"So-called war?" When is a war not a war? There is a conflict here between the way we see morality in relation to right and good.
“People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again,” proclaims Donald Trump. “I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!”
Cue predictable cheering and jeering, depending on who you are. The article says: 'For the uninitiated, the “war on Christmas” doesn’t refer to an actual war but to a sort of religious boogeyman for some Christian conservatives.'
The 'war on Christmas' doesn't exist, comes the response; the President is declaring a victory in a war that doesn't exist. OK, let's get the nonsense out of the way first.
Bill Clinton wished everyone a Merry Christmas, so did both the Bushes, Barak Obama too. So there is no war on Christmas. It is claimed. And Trump is a populist phony. The fact that he keeps striking a chord with people, however, should be a cause of concern among people who are seeking to win support for their political ideals, principles and policies. Every year I read the same attacks on Christianity and Christmas, the same arguments about Christians stealing pagan traditions, the same abuse of people who believe in fairy-tales and sky-fairies. I make a joke of it in the run up to Christmas, warning people to brace themselves for the revelation that Christianity stole Christmas! Like we've never heard this one before. But the points are not made to inform, they are made to abuse and insult. "Grown-ups who believe in fairy tales ought to keep that indulgence to themselves." I could copy every piece of abuse I've been exposed to on this. I could fill a book with the statements that come my way. Just today I had this from electronic friends: "Organized religion is for sheep," and "You are terminally stupid or religious, which amounts to the same thing." The abuse is relentless. And, as abuse, can just be ignored. Here's another one, which is worth quoting on account of the way it commits an error that is frequently made in these anti-religious diatribes:
"What's there to know? A bunch of gullible sheep believe that a guy that might have existed 2000 years ago, might have been the son of an imaginary god, some stuff he might've said was written down and then edited by some people who wanted to control masses of people with their fears and that gives these followers the right to talk down to people from a high horse of hypocrisy. Hey, if I claimed that a half-god/half-human being was going around performing all kinds of unbelievable miracles, I better have some damn good proof to back up those claims… because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Note the way these characters routinely identify evidence and proof. They are two very different things. Science deals with evidence, not proof. Proof belongs to logic. Also to metaphysics, for which the abusers of religion show no respect and even less talent for. This kind of stuff is OK for people who think logical positivism really does set the parameters of human knowing and being. It is, of course, blind to human realities. Proof? Try asking for proof in mathematics. These people are utterly oblivious to the complexities of epistemology, and apply the crudest of tools and tests to questions that require sophistication. But does anyone think if I pointed out the distinction between evidence and proof, it would make the slightest difference to those launching such anti-religious assaults? Of course not. Evidence and proof have nothing to do with it. They want empirical evidence of a non-empirical being, don't find it, of course, and therefore declare the non-existence of God. To the extent that God is transcendent, God is non-existent. There are no grounds.
I see this conflation of evidence and proof very often indeed. I did once have the inclination to intervene, but chose not to. The people involved wouldn't alter their loathing of religion, and I would in effect be tipping them off to correct this facile philosophical mistake. Instead, I amuse myself seeing how often these characters make the same error, posing as philosophical heavyweights whilst making elementary conceptual errors.
Evidence and proof belong to two wholly disparate conceptual orders, entailing a distinction between two qualitatively incommensurable kinds of reality. When people identify the two, I know immediately that we are to be treated to an exercise of prejudice masquerading as intellectual superiority. Admittedly, we should not judge a position by the inability of its adherents to make its case properly, but neither should we be tolerant of people who are concerned more with abusing others and their views than with the proper construction of an argument, least of all when they pose as intellectual heavyweights whilst displaying a breathtaking ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. I don’t know. If I gave a lesson in logic and reasoning, who knows, they may come to see the light, and see that the case for God involves something more than the view of sky-fairies or a bearded old man on a cloud. I’m not even sure that metaphysics is more of a help than a hindrance either. I’m not remotely convinced that Jesus and the Apostles would have passed their metaphysics papers, or understood a word of them. We really need to be looking elsewhere on this.
There are deeper issues that concern me here, though, than bigotry and prejudice and an inability to deal with metaphysics. And these relate to the pervasive scepticism of modern society. Every point has to be argued and supported by reason and evidence. Everything is put to those tests. That may seem reasonable. I ask, though, what can withstand such withering assault? And does anything think that a viable civilization can rest on constant scepticism? The ontological grounds and status of everything are uncertain, to say the very least. Scepticism, relativism, nihilism and sophism, a world in which might is right and power decides, beckons. Leave your ideals and values behind as you enter this world. And abandon all hope. It's a heartless and soulless world. The Left won't like it. Everything has been reduced to pointless 'debate,' dissolved into an endless "yes/no" precisely because people are seeing grounds and "evidence" where none exist. Don't demand of God and religion that which you and your values and beliefs cannot also satisfy. "I believe in what exists," comes the reply, as if that assertion settles anything. What exists? What is real? Tell me, without the mediation of human concepts and constructs. People who reject religion on grounds of the non-existence of things end up giving us philosophical and scientific "fairy tales" of their own, the worst kind of fairy tales, too, in that they are lacking in the moral, imaginative and emotional qualities that make for a true and rounded reality. A 'reality' based on mere facts may be easier for some minds to process, but it leaves out pretty much everything that makes for a meaningful and fulfilled human life. We shouldn't mix our logics, and we shouldn't suppress any of them that a merely empirical mind can't compute. Kant discovered the scandal of reason in the way it raises questions of meaning and significance that human beings cannot but ask, but which reason cannot answer. Stop asking, stop questing for a meaning that doesn't exist, get real! Yet the search for meaning and significance is very real indeed, and not satisfied by facts. The things left over from reason and fact are not worthless things to be ridiculed: and people who dismiss them so thoughtlessly betrays a complete lack of emotional intelligence. They are humanists who have little sense of what it is to be human. The real world is modified through contact with simple gifts and goodness, the Love that moves all things. The people who are now spending their Christmas ridiculing Donald Trump for his victory in the war-that-never-was need to catch themselves on, and quickly. His supporters see it as a victory. And they are responding to the low-level harassment people who love Christmas have been subject to year in year out, having to apologize for celebrating Christmas, not mere holidays, ending up withdrawing their Christmas greetings for fear of having to justify the Christian character of their celebration. Stop pretending that that 'war' hasn't been taking place. I know for a fact it has, low level abuse in the main, that just sours the whole Christmas spirit, and deliberately. I'd be careful. The Trumps of this world may well strike a chord with 'ordinary' folk, and give the intellectuals a public lesson in humility. People may not be as smart as they think they are. They may be armed with a wealth of facts. But life is more than facts. There is emotional intelligence. And some folk are lacking here, lacking in warmth and compassion, with no idea how to create warm, affective ties and loyalties in communities of close proximity, no idea how to add value to life. That's a serious deficiency in people looking to change the world.
Another deficiency is the gutlessness. I knew someone at school who was very smart, and would use his intelligence to tease boys who were slower than he was, stirring up conflict and then sitting back waiting for the explosion of temper. Then he would go silent and feign innocence and incomprehension. Or plain run off when the verbal jousting promised to turn physical. So knock it off with this denial that there has been a 'war' waged against Christmas, and admit that the insistence that religion, and Christianity in particular, be restricted to the private sphere (and by this they mean 'individual' choice, because many do think a religious upbringing should be persecuted as child abuse and brainwashing) is tantamount to the social extirpation. Note how the article above, which denies there has been a war against Christmas, ends on a sneering note, emphasizing that less and less people are bothered about Christmas, and just see it as another holiday, without any religious significance.
There has, however, been a concerted attempt to weaken the belief in Christmas by describing the story as a myth.
At which point, rather than defending the story of the nativity in terms of historical evidence, I am more concerned to point to the impoverished view of life and culture displayed by those who demand everything be subjected to the exacting standards of evidence and proof. Those who exalt reason are playing a dangerous game. They are the biggest utopians of all, dangerously so. Because they are extending reason into realms which are not amenable to rational treatment. That is not a justification of irrationalism. On the contrary, it is those who extend reason to encompass the non-rational and the arational who generate an irrationalism. Note well the presumption that myth is necessarily a 'bad thing.' Such arid rationalism strips human beings of the mythological apparatus they need to make sense of their lives and the forces that drive their dreams, passions and desires. That leaves people vulnerable and unable to cope with the things that life throws at them. And, defenceless, people will be dangerously exposed. The rationalists call themselves humanists. The most striking thing about them is how little they understand human beings. The mythical, the spiritual, the religious aspects of life are very much a human reality, present in every civilization. These rationalists are the true irrationalists, and they do immense damage. If we strip reality down to evidence and proof, then much that enhances the value of living in the world disappears. As A.N. Whitehead said, 'man may not live by bread alone, but nor does he live by disinfectants.' If we employ reason as a disinfectant, there will be no stories to live by - they are all 'made up!' Rather than extirpate myth, we need to re-appreciate it, and see how stories or narratives magnify truths in order to make us see them better. Your objection that a story is a myth in the sense of being 'made up' not only devalues myth and ignores its true significance in human living, it also applies to your own stories - because all culture is 'made up,' and any meaning in an objectively meaningless universe is 'made up.' See how long your civilisation lasts on that bleak and barren basis. Every civilisation has known religion, that is fact, stories, myths, tales, too, fact; and every civilisation demonstrates a quest for meaning, that is a fact about human beings that is undeniable. How real do people want it? The spiritual dimesion of life is a real one.
On one site alone, I copied and pasted comments as far as my immense patience would extend. The resulting document ran to 31,000 words. Nothing was resolved. All that there was was negation, and the hardly revelatory position that the insistence on empirical facts and logic leaves us unable to say much about the really interesting things in life. We can count different coloured beans and say that 1 +1 = 2. But as for the scandal of reason … questions that cannot be answered by a reason (severed from its psychic, emotional and moral components) are dismissed as non-questions, and those who insist on raising them are abused for their stupidity and gullibility. You can try this little exercise anywhere you like where religion crops up, and just observe the ‘debate’ that quickly starts up, and almost as quickly runs into sterility. Anyone who enters from a logical positivist position can offer nothing here but negation. Their methodology precludes the possibility of anything meaningful being said from the start. Wittgenstein’s silence is the only reasonable position for either side to take here. Yet it is seems an impossibility. Since human beings are social beings, what any of them say will impinge on the lives of others, and be incapable of being ignored. It is evident that the religious side of this ‘debate’ cannot answer the sceptical side in terms the sceptics set as the terms delimiting reason. The more they profess their belief and faith, and point to the benefits of the religious experience to their lives, the more they are exposed as immune to evidence and logic. And, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of this ‘question,’ immediately after its posing. Because it runs into nothing but utter sterility. In the narrow terms in which the debate is constructed, atheism is the only rational conclusion. The debate feeds itself through the upset of those who are religious believers, who find themselves drawn onto a terrain which has nought to do with questions of value, meaning and significance. The only thing to do is to turn the austere demands on everything that makes for a rich, varied and flourishing human life – the wealth of the arts, literature, poetry, music, interpersonal relationships, all of it – and demand evidence and proof by way of justification for any of it – and see that nothing worthy of being proven is capable of being proven. A life lived in accordance within the austerian parameters of logical positivism is impossible. Human beings may be able to exist in the external world, but they will suffocate and die in the inner world. Language, love and music are just the three strongest phenomena among many that would suggest that human beings are more than collections of meat. Purely materialist ‘explanations’ for the mysteries of human existence are just that, ‘explanations,’ which may work on an intellectual level, as far as the intellect will go, but no more. And human life is always that something more, that surplus or excess that goes beyond the limits of reason, and which is core to our being. The ‘silence’ that is wise here is the silence of reason – reason has nothing meaningful to say here. And Wittgenstein’s words were directed to atheists as well as theists. All that there can be is negation, nullity, sterility – acres of words so bereft of anything of depth, so boring, that one loses the will to live.
I could respond by citing Edward Feser’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God.
Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.
This book also offers a detailed treatment of each of the key divine attributes -- unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth -- showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.
This book offers as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past -- thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others -- that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism which gives aid and comfort to atheism.
“A watershed book… Feser has completely severed the intellectual legs upon which modern atheism had hoped to stand.” Matthew Levering, James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
“Edward Feser is widely recognized as a top scholar in the history of philosophy in general, and in Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy in particular… Feser admirably achieves his goal, and Five Proofs of the Existence of God is a must read for anyone interested in natural theology. I happily and highly recommend it.” J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University
“Yet another fine book by Edward Feser… Feser replies to (literally) all of the objections and shows convincingly how the most popular objections (the kind one hears in Introduction to Philosophy courses) are very often completely beside the point and, even when they’re not, are ‘staggeringly feeble and overrated’… Five Proofs of the Existence of God puts the lie to the common assumption among professional philosophers that natural theology was done in forever by the likes of Hume and Kant, never to rise again.” Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
“Refutes with devastating effect the standard objections to theistic proofs, from David Hume to the New Atheists. Feser draws on the best from both scholastic and modern analytic philosophy, including persuasive defenses of the real distinction in creatures between essence and existence, the absolute simplicity of God, and the continued importance of causation in a relativistic and quantum-mechanical world.” Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
“A powerful and important book... The concluding chapter, where Feser replies to possible objections to his arguments, is a gem; it alone is worth the price of this excellent work.” Stephen T. Davis, Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
Sounds good, no? I’ve read the arguments. It’s the same old philosophical argument, with all the limitations that that implies. Safe to say, those who take metaphysics seriously (and isn’t that the question?) will praise the book; those that don’t will not see how their objections have been refuted. And so the debate goes on. And I keep well away from it. It is an exercise in futility.
A.N. Wilson writes of having been an atheist, returning to Hume for reassurance over the years, as a believer returns to a shrine of a favourite saint whenever the faith is weakening. He quotes his neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, who used to say, "I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn't go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously." But he comments that his own doubting temperament made him an unconvincing, and ultimately unconvinced, atheist. He hits the nail smack on the head when he comments that ‘religion .. was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person.’ And that, precisely, is the point, underscoring the utter emptiness of ‘intellectual’ debates. Reading atheist biologist Stuart Kauffman’s book Reinventing the Sacred, I was struck by the way in which he praises Plato as pointing us in the right direction:
‘Because we cannot know, but must live our lives anyway, we live forward into mystery. Our deep need is to better understand how we do so, and to learn from this deep feature of life how to live our lives well. Plato said we seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Plato points us in the right direction.
Reintegration of reason with the rest of our full humanity takes me far beyond my domain of expertise. But I believe we must try to do so in the light of the new scientific worldview I have been discussing.’
‘How to live a good life with faith and courage is at the core of philosophic traditions dating back to Greece, with Plato stating that we seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.’
And the core of religious traditions too, actually. Notice how Kauffman appropriates the religious argument for philosophic reason, eliding the cosmic and religious dimensions of the thought of such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
In another chapter, Kauffman writes:
‘We echo Plato's philosopher king. It is not an accident that, for Plato, it is a philosopher, king of reason, who is king. But Plato himself was wiser than that: our human goals, he taught, are the pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. As Flanagan writes in The Really Hard Problem, we find our human meaning is a space of meaning including not just science, but art, politics, ethics, and the spiritual.’ (2008: ch 15).
I agree very much, but that is very different – as Kauffman well knows – from the insistence on fact and logic in the manner of logical positivism. I’m not sure Kauffman makes much of being an atheist. But his argument here works for the Wittgenstinian silence with respect to both theism and atheism.
As for the former atheist A.N. Wilson, he looked at language, love and music and became convinced that human beings are spiritual beings: ‘that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.’
