According to Buddhism the three roots of evil are lobha greed, dosa ill-will, and moha delusion. Traditionally these are personal problems, but today they must be understood more structurally, as institutionalized.
Our economic system promotes and even requires greed in at least two ways: desire for continuous profit is necessary to fuel the engine of economic growth, and consumers must be insatiable in order to maintain markets for what can be produced. Although justified as raising standards of living worldwide, economic globalization is actually leading to increasing unemployment and environmental degradation. The U.N. Development Report for 1997 pointed out that 1.3 billion people now live on less than one dollar a day, and estimated that there are 93 countries which have a per capita income below what they had a few decades ago. Long after the end of the cold war, the U.S. federal government continues to devote about half its resources to maintaining an enormously expensive war machine. Most other countries also continue to spend much more on arms than social services. There is no sign that the military-industrial complex, or the lucrative international market in arms sales, will be diverted into plowshares anytime in the foreseeable future.
The media that might inform us about these problems distract us with "infotainment" and sports spectacles to promote their real function, advertising. Universities traditionally encourage the critical thinking necessary to reflect on these developments, but in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in history we are told that budget cutbacks are necessary because there is less money available for education. Increasingly, the need to become more market-oriented is diverting academia into corporate research and advanced job training for those eager to join what I will argue is a morally questionable world order.
In short, our global economy is institutionalized greed; our military-industrial complex is institutionalized aggression; our media and even our universities promote institutionalized ignorance of what is actually happening. Unlike the original Buddhist roots of evil, these institutional roots of evil are rationalized as operating according to a logic (e.g., "laws of the market") that is inevitable because it is "natural". From my Buddhist perspective, however, they are better understood as the results of particular historical forces which can and should be challenged. This paper is an attempt to understand how those forces encouraged the development of such problematical institutions, which today control the earth and all its "resources" (including us): nation-states have divided up the earth's surface and waters and airspace as well as its peoples; corporations, increasingly transnational, exploit the resources of these areas for their own purposes; these claims are policed by war machines which have the power to unleash irresistible violence against those who challenge this world order; and these three are serviced by scientific and technological establishments that exist primarily to meet their insatiable pursuit of ever greater power and wealth... How did all this come to be?
One important factor in developing of these institutions, I want to suggest, is a spiritual one: a basic religious drive that we all have, although often functioning in a repressed and misunderstood way. I shall argue that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we can see this distorted urge helping to mold these new institutions.
Let me create the context for what follows by explaining that spiritual drive from a Buddhist perspective. How shall we understand anatta "nonself", that strange Buddhist teaching which denies the self we take for granted in our everyday lives? It is not enough to repeat and comment on the original Buddhist categories used to explain it -- skandhas, nidanas, etc. -- because in many ways our situation is quite different from Sakyamuni Buddha's. Today we must relate the anatta doctrine to what we know (or think we know) about the self and the way that self relates to its world. Since we cannot avoid bringing our own categories and presuppositions to our encounter with Buddhism, the issue boils down to whether we do so unconsciously or consciously.
Elsewhere I have argued that we can use the psychoanalytic understanding of repression to help us understand anatta, and vice-versa. Then anatta implies that our primary repression is not sexual wishes (as Freud thought), nor even death fears (as many existential psychologists think) but awareness of nonself -- the intuition that "I am not real" -- which we become conscious of (the "return of the repressed") as a sense of lack infecting our empty (sunya) core. Buddhism analyzes the sense-of-self into sets of impersonal psycho-physical phenomena, whose interaction creates the illusion of self-consciousness -- i.e., that consciousness is the attribute of a self. The death-repression emphasized by existential psychology transforms the Oedipal complex into what Norman Brown calls an Oedipal project: the attempt to become father of oneself, i.e., one's own origin. The child wants to conquer death by becoming the creator and sustainer of his/her own life. Buddhism merely shifts the emphasis: the Oedipal project is the attempt of the developing sense-of-self to attain autonomy, the quest to deny one's groundlessness by becoming one's own ground.
Then the Oedipal project derives from our intuition that self-consciousness is not something "self-existing" (svabhava) but a mental construct. Consciousness is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths that it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them. The problem arises when this conditioned consciousness wants to ground itself -- i.e., to make itself real. If the sense-of-self is an always-insecure construct, its efforts to real-ize itself will be attempts to objectify itself in some fashion. The ego-self is this never-ending project to objectify oneself, something consciousness can no more achieve than a hand can grasp itself or an eye can see itself.
The consequence of this perpetual failure is that the sense-of-self has, as its inescapable shadow, a sense-of-lack, which it always tries to escape. The return of the repressed in the distorted form of a symptom shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless project with the symbolic ways we try to make ourselves real in the world. We experience this deep sense of lack as the persistent feeling that "there is something wrong with me," but that feeling manifests, and we respond to it, in many different ways.
The problem with our objectifications is that no object can ever satisfy if it's not really an object we want. When we do not understand what is actually motivating us -- because what we think we want is only a symptom of something else (our desire to become real, which is essentially a spiritual yearning) - we end up compulsive. According to Nietzsche, a Christian who follows the Biblical admonition and plucks out his own eye does not kill his sensuality, for "it lives on in an uncanny vampire form and torments him in repulsive disguises." But the opposite is also true: if today we think we have killed or escaped our spiritual drive we are deceiving ourselves, for that drive lives on in uncanny secular forms which obsess us because we do not understand what motivates them.
According to Buddhism, any truly satisfactory resolution of this situation must address the root problem, my lack of self. This can lead to an awakening that transforms my lack from such a festering anxiety into an "empty" (sunya) source of creativity. The self's sense of separation from the world motivates me to try to secure myself within it, but the only authentic solution is the essentially religious realization that I am not other than it.
Is there also such a thing as collective lack? That is, does our lack have social and historical implications? Do its uncanny disguises include modern institutions, in which our alienated and objectified lack returns to haunt us unrecognized? An earlier paper has looked at what happened in the late middle ages, when the Christian myth began to lose its potency and what might be called "individualistic secular religions" began to flourish: especially our preoccupations with money, fame, and romance. They are individualistic insofar as they attempt a more personal solution to our lack, and secular insofar as they seek a salvation in the affairs of this world, but nonetheless religious insofar as they are still motivated by the spiritual desire to ground oneself and become real. Although these tendencies are not limited to any particular time or place, they became especially attractive when the Christian solution to lack began to decline. Today we take such preoccupations for granted, but our obsession with them originated in that period: our myth of romantic love as salvific began with the troubadours and the tale of Tristan and Isolde; Burckhardt pointed out that our burning desire for fame was unknown until the Renaissance; and there was no place in medieval theory for economic activity insubordinate to moral ends.
Romantic love tries to fill in one's lack with the beloved; pursuing fame and money attempt to real-ize oneself through symbols. As long as a truly catholic church provided a socially-agreed means to cope with lack, such individualistic projects were not necessary. If we do not presuppose the usual distinction between secular and sacred (cf. Mahayana Buddhism's denial of any difference in the scopes of samsara and nirvana), we can see the same drive operating in each case: a largely unconscious urge to resolve our sense of unreality by becoming real. Unfortunately, these projects also tend to become demonic because our inability to overcome our sense of lack through them is usually experienced as "I do not yet have enough ... (provide: fame, money, romantic love, etc.)".
This paper offers another chapter in the social history of lack, supplementing the above account of our individualistic idolatries with a lack history of our institutional idolatries. "Men are literally hypnotized by life and by those who represent life to them," Ernest Becker has argued; replace "life" with "being" and we begin to realize how our sense of lack is also a source of social domination. All power is sacred power, Becker adds, "because it begins in the hunger for immortality, and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power." Again, substituting "being" for "immortality" hints at the spiritual roots of our modern world. In particular, the supposed secularity of the nation-state, corporate capitalism and mechanistic science may be problematized by summarizing what is known about their origins. From a Buddhist lack perspective, we will see that there was something compulsive and delusive about their development because it was motivated by a profound social anxiety -- a collective sense of lack -- which became "liberated" in the sixteenth century and then channeled into these directions.
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
--John Donne, An Anatomy of the World (1611)
At the beginning of the Renaissance Europeans still understood the world and all its creatures according to an organic paradigm: everything, including human society, has its ordained place within a hierarchical cosmos created and maintained by God. Feudal society was unified, at least theoretically, in a Holy Roman Empire which, as the joke has it, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. But the messy reality matters less to us than the political ideal which provided a stability based on the authority of antiquity: a supposed continuation of the Roman empire, which offered a groundedness in the past that was as much a feature of the organic paradigm as its opposite, groundlessness (or rather, attempted self-grounding) became an essential feature of the modern world. Medieval groundedness was self-consciously religious in that civil authorities acknowledged the moral authority of the Church founded by Peter authorized by Christ.
