is a somewhat amorphous concept precisely because it refers to the myriad beliefs, practices, normative expectations, and even implicit assumptions that members of a society share and that shape their daily lives. It is not so much a conscious philosophy of life as a set of intuitions and practices. In sum, the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas. It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it. This is a very helpful concept precisely because it takes account of the fact that the way we think about many things is not grounded in a self-conscious belief in a particular theory of the world to which we have committed ourselves. We live our lives in a more intuitive fashion than that. The fact that “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes sense to Joe Smith probably has far less to do with him being committed to an elaborate understanding of the nature of gender and its relationship to biological sex than to the fact that it seems intuitively correct to affirm someone in his or her chosen identity and hurtful not to do so, however strange the particulars of that self-identification might have seemed to previous generations. We might perhaps say that, looked at from this angle, the social imaginary is a matter of intuitive social taste. Any account of the sexual revolution and of the underlying revolution in the understanding of the self, of which the sexual revolution is simply the latest iteration, must therefore not simply take into account the ideas of the cultural elite but must also look at how the intuitions of society at large have been formed. Ideas in themselves are only part of the story.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Mimesis and Poiesis A second useful element in Taylor’s work that connects to the social imaginary and to which we will have recourse is the relationship between mimesis and poiesis. Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual. Both of Taylor’s major works—Sources of the Self and A Secular Age—are narratives that tell the story of the move in Western culture from a predominantly mimetic view of the world to one that is primarily poietic. Various matters characterize this shift. As society moves from a view of the world as possessing intrinsic meaning, so it also moves away from a view of humanity as having a specific, given end. Teleology is thereby attenuated, whether it is that of Aristotle, with his view of man as a political animal and his understanding of ethics as an important function of that, or that of Christianity, with its notion that human life in this earthly sphere is to be regulated by the fact that humanity’s ultimate destiny is eternal communion with God. Again, to return to that statement highlighted in the introduction—“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”— such a statement is plausible only in a world in which the predominant way of thinking is poietic rather than mimetic. And a poietic world is one in which transcendent purpose collapses into the immanent and in which given purpose collapses into any purpose I choose to create or decide for myself. Human nature, one might say, becomes something individuals or societies invent for themselves.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Philip Rieff and the Nature of Culture Philip Rieff, the late professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is significant for this study because of his application of psychology to the patterns and pathologies of cultural change in the last one hundred years. In his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), Rieff used Sigmund Freud as his starting point for a theory of culture that he then proceeded to explicate by examining the work of subsequent thinkers, such as Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, and Wilhelm Reich. Rieff took as basic Freud’s argument that civilization was the result of sublimating sexual desire in a manner that left human beings perennially discontented but remarkably creative, and he developed this notion into a broad theory of culture and a means of critiquing the shifts that he saw developing at a rapid rate in the mid-twentieth century. To read Rieff’s book today is a fascinating experience, mainly because the claims that he makes about the direction of society, and the implications these would have for how people would come to think of themselves, are so startlingly prescient that it is very hard to dismiss his underlying analytical framework. Rieff’s approach to culture is characterized by a number of ideas. Foremost is his notion that cultures are primarily defined by what they forbid. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution This is a basically Freudian concept: if sexual taboos drive civilization, then civilization is really defined at its base by a negative idea, by that behavior that it denounces and renounces as unacceptable. This in turn has institutional implications: a culture’s vitality depends on the authority of those institutions that enforce or inculcate these renunciations and thus communicate them from one generation to the next. As Rieff expresses it: A culture survives principally... by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood. This connects to the second important aspect of culture for Rieff: culture, at least historically, directs the individual outward. It is in communal activities that individuals find their true selves; the true self in traditional cultures is therefore something that is given and learned, not something that the individual creates for himself. This insight allows us to connect the thinking of Rieff to that of Charles Taylor in a constructive manner, via the affinity that exists between Rieff’s concept of psychological man and Taylor’s concept of the expressive individual. