Evolutionary Pragmatism and Ethics by Eddy Beth L.;

Author:Eddy, Beth L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kropotkin even offers his own reinterpretation of the Reformation along lines that conform to his story about the history of the mutual aid instinct. According to him, the Reformation was not simply about the right to interpret Christian scripture for oneself; the Reformation was also about trying to amend political affronts to the mutual aid instinct. The Reformation involved demands that “communal lands [be] restored to the village communities and feudal servitudes [be] abolished.”[39] Insofar as the Christian religion had been a friend and ally of the mutual aid instinct, it was a good thing, but clerics and church institutions, he thought, tended to undermine those elements of Christianity. Kropotkin claimed that he had “not the slightest doubt that the great bulk of [the Christian church’s] members are moved by the same mutual-aid feelings which are common to all mankind. Unhappily the religious teachers of men prefer to ascribe to such feelings a supernatural origin.”[40] “The very religion of the pulpit is a religion of individualism,” he writes, “slightly mitigated by more or less charitable relations to one’s neighbours, chiefly on Sundays.”[41] He is reluctant to equate this instinct to mutual aid to the concept of Christian charity—it was more encompassing than Christianity’s message; “instead of the mutual aid which every savage considers as due to his kinsman,” he complained, the church had “preached charity.”[42] Christianity had taken what was a natural law of justice between living beings and made it parochial and the product of a supernatural grace.

Jane Addams also held the notion of Christian charity at arm’s length. She did so because she thought most Christians understood charity as a kind of philanthropy. Philanthropy, in her view, failed to capture the ways in which one must enter into the lives of others in order to understand their worlds and to be of any genuine help at all. Once philanthropists started to actually live with the neighbors to whom they sought to extend charity, they were likely to find that they learned more and received more from the relationship than they brought to it. Christian concern for the poor is near the center of her understanding of her own religious faith, but “charity” as commonly understood was not the word she would choose to describe that concern.

Addams’s religious faith owes a lot to American transcendentalist notions of nature and democracy. Her understanding of the roles of human equality and popular participation in government display the influence of Emerson and his advocacy of romantic democratic individualism. This Emersonian-influenced individualism was not about self-centeredness, selfishness, or Horatio Alger bootstrap philosophy. Rather it was about the value each individual held as an irreplaceable part of the whole. Without each person’s contribution of their most vital, best ideas and actions, the democracy could not become what it was ultimately meant to be. This understanding of democracy was undergirded by a romantic religious appeal to the over-soul that guaranteed the good of the whole. It also assumed the divinity of nature and each human as a vital part of and contributor to that divinity.

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