The Moral Butterfly Effect

That the whole moral universe could be inverted by a single word seems a rather absurd contention. Nevertheless, it is true, and knowing this fact helps us perceive a silent revolution now centuries in the making, wherein selfishness, cleverly rebranded as “self-love,” would become the central ethic of Western Civilization. No matter where one turns, all talk of self-renunciation and self-mastery—those virtues that formed the aspirations of moral persons for centuries—has been entirely replaced with the more progressive notions of self-affirmation and self-fulfillment. Whether one consults with their psychologist, parent, or pastor, one is likely to learn to accept the self, rather than die to it.  

This profound moral inversion arises from a seemingly innocuous moral development in the 1650s. Call it the moral equivalent of the Butterfly Effect—where a seemingly inconsequential action creates a veritable tempest of consequences (and, yes, chaos). The butterfly in this instance is the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Unlike the modest butterfly, which intends no destruction, Hobbes consciously identified the linchpin of all powers and dominions and sought to collapse it all in one fell swoop. More specifically, Hobbes noted that nearly all ancient and modern civilizations had at their moral foundation a principle known as the Golden Rule. Jesus of Nazareth put the principle in its most recognizable form: “Do that to another, which thou would have done to thyself.” Even the skeptic, Michael Shermer, admitted that this simple moral formula “lies at the foundation of most human interactions and exchanges and can be found in countless texts throughout recorded history and from around the world—a testimony to its universality.” 

The Golden Rule is found in all the major religions of the world, and it enjoins upon people a positive duty to work towards the good of others.  In other words, to be in good moral standing with God and one’s fellows, a person had to have an active, outward-looking disposition. Love, in other words, required an object external to oneself. Love, and indeed morality itself, depended on a mutual reciprocity, wherein individuals put others’ needs ahead of their own. Hobbes, who lived through the bloody wars of religion in Europe, concluded that religious people simply interfered too much in the lives of others and decided that such interferences must be stopped by the power of the Sovereign. To that end, Hobbes thought that he could improve upon the Golden Rule and thereby create a more solid and stable foundation for subsequent generations. In its place, Hobbes set forth his negative Golden Rule in Chapter XV of Leviathan: “Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself.”

Blink and you could miss it: the most consequential shift in the history of moral philosophy comes in the form of a simple negation. The moral universe has been inverted by Hobbes in a change so subtle as to be insidious. Love, that central virtue, has been shorn by Hobbes of its external object.  One could now “love” without becoming entangled in the lives of others, either physically or psychologically. More than that, one could now “love” merely through non-interference and non-judgment.  Love became, in other words, not an active duty to work towards another’s perfection, but rather a non-action—a sentiment, or vague feeling, of kindness towards them. Whereas John Winthrop once called love a “bond of perfection,” wherein one seeks another’s betterment, love is now defined by our culture as mere approval or affirmation.

Two centuries after Hobbes, John Stuart Mill could summarize the whole of contemporary ethical thought in his “Harm Principle,” which held that it was morally acceptable to do anything that does not result in harm to others. An individual could now, for the first time in history, testify to their merit or goodness by pointing to the mere absence of bad actions, rather than some positive account of habitual or intentional actions.  It is for this reason that so many people today call themselves “a good person,” simply by not being a bad person. We pat ourselves on the back, morally speaking, for our inactivity. 

But love is a thing which demands an object—it wanders, if you will, until it finds a suitable place to reside. Shorn of its proper object—one’s neighbors—love must inevitably become about the subject; it falls back upon the self.  Love has always been a verb primarily, rather than a noun; however, it was never meant to be a reflexive verb, wherein the subject and object were identical (as in “to love oneself”). In fact, turning love into a reflexive verb nullifies the concept of love altogether. As Plato noted in The Symposium, love is always seeking completeness—either gaining what one lacks from another or giving to another what one already has in abundance. Yet, one cannot give or take from oneself, and therefore no individual can ever achieve wholeness, or even betterment, through the now-fashionable notion of “self-love.” Self-love can flatter our pride and stroke our vanity, but it can never better our souls. 

Thus, slowly and imperceptibly, the vast horizons of proactive morality became reduced to the passive self-regarding morality of modernity. The seeds, planted centuries ago by Hobbes, have now matured and produced fruit—and we are now beginning to see that this new fruit is rotten. Is it mere coincidence that the era of self-love is also the era of anxiety, isolation, and social anomie?  Is it mere coincidence that those generations steeped in the importance of self-esteem admit to historically low levels of happiness and historically high levels of suicidal ideation? Nevertheless, our experts, like broken records, keep repeating their call for more self-love, as if the problem is one of not thinking highly enough of oneself. Perhaps, as C.S. Lewis once suggested, we should think of ourselves less, as an alternative to thinking less of ourselves.  Perhaps the old idea of love has more of the truth, and true love bids us to look outward, rather than inward. Perhaps too, in a sort of profound mystery, we gain more through self-sacrifice and self-mastery than we do through self-affirmation and self-fulfillment. Ideas, like butterflies, can create tempests; however, good ideas—tried and true ideas—can help us weather such tempests.

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