Conclusions

IDENTITY AND ORDER

Until the Renaissance, identity and order were thought to be mutually reinforcing; society conferred identities and practices associated with them sustained political, religious and social orders. This relationship became problematic when people began to distinguish themselves from their roles. The latter were increasingly seen as artificial constructs whose performance confined, even imprisoned, the self. Citing Hegel, but also modern psychology, I argued that the tension between reflective and social selves is often pronounced and can be considered a defining psychological feature of the modern era. This phenomenon gave rise to four generic strategies intended to reduce the gulf between reflective and social selves.

The first two strategies, both of which I characterize as anti-modern, emerged in the Renaissance. They attempt to resolve internal conflict by doing away with interiority and reflexivity. One seeks to do this by means of a secular utopia in which individuality will be all but expunged. The other aspires to recreate a religious-based cosmic order in which there will be no tension between individuals and their society because the former will be devout Christians and the latter will instantiate Christian principles and practices.

Thomas More, author of the first modern utopia, pioneered strategy one.⁷¹ As we saw in chapter two, More was deeply troubled by the growing tension between what he considered his inner self and his political and social roles. His Utopia aimed to overcome such alienation by submerging individuals so deeply in their social milieu that they would lose their interiority and reflexivity. Utopia allows for no visible distinctions among people, no independent careers, no real free time and no privacy. Such a society was intellectually appealing to More but unrealistic, and this may be why he acknowledged the "foolishness" of thinking that it might be a model for Europe. John Tyndale, responsible for the first printed English language bible, was one of a number of dissenting Protestants who helped to develop the second strategy. He rejected society as hypocritical and corrupt, in large part because people were forced to assume false roles. By leading an honest Christian life based on the bible, the tension between identity and society might be finessed to the extent that true believers could withdraw from or create their own society as the Pilgrims would later do.

These choices had diametrically opposed implications for order. More sought identity in society through active participation in its roles and rituals. Tyndale and his followers sought an identity outside of and against the conventions of society. Both strategies were equally problematic as evidenced by the fate of their proponents. More left office to become a private person because he could not accept Henry VIII’s rupture with the Catholic Church, but was arrested and executed. Ironically, the inner self he sought to deny rebelled against the public role he would have to play in an anti-Catholic regime. Tyndale's rejection of the state and its religion made him appear a double danger to the authorities and he was burned at the stake in 1536.

Tyndale’s project – and strategy two in general – requires a great strengthening of the inner self if believers are to turn away from society and face the tribulations and persecution such a life generally involves. While the inner self is strengthened, individual identity is nevertheless limited by anchoring it in the Bible. Identity is regarded as a communal phenomenon and individual differences are muted as far as possible as they are considered relatively unimportant in comparison to one’s relationship to god. Strategy two attempts to address interiority and reflexivity by reducing their importance but emphasizing aspects of them that can be made compatible with a Christian social order. A negative “other” is very helpful, if not essential, to this enterprise because it provides the role model against which the inner self is defined and solidified. For Tyndale and early Protestants, the Antichrist served as this "other" – as it does for present day Dispensationalists. More and his Utopia did not require an external "other" because his intended selves found expression and purpose in social roles. To the extent More and strategy one needs an "other," it is an internal one that feels hemmed in and yearns for oblivion.

These strategies that would be adopted in one form or another by many subsequent thinkers and movements with anti-modern agendas. Chapter two showed how More's underlying philosophical project was copied by, or at least found echoes in, many subsequent utopias. These utopias embed their citizens in social orders that allow little to no individual distinction in wealth or honor and only limited privacy and free-time. They do away with politics and thereby deny the possibility of free thinking and legitimate opposition. They kill, expel, discipline or brainwash citizens who raise objections, and some do this to those who merely give evidence of being contrarian. Rousseau is very much in this tradition. He regards interiority and reflection as the principal sources of human corruption because they encourage the desire for distinction and give rise to amour propre. His Social Contract is a variant of More's Utopia in that reflection is encouraged, but only about the community, never about the self, in the expectation that this will give rise to the general will.⁷² The triumph of the general will depends on the nearly complete stifling of interiority – although clearly, not Rousseau's. Marx and Engels develop another version, which arguably reduces, if not does away with, interiority through the near-total social integration of the worker in his or her enterprise and society. Alienation [Aufhebung], considered a product of exploitation, is made impossible by definition. In contrast to More's Utopia, workers have considerable freedom in how they spend their time, and great emphasis is put on free time.⁷³ However, there will no distinctions of wealth or status among them and a collective identity has largely replaced individual ones.⁷⁴ Engels, at least, recognizes that this shift in self-identification will not be easy to effect.⁷⁵

