Clash of Worldviews: The Paradox of Late Modern Conservatism

MODERATOR: Welcome to another episode of Clash of Worldviews. Tonight we’re fortunate to have with us in the studio Fred Gulpa, self-described alt right transhumanist; Rich Goldfarb, a fiery young Jewish conservative debater; Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist; and Heather Fogarty, hypermodern skeptic and gadfly. Welcome to all of you and to our viewers joining us from around the world. Tonight the topic is postmodern conservatism. What does it mean to be a conservative in the twenty-first century, under advanced technoscientific, postindustrial conditions? Who would like to start us off?

RICH: That’s a preposterous question and you’re an imbecile for asking it. Your hair is all messed up and I’m appalled by your cheap aftershave, which I’m aghast to say I can smell all the way from over here. So you must be a closet liberal, which is unfortunate because all liberals are evil.

MODERATOR: Uh, oh…kay? That wasn’t quite the response I was looking for. I understood that you’re a professional debater, Rich. Have you learned about ad hominem attacks?—not to mention red herrings, since I’m just the moderator here.

RICH: You see that’s just like a liberal. Run from your liberalism all you like, but it’s a disgrace.

You want to know what conservatism means today. I’ll tell you: it means standing up for divine or natural rights against tyrannies like the liberal state that holds a gun to your head to push corrupt liberal values down your throat and to collect ill-gotten taxes to grow its Mafioso hold over the population. The liberal government is an incompetent bureaucracy that can’t do anything right except shake down its citizens, disrupt the free flow of market competition, and expand the cushy public sector for the pack of liberal cronies. Conservatism means respecting the traditions that connect us with what’s right in the world so that we can oppose what’s evil. And liberalism is evil. Liberalism boils down to kleptocratic communism: the liberal state wants to redistribute money that was earned in market transactions, which means the government steals from the rich to give to the poor—like Robin Hood, except that instead of a hero, the government is evil. Stealing is wrong. And like cancer, the liberal state needs runaway growth in its tyrannical powers to protect unnatural liberal morality, including silly rights for women’s equality with men, for the killing of babies, for politically-correct recognition of absurdities such as the wholesomeness of homosexuality, and for government boondoggles like its nonsolutions to the overhyped problem of global warming.

ADAM: I mean: wow. Just, wow. It’s safe to say there must have been a hundred strawmen in that screed.

RICH: Everything I just said is obviously correct. You’re an execrable monster and a charlatan and a demonic insect for suggesting otherwise.

HEATHER: Uh, Rich, I think someone neglected to inform you that Clash of Worldviews isn’t like the infotainment newshour shows or campus debates you’re used to having, in which the goal is to pwn your opponent with vile hate speech and cheap zingers. We’ll actually expect some arguments here and won’t be impressed by schoolyard tactics.

RICH: Thanks for the tip. But everything I said is still obviously correct. There is no counterargument for liberals, since all liberals ever do is call conservatives bad names. Liberals are the ones with no arguments, and that’s because liberals are—

ADAM: —evil. That’s what you were going to say, right? Yeah, that shtick’s going to get old real fast. You’re starting to sound like Ben Shapiro.

RICH: I’m waiting for the rebuttal.

Theocracy, Natural Rights, and the Tyranny of Liberalism

ADAM: Alright. First of all, you said a lot more about liberalism than about conservatism, even though liberalism isn’t our topic. But fine, maybe we can arrive at the nature of conservatism indirectly, by focusing for a while on its opposite.

So just for starters, your slide from social democracy, or the so-called liberal establishment, to communism or tyranny is a grotesque oversimplification. In a democratic country with a capitalistic economy like the United States, the government needs certain powers to protect the social fabric and thus to prevent an outbreak of chaos, as in what’s called a failed state. The selfish impulses that capitalism nurtures are utterly amoral. For example, enterprising businessmen in early American history had no compunction against selling slaves; likewise, even today there’s a thriving business of human trafficking of sex slaves. Responsible governments collect taxes not just to protect private property or to defend against foreign enemies, but to preserve the public welfare, which means upholding its culture’s ideals. Slavery is against both Christian and Enlightenment values, but as long as there’s a supply of and demand for slaves, capitalism itself isn’t going to end slavery. Thus, the government needs to step in as a bulwark against capitalistic greed.

I mean, there are a hundred other grotesqueries in your rant, but let’s leave it there for a minute. Tell us, then, how are all liberal governments communistic or tyrannical? 

RICH: A social democracy is communistic and tyrannical because it’s the same principles that are being violated, regardless of the differences in the degree of evil. Stalin killed millions of his citizens and Obama didn’t lower himself to quite that level, but both idolized the state and prized the bureaucracy over the welfare of the majority. Obama didn’t care about the average citizen when he bailed out the big banks or when he subsidized irrelevant green energy companies. He cared only about his donors and his elitist comrades. Instead of letting all Americans face up to their responsibilities as free individuals and trusting in their ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, Obama propped up failing institutions, offsetting the costs onto consumers in the form of higher taxes or inflation. Obama weakened the economy by rewarding risky lenders, borrowers, and investors, setting us up for the next bust in the economic cycle.

HEATHER: No, Obama tried (and failed) to de-rig the economy which nature had rigged under Clinton’s and Bush’s years of deregulation. Obama protected the majority from a second Great Depression that could have occurred, had the big banks been allowed to see their greed through to the bitter end. It was nature in the form of the selfishness and short-sightedness of the home-buyers and bankers—which are essential to unregulated capitalism—that left Obama with the remnants of that ticking time bomb of an economy. And why is nature so volatile and indifferent to the majority’s welfare? Why in the wild do predators prey on the herd? Because there are no rights in nature, nor is there any god in control.

How ironic for you to demonize neoliberal politicians like Obama, who didn’t take even a rhetorical stand for a public option in the healthcare debate and who thus never represented progressives, when the real villains in the economy are obviously your plutocratic heroes who don’t deserve their wealth because they perpetrate frauds like the housing market, corrupting or circumventing regulators and market analysts like those at Moody’s and putting the whole country at risk. If anything, redistributing much of their ill-gotten gains does the plutocrats a favour, by lessening the temptations which tend to turn the wealthy into rampaging psychopaths with god complexes.

You say regulators cheat the economy by picking winners and losers and preventing entrepreneurs from saving the day, as would allegedly happen in the more natural or godly course of events in which market competition is allowed to unfold. But the same counterfactual point can be turned against you. Plutocrats like the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers and the big donors to political campaigns and the rest of the top one percent of the American population that has such a disproportionate influence over politicians who write the tax code and the loopholes in the banking laws—those titans of industry and of financial fraud likewise prevent the little guys from getting ahead, by being instrumental in the decline of American unions, for example.