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Psychological Man and Expressive Individualism Rieff describes the outward direction of traditional culture as follows: “Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” This is an important point: culture directs individuals outward. It is greater than, prior to, and formative of the individual. We learn who we are by learning how to conform ourselves to the purposes of the larger community to which we belong. First, Rieff argues, there was the culture of political man, of the sort set forth as an ideal in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. In contrast to the idiotic man (literally, the private man), the political man is the one who finds his identity in the activities in which he engages in the public life of the polis. Eventually, political man gave way to the second major type, that of religious man. The man of the Middle Ages was precisely such a person, someone who found his primary sense of self in his involvement in religious activities: attending mass, celebrating feast days, taking part in religious processions, going on pilgrimages. So much of the way medieval society is structured—from the dominance of its church buildings to the liturgical calendar, which marks time itself in religious terms—points toward religion as the key to culture during this time.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution In Rieff’s historical scheme, religious man was eventually displaced by a third type, what he calls economic man. Economic man is the individual who finds his sense of self in his economic activity: trade, production, the making of money. Rieff himself saw economic man as an unstable and temporary category. And economic man thus gives way to the latest player on the historical stage, that which Rieff dubs “psychological man”—a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities as was true for the previous types but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness. As a historical framework, Rieff’s scheme is far too simplistic. The idea that one can chart human history through the rise and fall of these four distinct types of human being is far fetched at best. For a start, the apostle Paul’s development of the concept of the will is what facilitates the rise of inner psychological narrative as a means of reflecting on the self. In the fourth century, Paul’s intellectual heir Augustine produced the Confessions, the first great Western work of psychological autobiography, which indicates the existence of life understood in terms of inner mental space long before Freud. Nevertheless, if the historical scheme is greatly oversimplified, the significance of the rise of psychological categories as the dominant factor in how Westerners think of themselves and who they consider themselves to be is surely a persuasive insight.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution In characterizing the modern age as that of psychological man, Rieff makes a point very similar to that of Charles Taylor in his understanding of the human self: that psychological categories and an inward focus are the hallmarks of being a modern person. This is what Taylor refers to as expressive individualism, that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires. For Taylor, this kind of self exists in what he describes as a culture of authenticity, which he defines as follows: The understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth century, that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. Rieff sees two historic reversals underlying this new world of psychological man. The first is a transformation of the understanding of therapy. Traditionally, the role of the therapist in any given culture was to enable the patient to grasp the nature of the community to which he belonged. But the basic thrust of much modern thinking serves to shatter the idea of the individual as one whose best interests are served by being educated to conform to the canons and protocols of society. And that is the intellectual foundation for the first reversal, whereby therapy ceases to serve the purpose of socializing an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability simply to be herself.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution This then leads to the second reversal. In the worlds of political, religious, and economic man, commitment was outwardly directed to those communal beliefs, practices, and institutions that were bigger than the individual and in which the individual, to the degree that he or she conformed to or cooperated with them, found meaning. In the world of psychological man, however, the commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Thus, the order is reversed. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being. Institutions cease to be places for the formation of individuals via their schooling in the various practices and disciplines that allow them to take their place in society. Instead, they become platforms for performance, where individuals are allowed to be their authentic selves precisely because they are able to give expression to who they are “inside.” For such selves in such a world, institutions such as schools and churches are places where one goes to perform, not to be formed—or, perhaps better, where one goes to be formed by performing. This helps explain in part the concern in recent years over making the classroom a “safe place”—that is, a place where students go not to be exposed to ideas that may challenge their deepest beliefs and commitments (part of what was traditionally considered to be the role of education) but to be affirmed and reassured. While hostile commentators berate this tendency as that caused by the hypersensitivity of a generation of “snowflakes,” it is actually the result of the slow but steady psychologizing of the self and the triumph of inward-directed therapeutic categories over traditional outward-directed educational philosophies.