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Morality Critique part 1 by PF Here’s a comment which has blossomed into a full-fledged blog post! Notus Wind wrote:
Morality is not the basis for a social movement. It is a way to control people based on shapes that appear on the frontiers of our knowledge. New knowledge immediately overturns previously existing moral structures, if anyone was keeping score of these ghostly entities, their carcasses are strewn all over every path of knowledge acquisition like the molted exoskeletons of insects. Social morality is the imposition of a ‘should’ without the understanding of an ‘is’ - one party telling another to do something on the basis of its own authority, not of any understanding. If you didn’t know what an electric socket was, and I told you not to stick a fork in there, but I’m not telling you why - that is what traditional morality has been. No explanation forthcoming, no free choice involved, authority cited as justification. If I convey to you knowledge that its an electric socket, then your choice not to stick a fork in it becomes strategic - and no longer moral. The extent to which I understand what is going on, to that extent I can act strategically. To the extent that I don’t understand what is going on and have to borrow and imitate from other people, is the extent that I am being ‘moral’.
When people had to respond to realities that they could not explain, we lived in a world that was perforce moral. Now we are in a position where the IQ 120+ set can basically navigate themselves through life quite well using strategic reasoning, absent the ‘should’. This is quite practical because it turns out that all these ‘shoulds’ are vectors for the worst kinds of viral nonsense, such as antiquated or idiosyncratic understandings which have no bearing on our own lives. Trying to blaze a path through modern life by the advice of such a huge, self-contradictory compendium of musings as .... um, the Torah, is difficult. Most of what’s in there its possible to absorb through the common-sense understandings of friends and relatives. Look for people not understanding their world in the abstract, yet having to function in it, and you find a need for morality. The presence of the emotion of fear is also a good indicator, since the most clueless in a situation are usually the most fearful, and thus the most slavish imitators of whoever is willing to give them some very ambiguously motivated “guidance” (ie control in exchange for information). Morality always gives you a bit of information, in exchange for getting a bit of control over your actions, control used to serve another’s interests. Morality is always part manipulation and part help. This is how it evolved, because if it wasn’t serving the interests of someone else, it wouldn’t be stable for them to give moral advice. If it wasn’t conferring some benefit, it wouldn’t be evolutionarily stable to respond to morality’s message. It is not necessary that we survive - but morality would pretend it was. Morality will tell us that anti-racism is necessary, or that reconquista of our lands is necessary and just, or that any number of other things are necessary. It will tell you whatever you want depending on how you program the ‘is’-matrix that generates the ‘should’-matrix. People think they can keep morality legitimate - i.e. that they will reason their way to the uniquely legitimate morality, as all prior generations have believed themselves able to do - by keeping a keen eye on what is admitted to the ‘is’-matrix. This is not enough to wash this mechanism clean. It is based on fear of death and abstract neocortex reasoning, both of which constrain the human being into a shallow felt-perception of self which makes the experiential confirmation of being ‘right’, worthless. Yet this is all that morality has to offer that strategic reasoning doesn’t already cover. If we are going to use morality as a tactic, we should remember that it is just that: an adaptive mechanism of social control that may become vestigial given advances in intelligence. Comments:2
Posted by Steve on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:09 | # Intelligent people, those who make good decisions, should trust their own instincts and be suspicious of any system that claims to offer them pre-packaged solutions. Human instincts are often universal, but morality and religion is a useful tool ONLY to keep the dumber from acting on their instincts, since their instincts optimize for quick gain over long-term gain. The idiot, acting on instinct, fails. The genius, acting on instinct, thrives. The key is to get all intelligent people thinking for themselves without concern for social rejection (of idiots), or worry over after-death consequences (since science doesn’t support its existence). 3
