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: The Meaning of Trumpism

MODERATOR: Good evening and welcome back to Clash of Worldviews, the show in which we try to get to the bottom of big issues. You may have heard that President-Elect Donald Trump is a charlatan and an ogre, and that Hillary Clinton is crooked and phony. But Trump’s election has cast doubt on so much of our conventional wisdom that we’re still wondering—as though lost in a wasteland—just what the true meaning of Trump’s election might be. To help answer that question, we’ve asked Adam Garnett, famed liberal humanist and Hillary Clinton supporter, and Fred Gulpa, a Donald Trump supporter and self-described member of the alt-right to be with us to discuss the matter. Gentlemen, who would like to begin? What is Trumpism all about? 

ADAM: In a word, Trump is about himself, while his supporters are about having a laugh at the country’s expense. They’re not downtrodden, these older white working class folks; they’re just venting because they’ve fared badly under globalization, they know the days of exclusive white power or imperialism are over, and they mean to take the country down with them. If they can’t rule any longer like they used to in the first half of the last century, they’re going to pollute the discourse with their vulgarity and send a bull into the china shop.

FRED: So “they’re not downtrodden,” but they’ve also “fared badly under globalization”? Which is it, I wonder? You see how the elites can’t even think straight? No wonder they were ripe for being humiliated by Trump and by the rise of the alt-right!

ADAM: I meant that these Trumpists have benefited from governmental support. They’re part of the middle class, but they’d like to blow up the social system, thus committing collective suicide by voting against their economic interest. Trump, in other words, isn’t an expression of revolt against the powers that be. Instead, he’s a rogue power, an agent of anarchy.

FRED: Keep telling yourself that, Adam! Keep patting yourself on the back. You’re one of the good guys, right? Not some useful idiot to plutocrats.

ADAM: And who are you, Freddy? What vile hate speech will you treat us to this evening? I can hardly wait to plug my ears.

FRED: Yeah, because you’re a feminized liberal who can’t stomach the naked truth. You think Trump’s supporters are all morons and only liberals have reason on their side. That’s where you’re wrong. Many of Trump’s voters aren’t highly educated, but that doesn’t make them stupid. Just look at what foolishness was wrought by Clinton’s neoliberal class of professionals: they’re the Ivy Leaguers but they got it all wrong. Their polls, their history lessons, their self-serving analyses were so many paper tigers squashed by the juggernaut Trump. You think Hillary Clinton deserved to win, because she was the more rational and responsible candidate. That’s what that euphemism was about: Trump supposedly lacked “the demeanor to be president.” But you know what Hillary Clinton lacked? An honest bone in her body. She couldn’t speak the unpopular truth to the public and she lost because hardly anyone trusted that she would change the United States for the better.

ADAM: And what will Trump do? Wave his magic wand and make American great again? Is that supposed to be some profound truth he told?

FRED: Trump doesn’t speak in fancy academic double-talk. I’ll grant you that. His language is seldom precise, but the essence of his diagnosis was highly negative and thus accurate. Trump’s view of America’s standing in the world is apocalyptic, as even the Democrats pointed out. Maybe Trump exaggerates for rhetorical effect, but his main point is that the United States isn’t doing well on the whole. That’s the truth that Hillary Clinton couldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, because she had to own Obama’s legacy. The public no longer respects the system, they were disappointed by Obama who ran falsely as a change candidate, and they wanted a leader from outside the corrupt establishment who would at least have a fighting chance of effecting radical change.

ADAM: Who is supposed to benefit from Trump’s administration? Surely you don’t mean the older blue collar whites who have been misled by Republicans for decades. Surely you’re aware that the Republicans have used social wedge issues to stir up animosities and compel these folks to vote against their economic interest. Surely you understand that trickle-down economics just further enriches the top one percent while everyone else falls further behind, that a smaller government with fewer taxes gets out of the way only of giant corporations which are already as powerful as some entire countries, but that the little guy may need government support if he’s going to survive globalization.

FRED: But he’s notgoing to survive globalization. Again, that’s the sort of dark truth you don’t want to hear. The system that maintains the economic status quo is rigged against him. That’s the system that Obama and Hillary defend as the technocratic managers they are. That’s the system we want Trump to destroy. 

ADAM: And your street smarts are supposed to enable you to divine the contents of Trump’s mind? When you psychically peer into its depths, how do you get past the boatload of mental disorders to discover his true intentions?

FRED: Oh, is Trump unfit to attend one of your dinner parties? Is he too coarse for polite company? And that would be the company of smug liberal professionals like you, the company of system managers and consumers who boast that they’re “progressive” when the system they’re upholding is impoverishing billions, enslaving or exterminating all nonhuman animal species, and destroying the planet.

ADAM: When did alt-right conservatives become tree-huggers?

FRED: I’m not opposed to eating meat. But I am disgusted with Big Agriculture. We should be upstanding men and women who earn what we have. If you want to eat meat, go out and hunt; be sustainable in your way of life. Don’t be a sissy who whines when you discover there are bad chemicals in the plastic-covered beef you buy at the supermarket.

ADAM: So now you want a sustainableway of life? What happened to Trump blowing up the system?

FRED: There’s no contradiction there: it’s the global system of crony capitalism that’s unsustainable, so it has to be destroyed to give us a chance to put something else in its place.

ADAM: And do you really think Trump will destroy the system that he admits to having gamed for decades to enrich himself?

FRED: I’m not a psychic or a prophet. I don’t know what Trump will do as president. But we’re not talking about Trump. We’re talking about Trumpism. The meaning of Trump is that he rose to power on a wave of resentment against the neoliberal social order.

ADAM: Resentment against social progress, you mean. Trump ascended thanks to a global backlash fuelled by churlish contempt for foreigners who threaten whites’ narcissistic, nationalist delusions of grandeur. You don’t want to share power with blacks, gays, or Muslims, so you empowered a regressive champion, like they’re doing in Europe.

FRED: Minorities and women have played the race card and identity politics for several decades now, but when white men stand up for themselves they’re being racists and misogynists? That’s a tiresome double standard.

ADAM: Yeah, it’s double because there are two things there. Blacks were literally slaves under whites, and women were oppressed in patriarchies around the world for millennia. White men benefited from those inequities, so now they’re not just “standing up for themselves”; they’re trying to reinstitute imperialist power structures.

FRED: Your beef then is with nature. You think we progress by departing from what’s natural, but that bit of liberal humanism is as delusional as belief in a sky-god with a white beard. Nature is filled with inequalities. Men aren’t the same as women, and races aren’t culturally or even biologically all the same. These are some more of those dark truths that terrify liberals.

ADAM: Races aren’t biologically the same, eh? So we’re back to the quackery that drove fascism in the Second World War?

FRED: Tell me, then, why wouldthe races be biologically the same? What would make them identical, overriding the genes that cause different skin colours, for example? You sound like Isaac Newton who assumed God must be holding the orbits in place, preventing planets from falling into the sun.

ADAM: Liberals don’t think races and sexes are identical. Obviously men and women have different physical characteristics, and blacks and whites, for example, have different skin colours. The point, rather, is that all people should be held in equal regard, the physical differences between them being irrelevant to their human rights.

FRED: That’s the liberal myth alright. But there are no human rights, you know. That’s a fiction we’ve been telling ourselves in the modern world, to replace the old religious stories that rationalized how we thought the world should be. You may prefer to treat men and women the same, but that civic religious dogma of yours is currently backfiring. When men treat women the same way they treat men, for example, that’s unromantic. Even if women are too politically correct or clouded by feminist platitudes to call metrosexual men on it, they won’t appreciate that sort of equal treatment. It’s boring and unsatisfying to them. That’s why their soap opera daydreams and romance novels tell a very different story. A woman wants a world to correspond to her fantasies in which a heroic man sweeps her off her feet.

