The meaning of ‘the West’ is defined by the Vatican in terms of the Catholic Church, the West’s oldest and greatest institution, and by the French secularists at the EU in terms of the values of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I offer a radical-Christian interpretation: Working out in history the implications of its own leading ideas, Christianity has gradually evolved beyond its ‘church’ form, and has become modern Western culture. This new culture, chiefly based on critical thinking and on humanitarian ethics, is now becoming fully globalised.
Scrupulosity1 I have suggested already that Western culture has, with astonishing success, taken various features of religion and extraverted and secularised them, applying them to the conduct of everyday affairs. The upshot is that Christianity, which until the Enlightenment was a religion, has gradually become the moral flavour of a whole culture, and is now almost globalised.
One of these features is the scrupulous, meticulous, observant, finicky, punctilious, assiduous and indeed ‘religious’ following of prescribed routines and procedures.
The starting-point here is the performance of religious rituals: all over the world complex liturgical Calendars of feasts, fasts, and other holy days are very exactly observed and complex rituals are performed, and nobody seems to have any difficulty with the idea that if the ritual is correctly done, with everything in just the right order, then it works ex opere operato (just by the doing of the work, as Roman Catholic doctrine has it). This nicety or punctiliousness about religious observances is the norm, and is taken utterly for granted in many a third-world country where it has so far proved impossible to persuade people that the same meticulousness, if applied to a whole range of small everyday matters like maintaining the water supply, or enforcing the building regulations, would be very highly beneficial to everyone. No: the fact is that people everywhere take the appropriateness of religious scrupulosity entirely for granted (it must be done, it must be done now, and it must be done in the correct order), but they simply hate the thought of being equally scrupulous about health and safety regulations, or about punctuality, or about the maintenance of society’s infrastructure.
An interesting compromise-solution to this problem comes from Japan, where the making of a good sword involves a lengthy technological routine. How are people to be persuaded to remember the sequence of forging operations accurately? Answer, by interweaving the technical procedure with a religious ritual. People always remember how to perform a religious ritual in the correct order. So they are taught the whole ritual, and they are taught the associations between each stage of the ritual and the corresponding technical operation; and now they know how to do the whole thing correctly, with the ritual sequence acting as the template and aide-memoire which ensures that the technical jobs are all done, and done in the right order.
This is interesting and amusing, but we are still left with the intellectual puzzle: Why is it that religion is so much more memorable than anything else? The best answer I can give is that religious ideas, rituals, teachings and so on are always storylike, and have the very strong memorability of the best stories and melodies.
The second feature of religion that has already been quoted seems to apply only to monotheistic religions. I refer to the great importance of being scrupulously and systematically self-critical when you examine your own conscience before God. To attain the goal of the religious life you must purify yourself thoroughly, which means that you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself, seeking out and purging every last little bit of error and self-deception. God, it is said, is holy and all-knowing, and all human hearts lie open to his gaze, so that you cannot hope to approach God unless you are inwardly completely pure. There is a simile in the background here: just as one bad apple may corrupt and spoil a whole basket of apples, so one unacknowledged and unabsolved sin is enough to make you quite unfit and unable to endure the holy gaze of God.
Extraverted and secularised, this religious selfexamination becomes critical thinking, and in particular the scientific method. The only way to truth, real truth, is by a thorough and systematic investigation which considers all possibilities, and by the rigorous expulsion of all detectable errors from your system of knowledge.
It is important to stress that the one and only religious way to knowledge that is important here is critical self-examination in the search for purity of heart before God.
Two-and-a-half millennia ago critical self-questioning was important in the development of religious asceticism, of psychological reflection, and even of philosophy itself. But all other religious ways to knowledge seem quite content to remain firmly non-critical. The custom was and is merely to accumulate and guard tradition and to treat every bit of it as more or less equally authoritative, without any critical purging. Thus in Christianity the four canonical Gospels were simply added together to produce a ‘Harmony of the The Meaning of theWest Don Cupitt’s Conference workshop had the title of his forthcoming book, which he introduces thus:
Japanese sword-maker Gospels’, just as your School Nativity Play to this day adds Luke’s infancy narrative to Matthew’s, and then throws in a little embroidery for good measure. Before critical scholarship came along hardly anyone had ever said openly that the Jesus of St John’s Gospel and the Jesus of St Mark’s Gospel are so different from each other that they simply cannot possibly be, both of them, equally and fully authoritative portraits of one and the same man. But that is how it was: traditional religious faith often incorporated conflicting themes and materials, but people seemed not to notice it. At any rate, attempts at critical tidying-up have always been very unpopular. People do not want to have their cherished beliefs tidied up for them, and least of all at Christmas time.