It ‘fits’ in the sense of making the best overall sense of human life, in a way that intellectual disinfectants do not. I counted 31,000 words in this one ‘debate’ on God and religion, and not a single word from the mouths of atheists was inspiring, moving or meaningful – just repetition and tedium. Not thrilling company. And people who are so beside the point, abstractors and detractors who turn an ethos, a practice, a way of life, something that is a matter of being and doing, into an intellectual proposition.
'But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi's own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?'
Wilson refers to language, love and music in his argument. He now takes his observations there further.
'I haven't mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer's book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer's serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.
My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God "a category mistake". Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . 'The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life'." And then Coleridge adds: "'And man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain those last words."
Comments from the ‘debates.’
‘NO!! God will not provide! We must provide for ourselves.’
Classic! And who is this ‘we?’ And where on earth have they been whilst so many suffer? To whom is the appeal made? And by what standard? Why, that is, is there an obligation on all to provide for each? There is none in a bleak, indifferent, meaningless universe and a species concerned with power, resources, self-interest and survival. Materialism quickly becomes problematical. If human beings are responsible for taking morality into their own hands, that begs the question as to why ‘we’ don’t. And where does this ‘must’ come from? There is no God, hence no pre-given morality, therefore we must create a morality. The argument – which is made by Kauffman in Reinventing the Sacred – is self-contradictory. Upon what evidence and proof does this faith in ‘man’ providing for all depend?
‘I thought god was all powerful? What? he doesn't know how to create his own wealth? Must be a puny god indeed if he needs his worshipers to give him ANYTHING and BTW there is no such thing as a church where you aren't being "lied to"
You can't crack open that black book without immediately reading lies.
Being a pastor is supposed to be a calling, not a job but just as every passage in that book of fables leads one to the inevitable conclusion that we are worthless with out god every pastor is there to make darned sure we get the message pounded into our heads (for a salary of course)
Either god is great and doesn't care about people suffering or he isn't there at all.
I hold with the latter.’
Who really cares? Is there a human ‘we’ that cares without God? If we are being enjoined to care for people suffering, then we need to ask about where this ‘ought to be’ comes from, and what standard it is defined in relation to. Human standards in time and place are conventional, life on earth is contingent. Push for evidence and proof consistently, and there is no avoiding the bleak conclusion that we are mere shaved chimpanzees clinging on a barren rock, in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, to no end, no purpose, in a meaningless universe. Any ought-to-be here on the part of humans caring for other humans is as ‘made-up’ as any god atheists choose to reject on account of its created status. And that’s the contradiction in the position – if there is no God, and that God and religion are to be rejected on account of being ‘made up,’ then any and all other ethical systems human beings create are subject to the same objections. They are contingent and conventional, useful to the extent people believe in them, yet open to the acidic rational assault on belief. The only logical position is nihilism. Forget morality. It’s power and survival and indifference that form the only true reality.
Why do so many intervene on expressions of faith just to vent their anger and contempt and make a mockery of belief in God. Have they nothing better to be doing with their lives? And so much anger against an imaginary being?!
The response:
‘It's a form of entertainment. It's like going to a freakshow where we can shoot spitballs at the idiots.
You believe in a tall bearded man with the power to do anything, yet he created a flawed product, Human Beings.
I believe in scientific facts and the beauty of logic. We also both like to shoot spitballs at idiots, like you guys. No offense, we're just childish that way.’
‘I believe in scientific facts …’ I believe. I needn’t draw attention to the caricature of the religious view, the statement of a position no theologian I know of has ever held. I think such people get their views from pictures.
‘When your b***s**t religious belief no longer affects my logical life, then I will stop pointing out your stupidity. got it?’
Again, I think of Wittgenstein’s silence when I think of logic, and then I see this caricature, insult and abuse. Most of all I note a complete inhumanism, the almost complete absence of the human dimension, the spitting contempt for other people who don’t ‘fit’ the logical life. It’s a form of hygiene. Humans are flawed indeed, and have a history of marginalising, suppressing and eliminating those others they don’t much like, still less respect.
‘Wolves and wolves in sheep clothing........all religions. Who needs a church, God is within you...think about it.’
I have thought. The kingdom of God is within, among, without and between.
I could go on. How boring, though, and beside the point. As I say, I ignore in the main. I've just pulled away from those who get all excited about this question. It gives an opportunity for lesser minds to pose as greater minds by simple reference to 'evidence' and 'proof' (even as they conflate the two) in a debate over an entity whose status is, shall we say, most certainly uncertain. As intellectual positions go, the belief in God is not the easiest to defend, and very easy to demolish. The evidence is non-existent, and the proof requires a good dose of metaphysics (itself out of fashion in an empirical age). So why am I bothered? Stupid, 'gullible sheep' (a good one from people who, mob handed, indulged in exactly the same objections and abusive terms - 'sky fairy!' such imagination and wit!) and brainwashed. I remember the lads in the sixth form challenging the Catholic brothers on how they had brainwashed us all. 'It hasn't worked then!' came the response back to us, 'you all seem more than capable of thinking for yourselves!' And, indeed, we all did seem more than able to think for ourselves, and challenge authority. Perish the thought that the choice of religious belief and faith might be a reasonable one, beyond 'brainwashing,' and make more sense of human life in the round. My own writings could possibly be described as atheist up to around 2010. They certainly present the view that God is an ideal projection of human beings better qualities that human beings ought to live up to. I thus argued for an ascending theme of power from sovereign humans as against a descending theme of power from God. I've continued to think and reason, and, time and again, I found philosophy coming up short - it was lacking something, there was also something left over, something that evaded reason, something missing, something core and essential. So when I hear dismissive comments on bearded men on clouds and sky fairies and imaginary beings ... I'm less than impressed.
We don't have to see this as a 'war.' Atheists complain of the abuse they receive at the hands of pastors. I wouldn't know. That's a war which will detract from the positives both sides have to offer. Just cease the squabbling and get on with doing whatever it is you do, lead by the power of example, and we'll see who does life, and satisfies the cosmic longing for meaning, better. But there seems no way to avoid the noise of war and competition. If one side attacks, the other side has no option but to defend.
I'm interested in the way that this 'war' expresses something that goes much deeper with respect to the liberal scepticism of all collective purposes beyond individual choice. It's part of the liberal assertion of the right over the good, the presentation of the public sphere as neutral between competing forms of the good, all of which take their chances in the moral marketplace, with no way of deciding between them. (An idea, incidentally, which is itself a view of 'the good life,' one that conforms to liberal values and institutions. Not neutral at all. And one that has implications that liberals with a social conscience don't seem to be aware of. They ditch objective morality and shared ethics and don't seem to realize what that entails. They carry on making moral appeals with respect to justice, equality and fairness - with which I agree - whilst at the same time rejecting objectivism for relativism, reducing morality to irreducible subjective opinion, a series of value judgments, with no independent standard by which to evaluate good and bad. That's a world of power relations and power struggles. They engage in the fight. They do insult and abuse Christmas and Christianity. And when they lose, they either cry, or deny they'd be at war in the first place. They are politically, institutionally and ethically flabby and feeble, and this profoundly lets down the causes they seek to advance. And causes which I support with respect to social justice, peace, planetary health and harmony. I want people to get serious about these things, in institutional and ethical terms, and in terms of actually connecting with 'ordinary' people, involving them as citizens with a stake in community, not haranguing and abusing them. I find it off-putting, cold and joyless, and I'm in agreement in large part with the causes. There's no mystery why millions give "Green politics" a wide berth. There are so many imbalances in this world, a desperate need for attunement and harmony at all levels. We need peace between people and the planet. That's the message I get every year at Midnight Mass - peace on Earth. Last night, I was among people who did not attend communion, who were clearly of other faiths, or maybe none at all. They were very welcome to receive the Christmas message, and their own offering of peace was welcome too. It's not that difficult to achieve. And, you know, those positive energies may be catching. I know they found something there that they do not find anywhere else in life.
Just make sure that your energies are positive, though, and are true to the service of principle, and not motivated by fear and anger in response to a threat, real or perceived. Don't become what your enemies say you are, and end up doing their job for them. Don't be provoked into supporting wrong actions out of despair for the way the political and social world seem to be going.
This essay focuses on the role of fear in the white evangelical drive to keep hold of or get control over culture, for reasons that are entirely due to politics and identity rather than religion. The price of such fear-driven theopolitical fundamentalism is to lose touch with religion's true worth as being the light in the darkness. It expresses a loss of faith in God, for if you truly have faith, you really don't suffer from the neurotic need for power and control:
"Ironically, it may well be that it is Christians’ fears about losing control of the culture that have accelerated the rise of secularism itself. (This has been an open secret in the sociology of religion for almost two decades.) Consider the rise of the “Nones” in American public life — those adults, especially younger adults, who when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none.” For decades that number was very low, but then it began to increase rapidly in the 1980s. Why? It seems to be caused by the tight alliance of Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity, with conservative politics over several decades — an association itself driven by prophesies of a rising tide of godlessness in America after the 1960s. Those prophesies about the 1960s were wrong; but they fueled the alliance of white Christians with right-wing politics from the 1980s forward, and that alliance has repelled many younger people from religion out of a distaste at seeing religion so eagerly bend the knee to short-term political gain. That is to say, Christians’ response to a misperceived crisis have become, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy."
So don't mistake my words as a criticism of the forces of atheism, humanism and secularism motivated by fear and hatred. I'm more concerned with the loss of the ethics of a collective morality, a dissolution of the moral world into an existential framework, and all that that entails (which I shall spell out later).
I initially headed this piece with another graphic, which read: 'atheists don't hate you or your religion. We pity you for your ignorance and your inability to face real problems like a mature adult. Know the difference.'
I'll not list the 'real problems' I've dealt with in my life, and still deal with. Just say death, disaster, chronic illness, mental illness, heavy stuff, serious stuff, stuff a million miles away from the narcissistic drivel of self-important, self-styled intellectuals who are so quick to abuse those who think differently as stupid and immature. I grew up long ago, the hard way. My grandmother and grandfather were god-fearing folk who lived through the depression, poverty, hunger, Nazism and war. I'd say they were far more mature than the characters who pen this kind of insult routinely, or who see religion as merely a platform for them to air their views on how they've seen through it all. I pass by in silent contempt when I read this kind of thing (and you'll find plenty of it on social media), because I know such people are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, mixing proof and evidence and having no idea how little we can actually say with any certainty - the most interesting things in life and its living are surplus, left over, gifts, an anarchic excess that evades capture by rational tools. And I judge people by what they do, not what they say. People of good will will get along fine with each other.
But I went with another caption for a reason - it emphasizes individual choice and an individual morality, which lands us within the existentialist problematic of having to find meaning by personal choice in an objectively meaningless universe. That seems liberatory enough, you would think. And there are clearly still people out there who are inclined to see it as a liberation. I can only presume they have been living in a cave, because this is where we have been for a century. Max Weber made this problematic crystal clear. There are big problems here, especially for issues like the environment, which require a shared and collective morality, which go far, far beyond the anti-religion animus of certain kinds of atheists.
But, yes, with respect to the first quote, (some) atheists do actually hate religion, and express complete utter contempt for religious folk. I know religious folk, doctors, medics, scientists, physicists, people who organize the food banks, and just 'ordinary' folk who turn up for work in the morning, put a shift in, make communities work. And I read this kind of bigoted bile, and draw some obvious conclusions. I exempt those atheists who don't even identify themselves as such, and don't see the need to, and do what the folk above do. I know them too, and they do things right. As always, it's the ones with the loudest voices, the ones who assert the most, the ones who speak with a certainty no one has in this world, who cause the trouble.
But the issue goes deeper. I've suffered having to apologize for loving Christmas for the last time. There might not be a systematic political or institutional war against Christmas, but there is certainly a cultural war, defended in terms of each and every ethical claim being dragged into the marketplace of competing ideologies and made to justify itself. And that does impact at the level of law and policy. That may be presented as fairness, but it’s a fairness that is based on liberal premises with respect to a neutral legal sphere .. that fits liberal values and institutions. Those whose good is on the receiving end of such laws and policies cannot but experience this as an attack, and try to fight back. ‘The course of history is against them,’ I’ve heard too many times now. That’s an immoral historicism of the worst order – have we still to learn the fundamental amorality of the historical process and the moral responsibility of the human actors that make history? Historicism leads us into a moral wasteland.
None, of course, can withstand this kind of scrutiny, which is why I say this amounts to the dissolution of morality as a common ethic transcending and obligating individuals, and the explicit triumph of secularism as a naked power politics. The extent to which people realize that is uncertain. People on the Left who are socialists and communists who seek to dissolve the religious ethic in the acid of the moral marketplace are oblivious to the fact that this acid of subjectivism dissolves the common ends and solidarities of socialism and communism too. And the same goes for Green environmentalism. The anti-religious bigotry of certain folk on the Left here puts an incoherence at the heart of their political commitments that they fail to see. Which is worry in two respects. It is worrying because it means that issues of social justice and environmental health - collective goods that I support - lack an effective ethics and politics. And it is worrying because there will be an attempt to compensate for the absence of a genuine moral and motivational content by legal and institutional force.
Green Politics is secular, atheist, pagan when it is in any way religious, but in the main makes a virtue of its irreligious nature. It is ‘spiritual’ only in an earthly sense; it is rationalist in a bleak, empirical sense. The only knowledge is that that is set within empirical parameters. It is utterly lacking in psychic and emotional intelligence. What it has is a lot of insipid “love is all you need” wishful thinking that falls quickly in face of the hard facts of all-too-human desires – the love of money, anyone? Dull, po-faced, humourless, unimaginative. Or maybe that’s just the Greens I have had the misfortune to come across. I’ve spent years trying to bring the transcendent dimension to Green politics. Why? Because arguments for justice, freedom and equality require transcendent norms, truths and values for coherence and cogency. Green politics makes a virtue of being science based. But this, too, is misleading. The ‘science’ here embodies very specific political and ethical commitments. The problem is that Greens don’t make these commitments explicit, but like to offer them as some form of necessity, necessary, non-negotiable policy based on ‘science’, evidence and that vaguest entity of all, “Nature.” Or 'History.' I’ve made similar criticisms in the past. Not explicitly, mind, in the hope that Green politics might learn, grow up, become more honest about itself as a politics and ethics, and less dogmatic and dictatorial with respect to its supposedly scientific basis.
In the U.S. we recently had the spectacle of scientists marching for the value of science. The what? In the context of the fact and value distinction, with fact being made the basis of all true knowledge, and morality relegated to the status of value judgments, that is, non-rational irreducible subjective opinion, scientific reason can only be ethically defended on non-rational grounds! The secular and atheist project crashes right here, and is ‘trumped’ so very easily by those who play power politics by nature. This is the ultimate, and bitter, irony. Without the objective standard of transcendent norms, values and truths, there is only relativism and power politics, the sophism of ‘might is right’ and Thrasymachus’ justice as the interests of the strongest. And in that straight fight, Greens are political naifs who really do seem to believe that science and statements of fact really can serve to do the job of politics and ethics. They lack any kind of grasp of practical ethics, seem utterly remote from ‘the masses,’ treat the great unwashed who refuse to see (their) reason with an ill-disguised contempt (they are stupid, racist, brain-washed, passive consumptive people who are all guilty for trashing “Nature.”), and really think that power and people are dictated to by facts and scientific reason. Or ought to be. Ought we obey science? Why? And in what way? That ‘ought’ is an ethic, and in the context of the fact-value distinction of modern secularism, upon which atheism is based, it can only be a non-rational subjective view, an existential choice that is grounded in nothing. The whole thing is internally incoherent. And it isn’t cogent, either. People leave Green politics alone in their droves. It leaves them cold. Why is this, if science is overwhelmingly, so we are told, on the side of Green secularism? It’s not a resistance to science. I’ve met more than enough people over the years, discussing Green politics with them. Public scepticism has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with the narrow, intellectualised, elitist, smug, superior, hectoring manner of Green educators. They lack the common touch. They lack respect for ‘ordinary’ people. They are more concerned to inform heads rather than engage people in their concerns. A sweeping generalisation, for sure, and as such of little substance. But I have lost patience on this, and need to move quickly on. My grievance is this – on account of Green atheist bigotry and sanctimonious, self-righteous proselytising, the cause of environmentalism has been damaged. In becoming associated with this minority – and despite decades of having the right issues and all the research and science in the world on their side, Greens remain a minority – environmentalism has become a harder sell among the general public. This is too serious an issue to be left in Green hands. Green infantilism in the field of practical reason, the utterly ineffectual politics, the promotion of favoured liberal and secular themes on the back of the climate crisis, the libertarian ethics, has associated the common environmental – which is of concern to us all – with a minority group who are perceived by the general public as, well, let’s be generous, and say idealistic and utopian.