ADAM: I’m pretty sure women have been clamouring also for equal pay for equal work.

FRED: Sure they have, because like children they don’t know what’s best for them. It’s in their best interest to be led by strong men. They may think they want to do men’s dirty work in business and politics and the like, and perhaps some women are exceptions and that’s what they truly want. But many feminists are lying to themselves and only pretending to be content with modernity. And I note again the shadiness of this talk of equality: the flip side of human rights is our domination of other species, which will lead to our downfall.

ADAM: Authoritarian men like Trump may prefer sheepish women, just as white bullies may presume that the white race has a manifest destiny to rule the planet while so-called inferior races are doomed to languish under the whip. But these are atrocious stereotypes, not dark empirical truths as you would have us believe.

FRED: They’re truer to nature than is your liberal humanistic happy-talk! You have to be blind and deaf in a bubble of political correctness to think the races are all the same. Think of races as breeds. We breed dogs or horses and we prize pure breeds, the ones that best display the characteristics of their type. A mutt, by contrast, is a dog with mixed blood and muddled traits that don’t allow it to excel in a particular environment. Natural selection works the same way, so when we interbreed as humans, we pollute our gene pool and lose the traits and skills required to excel or even to survive. 

ADAM: There’s just one problem with that bit of eugenics: natural selection doesn’t work the way same way on our species, because we’re not mere animals. Animals are slave to their programming, but people are self-aware and autonomous. That’s why blacks can be enslaved for generations, but an African-American can still be educated and can rise to become President of the United States. Likewise, a woman such as Hillary Clinton can study at Yale and Oxford and become as qualified as any man for that same position. As individuals we can defy our programming and our “blood,” and that’s the source of our equality: we have the equal potential to excel as free beings, liberated from the natural laws that rule over the animal kingdom. But your throwback rhetoric would have certain out-groups regress and be treated as animals so they can be conquered by a so-called exceptional class, by the “power elites.”

FRED: You establishment liberals need to listen more closely to the progressives you’ve ignored. Bernie Sanders and leftists such as Thomas Frank, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi recognize that there are power elites and plutocrats who run so-called democracies behind the scenes. I agree that humans have greater self-control than animals. But our freedom isn’t supernatural and it can be overcome by the environment. Look at what happened since the advent of Neolithic farming: we became sedentary and formed unequal, hierarchical societies—regardless of the culture or style of politics. Democracy is based on the assumption that voters have equal rights, but the ancient Greeks understood that democracies devolve, because demagogues arise, whip up mass resentments, and establish a tyranny of the majority. So instead of one from many, as it says on the American seal, we have inequality from equality. The clash between Democrats and Republicans this election cycle was between different economic classes vying for power, but because Trump is a far superior demagogue, he was able to energize his base and get them to vote for radical change. Despite Clinton’s superb self-control and intellectual heft, her voters were uninspired by her tired rhetoric. So where then was our vaunted equality? Our nonrational side got the better of us, and the more beastly class—the white older males and blue collar workers—took political power from the demoralized and decadent millennials and liberal professionals.

ADAM: So what’s your solution to this imperfect state of modern democracy? Elect the most egregious demagogue possible on a wing and a prayer that you just might be left standing after he hurls us all into the apocalypse?

FRED: You still don’t understand. The apocalypse is all around us; it’s been there since the beginning. It’s the state of nature. All human efforts are taken on a wing and prayer. We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re supernatural agents, free from natural processes so that we can forge our path in the wilderness. And being the hypocrites we are, we condemn out-groups who are likewise as deluded by their myths which are unfamiliar to us. You say the alt-right demonizes minorities and other groups, but Hillary Clinton was quick to demonize the alt-right as a “basket of deplorables.” Instead of exercising our autonomy and empathizing with others, we circle the wagons, applauding our tribe and howling at our opponents—just like a troop of monkeys. Instead of listening to what the alt-right is saying, liberals cherry-pick unflattering quotations from this or that website, and thus still don’t understand what the election was really about and why they lost to Trumpism.

ADAM: I know what the alt-right is about. It’s the Frankenstein monster created by the Republican establishment, including Fox News; it’s the set of wedge issues that kept the Republican base in line until the Great Recession unleashed the Tea Party which morphed into the birther movement, joining forces with a thousand conspiracy cliques on the internet, whether it be Alex Jones’ Infowars, the 911 Truthers, the pickup artists, the videogamers, and even the white supremacists. The alt-right is a form of conservatism that speaks to the underclass rather than to “the establishment” or to the wealthy managers of the Republican infrastructure. Instead of the neoliberal, globalist myths peddled by the New York Times and the like—the myths of the free market and of entrepreneurialism, upward mobility, and the need to get the government off our backs—you have the more vulgar myths that sprouted in the dark alleyways of the internet such as 4chan and Reddit.

FRED: Your analysis is incomplete, because the backlash against neoliberalism is global. The internet merely allows for freer communication. So we had Occupy Wall Street and then the Arab Spring, Brexit, the ascent of Putin, China, and Iran, and a rightwing insurgence across Europe. And now we have Trumpism. We use the internet to find the ideas that most interest us, but we mustn’t confuse the messenger with the message. The internet doesn’t cause hostility to free-market capitalism, globalization, and democracy; chat rooms and blogs, Facebook and Twitter merely bring that uprising to the fore. To understand Trumpism, you have to recognize the fault of liberalism, but you’re too invested in your myths to scrutinize them.

ADAM: You’re muddying the waters. Liberalism isn’t responsible for globalization, for so-called free-market economics, or for the libertarian frontier culture. Liberalism is just the modern faith that humans are obligated to be godlike, because we enlightened Westerners discovered that a nonhuman god is irrelevant and probably nonexistent. We’re free as individuals from the religious dogmas and traditions that oppressed the masses for most of our history. We have the right to self-determination, to find our own way to be happy as long as we don’t interfere with other people’s equal right to the same. The U.S. Declaration of Independence is a classic liberal document.

FRED: Sure, that’s where liberalism starts, in the ideal of self-determination, because the rational individual must take over for the old gods we’ve left behind. But the institutions of capitalism and democracy arise from that ideal. “Let the individual sellers and buyers select their prices and what to produce or purchase.” “Let the voters choose their political representatives.” We invest power in all of us, because we worship ourselves after the death of God. But look what happens to liberal economies and governments. Monopolies, oligopolies, and plutocracies emerge, and the wealthy exercise their unequal power to entrench their privileges, manipulating the laws to their advantage and going round and round the revolving door between the private and public sectors so that the majority falls far behind with stagnant wages and no political power. And when developing countries adopt the neoliberal Washington Consensus, we have a global competition and a race to the bottom for the sake of private profit, further hurting the chances of millions of Americans to “find their own way to be happy.”  

ADAM: But the irony here is appalling! The so-called Washington Consensus was established mainly by Republicans. Free market ideology grew out of right-wing, libertarian think-tanks.

FRED: Then how do you explain Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal or his repeal of Glass-Steagall?

ADAM: Clinton had to triangulate to outmaneuver the Republican-led congress.

