Authors: Unknown
In
my own amended Ten Commandments, I would choose some of the above, but
I would also try to find room for, among others:
•
Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave
others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which
are none of your business.
•
Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as
possible) species.
•
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for
themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
•
Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
But
never mind these small differences of priority. The point is that
we have almost all moved on, and in a big way, since biblical times.
Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most
of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth
century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to
the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the
equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that
manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no
longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times.
Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.
And if he had actually carried through his plan to sacrifice Isaac, we
would have convicted him of first-degree murder. Yet, according to the
mores
of his time, his conduct was entirely admirable, obeying
God's commandment. Religious or not, we have all changed massively in
our attitude to what is right and what is wrong. What is the nature of
this change, and what drives it?
In
any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus, which changes
over the decades, and for which it is not pretentious to use the German
loan-word
Zeitgeist
(spirit of the times). I said
that female suffrage was now universal in the world's democracies, but
this reform is in fact astonishingly recent. Here are some dates at
which women were granted the vote:
New
Zealand, 1893
Australia, 1902
Finland, 1906
Norway, 1913
United
States, 1920
Britain, 1928
France, 1945
Belgium, 1946
Switzerland, 1971
Kuwait, 2006
This
spread of dates through the twentieth century is a gauge of the
shifting
Zeitgeist.
Another is our attitude to
race. In the early part of the twentieth century, almost everybody in
Britain (and many other countries too) would be judged racist by
today's standards.
Most white people believed that black people (in which category they
would have lumped the very diverse Africans with unrelated groups from
India, Australia and Melanesia) were inferior to white people in almost
all respects except - patronizingly - sense of rhythm. The 1920s
equivalent of James Bond was that cheerfully debonair boyhood hero,
Bulldog Drummond. In one novel,
The Black Gang,
Drummond
refers to 'Jews, foreigners, and other unwashed folk'. In the climax
scene of
The Female of the Species,
Drummond is
cleverly disguised as Pedro, black servant of the arch-villain. For his
dramatic disclosure, to the reader as well as to the villain, that
'Pedro' is really Drummond himself, he could have said: 'You think I am
Pedro. Little do you realize, I am your archenemy Drummond, blacked
up.' Instead, he chose these words: 'Every beard is not false, but
every nigger smells. That beard ain't false, dearie, and dis nigger
don't smell. So I'm thinking, there's something wrong somewhere.' I
read it in the 1950s, three decades after it was written, and it was
(just) still possible for a boy to thrill to the drama and not notice
the racism. Nowadays, it would be inconceivable.
Thomas
Henry Huxley, by the standards of his times, was an enlightened and
liberal progressive. But his times were not ours, and in 1871 he wrote
the following:
No
rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro
is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be
true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are
removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as
well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his
bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be
carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the
hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our
dusky cousins.
104
It
is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past
times by the standards of their own. Abraham Lincoln, like Huxley, was
ahead of his time, yet his views on matters of race also
sound backwardly racist in ours. Here he is in a debate in 1858 with
Stephen A. Douglas:
I
will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and
black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making
voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor
to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this,
that there is a physical difference between the white and black races
which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on
terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot
so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of
superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the white race.
105
Had
Huxley and Lincoln been born and educated in our time, they would have
been the first to cringe with the rest of us at their own Victorian
sentiments and unctuous tone. I quote them only to illustrate how the
Zeitgeist
moves on. If even Huxley, one of the great liberal minds of
his age, and even Lincoln, who freed the slaves, could say such things,
just think what the
average
Victorian must have
thought. Going back to the eighteenth century it is, of course, well
known that Washington, Jefferson and other men of the Enlightenment
held slaves. The
Zeitgeist
moves on, so inexorably
that we sometimes take it for granted and forget that the change is a
real phenomenon in its own right.
There
are numerous other examples. When the sailors first landed in Mauritius
and saw the gentle dodos, it never occurred to them to do anything
other than club them to death. They didn't even want to eat them (they
were described as unpalatable). Presumably, hitting defenceless, tame,
flightless birds over the head with a club was just something to do.
Nowadays such behaviour would be unthinkable, and the extinction of a
modern equivalent of the dodo, even by accident, let alone by
deliberate human killing, is regarded as a tragedy.
Just
such a tragedy, by the standards of today's cultural climate, was the
more recent extinction of
Thylacinus,
the
Tasmanian wolf. These now iconically lamented creatures had a bounty on
their heads until as recently as 1909. In Victorian novels of Africa,
'elephant', 'lion' and 'antelope' (note the revealing singular) are
'game' and what you do to game, without a second thought, is shoot it.
