The Christian Ethos and the Primacy of Aesthetic Meaning

The fictions of our collective and personal brands

In Sapiens, the popular historian Yuval Harari suggests that the human capacity to entertain fictions enabled us to cooperate in large groups with strangers in the pursuit of common goals. He illustrates the universality of this practice by comparing ancient religions to modern corporations. Both are driven by fictions and mass hallucinations.

For example, Harari says the car company Peugeot is a “legal fiction” and “a figment of our collective imagination.” The heart of the company isn’t identical with its manufacturing plants or managers or employees. Indeed, a limited liability company is intended explicitly to be independent of its human owners and employees, to give them the freedom to take risks and to fail without going personally bankrupt.

The founder, Armand Peugeot, created his company in “much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches.” They did so mainly by “telling stories, and convincing people to believe them.”

Catholics told the story of Christ’s life and death, which gave rise to the ritual of the Eucharist. Together with the pomp and circumstance of the Church, that ritual reassures Catholics and convinces them to behave as if the founding miracles really happened.

Similarly in the case of Peugeot, writes Harari,

the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus — a new company was incorporated.

How far can this comparison be taken, I wonder, and what else might it tell us about the nature of myths, gods, and the human enterprise?

Branding an Ethos with a Mythos

A business company isn’t just a legal fiction. In business, the idea is to create a brand, complete with symbols that lend the company some mystique or association with certain ideals and compelling themes.

Peugeot has the lion as its logo, Ferrari the prancing horse, McDonald’s the clown, Wendy’s the founder’s red-headed daughter, the Toronto Raptors the titular fast-moving dinosaur, Facebook the coveted black book of elites’ names as shown in the movie “The Social Network,” and so on. Besides these icons, corporate brands are often defined by advertisements which came more and more to indulge in mythmaking or in the coopting of late-modern cynicism about grand narratives.

Similarly, religions have brands as defined by their myths and creeds which are replete with symbols. Christianity has the icon of the cross, Judaism the star of David, Buddhism the wheel of time. Nations have civil religions which adapt similar fictions to keep the populace on the same page. The national symbols are displayed proudly on the flag and are the subjects of the national anthems, and the architecture of the government buildings is typically majestic and adorned with symbols, much like that of religious temples.

What would it mean, though, to think of Christianity, for example, as just a brand? And is this how ancient Christians conceived of their religion before the invention of modern corporations? What exactly would a religious brand have to be, given that Christians fought and died for it?

I submit that the underlying idea of a brand is just that of an ethos. Sociologically, an ethos is a culture’s fundamental character or disposition. A mythos, then, is the set of underlying symbols that express that collective character.

In fighting or martyring yourself for your religion, you’re not defending just the symbols or the mythos. The symbols would be empty without the ethos they express. The religious symbols distinguish one population’s character from another’s.

The Christian Double Cross

For example, the Christian cross indicates not just an act of crucifixion, but a crossroads, a convergence of divinity and humanity, Judaism and paganism, and mortality and the hereafter. But what is the Christian ethos that makes these symbols vital?

Of course, Christianity is over two millennia old, and it spans multiple civilizations so there are different collective characters to match different Christianities, such as the Eastern and Western ones, and Catholic and Protestant sects.

Still, there’s a unifying theme which becomes apparent when we reflect on the fact that most Christians would hardly agree that their symbols are mere fictions. On the contrary, they’d insist, Christianity distinguishes itself by the historicity of its founding narrative. Jesus really existed as God in the flesh, he really inspired everyone he met, and he rose from the dead. All other religions are false, this majority of Christians says, because the non-Christian myths are mere stories, not factual reports.

This is to say that Christians blur the line between mythic and literal truth, which indicates a rather insidious Christian ethos. The convergence in Christianity is between the religious and the secular. Thus, the cross stands also for the church’s double cross of humanity in the church’s quest to rationalize its betrayal of uncompromising prophetic and ascetic ethics, as put in the mouth of Jesus Christ, the New Testament’s protagonist.

The betrayal began when the early Christians scapegoated the Jews and whitewashed Rome’s involvement in Jesus’s execution, and when they consented to the Roman Empire’s exploitation of their pacified, Romanized, Pauline Judaism.

Naturally, no Christian sees it that way. Instead of a betrayal, the Christian sees those more uplifting convergences between God and humankind. But the Christian’s operational ethos, her people’s religious behaviour throughout the centuries has been defined by that more unconscious crossing of their better angels.

The Christian double cross is apparent in Jesuitical sophistry and Catholic coopting of paganism; the excuses for war, slavery, torture, and imperialism in Christendom; and Protestants’ idolizing of capitalism, the televangelist’s grotesque frauds, and the creationist’s dishonest harmonizations between science and the Bible.

The Duplicity of Christian Atonement

Why do Christians love their religion if their true religious character is so duplicitous and undignified? The answer must be that Christianity excels at enabling our bestial impulses, precisely because this religion tames our potential for radical, more authentically spiritual and revelatory choices. On the surface, Christians are expected to be morally pure and Christ-like, but in practice Christianity survived by compromising.

