Guest post: There can be nothing new that is not of the devil
Originally a comment by Papito on “Morality” sounds better than “submit or else.”
I was idly contemplating these themes this morning as I walked down to the greengrocer for limes. I passed by the house of one of my daughter’s friends, whose parents had pulled her out of her very progressive school for a more traditional school that didn’t impress me very much, with the goal of later attending a school my son found utterly dehumanizing. I like the girl, and her parents as well, but why they would make such a choice didn’t really compute for me until I remembered that they are practicing Catholics (as opposed to cultural Catholics or recovering Catholics, no offense intended please). The doctrine of Catholicism (and most other varieties of Christianity) differs very much from the ethos of humanism in that it’s a zero-sum game. The roles of people, and the possible outcomes of people, have already been determined. What is a sin, and how one may be forgiven for it, is already written. In a sense, the only free will people have is to either comply or not comply with the rules laid down by God. For humanists, or secularists, the game is open-ended: we create the world, and what the world may become is yet undetermined. We have the freedom to determine who we will become and what that will mean. Education is, for the progressive, about the student creating herself, and possibly becoming something entirely new. For the traditional, it is about the student being trained to comply with a limited set of rules and roles. Freedom means something entirely different in the two cases.
To bring this back to Barr, we can understand how this man can violate every ethical guideline for his professional behavior, and yet believe that he is the one standing for morality, if we consider that he is constitutionally unable to understand human freedom. For a man like him, any deviation from his set of assumed strictures on human behavior must be considered sinful. There can be nothing new that is not of the devil. He seeks the ultimate end of Republicanism in an imperial presidency so that sinful people will not be allowed to determine their future collectively, but will instead be forced to return to the past. Domination and punishment are good for the souls of children and countries alike.
Excellent analysis, Papito. It fits with most of the fundamentalists I know (which includes nearly my entire family). What is even odder to me is that they scream loudly about democracy, but what they mean by democracy is not what we mean, it means for them that they get to determine how the government runs, and tell their neighbors how the cow ate the cabbage (to use an archaic phrase my mother frequently deployed).
Norman Mailer wrote somewhere that in his opinion the default political state of humanity is fascism. (NB: He was not in favour of fascism.)
Donald Trump would arguably favour an absolute monarchy, with himself naturally as Sun King. Or else Fuhrer. But I do think that Mailer had a point. The default state I would argue is feudalism, or feudal-type hierarchy; with most people having a station in it, knowing it, and being persuaded that it is natural, divinely appointed and alterable only for the worse. And as Churchill said, representative government is the least-worst system ever devised.
Trouble is, people are free to game the system and build themselves political careers on the basis of it. Perhaps those decision-makers in the parliaments, senates and congresses of whatever kind would be better appointed in the manner of those other decision-makers we call jurors: by lot.
Hanging around court houses buttonholing all and sundry for help starting a full-time career as a juror would at the bare minimum get the candidate escorted off the premises, or arrested.
Yet doing so for a parliament or whatever is perfectly OK. And so, power-seekers get preferment.
I much liked both Papito’s comment and iknklast’s comment to which it was a response. I think that what interests me about the faithful, particularly the Catholic faithful, is their assumption that ‘morality’ is a matter of falling verbally expressed rules that have been made by some omniscient & omnipotent being and therefore have authority (there is the link between ‘morality’ – of a kind – and hierarchy whose existence one commenter questioned elsewhere), and does not derive from the natural instincts of the social animals we are; how parochial this assumption of theirs is. Here’s Leszek Kolakowski, whose ‘Main Currents of Marxism’ I greatly admire, speaking in one his essays in dotage: ‘a world that has forgotten God has forgotten the very distinction between good and evil and has made human life meaningless, sunk into nihilism.’ And: ‘We try to assert our modernity but escape from its effects by various intellectual devices, in order to convince ourselves that meaning can be restored or recovered apart from the traditional religious legacy of mankind…’. But this ‘traditional religious legacy’ is certainly not that of ‘mankind’. It ‘belongs’ only to one of many traditions, a very powerful one because of its technological and colonising successes; and because it breaks the necessary link between natural feeling and moral ‘law’, I think it pernicious. It has much to do with the righteously punitive nature of what one might call AngloSaxondom (Britain’s prisons are not much better than those of the US, if at all).
I have often received the impression from my Catholic acquaintances that morality is a sort of deductive system. ‘Should I or should I not torture this child in these circumstances?’ Back to first principles, then click, click, click through a chain of deductive reasoning to the answer: ‘Yes, I should.’ Or ‘No, I shouldn’t.’ And never a thought for the natural feeling, ‘I don’t want to torture children; the mere idea of torturing a child disgusts me.’
