We continue this three part series, reflecting on how the belief in an external moral order is rapidly being displaced by a “morality of the inner self,” where each of us decides what is right by himself. According to this “new ethic of authenticity,” each one of must decide what is right according to his inner voice, as if neither God, nor nature, nor tradition stood outside as external, legitimate sources of moral authority. In contrast to the Delphic oracle that bid us each “Know thyself,” the ethic of authenticity invites each individually to “Rule Thyself,” or “Be Thine Own Emperor.” We have therefore aptly called this view the morality of the Imperial Self.
As noted in the first part of this series, while this view rose to public prominence in America in the morally tumultuous 1960s, the roots of the Imperial Self go at least to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and indeed, reach back even further. It is a complicated story, to say the least.
But things get even more complicated when we realize that, along with the Imperial Self, we have another strange moral creature with which to reckon, the Diminishing Self. The Diminishing Self is, ironically, a twin of the Imperial Self. Or to be more accurate, since these two quite often reside in the same person, they exist as a kind of dual personality in those who have rejected the belief that an external moral order exists. Now that we have met the Imperial Self, let us examine his twin.
Whereas the Imperial Self acts as if he is more than human, the sole judge and executioner of his own moral law, the Diminishing Self acts as if he is less than human, reduced to the status of a mere chemical concoction ruled in each thought and deed entirely by the laws of nature. The Imperial Self assumes the status of a deity. The Diminishing Self assumes the status of clay.
Whereas the Imperial Self is a product of Rousseau, the Diminishing Self is a product of modern materialist science. Before the rise of materialism in the west, we thought we were made in the image of God and had an immortal, rational souls. Then, modern materialists informed poor humanity that there was no God, no such thing as a soul, and human beings were merely one more kind of animal, driven by deep, unconscious instincts. Such was the story of Charles Darwin; such was the story of Sigmund Freud.
But the Self that listened to the siren song of materialism would be diminished still further. Not content to reduce human beings to mere animals, materialists reduced animals to complex chemical machines, ultimately cobbled together and run according to the laws of genetics, chemistry, and physics. This strain of reductionism runs all the way back to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and all the way forward to the present day, with the likes of zoologist Richard Dawkins.
Unlike the Imperial Self, the Diminishing Self seems unable to command anything at all, least of all his own will. He is entirely commanded by an external authority—not by a moral authority, but by a set of absolutely dictatorial physical laws. Indeed, if he follows the promptings of materialist psychologists completely, he soon realizes that he isn’t even a self at all. The “self” is only an illusion caused by a multitude of chemical reactions. How much further could the Self diminish?
Again, it is quite ironic to find, in one and the same culture, a moral revolution producing both the Imperial Self and the Diminishing Self. But perhaps it isn’t quite so strange after all.
If we reach back through history several centuries, we discover the ultimate source of our current revolution. Among the intelligentsia, first in a trickle and then building over several centuries to a rush, we find the belief that this grand universe and everything in it including human beings, was the result of a series of merely material accidents. On this view, the laws of physics pushed and pulled matter over countless millions of years into countless different shapes, producing, quite by accident, this creature we call man.
According to the materialist creation story, since man was the sum result of the purposeless kneading of matter, he was little more than clay. Behold the Adamic Diminishing Self! For him there is no knowledge of good and evil, for the laws of nature and brute matter are indifferent to questions of good and evil, and rule only by fickle chance and despotic necessity.
But since no creator ruled over him, bringing his clay to life by the gift of His breath, he was also as close to a deity as had been produced. Behold the Adamic Imperial Self! To him, in the moral vacuum, falls the necessity not only of naming the beasts, but of defining good and evil for himself.
So perhaps it isn’t as difficult to understand, at least in outline, how we have come to be engaged in cultural wars. Part of the culture still holds to the view that nature (including our human moral nature) is ordered by a benevolent God, who has defined good and evil for us. Part of the culture now holds the view that, lacking both the order of God and of nature, good and evil can only be defined by us.
Not a particularly happy situation, but one to which we must respond.
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