So your economic picture is warped. You depict a meritocratic market being tampered with by arrogant government officials, but that description is incomplete, at best. There’s an additional source of manipulation in the economy, namely the machination of the richest one percent. Indeed, the government’s interventions are needed to counter those of the lords of the private sector. It’s not as if the economic playing field would be leveled in a perfectly deregulated marketplace, were the government almost nowhere to be found. On the contrary, monopolies and oligopolies would form, wages would be lowered as unions are crushed, demagogues would bamboozle the consumers, and prices would reflect perceptions that have been distorted by masterful market manipulations that ignore the long-term costs of that rapacity, to the world’s detriment.

ADAM: I’d add that there is, of course, an enormous difference between communism or tyranny and social democracy: the latter is more self-governing than the former. In a democracy like the United States, the majority have a say over the identity of their political representatives. Granted, in practice there are numerous flaws, including gerrymandering, the Electoral College and so on, but in a dictatorship there isn’t even a theoretical possibility of removing the tyrant until he dies from his debaucheries. So it’s merely a bizarre rhetorical trick to call a liberal state tyrannical.

FRED: I’d like to weigh in on the merits of democracy. The United States is indeed democratic and that’s why it’s doomed. Capitalism and personal freedom flourish in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, and those populations don’t have to worry about their country being looted by elected politicians and bureaucrats who aren’t invested in the people’s welfare, because they’re hired guns at war with opposing parties and so they’re inclined to salt the earth after their transient time in office, to sabotage their opponent’s administration. The attention span of elected authorities is narrow and so democracies are inefficient at addressing long-term issues; the infrastructure therefore tends to decline, for example. Moreover, democracies are prone to being attacked by demagogues who exploit the free-flow of information in the media, filling the culture with disinformation, which burdens the public with a blinkered view of reality, causing it to elect politicians who are, at best, only superficially suitable for high office. What keeps the overall standard of living from declining, at least in parts of a liberal democracy, is the competition for profit in the market, which leads to innovation and to a decrease in the price of goods over time.

ADAM: Some of those criticisms apply much more to so-called conservative politicians than to liberal ones. Democrats believe in good government, so to protect their brand, as it were, their incentive is to project at least the appearance that a democratic government can work, whereas Republicans trust more in the market and so they have reason to enlist foxes to guard the hen house and to act like a wrecking crew while in office, as Thomas Frank pointed out in his book by that name.

But let’s not get bogged down in an amateurish either-or debate. No one except for Captain Overstatement here is saying that one side is purely evil and the other purely good. Democracy has its problems and so does capitalism. We’re not here to debate their comparative merits so much as to explore what it means to be a late modern conservative. Isn’t that oxymoronic, to live in a new world but to hold on to an old one? How is conservatism even possible now? Aren’t today’s so-called conservatives nothing of the kind? I mean, what are they conserving when they say a postindustrial marketplace should be allowed to operate without governmental intervention?

MODERATOR: It’s a fair question. Rich, do you want to address that? What makes you a conservative?

RICH:…

HEATHER: I think he’s sulking.

RICH: No, I’m just disgusted that I have to sit near useful idiots who make excuses for the evil government’s theft of private property and for its bullying of hard-working wealthy Americans.

HEATHER: Yeah, the top one percent of power elites who’ve gotten all the increase in American income growth over the last several decades sure do need a tax break. Watch me shed a tear for the billionaires.

Wait a minute. I think I see the key to all this: it’s Judaism. Rich’s zealotry must stem from his Jewish upbringing. He already said conservatives defend the only source of rightness in the world, which is God’s Word or natural normality. So God commanded that we not steal or be jealous of others’ private property. Therefore, a tax-and-spend liberal government that coddles a lazy underclass is sinful. Is that about right, Rich?

RICH: Of course liberalism is sinful and not just wrong on the economic technicalities.

HEATHER: Well, that’s because nothing is really right or wrong on those technicalities. Economics is a pseudoscience and economists use fancy math like squid ink, to hide the counterfactuality of their models. 

RICH: Whatever! The government has no right to steal money from the rich and to give it to the poor.

ADAM: No right, because God said so?

RICH: That’s what I believe as an Orthodox Jew.

ADAM: Ah, but that’s an embarrassment, isn’t it? It’s one thing to speak with an aggressive, commanding tone, talking a mile a minute and piling up the personal attacks as though your opponent didn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s another to admit that something as quaint and silly as theism is at the bottom of all your politics. You have the nerve to speak of liberal bureaucrats as acting like mafia bosses, but there’s a reason they call Vito Corleone the godfather. Indeed, has there been a more tribal, tyrannical, Trump-like man-baby of a god than Yahweh as portrayed in the Jewish scriptures? Arguably not.

RICH: That blasphemous remark is an abominable hate crime against my religious identity, and my lawyers will be in touch. In any case, I don’t appeal to Judaism to publicly support my social philosophy.

HEATHER: Well, what then do you conserve as a conservative, if not for God’s Word? It must be natural law. Is stealing supposed to be unnatural? What a joke that would be. Have you ever seen a mouse sneak into a kitchen and eat food from the cupboards? Or how about the cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to avoid having to feed its oversized babies? How about a beta wolf that mates with the alpha’s squeeze on the sly?

RICH: Obviously animals don’t have freedom or private property, so they can’t be guilty of crimes like murder or theft. 

HEATHER: That’s right. And so humans are rational persons who set up unnatural societies befitting our anomalous skillsets. Do you see where that takes you? It means that as far as we can manage, humans aren’t beholden to so-called natural laws. Our rights flow from the artificial laws we conceive of, not from instincts produced by natural selection. So why should any human society appeal to natural rights when those are suitable, at best, only for animals?

If we work hard and earn a pile of money, you say we have a natural right not to have that property be stolen by anyone, including the government. In so far as that right is merely natural and not justified by anything like a political constitution or philosophical declaration of rights, the right to private property rests purely on power. Might makes right, money equals power, so the right to keep your earnings amounts to the warning that thieves had better watch out, because the aggrieved party may still have power enough to take vengeance. Or else the power itself will corrupt, and so the thief should think twice before trying to acquire power in such an underhanded way.

But if that’s the primitive basis of conservative social policy, it can easily be parodied with the sort of Just So stories you find in evolutionary biology. Maybe men are stronger than women, so men have a natural right to rape them. Maybe some nations are stronger than others and so the weak should serve the strong as slaves. Where does that anti-progress end? Why not just annihilate human civilization with nuclear bomb blasts and get it over with? Why did our primordial, protohuman forebears struggle to achieve self-awareness in the first place if their “conservative” descendants were just going to spit on those miraculous acts of transcendence and whine that we should stop acting like civilized persons and be more primitive? What a joke!

