Beyond the Theory of Moral Relativity
On this Fourth of July, to understand how America — and much of the world — began to go off the rails in the 20th century, it’s worth flashing back to the tremendous opening shot of Paul Johnson’s opus Modern Times:
At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: ‘Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.’ Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.
He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.
The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.
Last week, while searching for that quote, I came across a 2010 comment on Johnson’s thesis by econo-blogger Bryan Caplan and a post at the long-running British libertarian blog Samizdata which both referenced it with some gentle criticism. As Johnathan Pearce wrote at the latter blog:
Like Caplan, I am not entirely sure that moral relativism captures the full nature of what went wrong in terms of the 20th Century, although I think Johnson does capture quite a lot of the problem with that concept. For me, the ultimate disaster of that century was the idea of the omniscient State and of the associated idea that governments, run by all-knowing officials, could solve many of the real or supposed problems of the age. The 20th Century was not unique in witnessing the growth of government, but it was an age when government had, like never before, the technology at its disposal to be immensely powerful, probably more so than at any time since the Romans (and even the writ of Rome had its limits). We are still, alas, in the grip of that delusion that government can and should fix problems, although there is perhaps, hopefully, a bit more cynicism about it than say, during the late 1940s when the likes of Attlee were in Downing Street.
Johnson is right, however, to point out that in a world where there is no stated respect for the idea of impartial rules and law, no respect for reason and for the idea of objective truth – or at least that it is noble to pursue truth – that terrible consequences follow; every irrationality, might-is-right worldview, will fill the vacumn. However, unlike Johnson, I do not think that morality requires the anchor of belief in a Supreme Being, and he tends to make the mistake, like a lot of devoutly religious folk, of assuming that atheists, for example, cannot arrive at a moral code, which seems to rather overlook the role of people such as Aristotle, who had a huge impact on views about ethics, and from whom other religions have borrowed (think of the Thomist tradition in Catholic thought, for instance).
I think he’s right. Part of the problem is that “moral relativity” and moral relativism sounds at first glance like a swingin’ night on the town in Manhattan during the Beame era – that squalid perigee of the 1970s when the city birthed Death Wish, Taxi Driver, and, heck, Saturday Night Fever, a hopelessly nihilistic period that, ironically, a surprising number of liberal New Yorkers bored with Mayor Bloomberg’s current great clean-up of the human soul would be happy to return to.
But at the risk of going to the well once too often, I’d say the real cause of the woes of the 20th century was this:
Whenever a revolutionary movement took shape, it effectively banished the past. But it wasn’t just history that vanished – Nietzsche killed God, and millennia of Judeo-Christian religion. Marx paved the way for systems of government where freedom of choice and economic knowledge accumulated over centuries of trial and error could be junked for a top-down centrally-planned command and control economy.
Progressives began to argue that man himself could be reengineered – as Tom Courtenay’s Pasha/Strelnikov character says to Julie Christie’s Lara near the start of David Lean’s version of Dr. Zhivago shortly before Hell descends, “It’s the system, Lara. People will be different after the Revolution.” And if they weren’t, they could be engineered to be different. H.G. Wells and other late 19th and early 20th century “progressives” believed this concept implicitly, Fred Siegel wrote in a 2009 article on Wells in City Journal magazine:
In A Modern Utopia, written in 1905, Wells updated John Stuart Mill’s culturally individualist liberalism in light of the horizons opened by Darwin and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Biologically, argues the book’s narrator, the “species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.” That means, he says, that the “people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.” Further, “the better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service.”
What provides the possibility for such freedom is eugenics. Wells has no use for the iron laws of Marxism, but he replaces them with the iron laws of Malthus and Darwin. “From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life,” he writes. “The extravagant swarm of new births” that created the masses was “the essential disaster of the 19th century.” Man’s propensity to reproduce will always outstrip his productive capacity, even in an age of machinery. Worse, the “base and servile types,” who are little more than the “leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon,” are the most fecund.
In Anticipations, Wells had already argued horrifyingly that the “nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, or poisons its People of the Abyss” would be ascendant. For the base and servile types, death would mean merely “the end of the bitterness of failure.” It was “their portion to die out and disappear.” The New Republicans would have “little pity and less benevolence” for the untermenschen, “born of unrestrained lusts . . . and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity.”
In A Modern Utopia, Wells, stung by criticism of Anticipations, backed off, but only partway. “Idiots,” “drunkards,” “criminals,” “lunatics,” “congenital invalids,” and the “diseased” would “spoil the world for others,” Wells again argued. But their depredations required “social surgery,” not total extermination. That meant preventing people below a set income and intelligence from reproducing, as well as isolating the “failures” on an island so that better folk could live unfettered by government intrusion. Remove the unfit, and there will be no need for jails or prisons, which are places “of torture by restraint.” Illiberalism enables liberalism.
In practice, the notion that groups of men deemed “inferior” could be eradicated did not begin with, nor was it exclusive to, the Nazis. Stalin used famine as a weapon to reorder early Soviet society; the German obsession with eugenics preceded the Nazis by decades. It was certainly very much in the intellectual atmosphere of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s while the Nazis gathered strength and plotted their own version of Hell.
In addition to killing off older forms of humanity, birthing “The New Man” was an obsession of both National and International Socialism in the first half of the 20th century, as Alvin Toffler wrote in his 1980 book, The Third Wave:
As a novel civilization erupts into our everyday lives we are left wondering whether we, too, are obsolete. With so many of habits, values, routines, and responses called into question, it is hardly surprising if we sometimes feel like people of the past, relics of Second Wave civilization. But if some of us are indeed anachronisms, are there also people of the future among us — anticipatory citizens, as it were, of the Third Wave civilization to come? Once we look past the decay and disintegration around us, can we see emerging outlines of the personality of the future — the coming, so speak, of a “new man”?
If so, it would not be the first time un homme nouveu was supposedly detected on the horizon. In a brilliant essay, André Reszler, director of the Center for European Culture, has described earlier attempts to forecast the coming of a new type of human being. At the end of the eighteenth century there was, for example, the “American Adam” — man born anew in North America, supposedly without the vices and weaknesses of the European. In the middle of the twentieth century, the new man was supposed to appear in Hitler’s Germany. Nazism, wrote Hermann Rauschning, “is more than a religion; it is the will to create the superman.” This sturdy “Aryan” would be part peasant, part warrior, part God. “I have seen the new man,” Hitler once confided to Rauschning. “He is intrepid and cruel. I stood in fear before him.”
The image of a new man (few ever speak of a “new woman,” except as an afterthought) also haunted the Communists. The Soviets speak of the coming of “Socialist Man.” But it was Trotsky who rhapsodized most vividly about the future human. “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser and more perceptive. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more melodious. His ways of life will acquire a powerfully dramatic quality. The average man will attain the level of an Aristotle, of a Goethe, of a Marx.”