Posted by John on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:01 | # Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between abstract, authoritarian morality and organic social rules of engagement, the latter of which seem to have been somewhat purposefully degraded in the last 100 years. 4
Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:09 | # An intelligent post, yet what horseshit! This is a classic Dawkins-type discussion. That is, you have a natively intelligent person, who is scientifically knowledgeable, but also smitten with empirical modes of knowing, thinking for himself about problems over which many of the most brilliant minds in history have pondered at great length, all the while without availing himself of the intellectual progress those thinkers have made (probably due to ignorance of the history of ethical and moral philosophy). You see this not only in PF’s post, but in the Romer comments that follow. I’m a great fan of Cattell myself, and I’m also a strong supporter (with Romer, I believe) of eugenics. But look at this howler: Science tells us clearly what is moral. Science most certainly does NOT tell us what is moral. Empirical knowledge may inform aspects of moral discussion, generally by providing ever better descriptions of human nature, and psychological sources of happiness. But morality has to do with standards of interpersonal behavior. Science only tells us about material causes. It is wholly ethically neutral. Someone with a much more developed background in both analytic philosophy and Christian ethical theology than I possess could just skewer what’s been written above. (New knowledge, incidentally, never overturns previous moral structures; at best, it can result in slight modifications to them.) 6
Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:44 | # I’m reposting the following, as it seems slightly relevant, and I want to respond to GW, but am going to lose the thread, and I’m too busy to do so now. But I’ll remember it here. LH
Concerning Trainspotter’s earthshakingly brilliant and original comment above (in a nutshell: multiculturalism is not only injecting alien physical presences into our historic territories, but concurrently invading our psyches, stripping us of our own cultural identities, too - a point made zillions of times over many, many years, in many forums, sometimes even by yours truly), some loosely apposite remarks (re the ultimate irrelevance of empirical, especially coldly scientific, arguments to winning our war for survival) I posted a few days ago, re-posted here: 1. Man is by nature religious. If he does not adhere to the old faith, he’ll transfer those religious impulses to more questionable projects, usually of secular utopianism (eg, yesterday Marxism, today multiculturalism), or else engage in inappropriate sacralizations (eg, much of modern ecologism). 2. Christianity at least coincided with Western expansion and dynamism. Correlation does not equal causation, but in big historical analyses correlation does carry some independent weight. 3. Christianity gives meaning to life. Atheism, I and legions of others would argue, does not. 4. A sense of life’s meaningfulness stimulates biological reproduction. Many Christian conservatives have wondered if it’s merely a coincidence that Europe’s birthrates have collapsed in tandem with its de-Christianization. Yes, feminism and the Pill have played big roles, as has the postwar welfare state explosion. But Christianity promotes marriage and family - and given feminism, contraception, and welfare, if we are going to boost Western fertility, it is only going to happen either via favorable pro-fertility tax incentives (which is having some positive effect in Russia, but I don’t see such legislation getting enacted in Western Europe or North America, except backhandedly through negative childcare tax credits, which really aren’t enough to stimulate artificial increases in fecundity; people in America have children or not regardless of tax credits, which can be helpful, but not dispositive), or because something psychological is compelling it. Religion is such a powerful shaping force. 5. The great clash of civilizations, especially on your side of the pond, is with Islam. All the vigor is with Islam. You don’t defeat that kind of moronic certainty with either rarefied, often self-referential, philosophy (really, ‘philosophical navel-gazing’) or hedonism. There needs to be some ideological/emotional counterweight. Ironically, for blacks, that actually could be race loyalty. Blacks are just the most racist, race-obsessed, people you’ll ever meet. Unfortunately, whites are differently ‘wired’, neurologically. (We aren’t, but many or most of our fellow whites are.) Christendom successfully beat off the Muslims in the past, and it can do so again, provided it can become again a fighting faith. For the Church of England the very idea must seem ludicrous, but not here in the US. I thought the Iraq war was a huge Jewish/neocon distraction, but there are lots of admittedly not too bright evangelicals who saw it in Good/Evil terms. We need