It is of course not only Christianity that leads to this kind of thinking. Notably, Communism did, and Naziiism did, and in his book ‘The Great Transformation’, Karl Polanyi speaks of how the British ruling classes steeled themselves with science so that they could happily dismiss the sufferings of the working classes and theIrish peasantry.
There is more truly ethical thinking, and understanding of what morality is, in the works of Meng Tse & Aristotle than in the received ideas of such as Bill Barr. Living in a non-Christian country, as I have done for nearly 50 years, helps one to realise how irredeemably parochial fundamental Christian ideas about morality are.
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Should read: ‘a matter of FOLLOWING verbally expressed rules’.
I think you’re quite right, Tim, to establish “natural feeling” as a counterpoint to religious doctrine. My wife, who was raised Christian, once told me that I was one of the most persistently moral people she’d ever met. I was raised as an atheist. My morality comes from the simple recognition that other people are people too. Empathy is the basis of it all. You shouldn’t mistreat other people because how would you feel if you were in their shoes? That is what you call “natural feeling.”
I’ve had so many encounters with Christians over the years, not all of them pleasant. I’ve had the little boy next door tell me “Mah momma says Ah cain’t play with you, cuz yore gointa HAY-ULL!” I have seen boys sent to school with the instruction from their fathers to beat us up because we weren’t Christians. I have seen a burning cross.
I have also encountered ugly religious doctrine up close. When I was a kid, a school bus with toys hanging from the roof would drive around the neighborhood picking up strays with the promises of candy and toys for attending their church. The brimstone screamed from the pulpit was more horrifying than the candy was sweet. When I had troubles in the public school, my mother sent me to Catholic school for two years. I met the meanest adults I’d ever come across in my classes, hitting me with yardsticks and open hands, and theorized that celibacy made a person go sour. I learned that the secret sauce of a lifetime of shame is telling children the Devil is in them. A child may escape cruel parents when he grows up, but God is less easily left behind once firmly implanted, because a childhood spent in internal struggle with Evil leaves deeper wounds.
The goal of this education seemed to be to separate a child from his “natural feeling,” and to substitute the celestial struggle between God and the Devil in its place. If successful, doctrine supplants empathy as the basis of morality. Once a person is successfully separated from his empathy, however, doctrine can be twisted to any end. This is how you get to what I think of as “lawyering” the doctrine. One can come to the conclusion that it is moral to beat a young boy because he appears gay and homosexuality is against the Bible. One can lawyer the doctrine to further conclusions unmentionable. And one can always receive forgiveness from the Church if one promises to follow the Church again.
I wonder if part of why Christians find the idea of morality without God impossible is that they cannot contemplate empathy as the basis of morality without falling into an abyss of horror at their own past actions. God offers forgiveness that can soothe remembrance.
Thank you, Papito! I came across this paragraph (which I’ve cut quite a bit) today in an excellent book that I am reading, ‘The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-Gatherers, Farmers, and the Shaping of the Modern World’, by Hugh Brody, who was, incidentally brought up in a British Jewish family:
‘Dichotomised morality is so integral to the Judaeo-Christian moral idiom that those brought up in its tradition have great difficulty conceiving of any alternative. There is a profound logic to this: the language of Judaeo-Christian morality relies on judgments expressed in two kinds of verbal category: good and bad. The concept of morality is somehow inseparable from a binary ethical structure…. There is no intermediate figure, no third term, sitting between God and Satan, representing some middle way between good and evil. Monotheism is the doctrine that there is, and can only be, one good God…. ‘
I should add to this that those brought up in the tradition of Judaeo-Christian religion, and those who are heirs to it even though they may not believe in it, have great difficulty in conceiving of religion in anything other than Judaeo-Christian terms. I include among these many of the New Atheists – those who so often regale us with ignorant tales about Japan (where I have lived for nearly fifty years) and China as being among the least religious societies in the world. They know nothing of Japanese or Chinese life. Very simply, Christianity and Islam in particular insist on ‘belief’ – hence the Apostles’ Creed: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; He, etc, etc.’ Ask Japanese people (who are not members of one of the new sects that multiplied in the aftermath of the Pacific War and who are not Christians) if they are religious, and they will answer ‘No’, because they correctly surmise that they are being asked if they formally, and formulaically, ‘believe’ in this, that, or the other, when such a thing as willed ‘belief’ simply does not arise in their traditional religions. The same is true of the hunter-gatherers of whom Hugh Brody so eloquently writes. Incidentally, a splendid chapter on Japanese religion may be found in a very good book by an acquaintance of mine, Richard Lloyd-Parry, about the Fukushima disaster: ‘Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death & Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone’.
