The "Rational" Man

Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) describes in vivid accents the modern man who prides himself in his rational approach to life unencumbered by the silly superstitions believed in by gullible religious people. The modern rational man, typified in her telling by someone like the 18th century philosophical icon Immanuel Kant, is a man who ...

...confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason . . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek . . . .

He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.

In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Lucifer? Why such a harsh judgment? Perhaps because the modern, "rational" man believes only what science and his senses tell him. The rational man looks at himself and his fellows as little more than flesh and bone machines, animals, whose only real "purpose" is to reproduce, experience pleasure and avoid pain.

He regards morality as an illusion. His reason affords him no basis for caring about the weak or the poor, no basis for human compassion, no particular point to conserving the earth's resources for future generations.

Whereas Kant thought that reason dictated the categorical imperative - i.e. the duty to treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to one's own happiness - the fact is that reason, unfettered from any divine sanction, dictates only that each should look to his or her own interests.

In practice modern man may care about the well-being of others, but he must abandon his fealty to science and reason to do so because these provide no justification for any moral obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, the purely rational man is led by the logic of his naturalism to the conclusion that might makes right. The pursuit of power frequently becomes the driving force of his life. It injects his life with meaning. It leads him to build abattoirs like Auschwitz and Dachau to eliminate the less powerful and less human.

Would Kant have agreed with this bleak assessment? No, but then Kant wasn't quite in tune with the modern, rational man. Kant believed that in order to make sense of our lives as moral agents we have to assume that three things are true: We have to assume that God exists, that we have free will, and that there is life beyond the grave.

Take away any of those three and morality reduces to a matter of one's individual preferences and tastes.

The modern man, of course, rejects all three of those assumptions, and in so doing he rejects the notion of objective moral value or obligation. That's why reason has led men to embrace ideologies that have produced vast tracts of corpses, and that's why, perhaps, Murdoch used the name Lucifer to describe them.

Goodbye to the Left

A lot of the discussion surrounding the question of how the Democrat Party can recover its electoral mojo has focused on the ball and chain that is woke ideology and its attendant cancel culture. It reminds me of a post I wrote about this topic some years ago but which still has resonance today. Here it is:

A generation or two ago the last place people would've thought free speech was imperiled was North American universities, yet today the pressure on students to conform to politically correct speech codes in some schools is enormous.

Consider the story of a young grad student named Lindsay Shepherd who attended Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada:

On November 1, 2017, during a first-year undergraduate class Shepherd was teaching, she showed two clips from a public Canadian television channel. The first featured [University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson], who has been an outspoken opponent of Canadian laws that mandate the use of transgender pronouns.

A heated discussion among the students followed the videos. Later, a student approached an LGBTQ support group, which then filed a complaint with the university’s Diversity and Equity Office. That office requested a meeting with Shepherd on November 8.

Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting, which turned into an interrogation. During the 40-minute circus, university staff (who acknowledged her “positionality” regarding open inquiry), accused her of having created a “toxic climate for some of the students” by playing the clips and approaching the topic neutrally (emphasis mine).

One professor even compared the pronoun debate to discussing whether a student of color should have rights. He also called Peterson a member of the “alt-right” and compared playing a clip featuring Peterson to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.” Peterson’s perspective was also rejected as “not valid,” as, apparently, not all perspectives are up for debate.

Shepherd released the recording to Canadian media. Not long afterward, WLU’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, apologized, as did Nathan Rambukkana, a professor and Shepherd’s academic advisor, who was the main antagonist in the meeting. MacLatchy said the meeting did not “reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires.”

Shepherd filed a lawsuit in June 2018 against the university, Rambukkana, and several others, for damages of $3.6 million, claiming “harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal.” Peterson also filed a lawsuit against Laurier and several university staff.

It's incredible that adopting a "neutral" standpoint on a controversial issue would get an instructor into trouble with her administration in an institution which is putatively committed to free and open inquiry.