A similar continuity existed for knowledge both sacred and secular: the spiritual and technological superiority of the ancients was taken for granted. Even in the sixteenth century doctors trained at Padua, the foremost medical school in Europe, swore an oath to defend the authority of Aristotle. Later Francis Bacon still felt a need to rail against the myth that the ancients' arts and sciences existed in their purest form at the beginning of time; he argued instead that antiquity was the youth of the human race and had no special claim on the respect of later times. The medieval attitude, however, has been the more common throughout world history, as in the four kalpas of Indian myth (which slowly deteriorate from an ancient golden age) and the East Asian belief in mappo (the decline of the Buddhist dharma since Sakyamuni). If such myths are unbelievable today, our modern myth of progress would have been no more believable to medieval society; and since the medieval criterion of improvement was primarily a moral one, perhaps the evidence is no better for ours.
The Church's understanding of sin and how to cope with it made the organic paradigm a self-contained system which, despite wretched poverty and widespread suffering, "worked" in the sense that our human sense of lack was explicitly acknowledged and addressed: all of us inherit the "original sin" of Adam, which can however be atoned for. Our lack was thus contained because its origins and solution were built into the structure of the Christian universe, which had an inescapable moral dimension. This Christian understanding of lack is quite different from a Buddhist one, but the important point is that each channels the effects of lack both individually and socially. To anticipate what follows: a mechanistic paradigm -- the universe as a machine functioning according to objective and morally-neutral laws -- implies very different ways of coping with our lack.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this paradigm collapsed. From a lack perspective, it was like opening Pandora's box. An enormous amount of anxiety became liberated, because the worldview and institutions which maintained it were overthrown. "In religion, politics, economics, and society, cherished authorities by the score were under attack, and centuries-old values no longer commanded unquestioned adherence... The sense that all solid landmarks had disappeared pervades the writing of the age -- either because men were toppling the landmarks or because they were seeking them in vain." The rug was pulled out from beneath religion (the reformation), government (widespread insurrections and revolution), war (gunpowder made warfare more aggressive), the economy (the discovery of new lands and new forms of business organization), science (the collapse of Aristotelianism), and last but not least nature itself (an exceptional number of natural disasters, especially in the seventeenth century: bad weather, poor harvests, soil exhaustion, famines and plagues, leading to riots, banditry, etc.). It is not surprising, then, that historians have consistently identified a widespread fear of chaos as the main feature of that era. It preoccupied all the forms of discourse that have survived. The old order was dying, and no one knew what new order, if any, would replace it.
The main point of this paper is that if we look at this collapse and the reconstruction that followed from a Buddhist lack perspective, we can gain a new insight into what happened. The usual explanation is a triumphalist narrative about the decline of an otherworldly religious worldview, which had constrained social and economic development, replaced by the rise of a more dynamic secular society and free market economy. But if lack is fundamentally a religious problem, because susceptible only to a religious solution, the usual dualism between an earlier otherworldly society and a later this-worldly one does not fit anymore. If (to reformulate the Mahayana claim) the bounds of a secular society are not different from the bounds of a religious one, we should look for the conscious or unconscious religious motivations affecting the rise of modern institutions and perhaps still built into them. People in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needed to create new structures, intellectual and institutional, in order to cope with the disorder that threatened them on all sides -- in my terms, with the lack-anxiety now liberated by the collapse of the organic understanding of sin and salvation... What insight does this yield into the birth of our modern world?
A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing . . .
--Lutheran hymn
The Protestant Reformation is a natural way to begin this story because the schism in Western Christendom between 1517 (when Luther posted his ninety-five theses) and 1564 (when Calvin died) was so instrumental in breaking down the organic paradigm. This is not the place to discuss the causes of that schism, but it is significant that the two preceding centuries witnessed an increasing preoccupation with death, suggesting that the Christian worldview -- which offered a solution to death (and to lack) -- was already losing its grip on people's minds. During this period, writes Philippe Aries, the earlier acceptance of death was replaced by more violent representations of it, including a new fascination with bodily decomposition. He quotes Huizinga: "No other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death." The physical fact of death replaced the images of final judgment; death was no longer a transition to eternal life but an end in itself. "Those who were formerly Christians discovered their own mortality. They banished themselves from heaven because they no longer had the strength to believe in it in a coherent manner." This would have brought the problem of our lack back into the center of human preoccupation.
As long as there was only one Church there was no church. Religious institutions and ideals were not distinguished from secular ones in the ways we now take for granted. Since the same worldview was more or less maintained by everyone (except Jews and heretics, which is why they were so threatening), salvation through the Church's institutions and mediation "worked" because it was believed to work. When that Church acrimoniously split and God helped neither side to destroy the impiety of the other, the long-term effect of this contest between lack-solutions was to discredit that type of solution to lack-anxiety.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) had been a model Augustinian monk, but his efforts within the Catholic framework of prayer, penance, charity, etc., brought no relief from his deep sense of sinfulness -- i.e., did not allay his sense of lack -- and the success of his alternative suggests that many others felt the same way. His solution postulated a vast gap between weak, corrupt humanity and the righteousness of God. Left to itself, human nature is all falsehood and impurity, a condition hopeless without the intercession of God himself, the source of all goodness and truth. Since humans by themselves can do virtually nothing, the solution is through faith alone in his mercy. It is a free acquittal of the guilty which has nothing to do with sacraments or any other mediation by church or clergy; one can rely only on the Bible, the sole infallible source of religious truth. This was an attempt to return to the original Christianity of Biblical times as Luther understood it.
Two implications of this reformation turned out to be crucial. Projecting all goodness onto a Deity who is elevated so far above our world initiated a dangerous tendency that would empty this fallen world of its spiritual and moral dimensions. The irrelevance for our salvation of any institutional mediation or even personal good works closed the world off from being the place where our spiritual activities could assuage our lack. Luther's emphasis on justification by faith alone offered a new interpretation of lack which precariously balanced pessimism about human nature with optimism about God -- but eliminated the intricate web of mediation that constituted, in effect, the sacral dimension of this world. "[T]o project the experience of the sacred onto an immaterial God is to shortchange sacredness as a dimension of material life and turn it into an object of worship that is beyond our world and thus alien to life. Sacrality hypostatized (or reified) can easily be sacrality lost." And so it would be.
The medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural had meant that true reality manifested sacramentally in the spiritual potentialities of this temporal world, potentialities which could be developed. The new broom of the Reformers swept this away -- not out the door but, as we shall see, under the carpet. What transformed the religiously-saturated medieval world into the secular one we experience today was less the disappearance of God than the disappearance of this continuity between sacred and temporal.
Lack of mediation threw each Christian back upon his or her own lack. Luther could challenge the Church because he believed God wanted him to do so. This sanctified the principle of a direct and private relationship with God, which, in combination with the authority of Scripture, encouraged a proliferation of fissiparous interpretations and, over time, an individualism that required working out one's own solution to one's own lack.
The doctrine of predestination taught by John Calvin (1509-1564) further developed both implications. Due to original sin humanity has lost its free will except to do evil. Without free will all our efforts to resolve our lack are useless. Only divine grace can restore the freedom to do good, but grace is bestowed only upon the elect, that small portion of the human race God has chosen for salvation. His salvation is a free act of his mercy, without any regard for human merit. Why does God condemn all others to eternal damnation? "For no other reason than that He wills to exclude them." Calvin himself admitted that this is a "horrible" doctrine, but God's omniscience and omnipotence allowed no other conclusion.
What effect did this have on the way Calvinists experienced their lack? All conventional religious activities were thrown out the window; there is absolutely nothing you can do that will qualify you for heaven, because it's all decided before you are born. Yet this powerlessness over our final destiny is not something we humans can live with. Predestination aggravates the anguish of our condition, our lack, unbearably. So a way out of this impasse must be discovered, and it was -- or rather, several ways were constructed. If all religious expedients are discredited, secular expedients need to be devised: expedients which (insofar as motivated by the need to resolve our sense of lack) were infused with a spiritually-driven dynamism, although (insofar as that motivation is unconscious) a dynamism that tended to take on a life of its own.
The Nation exists before all things and is the origin of all. Its will is always legal, it is the law unto itself.
-- Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, "What is the Third Estate?" (1789)"Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia...
-- Tom Nairn (1977)
In the last few centuries the most successful god -- the god that people have been the most willing to die for -- has been one's own country. By far the most popular religion today is nationalism, argued Toynbee, since the religion of the masses is but the "worship of the deified community concealed under the fine name of patriotism." Historians have noticed the curious fact that until the 1630's and 1640's the outcome of the religious struggles remained in doubt "and no government could ignore the force of the passions they aroused. Thereafter, however, religion ceased to be a violent issue." The sudden change makes sense when we realize that a new religion crystallized during that chaotic period. As this suggests, the nation-state has been one of the main beneficiaries of the Protestant Reformation. Its development was the political consequence of that schism, but it should be understood as a theological consequence as well. We cannot understand the state until we realize that it also serves as a religious institution for us.
The struggle between the Church and its reformers increased the leverage of civil rulers and the balance of power between church (moral authority) and state (secular authority) swung decisively to the latter. In the sixteenth century most kings were still basically feudal landlords; by 1650 they had become the supreme embodiments of a rapidly absolutizing state which in effect used them to centralize all civil authority and then discarded them.