to cultivate that kind of friend/enemy distinction and identification. I understand (GW’s) basic position, I think: the past cannot be resuscitated. You are trying to develop some type of racially positive philosophical meaningfulness in light of the twin acids of scientific materialism, and postmodernist scepticism. I don’t think materialism and scepticism are quite as well founded or lethal to tradition as you might, but that is a really big discussion. I do know that if we are going to save the West, we must save the white race, and if we are to do that, we need to figure out the most practical methods to persuade people to support immigration cessation, policies tending to increase fertility, as well as renewed racial and cultural pride, and concomitant rejection of multiculturalism and the cultural products of non-whites. Christianity at present is yet another barrier to what we want, but it could be an ally once again, if properly reconstructed. ______________________________________________ Posted by Guessedworker on August 05, 2010, 02:36 PM | # Leon, I am still not free to do your various comments justice with a full reply. But I will reply as and when I can. Meanwhile, a few reflexive retorts (or remarks, if you don’t like the adversarial tone of that word - I recognise and appreciate the kindness and consideration with which you address my ramblings): Man is by nature religious. Which Man? Faith is gene-coded, and the genes are either expressed or not, and the frequency and degree of expression itself will vary among human populations. In European Man, I estimate that two thirds to four-fifths have the genes. We are not as given to fanaticism as other peoples, not least, perhaps, because of the command for celibacy of the Christian priesthood. But the incidence of faith gene possession is probably higher than it would have been during the pre-Christian era, owing to the excesses that Christianity has, in the past, afforded those who are fanatical, ie the burning of 500,000 “witches” in the late-medieval and post-medieval period. The remaining one-fifth to one-third of Europeans who simply have no possibility whatever of sincere religious sentiment have historically been “socially religious” or, since the second half of the 19th century, increasingly atheist. You can’t ignore us. We are too valuable to Truth, for we give the lie to the wild and overblown Weltanschauung that all fanatics, secular and religious, seek to impose on everybody else. You do it yourself, Leon, with those opening five words, “Man is by nature religious”. No, he is by nature bound to Nature. He only made god to help make the bindings secure, and he ended up bound to a madman. If he does not adhere to the old faith, he’ll transfer those religious impulses to more questionable projects, usually of secular utopianism Yes, indeed. The anti-racist left is the direct genetic heir of those witch-burning fanatics. The greens are their hysterical goodwives. Christianity at least coincided with Western expansion and dynamism. Correlation does not equal causation, but in big historical analyses correlation does carry some independent weight. Moving people with faith genes to place their shoulder behind the wheel is culturally productive, and, certainly, cultural strength advances EGI. But those people who laboured for God with their hands and hearts and voices, who built the great cathedrals and wore down the cold stone flags of country churches were not free, were they? Faith does not free the mind. That is not its function. What, then, is the highest desideratum for you, personally? What will you choose for Leon, Leon? Freedom of the mind or obedience to faith-based culture-strengthening programmes? A sense of life’s meaningfulness stimulates biological reproduction. That may be so. Or it may not. Birth-rates are always depressed by shifts from rural to urban living. All the facts need to be known before a judgement can be made. Christianity gives meaning to life. Atheism, I and legions of others would argue, does not. You and legions of others would need to explain why believing something while conscious only in the ordinary waking sense is more productive of meaning than the human experience of reality through consciousness of self. I won’t go too far into this now, but my crystal clear understanding is that faith’s only connection to the real is as an easy-to-work but lightweight and shallow proxy that requires none of the intelligence, knowledge and effort demanded by the act of being. It’s a poor substitute and, anyway, its real purpose is elsewhere - in the affirmation of adaptive behaviour. Behaviour, let it be said, has absolutely nothing to do with reality and human presence. There is, for example, the well-known problem of the impossibility of conscious evil. No moral strictures required. Religion is such a powerful shaping force. Indeed, Christianity, and the Jewish hatred of it, has shaped postmodernity. All the vigor is