Think I’m exaggerating. Mention ‘Merry Christmas’ at Christmas time, and sit back and watch comment after comment slamming Christianity, be treated to the yearly ‘history’ lessons on how Christianity systematically appropriated pagan traditions (it didn’t, not in the simplistic sense these lessons portray), and po-faced lectures on how atheists are just as fun-loving and joyous as Christians who love Christmas, in fact, they assure us, much more so, given all the “fake” happiness and friendliness manufactured which characterises the Christian Christmas.
I’ve put up with this nonsense for far too long, in the vain hope that these characters might actually read and ponder the ethics and politics of environmentalism deeply and learn the lesson. It would appear, many years on, that there’s not a hope in hell of that. So why on earth am I trying to persuade such a minority and, politically and culturally, feeble and marginalised group who command no support among the wider public, and little respect among decision makers? They are permanent protestors, always on the outside resisting power, never, ever maturing to build institutions and organs capable of embedding and exercising power, endlessly rehearsing their next defeat. If there’s no God, no meaning and purpose to the universe, then it’s all existential choice. And power politics. Might is right. And this crowd lose, time and again. That should be the end of it. But, no, they cry relentlessly about the injustice of it all. Why? To who or what do they appeal? Government? Government responds to a number of constituencies. Business and finance, certainly, corporate power, definitely, ‘the economy,’ the market, all those euphemisms for the process of accumulation. That’s the economic system we live in. No government in the world is going to ignore the systemic imperatives arising from the capital economy, least of all suppress the growth of that economy. It is the epitome of naivety to expect governments to behave in this way. I don’t doubt that economic growth is fuelling the destruction of the planetary ecology. But simply stating this will never suffice to bring the structural transformation that is needed. The power of government is secondary and derivative, and its job is to facilitate the process of private accumulation, not subvert it. Only that government constituted by socialized organs of popular control, in the context of a social transformation delivering viable and functioning economic institutions, will give us a government capable of restraining economic activity within planetary boundaries. The truth is, Green politics refers its demands to government or to the grassroots of local resilience, leaving the entire social metabolic order of the capital system, its first and second order mediations, such as the division of labour, untouched. Hence it is utopian and ineffective. And ensures that environmentalism, the most important issue of our time, remains a minority interest. Environmentalism is too important to be left in the hand of these characters, attached to minority Green interests and obsessions that leave the wider public cold.
Christians are welcome in Green politics, but only as Greens, and certainly not as Christians. They don’t tolerate God much at all. But Christianity most of all is anathema. So what? There’s no God, no evidence and no proof for God (and, boy, am I tired of reading people who mix up evidence and proof, who mix their logics, don’t realize that it is illegitimate to use science to prove essential beliefs, who say God is a made-up human construction that we can therefore ignore as having no compelling force, evidently not realizing that if they are right, then the same objections can be made against any value or truth they care to offer. So that’s it, then, evidence based policy? Yet we know that research projects turning up evidence are shaped by theoretical concerns, metaphysics, standpoints, imagination, even. If it’s all construction and existential choice, then it is all conventional, contingent, and subjective, and no one needs be persuaded by anything anyone says. It’s power that decides. There is no “humanity,” only specific human beings organised within socially structured power relations. Some humans are a whole lot more powerful than others. If you think that that is unjust, then you have to base that claim on a standard that lies outside of those relations, that is, a transcendent hope or force. We don’t have to call that standard God, exactly. It’s just that the arguments against God are precisely the same that rule out that objective standard. It’s pointless raising moral demands within power relations, if we don’t respect a transcendent standard. Remove that, and it’s clear that power decides. That’s OK for those who argue explicitly that there is no good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, all of which are mere projections of fears and fantasies, rationalizations of resentment (Nietszche would not have liked Greens). If you get turned over in a power struggle, that’s just the way such a world goes. If you keep calling foul and crying about the injustice and unfairness of it all, be clear about the source of your appeal. Because it lies outside of prevailing relations in time and place.
Let me set my grievance in a deeper context, that of the status of morality in a modern world that is characterized by the dissolution of an objective and overarching moral framework. That dissolution not only claims God and the religious ethic as its victim, but any kind of common ethical endeavour, socialism, communism, environmentalism too. I'll do my best to explain (it's very late on Christmas night, and I've been enjoying myself immensely with a bottle of sherry. It may make me more lucid, or lurid - in vino veritas. Let's say atheists have picked a bad time to abuse God, religion and Christmas).
From the above article:
"Ironically, it may well be that it is Christians’ fears about losing control of the culture that have accelerated the rise of secularism itself. (This has been an open secret in the sociology of religion for almost two decades.) Consider the rise of the “Nones” in American public life — those adults, especially younger adults, who when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none.” For decades that number was very low, but then it began to increase rapidly in the 1980s. Why? It seems to be caused by the tight alliance of Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity, with conservative politics over several decades — an association itself driven by prophesies of a rising tide of godlessness in America after the 1960s. Those prophesies about the 1960s were wrong; but they fueled the alliance of white Christians with right-wing politics from the 1980s forward, and that alliance has repelled many younger people from religion out of a distaste at seeing religion so eagerly bend the knee to short-term political gain. That is to say, Christians’ response to a misperceived crisis have become, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy."
There are many reasons why people have come to reject religion. Raised on the idea that only statements with a basis in empirical fact, people find the idea of a transcendent entity, something that is literally non-existent, unbelievable. With epistemological preoccupations uppermost, it’s not an age that does metaphysics. Then there is the history of religious persecution and war. Dissent, nonconformity and heresy were all considered to be threats to social cohesion and the common good, things which put the health and survival of society as a whole in doubt. Anarchy and chaos would follow as a matter of course, undermining the social peace and plunging society into a disorder that directly impacted on the wellbeing of people. Set in the context of societies balanced precariously on the edge of necessity, actions which today seem reprehensible start to become understandable. With the loss of overarching notions of the good, moral behaviour is considered a matter of personal choice regulated by a neutral institutional framework. The idea of morality as something collective and constraining rather than individual is considered repressive, and is rejected as such.
So far, so liberal and secular, so conventional. The case against the common good as based upon a shared ethic that bounds each and all seems clear. So clear, indeed, that the issue of religion hardly seems worth debating, other than to express frustration that the remnants of an outmoded moral understanding still exist to the extent that it does. This, however, is where the problems start to bite. It is easy enough to see the capitalist economic system, individualist liberalism and a neutralised public sphere upholding an impersonal right as of a piece. The world is a marketplace of individuals shifting for themselves, with their own money, their own values, their own choices, competing with others, seeing others as potential means to personal ends, cooperating to that extent, but no more. It’s a market model of instrumental relations, a view of society in which there are only individuals and the choices they make, in economics and ethics. That viewpoint makes sense. It’s a liberal view, one that rejects collective purposes, common goods, public intervention for positive ends of freedom, each, any and every ethical or institutional form that lies beyond the single discrete individual.
But where does that leave ‘the environment?’ Either the social environment in terms of the public life and goods human beings as social beings need? Or the natural environment, the healthy, functioning planetary ecology upon which human beings as natural beings depend? Both these things point to a common good beyond the choosing individual. An ethics that is concerned with ‘the environment,’ it follows, cannot just be about individual choice and value judgments, mere subjective likes and dislikes (emotivism) or existential choices.
Pope Francis is big on moral imperatives. He declares protecting migrants and eliminating nuclear weapons to be moral imperatives.
And he quite explicitly states in Laudato Si that there is a moral imperative to act on climate change.
‘Pope Francis brings a clear and powerful moral voice to a climate change debate too often clouded by competing ideologies. He reminds us of our responsibilities to the planet and to one another, and makes plain the stakes and the urgency of stronger action.’
Transcending those competing ideologies implies the existence of a morality that is more than a subjective choice, more than a personal preference, something that exists as a standard outside of self- and sectional interest. Without that, there is simply an endless self-assertion that takes the form of a mutual self-cancellation until, with individual actions generating collective consequences that are destructive of the planetary ecology, ensure a mutual self-annihilation. If we accept that there is an environmental crisis – and there is a wealth of scientific research to back up the evidence of our own senses and experiences to tell us that there very clearly is – then there is a moral imperative to join together and act so as to ensure the health and welfare of the social and ecological fabric. For every action there is a consequence. We see clearly here the deleterious collective consequences of uncoordinated, subjective, individual actions. We can moralize here at the level of personal choice and responsibility, but it will fall far short of the collective endeavour that seriously addressing the environmental problem requires. As individuals we can all strive to do the right thing for right reasons. But to effect real change, such behaviour needs to be set within right relationships and an overarching moral framework that ensures that others do the right thing also. In other words, an effective environmental ethic cannot be merely a matter of personal choice. Plunging environmentalism into the moral marketplace as such one ideology competing with many others will ensure that all the big ambitions and demands and ideals with respect to living in peace and harmony with the planetary ecology will fail. If you do believe that environmental ethics is merely a matter of value judgments and personal choices, then there is no point campaigning for climate actions and agreements as anything more than legal, governmental and technocratic impositions (impositions which are utterly lacking in moral force and inspiration.) That’s not how environmentalists express themselves, they clearly believe that ecology is an ethical cause and a common cause that transcends individual choice and value preference.
But now we come to the incoherence. Since there are collective consequences that follow from individual choices and actions and which impact upon the environment, then it follows, if we are to ensure that this impact will be benign rather than destructive, that individuals must be constrained, even compelled, by moral, legal and institutional force, to do things that may well go against personal choice and individual will in accordance with a moral imperative. And that is the very repressive quality of morality that critics of the common good in general and religion in particular have been concerned to reject.
And that’s very much what I try to focus on in my own work, the extent to which it is taken for granted that there is no binding morality, no shared conception of the good, no objective grounds by which to bind individuals in a collective endeavour – in short, that morality is merely a series of subjective value judgments, a matter of personal choice and preference. That’s a view of morality that mirrors the capitalist market perfectly. Unfortunately, people who consider themselves progressive don’t seem able to see the implications. Religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning to bind together. Marx in the Communist Manifesto wrote that all that is solid melts into air. The environmental crisis challenges us to resolidify human relations beyond their fragmentation under the capital system. The problem is that the very same existential arguments that are launched against religion apply also to the social binding and solidarity required by socialism and other forms of collective politics.
With the split between the realm of facts and the realm of values, facts have been elevated to the status of the only basis of true knowledge, whilst values have been relegated to the status of value judgments, mere subjective opinions, with no way of discerning the truth, rightness or otherwise of these opinions. As Max Weber wrote a century ago, each individual is free to choose their own gods or devils, and we have no objective standard available to us to determine one as better than the other. In an objectively valueless and meaningless world, there can be no such thing as moral knowledge and truth; no meaningful statements as to whether something or someone is good or bad are possible in such a world. And it is this that serves to undermine notions of an environmental ethic. Environmentalists can point to ‘nature’ and the world of ecological fact until the cows come home, it possesses no moral meaning and significance, it has no motivational force, and, given that human beings live in socially structured patterns of behaviour and identity, it lacks social relevance. The appeal to ‘nature’s’ common good keeps being made, but no matter how often it is met with an almost complete lack of governmental and societal response, the lesson is not learned that it is politically, institutionally and morally deficient. Instead, there follows a bout of misanthropic abuse of human beings as greedy, stupid, passive, violent. Oh, and ignorant and backward too, with respect to religious belief. Critics, I state openly here, are the ones who need to take a good look at themselves and start to challenge their own backwardness and prejudice, and start to give the question a greater psychic and moral depth.
Because if the Pope is right – he is – then you need to start going to work on this notion of a ‘moral imperative,’ and see the need for an overarching ethic that transcends individual morality. ‘Nature’ won’t do it, and statements of fact won’t do it. To try to press science into doing the job of practical reason (ethics and politics) is to invite failure (it’s happened, environmentalism has racked up decades of failure on this). In a world of self- and sectional interest, in which morality is seen as subjective preference and choice, environmentalism and any other common good you choose to name, religious or political, socialism, is merely one of many competing ideologies, and will be rejected by choosing individuals as such. And all the assertions of a ‘moral imperative’ in the world won’t work. Because such assertions appeal to a social identity that, in modern conditions, does not exist – an identity in which individual and immediate good coincides with social and long-range good. Within prevailing notions of rationality, it is individuals who choose as rational self-maximisers. For any individual to sacrifice any part of their individual good for a common good implies irrational behaviour on their part. It’s possible. The figure of the self-maximising individual is a fiction that models human nature on capitalist instrumental relations. But those relations are not a fiction, they constitute the reality within which individuals have to act and earn a living and put a roof over their heads. Ignore that to assert sacrifice for a long term collective ecological and social good, and you are inviting political failure. To cut a long story short – an ecological ethic is effective and meaningful, coherent and cogent, only with the creation of the appropriate social identity within right relationships, buttressed by a common morality that re-restablishes morality in terms of a notion of moral knowledge and truth, that is, as something that transcends individual choice. And, whisper it, that makes an environmental morality closer to religion than is comfortable for those environmentalists who think that only science is the realm of the true and the rational, that religion is the realm of false and irrational. There it is, in a nutshell, the diremptive modern world that Weber described as split between fact and value, the rational and the irrational, the objective and the subjective. Except, in those terms, the idea that science itself yields objective knowledge proves impossible to sustain. Nietzsche pointed the flaw out from the first, claiming that all such claims are mere rationalizations and projections and conceptualisations.
It all gets unduly complicated here. In the US last year, scientists had to march in defence of ‘the value of science.’ The problem is this, once we enter the world of power struggles – and that is where we go once we see ethics as no more than the realm of value judgments, with no binding collective force – then the world of politics can press science into its service, take the bits it likes, and discard the rest. To argue for the value of science is to make a moral argument, but morality has now been put on a non-rational basis. This might appeal to those who like their history tinged with irony, but it is a bitter irony that may cost us a viable civilization – scientific reason, exalted as the one and true form of rationality above all else, can only be defended by ethics reduced to the realm of the non-rational. Of course, without the notion of a collectively binding moral truth, the defence fails. Trump or any political or business leader can tell science and scientists to take a hike, and that’s exactly what science and scientists will have to do in the absence of an effective practical reason.
I know environmentalists who are adamant that environmentalism is scientific and science based, and will have nought to do with politics, ethics, and, least of all, religion. On the other side, climate deniers have reinforced divisions by accusing environmentalists of engaging in the ‘new religion of climate alarmism.’ That’s a view that invites environmentalists to extirpate religion all the more and insist on good sound science. And science, the world of theoretical reason, departs even further from the world of practical reason. Instead of a bridge between the two worlds, ensuring that scientific and moral knowledge join hands to practical effect, a massive wall is erected between the two, with the result that we accumulate all the knowledge and know-how in the world, and are unable to act on it.