The development of the nation-state was thus a two-stage process. Initially, the subordination of Christianity enabled some rulers to appropriate the Church's mantle of religious charisma. They became absolute (literally, "unconditioned") rulers because they filled the vacuum of spiritual authority by becoming "secular gods" accountable only to God -- who was now conveniently far away, high up in his heaven. The long-term consequence was to centralize all political power in their persons. The eventual disappearance of such absolute rulers did not work to decentralize that absolute power; on the contrary, it in turn freed state institutions from any external authority. Since the state was now believed to represent and embody the people, the nation-state in effect became politically self-grounding and morally responsible to nothing outside itself.
In lack-terminology: since the Christian schism problematized that solution to our sense of lack and strengthened feudal overlords, an alternative was increased allegiance to those rulers, whose new aura of spiritual and moral authority radiated the promise of a more worldly solution to lack. Without an absolute sovereign the bureaucratic state could not have developed, for its institutions were the way he or she exercised power. But the sovereign's authority was a direct consequence of his new religious charisma -- i.e., of the fact that his subjects came to view him as a person in whose majestic being they could collectively ground their own lack of being. "The kings and emperors who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere megalomania, but out of a need for a unification of experience, a simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure sense of power." Here Becker refers to the early kings of Babylon and Egypt, but his point is just as valid for the sun kings that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, whose majesty also offered a secure sense of power in a world falling apart.
The impersonal state evolved in order to mediate this relationship, with the gradual effect of distancing the sovereign so far from his subjects that his religious role (as a solution to lack) became differentiated from the state's bureaucratic role. With the eventual overthrow of such rulers, the lack that had empowered them continued to empower the nation-states that had coalesced around them. People's collective sense-of-self was increasingly constructed around and identified with nationality. In the process, however, the religious (i.e., lack) origins of the nation-state have been obscured and issues of moral responsibility impersonalized into the issue of what is best for the nation -- e.g., realpolitik. The objectification of lack legitimized the new political institution only by becoming alienated from its original spiritual (including ethical) function. As usual with such objectifications, the state returned the favor by subjecting citizens to its own raison d'etat. Beware of the state, warned Nietzsche, for it will try to persuade you that it is the people. But it was the state that made the nation, and not vice-versa.
Medieval feudalism tended to fragment because it was a loose structure of mutual obligations based on a hierarchical network of interpersonal relations. Contracts were symbiotic and this applied even to the monarch, who was by no means sovereign (although some polities were more theocratic than others, such as France). In the early middle ages he was often regarded as an elected officer and his position was not necessarily hereditary; even later he was part of the community of the realm and responsible to its laws. Such a system diffused power and fostered what has been called a "massive sublife of numberless associations", which generated their own systems of rules and courts to adjudicate them. The society that resulted was criss-crossed with overlapping groups and conflicting loyalties and legal systems. One's patria was the town or region where one was born. Loyalty was personal, wars dynastic, and armies mostly mercenary.
Such personalized governance tended to reflect the idiosyncrasies of the local ruler. Since it operated through his household, it was portable and could be set up wherever the royal family established its residence. But such authority tended to undermine itself by shifting effective power downward to the lower links of lord-vassal relations. The long-term trend was fragmentation of large areas into increasingly autonomous systems that often quarreled with each other.
This tendency toward "feudal anarchy" was restrained by loyalty to the Church, the only responsibility that transcended local group attachments. Since the most important fact of life was salvation through the Church, which had a monopoly on the dispensation of lack, the church subordinated civil authority -- in widely-accepted principle, at least. Because all authority ultimately derived from God, politics too was a branch of theology. Fallen humanity required repressive controls to help people live a Christian life; one must submit even to evil rulers who were scourges sent by God.
It is not surprising, then, that the fatal schism in the Church's moral authority also created a political crisis which resulted in a century-long struggle for stability. The favorite conceit of seventeenth century political thought was the chaos that threatened society if lack of imposed order allowed reversion to a state-of-nature. After an exhausting thirty years' war which reduced the population by a third and brought Europe to the edge of a anarchic abyss, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was widely celebrated as a once-and-for-all settlement of all the outstanding problems by all the major powers. It enshrined non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states and (to counter the Papacy) recognized that only secular states could exercise political sovereignty. When Pope Innocent rejected the treaty as "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time", he could be and was politely ignored.
This signified the emergence of a new world order: a collection of individuating nation-states ruled by increasingly absolute sovereigns. Power came to rest solely with the monarch, but to exercise it he first had to increase his own prominence, had to magnify and project the majesty of his powers by greatly enlarging his court and intensifying his glamour. The absolute ruler's court was no longer the upper section of his household, a circle of relatives, close associates, and favored dependents. It was an extensive, artificially constructed and regulated, highly distinctive world that appeared to outsiders (and to foreigners) to be a lofty plateau, an exalted stage at the center of which the ruler stood in a position of unchallengeable superiority.
Such mystification worked to transfer spiritual authority from Pope to King. James I of England (1603-1625) emphasized that he was, in effect, the new stand-in for God. The monarchy is "the supremest thing on earth ... accountable to none but God only." If to deny God was blasphemy, to dispute a king was sedition. "What God is to Nature, the King is to the State."
But how can one person wield such vast authority? New institutions were needed to make that authority effective. In England, for example, Tudor ministers had no army, no police, not even a corps of salaried civil servants to implement their policies. In most places the crown was dependent upon unpaid justices of the peace drawn from the ranks of the local nobility and gentry. This presupposed an accommodation with the interests of the landed classes. As the centralizing authority of the crown increased, however, one after another institution of the royal household "went out of court" to become a bureaucratic department of state, still subject to the will of the king but free from day-to-day interference. In the 1530s Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister and closest confidant, initiated the division of the royal household into the principle ministries of modern government. The King's council, originally an informal circle of advisers, evolved into the Privy Council, a more regularized committee of ministers who determined and implemented royal policy.
All this required a new conception of law, which by no coincidence paralleled the new understanding of natural law that the natural philosophy of Bacon and Descartes was helping to establish. The traditional understanding based legal validity ultimately on the will of God, but his agency operated through the slow sedimentation of custom and negotiated accommodations among various semi-autonomous spheres (clerical law, guild regulations, etc.). The idea that the sovereign will of a ruler could replace common law with new statute law was revolutionary. Because he increasingly addressed himself to the whole population, in more uniform and abstract terms applicable everywhere and to everyone, there was a "leveling effect" that tended to eliminate the traditional plurality of overlapping authorities. In relation to the irresistible sovereignty of the king, everyone else was in principle equally subjugated -- just as the absolute sovereignty of the Protestant Deity eliminated mediation and transcended everyone and everything equally.
Absolutism was not established without resistance. In the middle of the seventeenth century there were upheavals in many places, most dramatically in Cromwell's Commonwealth (1649-1659) and the French Frondes (1648-1652). In the long run, however, the revolutionaries were unable to maintain responsible national governments without sun-kings (or father-kings) to legitimize the fragile political entities that were still crystallizing. In other words, the best explanation of their failure may be a religious one: the problem of legitimacy and loyalty was how to transfer spiritual and moral authority from a fissipating Church to civil rulers, whose new charisma offered a more secular solution to one's felt lack of being. More pluralistic or impersonal alternatives lacked this charisma.
Absolute sovereignty nevertheless contained the seed of its own destruction. As the king's power develops from a collection of various rights and prerogatives, it becomes instead more unitary and abstract, more potential, as it were. As such, it begins to detach itself conceptually from the physical person of the ruler; we might put it another way and say that it subsumes the ruler within itself, radiating its own energy through him.
Discussing the Prussian model, Poggi points out that the state was made transcendent over the physical person of its head through the depersonalization and objectification of its power. Public law shaped the state as an artificial, organizational entity operating through individuals who in principle were interchangeable and who in their official activities were expected to employ their certified abilities in stewardship, loyalty to the state and commitment to its interests.
As the king and his glamorous court ascended ever higher above the everyday workings of state power, they became less relevant and more dispensable to those workings: finally a mere theoretical foundation for absolute power which, once centralized into the state, no longer needed such a foundation.
The most important philosopher of the new nation-state was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for whom politics is a secular affair detached from the usual theological argument for the divine right of kings; in its place, he attempted to reconstruct society as a simple mechanical construct geometrically grounded on axioms about human nature. Following the metaphysical example of Descartes (whom he knew and read), he applied the new deductive method to human society.
Hobbes' social theory was a direct response to the social chaos he experienced first-hand: he prided himself as "the first of all that fled" the English civil war, and wrote his Leviathan (1651) during his French exile. Hobbes concluded that the greatest evil is civil war and the greatest good civil peace. Man's distinctive quality is egoism, more precisely "a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death." It may be doubted whether this is truly "a general inclination of all mankind", but it has considerable validity as a description of how many people reacted to the political chaos of his times, when lack of social stability did not allow other inclinations to flower fully. The only antidote was "that great Leviathan ... that mortal God, to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defense", a sovereign who is able to establish order because it is to the advantage of all others to submit to his authority, both as the wielder of supreme authority and as the guarantor of his subjects' rights. A modern nation-state requires an irresistible force at the center which constrains the activities of all those under it. This solution provided order, peace and control through a set of accepted rules governing the operation of a machine. His sovereign, who was the external embodiment of contracted unity and dispenser of these rules, operated from outside the machine like a technician. The state, created ex nihilo, was an artificial ordering of individual parts, not bound together by cohesion, as an organic community, but united by fear (Toulmin).
