John C. Wright's Journal

This is not necessarily a religious conviction: both Kant and John Rawls argue in favor of a nonreligious objective moral code, as does Ayn Rand. (A more thorough examination that these few paragraphs would be needed to weigh out pros and cons of each: I am merely pointing out that better arguments for nonreligious objective moral codes exist, without commenting on their persuasive force.)

Hedonistic and Utilitarian moral codes I reject for basically the reason given above: they do not cover all the cases where moral decisions are required, especially the two extremes of (1) temptation to commit an undiscoverable crime and (2) an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice where one will not live to see any reward for the act.

I am not sure that ‘an objective morality’ necessarily means that the moral actor makes no subjective valuations from his own point of view. If my speak without paradox, I am not sure ‘objective morality’ necessarily means the same rules apply when circumstances are fundamentally different: there is such a thing as mitigating and extenuating circumstances.

But an objective moral code does mean that, if I am in your shoes and you are in mine, my judgment that the act in question is “right” or “wrong” does not change. If I am doing to you something which, in all honesty, I would accept as right if done to me or to anyone else were I in your shoes, then my code is at least claiming to be objective.

If, on the other hand, I object that things are wrong when done to me that are right when done to others, and all other factors of guilt and innocence are the same, then I am not even pretending not to be a partisan cheerleader: I am merely rooting for my side in that case, and my words are opinion, not a statement of objective moral valuation.

I made comments along these lines in the comments box of yesterday’s article, a reader labeled Flamingphonebook wrote in:

(Quoting me) “Hedonistic and Utilitarian moral codes I reject for basically the reason given above: they do not cover all the cases where moral decisions are required, especially the two extremes of (1) temptation to commit an un-discoverable crime and (2) an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice where one will not live to see any reward for the act.”

(1) is a more difficult scenario for my view of morality. For me, it is ameliorated by my own desire to be able to call myself moral. I cannot help myself to the body or the property of another because to claim them as my own diminishes my claims over my own body and property, even if only in my own head. Others might be motivated by a more direct Golden Rule, thinking, “What would happen if I were in a situation where someone could commit an un-discoverable crime against me?” Or they might have to consider that un-discoverable is a very high standard, that may often seem to be the case when it is not.

As to (2), it assumes that death is the worst thing possible for the Hedonist. But pleasure-pain is a scale with both positivity and negativity. I would be loath to volunteer for a kamikaze mission, but if somehow I knew that would eliminate every Islamic terrorist on the planet, I would do it for the sheer joy that I would have in the decision, and the posthumous accolades I could imagine, and not least of all because the alternative would be reading headlines of future attacks while knowing I could have prevented them.

“But an objective moral code does mean that, if I am in your shoes and you are in mine, my judgment that the act in question is “right” or “wrong” does not change. If I am doing to you something which, in all honesty, I would accept as right if done to me or to anyone else were I in your shoes, then my code is at least claiming to be objective.”

I think that’s more impartial than objective. Parties reversed, decision remains is a good rule, in context. Obviously, if a four-foot-tall man shoots me five feet above my shoes, he may not claim innocence of murder on the grounds that, were I to shoot him five feet above his shoes, I would be innocent of murder. The element of the moral crime is the ending of the life of a person who wanted to live, not the mere mechanics of it. I believe this is what you mean by extenuating circumstances.

Why I believe morality is subjective is that I contend that such circumstances may exist only in the mind of the victim. If someone calls me a da** (ethnic insult), I don’t mind, because I don’t identify that strongly with my ethnicity. For others, it might be called immoral, since it hurts those.

He makes two very good points here; let us draw out the implications.

IF we assume that we have a moral duty to assume and abide by a moral standard (what you call an impartial moral standard, and what I call an objective moral standard) THEN a utilitarian or hedonistic moral code can be extended to cover the two extreme cases. Call this duty, Duty One: it is a moral imperative that we be loyal to an impartial or objective standard.

According to Duty One, we cannot commit an undetectable crime because we know justice would be offended if we were the victim of such a crime. While mere pragmatism might say we could commit the evil and be rewarded rather than punished, a concern for Duty One would stop us from giving in to the temptation to commit an undetectable crime.

Again, according to Duty One, we would be morally obligated to commit an act of self-sacrifice where we in an emergency where we would laud another for committing the same act. Suppose the ‘veil of ignorance’ of John Rawls was lowered over the APC into which a grenade has been thrown. For a moment of moral debate, none of the men in the squad know who will be called upon to throw himself on the hand-grenade. All contemplate the question: is it better that one man sacrifice himself to save the others, or that all die? Once they all agree it is better than one man sacrifice himself to save many, the veil is lifted, and if it turns out I am the one in position to throw myself on the grenade, a calculation of the hedonistic pains and pleasures no longer controls my actions. Instead, my actions are controlled by the agreement, which was made under conditions to ensure impartiality, that the sacrifice of one is better than the death of all.

But, to return to the main point, the reason why I myself am not persuaded by hedonism nor utilitarianism, is that I cannot see where or how one can deduce Duty One from the pleasure principle. Being moral is not as pleasant as merely pursuing pleasure.

Flamingphonebook’s comment speaks of “my own desire to be able to call myself moral”. This is, in my opinion, the most noble desire in the huamn breast. Most accounts of moral philosophy, and most speculations about the origins of morality, leave it out. It is not a desire for applause or peer approval, since the desire to be moral even in ordinary life causes us to go against the drift of our peers: many of us have been in a situation where a few chummy friends have been backbiting or gossiping about some absent friend, and felt the temptation not to speak up and defend him from gossip. Indeed, the desire for a clean conscience is a desire to find approval in something more impartial, and of greater moral gravity, than the opinion of gossipy friends.

Myself, I think of this desire as the most natural and rational thing in the world, and I cannot think of it as created by mere social conditioning or peer conformity, since it is so often against the drift. It is a facutlty of reasoning: it is the desire to be the kind of man an impartial judge would reward or an impartial and nonpartisan and uncorrupt conscience would approve. The purpose of moral education in the young is to instill and strengthen this desire.

I cannot account for the origins of this desire, except to return to the first argument given above, which says that the conscience is something that sees the good as the eye sees light, and it is obvious to anyone whose conscience is not blind that we should listen to our consciences, and seek to perfect them from corruption.

These leaves us with certain unanswered questions:

(1) What is the natural and practical reason for being loyal to impartiality (what I labled “Duty One” hereabove)?

(2) What is the natural origin of this desire, which apparently both theist and atheist share, or some of us, to think of ourself as moral: in other words, whence comes this desire to have an impartial an unpartisan judge or an impartial and unpartisan conscience approve our acts as moral?

(3) If it is simply intuitively obvious that we should obey our duties, pleasant or not, whence comes this intuition?

By transmission of culture – passing on the sum total of the learned behaviors common to a population – we can do what Darwinian genetic selection would not allow: we can inherit acquired characteristics. The wheel once having been invented, its manufacture and use can be passed down through the generations. Culture can adapt to change much faster than genes can, and this provides for finely tuned responses to environmental disturbances and upheavals. By means of cultural transmission, those behaviors which have proven useful in the past can be taught quickly to the young, so that adaptation to life – say on the Greenland ice cap – can be assured.

This account overlooks the fact that religious sentiment is the primary mechanism for cultural transmission.

The White man transmitted monogamy to the American Indian through missionary work and through conquest, primarily for religious motivations. Mothers in general place a high priority on teaching their children the doctrines of religion.

If so, then safeguarding religion from criticism is crucial to safeguard the evolutionary process which  (according to this account) creates our moral code. This account implies, in other words, that absent the religious cultural transmission of the “meme” of moral code, the moral code will fail. Thus, according to this account, without religion, even if religion is false, there is no moral imperative (and few strong reasons of any kind) to teach one’s moral code or cultural traditions to the young.

If we accept that morality evolved through a natural process of cultural evolution, we must therefore conclude that religion is the primary transmitter and driving force behind morality: which is the opposite of what Mr. Zindell set out to prove.

Even so, cultural transmission tends to be rigid: it took over one hundred thousand years to advance to chipping both sides of the hand-ax! Cultural mutations, like genetic mutations, tend more often than not to be harmful, and both are resisted – the former by cultural conservatism, the latter by natural selection. But changes do creep in faster than the rate of genetic change, and cultures slowly evolve. Even that cultural dinosaur known as the Catholic Church – despite its claim to be the unchanging repository of truth and “correct” behavior – has changed greatly since its beginning.

Talk to a Catholic to find out, please, what our claims are. We do not claim the Church has not changed, but we do say the later developments were implicit in the originals. Whether you think that this claim is true or false, it behooves an honest man to accurately represent the claim.

Incidentally, it is at this hand-ax stage of behavioral evolution at which most of the religions of today are still stuck. Our inflexible, absolutist moral codes also are fixated at this stage. The Ten Commandments are the moral counterpart of the “here’s-how-you-rub-the-sticks-together” phase of technological evolution. If the only type of fire you want is one to heat your cave and cook your clams, the stick-rubbing method suffices. But if you want a fire to propel your jet-plane, some changes have to be made.

This is contemptible. I am not sure what the writer regards as properly complex and modern. I personally regard the moral changes peculiar to the modern age with horror and disgust: The modern so-called moral code our times allows for such abominations as partial birth abortion, when a perfectly healthy baby has a fork stuck into his skull and the brain is vacuumed out, the baby dismembered, and the body parts fished of the bloody womb one little limb at a time. Other vile acts, such as the murder of Terri Schiavo, the widespread abuse or recreational drugs, a shamelessness of a pornography culture, are routinely excused, explained away, and lauded by the so-called modernism of the so-called modern moral code.

In contrast, the eternal moral code “Do not Kill” “Honor your father and mother” “Do as you would be done by” is something recognized by all races and all lands in all times. The literate cultures of India and China have a formulation of the Golden Rule indistinguishable from the Christian formulation. The natural moral law is as obvious as the principles of mathematics, and discernable to the reason.

Morality can no more change and evolve than the Pythagorean Theorem.

Indeed, a moral standard that evolves and changes is not a moral standard. All real moral evolution in the West has been the correct application of principles implicit since the beginning to additional groups: the rights once applied only to aristocrats were extended, due to religious sentiment, to the poor man, the woman, the slave.

Change is not necessarily for the better. If the morals and manners of a once-decent people degenerates, it does us no good to say the moral code itself changed. If we say the standard changed, we have no standard by which to judge whether the change was a degeneration or an improvement. Only if the standard does not change can we see where and when the current generation exceeds their ancestors, or falls short of them.

So, too, with the transmission of moral behavior. If we are to live lives which are as complex socially as jet-planes are complex technologically, we need something more than the Ten Commandments.

Something like the Catechism of the Catholic Church? The canon law? The Anglo-American Common Law? The Torah and the Mishnah? The Koran and the Hadith?

The complexity of the books of religious moral law and interpretation of all the Abrahamic religions should be something a writer is aware-of before he takes up a pen to criticize them, lest he be open to the charge of ignorance. You can say a lot of things, good and bad, about the SUMMA THEOLOGICA, but you cannot say it is not complex. Christian doctrine treats with all aspects of human life.

We cannot base our moral code upon arbitrary and capricious fiats reported to us by persons claiming to be privy to the intentions of the denizens of Sinai or Olympus. Our ethics can be based neither upon fictions concerning the nature of humankind nor upon fake reports concerning the desires of the deities. Our ethics must be firmly planted in the soil of scientific self-knowledge. They must be improvable and adaptable.

Obviously, this statement assumes the deities are fictional. But even if so, the moral reasoning based on natural law, where it overlaps with theological reason, is not necessarily invalidated or outdated. Christians, for example, hold Justice, Temperance, Moderation, and Courage to be virtues, because these are the classical virtues from Aristotle and other pagan philosophers. We hold Faith, Hope and Love to be virtues also, but these are specifically Christian virtues. If a theologian deduces that recklessness and cowardice are immortal extremes of a temperate courage, this deduction is valid, even if made by a Christian theologian. He would agree with a pagan here.