with Islam. You don’t defeat that kind of moronic certainty with either rarefied, often self-referential, philosophy We are only truth-speakers here. The activism we leave to Hunter and his pals. You are trying to develop some type of racially positive philosophical meaningfulness in light of the twin acids of scientific materialism, and postmodernist scepticism. No, it is rather more than that. I am not thinking defensively, or trying to pick bits out of the modern mind and weld them into some kind of Big Idea. But I do not like big talk about what I am trying to do as if I was a person of any consequence. I am nothing. I don’t matter at all. But ideas do. I do want to see European Man take ownership of himself, and I believe this would trigger the arising of a new civilisation of knowledge in the West, as I understand it to mean. I don’t think materialism and scepticism are quite as well founded or lethal to tradition as you might, but that is a really big discussion. All is material. We are all materialists, and cannot be other. But we live our lives steeped in illusions about self and reality. Knowing this ... having certitude ... I cannot be sceptical, can I? Scepticism is something assigned by those who have faith to those who need none. Neither am I anti-traditional in the sociobiological or socially conservative sense of the word. Nature is what it is, and will always out. No, I am anti-Traditionalist in the socially heirarchical sense. I am against the reign of minority interests, whatever they may be. I desire for myself and my brothers that no man stands over us save one we have put there ourselves and can vote out or nail to a tree or, along with James, challenge to mortal combat. Individualism is also part of the European sociobiology. we need to figure out the most practical methods to persuade people to support immigration cessation, policies tending to increase fertility, as well as renewed racial and cultural pride, and concomitant rejection of multiculturalism and the cultural products of non-whites. At present, we are far from practic. Everything must begin in ideas, or nothing will result. Christianity at present is yet another barrier to what we want, but it could be an ally once again, if properly reconstructed. Men and women will have faith, yes - in which regard America is wierd to European eyes. In the north of Europe and probably in the south too, it won’t be Christianity which expresses the gener’s faith. The Roman and Anglican Churches will continue to reap what they have sown. 7
Posted by Notus Wind on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:39 | # PF, I continue to profit from your use of the distinction “am > is> should” and have now come into my possession of some material, written by the German born Buddhist monk Nyanaponika Thera, that perfectly describes what you were trying to get at in your use of the term “am”. I feel like I am closing in on some of these concepts of yours.
Quite right. In my entry on the Molding of Minds I went so far as to argue that this is the cornerstone (or power base) of the current system that dominates us and that it works through the social mechanisms of conformity. In other words, propagandist media manufactures an artificial consensus in our mind - in your language this might be the same thing as setting up the “is” and “should” matrices - which is internally enforced via the need to conform. This is a unique form of social control that was made possible by 20th century technology. Here’s an amusing thought experiment worth considering that is well known in certain circles. Imagine a cage with a collection of monkeys on one side and a banana on the other. Now whenever one of the monkeys makes his way to the opposite side of the cage, to get to the banana, he is forced back by a stream of water that is so powerful that it causes injury to the monkey. One by one each monkey tries to go after the banana and one by one each monkey is rocked by the same stream of water and eventually they get the point (going after the banana is dangerous!) and stop trying. Here is where the thought experiment gets interesting. Take out one of the monkeys and put in a new one who does not know what awaits him if he goes after the banana, when he inevitably tries to do so all the other monkeys will hold him back and eventually the new monkey gets the point that going after the banana is bad news. Repeat this process one monkey at a time until every monkey in the cage has been replaced. At this point in our thought experiment we have arrived at the interesting situation where all the monkeys know that they should not go after the banana but they do not know why for none of them has experienced the is consequence of getting rocked by a stream of water. Of course, this is a metaphor about how morality is developed in human societies and serves to demonstrate how the complex interplay between “is” and “should” has its benefits.
This is a declaration of youth!