It's also ironic because Shepherd considered herself, until this episode, to be a leftist progressive who supports environmental causes and gay marriage. Since then, however, she has published a video on her website which she titles "Goodbye to the Left" in which she explains why she no longer considers herself a leftist although she still retains the same position on many of the social issues she did previously.

The left, however, is so rife with censorship, victimhood culture, and moral righteousness that she no longer feels a part of it. Her video has received almost a million views. You can read more about Shepherd at the link as well as get links to her video and youtube channel.

Her story is a common one. Liberals, and, of course, conservatives, who value free speech and the free flow of ideas are finding themselves hounded, intimidated, and driven from their jobs and careers by an intolerant, Stalinist left that brooks no challenge to, questioning of, nor deviation from, its woke dogmas.

The left is fond of purging from its midst anyone who sits just the slightest bit to their right, but by eliminating everyone situated to the right of the progressive mainstream they ensure that the mainstream continually moves leftward toward fascism, communism or some other tyrannical totalitarianism.

The left - not just the extremists in Antifa but also those who populate our college and university faculties and administrations as well as many in the upper echelons of the Democratic party - is a very real threat to the freedoms we take for granted as Americans, freedoms that are today under the greatest assault of any time in our nation's history.

Lindsay Shepherd and many others are unfortunately having to discover this the hard way. Google, for instance, the stories of liberals like Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, or Evergreen College biology professor Brett Weinstein. Or Google software engineer James Damore to see how liberals who have the temerity to express heterodox opinions are harrassed and even have their careers ruined by the progressive brown shirts.

You might also google literature professor Scott Yenor or astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez to get an idea of what a modern day inquisition looks like.

President Trump's Department of Education is doing what it can to end this harassment and intimidation on campus, but their efforts will be for naught if the nation simply turns around in 2028 and re-elects politicians who are the enablers of this academic tyranny.

Immortality on a Chip

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about the possibility of gaining immortality by downloading one's consciousness into some information-storing medium like a computer chip which could then be implanted into another body of some sort.

It sounds interesting given the technological advances in computer power that've been made in recent years, but as the following 11 minute video points out the obstacles to downloading the contents of one's brain in such a way that the self remains intact are more than daunting.

The narrator of the video, which was recommended to me by one of my students, seems to have a tongue-in-cheek optimism about the prospects of digitizing the brain. There's no reason to think it can't be done, he seems to imply, but as the video proceeds the viewer realizes that the whole point of the video is to show that, in fact, it could never be done.

One wonders, watching this video, how something as astoundingly complex as a brain could have ever evolved by chance, but set that very important questions aside.

In addition to all the fascinating technical difficulties that preserving one's consciousness involves there's another major problem that the video doesn't address. The video assumes that the brain is all that's involved in human consciousness, but it's by no means clear that that's so.

Many philosophers are coming to the conclusion that, in addition to the brain, human beings also possess a mind that somehow works in tandem with the brain to produce the phenomena of conscious experience. If this is correct then the problems entailed by downloading the data that comprise the physical brain are child's play compared to the difficulties of downloading an immaterial mind.

Maybe the only way to gain immortality is the old-fashioned way, the way that involves the God that your grandparents told you about.

Why Give Israel the Benefit of the Doubt But Not Hamas?

A good friend asked me recently why I seem to believe what the Israelis tell us about their war in Gaza and discount what Hamas tells us. It's a fair question. Here are eight reasons why I tend to give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt and distrust Hamas:

1. Hamas has repeatedly lied in the past. For example, it has lied about the use to which it was putting foreign aid. It lied about the damage done to the Al-Ahli hospital, claiming it was targeted by the Israelis when they knew it was bombed by their own errant artillery.

2. The Hadiths encourage Muslims to lie to infidels, especially in time of war. According to the authoritative Arabic text, Al-Taqiyya Fi Al-Islam: “Taqiyya [deception] is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it. We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream...Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.”