Improving and adapting ethics is futile. All that happens, once you admit that the ethic rules of Monday are not necessarily valid on Tuesday, is that by Wednesday people are excusing their crimes under the rhetoric that the rules for right and wrong have expired. And Wednesday’s child is full of woe.

The best one can do is deduce how to apply various competing moral principles to novel situations. This is what honest judges do, every time they interpret the law in a novel law case. An honest judge does not invent new laws.

And what judges do is not evolution, not improvement: it is merely change, involving some gain and some loss.

Where then, and with what, shall we begin?

Back to Ethics
Plato showed long ago, in his dialogue Euthyphro, that we cannot depend upon the moral fiats of a deity.

Er, no. That is not what Euthyphro showed.

Plato asked if the commandments of a god were “good” simply because a god had commanded them or because the god recognized what was good and commanded the action accordingly. If something is good simply because a god has commanded it, anything could be considered good. There would be no way of predicting what in particular the god might desire next, and it would be entirely meaningless to assert that “God is good.” Bashing babies with rocks would be just as likely to be “good” as would the principle “Love your enemies.” (It would appear that the “goodness” of the god of the Old Testament is entirely of this sort.)

On the other hand, if a god’s commandments are based on a knowledge of the inherent goodness of an act, we are faced with the realization that there is a standard of goodness independent of the god and we must admit that he cannot be the source of morality. In our quest for the good, we can bypass the god and go to his source!

And what do we say about the third case, where God is Love, the source and goal of loving, God is Just, the fountainhead and end-goal of all acts of justice?

By this same argument, if a father tells a bratty child to clean his room, should the child clean the room because it is good to clean the room, or should he clean the room because it is good to obey one’s father? If the father’s command is based on an inherent goodness of the act of cleaning the room, we are faced with the knowledge that the father is not the source of morality! Does this mean I don’t have to clean my room?

Given, then, that gods a priori cannot be the source of ethical principles,

This does not follow from the argument given. Euthyphro only argues that either moral principles exist independently of the gods, or that, if dependent, what we call good depends solely on the fiat of the gods, and will change when they change their minds. Obviously, if we postulate an eternal and unremovable God, something like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, or the Ideal of the Good of Plato, Euthyphro’s paradox does not obtain. 

we must seek such principles in the world in which we have evolved.

Just as a matter of logic, this does not follow. Merely because the gods cannot be the source of ethical principles, it does not mean that we must seek such principles in the world, unless we first establish that “the gods” and “the world” exhaust the cases, and unless we establish that we must seek ethical principles.

We must find the sublime in the mundane. What precept might we adopt?

The principle of “enlightened self-interest” is an excellent first approximation to an ethical principle which is both consistent with what we know of human nature and is relevant to the problems of life in a complex society.

Until your house is on fire. Then you damn well better have an unselfish and unenlightened fireman willing to risk his life and limb to haul your children out of a flaming inferno.

Let us examine this principle.

First we must distinguish between “enlightened” and “unenlightened” self-interest. Let’s take an extreme example for illustration. Suppose you lived a totally selfish life of immediate gratification of every desire. Suppose that whenever someone else had something you wanted, you took it for yourself.

It wouldn’t be long at all before everyone would be up in arms against you, and you would have to spend all your waking hours fending off reprisals. Depending upon how outrageous your activity had been, you might very well lose your life in an orgy of neighborly revenge. The life of total but unenlightened self-interest might be exciting and pleasant as long as it lasts – but it is not likely to last long.

The person who practices “enlightened” self-interest, by contrast, is the person whose behavioral strategy simultaneously maximizes both the intensity and duration of personal gratification.

An enlightened strategy will be one which, when practiced over a long span of time, will generate ever greater amounts and varieties of pleasures and satisfactions.

Why prefer remote gratification to immediate gratification? And what do I do in situations where the happiness of another being is mutually exclusive with mine, and he is in no position to object: a wife in a coma, a baby in the womb, a Jew in the concentration camp?

If I am in circumstances where evil is rewarded and goodness is punished (and such circumstances are commonplace: think of an army officer under Stalin) my long-term self-interest would prudently suggest cooperating with evil.

How is this to be done?

It is obvious that more is to be gained by cooperating with others than by acts of isolated egoism. One man with a rock cannot kill a buffalo for dinner. But a group of men or women, with lots of rocks, can drive the beast off a cliff and – even after dividing the meat up among them – will still have more to eat than they would have had without cooperation.

It is equally obvious that, by ganging up with a group of pirates, you can kill people and take their stuff. It is “obvious” that a black man in a remote continent living a happy life in isolation is of no benefit to me here on my plantation. The benefit to me if I enslave him is obvious. 

No, something more is required here than mere prudent consultation of one’s enlightened self-interest. You at least have to talk about opportunity costs, or raise human dignity to the level of a moral principle, or to say all men are brothers, or something.

If nothing else, you have to say that it is immoral to betray one’s enlightened self-interest. You have to condemn, AS IMMORAL, self-destructive acts, the Potlatch of the Indians, the suicide of Cato of Utica. Now, since a suicide places himself instantly beyond all human retribution, we have to suppose something other than fear of human retribution will be the motivation here.

But cooperation is a two-way street. If you cooperate with several others to kill buffaloes, and each time they drive you away from the kill and eat it themselves, you will quickly take your services elsewhere, and you will leave the ingrates to stumble along without the Paleolithic equivalent of a fourth-for-bridge. Cooperation implies reciprocity.

Justice has its roots in the problem of determining fairness and reciprocity in cooperation. If I cooperate with you in tilling your field of corn, how much of the corn is due me at harvest time? When there is justice, cooperation operates at maximal efficiency, and the fruits of cooperation become ever more desirable. Thus, enlightened self-interest entails a desire for justice. With justice and with cooperation, we can have symphonies. Without it, we haven’t even a song.

Aha! A point of agreement. Enlightened self-interest is meaningless without Justice! Now, all Mr. Zindler needs to do, is to show how an eternal principle like Justice can be deduced, or why, in a world of constant evolution, flux, and change, this principle has universal application. 

So far, all he has shown is that is it in my self-interest to act justly in situations where I mean to cooperate with repeat customers over the long term. In situations where I come across a random stranger, let us say, a comely yet unarmed virgin with a sack of gold, so far Mr. Zindler has not shown that treating her with justice is in my long term self-interest, and no motive for preferring my long term self interest to my short term, and no reason to prefer justice to self-interest when the two might be in conflict.

The hypothetical becomes more doubtful in cases where I have no long-term interests on earth to pursue: suppose I am Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER, and my biological programming will kill me in a week, no matter what.

Even if justice is in my long-term self-interest, why is it not in my short-term self interest to treat the virgin the same way a baboon in heat, or an ape, would treat a female of his species? Animals do not have a wedding custom, nor a marriage sacrament, nor vows, nor a rule of chastity, nor any Commandments (remember those things that Mr. Zindler finds so risible and so outdated?) against fornication, adultery, assault, or rapine.

I am curious to see how, once he establishes a case for the practicality of “pirate justice” (the principle of obeying the code with your shipmates) Mr. Zindler can extend this to a general or universal principle. Alas he never addresses this point.

I am curious to see how he can justify, for example, the principle that even torturing a ruthless, dishonorable and unprincipled enemy who schemes to kill you at any cost, and is undeterred by threats of death, is an act that morality forbids in all cases. I can certainly think of an argument grounded on religion. I can think of not one grounded on self-interest.

Let us bring this essay back to the point of our departure. Because we have the nervous systems of social animals, we are generally happier in the company of our fellow creatures than alone. Because we are emotionally suggestible, as we practice enlightened self-interest we usually will be wise to choose behaviors which will make others happy and willing to cooperate and accept us – for their happiness will reflect back upon us and intensify our own happiness.

This simply does not follow from what has been established in the argument. It might make us happy, if we are emotionally imitative beings, to create happiness in those around us, so as to bask in the reflected happiness, but that neither makes it in our self-interest, nor makes it wise, nor makes it moral. It may be, but it may not be. A comedian in a room full of bigots will make them happy and bask in their reflected happiness if he tells anti-Semitic jokes. The Romans will bask in the reflected happiness of Imperator Nero as the Christians are mauled by lions. Sir Thomas Moore, on the other hand, reflected no happiness from Parliament or from his King when he decided not to sign an Oath of Loyalty violating his principles.

On the other hand, actions which harm others and make them unhappy – even if they do not trigger overt retaliation which decreases our happiness – will create an emotional milieu which, because of our suggestibility, will make us less happy.

By this same argument, when the Spanish Inquisition calls on a Sephardic Jew to confess the Christian religion, it will create an emotional milieu, which, because of our emotional suggestibility, will make him and all the surrounding Spaniards more happy.

This argument proposes that the ground of moral behavior is mere conformity. That is almost too silly an argument to refute. What if the group is wrong or wicked, Inquisitors, Aztecs, or pirates?

I am still waiting for some argument, strong or weak, to show why the pirate’s code of justice should be extended to a universal principle. So far, all Mr. Zindell has argued is that I should be just and fair to my repeat customers, the members of my group, or tribe, or band. Or, in other words, if my fellow cutthroats are cutting throats, we should divide the swag according to the pirate articles we signed back in Tortuga. No one outside of my small band makes any personal or emotional difference to me.

Because our nervous systems are imprintable, we are able not only to fall in love at first sight, we are able to love objects and ideals as well as people, and we are able to love with variable intensities.

This does not follow. It is not that case that our ability to love at various intensities, or fall in love at first sight, or love an ideal, is cause by our being subject to ‘imprinting’. Not only has Mr. Zindler not proved that love at first sight is like the imprinting behavior of a duck, he did not even argue that point. All he said was  that is was highly likely that love at first sight is an imprinted behavior.

Even if this were proved, it would be irrelevant. Merely because love at first sight might be an imprinted behavior, it does not follow  that love of an abstract ideal is an imprinted behavior.

Indeed, common sense suggests that love of an ideal cannot be an imprinted behavior. A duckling might follow a toy train, but it has to see the train with its eye for the imprinting to take place. A baby human cannot see an ideal with its eye, or even understand the words involved in explaining it.

In any case, since people have been known to convert from one ideal to another, or even convert from atheism to Catholicism, merely saying that ideals are imprinted tells us nothing about the wisdom or morality of such conversions. Should I remain loyal to whatever ideal I was imprinted on back when I was young? If that question does not have a simple yes or no answer, then the fact that I imprinted on atheism when I was young does not tell me anything, anything at all, about whether it was wise or moral of me to break with my imprinting rather than continue with it.

Like the gosling attracted to the toy train, we are pulled forward by the desire for love. Unlike the gosling’s “love,” however, our love is to a considerable extent shapeable by experience and is capable of being educated. A major aim of enlightened self-interest, surely, is to give and receive love, both sexual and nonsexual.

This does not follow from the argument. It is a gratuitous assertion. It may be the case that many people prefer love to loneliness, but nothing established so far in the argument says that my enlightened self-interest might not, in some or even most cases, tell me to avoid love and seek personal profit. Why should Miss Bennett marry poor-but-honest Samwise the Gardener when her mother wants her to marry the dashing but cruel Lord Darcy? He is worth ten thousands pounds a year!

The general problem with this whole line of argument is that when love and self-interest combine (such as when you and your bride both want to make the other happy) there are no moral conflicts, no agonizing decisions, and no need of moral rules or principles.

Indeed, it is only in cases where one’s long term self-interest is in conflict with one’s loves, passions, temptations, or even with one’s short term self interest, that we need moral reasoning, and must contemplate, weigh and balance competing claims of moral obligations.

As a general – though not absolute – rule, we must choose those behaviors which will be likely to bring us love and acceptance, and we must eschew those behaviors which will not.

If the rule is not absolute, we should next be looking into the exceptions and how to behave toward them. If a man smites you on the right cheek, that is an exceptional behavior. Is it moral to offer him your left? Or is it moral to strike out the eye of one who struck out your eye? Nothing in this article so far shows Mr. Zindler is even aware of what moral reasoning is about.