Shorter PF: Morality is just a cynically crafted Faustian bargain! [Leon just fell out of his chair] Well that is certainly true some of the time, still one gets the feeling that too much has been swept away too easily. Can you really dismiss the long labors of Kant with the sweep of your arm? By the way, when will CC notice the fact that this sweep of the arm provides the greatest defense imaginable for the excesses of palingenetic nationalism. Or has he and I keep missing it? 8
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:55 | # From the Wiki page on the German monk:
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Posted by Notus Wind on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:09 | # GW, Alright, I should have said that he is a Jewish Buddhist monk then. FYI, here’s the paragraph of his that made me think of PF’s use of the term “am”:
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Posted by Gorboduc on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:13 | # Sorry, if you don’t see that there’s a moral obligation on YOU to stop a child from sticking its fork into a live socket then you’ve got a long hard road to travel as regards your moral education. And so have the suckers who so far have taken you seriously on this. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:43 | # Notus, Personally, I don’t like the word “bare”. “Controlled” or even “intentional” would be better. “Intentional”, however, suffers from the disadvantage of prior phenomenological art. Another good way to come to this question is to understand the following:
Now the question arises as to whether the attention in question is controlled or just haphazzard (meaning a light that shines just the same during sleep and ordinary waking consciousness on the endless flow of images, associations, sensations, and so on). Profound qualitative implications for “I” flow from that distinction. From our point view, interested as we are not in esoterism but in politics and philosophy, the big questions are (a) what stands for attention at the collective level, and (b) what effect would its “control” have on the collective? 12
Posted by Notus Wind on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:01 | # GW,
That is why the operative word here is neither German nor Jewish but Buddhist. I am generally prejudiced against the East and consider most of its thought to be hopelessly esoteric and stagnant. There are some interesting ideas to be found in its elaborately adorned labyrinths - perhaps “am” is one of them - but precious little that can rival the dynamism and romanticism of the Western canon. But these are the prejudices of ignorance since I have only made contact with Eastern thought through derivative material.
Neither do I. Your rephrasing, “Where my attention is, there I am.” is much better.
Yes, those are good questions. Just who is staring into that abyss and what does the answer mean? The Western mind cuts to the chase. Gorby,
Your disapproval is noted. 13
Posted by Wandrin on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:14 | #
I’d say it is simply adaptive as it provides a mechanism for continuous improvement. The mechanism does require the free flow of accurate information however. Our current situation is like a body with their hand in a fire where the pain signals from their nervous system have been switched off as the media acts as the nervous system of our body-politic. If it is adaptive then in its purest form it wouldn’t become vestigial but automatic. The need to enforce it would become vestigial. That may be what you meant. (When i say morality btw i mean anything that says x is good and y is bad. Vikings saying it was bad to sit at home farming and good to sail off and hack people to bits with an axe is a morality.) 14
Posted by Gorboduc on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:20 | # Not a question of disapproval, NW. A question of seeking coherence. This ain’t it. it’s feebly contrived, sketchily extemporised and ambiguously expressed. 2/10: should do better. Tho introduction of a feeble “thought experiment” relegates the whole thing to the status of a fourth form debate. GW’s big post of 5 August is a sad confession of bankruptcy. 15
Posted by Wandrin on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:27 | # A quick google http://www.mosaisk.com/auschwitz/Adolf-Hitler-about-the-Jews.php
I’m not saying he believed it or anything, just interesting. 16
Posted by alex zeka on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:37 | #
If I have good reason to wish that the child remain alive, then that is a question of interest. If I don’t have good reason (say if the child is the anti-christ), then no amount of moralising is going to make do that. The second possibility is almost completely unreal, but that just proves how irrelevant your example is. 17
Posted by Gorboduc on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:32 | # Well, if the child IS anti-Christ, you won’t be able to electrocute it. It’ll be protected. The basic features of Antichrist’s career are known to eschatologists. It won’t be snuffed out in childhood. I don’t quite understand what you mean by my “second possibility” and its “unreality”. I don’t think I’ve declined as disastrously as you have into the realm of the preposterous: I certainly wouldn’t introduce figures such as Antichrist into contexts such as this, and all I’m doing is attempting to exhibit the consequences of such wild and fantastic “thinking” as the original post. The original’s
is woefully incoherent. Try paraphrasing it. No clear meaning is here attributable to “authority” and “justification”. And what’s the meaning of “understanding” in line 1 of the excerpt? NOT a vote-winner: NOT a crowd-puller. NOT a stategy for victory. 18
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:41 | # Gorb, There are comments of Leon’s in that which he has not picked out in italics or blockquotes, so the text, read as a whole, is nonsensical.