As recently as a decade or two ago, Frantz Fanon heralded the coming of yet another new man who would have a “new mind.” Che Guevara saw his ideal man of the future as having a richer interior life. Each image is different.
Yet Reszler persuasively points out that behind most of these of the “new man” there lurks that familiar old fellow, the Noble Savage, a mythic creature endowed with all sorts of qualities civilization has supposedly corrupted or worn away. Reszler properly questions this romanticization of the primitive, reminding that regimes which set out consciously to foster a “new man” usually brought totalitarian havoc in their wake.
It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more the birth of a “new man” (unless, now that the genetic engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more unlikely.
In the 1970s, after American progressives forced our ignominious departure from South Vietnam, the combined efforts by dictators in that era to start from zero and return to the primitive took on frighteningly macabre forms, as this 2000 BBC article on Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot notes. Pol Pot dubbed 1975 “Year Zero,” and then…
When he came to power in 1975, he quickly set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia by emptying the cities, abolishing money, private property and religion and setting up rural collectives.
Pol Pot’s radical social experiment claimed the lives of countless Cambodians.
Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.
In his classic “The Great Relearning” essay, Tom Wolfe wrote that the notion of Starting From Zero wasn’t limited to governments, but often any sufficiently large societal force that believed it could jettison history. Wolfe credits the Bauhaus, the Weimar-era German modern architecture academy of the 1920s, with coining the term. But the concept preceded the Bauhaus by decades, and it would outlive that academy’s relatively brief lifespan. It was a concept that was – and is – simply in the DNA of the far left. Its notion would be adopted, as Wolfe noted most humorously, by the hippies of the 1960s, who embraced the idea of “free love” and simultaneously jettisoned the seemingly bourgeois notion of modern hygiene (or as Ayn Rand would dub them in the 1970s, “The Return of the Primitive”), and by newly liberated gays exploring their own version of free love in the following decade, with what were ultimately even more self-destructive results for many by the early ’80s.
Or as Wolfe wrote, “But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplification: AIDS.”
So while Johnson was right that moral relativism played a role in the history of the 20th century, the real horrors were caused by those who believed that they can hit the CTRL-ALT-DLT buttons and completely reboot every aspect of civilization, based on whatever was intellectually in fashion at the current moment.
Nowadays, self-styled “progressives” move forward into the past at a more relaxed pace. Or as the leitmotif of a recent video by PJTV’s Bill Whittle memorably went, “Slowly…Slowly…”
Our politically correct Left, steeped in Critical Pedagogy, hasn’t banished the American past, but simplified it and rearranged it to reflect what the Left opposes. By smearing slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow all over America instead of on the regions and people which produced them, the Left can make a persuasive case to rebuild an America they say was built on slavery and racism.
It’s no surprise race is the centerpiece of the Dem Party. Affirmative Action says even a Polish guy who moved here 30 years ago must have his children pay a price at college to the tune of a points-shaving scheme of 300 SAT points.
Today, whether it’s crime, education, immigration or health care, a racial perspective is always presented. That’s one thing – but the solution is always pointed directly away from high cheekbones because cheekbones bring innate morality and nobility. Ironically, the Dems are more fervent believers in a type of racial supremacy than any of the mainstream groups in American history they made up out of their heads.
By exaggerating the presence of old enemies and creating new ones long after old institutions are gone, the Year Zero is almost every year. The last one was 2008. And surprise, the leader came out of a racist cult. What a weird coincidence that.
I assume you are referring to the later period, and to the fact that the North abolished those practices in its own areas? I am mentioning this because early America has slavery in the North also, and – for example – the pre-civil-war Illinois (as North as you can get!) had Jim Crow laws that would make Lester Maddox green with envy (Separate but equal? What’s that?).
I am referring to things like the Northwest Ordinance, put forth before the Constitution was even ratified, that prohibited slavery in these new areas.
I’m referring for example, to Minnesota, where anti-Jim Crow laws were in force well before 1900.
I’m referring to Oregon for example, where there were 21 lynching 1882-1968, according to the Tuskegee Institute – one of those was black.
I am referring to not giving over versions of American history that paint the entire country as one giant evil without regard to individuals or regions. I am referring to a history put forward by the PC Left that doesn’t even rise to the level of a Classics Illustrated version of history – where nuance and context are not just stripped out but raped.
These morons just think slavery could’ve been abolished with one hand and the initial struggle for union as portrayed by the existence of The Federalist essays wasn’t real.
Well, I certainly agree with you there.
If the fight to abolish slavery was waged so tentatively by the North prior to the Civil War for fear of destroying the Union, just imagine how much trying to demand such a thing would’ve wrecked any chance of a union in 1787.
It was a choice: Balkanize the colonies perhaps forever or live to fight another day. And that’s what happened. And even then, we had to fight a terrific war just to reunite the country. When the Left makes statements like America was built on slavery, and says it just to promote a contemporary agenda, it burns me up.
It’s always good to remember that slavery was hundreds, undoubtedly thousands of years old and it was practiced all over the world. That was before England in the early 19th century, and at the urging of Christian leaders (one a former slave ship Captain), began the crusade to eliminate slavery first in England, then in the colonies and then in most of the civilized world. In the US the desire to eliminate slavery came out of a religious revival which swept the Northern states and forced the issue onto the government.
Thank you, Ed, for this thought-provoking article. It is a masterful job. Can you imagine the impact on our future if each teacher in each classroom spent just 15 minutes each school year presenting your article to America’s youth?
Yes, atheists and pagans and perhaps even adherents of the left-wing denominations can have a moral code. But what code is it? The great Roman historian Tacitus thought the Jews were weird because “they consider it a crime to kill a child”(*). Today we have people arguing to bring back infanticide, to make no mention of the horrors of abortion-on-demand (the original term) and Grandma being put to death based on a bull session in the waiting room.
Of course, that wasn’t all that Johnson was referring to. In the last chapter of “Intellectuals”, he refers to the intellectuals turning from utopianism to advocating hedonism and violence. Whether or not we seek government control of hedonism, the loss of a societal consensus of what is right and wrong in these matters has had great effects on society.
(*) Some translate this as “late-born child”, IIRC. The entire account is an amazing anti-semitic diatribe.
As a note: once a Roman father had heirs and made his will, further children were seen as unnecessary and disposed of. Infanticide was common, at least among the upper classes. I might also note that girl children were not given their own names; the daughters of Julius would be named Julia Primus, Julia Secondus, etc. (and George Foreman thought he was being original).
The Chinese had a similar custom; in many cases griles were called Girl number n. Mao’s mom, for example.
I believe that this did vary over time with the Romans.