Of course, it's possible that the Israelis are lying as well, but we have pretty conclusive proof that Hamas has lied about Israeli massacres. If we're to believe that the Israelis are dissembling, conclusive examples of it need to be offered. Moreover, we need to ask the common sense question, when Israel is accused of deliberately bombing a hospital or gratuitously opening fire on civilians trying to access food aid, what benefit there would be to Israel in doing so. There's considerable benefit to Hamas in trying to persuade the world that Israel has committed war crimes, but no benefit to Israel in actually committing those crimes.

3. Hamas uses its own people, including children, as human shields. Those who have so little regard for the lives of their own people can hardly expect the respect from others upon which trust is based.

4. Hamas, including many Gazan civilians, reveled in the slaughter of Israeli citizens. October 7th was an orgy of barbarism and savagery. People who would perpetrate such horror, and those who approve of it, do not deserve the trust of civilized people.

5. Hamas runs schools in Gaza, called madrasas, which inculcate into their children a hatred of Jews. The pronouncements of a society based on hate are not credible, at least not with me.

6. Repeatedly, journalists whose reporting from Gaza seems to favor Hamas have been found to be in the employ of Hamas.

7. Israel is an open, democratic society with a vibrant free press, a formidable political opposition, and a history of calling out its leaders when they transgress liberal values. Hamas, on the other hand, is a closed society with no free press, no history of permitting dissent, and no history of liberal values.

8. Hamas has sworn to destroy the state of Israel. Crediting anything Hamas says is like crediting anything Vladimir Putin says.

The question of credibility was put to me in the context of claims of famine in Gaza. Whether there's actually famine in Gaza or not, it's clear that any suffering could end today if Hamas would lay down their arms and leave the Gaza Strip. The miserable conditions that prevail in Gaza have come about because Hamas initiated a war with Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the misery persists because Hamas refuses to stop fighting and release their hostages.

Somewhat relatedly, there's more than a hint of a double standard in the world's willingness to condemn Israel for whatever misfortune befalls Gazan civilians.

After all, the world didn't much care when Hafiz al-Assad of Syria killed between 10,000 and 25,000 of his countrymen in the city of Hama in 1982. Nor was there an outcry against the Algerian government in 1991 when it slaughtered some 80,000 Algerians, most of whom were civilians. And where are the impassioned speeches at the U.N. and reports on our nightly news about the murders by Muslims of at least 52,250 Christians in Nigeria since 2009?

Is the salient difference that in each case the murderers were, or are, Muslims, but in the present case Israeli Jews are inflicting the damage?

A final thought: Imagine that the roles were reversed and Hamas had the military might of Israel and Israel was as weak as Hamas. How might we expect Hamas to behave toward starving Israelis? Would the world care? Would Hamas be careful to give warnings about their bombing? Would they go to the trouble of moving large populations around to keep them out of the line of fire? Would they go to the expense of shipping food to the hungry Israelis? Would they care what the rest of the world said? Would the rest of the world say anything?

Actually, their own rhetoric tells us what they'd do - they'd push every last Israeli into the sea. And many in Europe and the U.S., in our universities especially, would cheer.

Can We Be Good Without God? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by biologist Jerry Coyne the gravamen of which was that morality is not contingent upon a transcendent moral authority such as God. I'd like to continue our critique of this argument in today's post.

Coyne writes that,

though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one.

Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.

Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

Coyne here adverts to the classic Euthyphro dilemma which, contrary to what he thinks, has been discredited by philosophers for centuries (see here, and here). It's unfortunate that Coyne is unaware of this, but it illustrates the hazard of experts in one field speaking dogmatically on matters in other disciplines.

But what he says next merits a more thorough response:

So where does morality come from if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness.

This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

Assuming this is correct what makes the behaviors he mentions moral or right? If a chimp acted contrary to these tendencies would we think the chimp immoral? Would we call its actions evil or wicked? Why, then - if we're nothing more than hairless apes - do we call humans evil when they torture people or abuse children? We have an aversion to such things, to be sure, but aversion doesn't make something wicked.

