The PROBLEM OF PIFFLE, Part Five: Formless & Void (Continued): Amoral and Anarchic
Part Five: Formless & Void (Continued): Amoral and Anarchic
We continue our examination of the Formlessness and Void necessarily implied by the atheist worldview below. The previous entries are here:
We have previously established that a godless view of the universe, to be logically consistent with itself, must also be a nihilist hence irrational universe, an unreality where fiction and fact are indistinguishable, words are arbitrary, knowledge is impossible. It is hence a nonsense universe.
Immoral Morality
In a nonsense universe, there is no way to account for anything. Accounting, making words to express ideas, becomes impossible.
If there is no way to account for anything, there is no way to account for abstractions, which include moral abstractions like the concept of duty, of ought and ought not.
Moral righteousness is either a manmade convention, hence arbitrarily open to change by man, or the product of natural happenstance, a twist of neural tissue in whatever brain segment gives rise to the moral sentiments.
Moral sentiments most certainly cannot be the product of whatever produces maximal efficiency in our self-interested survival and fertility, nor the spread of selfish genes, since our most basic moral maxims, acknowledged by all man of all cultures, eschew self-interest and laud self-sacrifice in situations crucial to moral reasoning.
If self-sacrifice were justified solely as a tactic to allow for the spread of selfish genes as found in sons and nephews, and this is used to explain away the moral sentiment that makes a man risk death fighting off a wolf to save a nephew, how much wiser is the tactic of betraying a nephew to the wolf, if one might live long enough to mate with the nephew’s now-widowed wife, and have triplets?
The sly treachery of the famous fertility clinic doctor who substituted his own sperm distributed to all his women patients seeking the sperm of geniuses or healthy athletes, resulting in hundreds of his own offspring raised by others at their expense, as cuckoo’s eggs are raised by unwitting foster parents, would therefore rank as more fertile hence more moral, than any other behavior of any other man in history.
Or perhaps Genghis Khan, whose conquests, whose harem, and whose offspring were more immense and widespread than any man known to history, is by this logic the most morally perfect man in history. All his acts are to be imitated by those seeking righteousness.
That brutal and genocidal conquest, or fraudulent implantation of seed into an unwilling mother, offend basic moral intuition, I will not here pause to emphasize.
To be sure, a man, or a group of men, can adhere to certain behaviors, rites, and rules of action, as inclination, wish, interest, temptation, opinion, or will, may so direct. Human sanctions for violations of those actions can be enacted and enforced, also as the man or group is so inclined.
But such things are either courtesies of custom, arbitrarily meant for one time and place and group, or are practical necessities arising from certain universals of the human condition, such as our altricial biology, informed by a pragmatic understanding of how human behavior is likely to be influenced by incentives and disincentives.
In the second case, practical considerations are abandoned when they become impractical, that is, when the goal sought is foresworn in preference to another goal, or a means used is abandoned in favor of less costly means. But this is precisely why people cheat: they find it more efficient to achieve a desired prize, or to appear to achieve it, without expending the effort of abiding by rules and customs hindering other people. If morality is based on pragmatic considerations, so is immorality.
In the first case, manmade law can be unmade by man, for any reason or no reason.
Absent universal moral imperatives, however, no manmade law can be made or unmade on the grounds of its ability to serve a universal moral ideal, such as justice or mercy. There are no universal moral ideals to which to appeal, because universal have no existence in Nominalism.
If all law is manmade, all duties are manmade, a matter of willing consent to a covenant, or a matter of pragmatic self interest.
Now, the crucial error of discovering that it is a matter of fact that a given a behavior, in the long run, or if practiced honorably and faithfully by the majority of men across the majority of time, will have a given anticipated benefit, cannot, by any contortion of philosophy, lead to the conclusion that one is under a moral imperative to adopt such a behavior or seek such a benefit, even if the benefit is life itself.
This is called the naturalistic fallacy. Facts only speak of what is. Morals speak of duty. Duty is what one ought to do, regardless of inclination. One cannot deduce an “ought” from an “is.”
The fact that a certain behavior leads toward a certain desired outcome imposes no duty on a man who does not desire that outcome, even if the outcome is his own self-preservation. The moral maxim that one ought to desire an outcome one happens not to desire is a maxim that cannot based on one’s desires.
Likewise, various clever attempts have been made from time to time to deduce universal moral maxims from contemplations of long-run or generalized social benefit, or self interest rightly understood, presuppose that one ought to seek one’s own self-interest even when not so inclined, that is, even when it is not in one’s best interest. Such attempts are shallow, if not libel, since they equalize saintly and heroic behavior to mere selfish cunning.
Such attempts cannot even account for the existence of intuitive moral maxims obligating heroic or saintly or self-sacrificing behavior, or, for that matter, obligating the everyday examples of courage, common courtesy, and temperance needed to pass among civilized society without being locked up, or pass among barbaric society with being clubbed down.
Such attempts also fail at their main purpose, which is to exhort moral behavior, not in the name of God, but in the name of serving the good of all man in the long run. The long run has no innate reason to be preferred to the short run or any run, if there are no moral universals. Man has no innate reason to serve the long run. As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead.