Another aim of enlightened self-interest is to seek beauty in all its forms, to preserve and prolong its resonance between the world outside and that within. Beauty and love are but different facets of the same jewel: love is beautiful, and we love beauty.

This seems to be introducing a whole new topic, utterly unrelated to anything. It is simply not the case that it is in our enlightened self-interest to preserve beauty. It might be wise, or moral, or noble, but nothing so far has been offered in evidence. The statement, as it stands, is no more and no less gratuitous than a Turkish corsair saying it is in our long term self-interest to kidnap beautiful girls to sell to the harem of the Sultan. It might be true or it might be false, but, in a logical argument, you have to show the connection between the ideas involved.

By the logic in this essay, one could with equal justice say: “it is in our long term self interest to practice the Christian religion, because it creates happiness in the Christian community around us, and it preserves the beauty of Christian cathedrals, renaissance paintings, and choir music by Bach and Handel”. Would anyone not already persuaded of the point be convinced by a mere gratuitous assertion?

The experience of love and beauty, however, is a passive function of the mind. How much greater is the joy which comes from creating beauty. How delicious it is to exercise actively our creative powers to engender that which can be loved. Paints and pianos are not necessarily prerequisites for the exercise of creativity: Whenever we transform the raw materials of existence in such a way that we leave them better than they were when we found them, we have been creative.

We interrupt this program for an ode to creativity.

More interesting that a mere digression about the nature of creating beauty as opposed to admiring beauty, and more to the point, would be some discussion of the role of religious sentiment in creating and preserving beauty even in difficult circumstances, or the relationship of religion to art. Also interesting would be a discussion of the role of Christianity in history preserving even the beautiful things of pagan cultures. The gratuitous destruction by the paynim makes an interesting contrast. The Mohammedan spread by conquest, and the Christians (with few exceptions) by conversion: therefore an admiration for classical models was preserved in Christianity, and it is absent in Islam. In everything from BEOWULF to THE DIVINE COMEDY Christian artists paid great reverence and respect to their pagan forefathers. Indeed, the preservation of the ancient Greco-Roman world depended entirely on the role of the Catholic Church as the communicator of culture in the Dark Ages: the evolution of the West would have been stopped, and our cultural genes obliterated, had it not been for that.

The task of moral education, then, is not to inculcate by rote great lists of do’s and don’ts, but rather to help people to predict the consequences of actions being considered. What are the long-term as well as immediate rewards and draw-backs of the acts? Will an act increase or decrease one’s chances of experiencing the hedonic triad of love, beauty, and creativity?

This does not follow from anything that has been said before. Indeed, what has been said before was, in effect, that we should compile our list of do’s and don’t’s from consulting our enlightened self-interest and the imitative pack-animal behaviors we inherited from ape troops. That morality is primarily or should primarily be concerned with the consequences or utility of behaviors is a new and separate topic.

So far, Mr. Zindler has not even made the argument in favor of hedonism. He seems to assume in this last sentence that love and beauty are valuable because they please us.

Thus it happens, when the Atheist approaches the problem of finding natural grounds for human morals and establishing a nonsuperstitious basis for behavior, that it appears as though nature has already solved the problem to a great extent.

This is both a run-on sentence and a piece of arrant nonsense. The atheist approaching the problem of discover the nonsuperstitious basis of moral behavior (what I called natural prudence) discovers that nature has equipped men to be aggressive, cowardly, violent, selfish, and filled with lawless lusts. To ignore this basic fact is breathtakingly naïve. One need only read a newspaper or history book to see it confirmed.

Indeed, it appears as though the problem of establishing a natural, humanistic basis for ethical behavior is not much of a problem at all.

Mere insolence. All the pondering of all the philosophers and moralists of history is here airily dismissed. 

It is in our natures to desire love, to seek beauty, and to thrill at the act of creation.

Let us consult that respected philosopher, Conan the Barbarian on this point. Mr. Barbarian, what is best in life? “To crush your enemies see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.”

It is also in human nature for Paris to abduct Helen, for Cain to murder Abel, for Solomon the wise to erect temples to Baal and Moloch where children are sacrificed, and for Merlin to tell his secrets to comely Nimue, and wake up trapped in a cave.

The deep questions of the origins of morality is not solved, nor even addressed, by saying that, as a general rule, some people from time to time have a sentimental attachment to love and beauty and pride of workmanship in creative effort.

Indeed, this has nothing to do with the argument at all. It is merely an inaccurate and one-sided and very rosy-hued view of human nature. Civilized men in peacetime, who have been born and raised in a culture heavily influenced by Christian and classical values might place a high priority on love and beauty and creative work. The same cannot be said for a tribesman whose every waking moment is surrounded by dreadful taboos; he has little or no opportunity for creative work. The same cannot be said for the bold Spartan; he has no use for love and beauty, since he craves death in battle above all things. The same cannot be said for the grisly Toltec or Aztec; ugliness, malproportionate and ghastly, informs all his works of art and architecture, and he delights to hear the screams of little girls flayed to death whose tears bring rains from the demon-gods. The same cannot be said of the loyal Maoist: he yearns for the bloody uprising of the peasants and proletarians. It is not creative work he respects and desires, but war.   

The labyrinthine complexity we see when we examine traditional moral codes does not arise of necessity: it is largely the result of vain attempts to accommodate human needs and nature to the whimsical totems and taboos of the demons and deities who emerged with us from our cave-dwellings at the end of the Paleolithic Era – and have haunted our houses ever since.

Note here that he condemns the traditional moral codes of suffering “labyrinthine complexity”; and without a blush he earlier condemned them as being as simple as a stone-age hand axe, and said we needed complexity to deal with the modern world. I am curious how he will distinguish the cases and resolve the seeming paradox. Alas, he never returns to this point.

Wait, was that supposed to be his closing paragraph? What happened to the topic of the discussion? The essay consists of a string of more or less unrelated gratuitous assumptions, a lot of irrelevance, and then just breaks off.

Mr. Zindler promised that he would prove that religion has nothing at all to do with ethical behavior. Every time he made a gratuitous assertion, I took that as an implied promise he would later return to the point and set forth his proof and evidence. All those promises were broken.

(I am still curious about the first point he never got back to: I wonder why he believes religious people are not motivated by what we say we are motivated by. In effect, he told me Christians do not really fear hellfire. I am wondering why he mocks us for fearing demons if indeed he says we don’t. He mocks us for being coward, but says we are not really afraid.)

In fact, all he addressed was the idea that some ethical behavior has some roots in a pursuit of one’s enlightened self-interest, when dealing with repeat customers, when and if that self-interest happened to coincide with our natural desire for love and beauty. This does not show, nay, it does not even address, the topic question, which was to prove that religious sentiment was not necessary for ethical thinking, and indeed has nothing whatsoever to do with ethical behavior.

A very basic principle of logic is violated here, called the principle of the excluded middle. Let us condense this rambling and illogical account to the basic syllogism:

1. Some ethical behavior is caused by pursuit of self-interest
2. Self-interest does not require religious sentiment in all cases
3. Ergo, no ethical behavior ever requires religious sentiment in any case.

True, false, or indifferent, the third statement does not follow from the first.

Let us look at the cases. Of the set “ethical behaviors” I can think of cases where no religious sentiment is necessary for me to understand right from wrong, or to be obligated to do the right. These cases fill the subset called “Times when the right thing to do is also pleasant and rewarding”. The duty to be fruitful and multiply is certainly a pleasure to carry out if one has a lovely and beloved bride. Call it case A.

Next, I can think of cases where the right thing to do is rewarding but not pleasant: a soldier slogging through mud, bayoneting his fellow man, may indeed, if he lives, be rewarded with a tickertape parade, and by knowing in his conscience that serving his king and country is worthwhile. He may look for days of peace when the invader is gone, but the duties of a soldier are simply not pleasant. Call this case B.

Next, I can think of cases where doing the right thing is not rewarded in this life at all. Call this case C, the case of self-sacrifice. If there is no reward in the next life, there is no worldly reason to do them. That is the case this essay promises the reader it would address: it did not.

Here is a real world example of that case: 

On Dec. 4, 2006, Private Cedric McGinnis (19) was manning the turret in the last Humvee of a six-vehicle patrol in northeast Baghdad when an enemy threw a grenade from the roof of a nearby building.

As he stood up to get ready to jump out of the vehicle as he had been trained to do, McGinnis realized the other four soldiers in the vehicle did not know where the grenade had landed and did not have enough time to escape.

He threw his back against the radio mount and smothered the explosive with his body. McGinnis was killed instantly while the other four men survived.

This man, a true hero, was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. No one can argue that his actions were done for the sake of that worthless bit of medal. It is an honor that we, the living, bestow because we do not have the power to raise the dead and usher the deserving into glory.

No human has that power.

Only if the hopes of religion are correct, is there any possibility that this young man will receive the blessed reward we would all like to give him, and which natural justice says he is owed. If that hope is false, he is merely dust now, and it matters nothing at all to him (for there is no ‘him’ left) whether he died bravely or cravenly, and all his aspirations were in vain.

If the atheists are correct, there is no true justice in the world or the next, and moral decisions are based, if on anything, on natural prudence. While an argument can be made that natural prudence justifies moral behavior, Mr. Zindel does not here make that argument. 

ETHICS WITHOUT GODS

by Frank R. Zindler
The Probing Mind, February 1985

One of the first questions Atheists are asked by true believers and doubters alike is, “If you don’t believe in God, there’s nothing to prevent you from committing crimes, is there? Without the fear of hell-fire and eternal damnation, you can do anything you like, can’t you?”

I am not sure if this counts as a straw man or not, but I must say this is a rather weak and confused way of expressing the question. A stronger and clearer way of asking the question is this: “We have frequently seen in life that some men benefit from committing evils for which they cannot or will not be punished in this life. Since atheism doubts or denies the possibility of supernatural punishment in an afterlife, what natural or pragmatic reasons can serve as a disincentive for committing these unpunishable evils?

If there is no supernatural ground for a morals, is there some ground aside from merely natural or pragmatic, for a code of behavior? If so, what is this ground? If not, then what is the moral obligation to abide by merely natural or pragmatic code of behavior?”

Introduction
It is hard to believe that even intelligent and educated people could hold such an opinion, but they do!

Ad hominem. If an author expresses contempt for the opposing viewpoint at the beginning of an essay, he is writing an editorial, not a sincere philosophical engagement of the issues.

It seems never to have occurred to them that the Greeks and Romans, whose gods and goddesses were something less than paragons of virtue, nevertheless led lives not obviously worse than those of the Baptists of Alabama!

Ad Hominem again, and irrelevant. The topic is whether one needs a belief in gods to have a moral code. The pagans were theists. Hence, the observation that pagans have a moral code does not help the atheist position here.

The observation is also false. There are several practices of pagan times that civilized men recoil from, and which Christianity condemns, ranging from slavery to sodomy to infanticide to patria potestas (the legal power a husband had, in Roman law, to kill his disobedient child or wife). It is no argument to reply that modern pagans and atheists, communists and nihilists so on, do not see the evils in these things, for the statement was that the highly civilized Baptists in Alabama lived lives not obviously worse.

There is also a bit of bait and switch going on here. We are discussing what moral code (if any) can be erected on an atheist foundation. We might possibly also be discussing whether this moral code is inferior to one erected on an theist foundation. We are not discussing about how the pagans and the Baptists “lived their lives”, but, rather, what was their moral code. If the Baptists of Alabama are relaxed and indifferent about living up to the strictures of their moral code, and the Spartans are strict and exact about living up to theirs, this does not necessarily tell us anything about the comparative superiority of one code over the other.   

Moreover, pagans such as Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius – although their systems are not suitable for us today – managed to produce ethical treatises of great sophistication, a sophistication rarely if ever equaled by Christian moralists.

This statement is irrelevant, false and outrageous.