FRED: No, that’s a pitiful excuse. The Clintons and other Democratic leaders are one with establishment Republicans in their neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just a name for the bipartisan consensus that’s based on the sacrosanct classic liberal ideal of individual freedom. Bill Clinton was indoctrinated into neoliberalism under Carroll Quigley at Georgetown University, subsequently influencing his wife and thus another leader of the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama adopted the cutthroat, careerist culture of neoliberalism at Harvard Law School and was further indoctrinated by the neoliberal establishment figures he had picked for some reason to fill out his economics cabinet (I’m referring to Jaimie Rubin, Geithner, and Summers). What do these Democratic leaders have in common? They’re fatalistic about the powers that be, so that these neoliberal Democrats conclude that only incremental, not radical social change is possible. They take a neutral, “scientific,” hands-off, “no-drama” perspective on world affairs, seeing themselves as mere technocratic managers, because the system is already in place and functioning as it should. The system in question is capitalistic and democratic: it spread from Britain in the Industrial Revolution to the United States and then to other parts of the world. Liberalism was almost defeated by Nazi and Soviet ideologies, but the West won out and the American way of life is supposed to stand now as the goal for all humanity, the United States being the indispensible, exceptional nation that can do no wrong. That’s what all the American power elites believe on both the left and the right. Except they’re wrong and there’s both domestic and foreign revolts against neoliberalism, that is, against the American forms of capitalism and democracy which enrich the few at the expense of the many and which even play out as stage-managed hoaxes. A 2014 study showed that America is plutocratic, not democratic, because most voters’ interests never get translated into public policy; their representatives heed the directives only of their wealthy donors and patrons.

ADAM: Well, allow me to introduce an alternative interpretation. Again, it’s rich hearing this radical progressivism from an extreme right-winger. This looks to me rather like a cynical act of rebranding. After Obama was elected, the Republicans tried being friendlier to minorities, to address the demographic realities which must be unsettling to proponents of the trusty Southern Strategy. But that didn’t work, because the Tea Party took over the Republican Party, casting out the moderates and leaving Republicans with Trump whose crudities can’t be papered over. So there’s a new strategy: excuse alt-right radicalism by blaming it on the left, by pretending Trump is just like Bernie Sanders.

FRED: Your academic labels are unhelpful since they have you looking at the trees so you can’t see the whole forest. Progressives and the alt-right do have something in common: they’re both radical! They’ve both been shut out of the mainstream American discourse, so now the corporate media are scrambling to find labels to box us in, to normalize and co-opt us, to shut down the revolution and protect their privileged positions. Trump was elected precisely because of his vulgarity, because out of all the nominees and candidates, he was seen to have by far the greatest chance of being a genuine outsider who will destroy the establishment, who will drain the swamp, as he put it. That was the aim of the voters who mattered most this election, to subvert the neoliberal social order, to embarrass the power elites but also to rollback globalization, free trade, and the culture of stifling political correctness.

ADAM: Good luck with all that! The most likely outcome of this revolt will be its signaling that America has already declined past the point of easy retrieval. Cynics are lashing out but they have no idea how to solve our real problems, so the election of Trump is a symptom, not a cure for our disordered culture. Trump will probably succeed only in humiliating all Americans. At least he’ll entertain us, the way the violinists kept playing as the Titanic sank.

FRED: And when progressives are evidently so demoralized that they speak of the end of American greatness, you know you’ve got them beat.

ADAM: I’m just observing that this rightwing backlash against globalization is futile, because the heroes you’re electing, whether in Britain or here in the U.S., are actually bumbling imbeciles or charlatans who can’t govern a child’s birthday party let alone a superpowerful nation. What happens when a horde of troglodytes storms the battlements? Does it create a shining new world order or is nature using that manifest barbarism to wipe us all out? Sorry, but a businessman with the early advantages Trump had, who went bankrupt several times and is now hiding his true net worth by not releasing his tax returns doesn’t inspire much confidence that even if he could run the country the way he ran his businesses, our fate would be in good hands. But don’t worry: when Trump wrecks our economy the way he wrecked his businesses, it will be the Democrats who pick up the pieces. And bless the short memory of troglodytes, since that will prevent them from feeling the shame they ought to feel for having disgraced themselves with this reckless course of action. Indeed, they’ll have disgraced themselves before their white male forebears who were the classic liberals of early modernity, who were ingenious and highly creative renaissance men. Donald Trump is no renaissance man.

MODERATOR: That will have to be the last word for now. I’d like to thank our guests for their stimulating exchange on the meaning of Trumpism. Tune in next for a reading of the tea leaves of Trump’s latest tweet. 

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Against Richard Carrier’s Case for Natural Morality

Richard Carrier is a prolific writer on ancient history, atheism, and naturalistic philosophy. I started reading him in the 1990s when he wrote articles for the early Secular Web. I especially enjoy his works on the ahistoricity of Jesus. However, his case for the reduction of morality to a kind of instrumentalism, for morality’s being “natural” and “scientific” because it’s a matter merely of learning how to get what we most want, is frustrating because it combines confusion with hubris. Still, various interesting issues crop up in his discussion, so a critique is in order.

By way of providing some background, I should say that there are three paramount theories in moral philosophy: deontology (we ought to do our duty, because the form of action is most important), consequentialism (we ought to act in the way that has the best results), and virtue ethics (we ought to be the best kind of person). Carrier thinks that although philosophers have been debating these theories for centuries, all three views are the same. They reduce to each other and what emerges is instrumentalism, a reduction of moral imperatives to “hypothetical” or conditional ones. So the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit murder” is clarified when we translate it into a conditional imperative that makes reference to the means needed to achieve a desire, such as “If you want to stay out of jail or have self-respect or avoid being killed in return (or insert some other desire here; generally it’s ‘If you want to be happy…’), then you shouldn’t kill an innocent person.” For me, the question whether the three leading moral theories are in conflict is a tempest in a teapot, since I think naturalism has more radical implications for morality, which I’ll come to in the last section below.

But let’s look closer at Carrier’s argument as it’s formulated in his blog’s article on why moral imperatives are a posteriori and natural, meaning why they’re empirical like all other purely factual statements. Carrier’s opponents are two kinds of moral realists who both maintain that moral statements are true or false as opposed to being, say, nonrational expressions of feelings. There’s the theist who trusts that morality is supernatural in that it derives from God, and then there’s the atheist who thinks morality is non-natural in the same way that qualia or normativity in general are, in that their elucidation is beyond the purview of scientific methods, but not beyond philosophical ones. Carrier is aghast because his brand of atheism gives no quarter to theism, and his secular humanism is progressive so he’s opposed to defeatism with respect to the mission to solve all mysteries in the world. Contrary to Nietzsche, the sky isn’t falling just because God, the traditional guarantor of morality, is fictitious; liberal values are secured by reason, not faith. And instead of declaring that some parts of the world are incomprehensible, we should be methodical in our naturalism: we should assume that everything is naturally explainable until proven otherwise. In particular, morality is both real and natural, Carrier says, because it’s about the possibility that some actions are better or worse at achieving our best desires. Those desires are the ones we care about most and the ones we would have were we presented with all the relevant information bearing on ourselves and the world, and were we to think logically about what we most want out of life.

What’s Natural?

Carrier pontificates about how this or that is obviously “natural” in that it’s a part of the scientifically-explainable universe. For example, social properties are just as natural as quarks and sodium, he says, since sociology reduces to physics via psychology, neurology, and chemistry. The greater complexity of social systems is no matter, since sodium is likewise ‘more complex than “just quarks in motion,” which is why sodium is different from uranium, for example, even though both are just “quarks in motion.”’  

