Moral relativism
(the prevailing doctrine in our culture today) argues that humans
have no moral point of reference, that nothing I think can be
more wrong or right than what you think. Such a worldview prompts
an important question: Is there a universal moral law, a set of
rights and wrongs that is permanent and absolute and has existed
in nearly every culture?
For many years
I have contemplated that question by comparing the contrasting
views of two of the last century’s most influential thinkers:
C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Their writings run in striking
parallels, yet lead us to completely different conclusions. Lewis
serves as one of today’s primary spokesmen for absolute truth
and religious faith. With Marx discredited, Freud remains the
spokesman for moral relativism and materialism.
God-given
Law
We all possess
an awareness of right and wrong, or what we “ought” to do. Are
these feelings an indication of a God-given moral law? Or do they
simply reflect what our parents taught us? Freud believes that
we simply make up our own moral codes, just as we make up traffic
laws, and that these codes can change randomly from culture to
culture. Lewis maintains that we discover moral truth, good and
evil, just as we discover the laws of mathematics, and that the
universal moral law transcends time and culture.
“There are
no sources of knowledge,” Freud wrote, “other than carefully scrutinized
observations— what we call research.” He declares that there is
“no knowledge derived from revelation.” The Ten Commandments of
the Old Testament and the two Great Commandments of the New (to
love God, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself) come, according
to Freud, from human experience, not from God. The scientific
method, he insists, is our only source of knowledge.
Lewis couldn’t
disagree more: The scientific method simply cannot answer all
questions, cannot possibly be the source of all knowledge. The
job of science—a very important and necessary job—is to experiment
and observe and report how things behave or react. “But why anything
comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind
the things science observes…this is not a scientific question.”
Lewis argues
that the question of whether or not an Intelligence exists beyond
the universe can never be answered by the scientific method. Attempts
to answer that question are based on philosophical or metaphysical
assumptions, not scientific principles. Similarly, we cannot expect
science to answer questions concerning the existence of a moral
law.
Lewis continues:
“We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what
it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that
makes it what it is.” He thinks that one way we could expect this
power to show itself would be “inside ourselves as an influence
or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And
that is just what we do find inside ourselves… something which
is directing the universe and which appears in me as a law urging
me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable
when I do wrong.”
Lewis cites
two sources of evidence for the existence of a Creator: “One is
the universe He has made…the other is that Moral Law which He
has put into our minds.” The moral law is better evidence because
“it is inside information…you find out more about God from the
Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out
more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking
at a house he has built.” Lewis is joined in this opinion by none
other than Immanuel Kant, who also pointed to the “moral law within”
as a powerful witness to the existence of God.
Freud disagrees
with both men. He thinks it “strange” that Kant would use the
moral law within men as evidence for God’s existence. From his
observations of severely depressed patients, Freud concluded that
feelings of conscience and guilt come and go. “It is a most remarkable
experience to see morality, which is supposed to have been given
us by God and thus deeply implanted in us, functioning as a periodic
phenomenon,” he scoffs.
Freud did
not sneer entirely at internal moralities. He allowed that conscience
often plays an important role in mental illness. “If a patient
of ours is suffering from a sense of guilt…we do not recommend
him to disregard his qualms of conscience and do not emphasize
his undoubted innocence; he himself has often tried to do so without
success. What we do is to remind him that such a strong and persistent
feeling must after all be based on something real, which it may
perhaps be possible to discover” (and, presumably, explain away).
Children’s
sense of right and wrong comes merely from what they have been
taught by their parents, believes Freud. “Their parents’ prohibitions
and demands persist within them as a moral conscience,” he writes.
Eventually, they introduce this whole system of rewards and punishments
“unaltered into their religion.” God and His Commandments are
thus simply a projection of parental authority.
Lewis concedes
that we learn the moral law, in part, from our parents and teachers,
and that this helps develop our conscience. But that does not
mean that the moral law is “a human invention.” Lewis explains
that parents and teachers did not make up the moral law any more
than they made up the multiplication tables they also teach us.
He points out that some of what children learn from their elders
“are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn
to keep to the left of the road, but it might just have been the
rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics,
are real truths.” Mores and customs change with time; the moral
law holds firm.