Irrelevant, because Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius were theists, men in our camp, not atheists, men in your camp, so they are not relevant to the argument. We are talking about the foundations of morality. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic, and the foundations of stoicism were a belief in Pronia, or the divine mind of the universe. Aristotle argued that the good was an objective truth that issued from an unmoved mover, a perfect creator and sustainer of the intellectual universe, a pure idea.

False, because the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and others equals or surpasses the moral writings of Aristotle (who, after all, believed in slavery, and did not list mercy as a virtue): the sophistication of European canon law or the Catholic Catechism is surpasses that of the pagan writers: they simply did not cover every topic in every detail, and were not as well organized.

Outrageous, because the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and the great-souled man of Aristotle is something we are sorely in want of these days. When we are living in a time of moral corruption, weakness, ignobility and shamelessness, is not the hour to dismiss the giant philosophers of antiquity as irrelevant. The writer of this article is not merely illogical, he lacks experience and wisdom.

The answer to the questions posed above is, of course, “Absolutely not!”

Yes, that is the answer to the question as posed. That question is not the real question under discussion. The question under discussion is what moral code of behavior can be erected on merely natural grounds. The answer to that is not so absolute: the best we can deduce from natural grounds is a pragmatic, hedonistic, or utilitarian code of behavior. Someone not interested in acting pragmatically, who is willing to suffer a loss to his self-interest, can, of course, under a merely pragmatic code of behavior, do anything he wants. A pragmatic code can tell him that practical consequences are likely to follow, and it can warn him such things might not be in his self-interest, but cannot tell him what he ought or ought not do: it can call a life of crime self-destructive, and it can call self-destructive behavior impractical, but not call it immoral.

The behavior of Atheists is subject to the same rules of sociology, psychology, and neurophysiology that govern the behavior of all members of our species, religionists included.

We can hope Mr. Zindler will somehow show us the connection between what he calls “rules of sociology, psychology, and neurophysiology” (which would be scientific facts if there were such rules) and moral imperatives. If be taken seriously, this essay would have to overcome what is called the “Naturalistic fallacy” that is, this essay will have to prove that one can deduce a moral imperative from a statement of fact. At least a serious essay would address the issue, and make a bold attempt to overcome this fatal objection. The essay never returns to this point.

Now, let us not give this writer too much credit. He has fallen into the common habit among intellectuals of assuming things not in evidence have been proved. I have studied both sociology and psychology. They are in such a primitive state that they can hardly be called sciences. Certainly no general facts or principles have emerged from their various studies and assertions that are worthy of universal assent. This is not physics. This is not even economics. He is making reference to an inchoate body of study as if from it we can deduce universal principles of any kind, much less universal moral principles. I doubt one can even deduce general principles. (A universal principle is always the case; a general principle is generally the case, but admits of exceptions. Newton’s Third Law is a universal principle; the Law of Supply and Demand is a general law.)

In reality, the moral reasoning a man under the stress of a difficult moral decision never makes reference to any finding of sociology or psychology or neurobiology, except, perhaps, when he is looking for ground to excuse his crime on an insanity plea.

Moreover, despite protestations to the contrary, we may assert as a general rule that when religionists practice ethical behavior, it isn’t really due to their fear of hell-fire and damnation, nor is it due to their hopes of heaven.

This is irrelevant, false, and arrogant.

It is irrelevant because we are discussing whether there is a moral obligation to abide by merely natural or pragmatic code of behavior: The author here wants to argue that a supernatural motive, fear of an eternal and almighty God, is an insufficient ground for an objective moral code. Instead he makes the assertion (a gratuitous assertion at this point: perhaps he will support it later) that the theists are not motivated by what they say their motivations are. But even granting that point, it would nonetheless be true that belief in a Godhead, just as belief in the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, or the Pronia of the Stoics, is a sufficient groundwork on which to base an objective moral code; for it supposes a legislator who would have the authority to make the eternal laws under discussion, and imbue them with moral gravity and force.

The statement is false and betrays that Mr. Zindler, like most intellectuals, does not know any real people. I used to be an atheist. I never gave to charity, never forgave, never sought to check my pride, never sought to practice chastity. My moral code, based in pragmatic reasoning, saw no reason for these things. As a Christian I am morally obligated to follow the commandments of God on these and other matters; and I do. So, I am an eyewitness: and I testify that my religious conversion altered my moral code and behavior.

Since I was and am the same person before and after, living in the same circumstance, all other factors are constant. I offer myself as an almost-perfect scientific test of the proposition. Only my “religiousity” changed. Surely the alleged rules of sociology, psychology, and neurophysiology did not change before and after November 23rd of 2003.

This writer is putting himself forward as an expert witness, asking you to dismiss the testimony of an eyewitness. I am inside my mind and he is not. He is not a mind-reader. On what grounds, then, does he make the extraordinary assertion that he knows better than do I what goes on in my own mind? Is it some deduction from the so-called sciences of sociology and psychology? I would say he needs to offer not merely clear proof, but overwhelming proof, to carry the point.

In general, it is arrogant for a remote stranger to tell an eyewitness not to believe his own eyes. If I say I saw a UFO, or a ghost, it requires some argument stronger than a mere gratuitous assertion to prove to me that I did not, especially coming from someone who as not there at the time, and does not know my reputation for truthfulness in the community.

Ethical behavior – regardless of who the practitioner may be – results always from the same causes and is regulated by the same forces, and has nothing to do with the presence or absence of religious belief. The nature of these causes and forces is the subject of this essay.

Always? It has nothing to do with the presence or absence of religious belief? This pronouncement is beyond extraordinary: it is ridiculous on its face. It would be like saying the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with religious belief.

If nothing else, belief in a god would influence the words, actions, priorities, and psychological comfort of the believer. If he thinks that Odin sees every unseen act, it will modify his behavior. If his thinks (rightly or wrongly) that Allah forbids drinking alcohol or fornicating with goats, this will alter his emotional attitude toward drunkenness and beastility, what laws he will obey or break, whether he feels ashamed or shameless, and what he teaches his children.

Since this assertion is so jaw-droppingly extraordinary, we should expect Mr. Zindler to produce extraordinary proof to support it. He not only produces no proof, he never returns to this point.

Psychobiological Foundations
As human beings, we are social animals.

A classical Aristotelian observation. It is true for all of us but hermits.

Our sociality is the result of evolution, not choice.

An unsupported statement. I would speculate that there is an element of choice involved. You can choose to be a hermit. You chose to be antisocial rather than social. The aggregate choices of multitudes of mankind are limited by the aggregate choices of previous generations. This slow and mighty process can, perhaps, be called evolution, but only by analogy: for it consists of factors created by human choice, not by mindless natural processes in the ecology.

Natural selection has equipped us with nervous systems which are peculiarly sensitive to the emotional status of our fellows.

Not mine. 

Among our kind, emotions are contagious, and it is only the rare psychopathic mutants among us who can be happy in the midst of a sad society.

This writer comes from a different planet than the one I live on. I would have been very sad, for example, when surrounded by the happy drug-intoxicated hippy throngs, blaring noise, and awful smells, at Woodstock, which is my personal vision of hell. I have also been particularly happy, even elated, when all those around me where long-faced and morose with concern.

I suppose, at best, we can admit that there is some tendency for most people to take their cues from their kith and kin. This is modified by a number of factors, and does not apply equally across all parts of life. We might take our religious emotions from our Church but our political emotions from our newspaper, and other emotions relating to other parts of life from other circles of friends. During witch hysteria, people accused their neighbors, and applauded when the witch was hanged.

The castaway schoolboys in LORD OF THE FLIES also took their emotional cues from their peers; an admirable moral code was not the result. There are sufficient examples from non-fiction, or even in personal experience, that I need not dwell on this point.

It is in our nature to be happy in the midst of happiness, sad in the midst of sadness. It is in our nature, fortunately, to seek happiness for our fellows at the same time as we seek it for ourselves. Our happiness is greater when it is shared.

This explanation overlooks that slavery, piracy, jealousy, and race-hatred are common among our species, goodwill and civility a rare exception.

Mr. Zindler is being simplistic and overbroad here. The most we can say is that there is some tendency among human being to seek a certain amount of group cohesion: like pack animals, we like to have friends and brothers-in-arms. This is counterbalanced by an opposite tendency to delight in the wounds and screams of our enemies, and the vaunt when we have despoiled them. That is also a pack animal tendency.

The pack animal tendency is counterbalanced by an opposite tendency to exclude and be excluded by foreigners and sojourners, or members of your own group who have been expelled.

This writer says it is our nature to be happy in the midst of happiness. Mr. Zindler talks as if he never met a glum Jew at Christmas, I suppose; or an angry Socialist sour in the midst of the unparalleled peace and plenty ushered in my the free market; or even a bitter Islamic fascist, a son of wealthy and privileged Oil Money, educated in the West, glaring up at the soaring skyscrapers of New York with hate slowly hardening into insanity in his heart. These are all cases where we do not share the happiness around us. Generally it is not shared if for any reason we think the happiness is not our own, or not legitimate.

Nature also has provided us with nervous systems which are, to a considerable degree, imprintable. To be sure, this phenomenon is not as pronounced or as ineluctable as it is, say, in geese – where a newly hatched gosling can be “imprinted” to a toy train and will follow it to exhaustion, as if it were its mother. Nevertheless, some degree of imprinting is exhibited by humans. The human nervous system appears to retain its capacity for imprinting well into old age, and it is highly likely that the phenomenon known as “love-at-first-sight” is a form of imprinting. Imprinting is a form of attachment behavior, and it helps us to form strong interpersonal bonds. It is a major force which helps us to break through the ego barrier to create “significant others” whom we can love as much as ourselves.

The statement is false and irrelevant. Ducks imprint and humans do not. There is no psychological evidence (none known to me, but I am not an expert) that says humans form imprints like this. Maybe certain babies below the age of reason can be observed clinging and grasping, or reacting to smiley faces.

If he goes on to say that atheism is an imprinted behavior, and that he is an atheist because it was imprinted on him by sociological, psychological and neurobiological rules, I will be impressed with his consistency.

If he does not say this, the statement is irrelevant. While it might interest a neurobiologist to notice a baby’s suckling behavior can imprint on a baby bottle or something, it is of no interest to a man making a difficult moral decision, or to a moralist investigating the logical connections between moral imperatives, to investigate how irrational animals form instinctive emotional attachments. A moral decision is not an irrational emotional attachment.

Mr. Zindler is off-topic here. As if he were making an analogy to human moral decisions to the way a watch works, and paused to tell us about the mechanics of watchmaking. To the degree that actions in our nervous system are automatic and animalistic, they have no bearing on human moral decisions, except, perhaps, as objects to avoid or overcome. Indeed, it is exactly the automatic neural processes, the things over which we have no control, that we excuse utterly from moral considerations: that is the meaning of an insanity plea. Whatever a man cannot help, for those things he cannot be blamed or applauded.

So far, this article has no offered even a hint of how to escape the Naturalist Fallacy. If someone tells me my desire to murder my rich uncle for the inheritance is an imprinted behavior, does that mean I should use my human free will to oppose and overcome the imprinting, or does that mean I should accede to it, as if it had some moral authority to obligate me to obey? Likewise, if someone tells me that love at first sight is a chemical condition only, does that mean I should use my human free will to oppose and overcome the imprinting, or does that mean I should accede to it, as if it had some moral authority to obligate me to obey? What about an addiction to morphine? Do I oppose it or do I accede to it? What about a curiosity about morphine before I am addicted?

It should be clear that the presence or absence of imprinted behaviors makes no difference to the moral choices I make or should make: it merely makes the enforcement of certain moral choices more difficult or less.

These two characteristics of our nervous system – emotional suggestibility and attachment imprintability – although they are the foundation of all altruistic behavior and art, are thoroughly compatible with the selfishness characteristic of all behaviors created by the process of natural selection.

Let us break this into two sentences:

(1) Emotional suggestibility and attachment imprintability are the foundation of all altruistic behavior and art.