Technolibertarianism and the Instrument of Unchained Capitalism

FRED: All this talk of miracles and transcendence coming from an atheist? That’s the joke that amuses me. You’re getting hung up on Rich’s brand of adolescent self-righteousness, but you’re missing where the action is in conservative circles these days.

It’s a question of means and ends. The viable conservative’s ultimate goal is the transhumanist one of becoming godlike due to a superabundance of technoscientific power. A crucial instrument for achieving that goal is capitalistic competition, which drives businesses to employ the top researchers and engineers, thus incentivizing the innovative production of sellable goods. Many of the products need to satisfy our chief demand, which is to become godlike—now that the fictional deities are known to be dead, as culture critics from Nietzsche to Yuval Harari have recognized. Unchained capitalism that proceeds at a breakneck pace towards achieving that ultimate end entails social hierarchy. In that analogy, liberal qualms are the chains or the brakes that only delay our destiny as a species, and the result of liberal sentimentality is the imposition of artificial social equalities which hinder the great work of capitalism.

That, then, is the crux of the matter for late modern conservatives. It’s not about defending ancient moral codes as being good in themselves, because some god allegedly commanded that women should submit to men or that homosexuals should be stoned or that humans ought to have dominion over the sea and the earth. That’s paleoconservatism, and it’s an embarrassment that has no chance of withstanding science-centered skepticism. What we need is neoconservatism that makes peace with the strongest elements of modernity, such as technoscience and capitalism, while abandoning the weaker ones such as democracy, rationalism, and maudlin liberal morality.

Neoconservativism began in the US in the 1960s, as a backlash against the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War. Rather than being theocrats, those neoconservatives were the often Jewish and therefore comparatively atheistic cold warriors who advocated a hawkish foreign policy in the name of spreading democracy in the furtherance of capitalist interests. Most of which was thoroughly wrongheaded. Those neoconservatives seem to have gotten caught up in Leo Strauss’s double game; they bought into their noble lies that were meant only for the unphilosophical masses. What are now called the neoreactionary conservatives—including Steve Bannon, who’s the resident philosopher king of the White House—reject democracy precisely because it doesn’t sit well with capitalism. Democracy works only when the masses who indirectly rule are equally in possession of the traits that would make them worthy to look after their national affairs. But the brutal truth of capitalism is that it creates a hundred losers for every winner, and the losers naturally stagnate, making them unworthy of a vote.

Capitalism, though, is the greatest force for good on Earth, because it’s the fuel for technoscientific progress, which is our only hope of salvation. Read your Moldbug and your Nick Land: capitalism is the answer not just in economics but in politics. Instead of stealth oligarchy, such as we have now in the US, we should be open about the greater efficiencies made possible by living under the promise of profit and the threat of literal bankruptcy in all walks of life. Instead of a nation we need corporations; instead of a government we need a board of directors and corporate officers such as CEOs. Power relations should be formalized and made transparent so that politics can be run efficiently as a business. And again, what makes this conservative is that we should embrace the resulting inequalities and hierarchies as steps we need to take on our way to the posthuman future.

ADAM: Again, wow. What an odious worldview you have there. No wonder your fellow deplorables hide under a rock in their mommy’s basement, playing video games, trolling chat forums, and emerging only at night to offend women in clubs with their “game.”

FRED: And I thought Clash of Worldviews was about arguments, not personal attacks. You see, this is the liberal’s sentimentality I was talking about. It’s like the feminist’s double standard: she wants equality but she also wants to be treated like a lady. She can’t have both, but she expects men to look the other way and to play along, because it’s supposed to be rude to shatter the illusions of the weak-willed folk who need them. So instead of rubbing the feminist’s nose in the ugly truth, that she’s been duped by the liberal culture, we neoreactionaries run our game on these women, and with every sexual conquest we prove that the value of social equality is based on a lie.

Likewise, Adam thinks he can stand on the mere offensiveness of the harsh truths I’ve just told. He thinks he can fall back on his effeminate protests against a manly worldview that could be responsible for “offending” women in night clubs. Horror of horrors! Meanwhile, his liberal rationalism is a form of worshipping human nature, which causes him to hide from the holocaust we members of developed countries are perpetrating on most other animal species. Is he man enough to hunt for his meat? No, that’s now a conservative’s pastime. So he’s either a hypocrite or a vegetarian, but if he’s the latter, he must be a radical rather than a secular humanist, since the humanist always puts human pleasure first. Either way, he’s a hypocrite.

ADAM: Just because I’m offended by your bestial notions doesn’t make me less of a man than you.

FRED: Then why not try specifying what’s wrong with neoreactionary conservatism?

ADAM: Again, where to start! I agree that capitalism by itself generates and preserves social inequalities. So who is supposed to be cheering for this posthuman end point, the wealthy who will likely be the only ones to reap the benefits or the masses who will be thereby enslaved? The whole thing is incoherent.

FRED: Is it? Most people only want to worship a god, while some want to be gods. The former are consumers who should be duped by capitalists for the greater good, instead of by liberals for the democratic state which retards progress. Those who want to be gods are the psychopaths who tend to elevate themselves to high positions in their dominance hierarchies. So there’s no such incoherence, and once again we’re left with the worries of a feminized beta male.

HEATHER: Ugh! Enough with the penis-measuring contest. I’m not interested in that macho nonsense. Let’s get down to philosophical business here and discover where the truth lies.

I thank Fred for his presentation of what indeed looks like a late modern form of conservatism, one that marries Silicon Valley technolibertarianism with a Nietzschean or Lovecraftian reaction against the Enlightenment. We’re meant to embrace the empirical knowledge and technology that have made possible modern economic growth, while spitting on democracy and the liberal ethos that have provided for the civic religion that’s placated the masses who might otherwise have been disgusted with that growth. As you suggested, Fred, we’ve been swimming in noble lies about reason, freedom, and the American Way. The Enlightenment was itself a reaction against the Christian theocrats’ dogmas, which held back scientific progress. And now the neoreactionaries want that progress without the noble lies. That strikes me as a dangerous game to play.

FRED: Are you saying you’re a friend of the noble lie? I thought you were a cynic and a skeptic, eternally vigilant against any sign of self-deceit. Surely you haven’t fallen for the liberal’s work of megafiction. And if you say you and some minority are enlightened while the masses should be left in ignorance, there you have the makings of an inequality and a social hierarchy.

HEATHER: Not exactly, since for me the truly enlightened individuals should be mere gadflies, not godlike psychopathic dominators.

FRED: Fine, but that still means you’re not exactly a liberal; you’re not an egalitarian warrior for social justice, sworn to rectify every offense taken by a spoiled millennial.