I was just reading of a complaint made by a Saducee to the Pharisees. The Saducee was complaining about the fact the the Pharisees did not hold a man legally liable for the actions of his slaves (or his children for that matter, even minors). The Pharisee explained that if a man were liable, a slave who was angry at his master could just go cause a tremendous amount of damage. Left unsaid is the fact that there was a limit to what the master could do to his slave (or family) under Biblical law. (Too bad the old South didn’t follow it, or a man who killed his slave would be executed.) (Source – Mishna Yadayim, char. 4)
Kinda silly to expect all atheists and pagans to share some single moral code. Do you also expect very brand of theist from polytheist, to Christian, to Islamic terrorist to all share the same ethics, and ask “Yes, theists can have a code, but what code is it”.
Even among Catholics with their attempt at having a single infallible human representative of ethics there is no consistency. Different Catholics live by different ethical rules. Some for contraception and some not, some racists and some not, etc.
There isn’t any single code that atheists follow, and different atheists have differnent world views. I think Marxism is obviously evil, and that Objectivists. misunderstand reason, and those stripes of atheists have their own beliefs. Why expect me to have the same ethics as them? Do you also expect everyone who doesn’t believe in unicorns to all have the same ethical system?
I can’t tell whether you’re denying that the very idea of a shared culture is desirable, or denying that it is possible.
Culture itself is rooted in cultus, or worship. That is, the clearest description of what a culture is consists of describing what that civilization holds sacred. To say that it holds nothing to be inviolable or worthy of homage, is to say that it has no culture — it is Hobbesian chaos.
Following your point about Catholicism, it is true (and unsurprising within Catholic doctrine) that Catholics do not all adhere to their faith’s tenets. But the tenets still exist. When hypocrisy is still the tribute vice pays to virtue, chaos remains at bay; it is only when one asserts no difference between virtue and vice that chaos destroys all.
“I can’t tell whether you’re denying that the very idea of a shared culture is desirable, or denying that it is possible.”
Neither, my comment went over your head because you are boxed in by your perspective. The topic wasn’t culture. Ultimately ethics is an individual decision. You say things like, “civilization holds sacred” but civilizations don’t think, only individuals do, and only individuals can hold things sacred.
Catholics who don’t abide Catholic dogma are not necessarily hypocrites. They can do so because they don’t believe certain dogmas, or recognize them as unethical. Again an individual ethical decision. Many Decision by the Catholic hierarchy are objectively immoral, and so rejecting them makes one, not a hypocrite, bur an ethical person on the issue in question.
Great points here, and throughout this thread, Brian. Atheism does not make one a leftist, and if the Bible were followed literally, and without separation from the state, as many Christians claim it should be, we would have something similar to Sharia law in this country, as it has many of the same primitive barbaric laws contained in it.
I have begun to ponder the idea that Satan is the Christ-wanna-be, and that he always emphasizes or proposes a close counterfeit to Christ’s character, attributes, actions and programs.
In that model, I find discussions of a “new man” and “start-over” revision of history to be revealing as, perhaps, Satan’s counterfeit of the forgiveness and inner renewal promised in the rites, ordinances and holy holidays of Judaism, and in Christ’s atonement.
The basic human urges for care, consolation, and transcendence are unchanged. It would make sense that both camps’ efforts and programs are aimed at them, Satan’s being ultimately degenerative, and God’s being effective.
In referring to Eugenics, you forgot California.
“I do not think that morality requires the anchor of belief in a Supreme Being, and he tends to make the mistake, like a lot of devoutly religious folk, of assuming that atheists, for example, cannot arrive at a moral code.”
That issue is a trojan horse. The issue is not whether a theist or atheist can take a “moral” position. In the absence of an external reference point, all positions are arbitrary. Good, bad, moral, immoral, legal, illegal, are just individual and corporate variations of saying we like or dislike something. Adjectives, such as noble or immoral, serve to signal the position of the writer, and nothing more.
These characterizations have only the force of the individual or group behind them; they are of no more consequence than the position of any other individual or group. In this absence, the ability to inflict our views on others, power, becomes the measure.
I work around law enforcement and thugs (of all colors, gender and age, but mostly from the more impoverished class of society). Given the choice of running into one or a group of thugs while walking down the street I would much prefer that in growing up their grandma or parents had taken them to church/temple/synagogue every Sunday, rather than running into same who have instead been nurtured by an atheist education, and the morals of the modern left.
Morality doesn’t just happen, it takes thought and discussion of good, evil, and a host of considerations in how society should live, what is acceptable and what is not.
I’ve heard the Atheist mantra all to often from well meaning progressive college graduates living in the suburbs or a loft in ‘The City’ who sincerely but smugly inform us all how easy it is to be moral without a religion or God, but merely by personal deep thought, it’s simple they say. I say to them, ‘Come with me to the nether worlds of society and into those arenas where there is no belief in much of anything and morals are relative to the situation at hand. Let me leave you, my sweet well intentioned progressive, in that arena for one night and then tell me how it all worked out come morning, that is if you are still around to tell me about it”.
Religion from my vantage is all too often the only thing holding the impoverished people of the world together. Of course we could just eliminate religion, which seems to be the goal these days, and let eugenics and the other ‘solutions’ sort out the wheat from the chaff.
The incarceration rate for atheists is well below their percentage of the population. Every criminal attack I’ve experienced has been at the hands of a theist. Should we go by your anecdotes, mine, or the statistics? .
Also, what is this “atheist education” you speak of? They don’t teach atheism in the scoll system. Is that your code phrase for the teaching of science, specifically the theory of natural selection, in the school system? You’d be in much greater danger from criminals at the height of Christian belief in the dark ages than from any Darwinist you meet on the street.
“Come with me to the netherworlds…”
Liked that instructive analogy!
Having a deity is less objective a moral anchor than what some atheists use. Theistic ethics can justify anything and has, like flying planes into the World Trade Center. Ultimately you must use human judgement and your own conscience to pick and choose what you believe god commands, and even which theist religion and sect to follow. This is all old hate and was known by the ancient Greeks. You are thousands of years behind the curve on ethical thinking, perhaps 2.5 millennia.
I’m always thinking that the Internet’s complacent “theologians” of relativism can’t get any shallower. And that’s always when some dude comes along and manages to drain a few more inches out of the pool.
Einstein is innocent of all this. He named his theory the “theory of relativity” for reasons that have nothing at all to do with truth being “relative” or anybody’s social or political or ethical point of view being “equally valid”. He was later quite sorry about this and wished he had named his theory the “theory of invariants” (since what relativity says is NOT that “everything is relative” but — very roughly — that it is space-time which is invariant instead of both space and time seperately).
A similar weird fate happend to Thomas Kuhn. When he talked about scientists having “paradigms” and “shifting” them, he was making an observation as an historian about how scientists tend to work. It never occured to him that anybody could misundestand him so badly as to think that because scientists who disagree about what the scientific truth is have certain problems undestanding each other that no objective scientific truth exists.