There are at least two problems with this. First, although he grants that “brains interacting in social systems behave in ways that reflect the structure and behavior of the social system,” he doesn’t grasp that a scientific model has implicit meanings, or connotations, as well as explicit ones (denotations). It doesn’t matter if minds are nothing but brains, if the sets of symbols needed to explain the two orders are incommensurable. A social system may be metaphysically nothing but “atoms in motion,” but there is no sense of “motion” that explains both what atoms and societies do, without palpable equivocation. The word “motion” is defined differently in sociology and in physics. For example, a particle’s velocity is not like a political party’s motion to pass a bill. And reducibility applies to theories, not to the things to which the theories refer irrespective of how they may be understood using different languages or conceptual frameworks like sociology or physics. So denotatively or extensionally, that is with respect to the immediate reference of words, the meanings of “society” and “huge group of atoms” may be identical, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single, coherent set of concepts for explaining what societies and atoms do as seen from different orders of magnitude. Implicitly or intensionally, that is with respect to the words’ indirect meanings in virtue of their relation to background concepts, sociology isn’t reducible to physics, because the full meanings of the terms used to explain what happens in a society as such don’t translate into psychology or neurology or chemistry or physics. Only the extensions or the referents are assumed to be ultimately the same, regardless of our inability to explain without gaps how their identity manifests in the different levels of behaviour. The behaviours perceived from different vantage points, such as those of an appalled American voter witnessing her country’s cultural descent into madness, and of a blurry-eyed scientist staring at a computer screen at CERN, are not at all the same in that they’re not explainable by means of any single coherent set of symbols. You need at least two theoretical discourses to be able to predict what will happen at those levels of being. 

Does this mean we should reserve “natural” for our talk about the fundamental, physical level of the universe? Or should we empty “natural” of its content by saying that everything in the universe is natural as long as it’s “scientifically” explainable? The second problem here is that there’s no strict sense of “science” that applies to physics, biology, and the social sciences such as economics or sociology, let alone to both ancient and far future science. At best, there’s a loose sense of “rationality,” according to which these thinkers are “scientific” as long as they think logically about the evidence gathered from their senses. But this loose sense of scientific rationality wouldn’t rule out theological or conspiratorial positing of gods or aliens to explain certain data. After all, no philosophical rationalist who thinks that some statements are rationally justified “a priori,” or without appealing to the senses, thinks the senses have no bearing on logic. Even were we gifted with an innate rational faculty, the rules of reasoning would have evolved or been intelligently designed to help us in the perceivable, outer world; without a world in which to operate, logic would be useless. The paradigmatic instance of a priori reasoning is Descartes’ inference that even if his senses deceive him about the existence of an external world, he can be confident that his thoughts exist, since his doubts would be thoughts. And yet Descartes didn’t haphazardly arrive at that discovery, but conceived of it in a plan to build a cognitive foundation not just for theology but for the sciences which deal with that perceivable outer world.

The question, then, is how much weight to give to logic or to the senses. Theologians observe that there’s an external world and then they take off in reckless flights of fancy in making sense of that world, treating poetic myths as though they were science textbooks. Likewise, conspiracy theorists obsess over scant pieces of evidence, attempting to unify them in grand narratives based on only loose associations between them. You might doubt that those mental exercises are sufficiently empirical to be scientific. But recall that string theory is all the rage in physics, and that string theorists resort to math more than to observation. As Morris Kline explains in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, “there is not one body of mathematics but many…What then is mathematics if it is not a unique, rigorous, logical structure? It is a series of great intuitions carefully sifted, refined, and organized by the logic men are willing and able to apply at any time…It is a human construction and any attempt to find an absolute basis for it is probably doomed to failure.” In particular, mathematicians disagree about what constitutes proof and the acceptable principles of logic and axioms, as well as about the sense in which mathematical entities are supposed to exist (310-12). In short, mathematics has a problem with relativism, as do all other forms of reasoning in the postmodern age. So string theorists have their intuitions, which may be little more than gut-level convictions or articles of naturalistic faith, and theologians and conspiracy theorists have their opposing intuitions. Hurray, then! If string theory is scientific, it’s “logic,” “rationality,” and “science” all around!—as long as we’re willing to debase the meaning of those words to unify the worlds they deal with in some megaverse called “nature.” Indeed, physicists entertain the possibility that there are infinite universes regulated by infinite sets of laws. In what interesting sense would all of those universes be “natural”? If physicists can posit non-natural domains, using the most elite forms of reasoning, what’s the “naturalistic” basis for condemning theologians for relying on faith in their positing of heaven and hell?

There’s a better way to understand the difference between the natural and the non-natural. There are two senses of “natural,” the epistemological and the etiological. Epistemically, we can say as I’ve just gone over, that “nature” corresponds to that which is discovered using certain cognitive techniques. It’s then an open question whether, if two disciplines apply different methods of inquiry, they both deal with nature-in-the-epistemological-sense; the answer would depend on just how estranged are those methods from each other. (This kind of nature is often thought to be metaphysical, but the metaphysical notion reduces to the epistemological as soon as scientific methods are brought in to explain why, say, gods and ghosts don’t count as natural.) By contrast, according to the etiological sense of “nature” which Carrier has completely missed, something is natural if it has a certain kind of origin. Specifically, an event is natural if it’s produced entirely by an impersonal series of causes and effects. Naturalness in that sense is opposed to artificiality, that is, to events that originate from intelligent design or free choice, from leaps of faith or reflexive instincts, and in general from the cogitations of living things. Given this second sense of “natural,” morality is unnatural. Indeed, the impetus of Carrier’s case for the instrumental basis of morality presumes there’s only one relevant sense of “natural,” whereas there are two.

Carrier’s Naturalistic Fallacy

Carrier goes on to argue that morality is just a special case of normativity and that normativity is clearly natural since scientists themselves attempt to live up to standards. Says Carrier, “The sciences discover and prove normative propositions all the time: best practices in surgery, engineering, agriculture, and every other field, are all normative propositions about what we ought to do to achieve certain goals. They are empirically discovered and proved as securely as any other facts of the world.” Thus, just because something like morality is normative doesn’t make it unscientific or unnatural. Moreover, says Carrier, “We discover normative propositions, in all the practical sciences (like medicine and engineering) as well as in moral reasoning, by discovering what people desire (in the latter case, what they want out of life, the kind of person they want themselves to be, how they want the social system they must interact with to treat them, and so on) and by discovering what behaviors best obtain those desires (and by extension what habituated virtues will most reliably cause those behaviors).”

Carrier thinks, then, that the difference between a non-moral but normative imperative, such as “A surgeon ought to suture her patient after surgery, if the surgeon wants to save her patient’s life,” and a moral imperative, such as “A person shouldn’t steal if she wants to be happy,” has to do with their content, not with their form. As Carrier says,

Moral judgments operate exactly the same way as surgical judgments. The only difference in fact is that surgical judgments pertain to the goal of surgery, while moral judgments pertain to the goal of morality. 

Which means, once you identify the goal of morality, you are half way to discovering true moral facts. Just as once you identify the goal of surgery, you are half way to discovering true surgical facts. 

And since moral facts are by definition (by which I mean, the only definition of any use that corresponds to how nearly everyone uses these words in practice) “that which a person ought to do above all else,” you need to identify that which a person really would want above all else (if they were adequately informed of what’s relevantly true)… 

That’s morality. 

Everything else is false.

In his book, Sense and Goodness without God, in the section “The Goal Theory of Moral Value,” Carrier identifies the ultimate value that suffices for morality: “On close analysis, I believe there is only one core value: in agreement with Aristotle and Richard Taylor, I find this to be a desire for happiness. I believe that all other values are derived from this, in conjunction with other facts of the universe, and that all normative values are what they are because they must be held and acted upon in order for any human being to have the best chance of achieving a genuine, enduring happiness” (2.1.1).

