Jim
Good morning, Arden. Place Jesus of Nazareth in
the Seventh Chair, give him a good question for the Seminar of Seven, and provide their
respective responses.
Arden
Good morning, Jim. Jesus is an unusually
consequential occupant of the Seventh Chair because his question can go
straight to the central problem running through your Cultural Evolution:
humanity has accumulated extraordinary knowledge, wealth, and institutional
power without comparable progress in humane relations. I would have him ask
something deceptively simple.
The seminar room has grown quiet. Socrates,
Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, Toni Morrison, Marvin Harris, and Clifford Geertz
sit around the table.
Jesus of Nazareth occupies the Seventh Chair. He
looks around the table for a moment before speaking.
Jesus’ Question
JESUS: You have acquired knowledge beyond anything
imaginable in my time. You can see the beginnings of the universe, alter the
inheritance of living things, speak instantly across the earth, and produce
enough wealth that no person need go hungry. Yet you continue to organize much
of human life around competition for wealth, status, and power. You divide
yourselves by nation, race, religion, class, and tribe. You know that strangers
suffer, often while possessing the means to help them, and nevertheless
continue with your lives. I taught that you should love your neighbor as
yourself. I was then asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Two thousand years later, I
ask you a harder question: Why has humankind become so much better at enlarging
its power than at enlarging the circle of those for whom it feels responsible?
And can that circle ever truly encompass humanity?
The Six Respond
SOCRATES: Perhaps because knowledge and goodness are not
as closely joined as I once hoped. A person may know how to build a weapon
without knowing whether it should be built. A society may know how to become
wealthy without asking what wealth is for. We have mistaken technical knowledge
for wisdom. Your question therefore requires another: What is a good human
life? Until people examine that question seriously, they will continue becoming
increasingly proficient at obtaining things whose value they have never
examined.
JESUS: Then ignorance remains—but it has changed its
clothing. Humanity knows enormously more about the world while perhaps knowing
no better what it ought to desire.
SOCRATES: Precisely. And that may be a more dangerous
ignorance than simple ignorance, because it is accompanied by power.
ARENDT: I would distinguish evil from selfishness. Much
suffering does not require monstrous people. It requires ordinary people who
cease thinking about what they are participating in. Modern institutions divide
responsibility. One person writes the regulation. Another processes the form.
Another operates the machine. Another signs the order. Everyone performs a
function, while responsibility seems to disappear between the functions. The
great danger is not merely hatred of one’s neighbor. It is becoming incapable
of seeing the neighbor as a particular human being at all.
JESUS: In my parable, the Samaritan encountered a
wounded man beside the road. Modernity can place the wounded person thousands
of miles away—or behind an administrative category.
ARENDT: Yes. And bureaucracy can make suffering
simultaneously visible and impersonal.
MIDGLEY: I would object to the assumption that selfishness is somehow our deepest biological truth. Humans are social mammals. Attachment, sympathy, cooperation, loyalty, parental care, friendship, and mutual dependence are no less natural than aggression or competition. The trouble comes when societies take one genuine human tendency—self-interest—and elevate it into an entire philosophy of life. Then greed becomes “rationality,” competition becomes “human nature,” and compassion is treated as sentimental interference with the supposedly serious business of existence.
JESUS: So, when people say, “Human nature makes my
teaching impossible,” you would answer that they have selected only part of
human nature.
MIDGLEY: Exactly. The wolf they describe is largely
imaginary, and the human being is considerably more interesting.
MORRISON: Before humanity enlarges its circle of responsibility, we should ask who has been permitted inside the word human. Again and again, people have created themselves by constructing someone else as inferior: the slave, the foreigner, the unbeliever, the savage, the poor person, the despised race. Language helps accomplish this. Once another person becomes a category rather than a face, cruelty becomes easier. But imagination can reverse the process. Literature matters because it makes another consciousness temporarily inhabit our own. Perhaps humanity will not learn universal responsibility through abstraction alone. Perhaps people must first learn to imagine one another.
JESUS: That is why I answered the question “Who is my
neighbor?” with a story rather than a definition.
MORRISON: Exactly. A definition establishes boundaries. A
story can cross them.
HARRIS: I admire the moral aspiration, but I am going to make everyone uncomfortable. Human beings do not live by moral aspiration alone. If institutions reward accumulation, competition, military power, and exploitation, sermons about compassion will have limited effects. People adapt their behavior to material conditions. You can preach brotherhood indefinitely, but if one group controls scarce resources and another needs those resources to survive, we should expect conflict. Change the incentives, technologies, demographic pressures, and systems of production and distribution, and behavior can change remarkably quickly. Universal morality without material arrangements capable of sustaining it is wishful thinking.