An extraordinary statement demands extraordinary proof. A single contrary statement undermines a universal.

When Mr. Zindler says ALL altruistic art is founded on emotional suggestibility and imprinting, What evidence do we have for this dogmatic assertion? Suppose I said that Picasso was motivated by sheer hatred for mankind, or that Cervantes wrote DON QUIXOTE out of scorn for the knightly class, then I will have one example of art not prompted by altruism, or by emotional suggestibility and attachment imprintability.

I am an artist myself. Let me assure you, as an eyewitness, that my art does not take its cues from a ducklike imprinting behavior.

(2) Emotional suggestibility and attachment imprintability are thoroughly compatible with the selfishness characteristic of all behaviors created by the process of natural selection.

Again, this is a gratuitous assertion. Altruistic behaviors such as childrearing might be declared to be “compatible” with “the selfishness characteristic created by the process of natural selection” but altruistic behaviors such as anonymous charity to strangers, the pity of a good Samaritan, or the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his squad, cannot so be explained by reference to selfishness, not if the word “selfishness” has any meaning whatever.

That is to say, to a large extent behaviors which satisfy ourselves will be found, simultaneously, to satisfy our fellows, and vice-versa.

It undermines the entire argument to admit of exceptions here. If human selfishness and human altruism can overlap only “to a large extent” then what about the cases where there is no overlap?

I am curious how this writer would deal with cases of unavoidable conflicts of interest, such as when there can only be one winner at a sports contest, or only one seat left on a lifeboat.

This should not surprise us when we consider that among the societies of our nearest primate cousins, the great apes, social behavior is not chaotic, even if gorillas do lack the Ten Commandments!

Another irrelevant statement. Someone who lacks the Ten Commandments is a gentile, not a creature of social chaos. Christian philosophy asserts that there is a natural morality, a natural law, which all men can see and follow through their reason.

It is again irrelevant because Mr. Zindel is here anthropomorphizing Ape behavior, talking as if an Ape obeyed its conscience when it mere is controlled by its instincts. If the behavior is instinctive, the organism has no choice in the matter: it is not an act of obedience to follow one’s programming, but the reaction of a machine.

The young chimpanzee does not need an oracle to tell it to honor its mother and to refrain from killing its brothers and sisters.

Again, the alleged honor in which chimpanzees hold their parents is an instinctive behavior based on their natural animalistic passions and affections. A human separated from his mother at birth and reunited with her, if he followed the rule of honoring parents, would honor her, even if his natural inclinations prompted him to give his filial loyalty only to the woman who raised him. No chimpanzee would or could make that moral decision, since no one could explain to a chimp in words, or by showing him a birth certificate, who his natural birth mother was.

This statement is irrelevant to the point of folly. Chimps are not rational beings. They do not face what we would call moral conflicts: they follow their passions and instincts. They have no ability to question, oppose, or overcome their instincts and passions.

And, in any case, they do sometimes kill their brothers and sisters.

Of course, family squabbles and even murder have been observed in ape societies, but such behaviors are exceptions, not the norm.

This statement undermines this thread of the argument. If human behavior is based on natural selection, and natural selection has created primate societies where, by and large, we are conditioned to protect our kin and murder our rivals, then natural selection is also responsible for the rare cases where we murder our kin. The protective acts are not praiseworthy and the murderous acts not blameworthy. 

The author here is perhaps conflating a statistical norm with a moral norm. Merely because a behavior is unusual or rare does not mean it was or was not is not created by natural selection.

So too it is in human societies, everywhere and at all times.

If the author means to show that the moral code of all groups of men is the same, he is talking utter rubbish. The murder rate among hunter-gatherers like the Bushmen in Africa is extraordinarily higher than among civilized men, even in wartime, even in our most lawless inner-city ghettos. Murdering captured foes was the norm among Aztecs: they staged elaborate ‘flower wars’ merely for the purpose of capturing enemies alive to sacrifice. For that matter, the murder rate among the Irish is not the same as the murder rate among the Swedes.

And, if we consider other behaviors aside from murder, such as polygamy or girl-infanticide, the rates are very different between Western and Eastern cultures, between Christian and Pagan eras in the West.

If Mr. Zindler here means to argue that natural selection imprints a natural form of moral code on human beings, he has also to make the additional argument that culture, laws, customs, and religion, have little or no effect, or else he cannot conclude that religion, the prime carrier of culture, has no effect.

The African apes – whose genes are ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent identical to ours – go about their lives as social animals, cooperating in the living of life, entirely without the benefit of clergy and without the commandments of Exodus, Leviticus, or Deuteronomy.

Again, irrelevant rubbish. No Christian argues that men without the Ten Commandments are utterly immoral. Indeed, as a matter of logic utter immorality is impossible to practice: even pirates must honor their bargains they make to divide the swag.

The whole point of moral philosophy, Christian or pagan, is to discover the moral obligations we human have not to act like apes.

Before we move on, notice the parenthetical comment at the beginning of that sentence:

The African apes – whose genes are ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent identical to ours–

Ho ho. A gratuitous little aside meant to put across the notion that humans are like apes. Well, Dr. Zaius and the other scientists of Gorilla City do not agree, and the Pope of the Ape Church recently decreed in the Apish Encyclical Simiae Vitae… wait! What was that? You tell me that Apes do not have scientists, Ape Church does not have a Pope, and that Gorilla City is from a superhero funny book? But, Mr. Zindler tells us Ape genes are ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent identical to ours! Of course, if that one or two percent controls the human capacity for moral reasoning, then analogies to Apes have no bearing on the discussion. One might as well talk about how dutifully my clock keeps time without the benefit of a religious imperative to be dutiful and prompt, and say my grandfather clock is ninety-eight percent as tall as my grandfather.

It is further cheering to learn that sociobiologists have even observed altruistic behavior among troops of baboons. More than once, in troops attacked by leopards, aged, post reproduction-age males have been observed to linger at the rear of the escaping troop and to engage the leopard in what often amounts to a suicidal fight. As the old male delays the leopard’s pursuit by sacrificing his very life, the females and young escape and live to fulfill their several destinies.

Again, this whole line of argument is irrelevant to the issue raised at the beginning.

Eskimos also put out their old and weak on the ice to die when the tribe cannot support them. For that matter, the Spartans flung weak and unwanted children into a chasm called the Apothetae at the foot of mount Taygetos. The mere fact that tribes of baboons sacrifice the old and weak in suicidal combat with leopards does not tell us whether the laws and customs or the Eskimos or the Spartans is morally correct, and certainly does not give us a ground for discovering or enacting an objective moral code.

Among humans, it is the young men we send into combat, not the old and post-sexual. What difference would it make, let us say, to Ismay, when he decided to take a seat on the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic, that baboons act this way or that way. Should he have given his seat to a lady or a child if that gift means he must die in the cold north seas? If there is no life after death, then there is no personal reward for this self-sacrifice. If there is a life after death and a reward awaiting him, the action becomes not only moral, it becomes a matter of practical self-interest. That is what this discussion is about.

The heroism which we see acted out, from time to time, by our fellow men and women, is far older than their religions.

Since there is no evidence that homo sapiens ever existed without religion, this statement is not merely irrelevant, it is probably false. Again, no Christian argues that heroism does not exist among gentiles. That is not a point at issue. For that matter, no Christian should argue that heroism did not exist among the individual soldiers of the Soviet Union, an avowedly atheist empire: but to argue that the Soviet Union was not evil, and that the evil did not spring directly from its materialistic, naturalistic philosophy, that is a more difficult argument to make.

Long before the gods were created by the fear-filled minds of our less courageous ancestors, heroism and acts of self-sacrificing love existed. They did not require a supernatural excuse then, nor do they require one now.

Ad hominem. It is hard to convince a religion filled with martyrs that courage is lacking among the religious. And again, irrelevant. The Aztec warriors where bold and heroic, and, for that matter, the suicide of Cato of Utica was as heroic as any pagan can imagine. The question of whether human sacrifice or suicide is moral or immoral is not addressed by these facts. What Mr. Zindler here has to prove is that religious sentiment makes no difference to moral choices: in effect, he has to prove that Cato would have committed suicide even if his religion and culture taught suicide results in condemnation to eternal hell; and Mr. Zindel has to prove that their Aztec would have built elaborate temples and slain thousands of screaming human sacrifices even if their religion had held human life to be absolutely sacrosanct.

Just so we do not lose the thread of the argument: It is not whether or not baboons, gentiles, or atheists do or do not perform acts of self-sacrificing heroism at issue here. At issue are two closely related questions: (1) Does the Christian religion (the article is not really concerned with any other) provide a reason for such acts lacking in atheism? (2) In a purely naturalistic metaphysics, what is the ground of morality? If we say self-interest is the sole ground of morality, then self-sacrifice is excluded.

Given the general fact, then, that evolution has equipped us with nervous systems biased in favor of social, rather than antisocial, behaviors, is it not true, nevertheless, that antisocial behavior does exist, and it exists in amounts greater than a reasonable ethicist would find tolerable?

I am troubled that the article merely skips past the only interesting point raised so far. The question here is what does a reasonable ethicist find tolerable and on what grounds? How do we know right from wrong? If (as is here alleged) evolution instilled us with a conscience, why is there sin and evil in the world? How can man know what is right and do what is wrong? I wish at least one of these deep questions were addressed in an article allegedly about the foundations of ethics.

Alas, this is true. But it is true largely because we live in worlds far more complex than the Paleolithic world in which our nervous systems originated.

A false statement. The Paleolithic world is not simpler than ours: it takes just as much skill to nap a flint in the Stone Ages as to forge a horseshoe in the Iron Age or program a computer in the Information Age. The murder rate in the Paleolithic was higher than in more civilized ages: most of the skulls we dig up from those ages show death was by bludgeon or tomahawk. Also, the Paleolithic man were religious (as their burial customs and cave paintings imply), and I venture to guess that they knew right from wrong the way any rational creature does. None of this has anything to do with the complexities created by the Agrarian Revolution in the Neolithic, or any technical progress since then.

I am baffled that an atheist, in the midst of an anti-religious tract, would trot out the myth of the Garden of Eden as if it were proven by archeology that our ancestors lived long and happy lives with a low infant mortality rate. He could with more realism trot out the story of Cain and Abel if he wanted an accurate picture of those times.

In any case, even if our world is more complex than those of the Stone Age men, it is not because we live in a more complex world that there is sin and evil.

To understand the ethical significance of this fact, we must digress a bit and review the evolutionary history of human behavior.

A Digression
Today, heredity can control our behavior in only the most general of ways, it cannot dictate precise behaviors appropriate for infinitely varied circumstances. In our world, heredity needs help.

In the world of a fruit fly, by contrast, the problems to be solved are few in number and highly predictable in nature. Consequently, a fruit fly’s brain is largely “hard-wired” by heredity. That is to say, most behaviors result from environmental activation of nerve circuits which are formed automatically by the time of emergence of the adult fly. This is an extreme example of what is called instinctual behavior. Each behavior is coded for by a gene or genes which predispose the nervous system to develop certain types of circuits and not others, and where it is all but impossible to act contrary to the genetically predetermined script.

The world of a mammal – say a fox – is much more complex and unpredictable than that of the fruit fly. Consequently, the fox is born with only a portion of its neuronal circuitry hard-wired. Many of its neurons remain “plastic” throughout life. That is, they may or may not hook up with each other in functional circuits, depending upon environmental circumstances. Learned behavior is behavior which results from activation of these environmentally conditioned circuits. Learning allows the individual mammal to learn – by trial and error – greater numbers of adaptive behaviors than could be transmitted by heredity. A fox would be wall-to-wall genes if all its behaviors were specified genetically.

All this is irrelevant to this issue at hand.

