The Doubter's Companion (22 page)

This does not mean that history becomes a beacon of truth when it is separated from ideology. History is not about truth but about continuity, and not about a limited dialectic but about an unlimited movement. To the extent that
ETHICS
remain in the foreground, history cannot be grossly deformed. The ethics which Western civilization has attempted to push forward for two and a half millennia are scarcely a secret. If anything, they have remained painfully obvious as one set of power structures after another has sought to marginalize or manipulate them. It is in this context that ideology most typically seeks to fix our attention on a single, conclusive pattern which can be presented as inevitable and which therefore carries a deformation of ethics.

These destructive experiences illustrate the value of history as a guarantor of both stability and change. It is neither a conservative nor a revolutionary force. Instead, history is a constant memory and its value lies in our ability to make it a highly conscious part of our lives. In an age which presents abstract analysis—a method that denies continuity and memory—as the sole respectable method of exercising power, history is perhaps the sole intact linear means of thought. See:
HUMANISM.

HOBBES, THOMAS
   He was right about one thing—there is a solid relationship between authoritarianism and the difficulty humans have in dealing with their
FEAR
of
DEATH.

What Hobbes put forward in
Leviathan
in the seventeenth century—that democracy was disorder and that societies could only function with strong leaders who used their subjects' fear of mortality—has turned into a recurring theme. Whenever we hear a pessimistic description of humanity or a call for strong
LEADERSHIP
or an obscuring vision of our approaching conversion into dust, we are hearing echoes of Hobbes's anti-democratic arguments.

We, the citizen guarantors of our own democracy, have taken to using a language which suggests that there is every reason to be pessimistic about our ability to choose policies and leaders wisely, to control our impulses and to participate intelligently in our civilization. This pessimism brings us back repeatedly to a perceived need for leaders, by which we seem to mean strong leaders—people who will run things for us. Curiously enough these self-destructive impulses also seem to be an integral part of a society which, more than any other in history, has been carefully constructed so that each of us can avoid facing the reality of our own upcoming death.

We are all familiar with the concept of the enemy within. Our tendency is to go on imagining that a good citizen is one who remains vigilant, ever on the lookout for the authoritarian enemy. But we have ourselves become that enemy by forgetting the implications of our own arguments.

HOLY TRINITY—CHRISTIAN
   A pre-alchemist alchemist concept developed by early Christian administrators to soften the hard-edged simplicity of straight monotheism.

The three-in-one/one-in-three mystery of Father, Son and Holy Ghost made tritheism official. The subsequent almost-deification of the Virgin Mary made it quatrotheism. Twelve Disciples as semi-deities then made it sextusdecitheism. Finally, cart-loads of saints raised to quarter-deification turned Christianity into plain, old-fashioned polytheism. By the time of the Crusades, it was the most polytheistic religion ever to have existed, with the possible exception of Hinduism. This untenable contradiction between the assertion of monotheism and the reality of polytheism was dealt with by accusing other religions of the Christian fault. The Church—Catholic and later Protestant—turned aggressively on the two most clearly monotheistic religions in view—Judaism and Islam—and persecuted them as heathen or pagan.

The external history of Christianity consists largely of accusations that other religions rely on the worship of more than one god and therefore not the true God. These pagans must therefore be converted, conquered and/or killed for their own good in order that they may benefit from the singularity of the Holy Trinity, plus appendages.

HOLY TRINITY—POST-CHRISTIAN
   So far Nietzsche has been wrong about GOD. We have not managed to become Him in His place. Instead we have replaced God with a yet more abstract divinity based upon pure rational power.

Reason rose out of the generous humanist promise of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by climbing over the bodies of
HUMANISM
's other constituent elements—common sense, intuition, creativity, memory and ethics. These elements, which by limiting reason make it positive, were not simply struck dead. They were converted into the enemy of the new divinity.

In their place a post-Christian Holy Trinity was installed. Organization or structure replaced the Father,
TECHNOLOGY
displaced the Son and the Holy Ghost gave way to information. The new priesthood was made up of technocrats. As the etymology of the word “technocrat” indicates, from the beginning they were to be specialists in power. Masters of structure. Modern courtiers. They would control the use of technology as if it were a natural extension of themselves, which it is not. And they would stand guard over information, each specialist category dispensing its specialist knowledge as it saw fit.

This is the underlying truth of our society. There are other factors. Complications. Reasons for optimism. But this is our basic religion.

HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
   The main tenet of faith in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the promise of a rational paradise reached through devotion to competition, efficiency and the market-place. In this fashionable and remarkably intolerant Holy Trinity, the role of the Father is taken by competition, of the Son by efficiency and of the Holy Ghost by the market-place.

If these three mechanisms could be presented with both their strengths and their flaws, they would be valuable tools in a stable society. Treated as absolutes they quickly drag society into a confused and dangerous state where conventional wisdom is reliant on our denial of what we know to be wrong.

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization—our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity—to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists.

HUMANISM
   An exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

We are capable of freedom because we are capable of seeking the balance which integrates us into the world. And this equilibrium in society depends upon our acceptance of
DOUBT
as a positive force. The dignity of man is thus an expression of modesty, not of superior preening and vain assertions.