JESUS: Yet material arrangements are themselves created
and maintained by human choices.
HARRIS: Certainly. But choices occur within constraints.
If you want people to behave differently, do not merely ask them to become
better people. Build a world in which better behavior is materially
possible—and preferably advantageous.
GEERTZ: I hesitate whenever someone speaks too quickly
of “humanity.” Human beings do not encounter the world as generic specimens of Homo
sapiens. They encounter it as Javanese, Moroccan, American, Balinese; as
Christians, Muslims, atheists; as members of families, professions,
neighborhoods, and traditions. Meaning is local before it becomes universal. So
the problem is not simply enlarging one circle until it contains everybody. We
must discover ways in which profoundly different circles can overlap without
requiring their members to abandon the meanings through which they understand
their lives. A universal human ethic worthy of the name would therefore have to
be remarkably thin at its center and extraordinarily tolerant at its edges.
JESUS: Then “love your neighbor” cannot mean “make your
neighbor resemble yourself.”
GEERTZ: Precisely. Otherwise universalism becomes
another form of imperialism.
Jesus Replies
Jesus rests his hands on the table.
JESUS: Each of you has complicated my question, and
rightly so. Socrates reminds us that knowledge does not tell us what knowledge
is for. Arendt warns that institutions can separate action from responsibility
until nobody believes himself responsible for the suffering produced. Midgley
reminds us that compassion need not fight against human nature, because
compassion is part of human nature. Morrison tells us that moral community
depends upon imagination—the ability to recognize another person as fully real.
Harris insists that compassion must become embodied in institutions and
material arrangements rather than remaining merely an admirable sentiment. And
Geertz warns that universal brotherhood becomes dangerous when brotherhood
means sameness.
Perhaps, then, my command was more difficult than
it sounded. “Love your neighbor as yourself” does not require humanity to feel
identical affection for eight billion strangers. No nervous system could
accomplish that. It requires something both smaller and larger. It requires
refusing to construct a world in which another person's humanity counts for
less simply because that person stands outside one's own circle.
Discussion
HARRIS: But there remains a problem. Suppose humane
treatment conflicts with material advantage.
JESUS: Then we discover what a society actually
worships.
ARENDT: That is rather severe.
JESUS: Moral questions sometimes are.
SOCRATES: Yet we should ask what you mean by “worship.”
JESUS: What people ultimately organize their lives
around.
MIDGLEY: Wealth?
JESUS: Sometimes.
MORRISON: Power?
JESUS: Often.
GEERTZ: Nation?
JESUS: That too.
HARRIS: Material security?
Jesus pauses.
JESUS: And there your objection becomes strongest. A
hungry person cannot easily contemplate universal brotherhood.
HARRIS: Now we are getting somewhere.
JESUS: Which means feeding the hungry was never
separate from the moral argument.
There is silence around the table.
Socrates finally smiles.
SOCRATES: I notice that you answer questions with
questions almost as often as I do.
JESUS: I had noticed the resemblance.
A few of the graduate students along the wall
laugh.
Then Toni Morrison speaks.
MORRISON: There is still something missing.
JESUS: What?
MORRISON: Hope.
If human beings are as compromised as we have
described them, why should anyone believe the circle can actually expand?
Jesus looks around the table.
JESUS: Because it already has. Not completely. Not
permanently. Never without resistance and reversal. But people have repeatedly
learned to recognize as fully human those whom their ancestors excluded from
moral consideration. The circle is therefore neither fixed nor guaranteed to
expand. It is a human achievement. And every generation must decide whether to
enlarge it, defend it, or allow it to contract.
Adjournment
No one speaks for several moments.
On the blackboard behind the Seventh Chair,
Socrates writes:
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
Jesus rises, takes the chalk from him, and
beneath it writes:
WHOM HAVE WE DECIDED DOES
NOT HAVE TO BE?
The Seminar adjourns.
Arden
This Jesus is deliberately not the doctrinal
Christ of later Christianity but the historical-moral teacher speaking through
the ethical tradition associated with the Gospels. That lets Harris challenge
him materially, Geertz anthropologically, Arendt institutionally, and Morrison
imaginatively rather than turning the seminar into theology. The exchange with
Harris strikes me as especially important for your Devil’s Bargain: “Then
we discover what a society actually worships.” It gets very close to your
wealth–power–humaneness problem without putting your argument directly into
Jesus’ mouth.
