A Brief History of Universalism: Introduction
In a previous essay I wrote:
The liberal approach is to say that we should cultivate a care for humanity as a whole over petty tribal loyalties. This idea is in itself something very specific to Western culture. There are many cultures which have never incorporated this sort of universalism, and which place the advantage of family and tribe over other concerns.
There’s probably an essay to be written tracing the path of this idea through the universalism of the Roman Empire through Christianity into modern Humanism, but that’s for another day.
And that’s what I’m embarking on here. Every time I think I know what I’m going to say, something new pops up and it just gets bigger, so I’ll serialise this into maybe five parts or so and see how it goes.
This then is an introduction, starting with the opposite of what I want to talk about. There is method to my madness.
When I was a young man, my grandfather gifted me a copy of Njals Saga. The Icelandic sagas were mostly written down in the thirteenth century from oral tradition and cover events from the late ninth century through to the eleventh century as Iceland was being settled by Scandinavians. Njals Saga is one of the most famous works in this body of literature and was my entry point into it in my twenties.
There are a few aspects of this literature that are striking to modern readers: the lean, direct prose; the lineages of each character as they are introduced; and perhaps most of all, the contrast between the generally respectful and lawful (even legalistic) conduct shown to other Icelanders combined with the Viking enthusiasm for raiding and pillaging.
Within the community in Iceland and the Norse world more broadly, there were strong moral obligations towards other members of the community, enforced through a carefully defined legal process. The cultural practices for those inside this community extended to concepts of fairness, reciprocal gift-giving that bound giver and recipient into a complex web of debt and obligation, and an almost sacred duty of hospitality, even to enemies.
If one of my kinsmen were to kill one of your kinsmen, there would be compensation to be paid, which would be arbitrated at a regular community meeting (part parliament, part court) called a “thing”. Once the legally prescribed compensation was paid then we should consider ourselves even. And if it wasn’t paid then there was the possibility of outlawry – practically a death sentence in that environment.
And yet, outside the community, it was fine and praiseworthy to go raiding and pillaging, and to bring back plundered wealth from those unlucky enough to be within reach of the Viking longships. The legal and moral commitments that were upheld so strongly within the community did not apply to the unfortunate recipients of their raids. This was not mere opportunism: it’s important to remember that these people are operating within a moral framework that underpins this behaviour and justifies this disparity.
It would be straightforward but maybe not entirely correct to see the ingroup/outgroup distinction as being Norse vs non-Norse. In fact, where other groups could be brought into their trade networks, they often were, changing the relationship from one of plunder to reciprocity. Nevertheless, the ethnic relationship was the starting point, and the contrast between the careful respect shown to the ingroup versus the brutality directed towards the outgroup was stark.
Reading these books as a young man has coloured my understanding of morality ever since. It’s jarring seeing such different standards being applied to ingroup and outgroup, particularly coming from a society that is internally so lawful. But my guess is that something like this ingroup/outgroup disparity is actually fairly close to the default for human societies. You don’t have to look very far to see examples of this even today, in genocides such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, for example, or in the long history of ethnically-based slavery.
But, like I said, what I’m particularly interested in here is the opposite of this. How did we end up with a situation in the West in which, by and large, we try to avoid this disparity in treatment, regardless of a person’s origins or ethnicity? The next essay will try to identify the origins of these ideas in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.