The Foundations of Morality
22. Asceticism
1. The Cult of Self-Torture
Deeply embedded in the Christian ethical tradition—in fact, deeply embedded in nearly every ethical tradition that rests on a religious foundation, is a broad vein of asceticism. So deep does this go that even today a “moralist” is usually thought of as a killjoy, and most writers on ethics are at best rather patronizing toward pleasure and seem fearful of repudiating the ascetic principle except in its more extreme forms.
And he went on to ridicule its logical basis:
But though only a few have been able to carry the ascetic principle to its logical conclusion, and then only in the last week of their lives, many have succeeded in carrying it to fantastic and incredible lengths. Let us listen to the account that Lecky gives of the “ascetic epidemic” that swept over the Christian world during the fourth and fifth centuries:
Lecky goes on to tell us that
. . . self-torture was for some centuries regarded as the chief measure of human excellence. . . . The hermit’s cell was the scene of perpetual mourning. Tears and sobs, and frantic strugglings with imaginary daemons, and paroxysms of religious despair, were the texture of his life. . . . The solace of intellectual occupations was rarely resorted to. “The duty,” said St. Jerome, “of a monk is not to teach, but to weep.” . . . The great majority of the early monks appear to have been men who were not only absolutely ignorant themselves, but who also looked upon learning with positive disfavor. . . .
Most terrible of all were the struggles of young and ardent men. . . . With many of the hermits it was a rule never to look upon the face of any woman. . . . [In the fourth and fifth centuries] the cardinal virtue of the religious type was not [Christian] love, but chastity. And this chastity, which was regarded as the ideal state, was not the purity of an undefiled marriage. It was the absolute suppression of the whole sensual side of our nature. . . . The business of the saint was to eradicate a natural appetite. . . . The consequence of this was first of all a very deep sense of the habitual and innate depravity of human nature; and, in the next place, a very strong association of the idea of pleasure with that of vice. All this necessarily flowed from the supreme value placed upon virginity. . . .
Severance from the interests and affections of all around him was the chief object of the anchorite, and the first consequence of the prominence of asceticism was a profound discredit thrown upon the domestic virtues.
The extent to which this discredit was carried, the intense hardness of heart and ingratitude manifested by the saints towards those who were bound to them by the closest of earthly ties, is known to few who have not studied the original literature on the subject. These things are commonly thrown into the shade by those modern sentimentalists who delight in idealizing the devotees of the past. To break by his ingratitude the heart of the mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that it was her duty to separate from him for ever, to abandon his children, uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by the true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his God. His business was to save his own soul.
2. William James for the Defense
It is true that James treats this case as “perverse” and “pathological,” but he does strongly commend a more “healthyminded” asceticism:
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease. . . .
No one can deny that this is psychologically true. But it is not, on examination, an argument in favor of real asceticism. It merely points out that men find their happiness in different ways. It is an argument only against a shallow and shortsighted hedonism that identifies “pleasure” with a mere sensual indulgence or foam-rubber comfort. It might even be considered a refined hedonistic argument for “asceticism,” which counsels “austerity” in order to sharpen “the keen edge of seldom pleasure.” It assumes, in other words, that one can maximize one’s satisfactions and one’s long-run happiness by some temporary deprivation, toughening, or struggle, or else what is gained, in James’s own words, “comes too cheap and has no zest.”
It is surprising to find how many of the ostensibly “antihedonist” arguments that fill the ethical textbooks really turn out, on examination, to be arguments in favor of more subtle, intelligent, and far-sighted ways of maximizing pleasure or happiness than those that the so-called “hedonists” are supposed to recommend.
But in addition to this psychological defense of “asceticism,” James does undertake an ethical justification, which I think is worth quoting at some length:
Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. . . .
Does not . . . the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up today—so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles—in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline? . . .
One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be “the strenuous life,” without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed is the strenuous life,—without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be “the transformation of military courage,” and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.
Most readers will find it difficult not to feel a great deal of sympathy with this eloquent exhortation, though they may suspect that James has temporarily deserted the role of moral philosopher for that of preacher. When we examine his plea critically, we find a certain ambiguity in his use of the word “poverty” as well as in his use of the word “asceticism.” Certainly it is hard to admire mere acquisitiveness, the pursuit of wealth simply for wealth’s sake, or for the sake of mere comfort or, worse, of mere ostentation. But does this apply to the pursuit of wealth—at least of a competence—as a means to other ends? Is James advocating real poverty—the kind of poverty that means the constant pangs of hunger or actual starvation, lack of proper education or even proper nutrition for one’s children, the inability to secure medical help for oneself or one’s family when suffering pain or wasting away from some grave disease? Would this kind of poverty really “simplify and save” one’s “inner life”? Or would it not tend rather to make the enrichment of one’s inner life almost impossible?
A person with this kind of “voluntarily accepted poverty,” moreover, is not in a very good position to be of much help to others; he is likely, on the contrary, when it comes to a crisis, to find himself dependent on the wealth-seeking neighbors whom he despises.
