Secular morality: Promises and people

mantras of propaganda and historical “truths”.

For instance, there was no stable “religious” morality in the Middle Ages. The public thinking of the Middle Ages was mostly done by the Church, but it was not “stable” – it was constantly evolving. The Christian theory of marriage, say, did become the dominant ideology but it took some three centuries to coagulate. The same applies to the theories on the beginning of life worthy of protection, and on prostitution, (one particular monastic order even argued the social necessity of the oldest profession).

To say “religious” seems to imply a dichotomy between “Church” (“God”) and “State” (“Caesar”) but this was hardly the case. In the 20th century, the Italian thinker Santi Romano persuasively argued that the Middle Ages were a stateless epoch, that is, a time when the State was so weak, it was virtually non-existent. The grand state apparatus of the Caesars collapsed and disintegrated in Western Europe on the fall of Rome. This is difficult for us moderns to understand, as we are fishes living in the aquarium of the State, and cannot imagine life outside that aquarium in a wide state-less sea. But that is how it was.

The law has an intimate, bidirectional relationship with morality: it both shapes, and is shaped by, morality. And the State, which monopolises the creation of law, takes account of the winds of morality change. But the Middle Ages were another planet. In the Middle Ages, the law was not made by the State. There was no State to make the law! The law was made by different, competing centres of power, all legitimate but all existing in utter chaos, reflecting the “natural” chaotic state of society. The law was simultaneously made by the Church, by notaries, by judges, by communes, and also, but limitedly, very limitedly, by kings and other potentates. It was also made by scholars who commented on the centuries-old codex of the (Eastern) Roman Emperor Justinian, and the rest of the old Roman law, only re-discovered in the 11th century after it had lain forgotten for hundreds of years.

The Middle Ages were a mishmash of competing laws, of local customs, of a complex and variegated tapestry of overlapping and stratified jurisdictions and legal systems. There was no stability, even though there was an evolving worldview. This is the historical truth, not the mantra forged by 18th-century propaganda in the furnace of the French Revolution.

De-Christianisation

The “civilisation” ushered in by the Revolution necessarily needed to de-Christianise Europe. The new socio-economic formation needed a worldview fundamentally different from the medieval one which had been moulded and buttressed by Christianity.

It needed one, over-arching legal system to harmonise the different markets. But because law and morality are intimately intertwined, it also needed a new, secular morality based on one axiom: nothing is permanent, every obligation can be resolved, every contract rescinded, and this in accordance with the dictates of economic efficiency.

The moral idea found in Matthew 5:34-37, that all promises are binding, and which through Canon Law had shaped medieval law, was not useful to the new system. A new principle was introduced: there could be no “perpetual obligations”. The new mentality pervaded all spheres of life, from employment relations to interpersonal relations: nothing is permanent, everything is fluid. From the consensualism of the Middle Ages, Europe passed to the contractualism of the Enlightenment.

What possibly started out as a good antidote to the excesses of the medieval system, ended up evolving (or degenerating, depending on one’s viewpoint) into the (neo) liberal system we have today, in which nothing is sacred anymore (except profit).

I do not quote Church documents or reactionary authors. I find solace in the leftist French legal thinker Alain Supiot who, in his Homo Juridicus, published by Verso in 2007, devotes an entire chapter to “The Binding Force of the Word: Pacta Sunt Servanda”.

Out of the many points Supiot makes, I will choose only one. He argues that even though the modern contract arises in the wake of the Enlightenment, it could not have come into being without the medieval belief in God. Promises depend on trust and trust needs an all-seeing, allpowerful guarantor to thrive: God. (Remember the US dollar “In God We Trust”?)

What happened was that with secularisation, the State (Caesar) took the place of God. It is the State which now guarantees that promises are kept.

Supiot quotes Max Weber who, upon returning from a trip to the United States, reported a statement he had heard from a businessman: “What someone believes is wholly indifferent to me, but if I know that a client does not go to church, then for me he is not worth 50 cents; why would he pay me if he does not believe in anything?”