This Leviathan is "but an artificial man ... in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul" providing not life but "artificial motion". One could not find a better image for the new bureaucratic machinery of the state. A society of individuals equally subjugated to an absolute ruler requires bureaucracy, which provides fairness and consistency because it is based on a set of rational rules applying to all. Its formality increases objectivity by reducing subjectivity. In the Weberian ideal-type, bureaucratic role identification minimizes personal relations by maximizing functional relations. The more personal interaction is subordinated to functionally-motivated interaction, the more efficient the bureaucracy and the more people become parts of a social machine -- interchangeable parts, for such a bureaucracy "equalizes" people by abstracting the rights and obligations they have in common. From another perspective, it is the victory of means over ends, form over content. The impersonal efficiency of instrumental rationality overshadows the results of such procedures, perhaps most obviously in modern judicial systems.
"An artificial ordering of parts united by fear" gets at the heart of the issue: the contrast between the mutuality of an organic community and the fear that motivates Hobbes' contractual state. This ordering is externally imposed and supervised because in a social contract the self-interest of others is perceived as a constant threat to our own self-interest, for "except that they be restrained through fear of some coercive power, every man will dread and distrust each other." The absence of trust in the public realm precludes the possibility of mutuality; that is the reason for over-arching law, which comes to be perceived as the only effective means to address conflict. The objectivity of bureaucratic procedure engenders trust in the institution, which takes the form of law and respect for law. But this develops at the cost of personal trust.
As trust diminishes among individuals, bureaucracies, particularly legal bureaucracies, become more integral to the maintenance of social order and ultimately to the existence of society itself. In this context, law can be viewed as being inversely related to personal trust. With respect to trust, bureaucracy can be viewed as the antithesis of community.
The local breakdown of traditional communities creates "mobile and atomised populations whose claim to humanity rests more and more on the assertion of individual rights vis-a-vis an impersonal, distant and highly bureaucratised government apparatus." This tends to become a vicious circle, benefiting only the self-aggrandizing state: the breakdown of personal trust and mutualist community makes citizens more dependent on it to achieve safe and peaceful societies, and greater state sovereignty tends to replace the role of mutualist communities. That in turn generates the modern distinction between public and private (trust and mutuality become limited to the most intimate relationships) and thus promotes the very individualism that it postulates.
The Anabaptists (Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, etc.) understood that such a state is inherently coercive and reacted against it. They rejected the Lutheran/Calvinist accommodation with the new nation-state (and the new capitalist mode of production) by refusing to engage in its civil affairs, because state authority was antithetical to their own mutualist vision of community. Today the Anabaptists are viewed as hopelessly old-fashioned, but perhaps they saw a basic problem that the rest of us are just beginning to understand.
No one would willingly invest their loyalty in such a bureaucracy, which is why a "mortal God" was needed. That deity became dispensable once obedience to his institutions had been established at the cost of localized authorities and mutualist loyalties. The sovereignty of absolute rulers had been based upon their new role (taken over from the Church) as the temporal agents of almighty God's spiritual and moral authority. Louis XIV believed that military victory or defeat was God's reward or punishment, for a sovereign good or bad was an agent of God. When that role became questionable sovereigns too became disposable, leaving the nation-state as self-justifying and self-empowering, devoted wholly to its own interests.
More precisely, a self-empowering process: for those interests constantly needed to be modified as demographic, military, economic and political environments changed. The equilibrium of such an inter-national system is thus precarious and requires constant readjustment. This ongoing tension cannot be relieved by the operation of binding international norms, for strictly speaking there are no such norms except those that greater powers can impose on lesser ones. Self-justifying means the disappearance of any overarching moral principles regulating states' conduct, for what international law there is operates between states and not above them. Hence persistent tension between, on the one hand, the absoluteness of the notions of sovereignty and raison d'etat (which articulated and legitimated each systems commitment to self-aggrandizement), and, on the other, the continuous and inescapable presence of other states bounding that "will to sovereignty." Over and over again, each state came up against limits to its sovereignty in the form of competing states striving to satisfy their own self-defined interests.
Although much of the competition between developed nations has shifted from military to economic, our situation today otherwise remains much the same. Political polytheism is inherently unstable. The "sense of insecurity, of which nationalism was supposed to be the cure, persisted in the culture of the nation-state." At the time they emerged nation-states were a plausible solution to the social chaos that threatened, but the instability of such an international "community" led to incessant competition largely unbridled by moral restraints, and eventually to two world wars. The political tragedies of the twentieth century make one wonder how the cure was better than the disease.
With royal charisma replaced by impersonal state power, the religious grounding of civil authority finally disappears -- or does it? Do supposedly secular institutions merely obscure the religious basis of human allegiance even today? My point is that the nation-state has continued to derive its power over us from our sense of lack -- that is, from our need to identify with and ground ourselves in something greater, a need that is archetypally spiritual and inescapable. Each person, says Becker, "will knuckle under to some kind of authority, some source of sustaining and transcending power which gives him the mandate for his life" -- for his very being. So our visits to the moon were commemorated not by leaving shrines or offerings there, but by planting a cluster of national flags. In a world no longer united by any ostensible religious belief, we have devised other sources of transcendent power to commit ourselves to. In his famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation", Max Weber said that political entities have an ability shared only with religions -- to impart meaning to death; the warrior's death in battle is a consecrated one. The basic problem, however, is that although nation-states have provided a weak substitution for community (citizenship) and an even weaker solution to the problem of life (patriotism), they have otherwise been unable to fulfill the promise (to satisfy our lack) that nurtured them.
Perhaps this gives us some insight into the type of spiritual aberration that states are liable to, when they reject bureaucratic utilitarianism in favor of a search for self-transcendence that involves surrendering to some higher supra-individual destiny. Since the instrumentalist and impersonal machinery of the state cannot give us what we unconsciously seek from it -- a collective solution to our lack -- one might learn from the Anabaptists; but one might conclude instead that the nation needs to be transformed into a "purer" institution that does resolve our lack. If states retain the traces of their religious origins, as I am arguing, we can expect periods when its citizens are tempted to make it into a better religion. The results have been tragic, especially the fascisms and state socialisms of the twentieth century. Fascism was "an attempt to escape from the disciplines of 'stateness', from not only the emphasis on depersonalization which follows from the state's bureaucratic and legal character but also the idea of state and society as distinct realms."
As Holderlin put it, what has always made the state a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven. This failure is not incidental but essential to its unconscious spiritual function for us: insofar as we collectively try to become real through the nation-state, it can never become real enough to satisfy us, because it too is a human construct, "empty" and ungrounded despite the national-origin myths spun to mystify it. In lack terms, our objectified and depersonalized lack-anxiety internally feeds the unresolvable tension between state and civil society, and externally feeds the persistent competition among nations which constitutes the precarious "international order." In short, insofar as the state has become a religious institution for us, it is doomed to be a poor one.
Yet what is the alternative? From its inception, there has been an ongoing argument about the proper activities of the state. The younger Fichte, von Humboldt and Kant, for example, hesitated to acknowledge that the state has any common purpose except security. They saw it as a common framework within which subjects pursue their own ends. On the other side, Leibnitz, the later Fichte, and Herder attributed a more substantive cultural mission to the state; for Hegel the people are that part of the state which does not know what it wants.
Historically, at least, this argument was settled by Marx: the end of royal sovereignty led to states restructuring themselves to sustain capitalist domination. Today this means states identify so much with the economy that they operate largely at the service of the industrial process. As Dan Hamburg (D., Calif.) concluded from his years in the U.S. Congress: "The real government of our country is economic, dominated by large corporations that charter the state to do their bidding. Fostering a secure environment in which corporations and their investors can flourish is the paramount objective of both [political] parties." Economic growth is unanimously endorsed by all political leaders as the standard to judge each state's performance, as self-justifying and validating whatever burdens it might cause the state to impose upon society.
The result of this is very different from the pseudo-religious aspirations of fascism, but today we realize that such a state can be just as problematic.
Gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Paradise.
-- Christopher Columbus
At the same time the nation-state was taking shape, other gods were also being born: other secular projects which, insofar as they too seemed to offer a way to fill in our sense of lack, must also be understood as religious. As people began to have doubts about the afterlife, or at least confusion about the way to get there, economic success in this life became more important. But if the spiritual motivation behind this attraction was repressed and unconscious, one would expect this economic drive to be distorted in some uncanny vampirish ways.
This brings us to what Max Weber wrote about Puritanism and the origins of capitalism; a lack-reading supplements Weber's argument by adding another perspective on that process. If Weber is correct that capitalism originates in the "this-worldly" asceticism of Puritan ethics, lack implies that capitalism too remains essentially religious in its psychological structure.