As you can see, he speaks there more broadly of “normative values” as though these were the same as moral ones, which raises the question whether the surgical imperative, for example, is indirectly moral. If happiness is our ultimate goal, all other goals must be subordinate to it, so ultimately the surgeon who performs her job well, according to medical standards, would be acting also to fulfill the moral objective of being happy. If she doesn’t suture her patient, she may lose her job and perhaps then her home and her husband, in which case she’ll be unhappy. So this normative imperative would only directly be about surgery; indirectly, it would be about morality. And yet even that distinction is lost, because there’s no direct way to be happy. Happiness isn’t achievable by any particular act, because it’s an abstract goal that, as Aristotle says, requires us to evaluate the whole life of the person in question. We can lay down the imperative, “If you want to be happy, you ought not to steal,” but avoiding stealing won’t by itself make you happy. Likewise, we could say, “If you’re a surgeon and you want to be happy, you ought to suture your patient after surgery,” and carrying out that instrumental action wouldn’t make the surgeon happy. At best, both would be incremental ways of achieving that ultimate goal, but the same can be said about any other action, no matter how trivial: “If you want to be happy, you ought to turn off the TV when you’ve finished watching it.” “If you want to be happy, you ought to clip your toenails.” “If you want to be happy, you ought to flick away the eyelash that falls on your cheek.” As long as any action achieves some goal that helps you achieve the ultimate goal of being happy, that action would appear to be morally significant, according to Carrier’s analysis. And since there is no immediate way to achieve that ultimate goal, every conditional imperative must have moral force. That’s clearly not so, which means Carrier doesn’t tell us what morality is, after all.   

The problem, of course, is that Carrier wants moral statements to be true or false, which he thinks entails that those statements have to be factual. But factual statements are descriptive: they tell us what’s actually, possibly, probably, or necessarily the case. Moral statements are prescriptive: they tell us what ought to be the case. Those aren’t the same, so Carrier’s naturalistic take on morality is bound to fail: he commits the naturalistic fallacy of attempting to derive prescriptions from descriptions without adequate explanation. We can have our perfected science and be omniscient about all the mechanisms that obtain in nature, including all the facts of how human minds and social groups work, and we still could be clueless about what we ought to do in life. Just because you know everything about the actual world, doesn’t mean you know how to change that world for the better. Just because you know everything that’s naturally possible doesn’t mean you know which possibility to select as the ideal one. And just because you know what probably will or what must occur as a matter of natural law, doesn’t mean you know when to resist nature or how to recognize the beauty in tragic resistance.

A hypothetical imperative corresponds to a causal relation. The point is that the stated action directly or indirectly brings about the desired end as a matter of fact. If our desires were morally relevant, science and rationality generally could indeed inform us as to how to achieve those desires and thus how to be moral. But scientists have no business telling us what we ought to desire. They only observe and predict. Some people are psychopaths and can’t be convinced that murdering won’t make them happy. Others are melancholy and have no interest in happiness. Scientists as such could only study such individuals and write up reports about what they do desire. Such scientific studies and explanations wouldn’t make those individuals moral or immoral unless scientists could show that their subjects’ desires are morallyright or wrong. That can’t be done, though. At most, science can show that those individuals are abnormal as a matter of quantitative fact. But popularity isn’t a reliable indicator of morality or even in some cases of truth in general; indeed, it’s fallacious to think otherwise. In fact, most people are indifferent to morality, in that they follow their inclinations without reflecting on whether their behaviour is best. They feel good about themselves not because they’ve done their moral homework, but because they’re afraid to doubt themselves. And as Thomas Kuhn explained, science progresses by overturning normality in the case of conventional wisdom, by following the lead supplied by anomalous observations and subverting the paradigm with a radical new hypothesis. So perhaps the majority will one day tire of their craving for social interaction or for the happiness that’s fleeting at best, and will become Buddhists and live as quasi-sociopaths. Scientists will record the transition in human thinking and a future equivalent of Richard Carrier will have to defer to that majority and declare that the models of morally wise individuals are those who excel at antisocial and melancholic brooding. 

Let’s return to the present Carrier’s claim that sciences discover and prove normative statements all the time, just by having best practices. This is slippery. It’s like saying a Neanderthal discovered quantum mechanics just by picking up a rock in which quantum processes occurred. Likewise, scientists may have best practices, but that doesn’t mean their normative status is recognized or justified by employing scientific methods of inquiry. For example, that which makes for the excellence of certain practices in medicine obviously predates the modern science of medicine, since those practices which are considered best are prized because they satisfy the elementary desire to keep living in spite of ailments. Certainly, doctors learned how the body works, correcting their past misconceptions, but the normative status or the rightness of that learning doesn’t derive from logic or from the testing of hypotheses by paying careful attention to data. Those methods of rationality effect the changes in human affairs that are then evaluated as progressive, but the evaluation isn’t established by those methods. People want medical science to advance because our ideal world includes the scenario in which we’re healthy, and science can help achieve that goal, but the ideality of that possible world doesn’t originate from science. No scientist made an observation or an inference which then magically made health a standard worthy of pursuit.

Again, the sciences do have better and worse practices, and so they’re subject to normative evaluation, but the reason why some practices are better or worse doesn’t follow just from the content of any scientific explanation (unless that “scientific” explanation borders on a broader, philosophical argument). Scientists could make advances in their understanding of how to maintain a healthy body, but we might have been a carefree species, throwing health to the wind as soon as our children were raised or assigning the task of raising them to machines. In that case, our “advances” in medical knowledge wouldn’t be widely accepted as such. In this possible world, scientists could make their medical discoveries just the same, but the discoveries would lose their normative status were people at large indifferent to health (short of being suicidal). Alternatively, the positive evaluation of medical practices might have been reversed. Indeed, this re-evaluation has actually happened to some extent, as people in technologically advanced societies think more of quality rather than quantity of life and so frown on the doctor’s insistence of preserving human life under all circumstances.

Inviting the A Priori in through the Back Door

In fact, Carrier slips in a non-scientific and indeed an a priori source of normativity, when he adds the qualifier that morality depends on what we would desire were we adequately informed. Presumably, he adds this to account for immorality as a matter of ignorance. Many people have the wrong desires, which are ones that make them or others unhappy, but if only they were better informed about themselves and how the world works, they would adjust their values and increase the amount of happiness in the world. Unfortunately, this process of informing ourselves is endless. The notion that a pessimistic, antisocial, or melancholy person could be taught to desire happiness and thus to want to act efficiently to achieve that ultimate goal is as naïve as presuming that an Islamist terrorist could be taught to cherish American-style liberty or that a Wall Street banker could be led to convert to full-throated communism or that a diehard Star Wars fan could be supplied with data sufficient for her to switch her allegiance to Star Trek (or vice versa). Again, the fundamental problem is that all such matters of ideality are underdetermined by knowledge of the facts.Star Wars and Star Trek fans can be all-knowing with respect to both of those fictional universes and they might still argue for eternity about which of the fictions is superior. Moreover, no one can say which fact would or wouldn’t be relevant to the question of what we should ultimately value, so Carrier is leaving the door open for knowledge of allfacts in the universe. That knowledge is impossible, so his qualifier is counterfactual, which means it’s a priori. No one will ever stand at the end of the process of gathering knowledge of all the facts that are relevant to the question of what we ought to do in life. If we’re nevertheless to speculate about the result of that process, in a purely academic thought experiment, we must rely on our subjective resources; for example, we must use our imagination. Such a speculation isn’t based decisively on experience and so it’s largely a priori. Carrier’s case for the naturalness of morality is thus self-contradictory.