Social and biological explanations of moral maxims are even more foolish. Once one discovers that a certain self-sacrificing behavior benefits the statistical chance of one’s own selfish genes reproducing themselves via sons and nephews, one has no self-interested reason not to be more selfish than one’s selfish genes, and pursue the satiation of as many passions and appetites as one may see fit. This leads not to moral behavior, but to its opposite.
Telling me God says be fruitful and multiply is a sound basis for an argument favoring marriage, or disfavoring fornication, onanism, or contraception. The sacrifices needed to secure and uphold the institution of marriage, or the parental burdens of a large family, one might well reason are reasonable and proportionate costs of serving and pleasing God.
But why should one serve and please the mechanism of a selfish gene? If this selfish gene is what implanted the neural programming that inclines me to the mating behavior, why should I indulge that inclination? If I am told I should do so because it pleases me, I answer that buying harem slaves grants me the pleasures of sexual congress without necessarily imposing the burdens of matrimony, and hiring whores who abort or abandon unwanted children alleviates the burdens of childrearing. God can punish those who displease Him, either in this life or the next.
God has authority both by law and merit, as creator and father and sovereign and lawgiver over His creatures, children, subjects and servitors, as well as being wise and just beyond measure, the wellspring of all love, life, and meaning in the cosmos.
The selfish gene can do nothing, has no authority, and means nothing.
Why serve twisted molecule? Better to serve a golden calf, which at least is pretty.
Indeed, not only is there no moral reason to hold the selfish gene to be a moral authority, a consistent application of selfish gene morality would uphold the behaviors, not of the Catholic Church, with its lifelong marriage and prohibition on contraception, but of Genghis Khan, who had a legion of wives and hosts of sons, enough to spread his genes to a third of the world. His acts of worldwide polygamy, abduction, and rapine spread his genes more widely than Christian acts of chastity.
Here we reach the perfect absurdity implied by atheist morality: it is immoral to be moral, and moral to be immoral.
The substitution of moral for immoral is a phenomenon called “Gnostic Inversion” after the First Century Christian heretics of that name, who preached that their higher morality overturned and indeed reversed common moral codes.
The sexual mores of the generation outside my window fornicating and crossdressing atop countless heaps of the tiny skulls of aborted babies, but carefully wearing anti-pestilence masks, need no further comment here. To disapprove of grotesque and notorious acts of sexual perversion, by modern subjective standards, is immoral, because upholding moral standards is akin to violent repression, whereas upholding as sacred duties abstinence before marriage, and chastity within marriage, forbidding divorce and artificial infertility, is both libeled as unhealthy, and condemned as a vestige of patriarchal oppression, as well as being bad for the environment.
One cannot invent a new moral code any more than one can invent a new primary color. At best, one can swap customs and forms of courtesy one for another, or change the emphasis given to certain moral maxims over others of equal dignity, but any attempt to evolve the common moral code of mankind into a new form is either the extension of God-given natural rights to those previously denied them, or is a scam meant to disguise some vice as a virtue.
In such an atheist universe, no question of moral or immoral is meaningful. Moral maxims are either useful to one degree or another to sate arbitrary appetites and passions, or are expressions of arbitrary human will.
In neither case are any human thoughts, words, and deeds capable of being honestly described as moral or immoral. No standard exists for making any moral judgement. All are raw facts: question of what was done, not what ought to have been done. All are innately amoral.
The universe is amoral.
Antinomian Law
Here let us pause a moment to reflect on the great atheist moralists of the Twentieths Century, men whom, albeit godless, we admire for their heroic or saintly qualities.
If you can bring none to mind, that is because there are none.
Great atheist moralists inhabit an amoral universe. In an amoral universe, men have no awareness of the moral order of creation, for, as far as they can see, there is none.
When men have no awareness of the moral order of creation, they have no reason to abide by it.
Men will do as self interest, willpower, and sentiment dictate. Men of noble sentiments will do some noble things, no doubt, for so long as the passion controlling them so dictates, but when another sentiment arises, no duty prohibits them from following that inclination with equal passion: so is the history of many an emperor of the Far East, who, after bravely quelling riots, and restoring peace, then spent his twilight years seeking the elixir of immortality between indulging in palace orgies or palace murder-sprees.
However, a cursory glance at famous atheist intellectuals of the recent centuries, from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx to Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, will betray a rogue’s gallery of adulterers, fornicators, drunks, hypocrites, frauds, and at least one madman, not to mention Tolstoy to Sartre to Chomsky, who fall below the standard we would expect from sanitation workers, and far, far below the standard we expect from saints.
This is not to say that Christians are all as decent and lawful as, well, Christians. We have Pharisees and deceivers among us, not to mention pederasts and con-men, if anything, more horrid and more despicable than the rogues of the godless. Our Pharisees and hypocrites, in addition to their myriad other vices, are betrayers of a higher standard. Something pure beyond atheistic understanding is being demeaned by, and a deeper pit in hell is prepared for, those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, than by or for the fool who in his heart says there is no god.
Even in this, the godless cannot outperform the godly. Our sinners are worse than their criminals, for our sinners knowingly offend god’s law.