Strategy two builds on previous efforts by Medieval millennial sects to bring the social order in line with their understanding of Christianity, although many of them resorted to violence toward this end.⁷⁶ The Left Behind novels follow the Tyndale model closely Interiority is encouraged but only to construct an identity based on total commitment to Jesus. Rather than withdrawing from society, the Left Behind's authors destroy the corrupt society through war, famine, natural disasters. Jesus returns to create a millennium where the faithful can live a Christian life. Believers are integrated into a new society that is conceived of as a religious utopia. Inhabitants – they can hardly be called citizens -- possess little real interiority and reflexivity. Their life and thoughts are focused on Jesus and what reflections they have are encouraged take the form of love and admiration for their savior. Those who fail to achieve this level of commitment are zapped by lightning, regardless of their outward conformity. There is no meaningful wealth, and the distraction of profane interpersonal relations is greatly reduced by doing away with the hormones that arouse sexual desire. Residents are, in effect, neutered. Some opposition is allowed, but only to set an example for others when they are hit by lightning bolts and sent to hell to roast for eternity.

Secular and religious utopias do away with interiority and reflection or limit and direct it toward desirable ends. This is a major reason why their critics characterize these utopias as dystopias. Dystopias are more diverse than utopias in their horrors, but some very prominent works (e.g. Zamyatin's We, Orwell's 1984) achieve their most chilling effects by reducing interiority and reflexivity. Zamyatin and Orwell follow More in introducing regimentation, uniformity, propaganda and surveillance. In Huxley's "soft" dystopia, carrots largely replace sticks, but reduce interiority and reflection just as effectively by hooking individuals on drugs and sex. People are enticed to lull themselves into a numbing but pleasurable form of mindlessness.

Utopias and dystopias alike deprive human beings of meaningful freedom. In Don Giovanni, Mozart and Da Ponte explore the other side of this equation: the consequences of near total freedom. This is, of course, an instrumental goal of strategy four. People must free themselves of all social roles and conditioning to discover and express their inner selves. Don Giovanni suggests that efforts to liberate ourselves in this fashion ultimately deprives us of our humanity by reducing us to beasts governed by raw appetites. Don Giovanni is presented as the inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment project: a man liberated from external and internal restraints who is a danger to himself and everyone around him. He is intended to rebut the idealistic expectation that human beings will use freedom and reason to make themselves into more ethical beings, as Kant and so many other Enlightenment thinkers hoped. Mozart and Da Ponte believe that reason is more likely to be directed outwards, with the goal of satisfying unconstrained and therefore more urgent appetites. Untrammeled reason will not lead to a more harmonious society, but one in which a minority assert their will and exploit everyone else. This powerful minority will not be any happier, merely driven. Die Zauberflöte elaborates on to this theme. It suggests that political orders that pretend to be based on reason and love for humanity are really tyrannies. From our vantage point, Sarastro's realm, like Schiller's Spain in Don Carlos, can be regarded as the precursors of the totalitarian regimes that plagued the twentieth century.

Don Giovanni is more an archetype than a person and the Commendatore takes him to the underworld, not to hell. This Greek framing is appropriate because Giovanni behaves the way Greeks expect of someone who frees himself of social constraints. The opera can be interpreted as an avant la lettre critique of the fourth strategy of identity construction that would be associated with the Romantic movement. Mozart and DaPonte suggest that the project of autonomy is as dangerous as it is hollow. Conservatives still read Don Giovanni as a warning about individual assertion run amok, but the opera should also be understood as an equally powerful critique of the ancien régime and more traditional approaches to identity. Mozart and Da Ponte have no sympathy for the class-based hierarchy that sustains itself through superstition and oppression. Commoners like Leporello, Zerlina, Masetto, Figaro and Susanna, and the generally nameless peasants who surround them, are subject to the whims of exploitative patrons upon whom they depend for sustenance or support. Aristocrats are not necessarily any freer. To the degree they have internalized the moral codes of their society they must enact their assigned roles, suppress their emotions and defer, or forever postpone, gratification of ordinary human desires, let alone any attempt to develop and express more sophisticated personal projects. They lead crabbed, unfulfilled and thoroughly unenviable lives. This may be one reason why the women are so attracted to Giovanni. Zerlina aside, the aristocratic women are pathetic figures who oscillate between passivity and hysteria.