Mind you, all social organizations compromise on their principles in certain circumstances. Yet compromise is at the heart of Christian identity. For Christians, God came to earth, which means human sinners can be raised to God’s level and God can be brought down to earth, trivialized, humiliated, and made obsolete.

That’s the meaning of Christian atonement that hides in plain sight: according to the myth, Jesus was a bridge between the ideal and the material worlds, which makes for a two-way crossing for an anticipated unification. The Christian mythos emphasizes the uplifting of humanity, whereas the Christian ethos practices the reverse, the bastardization of spiritual (or existential) ideals by way of the Machiavellian approximations.

In the special case of Christianity, then, there’s a crossing of mythos and of ethos, too, that is a negation of the Christian mythos by its ethos. Christians celebrate their religion because Christianity enables them to have their cake and to eat it, to sanctify ungodly secular practices and pretend they’re doing God’s work.

Again, most religious practices are similarly disappointing, from a purist’s idealistic standpoint. For example, polytheism served as a defense of theocracy and of social inequality that amounted to a human version of a grandiose dominance hierarchy. The royals ruled over the peons because the former represented the gods.

But the difference is that polytheistic corruption wasn’t so hypocritical since its myths and symbols were nationalistic boasts and entertainments rather than expressions of an ecstatic vision of a transhuman future. Pre-Christian religious vice was facilitated partly by distraction: the elites got to live like kings and queens at the expense of the duped majority, because the former succeeded in focusing the latter’s attention on an entertaining mythos.

But the polytheistic myths also naturalized human vices by portraying the gods as similarly corrupt and by telling stories of epic heroes who represented the national ambitions and patriarchal values.

By contrast, Christian vice is meta, meaning that Christianity elevated hypocrisy to a high art. Christianity features the story of the human execution of God, which symbolizes, in effect, the Church’s betrayal of its moral and spiritual mission and the renunciation of our potential for renewal and enlightenment. Christians kill the Christ within by reducing their religion to a twisted excuse to be short-sighted, self-destructive, and otherwise godless, even though their mythos (the gospels’ narrative of Jesus’s life) is obviously opposed to tribalism and materialism.

The Human Endeavour is Aesthetic

What is at the root of this element of fiction in religion, politics (national pride or civil religion), and economics (capitalistic corporations)? Harari suggests it’s pragmatic since we need a way to cooperate.

But there may be a psychological underpinning to these social practices. Consider that the self has a brand, an individual character and a set of personal ideals. Instead of an icon or a logo, the self has a physical face, which is why we speak of a corporate brand or spokesperson as the “face” of the company.

Moreover, the self consists largely of an inner monologue, a story we tell to drive our efforts and to relate our memories to our interests in affecting our future. That story is largely fictional and irrational since it’s biased in our favour. We’re the protagonists of our story even when we’re the villains of someone else’s.

These egoistic biases are inherent to our modes of cognition. For instance, we’re genetically disposed to give preferential treatment to people who look and act like us, to members of our race or tribe. And we pay more attention to evidence that confirms our beliefs, than to troubling bits of contrary data.

Perhaps, then, the primary mythmaking is in the service of the self’s creation, and we form religions and corporations based on fictions to feel at home as fictions in society. First, we humanize ourselves, putting a comforting spin on our mental states, according to which the self is an immaterial, immortal, supernatural spirit or at least a protagonist necessarily worthy of love and happiness.

(This isn’t to say there’s no such thing as the self. Elsewhere, I argue against eliminativistic neuroscience, showing that we do exist as conscious, rational, creative, and relatively autonomous minds that control our bodies via our nervous system.)

Then, when working together, we humanize our social environment by nationalizing it, ensuring that our mass fictions cohere with our personal ones.

Just as our individual behaviour can become robotic when we’re desensitized to the audacity of our native fiction, mass religious, political, and economic behaviour can lose sight of the mythos, of the symbols and principles that reflect a vision of a perfected or at least of a fully unified society.

This happens when we lose interest in our adopted narratives. We wish we could fast-forward through our empty pastimes the way we fly through a mediocre show on television, because the stories no longer grip us. We search for a new guiding narrative, for a new character to cheer on or to play.

It’s fiction and aesthetics all the way down. The only meanings that make any sense in atheistic and naturalistic terms and that explain why we act as we do are aesthetic. Moral purpose and legal regularity are dependent on religious fictions in Harari’s sense, and those in turn derive from the overblown stories we tell ourselves. Fictions inspire and motivate us to be ourselves and to identify with our religious, political, or economic tribe.

We’re not the stuff that dreams are made of, contrary to a paraphrase of that line from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Instead, we identify with the main character of the story we keep telling ourselves, and we’re cursed with the rational capacity and the short attention span to grow tired of our tall tales, to see through them, and to long for fresh fiction that avoids clichés and bathos.

After all, that’s yet another similarity between organized religion and the capitalistic corporation: both are deflated by anticlimax. The former is undermined by science and philosophy, the latter by the wilderness that responds to the consumer’s infantile greed with preparations for our species’ termination.