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution This could also be described, using Taylor’s terminology, as the triumph of expressive individualism and of poiesis over mimesis. If education is to allow the individual simply to be himself, unhindered by outward pressure to conform to any greater reality, then the individual is king. He can be whoever he wants to be. And rejecting the notion of any external authority or meaning to which education is to conform, the individual simply makes himself the creator of any meaning that there might be. So-called “external” or “objective” truths are then simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and to harm the weak. Overthrowing them—and thus overthrowing the notion that there is a great reality to which we are all accountable, whether that of the polis, of some religion, or of the economy—becomes the central purpose of educational institutions. They are not to be places to form or to transform but rather places where students can perform. The triumph of the therapeutic represents the advent of the expressive individual as the normative type of human being and of the relativizing of all meaning and truth to personal taste. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Two Key Questions If it is true that we now live in a world in which the therapeutic needs of Rieff’s psychological man stand at the center of life, it would then perhaps be possible to offer an explanation as to why human identity has become so plastic and statements such as “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body” come to make sense. If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination. Yet this would still leave some questions unresolved, questions that have a particular urgency in our current political climate. Why, for example, have the politics of sexual identity become so ferocious that any dissent from the latest orthodoxy is greeted with scorn and sometimes even legal action? A moment’s reflection would seem to suggest that this is, on the surface at least, a rather odd phenomenon. Such questions miss an important point. If it were just sexual activity that were at issue, passions would likely not run so deep. But far more than codes of behavior are at stake here. In addressing the behavior that has come to prominence through the sexual revolution, we are actually not so much speaking of practices as we are speaking of identities. And when we are speaking of identities, the public, political stakes are incredibly high and raise a whole different set of issues.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution To anticipate the argument of later chapters, for the sexual revolutionaries who follow the line of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse the answer as to why dissent from the sexual revolution is to be eradicated is a simple one of political liberation. The oppressive nature of bourgeois society is built on repressive sexual codes that maintain the patriarchal nuclear family as the norm. As long as this state of affairs holds, there can be no true liberation, political or economic. Shattering sexual codes is therefore one of the principal emancipatory tasks of the political revolutionary. But few people have read Reich or Marcuse or Firestone. Fewer still perhaps accept the Marxist-Freudian metanarrative on which their politicized view of sex rests. But some of the ideas of these thinkers and philosophies are now part of the broader social imaginary of the West and have become the intuitive orthodoxy of much of society. That is part of the world of psychological man or expressive individualism, where personal authenticity is found through public performance of inward desires. And as the most powerful inward desires of most people are sexual in nature, so identity itself has come to be thought of as strongly sexual in nature.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Yet there are two key questions that need to be answered: 1. Why is it important that identity is publicly acknowledged? 2. Why is it that the public acknowledgment of some identities is compulsory and of others is forbidden? There are two parts to this answer, one drawn from Rieff (the analytic attitude) and one drawn from Taylor (the importance and nature of recognition). The Analytic Attitude At first glance, the concepts of psychological man or expressive individualism would not seem in themselves to offer an answer to the question of why public acknowledgment of the validity of particular identities is important or of why certain identities become respectable and others do not. It is clearly indisputable that mere tolerance of sexual identities that break with the heterosexual norm has not proved an acceptable option to the sexual revolutionaries. Nothing short of full equality under the law and full recognition of the legitimacy of certain nontraditional sexual identities by wider society has emerged as the ambition of the LGBTQ+ movement. It is not enough that I can buy a wedding cake somewhere in town. I must be able to buy a wedding cake from each and every baker in town who ever caters for weddings. Why is this the case?  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution One could build an answer to this question on one aspect of Philip Rieff’s definition of traditional culture— that it normally directs the self outward to communal purposes in which it can find satisfaction but that this direction has clearly been reversed in the era of psychological man. Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Indeed, it must now serve the purpose of meeting my psychological needs; I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic. The refusal to bake me a wedding cake, therefore, is not an act consistent with the therapeutic ideal; in fact, it is the opposite—an act causing me psychological harm. There is therefore an outward, social dimension to my psychological well-being that demands others acknowledge my inward, psychological identity. We all as individuals still inhabit the same social spaces, still interact with other individuals, and so these other individuals must be coerced to be part of our therapeutic world. The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practices, and beliefs that affect everyone. They all need to adapt to reflect a therapeutic mentality that focuses on the psychological well- being of the individual. Rieff calls this societal characteristic the analytic attitude.