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FAULTY SECULAR FOUNDATIONS ENTHRONING THE INDIVIDUAL
IN PLATO’S DIALOGUE, EUTHYPHRO, Socrates asks a self-righteous young man to explain righteousness. The fellow relates it to divine approval, but then Socrates asks him whether something is righteous because the gods approve of it or if they approve of it because it is righteous. That is, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? This question confuses the fellow, tying him in knots, as it has philosophers and theologians for centuries.
Today the issue falls under “metaethics,” the effort to establish the base for moral thinking. This base supports principles (such as justice and love), which are spelled out in rules (such as “Don’t murder” and “Don’t commit adultery”), which in turn are applied to interesting cases (such as whether artificial insemination with a donor constitutes adultery). But these case studies in “normative ethics” all lead back to the fundamental issue: What makes something right or wrong in the first place?
The range of answers to that question is astonishing. Some emphasize raw duty, while others focus on happy consequences, naturalness, or virtuous character, but it is not a tidy matter. These answers often overlap or simply address different questions. It is impossible to do them much justice in a few short chapters; indeed many books have been written on single ethical theories. But a quick survey will be useful.
The apologetic point of these first three chapters is that non-Christian ethical systems stumble and reflect poorly on the worldviews that craft and cherish them. Then, in chap. 4, we’ll examine religiously based ethics, finding fault with the offerings of false religions. Then, in chap. 5, we’ll consider the superiority of a full-orbed Christian approach.
Here then is a selection of pretenders to the throne, beginning with secular approaches which ground morality in the individual.
AESTHETIC PLEASURE
For some the highest moral categories are cast in aesthetic terms, whether beauty, intrigue, gracefulness, or rhythm. As conservative art critic Roger Kimball notes, it turns ruinous: “At the center of that way of life is the imperative to regard all experience as an occasion for aesthetic delectation: a seemingly attractive proposition, perhaps, until one realizes that it depends upon a narcissistic self-absorption that renders every moral demand negotiable.”
British painter Lucien Freud is an example. “Quite a few friends were crooks and psychopaths. Freud liked homosexual gangster Ronnie Kray because ‘he said interesting things, although he was, as everyone knows, a sadistic murderer.’”
Walter Pater
Nineteenth-century English essayist and critic Walter Pater is case in point. In his book on the Renaissance, he claimed that experience is its own end. For “a counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.” Thus we must focus on “getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” So we reach for “any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.”
The aim was total self-satisfaction: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits.” So to be comfortably consistent in the ways of virtue is a dead end. Better to be breaking fresh ground and getting a new rush, whatever the cost.
And though he was a fairly colorless man, his fantasies ran toward the illicit: “He was, for example, overheard to say that it would be great fun to take Holy Orders without believing a word of Christian doctrine.” Fortunately a friend wrote the bishop of London about this, heading off any attempt at it.
Poor Walter. He was always bemoaning the fact that he lacked “so-and-so’s courage and hardihood.” Were he so endowed, he once observed, with a little laugh, “I might have been a criminal.”
Adolph Hitler
A painter of modest skill, Adolph Hitler was frustrated by lack of acclaim in the galleries of Vienna, but he found a larger canvas on which to work. A “Central European Romantic,” he “worshipped the artist and his achievement as the embodiment of the highest social aspirations of an age,” and he repeatedly “define[d] his historic mission in artistic terms.”
In fact, Hitler took the practice of politics-as-an-art vastly beyond anything imagined by the Iron Chancellor [Bismarck]—to the extent, indeed, where he could, in an unguarded moment, style himself “the greatest actor in Europe.” With no immodesty he might have added that he was also the greatest theatrical impresario, the most daring playwright and the cleverest stage manager on the inter-war political scene.
Of course his palette included the blood of Jews, and his sound effects were the breaking of Jewish shop windows on Kristallnacht.
AUTONOMY
Ethical autonomists make their personal choices the highest good—freedom above all—and they count as wicked any attempt to hold them accountable to standards outside themselves. This stance comes in many flavors, but its spirit of total rebellion is recognizable throughout, as is its connection to the primordial lie of the serpent, that Adam and Eve could be like gods themselves.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The atheistic existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, defines his school of thought, existentialism, with the formula, “Existence precedes essence.” He uses a paper cutter for contrast: “Here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept.” Its “essence—that is, the ensemble of both the production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced and defined—precedes existence.”
But according to Sartre, man is just the opposite. He argues that
man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. . . . There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.
Thus answerable to nothing but himself, he makes up his own rules.
Of course the problem should be obvious. This ethic is entirely compatible with anything, including bestiality, pedophilia, and mass murder. Furthermore, as Sartre demonstrated in his own life, this view is virtually impossible to maintain, for he took stands against the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, signing manifestos that presupposed a universal morality.
Above all he loved the outlaw stance. He “felt a . . . pull towards ‘low places and shady young men,’ and his rejection of middle-class rules, his fascination with the thief Jean Genet, and his art all bear comparison with Dostoevsky’s convict code,” namely, “to live life according to one’s own passions, to create one’s own laws!”
Anarchists
Anarchists gained celebrity status when they heaved bricks through Seattle storefront windows during the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. Here is a statement of their perspective:
Anarchists are anti-authoritarians because they believe that no human being should dominate another. . . . Domination is inherently degrading and demeaning, since it submerges the will and judgment of the dominated to the will and judgement of the dominators, thus destroying the dignity and self-respect that comes only from personal autonomy. . . . So, in a nutshell, Anarchists seek a society in which people interact in ways which enhance the liberty of all rather than crush the liberty (and so potential) of the many for the benefit of a few. Anarchists do not want to give others power over themselves, the power to tell them what to do under the threat of punishment if they do not obey. Perhaps non-anarchists, rather than be puzzled why anarchists are anarchists, would be better off asking what it says about themselves that they feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.
Most would find their utter disregard for authority, whether human or divine, to be the perfect recipe for moral and social chaos.
Sheila Larson
In Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues describe a young nurse who was “in part, trying to find a center in herself after liberating herself from an oppressively conformist early family life.”
One person we interviewed has actually...