The deeper question raised by the opera goes to the core of the modern identity dilemma. Is it possible to find a rewarding and stable compromise between or alternative to anti-modern and modern approaches to identity? Could Europeans escape the antiquated values and confining roles of the traditional order without giving rise to even more dreadful horrors? Mozart and Da Ponte explore this possibility in Così fan tutti which voices the hope that enlightened cynicism might provide the basis for a more sophisticated ultimately more satisfying understandings of self and more stable social orders. Their cautious optimism stands in sharp contrast to the unrelievedly negative takes on the Enlightenment offered by modern critics like Oswald Spengler, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss and Zygmunt Bauman.⁷⁷ The reconciliation that occurs in the last scene of this opera can be analyzed in Kantian terms. The Königsberg sage contended that externally imposed rules crushed our freedom – as they do for the aristocrats in Don Giovanni – but that freedom from all rules makes us slaves to our appetites – as it does for Don Giovanni. To avoid these evils we must impose necessity on ourselves. We must adhere to rules that we have prescribed because they reflect our understanding that they do good for others. The reconciliation of the lovers is acceptance of a self-imposed order, and one that is understood to be good for all parties concerned. This resolution is decidedly in the face of the old order because it appears to affirm behavior that is traditionally considered immoral and to undermine the sanctity of marriage.

Così fan tutti valorizes certain kind of compromises but makes no attempt to resolve underlying tensions between reflective and social selves. At best, it minimizes them by easing up on social constraints to make individual expression easier, but also providing reasons for individuals to exercise self-restraint. Of equal importance, it encourages individuals to accept tensions, even contradictions, between their sense of what is right – a judgment arising from their reflective selves – and what they are prepared to accept in practice. The opera encourages these compromises through role playing, which it reframes in an interesting way. We have examined role playing as something that people are either forced to do to achieve their external goals or sought to do to express and develop their inner selves. The former involves conscious dissimulation which is likely to provoke tension between reflective and social selves while the latter often encounters external constraints and social disapproval. Mozart and Da Ponte put a positive spin on dissimulation and use it to smooth social frictions and allow people expanded freedom within a social order that must, of necessity, be to some degree constraining. The kind of dissimulation that characterizes the last scene of the opera stands in sharp contrast to the that which drives its plot. Guglielmo and Ferrando's charade to test the steadfastedness of their mistresses is egocentric and threatening to the social order, but their willingness to overlook the unfaithfulness of their women by pretending that it never happened has the potential to uphold the institution of marriage and restore the happiness of the two couples. Their charade is based on acceptance of the rigid social conventions of the existing order while their marriage accepts the inevitable tensions between that order and individual frailties and needs for self-expression.

Do reflective and social selves need to be harmonized? Mozart and Da Ponte clearly regard such a project as fatally flawed, if not downright dangerous. Some prominent political theorists disagree. Leo Strauss and Charles Taylor, and many conservatives and communitarians, believe that transcendent moral orders are essential and obtainable. Taylor maintains that only people who live in societies where there is consensus about the moral order are capable of developing identities in harmony with their surroundings. He conceives of identity as the site of our moral compass and denies that adequate foundations for moral choices can be found within ourselves, in nature or created through social engineering.⁷⁸

Secularism and cynicism have certainly increased in the modern world, but Taylor's argument fails to acknowledge that transcendent orders are no longer possible, or could only be achieved at horrendous human costs. In the West, traditional forms of Christianity compete with many different visions of the cosmos. There are some people – a small minority in the West -- who lead culturally isolated lives with others who share their beliefs and practices. Most Westerners live in pluralistic societies, and an even more pluralistic world, where there is no consensus about fundamental values. In its absence, we confront acute, sometimes violent, conflicts over beliefs and practices, making it impossible to live in harmony with the social order regardless of our beliefs.⁷⁹ Dispensationalism nicely illustrates this problem. Like all forms of Christianity, it claims legitimacy on the basis of its understanding of the cosmic order, but believers find the larger society bemused by or downright hostile to their eschatology. Their response – the only one possible aside from hermit-like withdrawal – is to insist that the Jesus will soon prove their truth claims by rapturing the faithful. This demonstration is expected to prompt mass conversions and, after a period of tribulation, the advent of the Millennium. Jesus, Dispensationalists insist, will impose harmony between individual identities and the social order.

Taylor is undoubtedly correct in insisting that in the absence of an accepted cosmic order there is no firm foundation for moral choices.⁸⁰ But it does not follow that people will stop making moral choices or give up their commitments to identity. Throughout this book I have argued that continuous and unified identities are impossible under any circumstances and belief or disbelief in cosmic orders does not affect this reality. Toward the end of this chapter I explore alternative ways of thinking about and practicing self-identifications. In the paragraphs that follow I relate ethical behavior to identity in a very different way than Taylor.