The distinction between fact and value does not describe the real world of human beings and is unsustainable. Failure to bridge that gap with cost us the conditions of civilised life. There is an unexamined, and utterly complacent, assumption underlying this split between fact and value, and that is that the facts alone are the basis of meaningful statements and will speak for themselves. And that morality is merely a world of opinions, preferences, likes, dislikes. That view is manifestly false. One of the first lessons I learned training in history was that the facts, most certainly, do not speak for themselves. A crude, disabling positivism still underlies the worldview of the modern world, and it incapacitates us when it comes to practical actions, the motivational economy and engaging in collective endeavour for a common good. Fact and value are not two distinct substances, and it is the failure of the modern world to see them as related that may prove fatal in the long run. The evidence, the facts, ‘nature’ and its physical processes and patterns, the sky, the water, the land – none of this is sufficient to constitute an ethic, something that not only motivates and influences an individual choice, but also serve to obligate others in a common endeavour, that is, gives force to the notion of a moral imperative as something that is indeed binding on the individual beyond subjective choice and valuation. You can’t just ask people to look at the evidence, judge for themselves – judge in what way? Just accept the dictatorship of facts? – and act. That’s a crude and naïve model that shows no understanding of how society functions and human beings operate. It implies that humans are mere passive vessels responding to the external stimuli of facts and their presentation. What facts? Presented by who? No facts are presented neutrally, outside of an institutional and social context. But we trust science to be self-cleansing, and scientists to check their work, and the work of each other, against objective standards. My point is not to challenge facts. It is to emphasise that science is not authoritative politically and ethically, and those who say it ought to be are asserting an ethic which, in the context of the fact-value division, is non-rational, hence subjective and non-binding – it cannot constitute the moral imperative that is needed. The evidence will never be enough. And when it comes to scientific evidence, people are being asked to take things on trust. Science is counter-intuitive. Much that is true seems to utterly contradict common sense. We trust the world of science to do its job well. But people will be sceptical when science and scientific fact comes to be seen to dictate to the realm of politics and society. Even in light of evidence that seems overwhelming – is it now 100% of climate scientists that affirm that climate change is attributable to human activity? – human beings as social beings with social interests will find cogent reasons to ignore inconvenient facts. It may be irrational in the long run, but, to borrow from Keynes, in the long run we are dead. Human beings live in there ‘here and now,’ said Hegel. And here’s the interesting bit – the religious ethic has been criticised for diverting attentions from earthly life to the promise of a Heaven to come in the afterlife. That devaluation of the material world, it is claimed, is instrumental in environmental destruction. That claim is false, in my view, for reasons given by Rabbi Sacks later on. We need to connect the short and the long run with respect to a common ethic that is binding on individuals, transcending immediate self-interested choice, compelling and obligating action devoted to a common end. Absorption in the material affairs of the ‘here and now,’ the facts of life, encourages a myopia with respect to a long term common good that, unchecked, will produce collective ruination.
At this point, the scientifically inclined still reluctant to overcome their scepticism of ethics and politics, and their fear and loathing of religion, will continue to hold that further education fostering scientific literacy on the part of the general public will finally ensure the breakthrough to the world of reason that is needed. Even if that rational utopia could come to be achieved, it still wouldn’t work – the field of ethics and politics is called practical reason for a very good reason, and it is the height of idealistic folly and naivety to think that the world of theoretic reason and fact can do the job.
I have spent years trying to spell this out. I doubt it has had any impact at all on environmentalists (or liberals and atheists for that matter). The claims made against religion in the context of the fact-value dualism of modernity apply also against any form of collective ethic and endeavour, communism, socialism and environmentalism itself. The underlying assumption of this view that morality is a matter of personal choice is that any kind of morality that is binding on individuals, constraining and compelling actions in terms of common ends, is repressive of individual liberty, denies the moral ultimacy and primacy of the individual, and is therefore to be rejected as immoral. There goes religion from the public realm. But there goes socialism, communism and ‘Green’ environmentalism too. The failure to understand or accept this seems like plain bad faith to me, and makes me very suspicious indeed of the political implications. Here, I see an incipient totalitarian which, with anything like real power, would act to suppress and silence contrary voices. In the absence of a genuine morality capable of commanding common allegiance and respect, there will be resort to legal and governmental force to compel compliance. I’ve read Hardin on the tragedy of the commons calling for mutual self-restraint mutually agreed. It’s a mouthful. If compulsion in some form is needed – it is, because individual choice and action alone won’t cut it – then any institutional constraint, agreed mutually, is possible and sustainable and meaningful only in the context of an ethic that transcends subjectivism. Human beings being what they are need to be motivated, enthused, inspired. Hence my reference to the belief systems that powered the great Cathedral building. An environmentalism of cathedral projects requires precisely that kind of belief system. The global tragedy of the commons can only be addressed by collective forms of action. Not only collective, of course, lest I be accused of overlooking the personal commitment. But the health and preservation of ecosystems, biodiversity, even the human species itself, cannot be ensured without individuals being compelled to act and make choices that the scientific evidence tells us (we are told by scientists) are necessary. And once we appreciate this, we start to see that morality is much more than a series of value judgments, but something with collective binding obligatory force constraining each and all. Those committed to individual liberty and personal choice will continue to try to put ethics in the marketplace, along with every other part of the global commons. But it is they who are being immoral here – they will cost us the Earth.
Here I am talking about ethics as a common endeavour. Overall, however, I am talking about religion, and reacting against a very sharp antipathy towards religion on the part of Green environmentalists, who have attached the environmental issue to their personal choices of atheism and secularism. This I see as putting an incoherence at the heart of environmentalism that serves to ensure its practical failure. Environmentalists like Hardin write of the need for compulsion and restraint, as if these things are merely institutional questions. This alone is insufficient. To agree on mutual restraint, people need to be persuaded, and to be persuaded they need to believe in what they are being made to do. A long time ago now, Jean Jacques Rousseau saw that the true and the good cannot just be given, or dictated in the manner of evidence, it has to be willed. Ludwig Wittgenstein understood this too: "To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.” (Wittgenstein, Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119). And that points to a dimension that is overlooked by those who think truth, as given in the form of scientific evidence, can simply be dictated. In The Age of Ecology, Joaquim Radkau points out that change in history is always the result of a combination of material interests and moral/metaphysical motivations. Human beings as meaning seeking creatures need to be inspired and enthused if they are to be obligated. They need ideals they can believe in, take to their hearts, and give any moral imperative an emotional pull. And that looks an awful lot like the religion that atheist environmentalists decry. Because that complete union of all our faculties, not just the rational, is not something that can simply be engineered. It is not amenable to technological and institutional treatment, it is not scientific in that sense. It is reason with the moral and emotional components in place. And here I return to irony, because the climate deniers who have been accusing environmentalists of engaging in pseudo-science, politics masquerading as science, and a ‘new religion’ of climate alarmism, may well have been showing environmentalists the way forward, breaking out of the confines of the world of fact into the world of practical reason, and finally coming to do politics and ethics properly, taking the immense wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how into the world of human action, allying the impressive ability we have acquired to act with the motivation and will to act. Let’s hope the Green enlightenment doesn’t come too late to make any difference. In the very least, I make these points to indicate that religion involves a collective ethic that takes individuals out of their egos and self-interest and raises their sights beyond the ‘here and now’ to the greater long term good. In the least, that suggests the ecological moral education that is required if we are to address the environmental crises we face. But religion implies something much more than a solution to environmental ills; it implies that environmentalism is not just a material but a moral issue, and that the moral question is the ultimate one, upon which the rest depends. Green atheist environmentalism has inverted the relation, is reduced to statements of fact and, as a result, left the mass of humanity unmoved, cold, and unresponsive. People aren’t stupid and greedy, they have throughout history risen to whatever challenge has been before them. They are often just uninspired, badly organised and badly led. A good leader inspires those who follow. I read the dreary, repetitive, writing of our obituary that passes for environmentalism, and I’m uninspired.
Religion is alive and kicking, and so is Christianity, despite the wishful thinking, and vicious rhetoric, of those concerned to see the end of these things as epitomizing human stupidity, superstition and bigotry. I’ve read enough of this bile now. Not many Christians are Greens. And not many Greens are Christians. There seems to be a mutual antipathy. Which would be fine for environmentalism if religion showed signs of disappearing. Too many are still hooked on the Enlightenment delusion that the advance of science would see the end of religion as an illusion. Religion, however, possesses an ineliminable psychic and emotional truth, something that bland, question begging assertions about “Mother Nature” do not satisfy. The human species is defined by a cosmic yearning for meaning, a meaning that involves questions of significance that lie outside the realm of science. We can dismiss that yearning as so much infantile craving for a reassurance that cannot be given. It’s just that people won’t buy it. The Greens could care less, it seems. They see religion as superstition, and Christianity as reactionary and conservative. It doesn’t seem to worry them much that conservatism politically is perennially strong and popular, is a politics that command the loyalty of millions, and, you know, gets politicians and folk in decision-making, policy-making positions, constitutes a government, leads a nation. That doesn’t seem persuasive. Which tells me that such folk don’t take politics seriously at all. They would prefer to be a minority who are, in their view, right, rather than a political movement seeking to establish their views on the testing ground of the public arena.
According to the Green policy unit, “Everyone has the right to follow and practise the religion of their choice without facing discrimination. Equality and antidiscrimination laws should apply to all organisations, including religious ones”. And that effectively means that churches, mosques and other religious premises would be subservient to secular public force, religious bodies and ministers mere functionaries of the law. That’s a discriminatory position. I’ve ignored this for years, thinking that there may be a possibility of getting Greens to see the need for a transcendent ethic. I see clearly I am arguing against blatant prejudice, bigotry and hatred. These people are totalitarians in politics, something people are inclined to overlook on account of the tiny support they command. People don’t like them, see them as elitist and hectoring, dictatorial in the way they thing whatever evidence they cite is persuasive in itself, with no space for debate and deliberation in a genuine public space composed of citizens. What value anyone’s opinion on a statement of fact! This is repeated to much merriment at the expense of the stupid masses. The people who do this clearly don’t realize, or more likely don’t care, that that ‘opinion’ is precisely what citizen discourse and interaction is all about. But it is evident that the views of people don’t count. This is a vision of an environmental dictatorship under the sway of self-appointed experts. I say ‘self-appointed’ because that’s the only way this crowd could ever come to determine policy – they will never ever persuade people to vote for them in sufficient numbers.
Can Christians serve in the public realm? They are saying clearly ‘no.’ They don’t want religion in politics or the public realm. Religion is to be strictly ‘private.’ Which means non-existent. With no social or political impact or relevance, religion doesn’t exist. This is merely the logical extension of the secular project. And what applies to religion applies to all notions of the good or the collective in politics. We live in an existentialist world of subjective values and choices, none of which are persuasive; we are all free to choose our own gods or devils, and, without an objective standard by which to evaluate these values, it doesn’t matter. The public realm is a neutralized, demoralised sphere, with any goods pursued contained in the private sphere, competing against each other in the market place. That’s a world without morality. No doubt, secularists will clap their hands, and celebrate freedom, diversity and otherness. And the rich and powerful will celebrate, too. Because money and power will decide everything. No wonder Rousseau condemned atheism as the ‘philosophy of the comfortable.’ He saw it all coming from the first, and hence he broke violently with the materialists of the Enlightenment. These people are walking headlong into a sophist word and, hilariously, they think sweet reason – their ideals – will prevail. No wonder they have spent so long crying over Trump. He’s given them a hard lesson in grown-up politics. They don’t show many signs of learning it, though.
I read: “The Green party has decided that religious organisations should not be involved in the running of state-funded schools. All of our church schools would therefore be abolished. They are fully behind the introduction of euthanasia and want to do away with the current law that requires the consent of two doctors for an abortion. Their hostility toward the State of Israel and their desire to abolish the Monarchy aren’t going to help either. The themes of equality and freedom from discrimination run through the Green Party’s website, yet that freedom is nebulous. For those who disagree with party policy, there is no freedom of thought or conscience. While the mainstream parties have given their MPs free votes on same-sex marriage, the right-to-die and abortion legislation, anyone serving the Greens must agree to have their moral minds made up for them by the in-house thought police. Dissent is not tolerated.”
Are there any Christian Green Party candidates? I know some Greens who are Christians. But it is as Greens that they are valued, or tolerated, rather. Their Christianity is a definite no-no. There is a certain malignancy at the heart of all of this. I don’t need the association with this kind of politics. It reeks of liberal intolerance, bigotry and prejudice. Environmentalism needs to be freed from the clutches of this kind of narrow politics, and made central to the concerns of people and communities, the ‘ordinary’ folk, people who want the basics of life covered. We live, as Hegel told us, in the ‘here and now.’ That’s where people want environmental concerns settled. They are not persuaded by abstract claims and vague promises – enforced by laws and regulations imposed from above, by self-serving politicians and bureaucrats – with respect to the long-term. I don’t disagree with collective purpose and action for the long term common good, far from it. But I have spent too long trying to get certain folk to get serious about how that good is effectively constituted. Some are doing great work on commons and transitions, and I exempt them entirely from these criticisms. It’s the people who are attaching their secular liberal agenda to environmentalism that I am calling out. Not merely on account of their hate-filled prejudice and bigotry, but on account of being so politically feeble, intellectually arrogant, unimaginative, soulless, smug and utterly repellent when it comes to winning the support of ‘ordinary’ people they so patently hold in contempt. They lack the common touch. They are big on equality and diversity in the abstract, love talking about embracing ‘otherness,’ except that the ‘others’ they refer to are always the same kind of people. A white working class Christian is not an ‘other’ likely to be embraced by these folk. And I’m gone. I’ve seen enough of these narrow-minded intolerant bigots to last a lifetime. I don’t think any of them listened to a single word I wasted on them. They didn’t even show much sign that they appreciated my work and support, either, for that matter. For a tiny minority who lie outside the mainstream, they show little concern to be popular. Just right. In their terms. And that’s before we even look at practical politics in the sense of forms of governance and economic provision. Here, wishful thinking, pipe dreams and delusions utterly divorced from people and realities is prevalent. Caveat suffragator – people beware. Except that we don’t need to issue the warning, people stay away in millions in any case. And now, so do I. I don’t find the liberal, 'social justice’ gospel persuasive at all. It's a religious ideal utterly lacking in any kind of the supporting religious ethic and practice required to give it substance. It's utopian, socially irrelevant in the sense that it lacks a purchase on social reality.
The fact is, Christians are enjoined to engage in Creation Care, and look after the Creation as part of worshipping the Creator. Secular atheist Greens invert this, worship Nature (not Creation) and ditch the Creator. That’s the ones who remain religious (or spiritual, which they prefer, loathing religion as much as they do). The others just give us nature as a physical entity, physical processes and biological imperatives outside of moral concern and evaluation. It’s a demoralisation and dehumanisation.