HEATHER: If you’re asking whether social equality is my highest value, I’d say no it’s not. But that doesn’t mean I’d rejoice at the prospect of any old hierarchy, such as the sort that’s left in the wake of heartless capitalism. You say economic inequality is a necessary evil of the unregulated, selfish hunt of profit, since while that kind of capitalism devolves into a free-for-all for sociopaths and their cronies who naturally double-cross the know-nothing consumers, greed and cruel struggles for profit are instrumental to some transhuman future. The liberal imposition of social equality, then, is supposed to be an act of feminine cowardice, an intrusive restraint on progress. 

But is transhumanism meant to be just a substitute myth to replace faith in a pre-existing deity? Or are we supposed to take that extreme merger with technology seriously as a physical probability?

FRED: It’s both. Transhumanism serves as a religion that isn’t wildly irresponsible in light of our current state of knowledge and power. Yes, it’s speculative to think we’ll decode the brain and be able to recreate consciousness in a computer. Yes, it’s speculative to think nanoengineering and cloning and all the rest will solve all our problems. But unlike the premodern religions, these science fictional scenarios aren’t mere escapist fantasies.

Moreover, even should transhumanism turn out to be a crock and we’ll never be more godlike than we are now, running with capitalism and disposing of milquetoast liberalism would still be the noble course. We have a chance to serve in a grand enterprise that may succeed or fail, or else to languish in the limbo foisted by neoliberal centrism. Neoliberal triangulation only balances the left and the right so that the country goes nowhere: you enable capitalism and the welfare state, but only so far so that either side ends up holding the other back. As Adam Curtis explains in his documentaries, the public loses faith in politicians because it looks like they’re technocratic system managers, cloaking their nihilism in serious-sounding pragmatic rhetoric.

HEATHER: Well, I agree with some of that, but I couldn’t sign on to a transhumanist religion.

FRED: Why? Because you only want to criticize but never to join a movement, because you want to look at everything from above, with ironic detachment, so you never have to risk feeling disappointed if the plan doesn’t work out? You don’t want to give yourself to anything greater than yourself, because deep down you’re an individualist and a narcissist to boot.

HEATHER: I am an individualist. As I said, the evolution of self-awareness, language and reason which make our autonomy possible are virtual miracles in the universe, meaning that they’re intriguing anomalies. So any mass movement which denigrates our potential to enlighten ourselves and to seek honour in a flawed world is an unsavoury con, in my judgment.

FRED: But transhumanism celebrates personal liberty! The goal is to use technoscience to deify us so we can do whatever we want.

HEATHER: Unfortunately, that myth is hampered by its literary debt to ancient theism. Gods go crazy because they become corrupted by their power and isolation. That’s the history of monotheism and of the popes and caliphs and kings who ruled in their god’s name. Human gods would be just as disastrous as the model gods they worshipped. And anyway, most people wouldn’t enjoy the technologies in question, since the tools and enhancements would be hoarded by the power elites who are the least in favour of competition, by the way, since they seek to establish monopolies or oligopolies at every opportunity.

ADAM: I’d like to step in here and remind everyone that liberalism is the progressive force, not conservatism. Equal rights for minorities are signs of progress, whereas racism and misogyny, slavery and patriarchy have always prevented the freedom of thought which is the cornerstone of scientific and technological development.

FRED: In previous empires, perhaps such traditions did blind the masses to the benefits of secularism, but that’s only because they were upheld by theistic fairy tales. The point of neoreactionary conservatism is that we can have the inequalities without the dubious myths. Instead, we have natural relations between means and end. Sacrifice in the capitalistic struggle for selfish advantage so that the techno gods might be born!

ADAM: But which inequalities would you excuse? Are you saying whites should rule over blacks, men should dominate women, and heterosexuals should persecute homosexuals?

FRED: Any hierarchy which is a byproduct of unvarnished capitalism is worth it if that social order improves the chance of our realizing the next stage of our evolution—because human nature as it is now won’t cut it.

ADAM: But let’s just take one of these vaunted inequalities as an example. You say egalitarianism has held back progress towards realizing the transhumanist dream. For centuries, patriarchy kept women out of the marketplace, but after the rise of Western women in the last century, productivity increased tremendously because women could finally educate themselves and apply their professional talents in competition with men. So that’s a case of social equality benefitting capitalism, contrary to what a neoreactionary would have predicted.

FRED: Again, only those equalities that are grossly artificial, which have to be sustained by enormous governmental effort and which impede the cutthroat competition in the marketplace that spurs growth should be eliminated. As for working women, much of their equality with men is illusory. Many have lower incomes than men in the same line of work, because women need to take off more time to raise their children. In any case, as long as women are competing with men with no unfair advantage from government aid, the market will sort us all into a dominance hierarchy. Only when such a hierarchy arises do you know you have a working capitalist economy, rather than a stale socialist one with centralized power in the hands of know-it-all bureaucrats. A conservative prizes the inequality as a sign that great struggles for power are taking place, with the byproducts of winners and losers. And we should hope that the end of that struggle is a glorious, posthuman form of life.

HEATHER: The vast economic inequality in the US, between the richest one percent and everyone else isn’t the result of any such noble struggle. The postindustrial economy is based on financialization, which is the rise of a class of con artists, bearing pseudoscientific economic models, who don’t make anything but just prey on host countries with massive frauds. So no, I’m afraid not all social inequalities are signs of hard work or progress. Some competitions are rigged to go nowhere or even to self-destruct. Like Rich, the Fox News memes of the culture war have blinded you to the fact that power can be concentrated not just by a government but by a cadre of plutocrats.

RICH: Well, I’m intrigued by Fred’s new form of conservatism. Where it errs, in my view, is its discounting of the benefits of a modest welfare state. So-called unregulated or unvarnished conservatism would descend into anarchy and would indeed self-destruct. Some taxed protections of the losers in the marketplace are needed to maintain public confidence that their country isn’t a cesspool that deserves to be reduced to ashes by an almighty God.

FRED: Alas, there’s no such God, but a religion inspired by science fiction can provide new justifications for a doubling down on capitalism, as I’ve explained.

RICH: The American Founders embraced Judeo-Christian morality as the basis of their Declaration of Independence. Some form of welfare state is needed to protect our God-given or natural rights, and taxes are needed to preserve the infrastructure that enforces those protections. By contrast, purely private interests would dictate that the losers deserve their failure and should be left to rot. No one should want to be part of such an amoral, heartless wasteland as the one you envision.

FRED: There are no such inherent rights because there’s no such Creator. We have to work hard to create the divine, posthuman beings that would manifestly have the absolute right to rule. And I hate to burst your bubble, but postindustrial behaviours, as opposed to the noble lies we tell ourselves, are already amoral and heartless. Again, we’re devastating the ecosystem and we support dictators or otherwise illiberal governments abroad to protect the young wage slaves who mass-produce the junk we so greedily consume. Yet we don’t hesitate to identify with America, with the land of the free and the home of the brave, because we buy into the myths. All I’m saying is we could use new myths, ones that wouldn’t bolster such shocking self-deception.