For our present purposes however it is sufficient to limit our attention to the penitent and the ascetic who undertake a scrupulous, rigorous self-examination in the quest for inner truthfulness, or purity of heart. In the background is the awesome, terrible figure of an infinitely holy and demanding heavenly Father, who sets us the very highest standards. We are trying to do his Will by meeting his demands – and there I hope the reader may already have thought of two of the greatest figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Newton, a posthumous (i.e., a child born after the death of his earthly father, like Sartre), was highly-conscious of a special relationship to his heavenly Father; and Darwin gives in his correspondence a strong impression of one who is trying to live up to the exacting standards set him by a very strong earthly father. Both men, in their different ways, give some indication of the religious background and the psychological cost of the scientific method. Religious, and even perhaps neurotic, scrupulosity is turned outwards so that it becomes intellectual scrupulosity — with startling results. Suddenly, we have a hugely powerful new tool.
Compare a traditional Herbal with a modern Flora.
The Herbal follows the same pattern as the Harmony of the Gospels, by simply piling up everything, good or bad, that Tradition supplies. So the Herbal will typically list all the names of a plant, supply a picture of it, describe its medicinal virtues and its astrological affinities, cite all the references to it in Classical literature, and so on until it has supplied several pages of jumbled, miscellaneous information. The modern Flora is quite different. It cuts out all the literary references, the folklore, the astrology, the medicinal properties and so on, and sticks strictly to botany.
There is a careful technical description designed to help the field botanist to identify the species accurately. There is information about habitat, distribution and abundance.
Here we note that, above all, the modern Flora contains no errors. The Herbal is an antique shop, a jumble of bygones, with almost none of its statements ever having been publicly tested, whereas behind the Flora there is a really stringent ethics of knowledge. Quite simply, neurotic scrupulosity, extraverted and applied to the construction of systems of knowledge, has proved hugely powerful. So much so that modern Western natural science is far and away the best and most powerful way to knowledge that human beings have ever devised.
Darwin’s biography well illustrates the main points.
As eventually published, The Origin of Species (1859) took the form of a lengthy cumulative argument worked up in considerable detail and over many years. In the nature of the case, much of what Darwin was proposing could at that time neither be modelled mathematically nor tested experimentally. He was attempting something like a Baconian induction, and he saw clearly that everything depended upon the facts being reliable, and all the arguments carefully considered. Darwin was diligent in reading expositions of the ‘Design’ explanation of adaptation, and in reading the relevant philosophers. In his letters he is collecting all the relevant facts and arguments he can get, and he specially thanks people for sending him facts and arguments that appear to tell against his theory. He really needs to be made aware of, to weigh, and to deal with every possible objection to his theory before he publishes it. Darwin took such pains over his great work that one readily understands his invalidism. He was very high-anxiety and he clearly shows us the connection between traditional religious and moral scrupulosity (anxiety about one’s own purity of heart and motive) and modern Western intellectual scrupulosity.
The history of Western intellectual standards and their progressive refinement over the last few centuries is scarcely yet written; but one day it will be written, and it will be very instructive. Two centuries ago, and even more recently, it was sufficient for a medical pioneer to test a new medical procedure upon himself and a new surgical procedure on his patients. Today, it costs around a billion US dollars to develop an important new drug and bring it to market, because field trials have perforce become so large-scale and expensive.
This religious self-examination becomes critical thinking, and in particular the scientific method.
Page from a medieval herbal 17 sofia 89 September 2008 In these reflections about religious scrupulosity and its transfer into various secular contexts we have learnt something about the religious significance of modern Western culture.
First, in the modern state the old distinction between the secular and the sacred realms has been transformed into the distinction between private life (in which you may, and indeed should, put first the interests of yourself and your own family members) and public service (in which you must disinterestedly follow prescribed routines to the letter). The public servant is an administrator, or in Greek, a ‘deacon’. The public realm is like God, those who work for it are ‘civil servants’ or ‘ministers’, and the highest standards of impartiality or disinterestedness are required.