To claim the theory of relativity’s claims about observers of physical phenomena mean anything about moral or social relativism is like claiming that we should be ruled by oceanographers or divers because they are the worlds’ “deepest” thinkers — something they themselves, of course, never claimed.
“Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God.”
This is a lie of omission about Einstein that many theists commit. Einstein was quite clear on his rejection of both Jewish and Christian gods. It is not as this sentence implies that he believed in a Jewish god but merely failed to go to synagogue. Numerous times he stated that he did not believe in such a god. Without a personal god Einsteins ethics cannot rest on a objectivity based on revelation from a infallible lawgiver.
One can arrive at objective rules of ethics without relying on theism. It merely requires one to recognize certain facts about individuals actors who need to cooperate, and the abstract nature of rules. An ethics that allows murder is objectively not a fair set of rules that one would want to live under. After all, the rules hardly matter if you are murdered. there are many other objective qualities of rules that can be used to decide which are and are not valid.
When referring to Quantum theory’s seemingly statistical approach to the inner workings of the atom, Einstein said “God does not play dice with the universe”.Now, that is a very strange statement from someone that had rejected God as you mentioned in your post.
Yes, he did, and he has been shown to be wrong that such a god exists, a god that created a deterministic universe. It is still a different god than the Jewish one. He has made many statements on the topic and is quite clear he is not talking about a personal god. He’s talking about a Spinosian god, you know, the kind of god that gets you called an atheist. A god concept that is so different that some people thought Spinosa was merely using the term god to refer to the universe. Einstein was, according to him, an agnostic, and criticized strong atheism. I would call him a theistic agnostic but I’m not sure he would appreciate that term. From my perspective he is a theist, not an atheist.
That doesn’t however mean Einstein beleives in a Jewish god but just doesn’t got to synagogue. No more than Pharaoh Akhenaten is a lapsed Christian or Jew just because he is a monotheist. Akhenten’s conception of god is that he is present and is the sun (but made everything else). Einstein, and any Christian or Jew would reject such a monotheistic god. Not all monotheistic gods are equivalent.
Einsteins god was such that the universe is deterministic. He was a determinist. Spinosa believed that the universe was a part of god, although not synonymous with god. Since Einstein claims to be a Spinosan it’s a good guess to say he believed the same. This is about as far away from theistic Judaism as you can get (not sure what his did culturally as a Jew. I sometimes put up an xmas tree and have easter egg hunts).
We know from science that the sun isn’t a god. We also know that whatever conception of god Einstein was working with at the time he made your quote turns out not to exist either. There is no god which created a deterministic universe since it appears not to be deterministic. Did he ever realize that? I don’t know. What would he have done had he realized? I don’t know. I think it likely he would have merely switched his notion of this panantheistic (not pantheistic) god and continued to be a theistic agnostic (someone who believes in a god but doesn’t think it possible to know that god exists).
This is not a god you can pray to, that you get an afterlife with, that loves or smites people, or any other things Christians or Jews believe in. It’s a god of, “I don’t understand how this could come to be, so there must be something more”. I might even be classified as a theist in this regard. I believe in a logos but I wouldn’t use the term “god” for it because that confuses people like you. It’s not even an “it” in the traditional sense of an existant. Logos doesn’t exist but just is. Logos is the best answer I have to the question of why we exist and it is inspired by Marvin Minsky. I’m not sure if I really say I believe it true either. I’m agnostic to my best theory of why things exist. I assure you that you would probably not like Minsky’s theory.
I like Einstein thing both Judaism and Christianity are childlike believe. Yep, he said child like.
That doesn’t make Einstein or me correct, but let’s be accurate about what people believe, or don’t believe. If Einstein were an atheist that wouldn’t make atheism the correct either. There of plenty of very smart people who disagree on these subjects.
The only reason one would need to play the card “Einstein was a theist” or “Einstein was an agnostic” or “Einstein was a atheist” is if someone called you stupid for being any of those things. There are plenty of smart people to choose from who are actually Christians, theists, atheists, and agnostics, so there is no need to shoehorn Einstein. I think people like to pick Einstein because they think that gives them scientific backing but the problem with that is that Einstein was wrong about quantum physics.
You are also being a bit intellectually dishonest, and cherry picking your You are also being a bit intellectually dishonest and cherry picking your facts. Einstein may have rejected a personal god which is central to Judeo-Christian tradition. He did, however, believe in a Spinozian style god. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what’s the same, Nature, and its modifications.
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”
“It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.”
“I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”
To be fair, he was a humanist who did believe that moral behavior shouldn’t spring from theism.
“I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance—but for us, not for God.”
“I do not believe that a man should be restrained in his daily actions by being afraid of punishment after death or that he should do things only because in this way he will be rewarded after he dies. This does not make sense. The proper guidance during the life of a man should be the weight that he puts upon ethics and the amount of consideration that he has for others.”
My comment was actually a response to the main article and somehow I screwed up and got it posted as a response to this other comment. I think you are misinterpreting my comment. Nowhere in my comment did I say Einstein was an strong atheist full stop. In fact I didn’t even refer to him as an strong atheist with regard to Judaism. I said that he was “quite clear on his rejection of both Jewish and Christian gods” and “did not believe in such a god” and that is completely accurate. Rejecting and not believing are not the same as professing to know something doesn’t exist.
If you got any other notion out of that then I apologize for not writing clearly enough. One can reject the Christian and Jewish god and still be a theist. Hindus are like that. Christians and Jews reject polytheistic gods and are still theists. They too cannot “know” that certain of these polytheistic gods they reject don’t exist, and they’d have to pick between a strong atheist view on such gods, or an agnostic view. I reject the existence of Nessie but that doesn’t mean I “know” Nessie doesn’t exist. The best evidence is that such a creature doesn’t, so I say it doesn’t. The same way I say Santa, the Easter Bunny, Unicorns, and the Tooth Fairy don’t exist.
My first paragraph showed what you have just admitted in your comment. That Einstein didn’t believe in the kind of personal god that hands down objective moral law via scripture, nor provides a way to derive such law directly from his mere existence. Since Einstein was an agnostic then any such moral law would have to believed agnostically too.
Instead he would be left with deriving any objective ethics the way any atheist would, and the same way we derive other natural laws (which are actually theories about the way the world works) like gravity, and Say’s law.
I believe Einstein was a theist, but the same is true of Hitler. There are in fact no atheist quotes from Hitler that didn’t come out of the book “Table Talk” and that has been shown to be a mistranslation from the German by Richard Carrier. This idea that being a theist somehow results in some one objective set of rules that can be justified is ridiculous. One can use God to justify anything.
Kuhn was actually wrong because in many cases scientists don’t “shift paradigms” but actually abandon all theories as false. So Popper is the better philosopher of science. I must say that Kuhn was popular with university English departments and in the social sciences.