In his letters,
Freud endorsed “the excellent maxim of Theodore Visher: ‘What
is moral is self-evident.’ ” He insisted that “We ‘just see’ that
there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed
to my own…. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light.
It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles
that we say to a man, when we would recall him to right conduct,
‘be reasonable.’ ” Freud’s internal compass is of course “rationally
perceived,” not placed there by a Creator. Yet this statement
belies his argument against the existence of inherent moral codes.
Lewis’s empirical
evidence suggests that certain truths are written in the hearts
of men. Moral law, he points out, is essentially the same in all
cultures. The differences that exist “are not really that great.”
“Human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they
ought to behave in a certain way.” They ought not steal another
man’s money, or make love to another man’s wife. Lewis compared
the moral teachings of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus,
Chinese, Greeks, and Romans and found “how very like they are
to each other and to our own.” For instance, “Men have differed
as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it
was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone.
But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself
first. Selfishness has never been admired.”
Natural
Law
This moral
law has been referred to as the Tao, or Natural Law, or traditional
morality. Lewis says that throughout history people took for granted
that everyone knew the moral law by nature. He reminds us that
during the last world war we took for granted that the Nazis knew
what they did was wrong. They knew the moral law and they knew
they broke it. We tried them and found them guilty. “What was
the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong,” Lewis asks,
“unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as
well as we did and ought to have practiced?”
Lewis notes
that although basic moral law does not change over time or from
culture to culture, the sensitivity to the law, and how a culture
or an individual expresses the law, may vary. Under the Nazi regime
the German nation obviously ignored the law and practiced a morality
the rest of the world considered abominable.
Bad ideas,
Lewis warned, contribute to moral decay. Indeed, he believed that
“the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind” could be blamed
partly for modern culture’s loss of sensitivity to real wrongdoing.
Freud’s “doctrines of repressions and inhibitions” imply that
“the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing,” Lewis
writes. “We are told to ‘get things out in the open’…on the ground
that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed.”
Thus we tend to accept uncivil behavior—“cowardice, lying, envy,
unchastity”—more readily than many earlier cultures.
Freud believed
that education and establishing the “dictatorship of reason” would
be the only solution to the cruel and immoral behavior that characterizes
human history. “Our best hope for the future,” he proclaims, “is
that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of
time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man.” In a
letter to Albert Einstein, who had written to Freud asking what
could be done to protect mankind from war, Freud responds: “The
ideal condition of things would of course be a community of men
who had subordinated their instinctual life to the dictatorship
of reason.”
Yet Freud
observed the rise of the Nazis within Germany, one of the most
modern and educated nations in the world, and he knew about the
terror of the SS troops, one of the most educated fighting forces
in history. He also noticed that the increased knowledge of psychoanalysts
generally did not make them more moral than other professional
groups. “That psychoanalysis has not made the analysts themselves
better, nobler, or of stronger character remains a disappointment
for me,” Freud confessed. “Perhaps I was wrong to expect it.”
Environmental
Factors
C. S. Lewis
acknowledges that, because of background and training, certain
individuals have a more developed understanding of the moral law
than others. He recalls that “when I came first to the university
I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be.
Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was
my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice
I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music.” He noticed in
some of his classmates a greater awareness of the moral law and
a greater desire to follow it, and he gradually discovered these
same things in himself.
Freud likewise
acknowledges that people differ in the development of their conscience.
But he concludes that if God did provide the moral law within
us, He “has done an uneven and careless piece of work, for a large
majority of men have brought along with them only a modest amount
of it or scarcely enough to be worth mentioning.” In a letter
to his friend Pfister, Freud wrote that “ethics are remote from
me…I do not break my head very much about good and evil.” He said
that he did not consider most people worth much “no matter whether
they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none
at all.” Freud did not include himself in the “large majority”
of thinly moraled men, however. In a letter to Bostonian Dr. James
Jackson Putnam, he wrote “I consider myself to be a very moral
person.” Freud compared his own conduct not with a universal law,
but against the moral conduct of others, and he liked the comparison.
“In a sense of justice and consideration for others, in disliking
making others suffer or taking advantage of them, I can measure
myself with the best people I have known. I have never done anything
mean or malicious and cannot trace any temptation to do so,” Freud
writes. He insisted he obtained no satisfaction “in concluding
I am better than most other people.”