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Once society starts to manifest the analytic attitude, there is, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, a transvaluation of values. That which was previously deemed good comes to be regarded as bad; that which was previously regarded as healthy comes to be deemed sickness. The turn to the psychological self is fundamentally iconoclastic with regard to traditional moral codes as they are now seen to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Emphasis on what we might call the “right to psychological happiness” of the individual will also have some obvious practical effects. For example, language will become much more contested than in the past, because words that cause “psychological harm” will become problematic and will need to be policed and suppressed. To use pejorative racial or sexual epithets ceases to be a trivial matter. Instead, it becomes an extremely serious act of oppression. This explains why so much outrage in the public square is now directed at what one might call speech crimes. Even the neologism hate speech speaks to this. While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Once harm and oppression are regarded as being primarily psycho- logical categories, freedom of speech then becomes part of the problem, not the solution, because words become potential weapons. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Yet Rieff’s approach still leaves open the pressing question of why some identities are acceptable and their acceptance compulsory and enforced, and other identities do not enjoy such privilege. The foot fetishist, too, surely suffers psychological harm when he is denied the right to proclaim his proclivities in public and receive acclamation and even legal protection for so doing. Yet few if any care to take up his cause. Why not? He would seem to have just as much a claim to being a marginalized sexual minority as anyone in the LGBTQ+ movement. And no cake baker is being sued for refusing to bake cakes that glorify incest or the Ku Klux Klan. Again, why not? Rieff certainly offers a plausible framework for understanding the psychological nature of oppression in the therapeutic world, but he does not allow us to discern why some marginal identities gain mainstream acceptance and others remain (at least for the present) beyond the pale. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition The question of why some identities find acceptance and others do not is simply a version of the question of how identity is formed in the first place. Much of this book focuses on the rise of the psychological self. It is necessary to note that for all psychological man’s inward turn, individual personal identity is not ultimately an internal monologue conducted in isolation by an individual self-consciousness. On the contrary, it is a dialogue between self-conscious beings. We each know ourselves as we know other people. Charles Taylor has done much to show that expressive individualism is a social phenomenon that emerges through the dialogical nature of what it means to be a person. As he expresses it: “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it.”  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Elsewhere, he offers a more elaborate, though still succinct, summary of his position: The general feature of human life that I want to evoke is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.... I want to take “language” in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love and the like. But we are inducted into these in exchange with others. No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own. We are introduced to them through exchanges with others who matter to us. Taylor is here pointing to the fact that who we think we are is intimately connected to those to whom we relate—family, friends, coworkers. Individual identity is thus truly a dialogue: how a person thinks of himself is the result of learning the language of the community so that he can be a part of the community. This dialogical dimension of identity also points to another aspect of modern selfhood. There is, for sure, a deep desire in the modern West for self-expression, to perform in public in a manner consistent with that which one feels or thinks one is on the inside. Yet the desire to belong to some larger whole, to find unity with others, is also characteristic of modern selfhood. One might note a comparatively trivial example of this: the teenager who dresses in a particular way to express her individuality and yet at the same time ends up wearing more or less the same clothes as every other member of her peer group. Her clothing is both a means of self-expression and a means of finding unity with a larger group at one and the same time. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution This idea—that identity requires recognition by another—is a vital insight that also points toward the way identity can thus become contentious. In a meeting of two primitive self-consciousnesses, recognition or acknowledgment of another self-consciousness requires a setting aside or a denial of oneself. The ultimate form of this dynamic is that the one self-consciousness comes to dominate the other totally, to negate it entirely. That is, if I meet someone else, the greatest way that my existence can be recognized by him is for me to fight and kill him. Recognition thus becomes a life-and-death struggle. But because death is also somewhat self-defeating from the victor’s standpoint —once the other person is dead, he cannot give me the recognition I desire— real life means that a compromise situation holds, whereby the one person comes to hold a superior position to the other who yet remains alive. A hierarchy of master and slave is thereby established, whereby the stronger receives from the weaker the recognition he desires.