Interestingly, the Greek word liturgy (leitourgia) means both public service and the worship of the gods. Both require the same ‘religious’ punctiliousness: you must be a ‘stickler’, an interesting old word with a long history.
Secondly, modern Western culture depends upon knowledge, knowledge acquired by critical method, and tested by critical standards that are themselves also subject to continual critical assessment and reformulation.
A particular tenet or assertion counts as part of the body of public knowledge if it is currently accepted as such by the relevant learned society, is taught in the universities, and is acceptable from an expert witness giving testimony in a court of law. And as we have found earlier, there is an exact analogy: just as in medieval Christian piety believers were required to carry out a stringent and comprehensive selfexamination to make themselves fit to stand before God, so in modern Western culture any candidate for the status of being public knowledge must be capable of surviving stringent and comprehensive critical testing before it can be deemed fit to stand in public.
Thirdly, not only does modern Western culture give great religious significance to the public realm and public service, but also its commitment to critical thinking and testing requires it to be a continuously self-critical and selfreforming type of society, which is all the time reviewing and developing what it counts as being public knowledge and publicly-established values. Unlike any previous culture, modern Western culture since the Enlightenment has attempted continual moral self-criticism and selfimprovement by legislation. We have tried to make ourselves morally better by reviewing and raising our public standards for the treatment of prisoners, of the insane, of slaves, of serfs, bonded workers and day-labourers, of animals, of children, of wounded soldiers, of women, of racial minorities, of sexual minorities, of the disabled and many other groups. The Western state has become ethical; it actively works to improve the moral standards of the population, and to this extent the modern Western state remains highly Christian, even after the Death of God and after the end of the Church. There is much more Christianity around now than ever there was in the Ages of Faith.
Fourth, and lastly, it is worth pointing out that the modern world expects Christian standards of the West. People in the poor countries expect the West to feel rather guilty about being so rich, and to acknowledge a duty to ‘redistribute’ its surplus wealth. They expect the West to acknowledge the sinfulness of colonialism and the slave trade, and to disburse annual development aid, humanitarian aid, and (nowadays) even reparations. They rather expect the West to go on about individual human rights, about democracy and the rule of law, and so on. In short, the rest of the world has a great range of moral expectations of the West, and tries hard to exploit them. But the poor countries don’t have the same expectation of other religions and cultureareas. Nobody seriously expects the Turks to apologize to the Armenians, or the Egyptian Arabs to repent of their long domination of the Copts. Nobody expects Indians to dwell on the evils of the Mughal Empire as much as they dwell on the evils of the British Empire, or the Zanzibaris to demand repentance and reparations for so many centuries of slavetrading in dhows down the East African coast.
In short, the world assumes that the West is Christian at heart, and that it is much more susceptible to moral appeals, arguments, and even blackmail than is any other religion or culture-area. The world assumes (rightly, it seems) that Christian values do still greatly influence Western behaviour. Many commentators assume that Christianity is a dying faith, whereas Islam is very much alive. Because other faiths and cultures show absolutely no inclination to be self-critical in public, they can confidently assert their own moral superiority and the West’s relative decadence.
But are rich oil sheiks apologizing to black East Africa for slavery, and offering aid without strings? Seemingly not, despite the fact that Almsgiving (Zakat) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. On the whole, the world notes that only the West, along with some institutions created by it such as the UN and the great humanitarian charities, still takes religious values sufficiently seriously to be persuaded to give money and personal service, unconditionally and on a large scale, over many years, to the needy.
Again I am led to the view that Christianity is doing better in its afterlife as ‘Western culture’ than ever it did as a religion – if you will allow me to reckon an organization like Médecins sans Frontières as belonging to the history of Christianity. 1 ‘Scrupulosity’ is a chapter from Don Cupitt’s new book The Meaning of the West forthcoming from SCM Press in November 2008.
Don Cupitt made the original BBC 1984 television series Sea of Faith, from which SoF Network takes its name.He is a Life Fellow and former Dean of Emmanuel College,Cambridge, who has published more than thirty-five books,with two forthcoming: Above Us Only Sky from Polebridge Press,USA and The Meaning of theWest from SCM Press in England.
Chapter from Don Cupitt's book The Meaning of the West, forthcoming from SCM Press (November 2008). Don Cupitt made the original BBC 1984 television series Sea of Faith. He is a Life Fellow and former Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has published more than thirty-five books.