Freud points
out that although he supported freer sexuality, he himself did
not exercise that freedom; he adhered to the traditional biblical
sexual code. When he acted differently from the way he argued—for
instance by being monogamous while endorsing untraditional sex
lives for others—Freud apparently saw no contradiction between
what he professed and what he practiced.
When Freud
says “I consider myself to be a very moral person…I can measure
myself with the best people I have known…I am better than most
other people,” he falls into a category that Lewis describes in
his book The Screwtape Letters. In an address to young devils
in training, the very experienced demon Screwtape says it is easier
to lead a person to hell if he will compare himself to others.
A person who knows he is superior in a certain aspect never needs
to point that out to others. He simply accepts it. The claim of
one’s own goodness is made only by those who feel “the itching,
smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient
refuses to accept.”
“The ethical
demands on which religion seeks to lay stress,” Freud wrote, “need
to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human
society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious
faith.” Why dangerous? Because Freud believed that as people became
more knowledgeable they would eventually turn away from religious
faith. And if the masses no longer believe in God, what will motivate
them to live moral lives? “If the sole reason why you must not
kill your neighbor is because God has forbidden it and will severely
punish you for it in this or the next life—then, when you learn
that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment,
you will certainly kill your neighbor without hesitation, and
you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force.”
Enlightened
Self-Interest
Freud proposed
an argument for enlightened self-interest as a basis for social
order. “Civilization has little to fear from educated people,”
he asserted—because reason tells them it is in their best interest
to be ethical. (He wrote this in 1927, not long before the Nazi
rise in educated Germany.) He warned that “it is another matter
with the great mass of uneducated.” Rank and file citizens need
to be given basic moral marching orders. Freud believed that if
the masses were told not to kill “in the interest of their communal
existence,” they would not. This, however, appears to contradict
his strong conviction that passion governs the masses more than
reason.
In any case,
“it would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out
altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of the regulations
and precepts of civilization,” Freud asserted. “Along with their
pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their
rigidity and unchangeableness as well.” As people became more
educated, they would understand that these rules were made “to
serve their interests…and they would adopt a more friendly attitude
toward them.”
C. S. Lewis,
however, believed that ignoring the moral law makes it hard for
people to see beyond their own selfish interests. After he rejected
atheism, Lewis wrote in a letter to a friend, “Who will take medicine
unless he knows he is in the grip of disease? Moral relativity
is the enemy we have to overcome.”
Without a
law and Lawmaker to whom we are accountable, there is little awareness
of how short we fall, and little need for forgiveness and redemption.
We end up merely comparing ourselves with others, especially those
who fail more than we do. This leads to low moral standards,
and spiritual conceit.
If, instead
of comparing himself to others, Freud had measured himself against
the great commandments of the Old and New Testaments, he might
not have been so complacent. He openly spoke of “loving one’s
neighbors as oneself” as foolish and “impossible.”
Lewis argued
that “when a man is getting better he understands more and more
clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting
worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately
bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks
he is all right.” The more we struggle with our bad impulses,
Lewis writes, the better we know them. “Even attempted virtue
brings light; indulgence brings fog.”
When Freud
examined his own behavior he acknowledged some force within him
that motivated him to act morally—“an impulsion to do good.” But
he could not fathom the source of his concept of right and wrong.
As his official biographer and colleague Ernest Jones wrote, “Freud
himself was constantly puzzled [that] a moral attitude was so
deeply implanted as to seem part of his original nature.”
In a letter
to Dr. Putnam, Freud admitted: “When I ask myself why I have always
behaved honorably, ready to spare others and to be kind wherever
possible, and why I did not give up doing so when I observed that
in that way one harms oneself and becomes an anvil, because other
people are brutal and untrustworthy, then, it is true, I have
no answer. Sensible it certainly was not.” We can be glad Freud
could not bring himself to be rude, uncaring, or unfaithful. And
perhaps his recognition of an “impulsion” within himself to be
moral may be a clear indication that, at some level, Freud agreed
with Lewis, and with St. Paul, who insisted that “the law is written
on their hearts.”
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