This would only be true if, as I pointed out to Leon, believing something while conscious only in the ordinary waking sense is more productive of meaning than the human experience of reality through consciousness of self. Would you care to make that argument? Would you care to argue that there is a connection between moral behaviour and the perception of the real through human presence? Leon did not. But since you have declared my position bankrupt I imagine you will be able to do so. 19
Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:41 | #
I spent a major portion of my adult life pursuing this state of “Bare Attention” through the rigorous practice of Zazen. I came to the conclusion that “I” is nothing more than a metaphorical antenna, genetically optimized to a certain wavelength. The entirety of my compulsion to “sit nine years facing the wall” was dependent on the persistent delusion about the existence of some universal wave length, (i.e. Bare Attention), which I could experience regardless of the configuration of the antenna. In other words, it was a huge crock of speculative bullshit. But at the same time, the palpable realization of its bullshit nature, was entirely liberating. It may be that the Jewish antennae are indeed tuned to some frickin’ universal standing wave. I have no way of ascertaining that. But I feel, to the soles of my feet, that I am destined to heterodyne against it. 20
Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:04 | # If I understand correctly, this position denies the evolution of morality. It does not deal with the impulses of mechanism. For instance sympathy, from whence is it derived? Strategic thinking or the central nervous system? It appears without subjective consciousness. This example was used before but is still pertinent. Europeans rescue a boatload of Africans apparently drowning off the cost of the Spain. Strategically, it makes no sense. These are the people that will supplant them in their homelands. There is no authority there demanding their action. Where does the sympathy for this poor Africans originate? It’s mechanistic. In contrast, “savages” on an island off the coast of India happened upon a pair of Indian fisherman who had fallen asleep in a drunken stupor and drifted ashore. How did these savages respond? They killed them. The lower IQ tribesmen appear to be acting strategically, although are probably not subjectively conscious. They have no word for God in their vocabulary. They are only moved by the spirits in their dreams. Darwin:
Descent of Man [ 1871] 21
Posted by Wandrin on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:03 | # @Desmond My since-destroyed mini-culture was nominally Christian but the actual moral foundation was passed down by the old people who used to say: “What if everybody did that?” 22
Posted by Wandrin on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:13 | # “Europeans rescue a boatload of Africans apparently drowning off the cost of the Spain. Strategically, it makes no sense.” Those sort of behaviours make sense if it leads to them being reciprocated but some groups aren’t capable of ever being in the situation to reciprocate and some are capable but not capable of seeing the benefit and some can do both but won’t because they’d rather be the master race and reciprocity is a barrier to that. Maybe? 23
Posted by Gorboduc on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:10 | # Jimmy: you make “I” the subject of a verb about 5 times. I’m reminded of the lady philosopher who wrote to Russell saying she was a solpipsist, obviously a very rational positioon: so rational in fact that she wonderd that it hadn’t caught on, and went on “I am surprised that there are so few of us” To tell the truth, I can’t understand any of this. So I’m not on this thread any more: but if we’re still talking a new morality, well someone here very recently posted a video of Ken Livingstone indulging in a chunk of bare-faced lying. Some people here felt annoyed. Why? He was using the new morality. Certain people should adopt a more tolerant attitude to evolutionary progress I seem to remember that the Victorian scientist and eugenicist Galton worried about what the” I” was: so he decided to consciously WILL every breath. Result, he lost the faculty of breathing automatically and nearly smothered himself. I wonder if the severe state of de-oxygenation thus inflicted on his poor brain has been passed down to any of his eugenicist progeny? Wandrin:
- no, but I suppose it enables you to feel a little bit of self-respect. Sorry, that’s how it is. 24
Posted by Unbareable on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:21 | # By whom, but a double-attender could the “bare attention” be attended? Post a comment:
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Posted by Steven E. Romer on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:29 | #
Great points. See Raymond Cattel’s “Beyondism” or morality from science. Science tells us clearly what is moral (in our future best interests over longer periods of time than personal interests). Look at evolution. That shows us what is important for survival, what gave us larger brains and the ability to learn priciples of how the world works and to be able to predict the future. We know what is rare, what gave us modern civilization, what is to be cherished. We can and should increase that. It is US folks! That is moral.