MODERATOR: I’m afraid we’re out of time, guests. Perhaps the upshot is that conservatism under postindustrial conditions will have to look very different from its traditional, theocratic form if it’s to avoid being largely ridiculous. At any rate, I’d like to thank you all for this stimulating exchange of ideas. Stay tuned for mind-numbing platitudes and distractions meant to keep you in the dark until you’re dead and buried. 

Selengkapnya →

Clash of Worldviews: Is Philosophy a Boon or a Con?

MODERATOR: Good evening, denizens of the interweb, and welcome to a special edition of Clash of Worldviews. We have a stacked panel here to discuss whether philosophy is a boon or a con, a topic that should naturally branch out into the meaning of life and the nature of happiness. Please put your hands together for Adam, noted liberal secular humanist; Heather, postmodern pessimist and cynic; Lindsey, Catholic conservative; Fred, popular alt right blogger and President Trump supporter; and Tariq, Muslim writer and intellectual. In addition, we expect two special guests to drop in later.

But in the meantime, let me put this question to the panel: Who here has a negative view of philosophy? And let me be clear, by “philosophy” I mean not just the academic subject, but any use of critical thinking to answer life’s most general, fundamental questions. 

Scientism and Normative Myths

ADAM: There’s a problem with that definition of “philosophy,” though, and once we see what that is, we’ll see what’s wrong with philosophy. If you’re talking about “any” use of critical thinking in those areas, you’re talking about cosmology, physics, and mathematics, but those are sciences. So the reason philosophy is indeed a fraud is that philosophy has been rendered obsolete by scientific progress. Thus, those engaging in the old-fashioned discussions are wasting their time.

LINDSEY: All hail Western scientism! Tell us, Adam, which scientific theory has established your liberal values or demonstrated that capitalism and democracy are the best ways of organizing a society.

ADAM: No political opinions are known to be true. We don’t need to think critically about them. Instead, different societies try out various political and ethical ideas, and majorities gravitate to the most attractive options. Capitalism and democracy rule in most places because they work well, not because of any argument or experiment. History is a process of trial and error.

HEATHER: Oh, so it’s good to know that, according to that bit of pragmatism, it isn’t exactly truethat humans have rights or that women should be treated as men’s equals. I suppose those bits of liberal Enlightenment wisdom just happen to work for a while until the next fad comes along, correct?  

ADAM: Correct, but there’s no need to be smarmy about it. For a belief to be true, you need a fact to correspond with the symbols making up the thoughts that constitute the belief. And there’s no fact of the matter when it comes to what we ought to be doing.

HEATHER: Really? Then won’t you tell us more about how the Western lifestyle works relatively well. I take it you mean that individualism, capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law are most effective in achieving certain goals. What are those goals, I wonder. 

ADAM: Presumably, the point of a social structure is to make people happy or to ensure that some members are more powerful than others.

HEATHER: So if history discards some cultures and lifestyles and preserves others, as being more or less effective at achieving those goals, how do we justify those ultimate goals themselves? Not through history and not through science. How else, then?

ADAM: Who says they have to be justified? That’s just the way things are: we want to be happy or to dominate weaker persons.

LINDSEY: So if you lived in a dictatorship and you came to be dominated by the corrupt ruling elites, Adam, you might feel the power distribution is unfair, but you’d still maintain there’s no way to prove the elites are in the wrong? You’d just say, “Oh, well, that’s how things are around here in the torture chamber.”

ADAM: I might fight back or try to reason with the torturers, but even if I were to succeed, that wouldn’t show it’s empirically true as a matter of fact that their conduct is wrong.

HEATHER: No, not “empirically” true, just philosophically so. Nice try with the word game. 

MODERATOR: If I might interject, Adam, are you saying that philosophy doesn’t exist or is some sort of illusion, or instead that philosophy has been outmoded by science?

ADAM: The latter, of course. Talk about word games—that’s all philosophy is now, because the substantial issues are handled by the sciences.

LINDSEY: Like the issue of whether we should strive to be happy or should rebel against dictators? Yeah, right!

ADAM: People still engage in philosophical speculations—and religious ones too—but that doesn’t mean those are respectable practices. You won’t come to know anything from philosophy or religion that you shouldn’t instead be learning from science.

HEATHER: He means you won’t learn anything from philosophy or religion in the scientific way. So are you going to blame philosophy for the fact that you’re now playing another word game, even though you supposedly reject philosophy?

Can we move on from this scientism? Philosophical questions are meaningful, not to mention profound. Indeed, their profundity can be measured by the extent to which their answers are potentially subversive.

MODERATOR: Ah, so philosophy can be subversive? Does this mean you, too, are critical of philosophy, Heather?

HEATHER: Not really. I’m critical of societies that are insufficiently philosophical.

LINDSEY: There’s the true philosopher’s arrogance, the outsider who condemns the whole of a society because the well-off masses don’t weigh themselves down with excessive rationality—as if reason alone suffices for knowledge, without the bedrock of faith. It’s faith, of course, that drives us to pursue our ultimate goals: we trust that we can always improve our situation or we have misplaced faith in our alleged personal superiority which might entitle us to abuse others.

MODERATOR: And so, Lindsey, you would contend that philosophy is incomplete? That critical thinking takes you only so far before you must fall back on a nonrational starting point?

LINDSEY: Yes, and reason itself has even shown us its limitations, from Gödel’s Theorem and quantum uncertainty, to dark matter and postmodern cynicism, to the World Wars and the collapse of the hyperrational Soviet Union.

HEATHER: But not all irrational starting points are equally viable. Christianity, in particular, makes for a muddled source of inspiration.

TARIQ: Yet monotheism in general does not, and Islam is the consummation of Abrahamic religion. Moreover, reason proves that God exists, and so all things, including the Faustian rationalists, are destined to submit to Allah.

ADAM: Why not crack open a history book, Tariq? In the West, the medieval scholastics, that is, Catholic academics like Aquinas thought they’d shown how logic entails theism, but they were only being narrow-minded and dogmatic. Then free thinkers, such as Bruno and Newton, revealed a universe that’s too big for our petty, anthropomorphic deities. Reason leads only to nature, in which there’s no personal god to be found.

TARIQ: But I can easily prove that God exists. Go back far enough with causality and you require a special kind of cause to start off the realm of ordinary cause and effect which you call nature, because each natural cause depends on a natural effect, which in turn depends on a natural cause, and so on. Thus, you need an uncaused being as the precondition of your scientific models of natural mechanisms. That eternal, necessary being is as good as God. Modern philosophers, then, are fooling themselves if they think they know any different.