With the evolution of humans, however, environmental complexity increased out of all proportion to the genetic and neuronal changes distinguishing us from our simian ancestors. This partly was due to the fact that our species evolved in a geologic period of great climatic flux – the Ice Ages – and partly was due to the fact that our behaviors themselves began to change our environment. The changed environment in turn created new problems to be solved. Their solutions further changed the environment, and so on. Thus, the discovery of fire led to the burning of trees and forests, which led to destruction of local water supplies and watersheds, which led to the development of architecture with which to build aqueducts, which led to laws concerning water-rights, which led to international strife, and on and on.

Next we discover that the elephant got his trunk because a crocodile pulled his nose.

I’m sorry, but the writer is indulging in a “just so” story. The discovery of fire did not “lead to” the burning of forests except in the general way that this tool made it possible for some Promethean thinker of the Stone Ages to deduce how to and then decide to burn the forest for the sake of crop production, an invention that neither you nor I, dropped into those ages and raised in those circumstances, would think of. The development of aqueducts was because of some unrecorded Edison from Ur or Eridu or Mohenjo-Daro. Laws concerning water rights are not something that simply happens: king and wise men in counsel decide and determine these things.

Mr. Zindler here is trying to ignore the gulf that separates fox behavior from human behavior. (As I mentioned above, the Pope of the Apes recently declared in this encyclical Vulpinae Vitae that foxes are not like human beings in their moral thinking.)

Examples of counterproductive or dishonest definitions occur frequently in partisan or sophistical writing. Marxism consists of little more than promoting popular economic errors under a set of vague and misleading definitions: real economists regard Marxism as a type of “word-fetishism”, where Marx merely defines a term for rhetorical effect.

7. An Example of a Word Fetish

A prime example of a word-fetish is the word “Capitalism” which Marx coined in order to imply that the free market rested on a power structure, a set of laws and customs and institutions, whose true nature is to oppress the poor and serve the self-interests of investors, whom Marx misidentified as a class (like knights or yeomen) and which he further misidentified as having a common interest and common unity of purpose.

All egregious error, of course. Economists from before Marx’s time had already investigated and corrected these misconceptions. Marx was apparently not even aware of the state of the literature at the time he wrote.

Capitalists are not a class: any man who invests can enter this role, whether or not he also touches the economy in other roles, such as wage-earner or consumer.

There is no necessary unity of interests between investors. If I have invested in Macy’s, I am a capitalist, but I do not want you to shop at Gimbel’s: my self-interest and the self-interest of any investors in that competing store are at odds. I am still, according to proper economic nomenclature, a capitalist if I invest capital, even if I am a poor farmer with a retirement fund who buys a sliver of stock in Macy’s.

And in any case, the free market does not favor or serve the interests of an investor who makes a bad investment; indeed, all that the market will do, if allowed to operate, is force him to lose money until he liquidates the malinvestment and invests where the consumers, by their aggregate decisions of buying and not buying, direct him to invest.

So why invent a word like “Capitalism” if it does not mean anything, and if it obscures, rather than clarifies, the investigation of economic truths? It is a non-word, an anti-word.

Its purpose is to halt clear thought on the topic. Marx could not criticize the free market on rational ground, nor could he erect a cogent argument on sound economic principles. Instead, he retreated into word-fetishism. He merely defines a thing to mean it’s opposite. When someone says “free market” Marx wants you to have the same emotional reaction as if you saw Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Monopoly game kicking the crutch away from Tiny Tim. Marx wants you to think that wage-earners are slaves, so he calls them “wage-slaves” and he makes no attempt to put forward a sound economic argument on the point.

The definition of “Left and Right” along a spectrum of Progress versus Reaction amounts to much the same thing, from much the same school of thought: It is a socialist conceit.

8. The Dishonesty of Misleading Terms

I submit to the reader’s candid judgment that, no matter how old or well respected the definitions of “Right and Left” might be, the model of placing all political factions on a spectrum that measures their “progressiveness” is a misleading nonessential, and misleading to the point of deceiving those who use it, so that they are unable to have a rational conversation about certain political issues.

(I speak here from experience: I can list several conversations I have had where, due to improper terminology, and nothing else, the audience was unable to think logically about the issues raised.)

It is dishonest for the same reason that, when drawing a boundary line between your land and your neighbor’s, you ought not draw the line in the wrong spot to get a choice bit of his land, a well, a timber stand, or some other amenity. Definitions draw the boundaries of ideas. To draw the line in the wrong spot misrepresents the idea. When this is done negligently, it is merely unfortunate, a source of confusion; when done deliberately, for rhetorical effect, it is a lie.

Such rhetoric is not merely useful, in the modern world, it is nearly all-powerful. A hypothetical example: if a mad feminist convinced the consensus of writers and thinkers to adopt a terminology where the two sexes were defined as being “females” and “rapists”, then this would be a remarkably dishonest terminology. “Boys” would be defined as “potential rapists” chaste married men would be defined as institutional or serial rapists, lovers whose fornication was entirely voluntary on both sides would be defined as voluntary co-rapists, and so on. The stream of nonsense and paradox would never cease.

The whole point of a dishonest terminology is to “blot out” certain concepts, to make them have no proper name, so that they are either (1) never discussed or (2) discussed only with an audience who is misled into false-to-facts associations. Under the hypothetical example of our “mad feminist”, one could not discuss chaste and voluntary relations between the sexes without recourse to an awkward make-shift phrase, such as “those rapists who only have sex with partners where the act is entirely voluntary on both sides.”

When a conversation requires these kinds of circumlocutions, it is safe to assume that dishonest definitions have corrupted the available vocabulary. It is safe to assume that propagandists have been diligently at work in order to “blot out” certain concepts.

Please note that this is exactly the position anyone of my political beliefs must adopt in a political discussion. The vocabulary and terminology used by the consensus, allows me no clear words to describe my position, which is, oddly enough, the mainstream majority political position of the Enlightenment.

9. The Idea With No Name

My political position is this: I favor constitutional representative democracy, where the lawmakers have powers curtailed by separation of powers, checks and balances, limited by the natural rights of man, and confined to specific spheres that they may not overstep; I favor the rule of law and the equality of man; I favor the common law and rational continuity of legal precedent; I favor private property, the free market and free trade; freedom of speech and of the press; and the right to bear arms.

This political philosophy is opposed implacably to established privilege and to socialist intervention into the market place. This political philosophy in one sense is very radical.

The free market unleashes the imaginative energy and industry of man, and nothing is conserved in such an environment. The free market is no respecter of persons: the son of a poor man can be a millionaire, the son of a millionaire can be a poor man, depending on the aggregate decision of the consumers.  The free market is a system of laws and customs that gives sovereignty to the productive consumers: in an unhindered free market, the productive consumer, no one else, determines the success or failures of businesses, their lines of production, and indirectly the consumer consensus defined even such factors as working conditions, prices, rate of return on investment, wage-rates, rents, and interest-rates.

This political philosophy is radical in the sense that it calls for fundamental change: the overthrow of settled intuitions and establishments that oppose these enumerated principles.

(Now, not to confuse matters, but my social philosophy is very conservative. Practical wisdom tells me that that political values mentioned, from the equality of man to the custom of consistency in the common law, depend on shared cultural values and virtues that the consensus of the culture must pursue, lest the institutions fail. Hence, this political philosophy differs from Libertarianism in that it emphasizes the need of traditional cultural values and customs, such as respect for human life, respect for marriage, courage, temperance, moderation, justice, fair-dealing in business, chastity, a work ethic, and so on. Those on the left who make no distinction between society and politics would call this a political philosophy: but I would say the one impinges on the other only in areas of family law, marriages and wills and so on. One might even call them “canon law” issues.)

Now, what is the term for this political philosophy? Historically speaking, the correct term is “Liberal”, for this is the philosophy of liberty that springs from the political thought of the Enlightenment.

10. The Evolution or Corruption of the Term Liberal

However, the Liberals of the last century came to regard as an equal opponent to liberty, and as an equal bastion of settled privilege, not just the privileged aristocracy and established clergy, but also the price system, private property and the free market, yes, that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned boogieman called “Capitalism”.

In order to preserve liberty, this faction proposed that the system of laws and customs which take advantage of the specialization of labor should be abolished, and the price mechanism for establishing the relative value of goods and services replaced with rationing, which means, by arbitrary and economically irrational fiat.

They may or may not have known this is what they were proposing: socialism is nothing but a tissue of popular and unscientific errors regarding economics. No one buying into this faulty system can have any very clear idea of what the specific results of a proposed policy would be. In that sense, it is wishful thinking, that is, thinking that never takes into account the connection between cause and effect. When someone proposes a cause A that leads to effect B, but wishfully daydreams that instead cause A might, for no reason, lead to effect C, it becomes a matter for a psychiatrist, not a philosopher, to determine if that dreamer “really” knew they were supporting B. As far as a philosopher is concerned, we can say this faction supported the replacement of free market institutions by rationing and irrational fiat, whether they admit it or not, know it or not.

This faction still called itself, in good faith, Liberal, but were, by that point, Socialists, and became enemies (whether they know it or not) of liberty. They are so-called advocates of liberty forever calling for ever more intrusive and complete state control of every aspect of human life. In the name of liberty, they wish to abolish liberty altogether.

Why is socialism incompatible with liberty? Socialist intervention in the market always requires, encourages, and necessitates rationing; and rationing always requires, encourages, and necessitates intrusion of government into the private sphere. For example, welfare agents check to see if you are lawfully married, or whether your child is going to school, or where and how you are seeking work; and they regulate or create incentives and disincentives for all these matters. Socialism is opposed implacably to private property, free trade, and the free market, and therefore, whether intentionally or not, is also opposed to individual liberty. You cannot tell the welfare agent to mind his own business if you are a dependent of the state, because you are his business. If everyone is a dependent of the state, an employee of the state, a conscript of the state, the state cannot mind its own business, because you are state property: a human natural resource, just as much as a timber stand or a coal deposit. Your home is no longer, in the eyes of the law, your castle, and the king need not ask permission to enter. Your home is something made with state funds and state resources, to be used as the state directs. It is a communal dormitory.

One cannot control the economic activities of free men and consider such men free in any real sense of the term. To gain ever more control his labor, his goods, his time, the price of what he sells and the wages and return on investment he receives, is eventually to have absolute power over him. A man without property, and dependent upon the state for his daily bread, is a serf, or less than a serf. Serfs, at least, had rights in a court of law. Socialism is opposed to the rule of law.

10. No Replacement Term for Liberal

So what do we call the political philosophy which once was called Liberal? What do we call the beliefs and theories of the Sons of Liberty?

We cannot call them “Rightwing.” Rightwing (in the consensus view) means siding with established privilege. Established privilege mean inequality of law, either of an establish church, a special canon law code for clerics, or a bifurcated legal code that grants special rights, based on birth, to aristocrats and royalty. By this definition, the “Right” is opposed implacably to the rule of law and the equality of man.

We cannot call them “Conservative” unless we specify a nation and a historical period where the Sons-of-Liberty values are now, or were in the very recent past, the core values of the nation or the people that the Sons of Liberty wish to preserve against a threatened change. As stated above, this term changes its meaning with its background, like a chameleon.

12. The Myth of the Consensus

Here is why the consensus terminology, offends me personally: the consensus terminology makes no allowance for my existence at all. There is no word to describe my position, nor the position of the jurists, statesmen, and philosophers who support the tradition I follow.

The consensus terminology assumes and promotes the idea that all politics whatsoever are concerned with a single issue: the struggle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. The Sons of Light are the forces of progressivism and socialism. The Sons of Darkness are the forces of established privilege and aristocracy. For some odd reason, perhaps due to historical accident, perhaps due to an outrageous lie, any number of disparate groups (such as the military, the church) are lumped with the forces of established privilege along with the free market, which is, in reality, the natural foe of established privilege.

So the consensus terminology divides all political factions into four groups: on the Far Right are the violent and totalitarian defenders of established privilege and foes of Progress: that is, Nazis and Fascists. In the Center Right are law-abiding and democratic or parliamentarian defenders of established privilege and foes of Progress, a coalition of nationalists, Puritans, monopolists and military Napoleons, churchmen and aristocrats. In the Center Left are law-abiding and democratic or parliamentarian defenders of Progress and foes of established privilege, a coalition of internationalists, pacifists, partisans of Free Love, labor unions and proletarians, defender of the weak and dispossessed and ethnic minorities. On the Far Left are violent and totalitarian defenders of Progress and foes of established privilege, that is, Communists.