Why is it that Christianity can produce, no matter how rarely, saintly men, pure in spirit and action, humble in speech, loving and just, as Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whereas the secular saints of atheism are unruly imps, filthy, drunk, fathering bastards on whores, when they are not outright demons, as Stalin and Mao, and other mass-murderers?
The answer falls out of the logic of subjective morality. In an amoral universe, there is no moral sanction to law. All law is manmade. There is no higher law than human law, no natural rights of man, no higher principles of justice nor mercy, to curb the excesses of human law.
There are no excesses, because human law is the measure of itself. It is its own standard. There is none other. That is the secret horror hidden in the simple slogan that man is the measure of all things.
If all law is manmade, man can unmake it, as there is no higher authority to consult. Subjective morality is not morality at all, for it is based not on duty, but on inclination, and hence has no reason not to change when inclinations change.
Torquemada or Tartuffe, at his worst, was acting in violation of Christian principles even while claiming to act in its name, because Christians have no authority to overrule Christ; whereas Stalin or Mao, at his worst was acting in accord Marxist principles, or his own, as he had a perfect right and authority to do.
Nothing grants Marx a greater authority than Mao to write or rewrite moral principles as he saw fit, and, as a sovereign despot, Stalin had considerably more authority than Marx, a private citizen of no accomplishments, to rewrite the laws of the land, or ignore them as need or whim inclined him.
Atheism implies nominalism implies amorality implies antinomianism, since laws cannot be justified as a manifestation of an eternal moral order in a universe where nothing is eternal, nor in a nominalist model where words are arbitrary, and universals are unreal.
There are two forms of antinomianism: the despotic and the anarchic.
To Thomas Hobbes, no rebellion could ever be justified, on the grounds that once sovereignty by legal fiction was ceded to the sovereign, there was no higher standard the sovereign needed to uphold in order rightly to demand loyalty unto death from his subjects, hence there was no way he could be held in breach of any violation of the mutual obligations of fealty. Indeed, the obligations were not mutual, but entirely one-sided, running only from subject to sovereign; any other option, so Hobbes argues, is tantamount to anarchy.
While Hobbes himself was a Christian man, or so one may glean from his writings, the argument is entirely secular, based on the axiom that morality is merely another word for self-interest, and that self-interest should and must always prioritize avoiding violent death at the hands of others above all other priorities; and that, to serve this priority, there was no other alternative than for men to establish between them a common sovereign with sufficient power to keep them all in awe of breaking the peace, or defrauding their compacts. Once established, the sovereign power cannot be lawfully withdrawn because this would be lawful establishment of anarchy, which is a clear contradiction in terms. So says Hobbes.
Please note that, if all law is manmade, Hobbes is entirely right, for no law exists with moral authority to overrule nor overturn the will of the sovereign, even if that will be corrupt or malign, for the sovereign is sovereign, or, to use the enduring Hobbesian metaphor, the sovereign is the Leviathan.
But if, as Marx would hold, no sovereign has legitimacy once the impersonal forces of historical necessity decree the violent end of the capitalistic stage of human evolution and the advent of the final socialist stage, then the opposite conclusion is reached: any and all revolutionaries have the perfect moral right to commit any atrocity whatsoever, provided only it aids the advent of utopia.
This means no manmade law has any innate moral force, nor ever can have. The Marxist logic leads to the same conclusion as the argument of Thrasymachus in the Plato’s REPUBLIC, that justice is the will of the stronger, merely that Marx, in an elliptical retreat into mysticism, personifies history as a goddess who bestows the strength of inevitable victory on the prophesized socialist revolution. Hence the betrayal of fealty, the breech of sacred oaths, mass-expropriation and mass-murder is not merely permitted to the socialist, but required of him. Obedience to the laws of the capitalist order is treason.
The very anarchy Hobbes absolutely forbids, Marx absolutely mandates. Both arguments are equally forceful in a godless universe.
Atheism is naturally and inevitably lawless, since law, to them, cannot be more than a matter of practical application of the appetites and passions of men, either appealing to self-interest, or to darker passions, lust and bloodlust, as the Twentieth Century so amply testifies.
Atheism in moral reasoning must offend, if not at first, then eventually, the basic moral maxims instinctive to all mankind, for, in atheism, the coherence between objective duty and subjective inclination can be brought into harmony only by blind happenstance, with no guarantee to last.
The despot or the despotic multitude, may, indeed, be inclined to follow the same rules of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance that Right Reason dictates, but as soon as inclination changes, there is and can be no innate duty making it imperative to continue so to act despite any contrary inclination.
There is nothing but subjective inclination to consult, or pragmatic maxims of how to achieve maximum pleasure at minimal effort.
To grant more moral weight to the imperative to maintain the social order and preserve the peace is absurd in a universe where nothing has moral weight.
To grant more moral weight to the imperative to maintain the social order and preserve the peace is absurd in a universe where nothing has moral weight.
Atheist law is exempt from the obligations of moral law. There is no reason, in a godless universe, for laws to be lawful rather than despotic.
The atheist universe is and must be an antinomian universe.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