Not for food. Not for self-defence. For 'sport'. But now the
Zeitgeist
has changed. Admittedly, rich, sedentary 'sportsmen' may
shoot wild African animals from the safety of a Land-Rover and take the
stuffed heads back home. But they have to pay through the nose to do
so, and are widely despised for it. Wildlife conservation and the
conservation of the environment have become accepted values with the
same moral status as was once accorded to keeping the sabbath and
shunning graven images.
The
swinging sixties are legendary for their liberal modernity. But at the
beginning of that decade a prosecuting barrister, in the trial for
obscenity of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
could still
ask the jury: 'Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters -
because girls can read as well as boys [can you
believe
he
said that?] - reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying
around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or
your servants to read?' This last rhetorical question is a particularly
stunning illustration of the speed with which the
Zeitgeist
changes.
The
American invasion of Iraq is widely condemned for its civilian
casualties, yet these casualty figures are orders of magnitude lower
than comparable numbers for the Second World War. There seems to be a
steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. Donald
Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded
like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the
Second World War. Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It
has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with
religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of
it.
The
shift is in a recognizably consistent direction, which most of us would
judge as improvement. Even Adolf Hitler, widely regarded as pushing the
envelope of evil into uncharted territory, would not have stood out in
the time of Caligula or of Genghis Khan. Hitler no
doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century
technology at his disposal. And did even Hitler gain his greatest
pleasure,
as Genghis avowedly did, from seeing his victims' 'near and
dear bathed in tears'? We judge Hitler's degree of evil by the
standards of today, and the moral
Zeitgeist
has
moved on since Caligula's time, just as the technology has. Hitler
seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time.
Within
my lifetime, large numbers of people thoughtlessly bandied derogatory
nicknames and national stereotypes: Frog, Wop, Dago, Hun, Yid, Coon,
Nip, Wog. I won't claim that such words have disappeared, but they are
now widely deplored in polite circles. The word 'negro', even though
not intended to be insulting, can be used to date a piece of English
prose. Prejudices are indeed revealing giveaways of the date of a piece
of writing. In his own time, a respected Cambridge theologian, A. C.
Bouquet, was able to begin the chapter on Islam of his
Comparative
Religion
with these words: 'The Semite is not a natural
monotheist, as was supposed about the middle of the nineteenth century.
He is an animist.' The obsession with race (as opposed to culture) and
the revealing use of the singular ('The Semite . . . He is an animist')
to reduce an entire plurality of people to one 'type' are not heinous
by any standards. But they are another tiny indicator of the changing
Zeitgeist.
No Cambridge professor of theology or any other subject would
today use those words. Such subtle hints of changing
mores
tell
us that Bouquet was writing no later than the middle of the twentieth
century. It was in fact 1941.
Go
back another four decades, and the changing standards become
unmistakeable. In a previous book I quoted H. G. Wells's Utopian
New
Republic,
and I shall do so again because it is such a
shocking illustration of the point I am making.
And
how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal
with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew?. . . those swarms
of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not
come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and
not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go ...
And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the
ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped
primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and
beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful
minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the
shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating
weakness ... is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have
an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
That
was written in 1902, and Wells was regarded as a progressive in his own
time. In 1902 such sentiments, while not widely agreed, would have made
for an acceptable dinner-party argument. Modern readers, by contrast,
literally gasp with horror when they see the words. We are forced to
realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far
outside the
Zeitgeist
of his time as he seems from
our vantage-point today. How swiftly the
Zeitgeist
changes
- and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated
world.
Where,
then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness
come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is
sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion. If forced
to advance a theory, I would approach it along the following lines. We
need to explain why the changing moral
Zeitgeist
is
so widely synchronized across large numbers of people; and we need to
explain its relatively consistent direction.
First,
how is it synchronized across so many people? It spreads itself from
mind to mind through conversations in bars and at dinner parties,
through books and book reviews, through newspapers and broadcasting,
and nowadays through the Internet. Changes in the moral climate are
signalled in editorials, on radio talk shows, in political speeches, in
the patter of stand-up comedians and the scripts of soap operas, in the
votes of parliaments making laws and the decisions of judges
interpreting them. One way to put it would be in terms of changing meme
frequencies in the meme pool, but I shall not pursue that.
Some
of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral
Zeitgeist
and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the
twenty-first
century are bunched together and way ahead of our counterparts in the
Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the
1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier
century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way
behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a
smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary
setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in
the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend
is unmistake-able and it will continue.