This narrative is socialist mythology through and through. It has little or no bearing on reality. The falsehoods and misleading assumptions of this narrative are myriad. In this space, I will mention but two.

First and foremost, even a cursory examination of the laws, principles, speeches, actions, values and customs of the Nazis and Fascists reveal that they are socialists. The word Nazi is an abbreviation for “National Socialist People’s Worker’s Party.” The laws in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought to combine, control, and unify all aspects of society. They were collectivists. They hated the free market and regulated wages, prices, working conditions; the fascist state was a Bismarckian Welfare state. The popular economic errors they believed were the same as the popular errors Socialists believe. They were radical, and sought to suborn all social institutions to their unitive collectivist end. There was no sphere of human life beyond the reach of national socialist law. The parallels to Communism cannot be overlooked. The only difference is that Communist political and economic theory is better articulated; Communists were internationalists rather than nationalists; Communists sought the outright destruction, rather than merely the subordination, of established institutions. 

Second, the socialist myth attributes self-interest to the Right and selflessness to the Left. The parties on the Right, either the Center-Right coalition of monopolists and military goons or the Far Right militarist racist Nazis, are thought to be acting to preserve their own established privileges. The Right is assumed to be struggling to retain control of the social mechanisms by which the poor and oppressed are exploited and milked. The Nazis are seen merely as more desperate versions of the monopolist and the military goon, those driven by fear of Progress into violent totalitarianism. Meanwhile, both Center-Left and Far Left are friends of the poor and dispossessed. The violence and totalitarian lawlessness of the Far Left is merely an unwelcome aberration, or a corruption of a good idea, or a necessary evil.

All this is ahistorical. The appeal of fascism to the folk of Germany and Italy was not based on a Lockean appeal to their self-interest, but a semi-religious or romantic appeal to their spirit of self-sacrifice. It was an appeal to their yearning for unity, a herd instinct, to a patriotism that despised selfish class war and sought in the illusion of a totally militarized society the utter subordination of selfish interests to esprit de corps.

It was an appeal to how pretty the blond beasts looked in snappy black uniforms. It was an appeal to the machinelike unity of a goose-stepping collective.

The appeal of any military metaphor in political rhetoric is an appeal to self-sacrifice; an appeal to “team spirit”, to the ashes of one’s fathers and the altars of one’s gods. The soldier, the hero, is one who sacrifices himself for the common good. The fascist myth of unity told all the stupid partisans of this ideology that they could be heroes, like soldiers, if they sacrificed their neighbor’s liberties and sacrificed their neighbors to the Moloch of the Good of the People. 

13. The Nowhere Man  

Nowhere in this tissue of political myth, the Apocalypse of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, is there room for someone who is not a friend and not a foe of historically inevitable socialist Progress.

Nowhere is there room for someone who does not want the state to run the economy.

Nowhere is there room for someone who neither favors the rich against the poor, nor favors the poor against the rich.

Nowhere is there mention of one who seeks (wherever possible) to harmonize the interests of investors and wage-earners through neutral laws, virtuous customs, and the rational mechanisms of the free market.

Nowhere in this political spectrum is there a self-made man.

Nowhere is there a man who neither exploits nor is exploited, a man with no special privileges and no need for government hand-outs.

I am someone who believes there is a natural harmony between those in the wage-earner role in the economy and those in the investor role.  (Note that I do not say “rich class and poor class” because class means a set of legal privileges or burdens; and economic roles are independent of wealth levels (as they even were in Marx’s time. His error on this point is inexcusable).) Where am I on this spectrum?

But this stupid, dishonest, unscientific, misleading political spectrum says that there are two and only two political factions: those who want to eat the rich to feed the poor, and those who want to eat the poor to feed the rich. In the middle are the peaceful law-abiding cannibals, who seek power through parliamentary means, and at either extreme are the violent cannibals, who seek power through mass-murder, mass-terror and violent, stupid thuggery.

Where do we put someone who is on nobody’s side in the foolish and self-destructive war between Privilege and Progress, but who is absolutely opposed to both? 

Where do we put someone who is not a political cannibal?

Nowhere am I.

For I am the person the consensus terminology blots out of everyone’s mind. I am one this world view will not allow its true believers to believe exists.

To them, I am either a Center-Right “conservative” which (to them) means a defender of the exploitation of the poor by a privileged class above the law; or I am a Center-Left “liberal”, one who defends the equality of rights of all men and minorities against class privilege. But neither label even comes close to describing me.

My ideas, the political tradition and political faction I represent, all the writers and statesmen and thinkers of my position are the ideas and people the consensus definitions define out of existence.

Why should I use, or even admit as valid, a terminology whose sole point is a rhetorical trick meant to silence me?

14. A Final Question: The Right to Bear Arms

Reason might suggest that if our model, our classification system by which we determine the Linnaean taxonomy of political factions and opinion distorts, blots out, and ignores the mainstream opinion of an entire nation or an entire age of history, then our classification system is inaccurate.

If it causes us to classify the object as the opposite of what it is, it is misleading.

If it was the intent of those who erected and support the classification system to elude discussion of the object so misclassified, it is not a classification system at all, it is Orwellian Newspeak: mere propaganda, a word fetish.

Keeping this in mind, let us ponder a final question:

I am someone who believes in the right to bear arms as the central, perhaps the only, fundamental human right. No tyrant ever prevailed in a nation whose people were armed and drilled in the use of arms. I am a Virginian. Sic Semper Tyrranis. That is the sum and motto of my political philosophy.

So where do I fit on this political spectrum? Am I on the “Right” as a near neighbor and partisan of mild form of Nazism, or am I on the “Left” as a near neighbor and partisan of mild form of Communist? Am I a friend or foe of Progress?

Neither Far Right nor Far Left allow for private ownership of arms.

Am I somewhere in the Center? The Near Left distrusts private ownership of anything, and seeks the dependency of all subjects on the state, and so it cannot support the private ownership of arms. By the consensus classification, the Near Right are partisans of class privilege, or privileges of powerful but small groups of monopolists or military elites. Surely the privileged classes recognize that an armed commonality is a massive threat to their oppressive power structure?

Indeed, the very definition of the aristocratic class was that it and it alone possessed the right to bear arms vice an unarmed class of commoners. The Near Right by the consensus definition should be the foes, not the supporters, of militia or the private use of arms in self-defense. The ability to man the barricades with armed citizens (or even to shoot a damn Yankee reviewer) cannot be said to be a policy that supports an elite regime. A man with a shotgun who says “Git off my land” to the bulldozers either of Big Business or Big Government is no ally of the Powers That Be, not a friend of the rich, and not a supporter of the Military-Industrial Complex. Where does he stand, the self-made man? Where is the little man who has ironclad individual rights?

One who calls for the blood of patriots and tyrants to mingle and liberally to water in the roots of the tree of liberty cannot be called a “conservative”, if that term has any real meaning. No call more revolutionary has ever been made.

I suggest instead that there is only one real political spectrum, running from white through gray to black. White are those who favor the right of free men to bear arms; gray are those who seek to curtail that right, seeking in illusory security; black are those villains who seek to abolish that right, enemies of mankind and enemies of the only practical and meaningful measure of human freedom, the freedom of arms.

That is the only real political spectrum. Everything else is just talk.

1. The Twins

I have always been suspicious of the consensus terminology which describes all political factions as being points along a spectrum running from the progressive “Left” to the reactionary “Right”.

I have never understood, and always opposed, the most absurd and historically inaccurate feature of this so-called spectrum, which puts Nazis and Fascists on the “Far Right” and Socialists and Communists on the “Far Left”, when, in fact, even a cursory glance at the economic theory and economic policies of the National Socialist People’s Worker’s Party or the National Fascist Party are indistinguishable except in metaphysical niceties from the economic theory and policy of socialists.

The fascist has no carefully-demarked political theory. The ideology is a rough coalition of popular economic errors, romanticism, nationalism, and so on. But one theme runs through the fascists of Spain, Italy and Germany: the theme of unity. Above all, fascists are collectivists. Fascism (which takes its name from the bundle of rods that can be broken only separately, never when together) promised an end to class struggle, and promised strength through unity: all society was to be put on a military footing. The unity involved central economic planning, which, in turn, of necessity involves contempt for Enlightenment concepts of private property and rule of law, private conscience, privacy.

Fascism is at its root a totalitarian ideology, for the state takes as its concern all aspects of life. It is at its root a dishonest ideology, for it takes the Party to be more important than the truth: Orwellian nonsense-talk and censorship are its hallmarks.

Socialism likewise promised a class struggle that would end on bloody victory for the proletarian class, after which they would enjoy an end to class struggle, world unity. It is also totalitarian, as control of the economy of necessity implies control of all aspects of life. It is also a dishonest ideology, for it takes the Party to be more important than the truth: as with Fascism, Orwellian nonsense-talk and censorship are its hallmarks.

Fascism is also a conspiracy theory, based in the politics of paranoia, seeking out enemies to national unity, racial enemies, capitalist enemies, all disloyal elements, or inventing such enemies when none are conveniently at hand. Socialism is likewise a conspiracy theory, the most complete, and, to be blunt, the most idiotic conspiracy theory in history: socialists regard private property and the free market, loaning capital at interest and the joint-stock corporation, as evils directed against the working man; whereas, in truth, the workingman has no greater friend, no more generous fountainhead of wealth and opportunity, than a free market system.

Of these two paranoid political movements, it must be noted that the enemies on the enemy’s list of the Socialists overlap, with few exceptions, those of the Fascists. Both are on the enemy lists of the other: The Jews were the witches hunted by the German fascists, but not by the Italians, but also hunted by the Socialists under Stalin in Russia. The only big difference between the two is that each appears on the enemy list of the other.

So far, at first glance it seems the twins should be placed next to each other on any honest spectrum (by which I mean, one that actually measures something or means something). What are the reasons why they might be placed apart?

2. Some Objections

2A: Antithesis

An objection I have heard is that the Fascists must be placed on the opposite side of the spectrum from the Socialists, because Fascism’s core value is anti-Socialism. Fascism is designed to oppose Socialism at all points. This is a misleading, indeed, trivial feature of the political philosophy. As if we were to place all religion on a spectrum, and place the Jesuits in the same camp as the Atheists on the grounds that the Society of Jesus was designed to oppose the Reformation at all points.

In reality, the opposition of Fascists and Socialists has the typical ferocity, the Odium Theologicum, of Orthodox toward Heterodox; it is the hatred of brothers, Cain and Abel, not the hatred of strangers.

2B: Reaction

Another objection I have heard is that the fascists were “reactionaries”, and sought to preserve the old order of things, the free market, democratic suffrage, the privileges of the aristocracy, the military and the state-run church, against the radical changes promised by the Socialists.

The difficulty with this line of argument is threefold: (1) the Fascists sought radical changes to all these institutions, demanded their subordination to the state, plotted their destruction, use them and abused them; (2) The fascists promoted a political economic policy only mildly less radical than the Socialist, promising to control and militarize the industrial class rather than liquidate and replace it; (3) the list of institutions the fascists are said to be “reacting” to protect from Socialism is a random list.

No one party could sensibly defend each institution on the list, unless it actually had no political philosophy and was a pure alliance of convenience. The aristocracy and the established church of the ancient regime are innately antithetical to the free market and universal suffrage of the classical liberal: no one (except in sophistry) can claim to be protecting both these institutions. In reality, one must suborn, corrupt or destroy the other. A nation cannot be both a true republic and a true monarchy.

