The implications of innocence: Rousseau and the spiritual hosts of wickedness

Jordan Peterson made a helpful contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the exchange of ideas, when he observed that, in the case of certain dogmatic progressives, it was not so much a case of people having ideas on certain subjects, but more that the ideas seem to have the people.

In fact, he went further and used the language of deliverance. He talked more specifically of people being possessed by certain ideas. Elon Musk offered a variation on the same theme, by describing certain ideas as analogous to a virus. In particular, he talked about people being infected by a “woke-mind” virus.

Both these approaches differ from what have been the normative assumptions about ideas in a culture that stretches back to the Enlightenment. But they do raise the question of whether people have ideas or ideas have people?

Why might this matter? It matters in the process of trying to exchange ideas with people. Do we live in a society where ideas are held freely, and can be compared, evaluated, modified and exchanged; or in an environment where people are held captive by ideas, and the ideas change and modify the people rather than the other way round?

Such an “epistemology of the idea” is at her heart of the way in which we communicate with each other.

One idea in particular seems to dominate the perspective of the progressives. It appears time and time again on social media. It is the insistence that human beings are born without sin or flaws, and consequently there are no barriers or limits to their improvement or perfectibility.

The Christian idea of original sin is deeply unpopular with some, and the cause of serious and intense antipathy. The vitriolic reaction against it, without any compelling evidence or analysis, is as unconvincing as it is odd.

The way in which the refutation of original sin has been platformed and pursued in our recent history raises as many questions as it answers.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is credited with providing the most articulate refutation of the original sin concept. He replaced it with a philosophy of humanity that was closer to the blank-slate model: human beings were born innocent and free from defect.

For some, Rousseau secularises the Judeo-Christian account of humankind’s loss of innocence. He portrays man at the dawn of time – the being he calls l’homme sauvage, or natural man – as self-sufficient and self-unaware.

Over the long passage of time, however, we were drawn away from our splendid but stupid isolation and towards the company of others. Perhaps while dancing or singing, Rousseau suggests, “each began to look at others and to want to be looked at himself”. The consequences were fatal.

“For one’s advantage, it was necessary to appear to be different from what in fact one was,” Rousseau said. “To be and appear to be became two entirely different things, and from this distinction came ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.”

Rousseau’s modern man, in the wonderful phrase of Allan Bloom, the American philosopher, classicist and academician, and author of the bestselling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, “is the person who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others”.

This is not the place to link Rousseau with the different dystopias his ideas have given birth to, or with the template for totalitarianism. But what catches the imagination is the way this bombshell of an idea came upon him. It was not so much like an idea, but more like a visiting spirit.

He was on his way to visit his friend Denis Diderot who was imprisoned in Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. What seems to have happened to Rousseau was more like a religious experience than an intellectual journey. In a manner similar – albeit in a darker way – to St Paul on the road to Damascus, where heaven broke in through the form of an encounter with Jesus, with Rousseau a visitation that ushered in a particular aspect of ant-Christian revelation suddenly grasped his imagination and never let go of him.

What actually happened? To pass the time as he walked on his visit to Diderot, Rousseau had brought with him a copy of a literary journal, Mercure de France. Reading as he walked, his eyes fell on a notice from the Academy of Dijon, inviting essays on the question of whether progress in the arts and sciences purified or corrupted our morals. It was an odd question to pose, particularly for Rousseau’s contemporaries, who, basking in the glow of the Enlightenment, heralded progress as an unadulterated good.

Either way, the announcement struck Rousseau with revelatory force. Dropping to the ground under one of the trees lining the road, he burst into tears. He was suddenly and irrationally overwhelmed by a “crowd of great truths”. These “truths” revealed to him were the abuses of religious and secular institutions, but also contradictions in the cures prescribed by enlightened thinkers.

How clearly, he later recalled, he saw “that man is naturally good and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked”. At that moment, he later wrote in his Confessions, “I saw another universe and became another man.”

Given the power and force of this revelation, and the damage it has caused to the Christian cause and interpretation of the human journey, was this just an intellectual insight, or was it something similar but importantly different? Was this one of those ideas generated by Rousseau himself, or one of those kinds of “memes”, as posited by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to explain the spread of cultural ideas and behaviours, that possessed Rousseau, rather than his possessing it?

If this was a pneumatic or spiritual phenomenon, more than just an idea, it would explain something of the subsequent grip it has had on people, as well as the damage it has caused not only the Church, but the freedoms of different cultures, in the name of a spurious innocence which carries the illusion of perfectibility.

St Paul was capable of distinguishing between ideas and spirits. And in one of his most famous passages on the nature of our struggle, he distinguishes between “flesh and blood” of the biological world and the pneumatic world of Gnostic striving and philosophy.

“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6.12).

In Rousseau’s claim to human innocence and potential perfectibility we may be encountering a spiritual perversity more than an intellectual one.

Hence it may be that the antidote to Rousseau is as much to be found in prayer and penance – the world of the soul and spirit – as it is in argument, intellectual force of arms and politics; an important and fitting reminder in the midst of this Lenten season.

Photo: A bust of Genevan born and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the newly restored Chateau de Voltaire in Ferney-Voltaire, France, 30 May 2018. At the time, the French President led celebrations for the reopening of the newly restored Chateau de Voltaire and the 240th anniversary of the death of the French philosopher and writer who had once lived there. (Photo credit FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images.)

The post The implications of innocence: Rousseau and the spiritual hosts of wickedness first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post The implications of innocence: Rousseau and the spiritual hosts of wickedness appeared first on Catholic Herald.