And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality.

In other words we should be nice because we've evolved to be nice. This is fallacious. Philosophers since Hume have recognized that one can't derive an ought from an is. Because we've evolved a certain tendency, if indeed we have, it doesn't follow that we have an obligation to express that tendency.

As mentioned yesterday, we've also evolved the tendency to be selfish and mean and a host of other unsavory behavioral traits. Are these behaviors morally right just because they've evolved? Should we consider cruelty good because it's an evolved behavior?

Coyne concludes with this thought:

Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.

This is silly. Secular reason says no such thing. What secular reason dictates is that I should look out for my own interests, I should put myself first, and use others to promote my own well-being and happiness.

That may entail that I give people the impression that I care about them in order to get them to assist me in my own pursuit of happiness, but people who are of no use to me are of no value to me. Thus, it'd be foolish of me to sacrifice my comforts to help some starving child in some other part of the world who will never be of any use to me.

Indeed, why, on Coyne's view, is it wrong to refuse aid to victims of poverty and starvation?

Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielson stresses this very point:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view or that all really rational persons unhoodwinked by myth or ideology need not be individual egoists or amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me...pure reason...will not take you to morality.

Secular reason and evolution have no answer to the question why we should help those who are in no position to help us, at least none that doesn't reduce to the claim that helping others just makes us feel good. It's an ugly fact about naturalism that its logic entails such conclusions, and either Coyne knows it's ugly and doesn't want his readers to know it, or he has no idea.

In either case he should stick to biology.

Can We Be Good Without God? (Pt.I)

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. He's also a prominent atheist who has written a book titled Faith Vs. Fact in which he tries to explain why theism is false.

A few years ago he wrote a column for USA Today in which he argued that belief in God is not necessary for one to live a moral life. He complains that:

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

Coyne believes that human morality is a consequence of the evolutionary process coupled with human reason. God is unnecessary.

There are at least four things wrong with Coyne's rejection of the belief that God is in some sense necessary for ethics. First, "God-given morality" is not incompatible with evolution. God could be the ground both of moral value and of evolutionary change.

There is a serious incompatibility, however, between "God-given morality" and Coyne's naturalism, i.e. his belief that the natural world is all there is. If naturalism is true then there is no God and thus no "God-given morality."

Second, no one argues that evolution could not, at least in theory, have bestowed upon us the sentiments Coyne lists. The problem is that if evolution is the source of these impulses then it's also the source of avarice, bigotry, cruelty, etc.

If we believe that evolution has produced all human behavioral tendencies, on what basis do we decide that one set of behaviors is good and the other bad? Are we not assuming a "moral dictionary", so to speak - a standard above and beyond nature by which we adjudicate between behaviors to determine which are right and which are wrong?

If so, what is that standard?

Third, if an impersonal, mindless, random process is the ultimate source of these behaviors it can't in any moral sense be wrong to act contrary to them. If moral sentiments are the product of natural selection and chance chemical happenstances in the brain there's no non-arbitrary moral value to anything.

Right and wrong reduce to subjective likes and dislikes, and that leads to moral nihilism.

Finally, in the absence of God in what sense are we accountable for our actions? And if we're not accountable, if there's no reckoning for how we behave, what does it mean to say that a given behavior is "wrong"? If there are no posted speed limits on a highway and no enforcement, what does it mean to say that one is "wrong" to go as fast as one wishes or thinks is prudent?

The most it can mean is that other people won't like it, but why should anyone care whether others approve of how he or she behaves?

We'll look at another aspect of Coyne's argument tomorrow.

A Late Summer Miracle

Those who spend time outdoors in the late summer are about to witness an annual "miracle."

Every year an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarchs roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs have revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that on the Darwinian hypothesis there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations in the history of the species, all of which were random but which somehow fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this astonishing journey.

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.