Radkin Honzák: Review of the publication ETHICS for Today's World. Published by Vyšehrad, Prague, 2021, 170 pages, original from 2011.
In the early days of Christian theology, among various views of man, there was more or less consensus that half of his qualities came from God and half from the devil. The disagreement lay in how to deal with the evil hidden within us. Some believed it was better to exorcise the devil, others proclaimed that the divine part should be cultivated so that the devil would be gradually pushed out. Sadists, who are never absent from any noble movement, described the horrors of hell awaiting sinners, while the wise turned the minds of both non-sinners and sinners toward God. God even preferred reformed sinners to the eternally righteous. But ethical precepts urging the doing of good arose long before that, whether it was Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or the Ten Commandments directly from Yahweh.
Joshua Greene defines morality, which ethical writings deal with, as a psychological agreement that allows a flock of largely selfish individuals to derive the greatest benefit from being destined to live in a community, for we were created as social creatures meant to be together.
Various recent observations indicate that in the behavior of Homo sapiens sapiens there are fewer genetically embedded elements of dominance than among its close relatives. That human society thus does not contain the seed crystal of a future hierarchical arrangement with clearly defined social roles and possibilities according to one's position on the social ladder, but is far more egalitarian. All the more important then are the agreed-upon rules, their fulfillment, and their enforceability.
Unlike Byzantine caesaropapism, which later evolved into "party rule," in Europe the power of rulers was balanced by the power of the church. The future Emperor Charles IV was scolded in his youth by the pope for his dandyish clothing and behavior, and he not only submitted to his authority but eventually internalized his stance (see the dream about the dauphin described in Vita Caroli). Christian churches were then the institutions overseeing morality. The kindness or cruelty of their oversight depended on the number of sadists in leadership.
At the same time, they fulfilled the spiritual needs of people. These were primarily daily prayers and periodic church services, rituals beginning with the magical ceremony of incense burning (let us recall, however, that incense has powerful antiseptic properties), and various gatherings, pilgrimages, and processions. The mystical experiences of saints were instructions for various types of concentration, relaxation, and imagination, and we may add that ecstasies were never considered by psychiatry to be pathological alterations of consciousness. Epileptic seizures with visions, on the other hand, belong to psychopathology and neurological disorders.
The theory of "Christian humility," as well as the injunction "do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you," and the clear delineation of position between pride and excessive submission captured in the two Gospels by Christ's two fundamental commandments — Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself (not more, not instead of yourself) — defined a framework of ethical requirements understandable to all. When the Enlightenment banned God, the civil sector took over morality, and the terror instituted by Robespierre was supposed to be the path to a community of virtue. The joyous building of communist society as the ideal goal and paradise on Earth had much greater success in terms of the number killed.
The idiotic notion that man is the pinnacle of everything and simultaneously the measure of all things led primarily to selfishness, to the worship of science as a source of power, and to the idolization of consumption, in which needs were replaced by desires; and the dish of desires is never full. This causes frustration, which in turn increases greed, leading to growing dissatisfaction.
It is a question whether faith in justice is partly fueled by fear of retribution. Probably yes, just as adherence to inconvenient health recommendations is motivated primarily by fear for one's health and life. Thus was born the argument that without an absolute God, all human justice is relative. Against it stands the pseudomorality that justifies human action that brings benefit only and exclusively to its creator, and to no one else, because he is the measure of all things. As a Polish proverb says: A descendant of noble ancestors is often a scoundrel.
Spirituality is not the same as religiosity. The Dalai Lama compares spirituality to water, which we all need, and religiosity to tea, which can have various flavors, aromas, and other properties. Yet most of society does not perceive this difference, and the idea of spirituality coincides with a bundt cake. This mistaken notion is reinforced by the fact that spirituality primarily uses ecclesiastical vocabulary. The Czech progressive resistance to churches, later followed throughout the originally Christian community, is nothing other than an inferiority complex from the possibility that any higher truth could exist than my own.
Science and faith originally got along very amicably; their divorce was actually brought about only by Galileo's discovery and the unwillingness of church authorities to accept it. Although physics has advanced to the point where it is again beginning to converge with faith, public consciousness has not yet taken note of this. The result is an existential philosophy with a highway staked out toward despair.
The Dalai Lama's publication tries to find a way out of this morass by introducing the concept of secular ethics. It proceeds from man's natural inclination toward good (i.e., the divine principle in man according to the old Christian theologians) and needs no religious faith, which many people find objectionable for various reasons. While all religious systems have some system of retribution, secular ethics does not reckon with anything of the sort and builds on the principles of belonging to all living things, compassion, and non-violence. At the same time, however, it does not present fundamentally different positions from doctrinally based ethical principles. How could it, when it is essentially the same thing, only without religion and its other content.
The book has seven chapters summarizing general principles and four additional ones with partly concrete guidance. The author understands the secular principle in the Indian, not European, conception, and thus offers a view of the entire world, material and spiritual, only "de-deified." This word thus does not lack spirituality for him, which is implicitly absent from the materialistic Western understanding of the term. Our common humanity, to which the second part of the text is devoted, is considered something akin to Kant's imperative. Sharing with everyone is the soil from which ethical behavior can grow. On the path to happiness, the author does not deviate too far from Comenius, who in his Labyrinth of the World (as in other labyrinths) finds happiness in inner harmonious arrangement. The chapter on compassion is, from my perspective, conceptually broader than the Czech word "soucit" entails, because it also requires empathy, which is feeling with someone and is something different than compassion. The part devoted to the importance of decision-making emphasizes the role of rational choice in dilemmatic situations, which is what ethics mainly deals with. Ethics in our shared world is a utopian wish for possible, in my view completely unrealistic, because voluntary, behavior of people in an increasingly crowded space.
The four chapters summarizing possible concrete approaches are very interesting because they offer practical guidance on what to do for a person's growth and improvement of their feelings and the actions stemming from them in the world. They are practical answers to questions of how we should understand spirituality and what to do for its development. Whether it concerns ethical vigilance, dealing with emotions, developing basic values, or practical instructions for meditation.
For those who seek spirituality and are not willing to accept the millennia-tested principles of Christianity, the book is a practical guide and instruction on how to proceed. For those who work more with the gifts of the devil, who enjoy power, hedonism, and consumption, it will appear ridiculous. For the well-grounded, it can be a means of offering a path to seekers.
MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author's blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php