According to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Calvinist belief in predestination encouraged what became an irresistible need to determine whether one was among the chosen. Such predestination devalued everything conventionally religious -- ritual, confession, penance, acts of charity, etc. -- in favor of economic success which came to be accepted as demonstrating God's favor. That had the effect of importing ascetic values from the monastery into worldly vocations, as one labored to prove oneself saved by reinvesting rather than consuming any surplus. This original motivation slowly evaporated but our preoccupation with capital and profit has not. On the contrary, it has become our main obsession. Since we no longer have any other goal, there being no other final salvation to believe in, in this way too the means has become our end.
As Weber emphasized, the ascetic vocational ethos may have lost its original meaning but that does not make it any the less powerful. Our type of salvation still requires a future-orientation. "We no longer give our surplus to God; the process of producing an ever-expanding surplus is in itself our God." In contrast to the cyclic time of medieval and other pre-modern societies, with their seasonal rituals of atonement, our economic time is linear and future-directed, since it reaches for an atonement that can no longer be achieved because it has disappeared as a conscious motivation. As an unconscious motivation, however, it still functions, for we continue to reach for an end that is perpetually postponed. So our collective reaction has become the need for growth: consumers' "standard of living" can never be high enough, and the gospel of economic expansion means corporations and the GNP are never big enough.
Lack fills in a psychological gap in this model. If my arbitrary Calvinist destiny is already decided and there is absolutely nothing I can do to qualify for heaven, why should I bother to exert myself in any way? The point is that we cannot live with this kind of aggravation to our anxiety; predestination exaggerates the anguish of our condition and destiny -- our lack -- unbearably. A way out must be discovered. There is no direct causal relation between material success and eternal salvation; wealth can only be a sign of God's approval. But psychologically there is no significant difference: working hard for such a sign provides an opportunity to direct one's lack-anxiety in a way that can hope to alleviate it -- with the nice extra fillip that since you can never be sure of God's grace (your business might fail tomorrow) you can never relax enough to enjoy the fruits of your labors.
In a way analogous to the eventual overthrow of Absolute sovereigns, the Calvinist God could also eventually disappear, but by then it didn't matter because he too wasn't needed anymore. The psychological structures that had formed -- use capital to get more capital; always jam tomorrow, never jam today -- had taken on a life of their own and objectified into new economic institutions, which in turn have objectified us into their servants.
The main difference between medieval and modern economic thinking is that the former subordinates economic motivations to the moral authority of the Deity, while the latter accepts no such moral supervision. In secular terms, the first subsumes the economy to the society, the second subsumes society to economic expediency which it liberates from social restraints (usually religious in form). Later, in the industrial revolution, new technology enabled the whole world to be converted into marketable commodities: the natural world into land and resources, human life into labor, and patrimony into capital.
A good example of religious restraints against such a "liberation" was the medieval Church's condemnation of usury -- what we now call interest, which is necessary for money to function as capital. Usury was prohibited because a usurer profits from something (i.e., time) that belongs only to God; money is infertile, so it is against nature for money loaned to spawn more money. Jacques Le Goff's analysis of penance, purgatory and usury in the late Middle Ages supplements Weber's argument by showing how the Church unwittingly undermined its own prohibition. Originally its doctrine of sin and penance focused on the act rather than the actor. Over time that doctrine became more internalized, as confession changed from a collective and public event, reserved for the most serious sins, to a more private act that after 1215 was obligatory at least once a year. The confessor's priority changed from chastising a fault to cleansing the person. This new preoccupation with daily intentions encouraged an introspection that would eventually transform ways of thinking and behaving. It also led to the development of a new intermediary realm, purgatory, for further contrition and cleansing the sinner. But the duration of this purgation could vary according to the prayers and concern of loved ones still on earth -- which might show itself by buying masses and indulgences from the Church to hasten their graduation to paradise.
Thus was built the system of "spiritual materialism" that Luther challenged. One unintended result was to legitimate usury. The accumulated wealth of a contrite usurer could be used, in effect, to buy his way out of purgatory. "In a society where all conscience was a religious conscience, obstacles were, first of all -- or finally -- religious. The hope of escaping Hell, thanks to Purgatory, permitted the usurer to propel the economy and society of the thirteenth century ahead toward capitalism." Since a usurer would need to save money to buy the services of the Church, his psychological structure may not have been much different from the Puritan asceticism Weber described. In both cases, a new religious attitude unintentionally worked to make money the supreme value.
The development of modern economic theory, like modern political theory, is usually presented as a shift from a religious to a naturalistic explanation. The organic synthesis fractured into different spheres -- religious, political, economic, scientific -- each assuming an independent vitality by acting according to the laws of its own nature. States operate according to their own raison d'etat, and markets fluctuate according to a calculus of impersonal economic factors. From a lack-perspective, however, this development is better understood as a shift from a conscious to an unconscious religious paradigm. If lack -- our need to become real -- is a constant spiritual drive, we can see religious motivations functioning both in the evolution of the nation-state and in the development of market capitalism. Once crystallized into institutions, those objectified motivations do not disappear along with the Calvinist Deity or the spectacular courts of sun-kings. To be willing to die for one's country is to assign a spiritual role to the nation (cf. the eagerness of early Christian martyrs) that is impervious to any distinction we make between church and state. The same is true for market capitalism. Weber's sociology of religion distinguished more ritualistic and legalistic religions, which adapt to the world, from salvation religions more hostile to it, which seek to inject a new message or promise into everyday life. Their efforts to ensure the perpetuation of grace in the world ultimately require reordering the social system, including its economics. Weber noticed that adherents of this type of religion usually "do not enjoy inner repose because they are in the grip of inner tensions." This suggests that market capitalism began as, and still remains, a form of salvation religion: dissatisfied with the world as it is and compelled to inject a new promise into it, motivated (and justifying itself) by faith in the grace of profit and concerned to perpetuate that grace, with a missionary zeal to expand and reorder (rationalize) the economic system. Then our secular economic values are not only derived from religious ones (salvation from injecting a revolutionary new promise into daily life), they are much the same future-oriented values, although now unconscious due to the loss of reference to an other-worldly dimension.
The psychohistories (or religio-histories) that Weber and Le Goff outline might have been only footnotes to history had they not encouraged some corresponding developments in economic organization. The first corporations with limited legal liability were established in the middle of the sixteenth century, perhaps the earliest in Florence in 1532. Both the place and date are revealing. Recent discoveries meant there were vast profits to be made in the East and in the New World; Vasco da Gama's trip to India in 1498 resulted in profits sixty times its cost. But such ventures were expensive and risky, given the debtors' prisons that awaited bankrupts and their families. The clever solution was limited liability: you could lose only what you invested. This required a special charter from one's ruler, which he was usually pleased to provide for a cut of the profits. The important points here are, first, that from their beginnings corporations were involved in colonial exploitation, because that is what they were created to do; and second, that this has usually involved an incestuous relationship with the state, which used them to exploit distant resources that could not otherwise be "developed". Without the enormous resources that such corporations imported from the colonies -- initially vast amounts of gold and silver -- the bureaucratic nation-state could not have developed, for there was insufficient domestic capital available for such centralized control.
Prior to gunpowder warfare was primarily defensive: the issue was usually whether an army could wait out a siege. This changed forever in 1494, when Charles VIII of France used artillery to breach the walls of the Italian city-states. As the gunpowder revolution spread, "a feeling of insecurity swept all of Europe." War became more aggressive, which led to the development of large standing armies and the need to finance their military adventures, leading in turn to the development of the first banks. The result is that nation-states evolved early into what Lewis Mumford calls "war states": "all the great national states, and the empires formed around a national core, are at bottom war states; their politics are war politics; and the all-absorbing preoccupation of their governing classes lies in collective preparation for armed assault." Paul Kennedy has more recently argued that war and its consequences provided more urgent and sustained pressures toward nation-building than any philosophical considerations or social changes. Charles Tilly expresses the point most succinctly: "war made the state and the state made war." But what motivated this aggression?
A Japanese colleague once commented to me that what he found most striking in the history of the West was its extraordinary aggressiveness. For approximately three-quarters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe tore itself to pieces. From a comparative standpoint, it is curious that this did not result in forcible reunion, for that is the historical pattern. Every other "high culture" area had been dominated by an empire that believed itself to be supreme and essentially alone in its world; the states system that developed in Europe was therefore unique. One factor was probably the religious disagreements that stiffened the backs of resisters, but another was the timely discovery of New Worlds, which increasingly diverted the attention of rulers to more profitable ventures.
Nevertheless, I suspect that this aggression, whereby a tiny corner of the Eurasian landmass came to dominate the whole globe, is not something fully explained by religious civil war. Nor is it something we should take for granted, any more than we should accept the nation-state or the transnational corporation as something inevitable. Consider the timing: at virtually the same moment that the organic paradigm collapsed, liberating vast amounts of lack-anxiety and preoccupying elites everywhere with the problem of subduing chaos, Western Europe began to conquer the rest of the world. Psychologically we know that one personal response to increased anxiety and fear can be aggression; does the historical development of Europe suggest that the same may be true collectively? One way to secure ourselves is to expand by dominating and incorporating the threatening other. Thanks to new technological developments, the other was not only that nation-state coalescing next door; it was that more vulnerable land across the sea, ripe for conquest.
The New World also offered a new world for religious projection. As interminable internecine strife made Europe seem irredeemable, America became much more than the abode of heathen to be converted and exploited. For some it was an empty land where religious and/or civil utopias could be achieved; for others its primitives exemplified a simple human happiness prior to the corruptions of civilization. For both, the New World became a place where our lack was or could be resolved.
The disintegration of the organic paradigm into different spheres, each operating according to its own objective laws, is usually taken to have liberated those spheres from any moral authority. If, however, the formation and function of these spheres reveal religious motivations, a moral dimension is also inescapable inasmuch as religion always has ethical implications. Then, instead of accepting the ethical neutrality that these "secular" spheres claim for themselves, we should look for the ways they deny or diffuse ethical responsibility.
A good example of such diffusion is provided by the limited-liability corporation and its twin the joint-stock market, the first chartered in England in 1553. Shares in a corporation could now be traded freely and even anonymously. Legally, the primary responsibility of a corporation is not to its employees nor to its customers but to its stockholders, today mostly unknown, scattered here and there, with little interest in a corporation's business except its profitability. Medieval production had been mostly for local markets, which meant that responsibility for one's actions was also mostly local, to one's immediate community. Contrast that with what happened in Bhopal, India in 1984, where a Union Carbide plant leaked toxic gases that killed up to 10,000 people and permanently injured another 50,000. The plant had been poorly supervised, and the recommendations from earlier problems and accidents had not been implemented by top management. So who was responsible? The CEO and members of the board of Union Carbide, like the thousands of anonymous people who own it, live far away, and legal liability -- usually only financial -- is quite different from having to live with the consequences.
This difference has great consequences for the way that impersonal institutions like transnational corporations can conduct their business. It has been said that "a principle purpose of corporations is to shield the managers and directors who run them, and shareholders who profit, from responsibility for what the corporation actually does." Today the most powerful ones have learned to play off nations and communities against each other in order to obtain the most profitable operating conditions -- the biggest tax breaks, the least environmental regulation, and so forth. Such corporations are freer than nation-states, which remain responsible to their own borders and peoples. Having no such fixed obligations, corporations can reinvent themselves at will, in a different location and even in a different business, if it is convenient for them to do so.
Of course, to be incorporated means that corporations gain a legal, not a physical, body. Like the bodies of humans and other animals, however, corporations are dissipative systems that absorb energy (e.g., raw materials) which is processed (e.g., manufacturing), and in order to thrive income must exceed expenditure. Unlike us, however, there is no intrinsic limit to their growth. The result is a fictitious but immortal person (because entitled to U.S. Bill of Rights protections ) with no emotional bonds to anyone or anything else, whose organizational structure diffuses all ethical (apart from legal) responsibility so thoroughly among anonymous stockholders that the possibility of genuine responsibility to anything else evaporates. Just like nation-states, transnational corporations have become self-justifying and self-empowering processes, with increasing access to all the world's resources but devoted wholly to their own interests.
The problem, then, is not what corporations do wrong but what they do well -- for themselves, that is. Thomas Hobbes called corporations "worms in the body politic", and in The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith's references to them are uniformly disparaging. Yet they should not be demonized, because our depersonalized lack has made them into what they are. "The economy" is a collective objectification of our desire not so much for a "higher standard of living" as for an economic solution to our lack. Unfortunately, there is no economic solution to our spiritual lack: just as I can never be wealthy enough to feel real, so the economy can never be big enough, corporations can never be profitable enough, and consumers can never consume enough. All of this manifests what is demonic: our preoccupation with growth as an end in itself. The tomorrow-that-never-actually-comes gives us hope of resolving the lack that gnaws on us today; the reality, however, is that our future orientation is a way of evading a present we are unable to cope with.
My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but to a clockwork.
-- Johannes Kepler
Let's summarize the pattern so far. The collapse of the organic paradigm did not eliminate God; instead, it pushed him higher above human affairs, by severing the continuity between him and us, between the natural and supernatural. Yet denying the intermediaries that worked to sanctify this world merely created a need for more secular deities. Absolute rulers and the bureaucratic states that coalesced around them led to the formation of nations. In a parallel fashion, the asceticism of Puritan ethics filled the void by importing religious self-denial from the monastery. Thus both institutions, the nation-state and corporate capitalism, may be viewed as objectified forms of collective lack which have taken on a life of their own that nonetheless continues to draw its power from our identification with them. The lack of nation-states feeds upon our need to ground our hollow sense of self in something greater than ourselves; the lack of corporate capitalism feeds upon and legitimates the limitless greed for profit that was liberated by the loss of religious security. In both cases the institutionalization of this lack alienates it from our control (and our moral standards), so that today all of us, even CEOs and prime ministers, are subject to the impersonal dynamic of the market and the "national interest" of raison d'etat.
If knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon famously put it, is a further parallel to be found in the new mechanistic science that provided technical support for the military and economic ambitions of the nascent states? What insight can a lack perspective grant into the origins and perspectives of modern science?
Copernicus' heliocentric hypothesis (1543) shook the firmament as much as gunpowder did. One could no longer trust even one's own senses, a problem aggravated by the invention of the telescope and microscope. Luther and Calvin thought they could refute Copernicus by citing the Old Testament, but their theologies unwittingly helped to banish its God from our universe.
Understood most broadly, science is a matter of learning how the world works, and in a religious society this is naturally a religious activity. When everyday life is permeated with the influence of a sacral dimension, scientific causality is also a sacred causality, and the impetus to understand that causality also spiritual. Today we take it for granted that scientific knowledge is something employed to manipulate the natural world, but our preoccupation with such power should not be anachronistically identified with the medieval attitude. As the old name for science suggests, the organic paradigm did not differentiate philosophy from "natural philosophy". The spiritual search for wisdom included an attempt to understand the workings of God in the natural world. How does nature manifest God's mind and will? How do its phenomena embody his "signature"? And, most importantly, what does this understanding of the world reveal about our role in it, i.e. the meaning of our lives? Notice that this spiritual impetus does not separate facts from values: the quest to discover what is not distinguished from our existential need to determine how we (part of what is) should live; in God's cosmic plan they are nondual.
Being so closely integrated, it is not surprising that the old theology and natural philosophy were overthrown together. The central concept which Protestant reformers and early scientists both challenged was hierarchy: the idea that the universe was composed of a graded chain of beings, extending from God in the highest heaven at the periphery of the cosmos, down through hierarchies of angelic beings inhabiting various celestial spheres, and then through the ranks to humans, animals, plants and minerals of the lowest terrestrial sphere at the center of the cosmic system. The Reformation worked to depopulate this hierarchy by denying any need for intermediaries between God and his world. Calvin, in particular, minimized the role of angels in governing the universe: "For the Holy Spirit designed to provide that no one should dream of primacy or domination in regard to the government of the Church." Since the Deity predetermined all events from the beginning, the workings of the Calvinist universe were orderly and in principle fully determinate.
This had scientific implications. According to the theory of mechanics generally accepted in the late middle ages, a body in motion required the constant action of a mover, and the integration of Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian theology had identified the movers of heavenly bodies with the angelic beings mentioned in the Bible. The physics of Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630) and Newton (1642-1727) can thus be understood as part of this larger process of moving away from the hierarchical conception of cosmic rule, with its multitude of spiritual powers, towards an absolutist theory of the governance of the universe, according to which physical events were subject to immutable laws -- originally those decreed by the Creator, only later the impersonal laws of modern physics.
A similar development occurred in anatomy. Michael Servetus (1511-1553) first published his theory of the blood's "lesser circulation" (through the lungs) in a theological treatise, the Restitutio Christianismi (1553), for such a hypothesis was implied by his denial of the Trinity. His medical training led Servetus to doubt that the human body was governed by a threefold hierarchy of natural, vital and animal spirits, for "in all of these there is the energy of the one spirit and of the light of God". He concluded that there was only one type of blood.
These new theories suggested analogies with absolute rule that were not overlooked by the natural philosophers themselves. More than a century before Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) was hailed as le Roi soleil, Copernicus in De Revolutionibus referred to the Sun enthroned as the ruler of the universe: "So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne, ruling his children, which circle around him." William Harvey (1578-1657) compared the heart to "the prince in a kingdom, in whose hands lie the chief and highest authority, rules over all; it is the original and foundation from which all power is derived, on which all power depends in the animal body." His book on blood circulation (1628) was dedicated to Charles I, "the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic".
In addition to these specific implications, there was what has been described as a concordance between the early Protestant ethos and the scientific attitude:
In their early days, both the Swiss and the German Reformers taught that man should reject the guidance and the authority of the priests of the Catholic faith and should seek for spiritual truth in his own religious experience: he should interpret the Scriptures for himself. Similarly the early modern scientists turned away from the systems of the ancient philosophers and the medieval schoolmen to search for scientific truth in their own empirical and theoretical experiences: they interpreted Nature for themselves.
This led to a break with Aristotelianism and the Arabic theories that had been dominant. "The witches, the astrologers, the alchemists, the hermeticists, the cabalists, and even some of the neoplatonists, hungered to find the key that could unlock some all-encompassing secret. They would have access to the true structure of the universe if only they discovered the proper method." Galileo's insight turned out to be the revolutionary one: "the Book of Nature is written in mathematical symbols" by "the great Geometer", so the key to its hidden laws is to be found by discovering the mathematical laws of the cosmos. Today we take this perspective so much for granted that it is difficult for us to realize how much it assumes a new and quite peculiar understanding of the relationship between God and nature. The Absolute Deity rules the universe not through a hierarchy of spiritual subordinates serving him but with a rational system of "hidden laws". As long as these laws constituted God's "signature" this was not quite a mechanistic view of the universe, but it was an intermediate step necessary for a fully mechanistic paradigm to develop. Again we encounter the consequences of depopulating the middle ground between God and us of all spiritual intermediaries. Where the medieval worldview saw the influence of God filtering through a hierarchy of agents, of varying degrees of blessedness and power according to their station and role in that hierarchy, the great Geometer was not to be identified with the fallen world he ruled impersonally from afar.
Since God was the ultimate source of all value, this was also the beginning of our bifurcation between fact and value. As the originator and maintainer of value gradually disappeared into the heavens, the world he left behind slowly but surely became de-valued.
This opened up exciting new possibilities: those who comprehended his hidden laws could use them to manipulate nature for their own purposes. Originally this way of thinking was not very different from the magic employed by the Renaissance magus, who also tried to manipulate the world according to its secret laws. However, mechanizing the world picture removed the controls over environmental exploitation that were an inherent part of the organic view that nature was alive, sensitive, and responsive to human action. Mechanism took over from the magical tradition the concept of the manipulation of matter but divested it of life and vital action. The passivity of matter, externality of motion, and elimination of the female world soul altered the character of cosmology and its associated normative restraints.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) kept the feminine imagery but turned it to rather different ends. He described nature as a "common harlot" who needed to be "tortured" in order to make her yield her secrets. Nature should be tortured to discover God's signature, and could be tortured because God was no longer "in" it. For this God needed to be far away, yet not too far away. Again, the political and economic parallels are instructive. Unless God were far away, there was no room and no need for absolute rulers; but if he were too far away they lost their divine right. Unless God were far away there was no space for the capitalist ethos to develop; but if he were too far away there was no incentive to import asceticism into the economic sphere. In each case God's new role was awkward and unstable, necessary for a while but soon to be supplanted.
The preoccupation of Bacon's era, subduing chaos, soon erased the traces of God's signature. Nature no longer signified something divine but appetites. "Matter is not devoid of an appetite and inclination to dissolve the world and fall back into the old Chaos", so bonds and handcuffs must be applied to its protean nature in order to restrain it. "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and of the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." Knowledge as power for the improvement of man's estate: a great, perhaps irresistible attraction for a culture of rampant lack in a seemingly-chaotic world. Without the religious security provided by a universal church, the only security to be found was one that humans made themselves.
The first writer to use the term "laws of Nature" consistently was Rene Descartes (1596-1650), whose Discourse on Method referred to "laws established in Nature by God". "God sets up mathematical laws in nature as a king sets up laws in his kingdom", he wrote to Mersenne (1630), and Descartes became the foremost exponent of the new mechanical philosophy. In addition to founding analytic geometry, he was the first to outline a system of universal mechanics that would explain all changes in the motion of bodies as due to the impacts between them. This was the scientific consequence of his radical dualism between the physical world, whose essence is extension, and the mental world whose essence is thinking. For Descartes too a deity was necessary to create and maintain the world, but God's role was shrinking fast. The English Puritans of the seventeenth century soon developed an idea abhorrent to Calvin but implicit in Calvin's writings: that the Deity was himself bound by his own ordinances.
The laws of Newton's mechanics (Principia, 1687) explained both terrestrial and heavenly motion, eliminating the need for anything more than a Creator. The Newtonian universe was now self-sustaining and completely mechanical, except for retaining God in the wholly passive role of a privileged observer. "The Deity endures for ever, and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere, He constitutes duration and space... [He is] a being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself." Newton's postulation of an absolute space and time, and an ether pervading them, was thus connected with his understanding of this single privileged observer in the universe.
On this account, the mechanistic worldview finally eliminated all traces of its spiritual origins only with Einstein's relativity theories. And with the refutation of ether the parallel with political and economic absolutism becomes complete. The Protestant "transcendentalization" of God gave the new Deity less and less to do, which reduced his day to day authority and led to his disappearance. But that disappearance had profound implications for the new intermediaries that had grown up to fill the vacuum between him and us. Once their sacral qualifications became dubious, absolute sovereigns were replaced by the bureaucratic states that had grown up to wield their authority. Puritan this-worldly asceticism for the sake of heaven yielded to the impersonal institutions of corporate capitalism and the more personal greed they worked to rationalize. And the spiritual quest to discover the great Geometer's signature evolved into replicable experimentation to discover and exploit the impersonal laws of the physical sciences, including the indifferent "survival of the fittest" motivating Darwinian evolution. Mechanism replaced organism in all three: in the functional bureaucratic rationality of Hobbes' "artificial man", in the supposedly objective laws regulating the operations of the market, and of course in the scientific laws determining the motion of physical objects and the development of living ones.
From a lack perspective, however, such scientific knowledge can never know enough, and our technological power can never be powerful enough, because they can never provide what we (motivated by our sense of lack) most need from them: an understanding of the world that also explains the meaning of our own lives by describing our role in the universe. Such value questions cannot be answered by an experimental discipline whose technique for pursuing knowledge involves determining the relationships among de-valued facts. Since facts cannot really be separated from values, scientists cannot avoid surreptitiously re-importing value implications (e.g., Dennett on Darwinism) by supposedly deriving them from the "objective facts". The basic problem with such attempts is not our inability to derive an "ought" from an "is", but just the opposite: the fundamental dualism between them that the scientific method takes for granted in the process of experimenting on the natural world. Its mechanistic approach does not refute the sanctity of the world; it merely ignores such a perspective, since it has no way to acknowledge it.
As with the nation-state (which can never be secure enough) and the economy (which can never be big enough), the scientific/technological project represses this failure into its future orientation: we do not yet know enough. Important discoveries are made, but every important answer breeds several more questions, even as every technological application of those answers breeds moral dilemmas that our science and technology cannot resolve for us.
To sum up: insofar as modern science has become our collective but futile effort to ground ourselves intellectually, by coming to an understanding of what the universe is and what our role in it is, it can never resolve our lack. Its experimental approach dualizes the one-who-wants-to-know from the objectified world that is known, because its functionalist perspective is inherently subordinated to our drive for ever-greater control over the natural world. Scientifically, we respond to this inadequacy by . . . funding further research, that is, by deferring to the future when, we hope, we may finally know enough to answer our deepest (spiritual) questions and live happily. In the meantime we preoccupy ourselves with the power that our increasing knowledge defers on us. What is this power to be used for? Again, our inability ever to answer this question makes the means, in effect, our ends.
The dream of foundationalism -- i.e., the search for a permanent and unique set of authoritative principles for human knowledge -- proves to be just a dream, which has its appeal in moments of intellectual crisis, but fades away when matters are viewed under a calmer and clearer light.
--Stephen Toulmin
Descartes is usually identified as the founder of modern philosophy, because Cartesian thought distinguishes itself from theology, or at least embarks on the path of that differentiation. Both in its methodology (self-grounding doubt) and in its conclusions (self-grounded subjectivity), Cartesianism broke with previous ways of thinking, which were mostly religiously-oriented. Philosophy achieves its own ground, for the arguments can be evaluated solely on their own logical terms.
In Cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity, Stephen Toulmin offers a different understanding of these origins. Instead of accepting the usual self-description of modern philosophy, Toulmin places its foundationalist project in historical context. As we have seen, the problem for the seventeenth century was instability, and this instability had philosophical implications too. The Christian schism and the fissiparous theologies originating from it were a serious challenge to the type of theologically-oriented thinking that had prevailed up to then. The philosophical response to this intellectual disorder was foundationalism: a search for the permanent and authoritative principles of all human knowledge. These principles were to be discovered by human rationality alone, without dependence on divine revelation or any other authority. Such foundationalism became the preoccupation of philosophy until the middle of the twentieth century, and that approach is not completely dead today.
Toulmin distinguishes the philosophical response to intellectual disorder into two historical phases: a more humanistic and literary period, exemplified by the influence of Montaigne (1533-1592) up to about 1630, followed by a more rationalist and foundationalist period exemplified by Descartes. The eclipse of Montaigne's more broad-minded tolerance was due to a growing dissatisfaction with skepticism which led people, in turn, into an unwillingness to suspend the search for provable doctrines, an active distrust of disbelievers, and finally to belief in belief itself.
If Europeans were to avoid falling into a skeptical morass, they had, it seemed, to find something to be 'certain' about. The longer fighting continued, the less plausible it was that Protestants would admit the 'certainty' of Catholic doctrines, let alone that devout Catholics would concede the 'certainty' of Protestant heresies. The only other place to look for 'certain foundations of belief' lay in the epistemological proofs that Montaigne had ruled out. On reflection, perhaps, human experience might turn out to embody clarities and certainties that Montaigne and the skeptics had overlooked.