Give me Pope Francis’ Laudato Si any day over the dreary misanthropy and assertions of natural necessity that pour forth from these Greens. And, please, don't get me started on the obsession with population! There are too many people, people are the problem, sweeping generalisations that make it clear that the world would be a better place if humans didn't exist. These people are psychologically preparing for extinction. (And let me make it clear that I know Greens who have argued clearly and cogently that the population issue is to be addressed by doing the things we need to do anyway in terms of a proper distribution and use of resources on the planet, including shifting responsibility into the hands of women - I exempt such people from these comments, they are honourable exceptions trying to educate the misanthropes, and I commend them). They give us a miserable science – which itself is a human conceptual construction, not reality as such – masquerading as ethics. I’ll make it clearer: there are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, Elokim and Hashem, the one the God of physical Creation, nature, its laws and processes, the other, the God of Love and personal relationships. Green atheists give us the one, and lose the other. And in losing the other, they engage in a dis-godding that is also a dehumanisation. And I’m finished with it. Environmentalism can take root, grow and thrive in other, healthier, richer, soil. This is barren terrain. I have much to write on this. I could write about the rationalist, humanist utopia these people want to build on the basis of their self-chosen values – the Tower of Babel story again – which amounts to nothing more than egoistic self-assertion and mutual self-cancellation, men as gods who become masters of nowhere. They just want to get rid of God and think things are so simple that some vague, non-existent (socially, institutionally and politically) “humanity” can come to create and live by its own values. They fail to see that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Once transcendent standards, such as justice, have been dissolved into diverse, and competing, human hands, within asymmetrical power relations, they are gone for good, replaced by a justice that really is, as sophist Thrasymachus said, the interests of the strong. Stop whining about Trump! That’s the way power politics goes. Grow up! Or, at long last, examine the source, ethically, of your endless crying, and make it explicit, instead of being so concerned to abolish it.
And if you think I’m exaggerating the extent of Green atheist bigotry .. open your eyes and ears.
Try this kind of thing, which suggests that religious folk are not smart enough or concerned enough to know all about clever things like ecology. I have a cousin who is professor of biology, specialist in plant and soil. This, Greenies, is the easy stuff. Try engaging in morality and meaning in any depth. But, forget religious folk here, and think about your average citizen – and wonder how they may react to this kind of arrogant and elitist assertion of knowledge and intelligence with respect to the planet’s ecology, as if this makes the holders of such knowledge somehow privileged culturally. Not so – the principle of self-assumed obligation remains in place, and we respect men and women as citizens.
I could multiply these examples. But it’s 5-46am on Christmas night. And I’ve heard enough abuse from certain Greens about Christmas today to know where health, happiness and humanity lie. And it’s not with bitter, narrow, sanctimonious bigots who make false claims to intelligence and knowledge on their part, denying it to those with whom they disagree. The environment is far too important to left in the hands of these people. Their crankiness puts ‘ordinary’ folk, practical people, working class, aspirers, achievers, business people and conservative bastions of every viable community right off. Environmentalism needs to be taken out of the clutches of the cranks, misanthropes, doomsters and bigots.
As for “things that exist,” material things are finite. 99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. Science tells us that the world is objectively valueless and meaningless, there is no purpose, point or direction, no meaning to the game of life other than staying in the game. To what end? Stupid question. It’s all pointless. That makes existentialists of us all. Except that any existential choice here, however free, is free only in the sense of arbitrary – as meaningless as the universe in which it is made. Plus … if human beings are free to choose their values, take morality into their own hands and choose what values to live by … then people are free to … choose God. You can say it’s all made up and there’s no evidence. And people who choose God can turn round and make exactly the same objection with respect to your self-chosen values. It’s a world without morality. Power and physical necessity and biological imperatives decide. And when it comes to “things that exist,” read up on Victor Frankl and the way he defines the human species in terms of the quest for meaning. That quest “exists” and is as real and as true to human nature as any physical fact you care to mention. That spiritual dimension exists. Those who seek to extirpate it are the utopians and unrealists that do damage to people and reality. They are blinkered bigots. And now, at 6am in the morning, I am going to bed, to sleep well, knowing I will never have to waste time and words with these people ever again. They are mired in the finite and are as miserable as sin. Their position is self-contradictory, and the sad thing is, for all of their much vaunted intelligence, they can't see it. Go on, take morality into your own hands, and then see that there really is no such thing as "humanity" at all - there is what we have no, irreducible subjective opinion, mutual self-cancellation leading to collective ruination, and the rule of right over the good, followed by the triumph of might over right. And the idealists will still be crying, and will continue to cry until they see that an ethic can only be effective, and ideals realized, if it is about something more than subjective choice. It's not the best ideals and values that prevail in the moral marketplace, it's the views of those who have the power to impose their perception of reality upon all those with contrary views. Environmentalism will remain incoherent for so long as it seeks to base ethics on subjective choice. As for the idea that science is a religion ... or naturalism .. please, that's every crude error in the book of ethics and more besides, an indication of how much humankind has lost under the sway of scientism. It looks like we'll have to start again, re-learn some ancient lessons.
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, therefore, we are saved by hope," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. "Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."
And if we want to "save the environment", we had better act as a "we", with a shared morality and common meaning, not an individual morality. I hear environmentalists referring to climate action as a "cathedral project," meaning a commitment to an endeavour that lasts longer than a lifetime, people starting to work on something whose end they will never see. I like the idea, and think this is the very thing we need. The problem is, those who built the cathedrals believed in a transcendent ethic that went beyond individual choice and material existence. They believed in God. That's what it takes to commit effort and talent to a "cathedral project." And if we are to "save the environment", then we will have to labour together united by a Greater Love. It won't happen any other way, even if we ever managed to construct the perfect system of enlightened self-interest.
That "faith in humanity," as someone put it to me, is touching, in a way, but naive, and dangerously so - it leaves us short our true ends, deficient and vulnerable to forces outside of individual choice. Let me try to explain this to leftist friends by citing the example of Ayn Rand.
It is impossible to argue for common goods or a common good, whether one identifies this in terms of socialism or environmentalism, ‘Society’ and ‘Nature’ (note inverted commas denoting an abstraction in need of content), social justice and environmental health, without a collective ethic. We see here how left liberal atheism and secularism which places the emphasis on personal choice undercuts itself. The only possible way out is that of Kant and his self-legislating Reason which holds that human beings, on account of their innate rationality, are capable of universalising the moral law. Kant’s genius is to have almost achieved the impossible. For reasons I have given elsewhere, I don’t think he succeeded, hence his intersubjective ethic falls to the subjectivism implicit in modern institutions.
Here is where I subject Kant to a Thomist critique:
Here, in an attempt to get the Left to understand the point, I shall examine the figure of Ayn Rand, the darling, even Goddess, of the American Right. The inconvenient truth for American conservatives is that Rand was an atheist. The churches condemned her. That doesn’t make Rand wrong and the churches right. Kant, too, has been condemned for his emphasis on human reason and enlightenment, as a secularisation of the religious ethic. Take that religious foundation away, and self-legislated reason implodes in on itself. Hence the scepticism of the churches, even hostility (read Jacques Maritain’s criticisms of Rousseau and Kant to see what I mean. I love Maritain, Rousseau and Kant, so you can appreciate my predicament here).
Rand’s philosophy is atheist and individualist. History professor Jennifer Burns, writer of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, says about Rand: ‘She was Jewish, but she always said her religion had no meaning to her.’ And that seems right. Rand’s emphasis was consistently upon personal choice and responsibility against all collective abstractions and fictions such as the state and public interest. For Rand, we are obligated to honour only those commitments that are of our own individual choosing. (Unlike family, into which one is born). Politics, economics and society denote a world of our choosing, with no collective purposes, loyalties or solidarities outside of that.
Such an atomistic society, for me, denies the warm affective ties and bonds that make for a healthy and happy society. It is interesting to read that the only philosophers that Rand ever claimed to have influenced her philosophy were Aristotle and Aquinas. I find that strange, because Aristotle built his ethics and politics on the observation that human beings are social beings requiring a public life in order to complete themselves and flourish (Eudaimonia). St Thomas did this too, adding a beatitude based on God to Aristotle's earthly flourishing. Individuality and sociability are two sides of the same human coin, a view that expressed too in the way that Catholic philosophy balances personality and community, creating a rich multi-layered social organisation that avoids the twin reefs of social atomism below and political centralisation above.
But there it is. The Left are united in their hostility to Rand and her individualist philosophy. And yet, her commitment to individual choice in ethics and economics is not at all dissimilar to the liberal left commitment to individual morality with respect to God as a ‘made up’ value. (In passing, note how this criticism undercuts itself. If there is no God, and any such ‘God’ is ‘made-up’ and, therefore, invalid, then the same objection applies to all human values. If the world is objectively valueless and without inherent meaning and purpose, if there is no objective reality and order to discern and disclose, then human beings are entirely responsible for ‘making up’ their values, begging the question of why anyone is obligated by the ‘made up’ values of others. Kant answers this in terms of the universalizability of the moral law that humans give themselves through their rationality. Whether that works … I have made the case for Kant at length over the years. As the years go by, I am less and less convinced by its cogency. And, oddly, Rand described Kant as a 'monster,' although I am sure she misunderstood him. She advocated reason rather than egoism as such, and, in my view, has much more similarities with Kant than Aristotle and Aquinas, for whom reason educates desire from within, rather than without in the deontological sense).
Here is the interesting thing about Rand. In 1973, she made a monetary donation to the state of Israel, thereby making a commitment to a collective entity and purpose, recognizing that a collective body or institution can, after all, secure purposes that enhance rather than inhibit individual liberty. Or so it would seem. Scholars are still debating the action.
In the words of Jennifer Burns, “Her donation raises some interesting questions about whether her religion was more important to her than she was willing to publicly admit.” That’s speculation. If true, I can compare this with Kant, who took what he considered to be the best values of the religion he was brought up with and sought to place them on the basis of a secular rationalism. The Judaeo-Christian ethic is assumed as a background support. Kant’s categorical imperative and his formulae of ends form the centrepoint of his moral philosophy. They read a secularisation of the religious ethic. The problem with such ethical systems is that they presume God as a background assumption and raise themselves up on the pretension that human Reason can put itself in the place of God. God fades so far into the background as to disappear, leaving only a self-legislating Reason in which the subjectivism of the ‘self’, in time, comes to dissolve the universalism of Reason.
As for Rand, she openly argued ‘against God’ when criticising faith as an abdication of individual responsibility and an insult to the human intellect denoting a psychological weakness on the part of believers. Rand insists that truths be tied objectively to reality, thus ruling out any supernatural entity such as God. Why do I make such an issue of God? Because I discovered that without the God of Love and personal relationships, nothing else matters, it is just life and it’s biological imperatives, which doesn’t need an ethic, and renders all talk of meaning and significance a nonsense. Art, music, culture, the very things that define human beings, are mere ephemera. As for love, it is nature’s ruse to propagate the species. And if you think a viable civilisation can be built and sustained on those mean-spirited and bleak foundations, you are deluded.
Note Rand’s criticisms of God and religion well – for they are precisely the same criticisms, made in much more abusive terms, by leftist atheists, liberals and secularists. And consider the implications. For Rand’s argument ‘against God,’ is also an argument against all forms of collective identity and purpose. Indeed, contrast how little she says in criticism of God and religion with her vehemence in denouncing socialism and communism and the politics of collective interest engineered via the state. In other words, leftists who are atheists and secularists emphasising individual morality and personal choice in the ethical and cultural sphere fail to see how such a philosophy totally undercuts their collective and social commitments in the political and economic sphere. And on that incoherence, they will fail. To be true to the commitment to social justice and environmental health (neither of which deny personality and individuality and subjectivity, I hasten to add, since I argue emphatically for individuality and sociality as two aspects of the same human nature), leftists need a collective morality, something that transcends the individual and individual choice. And that implies an objective standard, transcendent truths, values and norms, the very thing that those who obsess over God and religion, are concerned to reject.
'Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.'
— Gore Vidal, 1961
Rand said,
“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible….The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.”
For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.
‘Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him.’
It amazes me that there are conservatives who worship Rand. I can only speculate that their fear and hatred of socialism have reached such a level as to identify each, any and every collective purpose and public good with socialism, leading them to dissolve everything that makes for a viable social existence. And I can only think that they have succumb to the sin of avarice and are so addicted to money and private property as to be blind to others.
Rand is un-American, unchristian and plain wrong. For all of her assertion of objective reality, she does not affirm transcendent norms, truths and values and is certainly not religious, for reasons given. They are perfectly intellectually valid reasons: that truth must be objectively tied to reality. She sees any transcendent ethic standing outside of that reality as an offence to reason. Many people who oppose Rand’s ethics of self-interest and politics of capitalism say the same thing. But this is where I try to get those who reject God and religion on grounds of evidence and logic to see the implications. Rand may be telling a nasty truth about evolutionary biology, natural selection and reason as individual self-interest that people with progressive social principles would choose to deny. Such a view implies the rejection of collectivism and the idea of a society where people take care of each other, as they take personal responsibility in taking care of themselves – it’s not an either/or, and these false debates start and never end once we separate that which belongs together – personality and community.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
-- John Rogers
I'm with Tolkien and his fellowship. Tolkien and the Fellowship of All Living Things
Tolkien declared that he was not a socialist in any sense of that word. He believes in fellowship, though, and in a commitment to common ends that would identify him to Rand and her libertarian followers as a communist. There's something badly amiss here.
"Basic human need can be fulfilled only by and through other human beings, i.e. society. The need for community is itself a basic need. Loneliness, isolation, ostracism, by the group -- these are not only painful but pathogenic as well."
- Alfred Maslow
People who are so possessed by their hatred of God, so sure of their (self-choosing) reason, need to pause and think deeper.
I say self-choosing for a reason. Morality as subjective value judgments, preferences, opinions and likes affirms individual choice over each, any and every collective purpose or interest, whether that is expressed in terms of religious ideals and practices or politics (left and right). Think about that caption with which I headed this piece, it's a myth and you are free to choose. In an objectively meaningless world - which science denies this? - then all values are made up, and you are free to choose any. It's just that no one can offer good reasons to persuade anyone else that that subjective choice is valid for them, and there is no possibility of an ethics capable of inspiring and obligating others. It is at that point that a society loses its moral compass and is in the process of dissolution.
“I am against God," declared Rand. "I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”
Those words are being repeated by people who advance progressive causes in politics. But Rand rejected God and religion for the same reasons she rejected progressive causes affirming a common good, a public interest and the unity of each and all. Progressives may be for the "we," but in basis their argument on the self-choosing "I" they are following in the libertarian line of Rand.
Rand did actually have a God: herself:
'I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”'
If I am my own god, I may as well wish "Merry Christmas" to myself. But there would be no point, and no merriment. If we are all our own gods and devils, and our values are incommensurate rather than shared, then we are all locked in the prison of the ego. I, me, myself. Dante called Hell an 'eternal prison.' That's where the ego confines us.
As Bruce Levine says, 'while Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United States’ dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.
The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?'
I'm taking this question further and asking those who are committed to progressive values and causes to see that they cannot succeed on the basis of a philosophy of individual choice - they need to get to grips with communities of practice and character and with narrativity. At the moment, their actions are acidic rather than constructive. And incarcerating rather than liberating. Pope Benedict XVI makes the point effectively (June 2005):
'Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own "ego".'
And that's the bitter irony of a humanism which bases its values on nothing more than subjective choice - inhumanism.
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
And if that is a 'weakness,' as Rand says, and only fools are kind, then I guess it's wise to be cruel. And if life belongs only to the strong, what will you lend on an old golden rule?
And it amazes me too that there are radicals who worship John Lennon. It's a shallow and superficial radicalism grounded in nothing but wishful thinking, begging all the key questions.
Yes, you read it right, those great free-thinking, enlightened John Lennon fans who think religion the cause of bigotry and conflict are ‘outraged’ over changes in the wording to their sacred text. Not that they are dogmatists or anything, displaying a faithful adherence to the letter whilst ignoring the spirit. There is an idolatry of words as well as of things, and there’s a fanatical devotion at work here that is religion at its very worst. Of course, the idea that Lennon is a god of some kind whose words are sacred scripture beg further comment.