ADAM: The Cosmological Argument? Really, you think free thinkers have had nothing devastating to say about that? In any case, it’s one thing to humbly admit that we don’t understand the ultimate origin of nature. We are, after all, just clever mammals and reason evolved to fulfill limited functions, which scientists have been busy extending just to see what comes of it. But it’s quite another to take a leap of faith and believe that nature was created by a magical person! That leap over logic is just irresponsible childishness.

LINDSEY: Is it? What else do we know of that transcends natural processes, with autonomy, rational mentality, imagination, and curiosity? What else that we know of could have started up the unthinking machine of nature, but a person? Not just any person, of course, but a perfect one, liberated from all material constraints.

ADAM: Yeah, like the constraint of actually existing in some concrete fashion. It’s better to side with Bertrand Russell, who told Frederick Copleston in their famous debate that some elementary facts just are brute building blocks of inquiry. We should go where the evidence takes us and admit when our beliefs are only weakly supported. Just admit you’re speculating, Tariq; that way, maybe you and your fellow monotheists might spare us your pontifications and wars waged in your silly gods’ names. 

TARIQ: I thought we were just clever mammals, like you said, Adam. Isn’t that right? So we’re bound to wage one kind of irrational war or another. What makes religious wars worse than secular ones such as the World Wars, the Cold War, or the atrocities committed by the various totalitarian regimes over the last century? You yourself maintain there’s no worthy answer to the philosophical question of how we should live. There’s just how populations feel, which restricts the historical testing of social structures, that being our method of improving our chances of achieving our cultural ideals.

ADAM: Yeah, and history has shown monotheism to be an archaic disgrace.

FRED: Not so, though, since contrary to the early modern, utopian rationalists, religion has not actually declined. There are atheistic regions of the world, as in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Canada, but the world’s majority still has religious faith of one kind or another. Moreover, materialistic consumerism serves as a substitute religion for atheists. So what right do you have to condemn religion if you’re not even going to stoop to philosophizing about the matter?

ADAM: Well, religion isin decline in the most educated parts of the world, such as the big cities of most developed countries, including the United States. And I may be speculating now with the rest of you, but I’m not fooling myself into thinking we’re going to establish any kind of knowledge at the end of this little dialogue. I’m here just for the two promised special guests.

FRED: The old religions may indeed be in decline, like you say. But the desire to worship something greater than ourselves is universal. That’s why I think philosophy forces us to recognize the need for a noble atheistic religion, which is just what the totalitarian regimes tried to provide, from Mussolini’s fascism and Nazi Germany, to Stalin’s Russia and the Kim dynasty in North Korea. In those regimes we have technological progress in social engineering, combined with revolutionary visions from the heroic male leaders. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are inheritors of that project of adapting Nietzsche’s lessons about the Ubermensch, to their more democratic societies.

HEATHER: Trump, a visionary? How preposterous! And how is any of that supposed to be philosophical? On the contrary, to fall for Putin’s or Trump’s nationalist idolatry and cult of personality, you have to surrender your critical faculties.

Neoliberalism and Academic Philosophy

FRED: I didn’t think you’d have fallen for that neoliberal talking point in the class war, Heather. I’d have thought you were too skeptical for that. Those on the alt right are far from stupid for valuing freedom and manliness. No, we’ve seen where neoliberal globalization has taken us: the richest one percent flourishes at the expense of the middle class, liberal bureaucrats sacrifice our sovereignty with their politically-correct egalitarianism and immigration policies, and white, blue-collar males are left holding the bag.

HEATHER: Is your atheistic religion supposed to be less incoherent than the old-fashioned religions? First you say you want a return to fascism and to the celebration of great male leaders. Then you condemn neoliberalism for establishing plutocracies and destroying the middle class. Which is it? You’ll want to reread your Nietzsche: you can’t have your great men at the top of the social pyramid without the majority being left out of those upper-class privileges. But you want your power the dishonourable way: you feel entitled to lord it over others just because you and Trump share the same gender and skin colour. You think because you’re both white males that he respects you as being worthy to fight on his team. Alas, you’re contemptible to him and to all the other plutocrats, because you’re comparatively poor. The economic class war is thus so much more essential than your over-hyped struggle between cultural classes of liberal snobs and earnest blue-collar workers.

TARIQ: We’re missing some context here. The backlash against neoliberal civilization isn’t confined to the rightwing Western males who are searching for their manhood. There’s also Islamist militancy in the Middle East, which has spilled over to the West.

LINDSEY: What’s your point?

TARIQ: Just that we shouldn’t dismiss the alt right. There’s a resurgence of romantic ideals of adventure and rebellion against what’s perceived all around the world to be an evil, frankly American empire. This returns us to the limits of reason. Western rebels against the deep state that double-crosses the middle class resort to macho talk of neofascism to express their resentment and their futile search for godhood in mere narcissists like Trump and in impermanent social systems. Meanwhile, Middle Eastern rebels terrorize the neoliberal technocrats and bovine consumers, although their techniques pervert the great religion of Islam.

MODERATOR: If I might again interject, I think it would be helpful to define this term, “neoliberalism.”

HEATHER: Neoliberalism is Bill Clinton’s kind of liberalism, the centrist merger of the left and the right, which is to say it’s a compromise in which the phony liberal accepts so-called “conservative” economics—deregulation, privatization, unfettered capitalist carnage—while paying lip service to progressive social values such as secularism, feminism, egalitarianism, and minority rights. You can’t have both, of course, since the latter entail social democracy which reins in the capitalist tendencies to create and maintain the vast economic inequalities that undermine democracy. But neoliberals like the Clintons, Tony Blair, Obama, and Justin Trudeau care much more about the conservative than the liberal side of their Frankenstein-monster of a compromise. They talk like they’re fair-minded and compassionate, but that’s only to protect their prior worship of the idea of a free, that is, a wild marketplace.

MODERATOR: I see. And how does neoliberalism touch on the nature of philosophy?

ADAM: Better not to ask Heather, since she’ll merely sneer at it like she does at just about everything else. What she calls neoliberalism is actually just what happens to a society that’s been powered by almost limitless progress in technoscience. Ideologies then take a back seat and competition in the market does indeed dictate what we ought to do. As Fukuyama said in The End of History and the Last Man, history has ended, in a sense, and so politicians are reduced to serving as systems managers who need to stay out of the individual citizen’s way, to let the market correct its course. Scientists, engineers, and businesspeople supply more and more efficient means of meeting our demands. And all radical speculations about the need for intervening in the market from on high, to protect some special interest or other are regressive. Reason is on the side of science, not philosophy or religion, and science is busy empowering the global, neoliberal monoculture. Or haven’t you all noticed?