2C: The Extremes Meet

The most common objection I have heard, is that the political spectrum is not a spectrum at all, but a hoop, like the dial of a clock, where the most extreme of the Left, Communism, is found at the noon position, 12:00, and the most extreme of the Right is found at the midnight position, also 12:00. While this seems to answer the main objection (that alike political philosophies should be placed in like positions on a spectrum purporting to measure the alikeness of political philosophies), in fact it renders the spectrum meaningless.

The political “clock”, by this interpretation, runs from the totalitarians rest at High Noon, the ‘Near Left’ at Nine o’clock, the ‘Near Right’ at Three o’clock and the ‘Centrists’ at Six o’clock. As the hand sweeps around the dial, the Six o’clockers favor mild regulation of  business, the nine o’clockers favor nationalization and regulation of major sections of the economy, more and more as the hour gets later.

At twelve, we turn into totalitarian mass-murderers, and then at one o’clock we suddenly, somehow, find ourselves allegedly in the company of Washington, Jefferson, John Locke, and all those thinkers who favor small government, free enterprise, strong but private religion; and yet, (since these are also on the so-called “Right”) we are supposed to find populists, the Progressives who favor Eugenics, the Progressives who favor sterilization of lesser races, but not (for some reason) the Progressives who favor racial quotas and set-asides and special grievance laws. That group is on the other side of the clock.

Then as the hand drops toward six o’clock, all these small-government Jack Kemp types blend into their so-called near neighbors, the Welfare Statists who also (somehow, impossibly) favor tax money going to Big Businesses and the support of the Military-Industrial Complex. One would think these were two opposite groups, but let us put that aside. So what happens at one o’clock that makes the totalitarian anti-capitalist racists suddenly and shockingly blend into the libertarian capitalist individualists? What is the halfway position between these two positions that places them adjacently on our “clock” of political theory?

Where do political theories such as Libertarianism, Anarchism, Aristocracy, Christian Socialism, Populism, Nationalism, Isolationism, Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Militarist Police-Statism fit on this dial? Are they all somehow crammed into the angle between one o’clock and four o’clock?

2D Objections Not Answered

In order to place Fascists and Socialists at opposite sides of the spectrum, the spectrum has to be meaningless, at least as far as politic economic policy or theory is concerned. The political theory (totalitarianism) of Fascist and Socialist is the same; their economic theory (a state-run centrally-planned economy) is the same. They two differ in metaphysics only: the excuses they use for their legal depredations and economic foolery differ. The gangland tactics used to assume power, and the secret police tactics used to maintain it, are the same. They merely excuse the mass-murders in terms of a different collective that demands total obedience: one, the nation or a fictional race, the other, the people or a fictional economic class interest.

3. Fascist Socialism

History makes no secret of the Bismarckian nature of the welfare state the fascists erected. Unless the term has no meaning, they were “Progressives.”

The fascists in Italy demanded wage and price controls, government control of business, abolition of profit on capital investment, land reform, New-Dealesque public works programs, state-run welfare programs, and so on. The Nazis in Germany had an even more invasive and extensive program of welfare-state industrial collectivism. Control offices for every bureau of industry issued directives and collected raw materials by fiat, independent of any price structure. Losses did not result in a factory ceasing production; the control offices made sure that it got the raw materials and that the workers got rations of necessities.

Again, by late 1935 Hitler’s centralized agricultural policy created food shortages, due to near-elimination of food imports and restrictive government controls. By 1937, Goring’s Four Year Plan for economic self-sufficiency had created an endemic food shortage, and shortages of raw materials needed for rearmament. Hitler had to invade his neighbors, both to distract the people from their economic woes, and to seize sources of raw materials and finished goods the Hitlerian economic policy, i.e., Socialism, would not allow him to acquire by market trade.

Both Italy and Germany sought economic “autarchy” which is the erroneous notion that tariffs and trade barriers increase production by refusing the take advantage of the specialization of labor across national boundaries. (According to “autarchy” theory, the people in Banana Valley should not trade their bananas for ice cubes with the people of Icy Valley, but should instead create the ice locally in special refrigeration units at great expense; and likewise the people of Ice Valley should put up greenhouses to grow bananas locally, at absurd cost, rather than swap ice cubes for bananas cheaply.)

But enough. The nature of the fascist and Nazi economic policies is clear enough to any with eyes to see. They fell short of Communism only in that the leaders of industry were not liquidated, and the industries not nationalized de jure. They were only nationalized de facto.

4. Left and Right as a Measure of Change

So we can see that the Left-Right spectrum is not a spectrum measuring economic policy, from non-interventionist to interventionist to total state control of the market. It is not as if we put Free Marketeers to one side and Socialists to the other. Anyone who wishes to argue that Nazis are an extreme form of Free Market libertarianism has to explain away the long list of interventionist theory and law the National Socialists embraced. He also has to explain away the name “National Socialist.”

Perhaps the Left-Right spectrum measures something else? In its original and uncorrupt use, in the National Assembly of France, those who supported the ancient regime, the privileges of the possessing classes, the throne and altar, the traditional establishment, sat to the right of the aisle; the progressives, who sought to overthrow the monarchic system, and introduce wider franchise, equality, egalitarianism, rule of law, sat on the left. In other words, the Dukes in their lace cravats and the Cardinals in their red hats sat on the right, and the revolutionaries in their tricolor cockades sat on the left. In Spain, the two parties similarly seated were called the Servile, those who served the throne, and the Liberal, the free men.

Now, it would take a very shallow observer of the political scene indeed not to notice what is essential and what is accidental in this scheme. The non-essential is this: at that time, the Left urged rapid change and the Right urged caution. Some writers think this is the very definition of the Left-to-Right spectrum. Whoever urges change is Left; whoever opposes change is Right.

But this definition would change with any change in background.

George Washington before 1776 would be considered “Left” because he was a radical, indeed, the leader of a revolution, who sought the overthrow of monarchic government in the colonies and the establishment of a form of government absolutely new. After 1776, with no change of policy and opinion whatsoever, he would be considered “Right”, because he would then be opposing change and fighting to preserve the government in its then-current form, a democratic republic of limited powers.

For the same reason, Franklin Delano Roosevelt before the “New Deal” would be called “Left”, because he urged change, and after, with no change of policy, would be “Right” because he sought to maintain the New Deal policies, and the new form of government.

Likewise, if Washington and Roosevelt were spirited across the Atlantic dropped into the middle of the England or Germany contemporary to them, they would both be “Left” because they would oppose the monarchic or fascist regime ruling the nation in which they found themselves.

Someone living in the post-New Deal America who seeks a radical change and a return to the constitutionally limited government of Washington, would be “Left” since he sought fundamental change; and opposition seeking to keep the New Deal policies in place would be “Right”, or even “Reactionary.”

A modern Russian seeking to return to the days of the Soviet system of government would be “Left” since he favored change, but then again, with equal justice, could be called “a conservative” since he sought the return of institutions traditional in his tyranny-haunted land, and on that ground would be called “Right.”

Spider Robinson, in his book VARIABLE STAR, has one character voice the opinion that conservatives are fearful, slothful creatures, because they only seek to cling to the institutions they know, whereas the radicals are brave and blessed, superior forms of life, because they boldly go where no man has gone before. This is perhaps the stupidest political analysis of Left and Right that can be imagined.

Again, and for the same reasons, if “Left” and “Right” allegedly measure “Out” and “In”,  then the same objection applies. On the Left are those who support and seek to help the groups left out and left behind by the current power structure, and on the Right are those who seek to conserve and protect the current power structure. But if the “left” claim to represent the minority, the poor, the slow-footed in the Rat Race, then this claim changes as the background changes. In the Media, the Academia, in the Entertainment Industry (in the Science Fiction field, indeed) those who favor small-government, and profess the Christian Religion, are in the minority, and routinely snubbed and insulted, denied opportunities, disparaged, discouraged, and made to feel unwelcome. We are the “Outs” and the liberal conformity is “In.” The Christian Right is practically unknown in European politics: they cannot possibly be said to be the conservative defenders of the current EU political-economic power structure. They are so far “Out” that in places to voice Christian traditional teachings (such as, say, concerning sexual morality) is a hate crime. To preach chaste monogamy is risible. These are not the voices heard without dissent in the halls of parliament or the court of the monarch, the pages of the press, the groves of academia.

(Let it not be said that the Left do not CLAIM to be eternally the rebels eternally defending the ‘Little Man’ against the evils of ‘Big Man’— it is merely that this claim has outlasted any reasonable reality in certain contexts.)

Political allegiance has very little to do with whether one is changing or staying the same, whether one is ‘In’ with the ‘In-crowd’ or ‘Out’ in the cold: indeed, in real life, due to the constant corruption of manners and morals, institutions must be revisited and revised constantly in order to remain the same. A red stop-sign, in order to remain red, must be repainted periodically with new red paint, lest it soon be a brown sign. It is, so to speak, the Red Queen’s Race.

5. Left and Right as a Measure of Related Characteristics 

So let us not even consider the definition which identifies Left with change and Right with reaction. It is not a serious definition.

A more sober definition might be this: “Left” and “Right” include a rough coalition of political philosophies and interest groups that bear a “family resemblance” to each other. There is not one essential characteristic that defines membership at any particular part of the spectrum, but, rather, a group of related characteristics, interests, or even mere historical accident, that builds up, over time, and in an organic fashion, a coalition or web of alliances that we identify as “Left” and “Right”.

Now this is a more practical definition, because it says how the words are actually used, as oppose to how they would be used if they were accurate. Unfortunately, it will not serve. Between European politics and American there is a gulf that this terminology cannot cross.

By this definition, the coalition correctly called “Right” in, let us say, 1930’s Germany, consisted of populist economic errors, violent anti-Communism, Wagnerian-Nietzschean romanticism, racism, and elements of the military as well as privileged aristocrats and landowners with strong ties to industry and labor, not to mention a national, established church. The Right in 1930’s Germany was collectivist to the point of madness: no individual rights, no individual privileges, no individualism at all, was meant to stand in the way of the great fascistic union of all elements of society into a common brotherhood, without division and without rank. The Fascists promised to stop class warfare and put the economy on a state-controlled footing.

The coalition correctly called the “Right” in, let us say, 1980’s America is violently and absolutely opposed to each and every one of the political points. That coalition consists of free-marketeers, law-abiding anti-Communists (America never had blackshirt thugs beating redshirt thugs in the streets), strongly anti-racist (the party of Lincoln, and one which opposes set-asides and opposes reverse discrimination). No American party of any description has ever held the military power to be independent of or superior to the civil power. Our leaders never wear uniforms to make speeches: they wear silk hats and not brass hats. We have no privileged aristocracy and no laws or customs supporting them. The Right in America (and also our Left, but for different reasons) is suspicious of industrial ties to the state, and prefer deregulation and the loss of special privileges for industry. There is no class warfare to stop in America: we have no class system, no laws and no customs preventing upward social mobility.  Indeed, we expect and demand our rich be self-made men, and we scoff at those layabouts who inherited their wealth. We are suspicious of talk of the collective, of unity and brotherhood, when it impinges on personal liberty and freedom of conscience.

So, a “family resemblance” list of what features coalitions of the “Right” have in common show the word is meaningless across the scope of how it is used. These two camps have no “family resemblance” in common; they are not allies (indeed, the one destroyed the other in World War II) and they are not an organic union historically related: Mussolini did not credit John Locke with forming his early political thought; he credited socialism.

If you wanted, nonetheless, to use the terminology this way, you would have to be careful to say which nation and era you meant by the term, and no writer ever does this. Anyone who was serious about describing a political faction would not bother saying “Far-Right-Wing German from A.D. 1930.” He would say “Nazi.”

Likewise, a serious thinker would define the various political faction in history by their real nature, origins and interests: monarchists and Whigs, Tories, and democratic-republicans, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, Reformationists and Counter-Reformationists, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Imperialists, Napoleanists, Federalists, Optimates, Populists, Orange and Green factions in Ireland, Blue and Green factions in Byzantium, and so on.

Grouping disparate political ideologies and factions together who have nothing to do with each other is misleading. Why not merely use the real name of the party or faction or movement involved?