Cee Lo Green’s crime was to change the lyrics to the Lennon song ‘Imagine,’ singing ‘all religion is true’ instead of ‘and no religion too.’ Lennon fans deemed this sacrilegious and went after the singer with a vengeance. It’s just lucky that we have laws to restrain people’s enthusiasm, and no crosses were within easy reach. ‘Christ you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be; The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me.’ Lennon seemed to have something of a God complex himself. Engage in silly gesture politics and then scream persecution when people, rightly, draw attention to your infantile, self-important and stupid behaviour.
‘Lennon fans immediately pounced on Twitter following his solo rendition of the classic tune,’ says the article. "The whole point of that lyric is that religion causes harm. If "all [sic] religion's true" it would be a pretty bleak place," remarked @geekysteven, summing up Lennon's anti-religion philosophy.
Green responded with a perfectly reasonable statement that was in keeping with the invitation to ‘imagine’ a world we would want to live in: "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys!" he wrote in his erased post on the matter. "I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all."
You see, that’s the thing about self-invented values that atheist critics of religion have missed. They presume that people will be free to invent the values that they, the anarchists and libertarians and so forth agree with. No. If human beings are free to take morality into their own hands, as atheist Stuart Kauffman says in Reinventing the Sacred (2008), then they are free to invent any values they like. If, as Kauffman says, God is a human invention, the most powerful symbol created by human beings, then nothing at all changes should the world come to accept the atheist position – human beings could only ever have been inventors of their own morality. It’s just that people are free to invent God and religion, and are free to invent it in any which way they like. You can call it a projectionist fallacy and reject it. Religious folk, in turn, can say the same about your invented values. And if you cling to them and get outraged when people play around with and ‘reinvent’ your symbols, you are very much being as guilty of fetishising words as any religious adherent you claim to be bigoted.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/513449/cee-lo-green-adds-religion-to-imagine-fueling-outrage
As for the song ‘Imagine’ itself, I consider it to be dreary, insipid drivel for a narcissistic generation of self-important “I’s” incapable of constituting anything by way of the public community and solidarity human beings as social beings need, just living in a parasitism off the efforts of others. Read the lyric closely – there is a systematic, selfish evasion of all the problems of social life and order. Just imagine if all the things you consider to be the causes of conflict and dissension didn’t exist, then that would be problem solved and there’d be nothing to worry out, we’d all be living in peace! Except that that is not problem solved, it is problem evaded. It is infantile regression, back into the pram as the self-important ‘I’ around whom the entire world revolves. Imagine no politics, no governments, no private property, no classes and social groupings, no states, no nations, no tribes, no beliefs, no culture, no civilization, no religion, there’d nothing to argue over.
That may sound nice, it is anything but - that is politics on ice, that is humanity without difference. True peace is a balancing of the universal and the particular, not the suppression of the particular by the universal. Sexless, classless, genderless, raceless, placeless, nationless, thoughtless, pointless - the 'I' as the great individualist nothing.
"Religion is simply an outdated tool used for fear based control with a dash of hope and false security chucked in to help sell itself. That's why religious radicals can’t handle the thought that they have willingly lived a lie, and by being completely ignorant to facts presented, they have helped hold humanity back from peace and our true potential." -Nicholas Watson
Religious radicals are not the only ones who ‘can’t handle’ the truth. But note, yet again, the stand that is taken here on ‘facts.’ The merit of atheists like Kauffman and Owen Flanagan is that they have realised the errors of such crude positivism and openly admit that reality cannot be purely fact-based. They argue that in a ceaselessly created universe, in which we are co-creators, we can never have complete knowledge of things and never be in full command of the facts, but must live into the future anyway. This, we do, says Kauffman, with ‘courage and faith.’ This ‘reinvention’ of the sacred is beginning to sound like the old religion again. Read Rabbi Sacks, who points out the relation between God and Man was always ‘the great partnership.’ Ideas of ‘co-creation’ are reinventions of the wheel.
But this notion of religion holding back humanity from reaching its ‘true potential’ reveals nothing less than the old ‘men as gods’ delusion that has been peddled throughout the centuries. It’s a teenage dream. But at least it’s more mature than the Lennonist infantilism. I studied Marx long and hard at doctoral level. I had to deal with liberal critics who argued that there is a totalitarian potential in Marx. It was easy enough for me to point to texts in denial of this, where Marx argued not for the strengthening of the state and the centralisation of political power, but for the abolition of the state. Marx is not, therefore, a statist and totalitarian. The liberal criticism went deeper, though. The problem with Marx is that he didn’t so much solve the problem of conflict as evade it. His identification of conflict with the exploitative class relations of the capital system came with the corollary that if we were to abolish those relations, then conflict would disappear, and with it the state as a coercive institution. And that, it seems, would be the end of politics. ‘Nothing to live or die for, and no religion too.’ God as the projection of humanity’s best qualities, qualities frustrated within class relations. Abolish those relations, and we would become gods. Then we come to Marx’s prescriptions for the socialist economy – where are they? There are general statements on the ‘society of associated producers.’ I support Marx at the level of general principle. But Marx begs, and does not answer, the precise institutional and systemic forms of the socialist economy. The liberal critics pounced here – politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and any vacuum in politics is very quickly filled by bureaucracy. The self-governing democratic socialism from below that Marx evidently wanted in theory would soon degenerate into a top-down statism and a totalitarian imposition upon society in practice. It would be the world bureaucratised, not the world socialised. Max Weber was an early critic, arguing that instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism would institute the ‘dictatorship of the officials.’ I make these points not to indulge in anti-socialism. I openly declare myself a socialist and argue for socialism. It’s just that if you are going to engage in major and widespread alterations of society, make sure you know what you are doing, and put some deep thought into the very practical questions of institution building.
The only thing I can ‘imagine’ listening to Lennon’s dreary dirge and the way it evades all the major questions of how society works is a wasteland. The song is politically, sociologically and morally illiterate, taking morality in terms of the origin of ethics, ethos, a practice, a way of life. Religion has always been part of that. To say abolish religion makes as much sense as to argue for the abolition of politics and institutions … oh yes, he says that too.
At risk of being run out of my Merseyside home, Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is weak-minded drivel that runs the risk of turning Earth into Hell. If you think that a harsh assessment, note well the complete innocence of anything by way of constructive thinking with respect to institutions, systems and practices. Can you imagine any kind of society without the things Lennon mentions? The song is negative, merely rejecting the things that constitute society without putting any flesh on any possible alternative society. I repeat, I make these criticisms from a socialist position, one that begs people to think practically and realistically rather than engage in wishful thinking, or mere infantile negation. My points are entirely consistent with Marxist Istvan Meszaros’ criticisms of the idea of a society of pure unmediated spontaneity as a ‘romantic delusion,’ and a dangerous one too, in that it invites the very opposite of what is desired.
Marx explicitly stated that ‘mediation must take place.’ With that, he was trying to temper his own fantasies about ‘men as gods’ becoming so intoxicating as to generate the fantasy of an entirely free society without institutions, just free individuals in worlds of their own. A world that looks an awful lot like Rand’s own imagined utopia.
Meszaros’ criticism of infantile delusions of a society without mediation brings me back to Rand, and the way she made herself her own God.
Here, in Lennon, we see exactly the same ‘I’ we see in Rand, the same libertarianism and the same narcissism. And the same anti-social, inhuman delusions.
Here are the lyrics to Lennon’s ‘God:
'I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
and Yoko…
As a rejection of misplaced concreteness and conceptual extensionism, fine. But, as with Descartes' cogito, this is the beginning of theory and practice, not the end. There are any number of philosophers who have struggled with the question of the relation of concepts - and institutions - to reality. But the bent of this song is a withdrawal into the self, not its opening out into the world. There's nothing but the self-important 'I.’ Rand's ‘I’ as God. It’s called methodological individualism, which is opposed to methodological collectivism. That's what lies behind the libertarian notion of choosing your own values. Everyone is free to choose, and no one has any right of infringing upon personal choices. We live for ourselves only. The world belongs to the strong. Just say so, and cut the fake commitment to love and peace. If that commitment is genuine, then you will need more than an individualist morality to make good your social concerns. And once you start to take those extra steps, you will find your philosophy beginning to look a lot like the old politics and ethics and religion. It is easy enough to point to the falseness of society. It is a fatal error to fall into the trap of seeing society as such as false.
Such thinking sets a false antithesis between individual and society, self-interest and social interest, and it fuels the right vs left split in politics. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ said Margaret Thatcher, ‘only individuals.’ Only individuals making choices. She quickly added families to qualify that statement, as she must. But families are only the beginning of the social groupings which come naturally to human beings as social beings. This sociality of the various ‘we’s’ constituting society is dissolved by the acid of the choosing ‘I.’
Lennon’s ‘I’ betrays the self-same thinking as Rand’s ‘I,’ and to object that Lennon’s support for left wing causes makes him entirely different to Rand’s right wing politics is invalid – the libertarian base is the same, and offers no support whatsoever for any collective principle, purpose and practice in politics. Whilst people were busy in industrial disputes, fighting for justice, engaging in practices, pioneering new forms of industrial democracy, building cooperatives etc, Lennon was in bed with Yoko saying you can have peace if you want it.
I recently wrote a lengthy piece on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. It was ignored. Except by one person, who wrote to me that, in the end, ‘all you need is love.’ It was well-intentioned. But I replied: so The Beatles thought. Four young Liverpool lads from the same time and place, who rose to fame and fortune together. And who, within a couple of years of singing that song were at each other’s throats and splitting apart. Challenged on his Beatles past, Lennon said he had grown up, and perhaps those yearning for the old songs hadn't. In truth, Lennon became even more insistent on the love and peace message. It's just that the quality and quantity of his songs diminished at the same time.
What ‘love?’ The love of money? The love of money is the root of all evil. Love needs to be ordered to its proper object. And that ordering is what society is all about. Or do we just imagine no money? We can. I'm not saying we can't. I'm saying that we cannot just imagine problems away, but that ideal and real need to be brought into relation. (Try Mark Boyle's Moneyless Manifesto - OK, he charges money for the paperback, in recognition of 'the cost of printing a book in a money-based economy, which is a reality of our Age.' Recognize realities and make available the steps of transition from here to there is what I', saying, as against declaring impossible ideals bereft of the means of their realization - people are doing it, put the focus there. I intend to round up a list of the organisations I support on this - we have to lead by practices and expand the ideal by power of example - without that, we have mere good intentions that don't get acted on, not least because they lack the means and mechanisms of action). Compared to fanciful imaginings in which all problems are wished away, that practical concern with institution building is dreary. But Kenneth Clark in Civilisation was spot on – the dreary fact remains that it is institutions that make society work. And that, throughout history, has included religion. And that is fact, a fact of history, of life, of the human psyche. It is those who insist most on facts who seem most in denial of them.
I can make the same points with respect to Milton Friedman. Friedman wrote the book Free to Choose, emphasizing an individual morality based on choice. I employ the term ‘moral marketplace’ in this piece to indicate the dissolution of objective morality into a congeries of subjective values, with no standard available to us to differentiate between them in terms of good and bad. That, in itself, is not a problem for atheists, for whom evolution has equipped us to navigate this uncertain terrain of living. There is a reality, and there is also the phenomenology of interpersonal experience, generating a kind of objectivity of its own, educating and guiding individuals in their choices.
John Lofton has published his correspondence with Friedman on this. Here is what Friedman wrote back to Lofton in response to his questions as to whether he believed in God:
“I am an agnostic. I do not ‘believe in’ God, but I am not an atheist, because I believe the statement, ‘There is a god’ does not admit of being either confirmed or rejected. I do not believe God has anything to do with economics. But values do.”
“(1) Agnosticism ‘I do not know.’ (2) Atheism ‘I know that there is no god.’ (3) I do not know where my values come from, but that does not mean (a) I don’t have them, (b) I don’t hold them as strongly as you hold your belief in God. (c) They turn out — not accidentally, I believe — to be very much like these held by most other people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, or abstract. (d) Which leads me to believe that they are a product of the same evolutionary process that accounts for the rest of our customs as well as physical characterizations.”
Friedman, then, is an evolutionist who, while insisting that his ‘values’ were not ‘accidental,’ admits that they derive from an uncertain source. We can see the same surface level ambiguity, which expresses a deeper level antinomy, in the scientist Carl Sagan who, whilst denying that there was an afterlife and saying that humans were the products of chance, nevertheless wanted to describe humans and life as ‘precious,’ implying the possibility of lasting meaning and significance in a life without God. If it’s all contingent, then any meaning we find in life can only be one that we have made up, with no rational means of distinguishing one ‘made up’ value as better than another. Better by what standard? By the flourishing of a natural organism? Why is there an obligation or a duty for an entity to flourish? Such an argument concerning necessary development is a contradiction of a value-centred subjectivism based on choice. I affirm flourishing as central to my ethics, but shorn of any naturalist determinism by the inclusion of a value-centred dimension a la Kant. And I think I’m in a better place than the subjectivists of left and right who fight it out in the endless yes/no of the marketplace.
Friedman presumed that his values were substantial and came from somewhere and referred to something. He couldn’t state the basis of this confident view, other than deny that they were ‘accidental.’ Such a position is possible only by drawing on the Judaeo-Christian foundations of social life. In the same way that Kant’s ethics only work against the background of a religious ethic that Kant took for granted as a permanent gift bestowed on humankind, Friedman took for granted the reality of his values. And here is my problem with the economics that the likes of Friedman advocate. They are parasitic on a moral capital that it does not create, does plenty to dissipate, and does nothing to replenish. It is not ‘capital’ at all, in the sense that it is not a ‘made up’ human creation. These are eternal truths which stand outside of human self-creation. The position is not consistent. To be consistent, those who affirm values as something other than accidental have to argue for a purposeful, meaningful and good world, the world as the creation of the good God. The alternative is to accept that values are indeed accidental. The idea of the world as objectively valueless makes human valuers the source of value. This is the existentialist frame, the idea that individual agents are charged with the task of finding and imposing meaning in a meaningless world. Of course, if it is all accident without purpose, then any individual choices here are merely arbitrary and subjective, since there is nothing to choose about. Choice is lacking in substantive content. In a meaningless universe, choice itself is meaningless. I engage at length with Max Weber in my work for precisely this reason. Weber establishes the modern moral predicament (and spells out the hard political realities for those with commitments to the good and the collective interest) in all of its bleak reality:
“Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights.”
“Where there is nothing …” By this, Weber is pointing to the disenchantment of the world. In the German, disenchantment refers to ‘dis-godding.’ By this, Weber is drawing attention to the advance of scientific rationality and knowledge as revealing the universe to be bereft of purpose, value, design and meaning. Only ‘big children,’ he says, look for such things now. (Although the quote is frequently misunderstood, he was referring specifically to scientific investigation). With the world stripped of value, dis-godded, any value and meaning we come to see can only be a matter of individual choice, projection and imposition. Arbitrary, subjective and accidental, without any claims on others. That points to the loss of an overarching and binding ethic, the dissolution of a common ethic capable of uniting and guiding people into individual choice, what market economics calls subjective preference. Weber’s statement is clear: human beings only have rights to the extent that there is ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing.’ Existential choice on the part of individuals does not suffice to create that something that overcomes contingency.
The world has been slowly unravelling the moral infrastructure of the past. Weber, influenced by Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ saw the problem for the first. With the loss of the overarching and binding moral framework, Nietzsche pointed out that human beings themselves were now charged with being their own gods, taking responsibility for their actions. This was the ethics of responsibility that Weber espoused. Neither seemed to have much confidence in the ability of humans to live up to so onerous a burden, charged with making meaning in a world beyond good and evil.