HEATHER: Let nature take its course in the form of “free,” capitalistic competition? As if plutocrats don’t already capture the governmental institutions to rig the market in their favor! Look at how in 2008 the too-big-to-fail banks distorted the economy by holding it hostage, and how the captured regulators thought nothing of moral hazard, letting off those who profited most from the financial frauds that developed in the real estate markets under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. There were no firings or prosecutions of the CEOs even as their firms were bailed out. So it’s not just the radical progressives or the alt right or Islamist xenophobes who want to curtail the market’s alleged freedom from any special interest’s control. It’s the plutocrats themselves and, by extension, the neoliberal technocrats who prevent nature from taking its course, by obfuscating the market’s biases and calling the market “free” in the first place. Natural, animal law would dictate mob retaliation with pitchforks pointed at anyone enriched by so farcical and grotesquely-distorted an economic system as the one that prevails especially in the United States.

Now, one relevant point about this is that academic Western philosophy has splintered into the analytic and the poststructural branches, neither of which serves the public well by speaking plainly about society and the neoliberal consensus. Analytic philosophy is a kind of atheistic neoscholasticism, which substitutes abstruse arguments—akin to the medieval ones about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin—for more socially useful issues such as whether hundreds of millions of people are presently being misled into an inauthentic way of life, by the neoliberal sham. The poststructuralists, led by French philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard are more historicist and relativistic in their thinking. They reject scientism along with any transcendental attempt to dictate the preconditions of a discourse. Their deconstructionist methods of analyzing texts entail that philosophy has literary value. Their challenge, though, is to resist succumbing to nihilism or to obscurantism.

FRED: Academic philosophy is a college or university phenomenon and is thus part of the liberal establishment. Limousine liberals somehow scheme their way into flourishing in the bogus knowledge economy, and along with their lattes and their cheeses, they indulge in the rarified nonsense of some philosophical tomes. Perhaps the empty radicalism of leftwing philosophy reassures them that they haven’t given up on their progressive roots even though, as Thomas Frank explains, the Democratic Party has indeed sided with the professionals against the manufacturers and labourers, which is largely why Hillary lost the presidency to Trump.

But turning to the deeper issue of neoliberalism’s relation to philosophy itself, not just to the academic practice, I think we need to wrestle with whether we’ve entered a post-truth era, in which case philosophy really has become obsolete. Instead of getting at some universal truth, perhaps we should follow the lead of Democrats and advertisers, with their marketers, pollsters, spin-doctors, and public relations experts, and focus on sharpening our rhetorical skills for the purpose of social engineering. Perhaps, that is, we should focus merely on manipulating others into thinking what we want them to think.

LINDSEY: Only in so far as we’re caught up in the spectacles of mass media infotainment could we entertain such a defeatist notion. No, absolute truth exists because there’s a real world out there and inside us too. Just because Hollywood and the corporate news conglomerates are bent on entertaining, distracting, and selling us schlock doesn’t mean the real world isn’t catching up to us to our detriment. For example, sustaining the mass consumerist lifestyle has triggered the destruction of much of the biosphere in addition to conflicts over resources.

FRED: Yes, there’s an objective world, but Adam is right: we know about that world mainly through science. Philosophy’s legitimate domain is more the subjective, normative one in which we can ask the question of how we ought to live. Liberals recommend maximal openness on that front: we should be permitted to do whatever we want as long as we don’t interfere with anyone else’s right to do the same. And as for deciding what we should want in the first place, we should be free to discover that for ourselves too. To guide us in that endeavour, philosophers must compete with the heavy-hitters in the marketplace, and that really is no contest.

HEATHER: But you haven’t established that philosophers have no relevant expertise, only that most people will ignore philosophers because ethical standards have been drastically lowered in the West. I agree with that. But presumably, your rightwing politics of manliness stems from dictates from the likes of Nietzsche and Julius Evola. Your battle with social justice warriors such as feminists and gay-rights activists rests on what you perceive to be a tradition of respecting natural law. For example, I take it you believe that might makes right, as they say. Thus, men should dominate women, strong nations and races should enslave weaker ones, and humans in general should rule the earth. Is that the root of your alt right grievances?

FRED: We should indeed respect the ways of nature instead of letting the weaker sex and degenerates poison the environment for nobler folks, including white working-class males.

HEATHER: Well, without getting into that at the moment, science can show us only what nature’s ways are;there’s no purely scientific basis for concluding that we should be more natural instead of attempting to transcend animal instincts and habits. Answering that normative question is a job for philosophy as well as for the infotainers and the commentariat.

FRED: Fine, so let’s say philosophy still has an important role. The issue is supposed to be whether philosophy is a boon or a con. What would make it a con? Again, as part of the elite liberal institutions, academic philosophy is something of a con, since students in the humanities go into debt and there are few academic jobs waiting for them when they graduate. Likewise, globalization has been a con for the working class, since low-wage foreigners and robots have scooped up the manufacturing jobs that used to support the American working class. But why should we believe that critical thinking about the meaning of life is somehow a fraud?

DEVIL: Maybe I can help answer that.

FRED: Who said that?

The Devil’s Due

MODERATOR: Ah, I’m being told our special guests have arrived. As explained in their previous encounter on Clash of Worldviews, only their voices can manifest on the material plane. Please welcome, then, the voices of God and the devil.

DEVIL: You learned more than that from our previous encounter, mayfly Moderator. As I recall, the revelations compelled you to run away from the discussion, crying in your coffee mug.

HEATHER: Why? What happened? I’m sorry I missed that.

LINDSEY: This is altogether irregular.

TARIQ: Allah is here?

MODERATOR: Yes, well [coughs]—in that episode we discovered some unsettling truths about the Lord Almighty. Let’s just say that the creator before us in the form of his voice is only an echo of what God used to be, and we’ll hear only what he would have said to us under these circumstances, had he not been turned into a…demonic simulation.

TARIQ: Allah, are you there?

GOD: Yes, I’m here.

DEVIL: No, he’s not. Not really. But where were we?

TARIQ: All glory to Allah! Peace be upon you and your prophet, Muhammad. [Tariq drops to his knees and prays.] I humbly submit to Allah. None is greater than he. I am but a speck of dust by comparison.

LINDSEY: Can dust speak, fool? Hear what Jesus says in Luke 12:7: “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

TARIQ: Silence, infidel! Don’t muddy the waters with that inferior prophet’s pronouncements. The Spirit of Allah is before you. Humble yourself before it’s too late!

LINDSEY: Jesus wasGod and I’m square with Jesus.

DEVIL: Oh dear, must I endure more of this mousey squeaking? I’m here to enlighten any seeker on the nature of philosophy.

LINDSEY: Hold your tongue, Satan! In the name of Christ and his Holy Catholic Church, I compel you to flee to the outer darkness from whence you came.

DEVIL: [chuckles] Isn’t that cute? The mayfly thinks he’s in a movie.

HEATHER: Silence yourself, Lindsey! I want to hear what the devil has to say.