The salient characteristics of secular morality

One characteristic is that the State (Caesar) thinks of itself as God. On my Facebook page, I keep a ceiling fresco I saw in a church in Little Italy, Montreal, Canada. It is an incredible scene, painted by Guido Nincheri, with Mussolini on one side and the Pope on the other, both beneath the angels and saints, and ultimately God.

The official interpretation is that the painting commemorates the recognition of the Vatican State in 1929. To my mind, instead, it hints at the Fascist aspiration to elevate the State to divinity status, and to supplant Christianity with the Fascist religion. The official interpretation is one of cooperation; my own interpretation is one of competition.

To me, that painting represents a veritable preoccupation, because a Fascist State is the last thing I want to live in. A State that arrogates to itself the administration of my freedom of action and imposes on me what I can and cannot think is, to me, a suffocating prison cell where I can only keep a notebook with my thoughts jotted down.

I do think, like Jonah Goldberg, that Liberalism in its current state has become Fascist. Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism (2008) sheds much light on the path followed by the progressive-liberals from Mussolini to identity politics.

In the medieval (or Christian) system, people internalised the belief that God watched them, and this imposed on them a moral duty to keep their word. In the post-Enlightenment (or secular, de-Christianised) system, people know that the State – despite CCTV cameras and the highly-intrusive mobile phone with its Google panopticon-like applications and what have you – does not really watch you all the time, because it simply cannot. Surely not like God, who also knew your intentions apart from your deeds.

On top of that, the secular system tells you that your word is plastic. So not only is there no real guarantor, but in reality there is no pressing need for one as, all said and done, giving one’s word is a wishy-washy business.

In the medieval/Christian system, you had worth in God’s eyes, what you did was significant to Him, and you would be rewarded or punished in the afterlife for your deeds in this life.

In the secular system, Darwin (whose face appears on British paper currency) has been made to tell you that you are just another animal in the evolution of species. Highly speculative astrophysicists insist that you live on a little blueish-white speck in a vast universe, that is neither unique nor special. Therefore, you are not worth anything to any Higher Being. For secular morality, the only “God” there can be is Human Reason, which is self-evidently not higher than Humanity itself: Man (in his tower-like State) replaces God. But Man is at the same time, and paradoxically, reduced to a clump of cells, a human resource, a taxpayer, a slave to economic forces.

So you can do whatever you like – you can kill your own unborn child, you can deprive your children of a mother or a father because your private peccadillo becomes your public persona, you can commit suicide when you’re old, lonely and no longer useful to the consumer society, and so on – because ultimately you are insignificant. You are a little piece of shit, and you know it. The narcissistic freedom to do as you please and to consume as much as you can becomes the wall which isolates you from the others, and ultimately from yourself. Your only companion becomes an echo, which can only finish a sentence not started.

My Personal Library (25)

Some books end up on your shelf not because you treasure them but because you had to buy them to read what their author had to say. Many of these books you’d want to burn after you read them were it not for the belief that only an ignorant Nazi pig burns books.

(In reality, not only the Nazis were book-burning maniacs. Martin Luther, Louis XIV, and even Alexander the Great burnt books.)

I would have very much wanted to impose this destiny on one particular book, but I restrained myself, not only because of my staunch belief that books shouldn’t be burnt, but because of a short passage that saved it... a bit like when Abraham negotiated with God not to destroy Sodom if he managed to find x number of righteous men in the city. In the case of Sodom, these were nowhere to be found. In the case of Saviour Balzan’s dull-asdishwater, sophomoric autobiography of sorts, one episode saves it from the flames.

Mr Balzan closes his tedious little opus…cule by relating how he was once invited to a party and then-Prime Minister Fenech Adami introduced him to somebody thus: “This is Saviour Balzan, one of my fiercest critics”. Mr Balzan was positively impressed by Dr Fenech Adami’s attitude, and rightly so.

It is the only instance in which one can share Mr Balzan’s reaction. The rest of the book is forgettable. Joyfully shreddable, to be more precise.