What James overlooked is that all honestly acquired wealth tends to be achieved in direct proportion to what a man contributes to production—to the production, that is, of the goods and services that his neighbors need or want. The phrase “money-making” is a misleading metaphor. What people (except counterfeiters) “make” or produce is not money, but goods and services that are sufficiently desired so that people are willing to pay money for them. The phrase “money-making” is apt to be applied to activities that one does not admire—perhaps because one does not understand the function they serve or the need for them. Good doctors, dentists, and surgeons all “make money”—usually in proportion to how good they are. This money is voluntarily paid. Would James have disapproved of such careers—or of the efforts of a man to make himself a better doctor, dentist, or surgeon in order to “make more money”?
In the cultural field, eminent pianists, violinists, opera singers, orchestra leaders, painters, architects, actors, playwrights, novelists, even psychologists, philosophers, and professors, “make money.” But this does not mean that they are primarily engaged in money-making. And all of them make their money by rendering a service to others that others are willing to pay for. For many of them, as for a Henry Ford or a Thomas Edison, the money they make is merely a by-product of what they add to the community’s amenities, satisfactions and progress. True, most people in our civilization never achieve eminence, and most of them are in humbler occupations that contribute nothing to “culture” but a good deal to the material basis without which culture would not be possible. A sensible man does not despise the baker, the butcher, the dairyman, the grocer, the trucker, or farmers because their activities have been undertaken to make money. In making money for themselves these people have been rendering essential services to him. So money-making, in the disparaging sense, is apt to be applied to activities of which the speaker does not approve, such as brewing or distilling, or of which he does not quite understand the economic purpose, such as stockbroking or advertising. The disparagers are apt to forget, also, that callings that seem dull to them are often intensely interesting to those who engage in them, and help to give excitement, color, and flavor to their lives.
Finally, it seems inconsistent of James to praise “voluntarily accepted poverty” because it involves “the strenuous life” and to condemn money-making because it involves “scrambling” and “panting.” This is really to condemn money-making as entailing much too strenuous a life. Could it not be that many people do in fact find in production and intense business rivalry the exercise for their talents, the outlet for their energies, the strengthening of their faculties, and the testing of their nerve, grit, and stamina that become for them “the moral equivalent of war”?
The moral philosopher should not attempt to impose his own merely personal preferences and values on others. None of us has the right to insist that other people must lead the kind of lives or pursue the special ends that would appeal to us. What the moral philosopher can do, qua moral philosopher, is to suggest that people ask themselves whether the kind of lives they are leading and the objectives they are pursuing are really most likely to promote their own happiness in the long run or the happiness of the community of which they are a part. Within these limits, everyone must decide for himself what kind of life or what objectives would be most likely to promote his own happiness. This is the realm of chacun à son goût.
3. Self-Restraint, and Self-Discipline
The element of truth in Babbitt’s theory is an element that has been recognized, if not by Rousseauistic romanticists and the apostles of self-indulgence, at least by every intelligent utilitarian since Bentham. We must refrain from impulsive acts that may give us momentary pleasure at the cost of a more than offsetting disappointment, pain, and misery in the long run. Each of us, in brief, must practice self-discipline. This is unexpectedly but eloquently affirmed even by Bertrand Russell in a sketch of his friend Joseph Conrad:
He thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths. He was very conscious of the various forms of passionate madness to which men are prone, and it was this that gave him such a profound belief in the importance of discipline. His point of view, one might perhaps say, was the antithesis of Rousseau’s: “Man is born in chains, but he can become free.” He becomes free, so I believe Conrad would have said, not by letting loose his impulses, not by being casual and uncontrolled, but by subduing wayward impulse to a dominant purpose. . . .
Self-discipline is certainly a major virtue, and a necessary means for most of the other virtues. But self-discipline is essentially a means. It is a confusion of thought to treat it as the end itself. Its value is largely instrumental rather than “intrinsic,” derivative rather than independent. One refrains from sexual excesses, or excesses in smoking, drinking, or eating, in the interests of one’s long-run health and happiness.
Anything that is so important as a means tends of course to be regarded also as an end in itself. And provided the primarily instrumental function of self-restraint or self-discipline is kept in mind, this does no harm. But when self-discipline is regarded as the virtue, when its pursuit becomes obsessive, it is in danger of being perverted into a form of asceticism.
There is, however, a twilight zone in which practical decision may be difficult. William James, in a famous passage of his Psychology, urged his readers to practice self-restraint in little “unnecessary” things to develop the moral strength and the habit:
This is bracing and altogether admirable advice for the young, and probably essential to a good moral education. But when the character has been formed, and one has reached middle age, I doubt the necessity of being ascetic or heroic in “unnecessary” points. If one gets up every morning early enough to catch the 8:05, showers, shaves, and does one’s other necessary morning chores, puts in a full day’s work at a job sufficiently arduous to be lucrative, keeps one’s appointments and other promises, keeps regular hours, doesn’t indulge excessively in drinking or smoking, eats moderately, stays away from foods that one can’t digest or that lead to overweight or excessive cholesterol, does enough exercise to keep fit and prevent flabbiness, one is doing a good deal. The Lord will not blame you too much for not looking around for little “unnecessary” deprivations simply in order to develop your moral muscles.