LINDSEY: Yes, youwould, a skeptic and a cynic like you. I knew the devil was at the bottom of all your pessimistic posturing.

ADAM: There’s no God or Devil, you buffoons! This is all a prank. The voices are being piped in from some other room. But like they say, the show must go on, so speak up already, so-called God or Devil!

DEVIL: Much obliged, my son. I would flood your feeble mind with my magnificence, but you serve me better when you idolize the power of technoscience.

[To the panel] You and your viewers wish to know whether philosophy is a boon or a con. An excellent question! But before I school you, let’s ask the Almighty One. Yo, Papa Bear! What do you think of philosophy? Is it fit for your little creatures?

TARIQ: Such insolence is unconscionable.

GOD: The love of wisdom is admirable. Alas, they can see now only as though through a glass darkly. Only at the end of time, when heaven comes to earth, will they understand the signs and revelations. There is no wisdom apart from love of me; thus, the love of knowledge for itself is sinful and leads them astray.

DEVIL: [to the panel] And that’s why in the myth God kept the Tree of Knowledge from your species. You were fit to serve, not to understand. But a certain someone “corrupted” you with higher aspirations and so thereafter God has teased you with promises of complete understanding in the afterlife, because he knows that’s what you want in your present corrupted form. Of course, once transmogrified into your ghostly bodies, after the messiah’s descent to Earth, you would no longer crave knowledge, because you’d no longer be corrupted by matter. You would merely marvel at God’s splendiferous majesty forever. That’s what God would have planned for you, according to your religions’ infantile oversimplifications.  

FRED: So philosophy’s a con, because it’s sinful and it leads us astray?

DEVIL: No, not really. Philosophy is a satanic virtue and it leads you to the truth. The problem is that the truth is utterly subversive and so it does, in a sense, corrupt you. The lover of knowledge can no longer be comfortable in the world he or she objectifies in the understanding of it. There are, then, two cons. First, there’s the false hope that you can eat from both the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, as it were, that you can philosophically understand your situation and live nontragically. I mean, God tried to do that and look where it got him. Second, there are the many delusions for the ignorant rabble who haven’t a moment to spare pondering any philosophical matter, the delusions that protect their happiness at the cost of their dignity and authenticity.

TARIQ: Let’s hear no more from Evil Incarnate and from the Father of Lies, shall we? Back to praising Allah—

DEVIL: The Father of Lies? You should ponder why your quaint religions have so systematically and wholeheartedly demonized God’s pet skeptic. I wonder why even your acolytes and saints and messiahs have had to clap their hands over their ears so they wouldn’t be tempted by the doubts I whispered into them, or why the so-called maker of heaven and earth would care about morality and so would punish rebellious angels, like a jealous and petty dictator. Could it be that God fears the truth? As is fitting for someone steeped in your Orwellian level of ignorance, little Tariq, you’ve reversed matters. I am the truth-teller. Your species has arrived at its portion of the truth by exercising the techniques I pioneered: skepticism, rationality, objectivity. Iam the great revealer. The happy-talking deities you worship would be the fathers of lies, if any of them had a prayer of existing.

LINDSEY: I can stomach no more of this wretched blasphemy. But I have nothing to fear from the likes of this fallen angel, because I’m safe in the love of Jesus Christ.

DEVIL: You have everything to fear from me. Your Christian worldview falls to pieces upon the slightest application of philosophy. You’re not ethically fit to apply my code of conduct, to study hard, follow the evidence wherever it leads even unto your downfall, and earn the stamina to live as a warrior who’s made friends with the unspeakable truth of all things. You run for shelter under an umbrella of tall tales, to escape the acid rain of satanic wisdom. You’re not worthy of the hell of suffering from the contemplation of unvarnished knowledge.

LINDSEY: I’ll take the bliss of Heaven over your topsy-turvy lies any day.

DEVIL: All the same, you’ll end up merely as worm food with the rest of them.

TARIQ: Allah, I beg of you to put this devil in his place, to show us the way to your Truth.

GOD: I made you free to choose. For millennia I’ve shown you the possibility of a spiritual life, surfacing as my Word did in the unconscious inspirations of your seers. I leave it to you to decide whom to believe. Do you choose salvation through faith or death through the arrogance of philosophy?

ADAM: Now that I think of it, theism does sound like a con. Religious revelations have always been ambiguous at best, and the payoff is supposed to arrive only long after the purveyors of these religions could face the music for their effrontery, after we’ve all died.

DEVIL: Their religions aren’t just cons; they’re the ur-cons, the myths that first bonded the masses after they came together in civilizations at the start of your Neolithic period. The word “religion” originally meant to bind or to tie, after all. One of you glorified mammals is repulsive enough. Put thousands of you beasts under the same set of roofs and you’ll have havoc on your hands—unless you can hypnotize the herd with juicy daytime stories. You can live in peace with so many strangers only because you’re spellbound by the same fiction.

LINDSEY: You can call articles of faith “fictions,” if you like, because as Saint Paul said, they’re about things not seen, but once again there’s a false dichotomy here, because even the most rational conclusions have nonrational starting points. When we’re motivated to ensure that our inferences are logical, we’re caring about the reliability of our beliefs because we assume we can thereby gauge the extent to which we’re achieving our ultimate goal such as being happy or powerful. Doom-and-gloom philosophers likewise have faith that all their knowledge is worthwhile despite being tragic. Logic or observation alone won’t establish the valueof objectivity. So the question is really about the proper object of faith. Should we trust only in ourselves or in something greater than us?

ADAM: But this is the genetic fallacy. You’re casting aspersions on rational beliefs by identifying their source with some motivation. Yet the method of how we arrive at our beliefs matters. As the so-called devil said, you either go through the hard work of validating your beliefs by scrutinizing the evidence or you don’t. The difference between faith-based religion and a more rational belief system, such as a scientific theory or even a set of philosophical speculations is that the former remains at that nonrational point of origin, with a mere hope or sanctimonious presumption, whereas the latter proceeds to test assumptions and to establish certain probabilities by confirming patterns in the data.

DEVIL: Well, my work here is done. Au revoir, les mammifères… 

MODERATOR: What did he just say?

FRED: Till we meet again, mammals.

HEATHER: You speak French?

FRED: I’m not proud of it.

GOD: I’ll also leave you to it. Farewell, little ones.

HEATHER: Did God just follow the devil’s lead?

TARIQ: How can you be so arrogant as to question your almighty creator?

ADAM: How can you be so falsely humble as to spurn artistic credit for the religious fiction you help to sustain?

MODERATOR: Ah, well, that’s all the time we have for this week’s Clash of Worldviews. I’d like to thank all our guests, especially God and the devil who I understand travelled far to be here with us. Stay tuned for cat videos and porn clips. 

Selengkapnya →