1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 117

A. H. ESSER

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original teachings of Christ,) provided the Church with its built-in obsolescence. One cannot continually hide the consequences of an ethic which declares brotherly love while simultaneously expounding the irrelevance of anybody or anything that is not divinely blessed in a particular manner. The next change in our attitude in regard to our social environment, characterized by our growing individualism and concern for privacy, can be considered an outcome of a Christianity grown rigid. The Christian cultural tradition, pitting man against Nature, had gradually usurped the Sha' atnez principle of man's fit into the natural order. The reaction against tradition brought about by the Renaissance and Reformation led to professed individualism in the 18th century. The cult of individualism and privacy took away our last remaining vestiges of unity with our environment: the feeling of belonging to a group, of being part and parcel of the family of man. Man had, of course, always realized that he could individually survive outside the group; but to disbelieve that „no man is an island" and to think up physical expressions which separate one from the world, was known historically only via exceptions, e.g., the mystic or the legendary hero traveling after the holy Grail. In the last two hundred years, such super-individualists have become commonplace; the crazy scientist, the lonely gunman, the geographical explorer or the financial recluse are public images who certainly would not have been instantaneously recognized in the Middle Ages. An environmental change resulted because of this attitudinal shift, as our dwellings began to contain individual rooms with separate entrances, pubhc transportation came to be less favored than private vehicles, individual needs and time schedules increased the need for tailor-made services, etc. Much of what modern Western society has created is expressive of the desire for individuality and privacy. That is not to say that this atomization and partitioning-off of man would not have happened without Christianity; because we have to keep in mind that which we gradually brought about in our environment in turn influenced our thinking. The Judeo-Christian-secular tradition in man-environment interaction evidently had selective advantages in this world, because its success over the past 2500 years overshadows that of any other culture. How much the Western mind took comfort in this knowledge is clear from our smug attitude toward the rest of the world up to the Second World War, when

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