Here’s an article that provides one example in science that falsifies Kuhn’s theory: http://www.friesian.com/rudwick.htm
“Kuhn’s critique contains a considerable element of truth, since people, scientists included, often do just see what they want to see, and it is possible to explain away falsifying evidence. On the other hand, anomalies are often recognized that are inconvenient to a theory, and most scientists are now aware that if the theory cannot ultimately accommodate them, then a new theory will be necessary. And then there is the Great Devonian Controversy. Once all the major geologists recognized that there was no unconformity in the sequence, and that there were plants in the lower strata, there simply was no existing theory that could accommodate the facts. Thus, we had a situation that, in Kuhnian terms, was impossible. The evidence could not be interpreted to sustain any existing theoretical views.
The situation was sometimes discussed by participants in what sound like modern terms. Thus, John Phillips, professor of geology at King’s College, in London, wrote to De la Beche that his discovery of certain plant fossils, “is a fact to be introduced into the induction, not an anomaly to be frightened at” [p. 223]. Here “anomaly” would mean just what it means now: Some fact inconsistent with a received or desired theory. As “Baconians,” both Phillips and De la Beche think that the appropriate theories will be produced by “induction” from a sufficient catalogue of facts. Neither Kuhn nor Popper could agree with that old “Baconian” view of theories, but Kuhn and deconstructionists cannot allow that an anomaly all by itself could potentially falsify a theory, rather than vice versa. But in the Devonian Controversy, the anomalies overthrew all the theories.”
Of course the whole purpose of the procedures we had in science before Kuhn was to prevent the known biases of humans. So the “considerable element of truth” that Kuhn was talking about was nothing new.
An interesting article.
I want to make only a small point. Johnson, whom I generally admire, and most on the right today, profoundly misread Nietzsche as essentially nihilist for proclaiming the ‘death of God’. One needs to read widely and deeply in his work (preferably in German, it’s some of the best German prose in the 19th century), but the key insight on this point can be gleaned from the famous section 125 in The Gay Science in which his madman preaches the death of God: that the god man has killed is the holiest and most powerful thing the world has known, and people aren’t even aware they’ve done it.
Nietzsche’s larger point, I think, is not that some sort of overman can do precisely as he pleases, but that in the face of the death of God (as he sees it), it takes superhuman strength of character to be able to create and sustain any meaningful morality.
I beleive he was also rather philo-semitic. I think he would have been horrified at the way he was used politically.
(Wagner, on the other hand…)
Nietzsche’s views towards Jews is difficult to comprehend.
He certainly despised Judaism as he despised Christianity.
More than either of those, he despised anti-Semitism.
That led to some very difficult passages.
He wrote more than once that Christianity was the “revenge” of the Jews on the Romans for conquering them.
He also wrote more than once that the European nation that first embraced its Jewish population as full members of its nation would be the one that would win the endless rounds of European wars.
He also wrote multiple times “Jesus and Paul – the two most Jewish Jews of the New Testament” in regards to the negative traits anti-Semites, particularly Christian anti-Semites, attributed to Jews, saying such traits were most expressed by Jesus and Paul according to the writings in the New Testament.
As for Wagner, Nietzsche wrote an entire tract denouncing Wagner for Wagner’s anti-Semitism, and the two had been friends.
Indeed.
Nietzsche was fundamentally anti-Nihilist. His entire philosophy was predicated on presenting not merely a rebuttal to Nihilism, but offering a reasoned path away from Nihilism for those who had already been seduced by its anti-social and suicidal principles.
Alas, it has been impossible for me to take Johnson entirely seriously since I read Hitchens’ nasty piece detailing the former’s affection for recreational flogging.
And I don’t mean he liked DOING the flogging, either, which I could entirely forgive.
Quite simply, the position of MEN in the conservative movement should never be prone…
Likewise, I object to Johnson’s subsequent warm welcome at the Vatican, with nary a slap on the wrist. After all, he would have enjoyed it anyhow.
Corruption all around. Tsk.
Please to be remembering that Paul Johnson is British, which to me is shorthand for “Western version of Japanese.” Men of soaring ideas and widespread and accepted sadomasochistic sexual tendencies. I blame the island culture and insufferably regal women who motivate it.
Thank you for this column.
I think our society went off the rails with the expansion of the voting franchise beyond property owners coupled with the rise of “The City Manager” in the early 1900′s. Expansion of the franchise gave Paul the opportunity to take from Peter but that opportunity was largely thwarted by the lack of Paul’s ability to influence elections. But “The City Manager”, a direct result of A Modern Utopia, introduced unelected and largely unaccountable officials who could do whatever they choose without fear of the taxpayer. The society then changed from one being driven by the most successful to one being driven by the least successful.
If you look at any large city, and most of the world, you’ll find a society that’s now built on the traits for failure. I think that’s also a direct result of A Modern Utopia because it’s easier to be an “exceptional man” if you’ve created a society of “inferior men”.
We know lots of things eminent Victorians didn’t know.
Any shrink worthy of the name will tell you how hard behavior modification is, so forget about re-engineering human nature.
Wells’ belief that “people of exceptional quality must be ascendant” — how direct! — is not necessarily wrong, but in practice is wholly unattainable. Humans are flawed, human nature is not perfectible, checks and balances are vital to curb excess. The greatest excesses, predictably, are associated with concentration of gov’t power (i.e., the left). So for the greater good of all, gov’t should be as small and decentralized as possible.
This is not complex or new. But as an easily digestible voter-ready manifesto for now and tomorrow, it’s quite beyond Romney. There’s lots to do.
I tend to agree with you as far as our times are concerned, but this is not always so. For Jews living under the feudal society of the Muslims (still in place today in places), you were best off near a strong central government. The main problems occurred when you were under the control of, say, a local sheikh, who could do as he liked. Or a weak government, which left you at the mercy of any Moslem who wanted to kill you. I am talking of relatively recent times.
I am also reminded of the saying of Rabbi Hannania the helper of the priests – “Pray for the welfare of the government, for if it wasn’t for its awe, people would swallow each other alive.” There is to this day a voluntary fast day commemorating the martyrdom of the author of that statement by the people he said to pray for. There is no irony there; although the treatment of the Jews by the Roman empire bore a greater resemblance to Nazi Germany than the U.S., there is nothing worse than anarchy. (At least the government has to kill and cook you first.)
Point taken. Fortunately the choice we face right now isn’t between government and anarchy, but between a government that over-reaches and the resolve to restore a government of limited powers that doesn’t.
Life can’t have been much fun in feudal France, Saxon England or Viking Denmark/Norway either. And I’m not too convinced about Paris or London in the 1890s unless you were wealthy or your own natural source of penicillin…
That doesn’t mean we can’t regress, real fast too. I’ve yet to meet a noble savage.