Traditional European conceptions of order relied on enforcement of moral codes by family, church and state. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a general assault on these authorities and their self-serving claims that they were essential to maintain order.⁸¹ Philosophers conceived of morality as self-governance, which in turn provided the justification for people to assume control of their lives in a wide range of domains. Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, Bentham, Rousseau, Wolff and Kant are all major figures in this intellectual transformation. From Locke to Kant, many philosophers committed to this project nevertheless doubted that moral codes could effectively be enforced by reason-induced self-restraint. More and Voltaire considered belief a vengeful god necessary to maintaining order because those who would commit misdeeds had to expect judgment and punishment.⁸² Kant thought belief in god and a "world not now visible" absolutely essential if reason is to lead people to morality as its apprehension depends on receptivity to "objects of emulation and awe" as incentives and sources of resolve.⁸³ While writing this section of the chapter, Pope Benedict XVI was addressing 70,000 people a mile away in Hyde Park repeating his shopworn and empirically unjustifiable message that morality is impossible without religion and that atheism is responsible for the Nazis and other twentieth century horrors.

These fears are groundless. Public opinion polls reveal that the percentage of people who believe in god in the developed world, the US aside, is somewhere in the range of 30-35 percent.⁸⁴ It is lower in Scandinavia and Japan, places with relatively low crime rates and a high degree of voluntary compliance to social norms. By contrast, Eastern Europe and Latin America, with significantly higher religious beliefs and church attendance are demonstrably less law-abiding and more violent. There are many reasons for these differences and most political scientists would contend that they have little to do with religion. This is my point. Ethical behavior and political order are not dependent on widespread acceptance of cosmic orders and their transcendental moralities. Believers and non-believers alike routinely obey laws, practice honesty, behave considerately towards one another and not infrequently, display altruism.

When asked to justify their behavior, some religious people refer to the Ten Commandments or other religious principles or teachings. But many will simply assert, as most non-believers do, that they do what is right. Concern for divine sanction or logical grounds for ethical systems is a question that concerns a very narrow circle of intellectuals. Some of them err, and display arrogance, in thinking that the vast majority of people require or desire incontrovertible warrants for good behavior. The absence of such warrants does not even trouble most intellectuals who are aware of the problem. As Mozart and Da Ponte hope the principal characters of Così fan tutti will, they have long since learned to live comfortably with ungrounded ethics and difficult moral choices. They are prepared to accept many kinds of ethical compromises but also feel capable in most instances of distinguishing between right and wrong, even though they recognize they cannot possibility demonstrate the validity of their judgments. For many people, I suspect, ethical behavior helps them to construct and maintain identities. If so, the arrow of causation works in the opposite direction supposed by Strauss, MacIntyre and Taylor.

Even if they could be grounded or universally accepted, cosmic orders would not provide the kind of ethical guidance Strauss, MacIntyre and Taylor assume. Among people who believe in a deity – or any form of cosmic order -- there are, and always have been, enormous controversies about the proper application of religious principles to specific issues and problems. The ordination of female or homosexual ministers and same sex marriage offer contemporary examples, just as dancing, card playing and the education of women did in the past. Cosmic orders have lots of wiggle room and require interpretation the same way laws and constitutions do. Conflicting positions in these controversies are no more defensible in cosmic orders than they are in secular ones. In institutionalized cosmic orders, religious authorities attempt to adjudicate controversies, but in the West, a declining proportion of people are willing to accept their right to impose solutions by fiat. This points to a more general problem faced by religions or philosophical systems that root themselves in cosmic orders. Even in situations where there is a consensus about a moral position, it does not mean everyone will act accordingly. I have seen no empirical evidence in support of the proposition that religious people behave more ethically than their secular counterparts. The last century provides ample evidence of both kinds of people committing the worst kinds of atrocities.

In practice, modern roles and affiliations are multiple and often cross-cutting. These tensions put a premium on rules and conventions that provide guidance when facing role conflicts and they are routinely offered by the religious, economic, political and other authorities. In the modern world, these authorities are generally independent of one another and not infrequently at loggerheads. People in search of guidance often encounter competing sets of rules, which only intensifies their problems of choice and commitment. When rules are reinforcing and effective, they have the potential to become unduly constraining and make it difficult for people to act in ways they think consistent with their personalities, needs or goals.

This is the problem faced by all the aristocrats of Don Giovanni, its eponymous hero aside. Civil order and psychological well-being require rules -- but also frequent exceptions to them. Orders with loose, vague or ambiguous rules are invariably fortuitous as authorities of all kinds do their best to forestall such possibilities. For this reason, successful orders are never the result of purposeful design. It is all the more ironic that so many intellectuals have nevertheless aspired to overcome alienation and injustice through the rational construction of orders. And it is to these utopian projects that I now turn.