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution On the playground one sees this hierarchical form of recognition at play in the action of team selection. The fact that the teams are picked by leaders indicates that a number of the children are recognized as such by the rest. The captains are captains because the other children acknowledge them as their superiors in some way. Recognition thus always stands in potential relationship to hierarchy and therefore to potential struggle and conflict. Again, playgrounds provide a good example, that of the school bully. The bully is one who establishes his dominant role in a particular hierarchy by the use of power to subjugate those who are weaker. The recognition they grant him is vital to his own self-consciousness but is extracted from others in a way that negates them to some significant degree, such that they know themselves to be below him in the hierarchy of power, to be somehow “less” than him. Clearly, the dialogical nature of identity creates the possibility for tension not simply between individuals but also between the desires of the individual and the concerns of the community and, of course, between one community and another. And this is where the issue becomes complicated. It is also where one can begin to construct an answer to the question as to why only certain identities appear to enjoy legitimacy and widespread social privilege. To put the matter another way, it helps explain why some identities find recognition in society while others do not. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Here it is helpful to note a concept that Taylor draws from Hegel, that of Sittlichkeit. This term cannot be captured by a single English word, and so Taylor retains the original German in his work but offers this explanation of its precise meaning: Sittlichkeit refers to the moral obligations I have to an ongoing community of which I am part. These obligations are based on established norms and uses, and that is why the etymological root in Sitten is important for Hegel’s use. The crucial characteristic of Sittlichkeit is that it enjoins us to bring about what already is. This is a paradoxical way of putting it, but in fact the common life which is the basis of my sittlich obligation is already there in existence. It is in virtue of its being an ongoing affair that I have these obligations; and my fulfilment of these obligations is what sustains it and keeps it in being. Hence in Sittlichkeit there is no gap between what ought to be and what is, between Sollen and Sein. What this means is that society itself is an ethical community. What it implies is that the individual finds her self-consciousness in being recognized by that society, and this occurs because she is behaving according to the conventions of that society. In short, there is a need for the expressive individual to be at one with the expressive community. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution One can rephrase this idea using an analogy with language. For people to be self-conscious and to express themselves to others, they need to be able to speak the language of the community to which they belong or to which they wish to speak, to use its vocabulary and to follow its grammatical and syntactical rules. Of course, it is individuals who use the language, but the language is not something they invent for themselves. If that were the case, it would not be a language in the commonly understood sense of the word. Rather, it is something prior to them and that they have to learn. Further, it is as individuals use language that both the language has reality and its existence is sustained. What is vital to notice is that recognition is therefore a social phenomenon. It is important to me to have my identity recognized, but the framework and conventions both for expressing my identity and for that identity being recognized are socially constructed, specific to the context in which I find myself. When applied to the question of identity, specifically the kind of identities that the sexual revolution has brought in its wake, one can conclude that those that are considered legitimate— summed up by the LGBTQ+ acronym—are legitimate because they are recognized by the wider moral structure, the Sittlichkeit, of our society. The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence. All these things play into legitimizing and strengthening those groups that can define themselves in such terms. They capture, one might say, the spirit of the age. This helps explain why these identities are recognized and others are not. Pedophiles, for example, are currently unpersuasive as a victimized class, given the fact that they appear more as victimizers, however iconoclastic they are with regard to traditional sexual codes. Gay men, however, as consenting adults, are not seen as victimizers and can call on a long history of social marginalization and victimhood. They can thus claim a right to recognition, a recognition that is connected to a further aspect of the modern moral imagination, that of dignity. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution The Question of Dignity One of the underlying themes of this book, following Rieff, Taylor, and MacIntyre, is that psychological man and expressive individualism shape the dominant understanding of what it means to be a human self in this present age. Yet given the argument of the previous section, for these to be the controlling notions of the self demands that society itself embody certain assumptions. For the expressive individual to receive recognition means that the assumptions of expressive individualism must be the assumptions of society as a whole. Taylor argues that central to this thinking is the shift from a society based on the notion of honor to that based on the notion of dignity. The former is built on the idea of a given social hierarchy. The medieval feudal lord was owed honor by his vassals simply by virtue of his birth. This framework for recognition has been effectively demolished by two dramatic developments. First, technological and economic changes have over the centuries broken down the old hierarchical structures of society. Second, certain intellectual developments have proved lethal to traditional, hierarchical ways of thinking. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution This confluence of changing material conditions, social and economic practices, and intellectual developments served to shatter the old hierarchies of medieval and early modern Europe and paved the way for a more egalitarian view of humanity. The net result of the collapse of traditional hierarchies is that notions of honor no longer shape the pattern of social engagement and, therefore, of recognition in today’s society. That role is now played by the notion of dignity, which each and every human being possesses not by virtue of their social status but simply by being human. This egalitarian concept changes everything in theory, and as it therefore comes to change everything in practice, it almost inevitably involves conflict, for it brings us back to that important point concerning the Sittlichkeit of society: How does society understand identity, and what range of identities does it consider to be legitimate? If I am to be recognized and if I am to belong, then there needs to be conformity between that social reality and my personal reality. And sometimes that conformity needs to be realized through conflict, whereby the ethics of one group or era are consciously defeated by those of another.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution In a society where sexuality is foundational to personal identity, mere tolerance of homosexuality is bound to become unacceptable. The issue is not one of simply decriminalizing behavior; that would certainly mean that homosexual acts were tolerated by society, but the acts are only a part of the overall problem. The real issue is one of recognition, of recognizing the legitimacy of who the person thinks he actually is. That requires more than mere tolerance; it requires equality before the law and recognition by the law and in society. And that means that those who refuse to grant such recognition will be the ones who find themselves on the wrong side of both the law and emerging social attitudes. The person who objects to homosexual practice is, in contemporary society, actually objecting to homosexual identity. And the refusal by any individual to recognize an identity that society at large recognizes as legitimate is a moral offense, not simply a matter of indifference. The question of identity in the modern world is a question of dignity. For this reason, the various court cases in America concerning the provision of cakes and flowers for gay weddings are not ultimately about the flowers or the cakes. They are about the recognition of gay identity and, according to members of the LGBTQ+ community, the recognition that they need in order to feel that they are equal members of society.  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution Concluding Reflections The various concepts outlined in this chapter present facets of the overall narrative that will occupy the historical section of this book. Central to understanding the world in which we live is the idea of the social imaginary. This concept highlights that the tremendous changes we are witnessing can be interpreted through a variety of lenses. First, it is important to understand that most of us do not think about the world in the way we do because we have reasoned from first principles to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos. Rather, we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have often unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us. Second, we need to understand that our sense of selfhood, of who we are, is both intuitive and deeply intertwined with the expectations, ethical and otherwise, of the society in which we are placed. Rieff and Taylor are both correct in seeing psychological man and the expressive individual as the result of a long historical process and as the normative types in this present age. The psychologized, expressive individual that is the social norm today is unique, unprecedented, and singularly significant. The emergence of such selves is a matter of central importance in the history of the West as it is both a symptom and a cause of the many social, ethical, and political questions we now face.  PHI 44010 Introduction to Apologetics &Worldview Analysis Session 2  Mere Christianity Preface The contents of this book were first given on the air, and then published in three separate parts as Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943) and Beyond Personality (1944). The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’. You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic. This omission is intentional (even in the list I have just given the order is alphabetical). There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high’, nor especially ‘low’, nor especially anything else. But in this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times. I had more than one reason for thinking this. In the first place, the questions which divide Christians from one another often involve points of high Theology or even of ecclesiastical history, which ought never to be treated except by real experts. Secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold. Finally, I got the impression that far more, and more talented, authors were al- ready engaged in such controversial matters than in the defence of what Baxter calls ‘mere’ Christianity.  Mere Christianity All this is said simply in order to make clear what kind of book I was trying to write; not in the least to conceal or evade responsibility for my own beliefs. About those, as I said before, there is no secret. To quote Uncle Toby: ‘They are written in the Common-Prayer Book.’ The danger clearly was that I should put forward as common Christianity anything that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to myself. I tried to guard against this by sending the original script of what is now Book II to four clergymen (Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) and asking for their criticism. The Methodist thought I had not said enough about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought I had gone rather too far about the comparative unimportance of theories in explanation of the Atonement. Otherwise all five of us were agreed. I did not have the remaining books similarly ‘vetted’ because in them, though differences might arise among Christians, these would be differences between individuals or schools of thought, not between denominations. So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters written to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or ‘mere’ Christianity.  Mere Christianity So much for my omissions on doctrine. In Book III, which deals with morals, I have also passed over some things in silence, but for a different reason. Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. As a result I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed. No man, I suppose, is tempted to every sin. Far deeper objections may be felt—and have been expressed—against my use of the word Christian to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity. People ask: ‘Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?’ or ‘May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?’ Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it.  Mere Christianity If once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say ‘deepening’, the sense of the word Christian, it will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to ‘the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were ‘far closer to the spirit of Christ’ than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.  Mere Christianity Book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe The Law of Human Nature Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. It looks very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are. Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.  Mere Christianity But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.  Mere Christianity Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.  Mere Christianity Some Objections If they are the foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is. For example, some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses.  Mere Christianity Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ‘good,’ always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.  Mere Christianity There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can recognize the same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. Put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.  Mere Christianity The Reality of the Law I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practice, what you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so. The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean ‘what Nature, in fact, does’. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean ‘what human beings, in fact, do’; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.  Mere Christianity Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have any real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point. If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’—which simply brings us back to where we started. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing—a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.  Mere Christianity What Lies Behind the Law The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey. I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself—like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave.  Mere Christianity Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.  Mere Christianity The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. When I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way. Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.  Mere Christianity We Have Cause to Be Uneasy I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance. You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw’. You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him. First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.  Mere Christianity Then, secondly, this has not yet turned exactly into a ‘religious jaw’. We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general. Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about.  Mere Christianity Book 2: What Christians Believe The Rival Conceptions of God I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority. Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject. One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil.  Mere Christianity The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians. And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist, He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. I expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’  Mere Christianity Christianity thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ But then that threw me back into another difficulty. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.  Mere Christianity The Invasion Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right—leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies. It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either. What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war.  Mere Christianity I freely admit that real Christianity goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. The Shocking Alternative Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is this state of affairs in accordance with God’s will, or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?  Mere Christianity But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible. It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.  Mere Christianity God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended— civilizations are built up— excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.  Mere Christianity And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process. Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.  Mere Christianity One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility  Mere Christianity I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  Mere Christianity The Perfect Penitent We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. God has landed on this enemy- occupied world in human form. And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did he come to do? Well, to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking about something different—about His death and His coming to life again. It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies there. They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed. The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.  Mere Christianity We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. The Practical Conclusion The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: