The legacy of Descartes' bones
It’s in the nature of fundamentalism - religious or secular - to set up a strict dichotomy. Both early followers of René Descarters and the phenomenon of Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands are as radical as their religious counterparts, Russell Shorto explains. He pleads a way out of the lethal either-or battle between the extremists.
A couple of years ago I culminated a personal odyssey by standing in the basement of a Paris museum exchanging stares with the skull of the French philosopher René Descartes. It seemed a surprisingly small and delicate vessel to have contained the brain that once thought “I think therefore I am” and other phrases of world-class weight. But a brain scientist will tell you that size doesn’t matter: indeed, if saints’ bones served as touchstones in the Middle Ages, this grim little object I beheld is arguably the touchstone of our time, the very relic of modernity.
It’s worth pondering the significance of this relic at the present historical moment. The Mumbai terrorist attacks last month would seem to be the most recent expression of something that has been with us for a long time: the horrific, confused, continual clashing of religious and secular forces against the backdrop of modern society. The intensity of this clash has of course been heightened in the still-young 21st century. Since September 11 of 2001, the West has been grappling with Muslim terrorism that is aimed at what its adherents believe to be variously the secular evils or the Judeo-Christian bias of western society. But Islam is not the only source of extremism. Hindu extremism is also a destabilising force in India. In the United States, Christian absolutism has battled secular culture on every front, from stem cell research through procreation to death, often with global implications. In Europe, meanwhile, a plethora of events - from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the Danish cartoon broohaha to anti-immigrant measures enacted across the continent - trail in the wake of 9/11, all a result of the same gnashing of the tectonic plates of faith and reason.
Framework of knowledge
I sought out Descartes’ skull because I was craving some historical perspective - for this war of values started not seven years ago but four centuries ago. The modern era began with an exuberant outburst of efforts to probe the natural world: with telescopes, microscopes and dissections. But for all the excitement generated by the great scientific explorers of the seventeenth century - Galileo, Pascal, Francis Bacon, William Harvey, and others - their work was fragmented, so that the immediate effect of the endless experimenting was more confusion than clarity. That was because their results didn’t fit within the framework of knowledge that had existed for a thousand years.
People couldn’t use Aristotle or the Bible to explain these results, and in fact they threatened to undermine the pillars that had held up the edifice of knowledge. It’s impossible for us to appreciate what this meant at the time, but people of all walks of life, from the Pope to commoners with enough education to read pamphlets decrying the confusion, considered the situation a crisis. And of course no crisis is deeper than a crisis of belief.
Descartes provided a solution to the puzzle, one that has held sway ever since, even as it created a new form of crisis. In 1637, this irascible, vain, restless Frenchman wrote a 58-page essay - The Discourse on the Method - with the modest proposal to ground knowledge not on received wisdom from the Bible or kingly power but on human reason. In his system, the universe was one vast machine, and all of its parts - from planets in their orbits to the human body - also operated by machine-like logic. Along with this new model came a way of gathering information about the world that was so profound and elemental it has been known ever since by philosophers simply as “the method.” The Cartesian method became the basis for both the scientific method and the reason-based political philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Tokens of the change
Because Descartes was the first to bring all the new thinking into a comprehensive framework, his contemporaries considered that he had achieved something revolutionary. So significant did they think his work, in fact, that 16 years after he died his remains were dug up and people began taking pieces of them - some as tokens of the change he had wrought, some actually seeing his bones as religious relics, since, at the time, any inquiry into the heart of nature was deemed spiritual.
For several years I followed the twisting trails Descartes’ bones took down the centuries. I uncovered varied stories involving scientists, priests, thieves, soldiers and politicians who bought, sold, fought over and puzzled over this philosopher’s physical remains. But there was a common thread. Each story contained at its core a struggle over where meaning should be placed, in the religious or the secular. It happened in the 1660s, when the first Cartesians used the bones of their mentor in a parade and burial ceremony - with all Catholic trappings - to win legitimacy for their new cult, which we would call science and which many in the Church saw as a threat. It happened in the 1780s, when the leaders of the French Revolution debated enshrining Descartes’ bones in the Pantheon, a church-turned-secular temple, seeing him as a hero of democracy. It happened in the 19th century, when Descartes’ skull was used in the new field of anthropology to refute the prevalent theory that greater skull size was an indication of greater intelligence, and became caught up in that era’s science-versus-faith debate.
Descartes’ bones are more than literal - and their significance is still with us. Much of the work I have done as a journalist over the past several years has involved feeling for these metaphorical bones under the skin of current events. For one story, I found myself in the living room of a ranch house in suburban Maryland, sharing a meal with six people who were activists against same-sex marriage, who said they believed homosexuality itself is evil. In their view, modern history turns out to be a series of wrong turns, which they pointed out for me: the women’s rights movement, the birth control pill, the separation between church and state, Darwin. Finally, one man, a minister, said the name that was sitting in the front of my mind: “If you think about it, it really all starts with Descartes.” He then went on to talk eloquently about the changes that began with the reorientation of reality around human reason. “The human mind can be led astray,” he said. “It is no basis for anything without God.”
The faith-reason conundrum
Meanwhile, one bright winter day in 2007 I found myself in the restaurant of a fashionable New York hotel having lunch with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, not long after she had departed the Netherlands for the US. The whole phenomenon of Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands was a result of this country’s particular approach to the faith-reason conundrum as it has played out post-9/11. After growing up amid resurgent African Islam, she came to the Netherlands, where she read Voltaire, Rousseau and Freud and turned her back on her faith - on all faith. “The West,” Hirsi Ali told me, “was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. This led to secular government. Faith assumes infallibility, and that is the danger. Our prophet Mohammad can never make a mistake, so we are stuck with him.”
I felt the same righteousness coming from both the Christians in Maryland and the African secularist in New York. How are we to bridge such an earnest and ponderous divide?
Of course, it’s in the nature of fundamentalism - religious or secular - to set up a strict dichotomy. But from the time of Descartes things were never black and white. As modernity matured, a three-way division came into being. There was the theological camp, which held onto a worldview grounded in religious tradition. And there was a “radical Enlightenment” camp, which, in the advent of the “new philosophy,” wanted to overthrow the old order, with its centres of power in the church and the monarchy, and replace it with a society ruled by democracy and science.
But there was also a “moderate Enlightenment” camp, which argued that the scientific and religious worldviews aren’t truly inconsistent, but that perceived conflicts have to be sorted out. Descartes himself was in this camp: while developing what might be considered the philosophy of secularism, he remained a devout Catholic. His philosophical attempt at resolving the seeming conflict between faith and reason was to build a wall in human consciousness: the infamous Cartesian dualism, which puts the material world on one plane of reality and “mind/soul” on another. Descartes wanted to protect faith from the prying fingers of science. Ironically, in doing so he contributed to the very problem we face today. As science got better and better and explaining phenomena via natural means, faith seemed less and less necessary.
All three of these factions remain with us today. Their adherents express themselves on television talk shows, in blogs and court cases - and with bombs. The Mumbai terrorists would seem to be members of today’s version of the “theological party.” In his bestselling atheistic manifesto God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens sounded the trumpet for “radical Enlightenment” warriors of the twenty-first century by using language that mirrors the Free Thinkers of three centuries ago: “…we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason…. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”
Not tolerate religious intolerance
Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted not just to secularism but to its radical form. She would have found a ready place for her ideas during the French Revolution, and indeed her ideas tend toward a similar extreme: she has declared that “we are at war with Islam,” and that, in the name of reason, not just Islamic terrorism but Islam itself, along with its 1.5 billion adherents, must be “defeated” so that “it can mutate into something peaceful.”
The radical secularists are right to say that enormous ugliness has been done and is being done in the name of religion; we have to find an intelligent way not to tolerate religious intolerance. But history shows that there are lethal errors in radical secularism. It thinks too highly of reason, or at least of the ability of humans to employ it. And, awed by its own brand of certainty, radical secularism takes a too narrow construction of reality. Religion, like art, is a way of negotiating the conundrum of existence. To deny religion outright is not only futile; it exposes those who trumpet the use of reason to the charge of unreasonableness - of intolerance.
Using history as a guide, it seems clear that the best way of defeating religious extremism is not by demonising faith but by enfolding it within the rational tradition. Jürgen Habermas, the great German philosopher (who himself is not religiously inclined), has used the term “post-secular” to describe what he believes can be the next stage in the evolution of western society. This stage, he argues, would involve “the assimilation and reflexive transformation of both religious and secular mentalities.”
This isn’t as arcane as it sounds. In fact, much of the world manages it. In the US, fundamentalist Christians may make headlines, but more noteworthy are the tens of millions who are serious about both their faith and their commitment to secular society. To the extent that Europe has “lost faith,” as is often claimed, it may not be more advanced than the rest of the world so much as stuck in a historical rut.
Climate change
Nudging a society out of a fundamentalist rut, whether religious or secular, would presumably require convincing or cajoling or armtwisting its radical partisans into widening their picture of reality, getting both hardcore secularists and believers to acknowledge that the world is too wild for our strategies to contain it. At the same time, it’s also vital that we find a way to convince one of those fundamentalist wings - the billions of people who grew up in cultures that never experienced an Enlightenment, that developed without the legacy of Descartes’ bones -to recognise that we have, in the past few centuries, latched onto some fairly profound ways of understanding the world and advancing humanity, and that these must be taken by everyone as a foundation.
It’s no coincidence that the years of George W. Bush’s presidency have coincided with a worldwide rise of fundamentalisms, of every stripe. The 9/11 attacks came in the early days of an administration that was already disposed toward an extreme theological worldview, further fueling its extremism and leading to the rise of others. The strong vote for Barack Obama - a non-ideological pragmatist - suggests the hunger among Americans for a way out of the lethal either-or battle between the extremists.
And how about the Netherlands? How will it negotiate the faith-reason thicket that continues to be a defining feature of modernity, and reconcile its secular culture with both immigrant and indigenous religious sensibilities? In the 17th century, Descartes sought the purest intellectual air in Europe, the freest intellectual climate in which to pursue his world-changing ideas. So he came to the Netherlands. This generation of Dutch may decide whether any of that pure air remains, or if the climate has changed irrevocably.