Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

The strain in Western civilization that is expressed in Malthus/Darwin/Nietzsche/Freud has no place in it for the cult of the soul, that old Jacob lamed and blessed in a long night of struggle. There is a passionate encounter with the cruelty of the world at the center of Judeo-Christian experience. So far as we can tell, only we among the creatures can even form the thought that the world is cruel. We are the species most inclined to adapt the environment to ourselves, so perhaps noting the difference between what is and what, from a human point of view, ought to be, is simply a function of our nature, a recognition of the fact that we have choices, that we can improvise. If, as the Darwinists assure us, there is only the natural world, then nothing can be alien to it, and our arrangements, however extravagantly they depart from the ways of other creatures, can never be called unnatural. It is certainly one of the oddest features of a school of thought that denies human exceptionalism as its first premise that it finds so much of human behavior contrary to nature — and objectionable on those grounds. Such an idea can only have survived as part of a self-declared scientific worldview because it allows the making of value judgments, the oldest project of this line of thought. If life had only such meaning as arose from within it, then people could practice philanthropy and give themselves over to mystical visions and harden themselves to their own interests and passions without fear of rebuke. The persistent use of the idea of unnaturalness by people who insist there is only nature suggests that their model of reality is too constricted to permit even its own elaboration. This is true because it is first of all — as premise, not as conclusion — a rejection of things demonstrably present in the world, for example, human fellow-feeling. The idea of the antinatural, of decadence and priestly imposition, gives Darwinism its character as a cause.

This school of thought — ordinarily referred to as modern thought — tells us nothing more urgently than that we are wrong about ourselves. We are to believe we are the dupes of the very reactions that make us judges of circumstance, and that make us free in relation to it. Obviously, if we must act in our own interest, crudely understood, we have few real options. But if we act from a sense of justice, or from tact or compassionate imagination, then we put the impress of our own sense of things on the external world. If this is another version of the will to power, it is in any case the kind of power that religion, and civilization in its highest forms, has always sought to confer. If this is another version of self-interest, it is also a proof of the fact that the definition of that term is very broad indeed, classically friendly to paradox — “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” for example, or “it is in dying we live.” This does not by any means imply the moral equality of every act that can be construed as rewarding to the one who carries it out, without reference to its consequences. Nor does it imply that apparently selfless conduct is in fact merely less honest than straightforward selfishness. It means that there are rewards in experience for generosity, probably because it serves the collective well-being, but probably also because it is appropriate to our singular dignity as creatures who can act freely, outside the tedious limits of our own interests.

I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking it has displaced. Daniel Dennett scolds Judeo-Christianity for Genesis 1:28, in which humankind is given dominion over all the earth, as if it licensed depredation. Notions of this kind go unchallenged now because the Bible is so little known. In the recapitulation of creation that occurs after the waters have receded in the narrative of the Flood (Genesis 9:1–4), people are told, as if for the first time, that they may eat the flesh of animals. It would appear the Edenic regime was meant to be rather mild. And of course the most reassuring images of the lordliness of God in both Testaments describe him as a shepherd. Over against this we have Darwin and Nietzsche with their talk of extermination.

If it is objected — and there would be grounds for alarm if it were not objected — that the passages I have quoted above from Darwin and Nietzsche are misread by those who take issue with them, their defenders must make some little effort to be fair to the context of Genesis. It may be true historically that people have justified brutal misuse of nature on the authority of Genesis 1:28, but it is surely true that they have taken a high hand against the whole of creation on the pretext offered them by “the survival of the fittest” or “the will to power.” The verse in Genesis 9 that permits the eating of animals is followed by a verse that forbids the shedding of human blood, pointedly invoking the protection of the divine image. This is the human exceptionalism which Dennett and the whole tribe of Darwinians reject as if on a moral scruple. But its effect is to limit violence, not to authorize it.

In nothing is the retrograde character of modern thought more apparent. These ancients are never guilty of the parochialism of suggesting that any ambiguity surrounds the word “human,” or that there is any doubt about human consanguinity, though such notions would be forgivable in a people surrounded by tribes and nations with which their relations were often desperately hostile. To say this is to grant what is clearly true, that they often failed to live up to their own most dearly held beliefs. This can be looked at from another side, however. They were loyal over many centuries to standards by which they themselves (though less, no doubt, than humankind in general) were found guilty and wanting. This is a burden they could have put down. It is the burden Western civilization has put down, in the degree that it has rejected the assertion of human uniqueness. Darwin’s response to objections to the idea of kinship with monkeys was, better a monkey than a Fuegian, a naked savage.

History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign. Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied. The proof of this is that, in the twentieth century, “scientific” policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes. Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word “science,” which, quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant “truth.” Surely it is fair to say that science is to the “science” that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the “Christianity” that inspired Crusades. In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been discredited. The failure in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.

These are not the worst consequences, however. The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.