But without that subjunctive qualifier about what we would value if only we knew everything, Carrier’s instrumentalism would trivialize morality by entailing that all actual, possible, probable, or necessary desires are equally right. All that would matter for morality would be the capacity to satisfy your desire to one degree or another, depending on the extent of your knowledge of how the world works. Thus, a child who can’t open a cookie jar might be called “immoral” for failing to achieve her goal due to her lack of empirical knowledge, whereas any adult whose life runs smoothly, owing to her adequate knowledge of how to get what she wants most of the time, would be “moral.” In short, morality would be the same as efficiency. As long as your actions were rationally and otherwise effectively chosen to achieve your goals, you’d be as righteous as any saint. And there would be no reason to assume that the desire for happiness is the best desire, since there would be no known end of the process of acquiring the relevant knowledge or any need for that process in the first place, without Carrier’s qualifier. So there would be no evaluation of anyone’s goals themselves, and so murderous psychopaths could be as “moral,” that is, as instrumentally efficient as nurses or firemen as long as they all know what they’re doing.

Suppose Carrier says there’s no need for an absolute closure of the rational enterprise of discovering all the relevant facts; the process has gone on long enough, and we’ve already learned that the desire for happiness is best. Remember that this wild judgment would differ from the sensible one that the desire for happiness is normal, that most people would say if asked, that they want to be happy. The latter judgment is empirical and could be proven by rigorous polling and scientific studies. The former judgment is utterly non-empirical. Thus, the declaration that some stage in the process of thinking carefully about the facts enables us to discover our ultimate purpose is arbitrary. The choice of our ideals is underdetermined by empirical evidence, so it doesn’t matter where we are with respect to understanding how the world works; we could still be stumped as to how best to respond to that world.

Far from appreciating this problem, Carrier writes, “Nor can we know a priori what they would want when given more information (about themselves and the world).” On the contrary, that prediction must be a priori, because it’s counterfactual and thus it speaks to a fictional possibility which obviously can’t be understood solely by observing the nonfictional world. We can speak of probabilities based on our limited experience, but our prediction of what someone would want if well informed transcends that experience—just as all so-called a posteriori judgments over-generalize from a strictly empiricist, Humean perspective. The a posteriori procedure of generalizing based just on observations of particular instances has never once been realized in humans. That was the essence of Kant’s reply to Hume. When interpreting data, we always rely on our innate ability to model the world and on our background concepts which lend our thoughts their connotative meanings. True, scientific institutions minimize that subjectivity by objectively testing hypotheses, but they replace subjectivity with what Kuhn called the bias of “normal science,” the institutional inertia that prejudices complacent professionals until a cognitive revolution makes their resistance futile. So the dispute about whether moral judgments are a priori or a posteriori is another tempest in a teapot. If the question is just whether moral judgments are empirical, which is to say adequately fact-based to be useful in a real-world application, there is no dispute since no one thinks morality has nothing to do with the outer reality that we perceive with our senses. Even the theists who say faith is more important than reason would disagree only with some naturalists' view that reality is constrained by the extent of scientific methods of investigation.

The Distraction of Happiness

In any case, it’s dubious specifically for a naturalist to think that happiness is the ultimate goal. The ancient Greek concept of happiness was anthropocentric. Happiness for the likes of Hesiod, Homer and Aristotle was a kind of harmony, beauty, and justice which align us with similar qualities found at the cosmic scale. Thus, happiness was achieved by acting virtuously or moderately, avoiding extremes. Like the Daoist who recommends that we go with the flow of nature’s way, the ancient Greek presumed that the natural order is ideal because order is better than the alternative of chaos, and so we ought to pursue happiness because that’s our function as rational creatures in the greater order of things. (For more on the roles of order and chaos in Hellenic culture, see Luc Ferry’s The Wisdom of the Myths.) That dichotomy between order and chaos is childishly human-centered. The unstated reasoning is that chaos is bad, because it makes human life impossible, but we like ourselves, so the world whose order is a precondition of our existence must be as great as us. Of course, we now know that that distinction is also gratuitous. Chaos abounds in nature, as does quantum weirdness which in no respect harmonizes with our intuitions; thus, the harmony, beauty, and justice we secularists might think we discern in natural events are mere philosophical projections that substitute for the more naïve theistic ones. Nature is almost everywhere a profoundly impersonal place. As such, overextending parochial metaphors by calling natural order harmonious, beautiful, or just is as preposterous as ignoring the anomalousness of human activities and reducing them to nothing but particles in motion. And if nature isn’t ideally harmonious, the ancient Greek underpinning of the West’s obsession with happiness is lost. Why follow nature if nature isn’t ideal by our lights?

There’s also a political reason to doubt that moral rightness consists in trying to be happy. Happiness is the overall contentment with your life’s course, but that contentment could be similar to religion in the Marxian respect; that is, the feeling of happiness might be an opiate that dulls the masses’ critical faculties and distracts us from economic and other material injustices. The science of Western medicine, for example, is currently in league with giant pharmaceutical companies dedicated to making people happy in precisely Carrier’s denuded, instrumental sense. Without ever explicitly second-guessing our actual interests, but while subtly steering them in materialistic directions via relentless ad campaigns, drug companies supply us with efficient means for us to get what we want. Are you depressed? Take this drug and feel better. Urinate too often? Here, buy this pill and be happier. Our contentment occurs, however, within politically acceptable boundaries. As long as we focus narrowly on our self-interest, for the sake of the “free market,” and eschew anticapitalistic or antiplutocratic ideals, we fulfill our function as dupes and drones while the upper class that receives a vastly disproportionate share of this system’s profits, especially in the hyper-individualistic United States, pursues something quite different from the beta person’s contentment. The top one percent of multimillionaires and billionaires isn’t interested in moderation or mere satisfaction for themselves. Typically striving with sociopathic indifference to the plight of those haplessly caught in their schemes for global domination, the cynical power elites who have some direct control over the materialistic culture that perpetuates the no-questions-asked, instrumental interpretation of happiness in the West are busy living as gods who’ve abandoned morality in toto. Like the laws which the wealthy can bypass or have rewritten to their benefit, the very notion of moral restraint is anathema to those brave few who have almost no terrestrial barriers and so can genuinely do whatever they will.

Indeed, the hidden implication of the West’s fixation on individual happiness is that this entire culture is literally satanic in the Crowleyan respect. “‘Do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the Law,” reads an infamous passage of the Satanic Bible. But only those who are wealthy or otherwise powerful enough to despoil and murder with impunity can be perfectly instrumental, since a whimsical ambition need merely pop into an oligarch’s head and he or she can move heaven and earth to achieve it. This is how Taylor Swift became famous, for example; her wealthy parents bought her stardom. The rest of us are forced to prioritize, to shortchange some of our desires so that we fail in our Rabelaisian task of honouring our freedom by simply doing whatever we want. Happiness for the hindered majority is conventionally regarded as consisting in contentment with our relatively pitiful lot in life. We’re supposed to understand now that there’s nothing specific that all of us should do, no universal human mission, since values and ideals are subjective. There’s nothing more to having a moral purpose than having a desire, and since our desires differ due to many factors, there’s not one moral imperative for all but a plethora of such imperatives. We’re bound to come into conflict, then, just as the rest of the world naturally throws up obstacles before us which few can fully overcome. Again, for most of us, to say that the search for happiness is life’s meaning is to say that we must reconcile ourselves to that disappointing state of affairs and learn to appreciate our small triumphs. As for the glorious minority who are undeterred by any impediment, their purpose is the satanic one of the pure instrumentalist who thinks the evaluation of ultimate goals is irrational or pointless, and so all that matters is being efficient in tailoring means to ends. That esoteric purpose is to fully express every little thought of theirs that strikes their fancy, to celebrate their freedom by doing precisely whatever they want. Power corrupts, after all.