“When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then ? Will you be bitter or banausic ? Will you simply and dully accept world and occupation? Or will the third and by no means the least frequent possibility be your lot: mystic flight from reality for those who are gifted for it, or--as is both frequent and unpleasant--for those who belabor themselves to follow this fashion? In every one of such cases, I shall draw the conclusion that they have not measured up to their own doings. They have not measured up to the world as it really is in its everyday routine. Objectively and actually, they have not experienced the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning, which they thought they had. They would have done better in simply cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations. And for the rest--they should have gone soberly about their daily work.”
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 'Politik als Beruf,' Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Muenchen, l921), pp. 396-450. Originally a speech at Munich University, 1918, published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber describes capitalist modernity as an ‘iron cage’ which determines the lives of each and all with ‘irresistible force.’ He describes the condition of human beings who, believing themselves as choosers and valuers, are in fact bound hard and tight to the system that embraces their very subjectivity, the masters of nowhere who think themselves the pinnacle of (self)Creation:
‘No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”’
It’s the age of Nietzsche’s Last Man:
‘When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he again looked at the people, and was silent. And to his heart he said:
There they stand; there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.
Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?
They have something of which they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.
They dislike, therefore, to hear of “contempt” of themselves. So I will appeal to their pride.
I will speak to them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is the Last Man!"
And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people:
It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.
His soil is still rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow there.
Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man -- and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whiz!
I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
As for the Christmas spirit! Here is Nietzsche:
'Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.'
Yup, that's 'men as gods,' self-made man in a self-made world, inventing laughter, but never getting round to do much by way of laughter, still suffering deeply, whilst remaining all alone.
“For Equilibrium, a Blessing: Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul. As the wind loves to call things to dance, May your gravity by lightened by grace. Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth, May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. As water takes whatever shape it is in, So free may you be about who you become. As silence smiles on the other side of what's said, May your sense of irony bring perspective. As time remains free of all that it frames, May your mind stay clear of all it names. May your prayer of listening deepen enough to hear in the depths the laughter of god.”
- John O'Donohue
I address these points to people who retain ideals and values, who think human personality and dignity is something, who affirm the moral ultimacy of humanity, who go further and set human beings within a greater picture, seeing one’s human being as enlarged through connection with, and participation in, something greater than the ego, (Society, Nature, God). To those who see the world as valueless and meaningless and purposeless, such views lack any rational basis and are merely pleasant fictions and reassuring beliefs. Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins has some sharp words for idealists here, underlining the inherent purposelessness of the world:
‘In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.’
It’s one to ponder. Without God, the world is meaningless and purposeless, and all your hopes and joys and interests and values are merely subjective choices, of meaning to you, but no one else. And nature? Nature carries on in complete indifference. That view is also to be found in Einstein who, when asked if he believed in God, replied that he believed in Spinoza’s God, a God that is revealed in the lawful harmony of the universe and is unconcerned with the fate of human beings. The people who praise this view need to think harder – because human beings are concerned with their fate, their own and that of others. And that is what the personal God of Love and relationships brings in terms of value and meaning. The human world shrivels and dies in indifference and impersonality. Without God, life is ultimately meaningless and fades away in indifference. I recently saw ecologist friends waxing lyrical about Dr Glen Barry’s article The Appalling Meaningless of Being in a Post-Modern, pre-Apocalyptic world.
Barry is a militant atheist who has written on the ‘religion pollution.’ He opens this article with this statement:
‘Big important ideas to base your life upon are in short supply. Pretty much god myths, stuff, and tribes are all we got. There is nature. And she needs us.’
There, in a nutshell, is the impotence of naturalism. Because as practical guidance to human beings, the value of statements such as this is zero. Actually, it is worth than that, because in giving us a problem with no serious way of dealing with it, such statements are debilitating. Barry concludes with the 'big idea:'
‘The meaning of life is nature, and universal embrace of an ecology ethic before the biosphere collapses is all that really matters anymore.’
That's all you've got? There's nothing like an ethic advanced anywhere in this article at all. I see a description of nature and an assertion of the importance of natural systems to human and planetary health. That’s just a truism, it’s not an ethic. In terms of offering guidance to individuals with respect to organized and structured patterns of living, there is nothing. You may as well say ‘keep breathing.’ Nature is as nature does. It’s the bit beyond that that is the difficult part. Simply evading it or opting out of it makes writing like this an exercise in futility, inculcating a sense of the utter hopelessness of it all. It reads like the human species giving up and preparing the psychological ground for its own death. Suffice to say, the bald assertion that ‘the meaning of life is nature’ has no meaning whatsoever. As to Barry’s vehement assaults on religion, he plainly has no idea of who or what religion is and human beings are – God is an entity that draws human beings outside of their egoism and narcissism, identifying with some larger than they are, seeing their ends as fulfilled only in the service of a power or a force that is more than they are. It is precisely the ethic that ecologists are attempting to define in relation to ‘Nature.’ Whether we call it ‘God’ or ‘Nature,’ that ethic succeeds only if we see the universe as something more than the sum of choices on the part of human valuers. But as far as meaning in nature is concerned, scientists like Dawkins and Monod and many, many more will just say stop being ‘big children’ and ‘grow up.’ Without God in the picture, there is no good or evil, just personal choices which cannot give good reasons for anyone else to take them seriously.
Anyhow ... time is pressing .. it is now 7-23 am and I have still to get to bed. I issued all my Merry Christmases in person, rather than make a general statement over the Hell that is (anti)social (self-assertive, self-opinionated) media. Instead of one line of greeting, offered openly and spontaneously, with good cheer, people issued vast documents packed with clauses, qualifications, disclaimers and the most contorted legalese - long texts giving a statement of personal beliefs or, more likely, non-beliefs. It sounds like a soliloquy to me. Apparently, so I'm told, atheists can enjoy Christmas as much as any Christian, and have even more right so to do! Well do it then! Enjoy it then! Instead of moaning and complaining in public, hectoring and lecturing, and generally depressing the general mood. Oh, and making a point of attacking Christianity for pinching pagan traditions and making the rest up. Or do you think that human beings should cease to be social beings and express themselves and their personalities only in private? The public realm as neutralised and demoralised, a legalistic politics and impersonal economics which operates without regard to persons and their distinctive qualities ... You see, if it's all personal choice, then it's all made up, the ontological status of everything is uncertain, all reality is mediated by concepts and constructs.
It's simple. 'Merry Christmas!' You think that's a cultural imposition? That there's no such thing as society, only individuals with rights as claims against others? You like 'the other' and 'otherness', I note. You tell us often enough. It's just that these others are always the same kind of people, your kind.
'Merry Christmas!' People of good heart get it, and act on it. We need to cultivate warm, affectives ties and solidarities in the context of social proximity, habits of the heart nurtured in close relation to one another, something much more than a legal imposition of the civic peace and a contractual agreement to 'tolerate' one another, emptying views of moral content, living in a society that thinks itself beyond good and evil. In thinking it can do without good, it fosters a culture that makes evil possible. Or do people really think that their machine gods will save them? How real do people want it? If you reduce morality to a power struggle, make sure that you win, and know that your position won't be legitimate or worthy on that account either. Nature? Nature could care less about your joys and your sorrows. And don't cry when you lose out. Nietzsche condemned Christianity as a morality of slaves. Think long and hard about the words that Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power:
"The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate'. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no 'equal rights', between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"
Provocative, indeed. I could re-write a naturalist ethics more generously than this. But that generosity is all the more easy to understand with the belief in a Good God who made a Good Earth. Many people who wish to see goodness and kindness win out, in the context of planetary health and harmony, don't see the need for that God, even think it detracts from Earthly joys and diverts attention away from the material world. They can't be reading - the morality of Creation Care is all about joy and abundance, and for all, and that is very clear. But many don't see the need for a personal God, the God of Love and relationships. They write easily of "Nature," as if nature's systems and patterns and processes in themselves constitute an ethic. They don't, and the belief that they do diminishes the moral ecology of the human heart. A word of warning to my friends on the Left - conservative thinkers get this and get it profoundly: and they are right. Here is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaking in the debate on Education in the House of Lords, 7th December 2017. He is speaking on the contribution that faith schools have made, and continue to make, to the education system and to wider society, and especially about the values they give our children. So here is the dividing line - on one side there are those who see faith schools as divisive and as indoctrinating children rather than teaching them to make their own minds up, on the other side are those who see that being able to make your own minds up requires certain virtues in the first place.
"We make a grave mistake if we think of education only in terms of knowledge and skills – what the American writer David Brooks calls the resume virtues as opposed to the eulogy virtues.
And this is not woolly idealism. It’s hard-headed pragmatism. Never has the world changed so fast, and it’s getting faster each year. We have no idea what patterns of employment will look like in 2, let alone 20 years from now, what skills will be valued, and which done instead by artificially intelligent, preternaturally polite robots.
We need to give our children an internalised moral Satellite Navigation System so that they can find their way across the undiscovered country called the future. We need to give them the strongest possible sense of collective responsibility for the common good, because we don’t know who will be the winners and losers in the lottery of the global economy and we need to ensure its blessings are shared. There is too much “I” and too little “We” in our culture and we need to teach our children to care for others, especially those not like us."
We can do this without the intervention of faith schools will come the response. But here's the problem, in a world which has separated the realm of fact and the realm of value, located all true knowledge (science, reason, facts) in the former, whilst reducing the latter to subjective value judgments, all goods are considered subjective, without rational grounding, and it is impossible to identify a common good. A common good is considered repressive in its implications, suppressive of otherness and different voices.
If it's about choice, then make yours here, because here is the dividing line. I've made my position clear, and given the reasons why. I don't think "Green" environmentalism, in its militant liberal/atheist/humanist/secularist form, can generate anything like the moral depth and capacity needed to be effective in delivering the common good. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is much more clear, cogent and compelling in the way he addresses the crises of modernity.
In this talk, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offers some thoughts on his reading of Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens and Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe. Neither author are religious, but both say things that are deeply ethical about the state of our world. And Sacks is prepared to state forthrightly what is at stake here, about the profoundly religious dimensions of the crisis that is upon and the work we need to do to protect our society.
Sacks quotes Will Durant in The Story of Civilisation. Durant understood the decline of a civilization as a culmination of the split between religion and secular intellectualism, issuing in a conflict that undermined the precarious institutions of convention and morality. This happens as the institutions and laws that make society work come to be undermined by losing their foundations in our God-given morality, replaced by a secular philosophy which can be nothing more than a self-legislating reason grounded in nothing but itself. Durant is worth quoting at length on this:
"Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.
For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion."
Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and-after some hesitation-the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea.
Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into Epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."
Ref. 7 The Story of Civilization, V.1., 71.
The interesting this about Will Durant, Sacks notes, is that he started out with ambitions to be a Catholic priest. He lost his faith and his religion. Sacks, then, gives us three serious thinkers addressing the big questions of life and meaning, thinkers who are not religious at all, but who nevertheless warn us that when a society loses its religious base, its civilisation is about to die.
Here, Rabbi Sacks asks us a ‘simple question’ that is very much to the forefront of my mind:
‘Supposing I told you that all this talk about climate change and global warming were a load of absolute nonsense put together by pseudo-intellectuals practising pseudo-science, you’d probably think me mad, irresponsible or about to stand as president for some country or another. Now I want to argue that we are in the same kind of denial about another kind of climate change, namely cultural climate change, civilizational climate change, which is every bit as dangerous to the human future as is straightforward climate change.’
Praise be! I have been attempting to make this very point for more years than I care to remember, and with enough words to fill a library. In putting that point simply and directly, with a force and vigour that cannot be overlooked, Rabbi Sacks has done the world a huge service. At length I have challenged those who talk about living in a ‘post-truth’ world to see this as more than an issue of being ‘post-fact.’ They are concerned with the denial of the facts of climate science, but fail to see the problem as something much deeper than that, as something rooted in the nature of the society within which we live. If people and governments do not act on a presentation of facts, it is not necessarily because they are in denial of the facts, it is because that is not how action proceeds institutionally and socially. The springs of action are missing. If you don’t provide the means and mechanisms of action, don’t be surprised by the lack of response. This includes not merely institutional and organisational springs, but psychological, emotional, and, indeed, moral (I hardly dare say metaphysical and spiritual, too, lest the brave soldiers of positivist science and naturalism either turn tail and run or simply pass out). And that absence points to something deeper than a denial of fact. The modern world is characterised by the division between the realm of fact and the realm of value. Fact is the basis of all true knowledge; value is mere value judgment, subjective opinion, incapable of yielding knowledge. We live in a post-value world. And there, my friends, lies the source of all our problems. If you want to motivate people and empower governments to act on facts, you will have to recover the moral dimension of life, create a habitus in which the virtues can be acquired and exercised, put character formation alongside social formation so as to make available a social identity in which individual good and social good coincide, and establish the institutional conditions of the general good within forms of the common life and right relationships.
Here, John F Kennedy is worth quoting. People found him an inspiring figure. Same with Martin Luther King jr. Both were giving a simple statement of virtue ethics:
‘The basis of self-government and freedom requires the development of character and self-restraint and perseverance and the long-view. And these are qualities which require many years of training and education.’
As I note, some environmentalists are describing environmental projects as ‘Cathedral projects.’ The original Cathedrals were built by people motivated, inspired and obligated by a morality that transcended individual choices, likes, preferences and opinions. That is the only basis on which Cathedral projects will ever get off the ground, and it is the only way they can be sustained. The virtues that Kennedy speaks of here are not simply innate, and do not arise spontaneously. Upon the naïve belief in ‘Nature,’ environmentalism as naturalism will remain politically and ethically innocent and incapable. And that failure to wise up will play as big a part in environmental and civilizational collapse as any of the damaging actions environmentalists criticise.
Sacks says pointedly:
“In which case I suggest it’s real and it’s dangerous and we’d better start doing something about it now. Because we are rapidly losing the very culture that gave us the foundations of liberty, namely the sanctity of the individual person, the dignity to which we are each entitled, and what the American Declaration of Independence calls our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, all of which were ideas born in the seventeenth century that have survived and served us until now, all of which stood on the basis of a foundation in Judaeo-Christian faith.”
Sacks quotes John F Kennedy in his Inaugural Address of 20th January 1961:
“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
A self-legislating Reason, individuals living by values they have self-chosen, is not the same thing at all, and lacks the motivating and compelling power of the rights that Kennedy spoke of here. Because such self-chosen values are based on nothing but individual will, and can offer no good reason as to why anyone else should choose those values, let alone feel obligated by them. ‘Nature’ requires more than an individual morality, the environmental crisis needs more than that, civilizational needs more than that.
Sacks tells it straight, and I agree with every single word:
“Now, if we lose that belief, none of the other institutions of the contemporary world is going to save us, not science, not technology, not market economics and not the liberal democratic state. For a pretty simple reason. Because science can tell us how but not why, technology can give us power but cannot tell us how to use that power, the market economy gives us choices but doesn’t tell us which choices lead on to human flourishing and which to self-destruction, and the liberal democratic state gives us freedom but cannot itself in itself provide the intellectual or moral or spiritual basis of that freedom. So the end result is, to put it mildly, we are in trouble.
And you don’t have to be religious to recognize all the danger signals and all the early warning signs. And whether Europe dies and hands over to the barbarians or humanity dies and hands over to the robots, one way or another we are at serious risk.
And therefore my suggestion is really quite simple. All of us, religious and non-religious alike who believe in liberal humanism, who believe in human dignity, who believe in the free society, had better come together soon and work to protect the human environment with the same passion as we have come together in the past to protect the natural environment. Because if we fail to do so we will, by forgetting our past, lose, destroy, our human future. And if that happens, Heaven help us and our grandchildren.”