A few weeks ago I finished reading “The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh.” The book was about the first Americans at the end of World War II that liberated the German concentration camps and what they found and saw. What struck me is that every person in the book essentially said the same thing when they first discovered the camps. They said, “How could people treat other people this way?”
Now that almost 70 years has passed since the end of the war, are we to repeat the same mistakes that brought us to that war? You can’t say that it will not happen again, becuase it already has, in places like Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. True, it wasn’t on the same scale as Nazi Germany, but I don’t think that really mattered to the people who were killed in those smaller genocides. And we have not even mentioned the millions of people who were killed by their own country in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao. Although not technically genocides, it showed that millions of people can be killed by tyrants who want them to bend to their own will.
So what are we to do with this information? Are we just to ignore it, chalk it up to history, and become fat, dumb, and lazy, no better than a country like France? If that is the case, we throw away all of the hard lessons that we learned over the past 70 odd years. If we close our eyes and allow petty dictators to run wild in the world, as they are now in places like Iran and North Korea, we risk allowing them to drag us into yet another major conflagration that could consume the entire world. And THAT would be a very scary place to be in. We may take our shots from the Europeans, we may be mocked by smaller countries in the world, and we may be reviled by the forces of Islam that threaten to destabilize much of the world. We may have to endure all of that in order to maintain much of the uneasy peace that has blessed us over the last 70 years. Yes, we have fought several smaller wars since the end of World War II in 1945, but nothing on the scale of World War II itself. There is a lot of evil out there and we can’t stop all of it. But if we solve none of it at all, we risk going back to a time when that same evil will destroy much of the world and a lot of people with it. Now THAT is a very scary thought indeed.
>clapping<
Quoted in article:
“However, unlike Johnson, I do not think that morality requires the anchor of belief in a Supreme Being, and he tends to make the mistake, like a lot of devoutly religious folk, of assuming that atheists, for example, cannot arrive at a moral code, ”
To tHat I say, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot had a moral code. Just not *our* moral code.
For the most part I have to admit to not being able to follow this article for its intellectual gymnastics. I tried, but not too hard. I can get through Chesterton’s stuff and enjoy it too, so it’s not so much I’m not up to this piece, more like it’s not meant to enlighten, but to impress. No thanks.
I leave you with Chesterton:
“It is obvious tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than some isolated or arbitrary record. … Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
And… here’s why the left is hell bent on discrediting the Catholic church….
“The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
Well said, Mr. Driscoll.
Paul Johnson is certainly a rarity today – an academic with good common sense.
Old school conservatives are libertarians. Look up what the conservatives of 1900 believed. New school conservatives are Progressives. They believe in Master/Slave. Their difference with the left are only about who is going to be the master and who is going to be the slave.
THIS Old School Conservative has strong libertarian leanings coupled with a realization of the limitations that are needed to keep liberty from descending into chaos.
As for any desire toward a master/slave realtionship with anyone in either position, I find the thought utterly repulsive.
‘Classical’ liberals were those of the Enlightenment era, who overthrew the old ‘conservative’ notions of ‘know your place,’ embedded class hierarchy and mindless authoritarianism, and sought to replace it with universal rights for all human being equally. Hence, these values are what today’s ‘conservatives’ are trying to conserve. Today’s ‘conservatives’ are the real progressives, because they still believe in only individual human citizens being granted real, inalienable rights, (to not be attacked first) while all mere groups (of individuals) should at most be afforded some temporary, revokable privileges.
Contrast this with the fear-based, ‘liberals’ of today, who are all group-rights worshipping statists, who so fear and therefore seek to micro-manage their fellow humans, whose dynamic circumstances they ever seek to contain in static “class”(-ifications) stereotypes, that they posit in their corrupting, victimology sales platforms that only groups (which, of course, they will have to lead) should be granted full rights, while all merely fallible, and so, potentially dangerous, individual humans should at best be afforded some temporary, revokable privileges. Hence, modern liberals are the true ‘reactionaries’ and they never really liberate anyone; they only ever take liberties. In olden times, they were known as idolaters, for using this simple, childish, and criminally negligent excuse to evade personal responsibility while maitaining their false right to remain wrong:
“I didn’t do it! ONLY The GROUP did it!”
…and, ‘even better’ (worse):
“None of us IN The Group did it, either – ONLY The GROUP did it! Whee!”
Modern statists like to substitute synonyms for ‘group, especially ‘system:’
“We humans didn’t do it! It was a ‘Systemic Problem!’ ONLY The SYSTEM did it!”
Is it any wonder Leftists are Godless? Their credo says that anything is permissible, as long as it gratifies the individual. Religion, however, sets boundaries, places where people should wisely not go.
I don’t know about the rest of you (well, I hang around here, so yes, I guess I do) but I cannot fathom a life without purpose, a deeper meaning. What it must be to simply gratify ones’ self as the do-all end-all of one’s existence is anathema to me.
All of these ludicrous “movements”, moral relativity, progressivism, social justice, liberalism, fairness, socialism, marxism, green, etc., etc., etc….have one and only one purpose, which is to enthrone their proponents as absolute despots.
This has been the fulltime quest of demigods everywhere since the American Revolution began the only real revolution since mankind gave up hunting and gathering. Because for all of civilizatiion, 1/10th of 1 percent have managed to acquire total power over the other 99.999%. The kings, emperors, presidente’s and commissars liked it that way and they want it back. The fact that you will live like worms in the dirt doesn’t matter to them one iota, They view that aspect of it as a positive feature.
December 13, 2011 10:10 AM ‘My views are progressive’ By Steve Benen
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/my_views_are_progressive034076.php
He never ate a dog, and he’s actually done things before entering politics so he’s got that going for him at least.
That link is interesting, but since they bring up Gingrich, he STILL says he’s a progressive.
There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”
“But they Starts with thinking about people as things…”
Terry Pratchett (1948 -)
Source: “Carpe Jugulum” by Terry Pratchett
Contributed by: The Traceless Warrior
Your suggestion that the real horrors of the 20th century were due to the left’s desire to remake and control human beings and civilization is quite right, I think. To fight over whether such a thing as truth really exists or whether truth is relative does not necessarily lead to action, but the desire to re-engineer human beings does lead to action, especially political action.
In our own society, President Eisenhower in his 1961 Military-Industrial Complex speech said: “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
When we put government-funded scientific research together with a huge government bureaucracy, the combination of scientists and bureaucrats leads to the vast over-regulated society we have today and our subsequent loss of freedom. We have lost the freedom to eat what we want because the scientists claim we are too fat. We are losing the freedom to drive the kind of car we want because scientists and bureaucrats claim our preferred vehicles cause climate change. Our unborn babies will soon routinely be tested before they are born for supposed genetic disorders and a bureaucrat will tell us to abort those babies that are deemed too expensive or troublesome to maintain medically. Nowadays children who do not automatically pay attention in class, are routinely re-engineered to sit passively and quietly by being give drugs for their supposed disorder.