For Montaigne "there is nothing that throws us so much into dangers as an unthinkable eagerness to get clear of them" , but the widespread difficulty in coping with an excess of lack-anxiety kept his skeptical tolerance from providing a viable alternative to some dogma to believe in, either Christian or rational: in either case, nothing less than certainty would do. People will die for a dogma who will not stir for a conclusion, as Newman put it, but in a fix you can try to make the latter into the former. So Descartes founded modern philosophy and modern subjectivity by attempting to ground knowledge on the indubitability of his own doubt. This preoccupation with deductive logic based on axiomatic self-grounding was followed by Spinoza, who not only constructed his Ethics in deductive form but rewrote Descartes' Meditations into the same geometric format. Religious certainty had been wounded, but lack continued seeking to secure itself, and intellectually this meant a compulsive need for propositional certainty. If philosophical certainty is not to be found outside us, it must be located inside, in our mental processes. Cartesian dualism juxtaposed the mechanical causality of natural phenomena with the logical rationality of human thought and intentionality. The foundationalist trajectory of modern philosophy was set.
As Toulmin emphasizes, this self-grounding rationalist dream was always illusory:
"We no longer ground all our knowledge in universal, timeless systems today, only because the rationalist dream was always illusory. Descartes never faced classical skepticism on its own ground: instead, he pointed to subjects in which, within practical limits, formal logic can provide a kind of coherence to which Montaigne had done something less than full justice; but the implication that these examples were the model for all intellectual disciplines remains an unfulfilled dream. Nor does the fact that no such model is available today imply the 'death' of Rationality: rather, it marks our awakening from a transient, ambiguous daydream."
Again we can notice a parallel with the political, economic and scientific responses to a transcendentalized God. Descartes' break with the old paradigm was not very clean, for he soon found it necessary to reintroduce God to protect his cogitations from deceptions that might otherwise be introduced by an evil deceiver. Cartesian and other rationalist philosophy still required a deity to maintain the universe, but his tenure too proved to be limited... And what secular god would take his place? We do not need to look very far. The eventual disappearance of the philosophers' God left his religious and moral functions to a subjectivity increasingly alienated from a factual "objective" world desiccated of all value, purpose, and meaning. Philosophy today may have awakened from the transient daydream of foundationalism, but the nihilistic implications of the Cartesian legacy continue to haunt our nightmares.
To what powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of his life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies? ... Each person lives his version of the real without knowing it, by giving his whole uncritical allegiance to some kind of model of power.
-- Ernest Becker
Our human lack was unable to cope with bifurcating the supernatural from the natural -- with desacralizing the everyday world by transcendentalizing God -- so it filled the void by creating more worldly deities, which have evolved into the "secular" institutions that now control the earth and its creatures. Today each claims to operate according to its own objective and morally neutral laws, but those laws presuppose the mechanistic and atomistic paradigm of modernity. Far from escaping ethical issues, they merely deny or diffuse responsibility for their consequences. "National interest" allows us to rationalize acts of state that most of us would refuse to do as individuals. The limited liability of corporations and the anonymity of the stock market ensures we remain largely ignorant of, and protected from, the social and ecological consequences of our pooled economic decisions. Scientific research and its technological application are perceived as neutral in themselves, but nature divested of a spiritual dimension, and thus of spiritual protection, can be freely dissected and divested of its "resources".
We may summarize by contemplating what has happened to the lack that was originally "built into" these now-impersonal institutions. If the human sense of lack is a constant, how does our collective lack still manifest in them, now that absolute sovereigns, the Protestant ethic and God's signature have faded away?
The important point is that the deity has not really disappeared. From a lack perspective, God is still present in the functioning of the nation-state, the market economy, and the Enlightenment scientific/technological project, because these collectivities, like us, are not things but "empty" processes which continue to be motivated by what may be described as institutional lack. The history of the nation-states system demonstrates that they are externally unstable and internally self-aggrandizing. Economically, GNP is never big enough, corporations are never profitable enough, consumers never consume enough. And the same is true for our scientific and technological establishments: the Faustian problem is not that we do not yet know enough, but that we never can, insofar as their functionalist perspective subordinates them to our drive for ever greater control over the world.
Each, then, may be considered a victory of means over ends: the objectification of our lack into impersonal "secular" institutions means that basic questions about the meaning of our lives - the central spiritual issue for a being that needs to understand and resolve its own sense of lack - have become alienated into a "not yet enough" that can never be enough. For all three, power has become an end in itself, which is why there is something demonic about them. Power, although it may be a good servant, is a bad master, because you can never have enough power if power itself is the goal. That points to the basic nihilism of modernity: the lack of an overtly spiritual grounding to our lives means that this "secular" preoccupation has become religiously compulsive. Because this compulsion is unconscious, not understood by us, these institutions have taken on lives of their own which subordinate us to them while accepting no subordination to anything else.
Secularity has been a basic concept for our understanding of modernity, but this denies the distinction we usually make between a secular society and a religiously-grounded one. That distinction is replaced by one between societies that are ostensibly spiritual and those that are unconsciously spiritual: spiritual, that is, in the basic existential sense of addressing our inescapable need to ground ourselves and feel real. Remember what Norman Brown said about the Oedipus complex, or rather Oedipus project: it is essentially the attempt to deny our conditioned origins and defend our fragile sense of independence, by becoming self-sufficient; in Buddhist terms, the ongoing (because never successful) attempt to overcome the sense of nonbeing or unreality that we become conscious of as a sense of lack. The problem with deifying the nation-state, corporate capitalism, and the Enlightenment scientific/technological project is, finally, that our lack cannot be resolved in those ways.
If the spiritual need to ground ourselves must be addressed, the issue becomes whether we will choose authentic versions of this quest, or whether we continue to pursue unconscious and therefore perverted versions, i.e. idolatrous ones. In this paper I have offered a broader understanding of the three Buddhist roots of evil -- greed, hatred and delusion -- which in turn suggests a broader understanding of idolatry. "Whatever idols man remains rooted to are idols designed precisely to hide the reality of the despair of his condition; all the frantic and obsessive activity of daily life, in whatever country, under whatever ideology, is a defense against full human self-consciousness." Idolatry occurs whenever we try to "become real" by completely identifying with something in the world as the source of our power. Psychologically idolatry is akin to fetishism, and like fetishists idolators gain their security at the price of living in a more constricted world, with narrowed perception and fewer possibilities. Insofar as our modern world is dominated by nationalism, corporate capitalism, scientism and technopoly, today we all live in such a constricted world, with other possibilities foreclosed by our blinkered, socially-permitted perceptions. This is the very "essence of idolatry -- to let what is define what could and ought to be."
Yet what is the alternative? If idolatry is inauthentic religion, what does authentic religiosity look like? Again, I think Becker points the way: the problem of life is how to "grow out of" our idolatries by expanding our allegiances and preoccupations:
Human beings believe either in God or in idols. There is no third course open. For God is the only object who is not a concrete object... God is abstract necessity, the unconditioned, and this is liberating rather than opposing or confining, even though we submit our energies to it. Humanity achieves its highest freedom when energies are allied with the unconditioned cosmic process. Free human beings must turn to God as ultimate support for meaning because truly free people have nowhere else to turn. That is, to God as the highest ground for meanings, as the uncompromising critical perspective on earthly authority.
Buddhism uses a different vocabulary to make the same point: all things, including ourselves and Buddhas, are "empty" (sunya), so we should not be attached to any of them. The touchstone of authentic spirituality is not whether one believes in God but whether one believes in and works to ground one's energies in the unconditioned cosmic process.
There is no space in this already-too-long paper to elaborate on what this solution involves, but before concluding it is necessary to consider briefly what this implies for the modern institutions whose religious roots have been discussed. It becomes obvious that we should not look to the nation-state, nor to corporate capitalism, nor to the scientific/technological establishments that service their ambitions, for solutions to the problems they have created (e.g., the environmental crisis, addictive consumerism, increasing social injustice). This is not because they have created the problems, but because they are the problems. Instead of appealing to national governments for solutions, we need to work for more decentralized political institutions which will allow for increasing local self-governance and more direct participation. Instead of hoping that transnational corporations and market mechanisms might be used to solve the problems they have created, we need to rein them in, perhaps most radically by rewriting their corporate charters, the umbilical cords that could be used to subordinate them to greater social concerns. And since science is functionally unable to set self-limits on what it tries to discover and how those discoveries are to be used, scientific ambitions, like corporate ones, must be firmly subordinated to more democratically-determined goals. Today the many ethical issues raised by genetic research, in particular, make this an urgent problem. It will not be easy to decide how this new knowledge should be developed and used, but history suggests that the worst solution is to leave it to market forces and their political allies and technological servants.
This approach to history through a Buddhist understanding of our lack stands Marx on his head: instead of reducing a superstructure of philosophical and religious ideology to some materialist infrastructure, I have argued that an unacknowledged repression of a spiritual character has played a significant role in the development of modernity. But Marx may have been right about something else. If the approach adumbrated here is valid, perhaps it is not enough for us just to understand it. I believe that we must expose the three roots of evil, and struggle against them, not only in our own personal lives but structurally in the institutions of modernity.