Jonathan Sacks thus speaks cogently about the need for us to take the moral environment just as seriously as the natural environment. He goes further than this and makes it clear that unless we get the former right, we will never resolve our crises in the latter. Here is Sacks on The Stewardship Paradigm:
"The Midrash says that God showed Adam around the Garden of Eden and said, “Look at my works! See how beautiful they are – how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.”Creation has its own dignity as God’s masterpiece, and though we have the mandate to use it, we have none to destroy or despoil it. Rabbi Hirsch says that Shabbat was given to humanity “in order that he should not grow overweening in his dominion” of God’s creation. On the Day of Rest, “he must, as it were, return the borrowed world to its Divine Owner in order to realize that it is but lent to him.”
Ingrained in the process of creation and central to the life of every Jew is a weekly reminder that our dominion of earth must be l’shem shamayim – in the name of Heaven. The choice is ours. If we continue to live as though God had only commanded us to subdue the earth, we must be prepared for our children to inherit a seriously degraded planet, with the future of human civilisation put into question. If we see our role as masters of the earth as a unique opportunity to truly serve and care for the planet, its creatures, and its resources, then we can reclaim our status as stewards of the world, and raise our new generations in an environment much closer to that of Eden."
I agree wholeheartedly. 'Nature' just doesn't do this, and as an ethics of immanence is seriously flawed, leaving environmentalism incoherent and incapable with respect to the practical challenges of living (as opposed to indulging pleasant fantasies). If only 'Nature' was enough. But it isn't. And I'm tired of trying to wean nature worshippers away from the naive faith they have in the processes of ecology into a serious engagement with ethics. Their naturalism neglects the importance of moral agency on the part of humans, meaning that they will forever fall short of the practical aspects of environmentalism as how best we may come to live well together. 'There's only nature, and she needs us,' I read from an article written by one deep ecologist and scientist, shared widely over social media. With respect, that's infantile, regressive nonsense that shows no understanding whatsoever of what it takes to address the key political, moral and institutional questions in a way that produces a viable form of living that commands the allegiance of those charged with the task of making society work. If you are serious about 'the environment,' then get serious about ethics and politics, and ditch the flabby relativism, the assertive moralism, the legalism that substitutes for an effective politics, and the question-begging naturalism, see reality as something more than power struggles, and see how virtues as qualities for successful living translate into forms of the common life and communities of practice. And then you might start seeing the changes you constantly demand, you might start to back the demands made with the means for acting upon them.
It's all in there in the religious traditions that Green atheists deride and demand that society discard. This rejection of the religious ethic is mistaken, and profoundly so. It amounts to destroying the very motivational qualities we need in order to act for the long term common good. It amounts to an ethical disarmament that plunges us into the world of power relations and biological imperatives, a meaningless and objectively valueless world of the sophist 'might is right.'
"We know much more than we once did about the dangers to the earth’s ecology of the ceaseless pursuit of economic gain. The guidance of the Oral tradition in interpreting “do not destroy” expansively, not restrictively, should inspire us now. We should expand our horizons of environmental responsibility for the sake of generations not yet born, and for the sake of God whose guests on earth we are."
Try this book for starters, The Geography of Good and Evil: Philosophical Investigations by Andreas Kinneging. If you are prepared to go deeper than the usual knockabout, and come out of the shallow end of the pool, try Edward Feser, associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, and a first rate scholar who has powerfully restated the truths of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy in the modern world. He recovers the rational science of human life from the clutches of scientism, materialism, reductionism and naturalism. Check his books Five Proofs for the Existence of God or The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Do I think he proves the existence of God? I don't think it can be proven, and doesn't need to be. Does he refute atheism, either old or new? I don't think either side can refute the other, I don't think humans have smart enough cognitive equipment or conceptual capacity to be able to do that. In which case, on this intellectual terrain, victory will go, by default, to the most parsimonious argument, the argument which explains the most with the least assumptions. There are a lot of easy victories in the shallows, and this is what we are exposed to constantly. The likes of Kinneging and Feser show there are greater depths out there. Roger Trigg, John Haldane and Jonathan Sacks too. And they show that religion is real and rational. Since neither side can refute the other philosophically, we have to decide which makes more sense of human life in the round, by which I mean not only explains the facts of existence better, but the meaning and significance of the way that humans go about the business of actually living. That's the test. And it's more than philosophical, and certainly more than scientific in that it concerns the really difficult questions of life, the human questions. Which is the most emotionally satisfying account of human existence?
I go with Kinneging, Feser, Trigg etc. And I go with the way they show this not to be a science vs religion debate at all, defending their views with reason. And showing a lot of the abuse poured upon theists to be philosophically ignorant. That split between science and religion was opposed up by reductionist and mechanicist science, and has led the more ignorant out there to claim that religion has always been anti-science. Not so. I would say this because I agree with them? No. Actually, I have very different political views. I select them deliberately as conservative thinkers who can support choices and justify actions with a coherent philosophy, and with a rational science that upholds moral truth as swell as scientific truth, and which stands firm against the incoherence and self-defeating relativism of the modern terrain. I tend to be on the side of left wing causes, and some would say very left wing when it comes to the commitment to the commons and to transitioning to a socialist economy. Same with environmental justice. I just don't see a firm philosophical basis for anything other than an individualist liberalism on a demoralised terrain composed of a marketplace of competing goods, held in check by a neutralised public sphere. And in the end, such a world is untenable, it just eats away at its roots, without replacing them. Those causes will remain incoherent in theory, marginal in politics, and probably disastrous, and potentially dangerous (with respect to totalitarian implications), in practice without something more than subjective choice and class interest to buttress them, without a transcendent standard against which to discern, orient and evaluate actions.
All philosophical conceptions and presentations of the world are open to philosophical objections. Hegel himself wrote of the capacity of philosophy to undercut itself. There is a danger of placing the ‘big questions’ of life and its living on a purely intellectual terrain, inviting a sterile conclusion in which ‘victory’ goes to the side with the least implausible claims, that is, the side that reduces the size of the questions down to the meagre size of the available evidence, or what counts as evidence and proof given philosophical limitations. I pass on by when I come across this stuff. But it really does encroach on the enjoyment of life these days. It’s an age of the endless ‘debate,’ in which everything simply has to be questioned and made to justify its existence by reasons and evidence. Not that anything gets settled that way. Without a common and shared standard, the values traded are incommensurate, and so ‘debate’ quickly ceases to be an intellectual exchange and instead generates into abuse and counter-abuse. Interesting how both sides tend to accuse the other of being stupid. My feeling, having spent far too long in the Limbo of philosophical world than is healthy, is that to engage in this endless yes/no debate in the first place is the one piece of evidence that we can be certain of in it all, evidence of all parties being stupid, in thinking they can have certainty at this level, where no certainty is possible. I do share Feser’s concern to reinstate Aristotelianism and Thomism as the ‘rational science’ of human life, and I think that view makes the most sense overall of human life and its meaning. I don’t consider the arguments decisive. I dare say everyone from Epicurus to Hume will carry on making their arguments and objections. It carries on. That’s why Dante put the philosophers in Limbo. These argumentative souls love nothing better than to endlessly argue. I’ve got better things to be doing. And so, thankfully, have most other people.
So why all these words? To expose the fallacies and dangers of subjective choice.
Radicals might think such choice libertarian when aimed against God and religion. They need to open their eyes to all else it dissolves with respect to the collective purposes, human solidarities and common goods they affirm in other areas. Unless you think natural selection will do it all for us, and evolve the positive society from within natural processes. I know the argument. Try Robert Wright. Work with our natural capacities, with which evolution has equipped us with. It’s just that, at this juncture in history, the creative human agency of free-riders and parasites is proving much stronger than these cooperative instincts bringing about world union. There is no ducking the questions of ethics and politics, and the active intervention of human beings in shaping social and cultural evolution. Naturally .. humans create culture and guide their lives by it. Think you can do it by subjective choice? Or by the institutions, identities and relations that make such choice rational for individuals over against considerations of the long term common good? We need other social forms. For all of your assertions of the common good with respect to social justice and equality and the health of the planetary ecology, with a wealth of facts and science behind you (you claim), think long and hard as to why you struggle to mobilize sufficient numbers in a common cause, keep them together and, most important, concentrate those numbers in a reality-changing and politically effective way. You cannot build a movement on the basis of an identity which privileges individual choice and self-interest, and which makes the common good unavailable in all but the most abstract forms. In those conditions, separating self- and social interest, to demand action for a long term common good is to demand a level of self-sacrifice which, from the perspective of choosing individuals, is irrational. The problem with the argument is that, in rejecting ethics as a ‘rational science’ capable of binding, mobilising and obligating individuals in common cause, the subjectivist philosophy degenerates into an impotent moralism. The common causes fracture and fragment. Hence the whining and abuse that comes in conditions of frustration and despair.
Just ponder this quote:
"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."
Mary Oliver, Of the Empire
Don't engage in power politics if you are sensitive to values and cry easily. In fact, just don't do it at all. Even if you win, it's a worthless victory, detached from the transcendent standards which alone determine good and bad, right and wrong. Try to see the true grounds of your values in those terms. They are not merely conventional or 'made-up' social constructions. Try the virtue tradition instead.
As in so many areas, it is Pope Francis who is leading the way.
'After U.S. President Donald Trump made a point of wishing Americans “Merry Christmas,” saying he was irked by “politically correct” efforts to scrub references to Christmas from the holiday, Pope Francis on Wednesday warned the real danger is taking Christ out of Christmas, driven by a “false respect” for non-Christians that amounts to a desire to “marginalize” faith.“In our times, especially in Europe, we’re seeing a ‘distortion’ of Christmas,” the pope said in his final General Audience of 2017.“In the name of a false respect for non-Christians, which often hides a desire to marginalize the faith, every reference to the birth of Christ is being eliminated from the holiday,” Francis said. “But in reality, this event is the one true Christmas!”
“Without Jesus, there is no Christmas,” the pope said, drawing strong applause from a crowd gathered Wednesday morning in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall.“If he’s at the center, then everything around him, that is, the lights, the songs, the various local traditions, including the characteristic foods, all comes together to create the atmosphere of a real festival,” he said.“But if we take [Christ] away, the lights go off and everything becomes fake, mere appearances,” the pope said.'
“God involves those who, confined to the margins of society, are the first to receive his gift, which is the salvation brought by Jesus,” Francis said. “With the small ones, the disrespected, Jesus establishes a friendship that continues across time, and nourishes hope for a better future.”
With these persons, Francis said, “In every age, God wants to build a new world, a world in which no one is thrown away, no one is mistreated and indigent.”
Can those who worship the false god of "I" and assert subjective choice over any common purpose or identity say the same for their 'made-up' myths, stories and values?
I say not.
It takes an awful lot of noisy words to tell people that silence is the best policy. And since human beings are social beings, that is, live in relation to each other and share public space, expressing the beliefs and bodying forth their values in public, it’s not at all clear where and how maintaining silent space is possible. Withdrawal into contemplation, an anti-socialism, the privatisation of the ethical commons, to go with the privatization of all other aspects of social life.
It's a world in which subjective choice trumps any collective end or morality - except those imposed by the systemic imperatives of an economy that is outisde of anyone's control, including governments. It may sound liberatory, people being free to do as they please. Except, of course, they are not remotely free from supra-individual forces which, in the absence of collective media and mechanisms of control, constrain human social life as an external force. As for subjective choice, it leads to the anti-society of mutual self-cancellation, a denial of all commonalities since all arguments are ended by the assertion that 'that's only your opinion.' I learned long ago that arguing the point is a waste of time, since there is no recognition of any objective standard by which to evaluate any claims made and arguments advanced. Sophism reigns, and justice is the interests of the strongest. Just don't cry when you are on the receiving end of power.
The world is characterized by a mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance, as Max Weber wrote back in 1904.
It's like Ludwig Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box, the "private language argument." Everyone has a box in which they keep what they call a beetle. You can't see inside anyone's box. You can ask them to describe the beetle in their box. But since no one can really know what is in any box but their own, the word "beetle" ceases to have any meaning. Each to their own beetle and their own box. The language we use to describe our private experiences is defined by the way it is used in exchanges with others; a language that exclusively describes one's own private experiences is an impossibility.
And I say:
Less idle words, more actions in the community, more interpersonal relations fostering habits of the heart; less intellectual acid, more solid practice that gives something to the community.
More commitment to ends determined by a scale of values, less pointless assertion of values grounded in nothing other than subjective choice. Idiotic non-debate. Have people really got nothing better to do with their time that give us the benefit of their prejudices? Utterly joyless, ungrateful, as bleak and as cold and as miserable as the world is in their 'philosophy.'
Merry Christmas! To one and to all. I'd better put the sherry bottle down - it's nearly empty anyway - and get to bed now. And get back to some serious work beyond idle intellectualizing with anti-intellectuals.
Of anyone ask: what positive contribution do you make to the reality unfolding all around you? To what ends, if any, do you live? And why do you strive to make a difference, and think words and deeds make any difference, in an indifferent world?
What, exactly, does victory look like? And by what standards?
Do you think you are entitled to victory? Do you think it can be chosen, picked off the shelf in the marketplace, provided by others (at what price)? Or are you prepared to join with others and earn it?
Additional
This was quite something to read daubed on the church in my own home town on Christmas morning:
'The 'sick and disgraceful' graffiti was spotted on Christmas Day morning.'
‘POLICE have confirmed they are investigating after a swastika was painted on a church door on Christmas day.
Officers were called to St David’s Church on Eskdale Avenue, Carr Mill on the morning of Monday, December 25 after reports that the Nazi symbol had been sprayed on the door.
A picture of the graffiti showing the Nazi symbol, which appears to have been daubed in black paint, was taken by a resident passing St David’s Church, St Helens , on Christmas Day morning.
Alongside the symbol, used by the German Nazi party, were the words “Christians R NAZIS”’.
Imagine, then, switching on social media, and hearing atheists saying much the same thing. In great numbers, too, in what is obviously a systematic attempt to undermine a Christian celebration. I know bigotry when I see it. And I know hatred too. As for Nazis, I'm left wondering what people with such spitting contempt for other people would do with an ounce of power. It could have been the work of drunken idiots, of course. But they don't operate in a vacuum, and are too stupid to produce any original ideas of their own. It all comes from somewhere. Pope Francis spoke well on Christmas Day on migrants and refugees. Hardly the message of a Nazi. The very opposite, in fact. White evangelical Christians backing Trump is not helpful, rendering Christianity in general open to charges of stupidity, racism and worse. It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Donald Trump ...! Religion in the service of political ideology never, ever ends well, not for politics and not for religion, and not for people. Pope Benedict spoke of man's stupidity as infinite, exceeded only by God's mercy. We'd better hope so. As I warned from the start, be careful in your reactions lest you become what your enemies say you are. Turn this into a political war, and it won't end well for Christianity. It will confirm the bigots on the other side in their bigotry too. The abuse of religion on social media has become routine. I could fill a book with it. And where is the voice of reason in all of this, as the world goes to extremes? As I quote Jonathan Sacks above, 'to put it mildly, we are in trouble.'
Think long and hard on Romans 13:1. It confuses many, especially many who think themselves believers: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” That would seem to imply that God has created all authorities, and therefore that we must be obedient at all times. Here comes the tricky bit: Romans 13:7 adds the crucial rider that we are to give taxes, toll, and loyalty to those to whom they are due. There is qualification in that statement: we pay our dues not infinitely to earthly authorities, but until and unless. Obedience is due to true authority, to which all authorities are measured in accordance with. The act of obedience, then, is conditional upon the moral framework in which such obedience is constituted.
'Read Pastor Bonhoeffer's book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct.' (A.N. Wilson).