Wacky periods in human history

Forget arguments about the validity of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Here is a book (Soul, Self and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State, by Edward Rubin) that claims there are just three periods in “Western ethical life” (whatever that is): the morality of honour, the morality of higher purposes and the morality of self-fulfilment. The morality of honour is from the end of the Roman Empire to 1000; the morality of higher purposes from 1000 until 1800; and finally, the morality of self-fulfilment happened around 1800.

Terms associated with these three moralities are heroism, physical courage, and reputation (for the morality of honour); concern to save one’s soul (for the morality of higher purposes); and concern with present pleasure rather than saving one’s soul (for the modern era). A moment’s thought reveals the idiocy of these categories. If saving one’s soul was the predominant morality to 1800, then what was the Enlightenment doing? Heroism and physical courage may have been a feature of the very few literary works dated before 1000, but they are vastly outweighed by religious works. In terms of output, religion wins by a mile. The reviewer Albert Weale in the TLS spends two columns pointing out shortcomings in the periodization; he could have taken twenty pages. Yet instead of condemning the lunacy of such vast categories, Weale suggests a further periodization of his own: one taken from Henry Sidgwick, suggesting that only in the 17th century in England did there emerge a distinction between thinking what is good for a person and thinking what is good for the world. At least such a distinction could perhaps be validated with a little more precision than Rubin’s three moralities.

Rubin’s argument does not stop there. His book attempts to link morals with the three periods. Self-fulfilment, in Rubin’s terms, is a good, meaning that people living under the ideal of "self-fulfilment" choose the most meaningful life path. However, that doesn’t sound like self-fulfilment to me; I look around and see plenty of examples of self-fulfilment in the modern world that strike me as case studies of excessive egotism. The real problem is that 464 pages can only really be trite, if you try to sum up 2000 years of (Western) human history. By the way, why “Western ethical life”? Was there no ethical life elsewhere? And does he mean what people believed, or what they said they believed, or how they lived? There is enough here for several books, in fact a whole library.   

This broad-brush view of history seems to me to be so much the product of an academic study that it is hardly worth discussing. You can’t help feeling that a few minutes’ discussion with a few other academics before committing any words on paper might have saved a lot of time. As a sixth-form essay it might have been received politely, but as a 464-page monograph you wonder what the point in writing it was. In the TLS it was reviewed under “religion”, a heading that seems as misguided as the book itself. Perhaps anyone who includes the word “soul” in the title of their book suggests a particular world-view that puts into question any dispassionate, neutral analysis of the history of human ethics. Who knows? Rubin himself is a law professor.