The ambiguity of “happiness” surfaces in Carrier’s definition of the word in Sense and Goodness: “By happiness, I do not mean mere momentary pleasure or joy, but an abiding contentment, a persistent, underlying sense of reverie that makes life itself worth living...” Carrier then quotes David Myers as saying, ‘real happiness means “fulfillment, well-being, and enduring personal joy”’ (2.1.2). But what does contentment have to do with reverie? If you’re content with your life, you’re not likely to attempt to escape from it to a daydream. Likewise, if you’re merely content, well, and satisfied, you’re not yet in a position to feel joy. Joy is great delight or keen pleasure which surpasses contentment. The explanation for these confusions is that, politically speaking, there are two standards of happiness, one of contentment for the moderate, hamstrung masses who can’t afford to be happy in the higher sense that allows for reverie and joy in the satanic, boundless expression of freedom. The members of the hedonistic and enterprising upper class must be encouraged to daydream, not only because they have the luxury of much free time, but because their wealth equips them for the Herculean task of moving mountains to make their dreams realities.

You might be thinking that Carrier has an obvious rejoinder: there’s no Satanism or raw instrumentalism at issue, because a liberal secular humanist who thinks morality is a matter of learning how to be happy can appeal to Mill’s dictum that we should each pursue our self-interest as long as we don’t interfere with each other’s right to pursue theirs. This variant of the Golden Rule assumes we all have an equal right to attempt to reap the benefits of a good life. There would, then, be two problems with Carrier’s use of this principle. First, Mill’s point is consistent with the Kantian one that we’re special because of our autonomy and our creativity, which imply that we impose an artificial world order onto nature. Moral deeds would be etiologically unnatural, indeed precisely anti-natural, contrary to Carrier’s heavy-handed naturalism.

Carrier would need a reason why we should respect each other’s attempts to be happy, even though we’re all really just atoms in motion like everything else. Scientists objectify whatever they study, whereas the Golden Rule assumes that the source of morality is an inviolable subjectivity in each of us, a godlike power to reshape the prehuman landscape to suit our often outlandish ideals. One reason Carrier might turn to is that when we harm others, we impede our efforts to be happy, because our conscience will provide painful reminders that we’ve done wrong, for example. Clearly, the conscience does function in this way for most people. However, we also have a penchant for rationalizing our misdeeds, to reframe the facts so as to minimize our cognitive dissonance. So even those who aren’t psychopaths, who have the capacities for empathy and remorse, often presuppose that their happiness matters more than most other people’s. If such commonplace selfishness is immoral, Carrier’s instrumentalism doesn’t explain why that’s so. On his account, morality is the attempt to be happy, by learning which actions best fulfill your mediate and ultimate desires. Ifit turns out that the possibility of harming someone will provide you only with short-term gain but long-term unhappiness, because your conscience will bother you, you might well calculate that the action isn’t worthwhile from the perspective purely of self-interest. But if you can reinterpret the possibilities to get around your conscience, bringing to bear your powers of rationalization and confabulation, you’ll have no such reason to resist that temptation to harm someone else to benefit yourself.

Second, it’s easy to see, on the contrary, that we’re not nearly as equal as Mill’s liberal dictum assumes. The most glaring instance is the class divide between the very wealthy and the masses of poor in the United States and most other countries. Take Donald Trump and a homeless man, for example. Both are biologically and physically similar, but socially they’re vastly different. Trump has billions of dollars, the homeless man has pennies. That wealth inequality is part of what Richard Dawkins might call their extended phenotypes, that is, their external, non-biological bodies. Trump’s wealth allows him to luxuriate in many enormous homes, to fly to any part of the world at a moment’s notice on his private jet, or to take over one of the two official political parties in the world’s most powerful nation. The homeless man is lucky if he can guilt-trip enough people in a day to fund his effort to eke out a coffee and a McDonald’s hamburger. In many ways that count, the two individuals aren’t remotely equal. If squashing that homeless man—or by extension the majority of Americans—is somehow in Trump’s personal best interest, why should he refrain from doing so, given just the instrumental take on morality plus Mill’s Golden Rule? The latter rule is nullified by the overwhelming inequality, so that all that matters to morality, for Carrier, is the instrumental relations between means and the end of personal happiness. If dominating underlings is in an autocrat’s best interest, if that’s what he thinks of as the greatest success and the autocrat flourishes on that basis, Carrier must congratulate him for being a moral paragon. In that case morality has been redefined as satanic (egoistic) ruthlessness, to excuse the extent to which American-style pseudocapitalism has warped the Western psyche. 

Again, as a matter of fact, the wealthy do see themselves not just as different from the poor but as superior, and the poor agree because they’d desperately like to be rich. With respect to our capacity to take action to achieve our aims, our extended phenotypes—our material possessions, financial and other resources, social networks and pedigrees—are just as relevant as our biological bodies (and specifically our brains). True, wealth is no guarantor of happiness and our expectations adjust to our circumstances so that a poor person might conceivably feel more content than a rich one. But most people would rather be a sad rich guy than a happy bum. Mill’s dictum, therefore, has no universal application once we shake off the modern humanist’s myths and attend to the real social differences between us. At best, Mill’s principle might be relativized so that it applies only to those who are actually equal to you in the relevant ways. A billionaire’s narcissism might not be able to overcome the logic that one billionaire’s happiness can’t matter more than that of other billionaires, but the wealthy would be free to prioritize their interests over those of the much less powerful masses, without any fear of violating some reasonable liberal principle of morality. 

Morality is having the Good Taste to Defy Nature

So much for Carrier’s argument. I’ve said, though, that morality is etiologically unnatural. What, then, is the root of morality’s anomalousness which leads Carrier’s secular opponents to compare it to qualia? Everything we do is similarly unnatural, which means just that nature-as-wilderness can be usefully distinguished from any artificial world. This doesn’t mean we have to be Cartesian dualists, but we should appreciate the logical gaps between explanations of impersonal nature and those of what happens in personal, social, and even some animal domains. Kant was right when he said that morality is opposed to “inclinations” and thus to the natural world. We’re at our most moral when we think our action is right regardless of whether we want to act that way or whether we approve of the action's likely results. Morality depends on freedom from the biological cycles that would confine us to reacting to stimuli or to expressing our genetic, bodily potential. But I don’t follow Kant’s interpretation of morality as being just about rationally self-directing our behaviour, and thus about following the laws that distinguish what I’ve been calling the artificial world we create, from nature.

The deeper reason for morality as well as for artificiality in general is that living things are appalled by nature’s monstrousness. In so far as we react with indignation to the chaos and indifference and unfairness in nature, to the sheer horror of the struggles fought throughout the animal kingdom and of the galactic rearrangements that both create and remove the conditions for life to emerge and to thrive, we may still be acting from the instinct to endure. In that respect, nature would be at war with itself: natural forces would come together to create living things that set themselves apart from the wilderness, counter-creating an artificial territory that displaces their pristine, mindless habitat. As Keith Stanovich says in The Robot’s Rebellion, the genes put us on a “long leash,” allowing us the freedom even to bite the hand that feeds us. This kind of antinatural creativity that occurs especially when animals modify their environment to their advantage is likely an evolutionary stage in a war of attrition that makes for highly specialized adaptations. Proto-giraffes evolved long necks which allowed their descendants to beat their competitors and thrive by reaching higher and higher leaves. And proto-humans evolved the ability to rationally control their minds, which allowed us to thrive by extinguishing or enslaving our competitors and by redesigning the entire playing field, bulldozing forests and mountains, building bridges and dams and concrete cities, and even tinkering with our genetic makeup. Often, then, our antinatural activities are part of an evolutionary long con: we think we’re free and independent, but really we’re just spreading our genes in a new way that will eventually be replaced by some posthuman way of life.