Our public policies have, on all levels, become captive to an elite. That elite claims special knowledge and foists those claims, via a huge bureaucracy of civil servants and academics and teachers, upon the rest of society. We did not heed President Eisenhower’s warning.
“We have lost the freedom to eat what we want because the scientists claim we are too fat.” Elementary logic: We are fat BECAUSE we have the freedom to eat what we want unrestrained by any ethic, culture or circumstance of deprivation.
The notion that persons of exceptional quality should be ascendant is an interesting idea. Hmm, look around the whole world at those who are ascendant. Where is the “exceptional quality”? All I see are morons who have only one skill: talking loudly and so fast that no one else can get a word in edgewise. I think we elect liberals just to get them to shut up for a while!
“Wells has no use for the iron laws of Marxism, but he replaces them with the iron laws of Malthus and Darwin.” The ironic thing is that the fittest descendent, the one that survives, may not be the most impressive, the one viewed as “superior” by his contemporaries. It is simply the one that lives long enough to have children. Sickle-cell anemia may be viewed as a genetic defect, but imparts a resistance to malaria. David was weaker than Goliath, but mastered a ranged-weapon (the sling). David’s descendents are still with us.
The true reason people become Leftists is to grab their seat on the train before they get left behind.
Morals fade fast when it’s either abandon them, or live in your own feces because the God Kings have taken everything else.
The absurd implication of this essay is somehow the west (or anyone) was at one time more moral. There is no historical evidence of this claim.
But they really cleaned up their act after WWI, eh?
Well, I’m the last one to whitewash the history of Christendom or Islam (or the pagans, for that matter). But I think the death toll gives a pretty good answer; at least religion gives SOME restraint.
“…at least religion gives SOME restraint.”
If communism isn’t a religion, then why do/did so many people in communist countries have iconic photographs of their current dictators in their houses and places of work? Why did so many communists in history so publicly mourn the death of their former masters? Why did some German kid in 1945 gush about touching Hitler’s God-like hand? Religious restraint?
On the last part of my previous comment, I should add that I consider Naziism to be both a religion and a form of communism. The history is there folks!
Ed,
It is much worse than that. We are reverting to a state of nature. Masters ans slaves. A short discussion of that topic:
http://classicalvalues.com/2012/07/my-message-for-the-4th/
What sets this in motion is that most people WANT to be slaves.
Ed,
The desire for slavery is very old. People will put up with a lot for two squares and a tent. Reread about Moses, Exodus, and 40 years in the desert.
I believe self selected abortion is the kindest and gentlest way to cull the slaves. I wouldn’t put any such power in the hands of government.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is that it simply assumes that a theory or framework of knowledge just spreads out in cancer-like fashion outside of human agency. When our sum total knowledge of history suggests this is not so.
Rather, I would argue that the hard swing in all industrialized countries towards centralized, semi-hereditary, bureaucratized oligarchies or dictatorships reflects the influence of technology and the re-ordering of social and political power. Like gunpowder (no expensive knights, cheap peasant armies), and the printing press (literacy means no need for a pre-literate Catholic Church and expensive monasteries and lands); the pill, condom, urbanization, mass transit, and mass media combined with mass consumerism shifted everything … female.
If you are Joe Average, you want an option to rise higher, but security not to fall too far down while gambling. You’d like the ability to be Steve Jobs, but you don’t want to be homeless under a bridge if you fail. Or dead. This is the story of the West basically since the Protestant Revolution, irregularly but invariably re-ordering itself to “managed chaos” where ordinary men could rise, but not to Stalin/Napoleon levels, but not fall too far either. Consistently old orders were destroyed and replaced with new ones, while retaining the core of relatively flat, relatively non-hierarchical system (compared to contemporary rivals).
All this new technology changed that, giving power particularly social and political power, to women. Who want radically different things: more inequality (better if there princes and paupers) among MEN and more equality among women (lots of female-dominated makework government related jobs). Hence “diversity” and the desire to re-invent or import a new people.
No one EVER talked about a New Woman. That is the dog not barking in the night-time. Only a New Man. Suggesting in a back-to-nature way that the sacrifices and compromises needed to create wealth and stability leave men wanting as far as women in the West are concerned: not sexy enough. Hence an Eat-Pray-Love desire to experience the Third World, or import it here, moralize, and increase male inequality while stabilizing things for women.
While some of this is good, a female dominated Germany is about as likely as a Senior Center to be the source of violence, imbalance leads to the soft, degrading oligarchy of semi-princes and princesses, a stultifying Harry Potter Ministry of Magic like bureaucracy run at the operational level by women, a slow Ottoman like decline.
I would argue technology has enabled women in the West, throughout, to push hard to turn back the clock to semi-feudal and semi-Aristocratic (Gossip Girl anyone?) models AGAINST a semi-permanent age of destruction and creation (that kept the core of the West intact). Look at Mad Men. Its popular because the men are all sexist cads who dominate socially while crafting consumer messages to a female audience, not nerdy, cooperative-competitive rocket scientists at NASA doing stuff of interest only to men. Or a soap opera based on rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, as male-oriented as it gets (in general women find math, science, and computers boring as baseball statistics movies without Brad Pitt).
Women want a return to Zero because it creates dominant, sexy men. Instead of the nerdy guys behind the creative destruction and creation cycle of ever better, newer, more powerful technology. Again no one ever talks about creating New Women.
Damn, I just thought he knew how to run the triple option
“Further, ‘the better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service.’”
This might at least have a CHANCE of working, if we as humans weren’t so MIND-BOGGLING BAD at determining who are the “better sort of people”. Inevitably, the ruler-wannabes select (what a shock!) THEMSELVES as the “better sort”.
As near as _I_ can determine, there’s NOBODY – especially not me! – who’s above the “appalling” level at picking who the “better sort” are.
If moral relativists contend that there are no absolutes, whence the certitude that there are no absolutes?
I guess I see this one differently. I think people go wrong at some earlier level of thought and then, after already corrupted, grasp onto theories like moral relativism as enablers to explain the behavior they’d do anyway.
Point A:
Because objectively; moral relativism has some truth to it. We all know if we go visit some cannibals that we would be repulsed. We also know they won’t get why we are. If they’re terrorizing people I don’t have a problem wiping out their tribe / culture… but moral relativism simply explains why they didn’t get that what they were doing was evil.
Point B:
Anyone who has talked with a leftist knows they don’t really believe in moral relativism. They’re moral absolutists who think they are good and you are evil. Moral relativism is just a hammer to attack the majority culture / values. They don’t really believe in it.