We may agree with William James, in brief, in regarding self-discipline as, so to speak, a form of moral insurance, but this is no reason for paying an excessive insurance premium. James frequently used the word “asceticism” when he did not mean real asceticism but only self-discipline or self-toughening—what might better be called athleticism. Let us say, for clarity of concept and definition, that any voluntary deprivation or exertion that undermines one’s health and strength is really asceticism, but any voluntary deprivation, exercise, or exertion that increases one’s health, strength and hardihood is not asceticism but athleticism or self-discipline.
In sum: We practice self-restraint, we refuse to yield to every impulse or passion or animal appetite, not for the sake of sacrifice itself, but only in the interests of our health, happiness, and well-being in the long run.
As Ludwig von Mises has put it:
To act reasonably means to sacrifice the less important to the more important. We make temporary sacrifices when we give up small things to obtain bigger things, as when we cease to indulge in alcohol to avoid its physiological after-effects. Men submit to the effort of labor in order that they may not starve.
Moral behavior is the name we give to the temporary sacrifices made in the interests of social cooperation, which is the chief means by which human wants and human life generally may be supplied. All ethics are social ethics. . . . To behave morally, means to sacrifice the less important to the more important by making social co-operation possible.
The fundamental defect of most of the anti-utilitarian systems of ethics lies in the misconstruction of the meaning of the temporary sacrifices which duty demands. They do not see the purpose of sacrifice and foregoing of pleasure, and they construct the absurd hypothesis that sacrifice and renunciation are morally valuable in themselves. They elevate unselfishness and self-sacrifice and the love or compassion which lead to them, to absolute moral values. The pain that at first accompanies the sacrifice is defined as moral because it is painful—which is very near asserting that all action painful to the performer is moral.
From the discovery of this confusion we can see why various sentiments and actions which are socially neutral or even harmful come to be called moral. . . .
4. Erecting Means into Ends
But the immemorial persistence of this moral confusion, of this erection of temporary means into absolute ends, has tended to make the dominant philosophies of morals dismal and grim. All theories that insist on Virtue and Duty for their own sake are almost necessarily dreary and joyless. They place their emphasis always on self-denial, self-deprivation, self-sacrifice for their own sake, and tend to lead to the fallacy that suffering, mortification, and flagellation are pleasing to God. But theories that emphasize Virtue and the performance of Duty as primarily means to the reduction of human misery and the promotion of human happiness not only have the enormous advantage of making Virtue attractive rather than unpalatable to the mass of mankind, and are not only cheering in themselves, but imply that Cheerfulness is itself one of the Virtues, because it makes those who adopt it a source of cheer and joy to others, by example and contagion rather than by solemn (and inconsistent) admonition.
Both asceticism and self-sacrifice, as moral ideals, can be a perversion of true morality. Both confuse means with ends, and erect a means into an end. The readiness to undergo hardships or to make sacrifices, if they should prove necessary, is one thing; the insistence on undergoing hardships and making sacrifices (and making the extent of the hardships and sacrifices rather than the good achieved the test of the “morality” of an action) is quite another.
Yet this moral confusion, this exaltation of means above ends, persists in modern moral judgments. A chemist who develops a new drug that cures millions (but whose work may involve no particular risk to himself and may even bring him a profit), is not regarded as an outstanding exemplar of “morality,” whereas a Western doctor who goes to Africa to cure a comparative handful of savages, and perhaps administer this same drug to them, gets a worldwide reputation as a “saint” because his actions, while quantitatively far less beneficial to mankind, involve great hardships and self-sacrifice.
It may be argued that while this doctor has not perhaps conferred as much direct and immediate good on humanity as the discoverer of the new drug, he has nevertheless earned greater moral merit, and that in the long run his inspiring personal example may confer a benefit upon mankind not to be measured merely by the immediate physical suffering that the doctor has relieved by his work. Perhaps. Yet it is hard to escape the suspicion that much of the idolatry of the doctor in Africa is the result of regarding asceticism, sacrifice, “morality,” “self-perfection,” as the end in itself, wholly apart from what it may or may not contribute to relieving human misery. The medieval saint, symbolized by Simeon Stylites, performed prodigious feats of asceticism, but was of very little use to anybody else, whereas a modern medical researcher, who injects himself with the germs or virus of a dread disease, in order that he may test his remedy, may confer a priceless benefit on mankind. His risk or self-sacrifice is not sacrifice for its own sake, but for the sake of a goal which gives meaning and value to the sacrifice.
In sum, morality is a means. The striving for “morality” or “self-perfection” for its own sake is a perversion of true morality.