This required and willed belief has led, and leads, to great cruelty, but since it is all in a good cause – the best and only cause – it is not recognised as such (hence the cruelty of Papito’s teachers, and certainly of the teachers at the ‘residential schools’ in Canada of which Brophy speaks, where Inuit & Native children had their cultures and languages beaten, and starved, out of them) but actively condoned. In one of his essays in ‘Modernity on Endless Trial’, Leszek Kolakowski goes so far as to defend (with many qualifications that do not in the end qualify anything very much) the actions of Cortes & his conquistadors on the grounds that their lack of tolerance for the religious practices of other cultures was in some way the correct attitude; he speaks readily in this essay of ‘savages’, who are opposed to the ‘civilised’ (and European) anthropologist who studies them. Kolakowsi had, of course, never studied another non-Western ‘culture’, and clearly had no interest in doing so.
I am reminded me of the (as I recall true) story that I read somewhere – perhaps in Nigel Barley’s very good ‘The Innocent Anthropologist’ – of the student anthropologist who was taking down the creation myths from the elder of some South American tribe, who had probably been asked to recount them umpteen times before. At one point, the elder paused, and then said rather wearily, ‘I suppose you suppose that we believe all this.’
Sorry to go on, but Brody quotes in his book from Colin Turnbull’s controversial ‘The Mountain People’ about hunter-gatherer societies in general that their members ”frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: ‘kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity and others’. He goes on to observe that : ‘this sounds like a formidable list of virtues, and so it would be if they WERE virtues, but for the hunter they are not.’ They are, rather, ‘necessities for survival; without them [hunter-gatherer] society would collapse.’ ” (The ‘were’ I have capitalised to replace the italics in Turnbull’s sentence.) It doesn’t occur to him that that is precisely what virtues are, things that spring out of our social nature and shape modes of life – ours as much as those of the hunter-gatherers – and are not divinely handed-down abstractions to which we appeal, as we suppose them to be in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is the only understanding of ‘virtues’ that Turnbull can, from his manner of writing, take seriously. As Brophy remarks, the actual voices of the Ik are not presented at all in his book, and it may be remembered that the Ik themselves protested vehemently at what they judged to be Turnbull’s misrepresentations of their lives, their society, and their predicament.
Yes exactly, the necessities for survival. I’m convinced these virtues are something that evolved before recorded history, and allowed the human race to continue to this day. Religion of course claims them as their own, given by some all powerful (yet invisible) entity who created everything. The big all knowing enforcer replaces your own conscience, imposing some reward or punishment in the afterlife (also invisible) according to their rules. Back in ancient times it was pure genius to use this as a means of control, using the fear of death and their survival instinct against them, because most of the population was illiterate and had a very narrow worldview. One of the things about patriarchy that galls me in particular, is that a lot of people seem to think we need some kind of father figure to tell us right from wrong our entire lives, and that we never mature into adults, I find it revolting.
Interesting how much it takes to get beyond one’s own frame of reference.
That fits well with studies that have shown most people prefer to have someone telling them what to do; it’s easier if they don’t have to make decisions themselves. Religion offers them that. So does monarchy and fascism.
The thing is, most people I know seem to want the illusion of making their own decisions and having freedom of thought. So they convince themselves that they came to these decisions of their own free will; the fact that they jibe so well with what the authorities are saying to them (religious authorities or secular ones) merely convinces them that they are noble and righteous.
And what they think will always agree with the authorities, depending on how they define authorities. They might follow Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders; they might follow the Pope or Joel Osteen; they might hang on their philosophy professor’s every word, or agree with everything their biology professor says. That’s because they have anointed that individual as authority, and that is the person who can tell them what to think, to do, to say, how to feel about things. (I was told I should adopt this role for my Hispanic students, because they will look up to me as a god; I reject that role, and refuse to play the because I said so game – and I think most of my Hispanic students are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves).
twiliter,
Frans de Waal’s book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals discusses just that. Highly recommend: it’s one of my desert island books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Natured
Thanks very much! It’s a fascinating subject to me, in fact most things relating to evolutionary theory are. I’ll check it out.
When theists talk about how there’s no reason to treat others well in the absence of God, what they’re really saying is “I don’t recognize any moral obligations or responsibilities towards anyone who isn’t God. Exploiting, mistreating, injuring or killing other people is only a crime against God and not against them, because no one who isn’t God matters at all. There’s no way I would ever be good to my fellow human being for their sake.” It’s kind of analogous to the idea that rape is only a crime against the woman’s husband or father and not against her.
Bjarte, that is a perfect description. It fits what I experienced from my fundamentalist family perfectly. It’s the perfect anti-humanism.