Point C:
Since conservatives are more aware of culture than leftists… they are more inclined to unconsciously know there is some truth to a reasonable / moderate understanding of moral relativism. Re: such as the example in Point A… you’d know what was up with cannibals before you got there… and why…
The twentieth century should be enough to settle the issue as to whether a God-based moral code out-performs an atheistic one. One thing to remember about Rome: even though infanticide and abortion were widely practiced, they were illegal. The penalty for abortion was the pillory.
Having raised 7 children to adulthood, I can tell you that in my experience, relativism versus absolutism is genetic in large part (along with alot of other traits such as altruism, aggression, etc.).
I can remember having a discussion with my youngest son when he was quite young (between 8 and 11). We went down the list of all of his brothers and sisters and we agreed on which ones were relativists and which ones were absolutists. He described himself as a relativist (as did I).
All of them have retained their ‘orientation’ as assigned those years ago.
I didn’t.
I even wrote a paper in college advocating relativism.
What it took to change my mind was living some life. After a while, you realize that rules, even when you don’t like them, are a necessary thing.
The relativists don’t really believe in the philosophy either. They just want to use it to destroy the current system, after which they will implement their own rules with THEMSELVES in charge. At that point, they will destroy anybody who advocates for relatism. It’s effectively a truism, since it has happend thousands of times throughout history.
it finally dawned on me at the very end. what was the key buzzword that pres. obama and his sycophants repeated over and over again for most of 2009?? RESET. hitting the proverbial reset button is one and the same with all the demagogues and tyrants who have come before. he is one of them. and he knows it.
We are still, alas, in the grip of that delusion that government can and should fix problems.
I’ve never been under that delusion.
In my lifetime, everything individuals and states have distanced themselves from (e.g. education, medicine, business, the environment) and placed under the purview of government has, proportionately and predictably, turned to sh!t.
My delusion, fixed and unchanging, is that “government” should attempt no more than the highly limited tasks and duties to which it is assigned in the Constitution.
Leftists have always have a fondness for eugenics. Self-designated élites are, of course, the deciders as to who is and who is not worthy to continue to draw breath on Mommy Gaia.
Utopians will never tire of attempting to fine tune human condition according to the narrow little schemes between their ears.
“Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.”
~Jean-François) Revel Last Exit to Utopia
I think Last Exit to Utopia should be required reading. Especially good for appreciating UNESCO’s malevolent programs and the nature of the government directed dirigiste economy that is where Obama and these ed policies are taking us. It did not get much attention but this Admin officially announced that the US should have an Industrial Policy orientation like other countries.
It is also excellent for tuning you into what Marxism looks like in practice when it is out in the open. You discover that many “theories” are actually pure Marxism masquerading in plain sight.
Revels’ Totalitarian Temptation is great too. You can see what he saw in the 70s when the Cold War’s outcome was unknown.
This precise same impulse is quietly being implemented all over the West, including the United States, by making the emphasis in both K-12 and now in higher ed more about social and emotional learning and perspectives taking and dialogues about intractable social problems to be jointly solved via project learning. The accreditation agencies especially are putting tremendous pressure on all the institutions involved with education to move away from the transmission of knowledge. In K-12 it is coming in through the Common Core implementation that was funded by the 2009 Stimulus Act. In higher ed it is coming in through pushing the Lumina Foundation’s Diploma Qualifications Profile.
Many of the documents openly acknowledge that these measures being pushed especially by UNESCO and the OECD and embraced by the US DoED are about creating a different set of values and attitudes to transform human behaviors. There are explicit repeated references to establishing a new economic system based on a “caring economics” and reforming the workplaces to fit this approach. So basically administrators, profs, and accreditors who already live at taxpayer expense and have little knowledge of history or economics are using their monopolies to change the US social, political, and economic system.
They won’t get what they seek but they will trash everything that does work trying to obtain some type of post-fossil fuel sustainable utopia. That a modicum of real knowledge and good sense would tip anyone off as being impossible.
Here’s something I wrote about a month ago about how Quality Learning and Quality Education is the return of all John Dewey’s aspirations to use education to reform society. It did not go well when the Soviets used his theories to try to create their New Man in the 1920s.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/why-quality-learning-may-be-the-last-thing-you-want-for-your-child/
Because Common Core is broken into so many pieces to avoid controversy these elements are difficult to see. But they are also impossible to miss once you understand the underlying template of fulfilling Dewey’s long sought dream for a radically different American and a transformed US.
Moral Relativism: Changing the world one gullible mind at a time.
Einstein held contradictory ‘beliefs,’ too: he correctly opined that government was to operate as the largest, collectively owned non-profit insurance company, to defend public needs (necessities, like clean air and water, food, basic housing/shelter, healthcare and education, and to maintain the roads and waterways to ensure access to all that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) BUT he also wanted an uber-government global nannystate like the UN to be formed to prevent war; he ignored that all ‘groups’ of humans, are still really only composed of individual humans; all ‘institutions, edifices,’ and ‘establishments’ are not some infallible stone idols or perfectly-functioning robots, but are merely groups of fearsomely fearful, greedy and corrupt disfunctional humans as well.
And, to pretend that Aristotle was some sort of champion of morality, is to ignore and or entirely avoid reading his main work, ‘the Rhetoric,’ where he clearly states it doesn’t matter WHAT is said (i.e: it advocates that stealing the truth, aka lying is OK) so long as you can ‘win’ by tricking and confusing your opponents. That stance pretty-much sums up and encourages (if not actually discovers or invents) immoral relativism. He pioneered the stereotyping of individual people into groups or ‘forms’ with his initial nine – a matrix of poor, middle-class, and rich, cross-referenced with young, middle-aged, and old (all men, because this was ancient Greece). Hence the later Marxist’s “class”(ifications) warfare model or ‘ideal’ idea (idol) was originally founded by Aristotle himself. From this false, backwards notion (that groups create individuals, and not vice-versa) comes the insidious slave victimology mentality of all modern, fearfully reactionary ‘progressives,’ that, since all humans are weak, fallible, and potentially dangerous to all others, only groups must be granted full rights, while all such mere individual humans must at most be afforded some temporary, revokable privileges.
Re: “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” (Repeat Endlessly)…
Here, Ed, let me save you the trouble:
http://unclevladdi.posterous.com/a-response-to-ed-driscolls-beyond-the-theory
Hmmm the real year zero …
“For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Man knows good and evil yet constantly tries to be God, rejecting that knowledge and deciding who is not fit to live. That eugenics still effectively lives in the left is not so surprising, since they still believe they can change man.
Odd, how it is always the “other” who must be sacrificed, today it is done by Hillary’s hero type eugenics of Sanger.
The year is zero now – Talk of moral relativism is a waste of time, while the Islamic hoards are killing all over the world to spread sharia law. We’d better wake up in the wester world and pull together, because they clearly know what they want and believe. They want all the “infidel” dead or converted. There is no relativism or hesitation in their “moral code”.