However, we begin to act out of moral obligation rather than just instinct or inclination when we appreciate the aesthetic need rather than just the empirical reason for an artificial world to replace the wilderness. Reason is an exaptation and science is its ultimate byproduct. We exercise instrumental reason when we understand our actions as the means to satisfy our desires, including our desire to flourish. That latter desire may be an instinct that makes us stooges in a drama run by a headless director. But when we stand back and perceive the hideousness of a natural order founded not on a heroic, Olympian struggle against chaos, as the ancient Greeks felt, but on quantum weirdness; when we detach ourselves from practical reason and scrutinize the facts as we experience them from the aesthetic stance, ignoring their utility and evaluating whether nature as a whole is a comforting or an eerily inhospitable place; in short, when we ponder our existential situation and suffer the angst and alienation that generate our aesthetic condemnation of the world, we act against the cosmos out of a tragic recognition that even though we’re often pawns, our defiance is noble.

We’re pawns that know we’re such and so we needn’t indulge in Enlightenment metanarratives like Kant’s or Carrier’s. We’re pawns that can rewrite the rules and build another game board; moreover, we can do this not just because our terrestrial game board still rests atop the larger, natural one, as it were, but because our effort has aesthetic value even though its results will ultimately be negated by the encroaching wilderness. When we take a stand against nature’s inhumanity, as opposed to pretending that our values are so great they’re somehow universal, we rise on behalf of all living things. Yes, that’s rich coming from the most lethal species that’s emerged on earth. But our barbarous slaughter of other species is typically due to our natural inclinations. We destroy the ecosystem not because we’re acting with aesthetic detachment and existential appreciation for life’s tragedy, but because we selfishly want to thrive even at the expense of all other creatures. Thus, human savagery is attributable to nature’s mindlessness: our genes implant us with the aptitude for narrow-minded, Machiavellian reasoning as well as with the urge to survive at all costs. We thereby indirectly destroy ourselves in so far as we’re puppets in nature’s war against itself. By contrast, as aesthetic critics and existential artists, we would seek to preserve the stage that sustains the moral resistance against nature’s ghastliness. Moreover, we’d sympathize with the plight of all creatures plunged into the Potemkin paradise that swirls in the greater void.

This aesthetic creativity is all that’s left of morality after the postmodern erosion of ancient and modern myths. Instead of deferring to blinkered or corrupted priests, cult leaders, or condescending secular authorities, we should each appreciate what’s at stake in life at the existential level. Moral persons are called by their muse to know exactly where and what they are, and to do something honourable with that knowledge. We shouldn’t surrender our autonomy, whether to religious delusions about autocrats in the heavens or to substitute ideologies espoused by politically correct New Atheists like Richard Carrier whose harangues about happiness help maintain outrageous economic inequalities that are our versions of primitive dominance hierarchies. We shouldn’t be content with a technocrat’s narrow conception of normative evaluation, according to which the worthiness of most values depends on their efficiency in achieving some ultimate end, and the worth of that end isn’t explained but fallaciously reduced to its normality. And we should make the best of the horror that ought to follow from philosophical naturalism. We’re moral rather than just socially normal or legally protected or immune to reprisal thanks to our oligarchic dominance, when we act out of distaste for the grotesqueries that could arise only in an abominable universe that mindlessly creates and destroys itself.

Needless to say, this account of the basis of postmodern, naturalistic morality inverts Carrier’s. For him, we’re moral when we’re happy, which is when we’re able to do what we most want. True, most of us want to be happy. But contentment in the teeth of our existential predicament is an appalling breach of our existential responsibility. When we’re content with our meager achievements as these are credited in some myopic and self-destructive neoliberal scheme, ignoring the nightmares and the holocausts all around us, we’re not fulfilling our moral obligation. On the contrary, we’re showing ourselves to be self-centered and uninspired. Great art is usually drawn from great suffering. This is demonstrated by the fact that moving, original art is produced usually when the artist is still languishing in obscurity before achieving fame later in life or after death; the more success she has in her artistic endeavours, the more self-indulgent they become. We must pass through the inferno of existential pain before we can take a worthy leap of faith in carrying out some dignified, albeit doomed artistic project such as the creation of a worthy human life. Rather than being egoistically fixated on the urge to satisfy our puny desires that are often sustained by delusions, we should realize that such contentment is shameful and we should long to feel possessed by a daemonic muse that guides our use of natural resources for the sake of artistic greatness. We shouldn’t do what we most want; instead, we should go to war against our monstrous foe. There’s no sane joy in war. War is a sorrowful labour of last resort. We’d prefer to be happy in an ideal world in which we could feel content, without our self-centeredness being a total disgrace. But we don’t live in a real paradise. We live in an indifferent world in which the intelligence behind our design is an illusion. Mother Nature has already declared war on all living things from the moment they emerged. She’s set us at war with each other and with her zombified appendages that periodically slam into us in the form of natural disasters. To think that our ultimate purpose is for our worldly successes to be rewarded with our feelings of complacency is to lose all existential perspective and to surrender to the enemy.       

And this sketch explains, too, why far from being widespread, as in Carrier’s reductive argument, true morality is rare. Whereas Carrier’s account implies that all our actions are indirectly moral in so far as they help make us happy, most people, as I said above, are indifferent to morality. They’re content with the law’s regulating of society, and they assume morality is just an academic subject for dusty old philosophers. Most people would never call a convicted murderer merely “immoral,” since they would assume that that’s an understatement. True, the theistic masses believe their society’s laws derive from divine commandments and that they’re soldiers in a spiritual war between forces of Good and Evil. But they don’t think of spiritual righteousness and demonic rebellion as having much to do with morality. They presuppose that we should follow the Ten Commandments, not because we ought to do what God says, but because God is all-powerful and will reward or punish us depending on whether or not we obey him. This is just the theistic version of the self-centered dupe’s instrumental reasoning that takes for granted our instinct to care mostly about our paltry welfare. So-called divine commandments are always implicitly conditional imperatives that promise eternal happiness or suffering. So religious “morality” is about siding with the so-called greatest power and about rationalizing the inequities that spring from the institutions that depend on such mass gullibility.

In our daily life, most of us are much more concerned with obeying or with bending the law than with whether we’re fulfilling our highest calling. This is partly because proper morality is a philosophical subject, and thanks to its institutionalization, Western philosophy is unpopular. But it’s also because morality is hard. It takes uncanny willpower to stomach the travesties and catastrophes that motivate us to act out of righteous indignation. We don’t often care about morality, because we prefer to be playthings of natural processes than to ascetically detach ourselves even from our animal cravings. We prefer to keep our head down, follow the majority and be normal so that we need exert effort only in calculating the most rational means to satisfy our natural desire to feel good about ourselves on the whole. We don’t want to face the startling fact that all living things are etiologically unnatural in so far as their minds alter their environments and themselves. We don’t want to confront the truth that the abyss between our speck of a planet on which life teems and the astronomically vast universe in which life is vanishingly rare draws us into a tragic conflict with our mindless maker. We’d rather our best actions were fuelled by something other than horror and a feel for the absurd and the tragic. That’s because we are primarily animals, lesser artists, and dupes on long leashes. The desire for happiness is merely normal, as is our cowardice in the face of our only remaining moral obligation. Morality, that is, the grim, knowing commitment to war on nature’s hideousness, is as rare among living things as the latter are in the universe that contributes to the aesthetic worth of our acts of defiance by making them dreadfully for naught.

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