These simple notions are central to the Western idea of civilization. They are clearly opposed to the narrow and mechanistic certainties of ideology; those assertions of certainty intended to hide the fear of doubt.

Modern humanism appeared in Italy in the fourteenth century with Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. It was given philosophical form in the second half of the fifteenth century. Among those who reimagined its shape were Pico della Mirandola, who in his
Oration on the Dignity of Man
has God tell Adam: “I have placed you at the centre of the world so that from there you may see what is in it.”

Most specialists devoted to the
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
now describe humanism in highly technical terms as a movement which revived classical Greek and Roman texts and devoted itself to detailed studies of language and definition and translation. In this way they reduce a revolution to their own level of modern
SCHOLASTICISM.
But the original humanists were, above all, set on attacking the original scholastics. They sought out the classical texts not in a scholastic desire to study the past, but with a determination to use classical ideas against oppressive mediaeval rhetoric.

The humanist path was filled with writers seeking new ways to communicate with larger audiences in clear language. And the element of doubt was always there. In the early sixteenth century, Erasmus seemed often to stand alone as a moderate voice attempting to hold the religious extremists, Catholic and Protestant, back from their desire for blood. The same belief in balance which carried Erasmus could be found in the Enlightenment. Yes, these eighteenth-century thinkers spent a lot of time defining concepts. What interested them, however, was not proving they were right, but being in tune with reality.

As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, it became obvious that a new wave of ideologies was going to reject doubt as a weakness, as ignorance, as irresponsibility; indeed as subversion. Perhaps this explains why the ideology of
REASON
and its various minor manifestations, such as Marxism and Capitalism, have so easily swept humanism off centre stage. They have all the fears of uncontrolled ideas and so use their absolutism to manipulate certainty and force with ease. Balance, on the other hand, requires care and time and, of course, the embracing of uncertainty. Humanism's seeming weakness in the face of ideology is not surprising. Narrow certainty always appears to have a short-term advantage over balance and doubt.

The curious thing about ideologies is that their promise, being eternal and all-encompassing, is therefore impossible, and therefore provokes constant short-term emergencies. In order for the day to be saved, the citizen must react with passive acceptance. Passivity is required because it is believed that the individual, left to act freely in a crisis, will do the wrong thing.

For the humanist, short-term problems are not a crisis. They simply represent reality with all its complications and contradictions. And the citizen's reaction to reality is not expected to be passive, for the simple reason that human nature is neither a problem nor something to be feared. “We're not interested in a world,” as René-Daniel Dubois puts it, “in which to be human is a weakness.”
³
Human nature is a positive force to the extent that it is in balance.

But a balance of what? What is this equilibrium the humanists seek?

A reasonable list of human qualities might include:
ETHICS,
common sense, imagination or creativity, memory or history or experience, intuition and reason. The humanist tries to use all of these. But what does it mean to be in balance?

The Athenians didn't know about the structure of the atom, in which several poles are held in a self-maintaining equilibrium, not by what we would call either a physical or a logical structure but by tension. The tension of complementary opposites. Our qualities, seen as a whole, resemble an atom. The moment one quality is cut free from the others and given precedence over them, this imbalance will bring out the winner's negative aspects.

Thus ethics in power quickly turn into a religious dictatorship. Common sense couldn't help but subside into pessimistic confusion, as if wallowing in the mud. Creativity into anarchy. Memory into the worst sort of monarchical dictatorship. Intuition into the rule of base superstition. And reason, as we have seen over the last half-century, into a directionless, amoral dictatorship of structure.

But if imbalance, which we call ideology, can so easily sweep balance aside, has humanism ever been anything more than a marginal refuge for idealism? That, of course, isn't a question. It's an answer structured as a question and it reflects the standard ideological approach towards humanism.

It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal. The question is not whether we could ever achieve a humanist equilibrium, but whether we are attempting to achieve it. Better that than to seek the imprisoning imbalance of ideology.

We've always known that it was easier to run Sparta than Athens. Sparta had all the advantages of an enormous ancillary slave population, a society based on military obedience and the absence of debate. It was harder to be Athenian and in the end they themselves failed even by their own standards. But they succeeded for a long time and those standards still mark our path. We have added to them, embroidered upon and improved them. It isn't that we have progressed. But we have progressed in our knowledge of how we ought to act. Much of the time we fail to act up to our own standards. We fail ourselves. But if we know that, then we can also find ways to save ourselves. That is the essence of humanism.

I

IDEOLOGY
   Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.

A god who intervenes in human affairs through spokesmen who generally call themselves priests; a king who implements instructions received from God; a predestined class war which requires the representatives of a particular class to take power; a corporatist structure of experts who implement truth through fact-based conclusions; a racial unit which because of its blood-ties has a destiny as revealed by nationalist leaders; a world market which, whether anyone likes it or not, will determine the shape of every human life, as interpreted by corporate executives—all of these and many more are ideologies.

Followers are caught up in the naïve obsessions of these movements. This combination ensures failure and is prone to violence. That's why the decent intentions of the
Communist Manifesto
end up in gulags and murder. Or the market-place's promise of prosperity in the exploitation of cheap, often child, labour.